EMORY UNIVERSITY – GRADUATE DEPARTMENT OF RELIGION

GENESIS REDUX: ETERNAL LOVE, INFINITE DESIRE, AND FINITE FREEDOM

ASHLEY GAY

PHILOSOPHY OF TIME AND THE INFINITEDR. WENDY FARLEY

MAY 8, 2012

I) One man suffers

Lord of havinghell at handLord of losingwhat I havethis heaven now

may I movein timelike a cloudin skymy torn formthe wind’sone sign

may my suffering bespeechlessclarityas of waterin some reach

of rockit would takeworkto ascendand see

any may my handsmy eyesthe very nubof my tongue

be scrubbedout of this hourif I should utterthe dirty wordeternityi

Make no mistake. The Richter Scale of experience is this

very vibration between finite and infinite, rifting through the

landscape of eternity. Poet Christian Wiman articulates this

vibration between a man’s desire for “this heaven now” even as it

brushes against “hell at hand.” The nearness of both eternal life

and infinite abyss press upon the finite present (in all its

fleeting). And God, this “Lord of Having” either is or has “hell

at hand.” The line break leaves open this significant width in

interpretation: is the space indicating being or having?

Furthermore, this God, called “Lord of Losing” either is, has, or

loses “what I have/ this heaven now.” Again, the line break is a

wound and possibility that the poet’s suffering marks. It may be

that to portray God as “Having” or possession is to create a kind

of hell. Wiman’s Hell: the unmitigated desire to possess a

presence that can only rightly possess us.ii In contrast, to

speak of God as “Losing” or dispossession, opens a heaven even

within fleeting time. Wiman’s Heaven: the saturation of a present

moment that mitigates suffering, or somehow recovers time’s

losses.

This reading implies who God is not what God has, though the

opposite is equally present in the poem. God may only “hav[e]

hell at hand” to offer, and may be working through time to steal

present heavens. But Wiman enacts the subtle shift of negative

theology which, like a turned hologram, exposes blasphemy as only

one dimension of faith. He continues his prayer to this Lord of

Having and Losing, asking that this Presenting-Passing aspect of

God make of him a cloud. This cloud is not a blissful float; it

is a “torn form.” But its very tearing is the condition of his

sensation of and reliance upon wind. The poet asks to be the

“sign” of this wind. He wants to serve as an allusion to the

invisible force that is as much Having-Losing as it is Present-

Absent.

God seems to be here conflated with Wiman’s image of time

that wind oddly witnesses: that which propels forward and sweeps

away. Caught in this movement of an apophatic-kataphatic Lord,

the poet asks his suffering to be likewise. “May [it] be

speechless clarity” like “water from a rock”: an impossible

resource that only those who “work to ascend” can understand. It

is as if his images of time, wind, suffering, and God are deeply

interwoven: they are resistant resources that require the work of

patient understanding. Understanding, in this context, is not

standing under suffering or God or Time with some adequate

ground, but riding above each like a cloud on ascending wind. It

is an awkward rise, not entirely gratifying.

Wimand doesn’t ask escape into some eternal perspective; his

God is as Time, present-passing. And he needs sensation—touching

(“my hands”), seeing (“my eyes”), tasting (“the very nub of my

tongue”)—to do the witness of ascension. Curiously, he expects

his finitude to be integral in his transcendence. Heaven and hell

are immanent as the transcendent Lord who is or offers them.

Therefore, to be external to one’s suffering or to encounter God,

is not to leave sensation or time. After all, if he dares summon

eternity, it would be a “dirty word,” the very penalty of which

would be a kind of death—a sentience “scrubbed out of this hour.”

The strange ending of his prayer runs counter to the

traditional Lord’s prayer which ends on “forever and ever. Amen.”

Christian Wiman’s poem-prayer indicates his dis-ease with the

notion of eternity—the forever that undergirds the ever-ness of

the non-finite. He seems conceptually comfortable with the non-

finite, as it manifests in his understanding of suffering, of

God, or time itself. But, for Wiman, the eternal smacks of

totality. He has stated elsewhere that suffering cannot be met

with an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God.iii And through

this poem, he might add to that list of idols “Eternal God.”

Eternity as Pure Time, impervious to while founding all change, makes

of God an immutable and unapproachable first cause. And this

definition is—for Wiman’s suffering, for human experience—no God

at all.

Suffering may occlude one’s perception of or desire for eternal

life. By confining the self to the limiting weight of the “now,”

the “at hand” hell, suffering can restrict one’s capacity for

hope (futural projection) or sense-making (reflection upon the

past). As Simone Weil states, in the state of profound suffering,

affliction “takes possession of the soul and marks it through and

through with its own particular mark, the mark of slavery… ‘A man

loses half his soul the day he becomes a slave.’”iv Weil goes on

to assert that physical and spiritual suffering “chain down our

thoughts” because the affliction is so total. The event of

affliction “has seized and uprooted a life that attacks it,

directly or indirectly in all its parts.”v It is as if the

afflicted are abstracted from life, removed into a prison in

which time and order are not at play. This separation does not

create the ego in individuation, or dissolve the ego in ekstasis;

this separation through suffering decimates the ego toward

emptiness.

Wiman is caught, oscillating between this affliction and his

own prayer’s hope. If “affliction makes God appear to be absent

for a time,” Wiman’s poem-prayer struggles to speak with and to

presence.vi His words mark the absent-present God, and in this

way serve as a kind of devotion that persists. As Weil urges,

“The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least to go

on wanting to love, thought it may only be with an infinitesimal

part of itself….But if the soul stops loving it falls, even in

this life, into something almost equivalent to hell.”vii It would

seem then, that love is the subversion of hell, affliction’s

imprisonment. Love is the welcoming of an otherwise that exposes

limitation as merely penultimate. Another way in which this

excess, this infinite over against and within the finite, makes

itself available is through beauty. The irony of Wiman’s disdain

for the “dirty word” of eternity, is that “we seek in art an

image of eternalization. If for a brief moment our spirit finds

peace and rest and assuagement in the contemplation of the

beautiful, even though it finds therein no real cure for its

distress, it is because the beautiful is the revelation of the

eternal of the divine in things, and beauty by the perpetuation

of momentaneity.”viii In spatiotemporality, the infinite reveals

itself in the irreducibility of finite forms. Though the

processes of contemplation, beauty, and poiesis do not cure

affliction, they press against the “hell at hand” by aiming to

recover “this heaven now.”

