The Evil of Purity: A Theology of Allusion

Being at one is godlike and good, but human, too human, the maniaWhich insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and one way.

- Friedrich Hölderlin, “Root of AllEvil”1

Evil has to be purified— or life is not possible. God alone can do that….ButJehovah, Allah, Hitler are earthly Gods. The purification they bring about isimaginary. That which is essentially different from evil is virtue accompanied by a clear perception of the possibility of evil, and of evil appearing as something good. The presence of illusions which we have abandoned, but which are still present in the mind, is perhaps the criterion of truth.

- Simone Weil, “Evil”2

Strange company: Jehovah, Allah, and Hitler. Simone Weil

collects them in their purifying impulses; she suggests an

alarming similarity. However, perhaps she is signaling their

relation as what the Buddhist tradition calls, “near enemies.”

They are a shade (or many more!) off from the vibrancy of true

purification. One could, without hesitation, claim that Hitlerism

is purification’s most evil distortion. Additionally, one could

abstract scriptures from the Hebrew Bible about Jehovah’s

ordained genocide. So, too, one could privilege certain violent

purifications within the Quran. “God alone can [purify evil]”—an

1 Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press Poetry 2004), 109. 2 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (New York: Van Rees Press, 1952), 129.

assertion with witnesses as wide apart (or near) as Hitler and

Jehovah.

This resonance she conjures may surprise or confuse us;

especially if we were to halt at her dismissal of their purity as

“imaginary.” Earthly Gods all: masquerading as the God who makes

life possible, makes purity desirable. They are each illusory

leaders, proclaiming good what is evil. And yet, it is not as if

she finds the earth without hope. The earth is not purely evil’s

distortion; it is not illusion all the way down. One can gain

exteriority through “virtue accompanied by clear perception.”

This perception does not simply dismiss illusions, but holds them

“still present in the mind.” The mind’s grasp of illusion is not

the fanatic’s chokehold of “the One, one country, one truth and

one way.”3 Rather, clear perception holds illusions in order to

hold them up to the light of scrutiny. Weil suggests that the

limitations of illusions can be our cause for abandoning them in

life; and yet, our thoughtful criticism of illusion can provide,

for the perceptive, the criterion of truth.4 It is as if one sees

3 Poems and Fragments, 109.4 This is reminiscent of St. Thomas Aquinas’ sentiment, ““We must love them both, those whose opinions we share and those whose opinions we reject, for both have labored in the search for truth, and both have helped us in finding it.” Qtd. in

truth in bas relief—the shadows illumine its dimensions.5 Or, as

Hölderlin writes, “That is the profit we gain from experience,

that we think of nothing excellent without its deformed

opposite.”6

Illusions are shadows that claim to be truth’s lucidity;

they achieve this through what Whitehead would name, “the fallacy

of misplaced concreteness.”7 They are abstractions in service of

essentialism, absolutism, and thin (violent) unity.

Unfortunately, illusions are abstractions that claim to be

concrete even as they strive to be universal, pure, or absolute.

Illusions are tempted toward the sin of purity; they forget the

concrete, and their forgetting is often a violent usurpation of

the rich plurality (even ambiguity) of concreteness. All this in

the name of the “One,” the “Set-Apart,” the “Pure,” that excludes

Thomas Merton, Thomas Merton: The Essential Writings, ed. Lawrence Cunningham (NewYork: Paulist Press, 1992) 121. Yes, Aquinas believed “All truth is one,” and yet,it does not reveal itself in one being only. It is not univocal. This is what Simone Weil and Friedrich Hölderlin resist in their own ways. Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Christian Classics, 1981), 89.5 “To allow the imagination to dwell on what is evil implies a certain cowardice; we hope to enjoy, to know, and to grow through what is unreal.” (Gravity and Grace, 128.)6 Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion: Or the Hermit in Greece, trans. Ross Benjamin (Brooklyn: Archipelago Books, 2008), 17.7 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World. (New York: Free Press , 1967), 51.

what it cannot assimilate into its own. All this to reassert the

violent “logic” of totality.8

It is the assumption of this paper that abstractions can

serve these demonic habits of “purity.” This will be considered

in an examination of the term “holiness.” In order to redefine

the desire for purity and holiness, I will first explore evil

distortions implied within “holiness” and “purity.” Then, I will

briefly return “abstraction” to its definition as a more neutral

habit of mind and communication. After noting this ambiguity of

abstraction, I will conclude by demonstrating how abstractions

can serve as allusions. If we can expose an abstraction’s illusory

quality by recalling its ambiguity, we can perhaps understand the

abstraction in its allusory potential. Allusion comes from the Latin

allusio, a “playing-with.” We find in this word our way out of

abstraction qua totalizing illusion. In order to use abstractions

in fruitful ways, we must consider every abstraction within its

8 “For this logic, multiplicity is a fall of the One of the Infinite, a diminutionin being which each of the multiple beings would have to surmount so as to return from the multiple to the One, from the finite to the Infinite. Metaphysics, the relation with exteriority, that is, with superiority, indicates, on the contrary, that the relation between the finite and infinite does not consist in the finite being absorbed in what faces him, but in remaining in his own being, maintaining himself there, acting here below.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay On Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press), 292.

context, its relationships. We must reinstate abstraction within

that which it has been drawn away from (abstrahere).