As Miguel de Unamuno suggests, it is the recovery of beauty,

the “esthetic feeing” that reinstates “this longing of faith…this

hope.”ix This may be why Christian Wiman anchors in sensation and

turns to poetry (poiesis, making). To remain connected to creation

is to hold the possibility of a presence terribly immanent. And

yet, it is a breed of faith more akin to desire, which longs to

see in the finite flickers of the infinite. As Unamuno reminds,

“Possibly the esthetic feeling enters into it, but without

completely satisfying it.”x In Wiman’s case, this is precisely

inverted. The abstraction of eternity proves unsatisfying. He can

write of the interplay between the finite and infinite, between

the limitations of suffering and the hope of signification. But

he seems to ask: need these spatio-temporal fluxes imply

eternity? Would not eternity be the eradication of sensation, a

removal from the time that perpetuates and animates desire?

For anyone who finds a home in desire, the eternal seems an

unattractive consummation: the totality in which the infinite and

finite rest, perhaps die, “scrubbed out” from time. But it may

be, as Simone Weil acknowledges, that in spatio-temporal

creation, the “impossible desires” within us mark us for another

destination, perhaps one of impossible resource.xi Conversant

with Wiman, she cautions that while in this world, these traces

that eternity leaves are “good for us when we no longer hope to

accomplish them.”xii In other words, to make of this world a “bad

eternity” or a totality, would be to fill in the chasms or sweep

away the traces. Such an act would be the destructive end of

desire, of time, of space, of sensation. Weil makes clear that

eternity’s end is not destructive, not simply deletion of

creation, but the unification which can only be made by Love.

Meanwhile, our “impossible desires” can at best orient toward a

God found in the affliction of the soul, in charity toward

others, and in the beauties of creation.xiii

To what degree does the eternal manifest in our orientation

of desire for the other? Is it possible to conceive of these

“mark[s] of our destination” as Unamuno does in the alterity of

beauty—“which is the root of eternity…revealed to us by love”?xiv

For Unamuno, beauty is “the supreme revelation of the love of God

and the token of our ultimate victory over time.” He attributes

beauty (infinite within the finite form) and eternity (that which

grounds infinity and the finite) as “creations of love.”xv It

follows that eternity can be witnessed in spatio-temporality as

love. And if this is so, eternity is not a “dirty word” for the

sufferer; it is rather the opening through which the afflicted

can resist the uprooting of affliction. Eternity then, like

Weil’s understanding of love, is irreducible to neither time nor

space; and in Wiman’s terms, it may prove to be the sign of the

wind—propelling “torn forms” toward “speechless clarity.”xvi

It is the task of my paper to explore how eternity interacts

with spatio-temporality. Throughout, I will use this interaction

as a metaphor for the engagement of an Eternal God with created

beings. At stake in the conception of God as eternal is the

nature of Divine love, which meets creation in its separation and

consequent suffering. If God is not eternal being, then our

infinite desires can only be finite; separation and suffering

could only be answered by evil. It is my understanding that evil

is the human capacity to direct desire toward the finite. Only if

God is eternal can there be space for infinite desires (goodness)

to challenge finite desires (evil). The human who desires

infinitely cannot treat creation as simply a means, nor can it

regard humans as objects. Again, this can only be so if God does

not allow the separation of creation, nor its suffering to, be

the eternal word.

Wrapped in God’s eternity is God’s love. But this means

created being (the world of becoming) is not the manifestation of

God’s love, but the iterative separations (freedoms) through

which God’s love must radiate, if we are to have any hope at all

for wholeness.

II) The Eternal A/partxvii

Physicists affirm that not a single particle of matter nor a single tremor of energy is lost, but that each istransformed and transmitted and persists. And can it bethat any form, however fugitive it may be, is lost? We must needs believe--believe and hope!—that it is not, but that somewhere it remains archived and perpetuated,and that there is some mirror of eternity in which, without losing themselves in one another, all the images that pass through time are received.xviii

It is understandable that Wiman dubs eternity a “dirty

word.” Eternity cannot be anything but adulterated since, by

entering concepts, its non-dual unity is tainted. The consequence

is that, in removing it from spatio-temporal understanding, it

can appear a dead abstraction, or a static unity. However, if one

recalls that this unity surrounds, holds, and penetrates into the

very fluidities of “becoming,” then eternity is far from static.

This is difficult to grasp since most characterizations of

eternity imply immutability, even while personifying eternal

beings as actively moving in the world.

Plato in the Timaeus, for example, speaks of a father

creator whose realm is eternity or “The Good Beyond Being.” And

out of eternity, the demiurge partitions space-time (the realm of

“becoming” also called “the world of generation.”). In space-

time, the demiurge sees the “creatures which he had made moving

and living.”xix These creatures, similar to Ancient Near Eastern

traditions, are in the image of “eternal gods.”xx However, as an

image or copy, these moving, living creatures, could not hold the

fullness of eternity. It is as if they lived in pure space, which

proved a mere shadow of the eternal universe. So the demiurge

granted these creatures time. Thus, the copies could closer

resemble eternity, since space-time faintly resembles the

eternal. One gets the sense that this shade of distinction is

important. The difference between eternity and space-time, is

even more wide than the distance between space-time and pure

space. If space (three dimensions) is made more real by the added

dimension of time (the fourth dimension), then the leap between

the fourth dimension and all possible dimensions (eternal

universe) is even closer to the Idea’s reality. This reality is

the eternal image that, in time, is able to move even while

“eternity itself rests in unity.”xxi

The eternal image is understood as the ideal being that

cannot be reduced to the divisions of the lower dimensions of

“becoming” it includes. Eternity, or the “eternal essence,” is

the emergent reality of space-time, and therefore cannot be

simply broken into “the parts of time.”xxii Though we attribute

‘was,’ ‘is,’ and ‘will be’ to the “eternal essence” of the

“eternal gods,” this is a heuristic device endemic to created

beings in time. Plato states that the eternal essence can only be

—it is; to say that it “will be” or “was” is to ascribe motion to

eternity. Eternal essence, for Plato, is “immovably the same

[and] cannot become older or younger by time, nor even did or has

become.”xxiii It is again, as if Eternity is Pure (Ideal) Time, and

generated time only imitates it. Imitation implies motion, freed

moves away or towards the eidos. Thus, even as we lament spatio-

temporality in its distinction from the ideal, its distinction is

what gives us our understandings of freedom, movement, and the

burden-blessing of change.

One might conceive Plato’s eternity as the totality of all

infinities, with infinity being the ongoing trail of all

finitudes. Infinity—the domain of time as it mobilizes space—

requires movement. Eternity, conversely suggests immutable

containment—mathematically speaking, the bounded set of all

infinities. This notion has implications similar to Unamuno’s

image of eternity, which is like a cinematic archive. He writes,

“The temporal world has its roots in eternity, and eternity

yesterday is united with the to-day and to-morrow. The scenes of

life pass before us as in a cinematography show, but on the

further side of time the film is one and indivisible.”xxiv Thus,

eternity holds all in union: “nothing is lost, nothing wholly

passes away…and everything, after passing through time, returns

to eternity.”xxv So when Unamuno links eternity to love, he speaks

of a bond that is all encompassing; it is a realm where divisions

do not apply. In this way he is not far from Simone Weil, who

speaks of the pervasion of love like “pure and heart-rending

harmony.”xxvi The “tearing apart” of time and space is

nevertheless bonded in a “supreme union” by “supreme love…

echo[ing] perpetually across the universe in the midst of the

silence, like two notes, separating yet melting into one.”xxvii

The eternal essence as love therefore has no potentiality

that it withholds. Its sense is “all encompassing being,” with an

all-enduring potency of love. As Edith Stein outlines in Finite and

Eternal Being, the eternal being of God is “pure act”—God’s essence

is God’s existence.xxviii Put otherwise, “God’s being is his

nature”—hence the Christian understanding that God is love.xxix But

to continue the philosophical grounds for such a supposition, she

names God as the “immutable vitality” from which all meaning

derives. The very capacity for meaning depends on an eternal

essence that stabilizes or allows continuity. This is in contrast

to “the ineradicable fact of our own being [which] reveals itself

as fleeting, narrowly limited from moment to moment.”xxx According

to Stein, our finite being is inconceivable without the concept

of another “kind of being, which resting firmly in itself, is

supremely creative and—as Lord of all being—is being itself.”xxxi

Stein’s depiction of eternal being as “resting” in itself marks

its distinction from the finite (actual) being that “receives its

being.”xxxii

We can approximate this eternal being once we notice the

infinite—as in, “what aris[es] and grow[s]” within and out of “our

fleeting and fluctuating being.”xxxiii Because we can conceive of

the infinite or that which transcends the finite moment or state,

we can extrapolate eternity from the infinite. The eternal is

what arises in and grows out of the infinite. It emerges out of

what it grounds. This does not mean that the eternal can be

equated with our limited transcendence as it occurs in the

generated world. In the existential-actual word, meanings are

“finite inasmuch as they are ‘something, yet not everything.’ But

they lack the possibility of beginning and ending in time.” In

other words, there is something existential about meaning and

something essential about meaning; the eternal makes it possible

for essence to outlast existence.

From our perspective, however, the eternal can only be

perceived in its effects—its imitative iterations. To confuse the

Eternal Being, even with the most convincing modes of

transcendence we experience as finite beings, is an idolatrous

move. It would be similar to confusing the paint tints with the

artwork. Art is an emergent totality of meaning in which the

tints are accidental. Stein reminds us that eternal being is an

emergent totality rising out of our every finite freedom and

infinite desire. The dilemma arises when we ignore the

limitations of our freedom, or when our infinite desire turns

toward finitude itself. In Stein’s understanding, finite beings

(and their infinite desire aimed toward the Eternal) never cease

to engage in “this groping search in darkness.” For the Eternal

being is simultaneously “the incomprehensible one [and]

inescapably near, as the one in whom ‘we live, move, and

are.’”xxxiv Faith can perceive “the God of personal nearness, the

loving and merciful God,” radiating through the screen of

nature.xxxv She notes, as many theologians would, that the screen

of nature, in itself, cannot reveal this God. However, she also

states that faith has its own darkness, too. Even faith is

constricted by concepts. God must “attune his language to the

measure of human understanding, so as to make the

incomprehensible intelligible to some extent.”xxxvi

God’s reduction into intelligibility is as much a function

of the limitations of a created world as it is the constraints of

our thought. According to Stein, God works in and arises out of

these domains, present and absent in them, in order to allude to

God’s eternity. God’s essence is “not in time at all…belong[ing]

to a sphere entirely different from that of objects.”

Nevertheless, God’s eternal essence “enters into relationship

with [finite beings],” and we in turn are capable of “partak[ing]

of the essence.” This happens on an ontological level. Stein

suggests that temporal beings are the finitudes moving in the

infinities of eternal being. The former is “objectively limited…

as something that is not nothing, but neither is it everything.” But

eternal being is “of such a kind that there is nothing that it is not: It

is everything.”xxxvii

At every moment of the ‘present’ we are contacted by the

eternal, immutable being; this reflexively makes us aware of our

becoming. Becoming comprises of the complex interactions between

possibilities and actuality. The ego’s actual existence (its

presence in the present) is the crest of this contact which then

fades into the past or slides into the future. The actual ego,

receiving its existence at every moment by the eternal being

(God) is also at every moment emerging from the non-being of its

past. So it would seem that genesis is a perpetual process,

instigated in each present moment for actualized egos. And the

fading of our selves into the past memories or future

expectations, reenact a sort of fall, a slippage. But in this

sense, the falls or little deaths of our present to the past are

the same actions of time that make possible our potentiality.

Time is a gift of creative love that will not allow being to come

to nothing.

As finite beings, we are saddened perhaps by the vitality

lost when a present moment becomes the past, or impatient when a

present moment seems postponed to the future. And yet, if--as

Stein suggests--the eternal gives us our actualization (present

existence) at every moment, becoming in time is no longer a

devastation, but rather the true communion of fidelity and flux,

giver and receiver. Finite time meets duration so that we have

ongoing vitality, little resurrections every second. It is as if

God could not leave the past alone and must therefore open the

way for our futures.

III) A Universal Tearxxxviii

But resulting from the Creation, the Incarnation, and the Passion, there is also infinite distance. The totality of space and the totality of time, interposingtheir immensity, put an infinite distance between God and God…The love between God and God, which in itself is God, is this bond of double virtue: the bond that unites two being so closely that they are no longer distinguishable and really from a single unity and the bond that stretches across distance and triumphs over infinite separation.xxxix

Heralds in every age, now the physicists, speak of an abrupt

start that emerges from an unknown chaos or void. Whether from

eternity or abyss, the universe widens out, expanding like an

escape, only to culminate with parallels gathering, collapsing,

returning. And as this reality occurs on cosmic levels, we might

ask if the universe is one eruption of many, and from where? And

is the eternal origin, underlying all possible universes, a

reality that critiques, supports, or symbolizes our own

particular experiences? These questions form the root of

speculative cosmology, but not without their existential

implications. It is the task of this section to recognize a

metaxu between the creation (qua separation) and the God of

unitive love.

Physicists theorize that the universe is tear-shaped.xl Like

a drop of water, or of blood, time-space warps to this poignant

conformity. And why not? So many have suggested this image on a

more micro-level: to exist is to suffer, or to fall, trickle

perhaps from some god-eyed perception. Theologians and

philosophers alike note that to live in time-space is to endure

rupture, illusions covering our elision, a kind of half-life

trying to catch up with a fullness once felt. In this way, faith

seems as much a wounding uncertainty of things we once saw as a

“certainty that what we cannot see exists.”xli In a more

phenomenological, less cosmogonic sense, to exist is to be

capable of bleeding, of crying, of sweating: landscapes eroding

as they bleed into water, air, fire; seeds scattered like wind-

wafted tears; concepts, words, perspiring, (with some loss of

evaporation) from reservoirs of experience.

And indeed we see that the shape of a seed, the beads of

sweat, the trickle or rush of thoughts, resemble teardrops. The

origins of created life are all too linked with suffering, with

toil, with grasping. How easily—this side of the eternal—freedom

is confused with control; how quickly comprehension desires

possession. In other words, how often finitude forgets the

infinity from which it draws! I lay out these laments to attend

the parallels of being. The parallels between the cosmic topology

and humanity’s temptations are not merely coincidental. It is my

understanding that the “fall of man” is in fact a third creation

narrative. If the first two narratives articulate creations

happening within God’s essential world, or in our “dreamed

innocence,” the last narrative (Genesis 3) demonstrates the

creation of the existential world.xlii

The book of Genesis begins with two creation narratives, one

ending in Genesis 2:4, the next culminating in 2:24. In the

former, God is depicted as a masterful engineer, linking verbal

commands like software to the calculating hardware of a cosmos.

Each structural implementation is met with God’s aesthetic and

perhaps ethical evaluation. Indeed, these two senses of ‘good’

imply a wholeness or interdependency between beauty’s givenness

(creation) and God’s giving (love). The Hebrew word for “good,”

employed in God’s blessings of creation, is tov. Tov is a word of

rich and varied connotations, ranging from the process of

becoming better, to being pleasant, whole, agreeable, valuable or

even right (in the ethical sense). In this way, Emmanuel Levinas’

comment “ethics is the spiritual optics” reminds that aesthetic

valuation (perception) works integrally with ethical discernment

(justice).xliii This connection is most noticeable in God’s first

words to Adam and Eve (1:28-30). After blessing them, God

requires them to be fruitful and multiply like the created

plentitude around them (givenness). He then “gives [them] every

seed-bearing plant that is upon the eat, and every tree that has

see-bearing fruit; they shall be yours for food…”xliv The

essential landscape correlates with humanity’s essential purpose:

to participate in the fecund givenness (infinity) that the

creator’s gifting nature is.

The second narrative reminds that God is not distant as God

dreams creation into essential being.xlv We are not merely the

implementation of an engineer’s commands. In Genesis 1-2:4, God

is the first cause or commander of “goodness.” In Genesis 2:5-24,

God is more ‘hands-on.’ God, like a potter, “form[s] man from the

dust of the earth.”xlvi God touches creation instead of merely

speaking it into being. In a sense, God’s identity is incarnated

for readers. God shifts from the distant eyes and voice of the

first narrative to a being with hands, mouth, and breath in the

second narrative. Whereas in the first narrative God creates the

world of plenitude and inserts humanity into it, in the second

narrative, the world is not yet perfected. It is provided for,

but still barren. Man is created in the midst of desert. It is

not until God, as farmer, “plant[s] a garden in Eden” that the

man has a place. This existence is still within pure being.

Humanity’s essence is still its existence in the pure act of

God’s flourishing. There is no discrepancy yet.

We read that the knowledge permitted in pure being is not

that of “good and evil.” In the beginning, the human’s act of

knowledge is naming—not to morally judge reality, but to evoke

it, free it into meaning. Man is still, like God, perceptive of

reality’s essential meaning as it matches form. Again, there is

discernment between forms, but not yet discrepancy between

essential meanings and their existential forms. And even the

differentiations that exist between forms are still perceived as

foundationally relational. Woman is flesh of man’s flesh. Woman

is Ishah of man’s Ish; the name Adamah gives her implies equality

even within derivation.

But what I posit as the third creation narrative disrupts

this relationality of essence with the tears of existence. Eden,

as u-topia, implies an origin that is without an existential

topos; it is without time-space. As Paul Tillich posits,

“Creation and the Fall coincide in so far as there is no point in

time and space in which created goodness was actualized and had

existence…There was no ‘utopia’ in the past, just as there will

be no ‘utopia’ in the future. Actualized creation and estranged

existence are identical.”xlvii If Eden takes place outside of time

and space, it resides in Eternity. Eternity is now the memory of

a once held intimacy with God, in which we perceive distinctions

without judging them to be evil or good. In Eternity, we are

extensions of fecundity, held in the womb of God’s accumulated

infinities. The ‘fall of man’ is therefore less about original

sin, and more about original entry into time-space, into

finitude.

It is my understanding that all three narratives attempt to

get at this transition from the “chaotic void” of Eternity.

Chaotic because it is plentiful, everything. Void because it is

no-thing. What is distinctive about the third narrative is the

traumatic memory it surfaces. Creation, as actualized existence,

becomes separated from its potentiality which was pure being. If

in Eden, potential and actuality are inseparable, like Stein’s

Eternal Being, outside of Eden potentiality takes residence in

time, and actuality in space. Time becomes the reserve of

possibilities, but space constrains. Because of space I feel the

finitude of edges, boundaries; but because of time’s penetration

of space, I can perceive and enact motion, change.xlviii

But why the entry into time-space, into finite freedom, all

from humanity’s desire to know good and evil? It may be that when

humanity desired to know ‘good and evil,’ to be able to taste,

digest—in other words experience it within—the consequence was to

experience finitude. As Ricouer points out in Fallible Man, the

experience of evil depends upon a disproportion, a discrepancy

instated by the gap between finitude and infinity.xlix The fault-

line between the limitations of space and the potentiality of

time creates the very space of freedom. But this freedom comes

with a price; it allows the potential of evil. Freedom—as the

interplay between mobility and constraint of space-time—is always

choosing one thing and not another. Freedom is the experience of

beings made mobile through constraints. The constraints of our

choices orient, serve as a direction in which to chart our

freedom. And just as choice can orient toward the infinite love

(the good beyond being), so too it can desire finitude (evil).

When later theologians read upon Genesis 3 notions like

‘original sin,’ they neglect the fact that “sin” appears nowhere

in the narrative. Rather, it would be better to say ‘originating

consequence,’ or the moment in which humanity chooses finite

freedom over infinite union. True, the choice of evil, or the

desire for the finite, is performed in the text. Adam and Eve

desire to experience the knowledge of good and evil—which, as

binaries, implies dualistic experience, edges, boundaries, finite

existence. Gnosis in time-space becomes wholly dual, marked by

the edges of what can be grasped, eaten by the mind. The

perceiver is separated from the perceived, and a fault-line

erupts between essence and existence.

As a result, the whole of the human soul is constrained to

perceived character; happiness is reduced to pleasure; and we

become fragile.l Into this fragility enters the restless desire

to return or regain, as well as the confused retaliation of

wanting finitude. As Ricoeur states, the heart is this mixture of

the indefinite spirit and the finitude of vitality. We exist as

exchanges “between the indefinite quests of the self and the

finite cyclic tensions on the vital level, and on the other hand

between these same thymic quests and the desire for happiness.”li

We are caught between bios and logos, a felt discrepancy between our

finite living and our infinite desire to understand. In a strange

projection, the conflicted self often wishes to synthesize its

objects. It makes of every infinity a totality, of every person a

simulacrum, of every ideology an idol.

This began in the creation story of Genesis 3: In the

beginning, we were too allured by the basest knowing. We

contracted ethical discernment before morality even existed. We

were above this gnosis, but were tempted to descend into its

differentiations. How could we not? We could not help but sense

the distinction between God and humanity. We made this gap a

value judgment instead of the space in which a chord might sing–

like Pythagorean harmony sustained by difference. We asked for

finitudes, ingested them. And in so doing became organs

ourselves: stomachs receiving life and death, fighting, pushing,

asking to be nourished by sources not our own, dealing in

hungers. We were once Ideas, timeless, unbounded dreams in the

mind of a living God. We were God’s internalized others. Our

desires to split ourselves further–to make of knowing a

mitochondrial enterprise–gave us externality. To know good and

evil is to die, to enter finitudes that mark the distinctions,

the distance between what is and what could be.

This split of Eternal Being into existential beings is often

taken up by philosophy. As Tillich writes of Hegel, “In his early

fragments he described life-processes as possessing an original

unity which is disrupted by the split into subjectivity and

objectivity and by the replacement of love by law.”lii Though

Hegel was quick to reconcile this estrangement in history, others

proclaim that existence is now and forever (in time-space)

essentially estrangement. If Eden’s eternity is essentially united

infinities, existence torn from eternal being is now an

oscillation between finitude and infinity. In evil, this

manifests as the temptation of possession: grasping, accumulating

finitudes as surrogate infinity. The conditions of time-space

lend themselves naturally to possession—as one can only hold what

is has edges, boundaries. Whether this manifests in the

accumulation of material possessions in wealth or amassed corpses

in war, we are capable of seeking false infinites. Unfortunately,

possession often correlates with oppression or suppression of the

infinite; the habit of ‘having’ replaces being. Desire becomes

limited by confused consummation; and perception, by narrowed

perspective, forgetting.

We readily forget that we can existentially resist our

essential estrangement. It requires, first, acknowledging that

The profundity of the term ‘estrangement’ lies in the implication that one belongs essentially to that from which one is estranged. Man is not a stranger to his true being, for he belongs to it. He is judged by it but cannot be completely separated, even if he is hostile to it. Man’s hostility to God [and to God’s creation] proves indisputably that he belongs to him. Where there is the possibility of hate, there and therealone is the possibility of love.liii

If estrangement marks our existence, so too does the freedom

created by separation. The question becomes: can freedom be in

service of eternity—in all its united infinities, its essence of

love? If not, we must acknowledge that freedom will be tragically

in service of accumulating finitude, false infinities, and

cancerous evil.

IV) The Falling Freedoms

The writings of Emmanuel Levinas iterate the ethical

relation as one that preserves the infinite relation. If

possession degrades all relations (social, cognitive, sensorial)

into finite totalities, then responsibility restores the infinite

relation of self and other. Other, in this context, appears in

the “face”—a notation that is both literal and symbolic.

Literally, the face of a person is what cannot be reduced to the

finite. There is something elusive, allusive, and unintelligible

about the face. And yet, the face is a mode of expression, the

means of connection to a primordial command, “you shall not

commit murder.”liv As Levinas explains,

The expression the face introduces into the world does not defy the feebleness of my powers, but my ability for power. The face, still a thing among things, breaksthrough the form that nevertheless delimits it. This means concretely: the face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.lv

Thus, the face is not simply of a person; it can encounter us in

our relation to nature or to knowledge. To preserve the infinite

is to regard the other as that which cannot be reducible to

“sensible datum” or “suspended by an appropriation.” The face is

the indication of an otherworldliness, even as the world is its

delimitation. Like eternity, the face participates in and is

apart from its horizons. In this way, “face” comes closest to

resembling the Transcendent Other—the one whose expression

coincides with his or her existence.lvi

However, as allusion to the infinite within finite form, the

face threatens the ego’s autonomy. If the ego regards its freedom

as an alibi from responding to the face, the ego rests

dangerously in its finitude. For Levinas, the process of

individuation, of the ego’s actualization, is an ongoing

temptation. When freedom becomes our desire, responsibility is

violently ignored. Freedom, as a kind of selfishness, is what

lends us to dispose of the other. The other challenges our

selfishness insofar as we recognize that it exceeds our

subjective objectifying.

Thus, an ethical relation to the other is one that

perpetuates desire, and by definition breaks all objectifying

measurements. This desire is metaphysical in nature. It is not

satisfied by the physical desires of hunger, thirst, or

sexuality; these desires can be met, if even briefly.

Metaphysical desire “has another intention; it desires beyond

everything that can simply complete it. It is like goodness—the

Desired does not fulfill it, but deepens it.”lvii As such, it does

not wish for a reconciliation or “disappearance of distance”—at

least, not in this life. Desire accepts estrangement, but also

shifts the estrangement. It is not that the “I” must remain

estranged from others, in a superficial freedom. Rather, the

estrangement of the “I” makes possible a chase of receding

horizons discovered in the irreducible Face.

Distance is the space of desire. Autonomy is the vacuum of

desire, subsuming all otherness into adequation of the self, the

same. To break from this prison, one must not break from

mortality, but from the limitations of the same. It is possible,

as a mortal being, to not reduce all others to the same (either

in violent action or reductive ideologies). But in order for

freedom to be in service of this ongoing journey toward the

remote, we must first recognize that “freedom consists in knowing

that freedom is in peril.”lviii In Ricouer’s terms, this would

require making positive use of the disproportion that founds our

being. If we are constantly striving in existence to catch up

with our essential being, and this essential being is Levinas’

“Transcendent Other,” we must not try to level asymmetry, but

preserve it.

The preservation of alterity proves difficult as our general

mode of being is to make our selves at home in the world. For

Levinas, “Dwelling is the very mode of maintaining oneself, not as

the famous serpent grasping itself by biting onto its tail, but

as the body that, on the earth exterior to it, holds itself up and

can.” Our freedom, which depends on our self-assertion, is

grounded in this process of maintaining oneself. However, the

process of self-assertion or homing, often devolves into self-

possession, responsibility only to one’s self and what belongs to

the self. The home of the self becomes isolated from its primal

call to hospitality of the other.lix

To reverse this rigid construction of the self, the ego must

be encountered by an alterity which it cannot possess or adequate

to its own ideas. The other, or object of desire, must break the

cycle of the self’s preservative isolation. In order to do so,

desire must be animated within the self, to lead the ego out into

an ongoing relation with alterity. Only if the Desirable animates

the subject, can the ego move not out of self-need, but out of

true desire toward the infinite Other.lx Desire transfigures the

“I,” moving it above the habits of being. As Levinas exclaims,

“Desire marks a sort of inversion with regard to the classical

notion of substance. In it being becomes goodness: at the apogee

of its being, expanded into happiness, in egoism, positing itself

as ego, here it is, beating its own record, preoccupied with

another being!”lxi

Some might ask how this desire is distinct from the desire

of Adam and Eve to know good and evil. It is the difference

between gnosis as grasping knowledge and ahav as giving

intimacy.lxii I would answer that it restores a desire for the

fruits from the “Tree of Everlasting Life.” God never commanded

humanity to cease its desire for abundant life. God did not

forbid us from tasting its fruits in Eden. Levinas seems to say

that this metaphysical desire calls us to a different freedom;

not the choice of neutralizing otherness within our categories,

but of letting otherness exist in all its non-adequation. Only if

we preserve the strangeness of the Face, can we let the other be

free. We cannot reduce the other qua Face into “object-

cognition.”lxiii We must assume that any cognition we have is

incomplete, as if facets of the other exist ever in a dimension

not reducible to the self, or even to the dimension of space-

time.

It follows then, that the ego’s freedom must be chastened by

the freedom of the other. The other, in its freedom, may surpass

us, elude us, and even reveal itself, provisionally, to us. Thus,

even to “hear the divine word does not amount to knowing an

object; it is to be in relation with a substance overflowing its

own idea in me, overflowing what Descartes calls its ‘objective

existence.’”lxiv And if in fact, we let others overflow their

objective existence, we permit them transcendence, even as it

calls us to responsibility. No longer can language or thought be

a means of possessing ideas, people, or nature. Rather, “The

relationship between the same and the other, my welcoming of the

other, is the ultimate fact, and in it things figure not as what

one builds but as what one gives.”lxv The ego is no longer simply

called to dwell—to build and preserve itself as Heidegger’s being

at home—but also to host the stranger, the widow, the orphan,

anyone and anything wrapped in our shared estrangement.

Consequently, we cannot relegate otherness to theology, or any

ideology at all for that matter.lxvi

A freedom in service to eternity aims at uniting the

infinite otherness—not in encompassing thematizations—but in

ongoing relations that ever seek justice, always chasing

eschatological peace. This side of the eschaton, there can be “no

‘knowledge’ of God separated from the relationship with men. The

Other is the very locus of metaphysical truth, and is

indispensable for my relation with God.”lxvii In order to engage

the Eternal God, we must preserve the infinity within each human—

the eternal traces located in, but not limited to, this world.

V) Recovering from Eternity

It follows that Levinas would have us remake our

understanding of religion. Religion cannot fall prey to finite

desires: consummating our search for truth in the name of a

closed canon, or narrow reads of redemption. If the ego is

responsible, despite its vain autonomy, for vigilance toward

others, religious groups too must remain in response to

strangers. This vision of religion asks vigilance privileged

toward the outsider, the strange, the different. Thus, Levinas

defines religion anew, “For the relation between the being here

below and the transcendent being that results in no community of

concept or totality—a relation without relation—we reserve the

term religion.”lxviii A ‘relation without relation’ resembles

eternity as the unity that preserves of diversity. The key to

Levinas’ definition, however, is the acknowledgement that, this

side of eternity, we cannot claim to know the uniting relation.

It is primordial and not properly translatable into any “concept

or totality” the mind can form. It may be, then, that our best

approximations of this primordial eternity are not conceptual.

Many philosophies and religions aim at the eternal dimension

by seeking totality, continuity, or the systematic structuring of

plural particulars. Or else, these enterprises are fascinated by

death, perhaps with the tacit expectation that only after we

demarcate death can we glimpse the eternal.lxix However they try

to obtain ‘what lasts,’ these philosophies fall short in their

totalizing efforts to know, what can only be inchoately

experienced. The inchoate nature must necessarily stem from the

fact that eternity’s dimensions necessarily exceed ours.

I am reminded of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s mathematical

exposition of Euclidean space within theological discourse. After

the third dimension, the cutting-off point (the finitudes) of

geometrical shapes within an unknown fourth dimension “will

result in the plane loosing its coupure-function and passing it

on to volume.” Representations that we carry now (definitions via

discernment of what form is/is not) will give way to openness, a

dis-closure. This is significant on two immediate points. First,

when the lower order enters into the higher order, it is said to

be “‘impregnated and preserved’ by divine plenitude.”lxx Secondly,

when the higher order discloses itself within the lower, a human

being will seek for words to capture the encounter, but feel only

the shadow: the backside of God’s presencelxxi as we reach for the

hem of the garment,lxxii the edge of the cloak.lxxiii Even when the

Eternal reveals itself, it can only do so as “I AM WHO I AM.”lxxiv

This revelation is mysterious, even as it structures our concept

of a being whose existence is its essence. What can help us

experience the verity of this statement: a being whose nature is

vitality and abiding; a pure actuality whose expressed presence

reserves no potentiality?

After all, what can be know of this Eternal Name, since we

are merely shadows of eternal beings?lxxv As Edith Stein writes in

her discussion on God’s pure actuality (quoting Augustine),

“‘When you begin to step nearer, conscious of similitude with

him, and when you then true to probe the being of God—in a

measure proprortionate to your growing love (for your love also

is of God)—then you experience something you expressed in words

and something you did not and could not express in words.’”lxxvi

From the view of Eternity, God may be whole, immutable,

unchanging. But from within the limitations of time-space, the

created world as we know it, God cannot be anything but an

elusive expression. However, what sort of perception is capable

of keeping up with what fills and exceeds our words? Levinas says

ethics provides such an optics. The writer of 1st John would add

that this ethics is rooted in love’s knowledge, “Whoever does not

love does not know God, for God is love.”lxxvii It may be that our

participation in love constitutes our experiences of God. Only

love preserves the asymmetry of filling to overflowing, walking

an extra mile, giving an extra garment. But what in love is so

reminiscent of eternity?

After all, Levinas claims that love can become an egoisme-a-

deux, where lovers resign the world, neglect the Face.lxxviii To

prevent this limited love, Levinas calls us toward “the

interhuman events which open towards transcendence and reveal the

traces where God has passed.”lxxix This could be a love never

satisfied by just one other, rather expanding to all in the

desire for justice. Love as justice, as vigilantly attending to

suffering, is love that “aims at the other…To love is to fear for

another, to come to the assistance of his frailty.”lxxx This might

return us to the frailty of poet Christian Wiman in his

suffering. Why are God’s eternal traces “love” and not suffering—

since suffering seems to make wounds out of which we seek

transcendence? If God essentially is unmitigated, eternal suffering,

then our essence is suffering, estrangement. Existential tastes

of transcendence are lies; there’s no water in the rock.

We have a choice. First: if God’s essence is suffering than

God’s eternal being is a vacuous abyss, the nothingness that

cancels out beings. If this were the case, Christian Wiman would

be right to call eternity a foul consolation, indeed. But Wiman’s

prayer is not to an abyss, but the possibility of speechless

clarity, of suffering which signifies more than the limitations

it places on being. So we have a second approach: if God’s

essence is love than God’s eternal being is a blossoming all, the

everything that perpetuates and unifies being. If this is so,

Christian Wiman and Simone Weil can rightly speak of the

sustenance of love even in affliction.

From the belief that God is essentially love, existentially,

we would experience this in allusory ways. It would be akin to

Derrida’s perhaps as it relates to love in time:

For to love friendship, it is not enough to know how tobear the other in mourning; one must love the future. And there is no more just category for the future than that of the “perhaps.” Such a thought conjoins friendship, the future, and the perhaps to open on to the coming of what comes—that is to say, necessarily inthe regime of a possible whose possibilization must prevail over the impossible.lxxxi

It is this perhaps which initiates fidelity to the present

as it is stretched by creative openness to the future. The move

of the perhaps in the midst of mourning, is similar to the move

of the infinite in the midst of the finite. It turns experience

to another dimension of expression; it sees another side yet to

be disclosed. Only love has this patience and hope that

establishes constancy despite the limitations of the present, or

the unknowns of the future.

In his poetic philosophical text, The Unforgettable and the

Unhoped For, Jean-Louis Chretien begins with such a possibility, a

profound perhaps, “Is there an initial forgetting?...If there is

an initial forgetting, what it would make emerge must be an

absolute immemorial: not a past that, having been present and

thus already open and destined to memory, would afterward become

inaccessible in memory or for memory, but a past that is

initially past and originally lost…” In other words, is it

possible to forget our forgetting—to not remember Eden perhaps,

or its eternity? Is it that when humanity fell, when creation as

we know it came into existence, we lost everything prior? Or are

their hints, traces?

Chretien spends his text troubling our conceptions of memory

as restricted to time-space. In fact, memory serves as a kind of

immortalizing feature, absorbing into infinity what would

otherwise die in the momentary. “Memory would then be the place

where we free ourselves from time; it transcends the past,

abolishes the relation to the past as such in order to reach the

timeless presence of essence….memory tends toward a resurrection

or a parousia.”lxxxii And yet, this is a limited eternity; as

transcendent as memory proves to be, it is not without its own

constraints. We are finite beings, with limited brain capacities.

So he ask if perhaps eternity would not be instead a self-

forgetting, a “perfect amnesia” that he finds in Plotinus: “To

contemplate in such a way that one is united with what one

contemplates, is to forget oneself, to lose oneself in

light.”lxxxiii But this contemplative act does not simply reduce

everything in the “sameness” of the ego, as Levinas might worry.

Rather, the self becomes diffused into everything. Chretien notes

that, for Plotinus, “I know myself in knowing everything, which

is to say in becoming everything, and not in reflecting on

myself.”lxxxiv Here, the eternal is accessed in the loss of losing

forms, since forms are themselves illusions marking our

forgetting.

This great forgetting Chretien of the Eternal or Immemorial,

can also be characterized in the Dark Night of the Soul. As John of

the Cross writes, “Hope empties and withdraws the memory from all

creature possessions, for as Paul says, hope is for that which is

not possessed.”lxxxv This capacity to engage the world in “great

forgetting” requires a supple grip, not possession. The mind must

become “malleable, receptive to divine action, instead of being

the organ of attachment to what escapes it or has already escaped

it.” God is what the mind remembers when it has ceased to

remember. The Eternal comes as the wound of dispossession, which

may be why it is acute in suffering. But suffering is not its

only trace. The Immemorial, Eternal God wounds the memory in

love. As Chretien remarks,

God comes to memory in order to strike it with a wound of love that eternity itself could not close again….Theannunciation of God to memory does not signify that we do not have to seek God, to desire God, and to tend towards God, for it is only if God manifests himself tous, precedes us, and foresees us that a desire for him is possible….To call God unforgettable is to say that we are forever, at the most inward part of ourselves, transpierced by his light, and not that we souls alwayssuffer it in the same way. What could a person attempt to cover up and veil if not such a light? What could one attempt to flee, if not such an encounter? What could one try to fill in by any means, if not such a fault?

Chretien describes God’s love as a kind of violence—“strike,”

“wound,” “transpierced,” “suffer,” “fault.” Perhaps it is worth

noting that the Holy, even in love, inspires fear, the most

common refrain in scripture being, “Do not be afraid.” But why

are we overwhelmed by and fearful of such love? It asks all. It desires

all. It encompasses and hosts all. The terror of being utterly desired. It

threatens the ego. The ego fears dissolution, or is ashamed of

its difference.

Perhaps our fear is that we are not fit for God’s love,

being less than gods ourselves. The fear of not being symmetrical

to God, who created us in love for asymmetry, is as primal as

Genesis 3. Humanity desired to be as gods. Adam and Eve feared

that their knowledge was not enough to match the God that created

them. This is the great lie that has us hungering for the finite,

the great deception that ushered us into time-space and its

dualistic habits of mind. The great deception of adequation: one’s

difference from God compromises God’s eternal love. Ironically,

death results from this lie, and yet death exposes the truth.

Nothing can separate us.

Our only means of undoing this deception is to stop

“veil[ing], “flee[ing],” and “fill[ing] in” the fault-lines that

God’s loving wound intended. It is our difference from God that

gives us our rest in God’s love. For Love, as Eternal Being, is

the bonding of every infinite, irreducible, stranger within the

One. A relation without relation; an identity that preserves

vital difference.

From within this world, our love can only be likewise, in

service of the Eternal, if we “love and respect [that] which is

not at all at our disposal.”lxxxvi As it turns out, the Eternal, as

our unforgettable origin and return, “is not what we perpetually

grasp and what cannot withdraw from memory, but what does not

cease to grasp us and from which we cannot withdraw. The fact

that it is indissociable from our own being in the image of God

shows that what gives us our ownness remains inaccessible and

beyond appropriation.”lxxxvii If this is so, then we will ever be

existentially chasing our potential essence. Only in Eternity

will there be rest, coincidence. It is this aim for coincidence

that can easily slip into evil—the temptation to “sameness,”

finite totalities, idols. But it is also this desire for

coincidence, never satisfied, never possessed, which manifests

itself over time, in our love for others, infinity, the Face.

i Christian Wiman, “Lord of Having,” Every Riven Thing (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2010), 86-87.ii I think of Simone Weil’s notion of evil, where possession is the definitively errant move. “We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends back to us our own desire for goodness….We should like to feed upon it, but it is only something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only …in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. ... It may be that vice, depravity and crime are nearly always ... in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at.” Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 105.iii Christian Wiman, “Christian Wiman on Love, Faith, and Cancer,” http://billmoyers.com/segment/poet-christian-wiman-on-love-faith-and-cancer/ (accessed April 21, 2012).iv Waiting for God, 67.v Ibid., 68.vi Ibid., 70.vii Ibid., 70.viii Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Cosimo, Inc., 2007), 201.ix Ibid., 201.x Ibid., 201.xi Waiting for God, 74.xii Waiting for God, 74.xiii “It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces itfinds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not the in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God. In a dimension that does not belong to space, that is not time, that is indeed quite a different dimension, this nail has pieced cleanly through all creation, through the thicknessof the screen separating the soul from God.” Elsewhere she speaks of beauty as a sort of piercing the screen (Waiting for God, 112), but this passage explains how love, as the direction of turning toward God, cancels out creation even in its separation.xiv Tragic Sense of Life, 202.xv Ibid., 202.xvi “Lord of Having,” 86.xvii I write “a/part” to note the flexibility of eternity: how it both participates in time and is apart from temporality.xviii Tragic Sense of Life, 201.xix Plato, The Timaeus (Rockville: Serenity Publishers, 2009), 20.xx Ibid., 20.xxi Ibid., 20.xxii Ibid., 20.xxiii Ibid., 20.

xxiv Tragice Sense of Life, 201.xxv Ibid., 201.xxvi Waiting for God, 72.xxvii Ibid., 72.xxviii Edith Stein, Finite and Eternal Being (Washington, D.C.: ICS Publications, 2002), 108.xxix Ibid., 109.xxx Ibid., 105.xxxi Ibid., 105.xxxii Ibid., 109.xxxiii Ibid., 105.xxxiv Ibid., 60.xxxv Ibid., 60.xxxvi Ibid., 60.xxxvii Ibid., 61.xxxviii I employ “tear” as the thematic in this section since as a noun it suggests the form that extreme joy or suffering takes; and as a verb, it denotes a rupture or split.xxxix Waiting for God, 74.xl The following website served as an introduction to the physics of my theopoetics. See especially the lectures: James Schombert, “Cosmology,” http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/ (accessed April 28, 2012).xli Hebrews 11:1. In this way faith is like knowledge as Socrates describes it in Meno. Plato, “Meno,” Epistemology: Contemporary Readings, ed. Michael Huemer (New York: Routledge, 2006), 134.xlii Here, I resonate with Paul Tillich’s understanding of the “fall” as the “transition from essence to existence.” I extend this to mean that the “creation ofthe world,” as we know it, was born in this fall. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology: Volume II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 29-43.xliii Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 78.xliv Etz Hayim: Torah and Commentary, ed. David L. Lieber (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 2001). xlv Miguel de Unamuno describes our existence as God’s dream, or a fiction of a divine mind. Costica Bradatan, “‘God is dreaming you’: Narrative as Imatatio Dei in Miguel de Unamuno,” Janus Head 7, no. 2 (2004), 453-467.xlvi Etz Hayim, Genesis 2:7. The word for dust in this verse is synonymous with ‘clay.’xlvii Systematic Theology, 44.xlviii In this way time is experienced as infinite (not reducible to space) by finite beings; it can be felt as transcendent. Time, like Kant’s “blind and indispensable” imagination works as a transcendental synthesis, working to unite intelligibility and sensibility. Ricouer summarizes Kant’s position, “Is not time the mixture par excellence? Is not time the condition of all lived diversity, and to deal freely with the Kantian ideal of diversity, the condition of every surprise,

of every encounter, of all incoherence, of ever innovation, appearance, and excision? In shot, is not time essentially distended, and is not this disconnecteness what makes time ‘homogenous with the phenomenon,’ to speak again inKantian terms?” Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986),42.xlix Ibid., 146.l Ibid., 60-61.li Ibid., 127.lii Systematic Theology, 45.liii Ibid., 45.liv Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 199.lv Ibid., 198.lvi Ibid., 66-67.lvii Ibid., 34.lviii Ibid., 35.lix Ibid., 37.lx Ibid., 62.lxi Ibid., 63.lxii I use the Hebrew AHAV because its root letters, without the aleph, form the notion of giving, and with the aleph, the notion of love. Thus the giving love as knowledge among intimate partners.lxiii Ibid., 75.lxiv Ibid., 77.lxv Ibid., 76-77.lxvi Ibid., 78.lxvii Ibid., 78-79.lxviii Ibid., 88.lxix This is certainly a view held by Nicolas Berdyaev in his essay, “Death and Immortality,” in which he describes death as the only door out of “bad time” and into eternity. It’s not that he disparages life here on earth, but rather, with itsmetaxu-door of death, the earth as such cannot be complete meaning. He makes a fascinating assertion that death, even if caused by sin, serves paradoxically as our way into eternity. It’s as if the world is the foyer for eternal life with (or isolation from) God. The Destiny of Man (New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1960), 249-265.lxx Chris Doude van Troostwijk, “Phrasing God: Lyotard’s Hidden Philosophy of Religion,” God in France, 174.lxxi NRSV, Exodus 33:19-23.lxxii NRSV, Zechariah 8:23. lxxiii NRSV, Luke 8:44.lxxiv NRSV, Exodus 3:14.lxxv The word for image in the context of “made in Gods’ image” can also be translated shadow, as in a demotion in dimension, also the sense that Plato’s image

implies. Etz Hayim, Genesis 1:27.lxxvi Finite and Eternal Being, 60.lxxvii NRSV, 1 John 4:8.lxxviii Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics of the Infinite,” Debates in Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 66.lxxix Ibid., 67.lxxx Totality and Infinity, 256.lxxxi Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (Longdon: Verso Press, 1997), 29.lxxxii Jean-Louis Chretien, The Unforgettable and Unhoped For (New York: Fordham UniversityPress, 2002), 63.lxxxiii Ibid., 67.lxxxiv Ibid., 67.lxxxv Quoted in Ibid., 76.lxxxvi Ibid., 90.lxxxvii Ibid., 90.