This reinstatement of abstraction qua allusion will seem a

philosophical task, in Gabriel Marcel’s understanding of

philosophy: “a philosopher worthy of the name [has] no more

important undertaking than that of reinstating experience in the

place of such bad substitutes for it.”9 The reinstating of

experience here must borrow from what Emmanuel Levinas’ claims

“alone deserves the name of experience”: “the idea of infinity,

in which being overflows the idea, in which the other overflows

the same, breaks with the inward play of the soul…a relationship

with the exterior.”10 And because exteriority’s infinite overflow

leads us to Levinas’ metaphysical Other, this paper’s task will

also be a theological one. The holiness of God, and God’s

purifying capacity, must be redefined within the human potential

for perceiving (and receiving) the good beyond being. Otherwise,

“earthly Gods” and human “mania” have a hold; and if so, we

should rightly dismiss God as the metaphysical license for

9 Gabriel Marcel, “Chapter I: Introduction,” The Mystery of Being: Reflection and Mystery 1948–1950, http://www.giffordlectures.org (accessed online: November 28, 2012).10 Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 56.

violent purity. Instead, I suggest a radical purification of

holiness: stripping holiness of its violent absolutism, its

harmfully reductive abstraction, and its radical separateness.

It is perhaps in this new understanding of abstraction qua

allusion that the goodness of the “holy” becomes perceivable as

beauty, and witnessed as hospitality. When the abstraction that

has been extricated from becomes implicated by the Other, a space can

open in which desire cultivates the beautiful and the good. But

for this desire to open, holiness must be reinstated to its gift

of exteriority: its capacity to purify us of our illusions, and

prepare us to host the beautiful.

I) “Like God, knowing good and evil”: The Illusion of Evil11

In the beginning, the world is good, marked even with a

double blessing on the day God creates humanity. Here, the

blessing of ‘it was good’ (tov) has not yet taken the moral

connotation it has received in Christian readings of Genesis 3.

Goodness is somehow an aesthetic judgment of beauty, wholeness,

and the connectivity of diversity. It is also used, in Genesis 3,

as a description of the tree of knowledge—goodness as frui and uti—

11 NRSV, Genesis 3.5.

pleasing to the eye and good for food. Goodness is connected with

desire. However this desire can be falsely oriented, and short-

circuited, by the tempter’s illusion: “You will not die; for God

knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you

will be like God, knowing good and evil.”12 Desire shifts from

its orientation toward beauty and relationship, to being as God,

knowing absolutely. This hunger for absolute knowledge is death.

In fact this illusion meant a closing of the eyes, and distance

from the very God who remained with them in the goodness of

creation. One wonders whether the serpent’s lie was that humanity

would not die, or if the serpent’s lie was not (also) a deception

about the very capacity of being like God. Perhaps humans already

knew all they needed to know about true good, insofar as they

were in the presence of an infinite God, and a fully manifest

good as beauty. The illusion—that to be Godlike is to know ‘good

and evil’—once accepted, meant that humans would come to know the

reality of evil via the illusion of good.

Before the moral connotations of ‘knowing good and evil,’

there was a primordial goodness of relationality: being with God

12 NRSV, Genesis 3.4-5.

as privileged over the goodness of being as God. The desire to be

the same, to collapse the distance that makes possible a desire

for relationship, remains at the root of all evil. Further

manifestations of evil, growing alongside (and masquerading as)

the desire for oneness, distort goodness into the satisfaction of

desire. Goodness is no longer the blessed beauty of creation (as

the relation of difference), but the eradication of difference

(and distance) in the logic of purity. Beauty as desire for

goodness slides into an illusory call: to swallow what difference

intended to be preserved. Thus, beauty, Simone Weil writes,

is like a mirror that sends back to us our own desire for goodness….We should like to feed upon it, but it isonly 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….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.13

At the beginning of her collected aphorisms on evil, Simone

Weil posits creation as “good broken up into pieces and scattered

throughout evil.”14 Certainly this is not how the story ended in

Genesis 3. Or is it? It would depend on one’s definition of evil:

13 Simone Weil, Waiting for God (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 105.14 Gravity and Grace, 119.

death, finitude, morality, sin, curse? Simone Weil’s definition

begins more abstractly, “Evil is limitless, but it is not

infinite. Only the infinite limits the limitless.”15 Thus evil

has a sort of cancerous element: a replication of the same that

leads to death. It is a static monotony that models broken

dynamism; its expansion subsumes difference into the same. Evil

is a “false infinity.”16 Like “hell itself,” evil “never

[permits] anything new, everything about it is equivalent. Never

anything real, everything about it is imaginary.”17 Evil strives

to create the real and ends up destroying it through some sort of

illusory distortion. Therefore Weil can state evil as the “bad

attempt to imitate God.”18 She qualifies this attempt as holding

two possibilities—“preserving and destroying.” In the imitation

of God that is evil, one destroys what it should preserve. To

imitate God’s true infinity, one must escape limitation. But she

warns, “We can only escape limitation by rising up toward unity

or going down toward the limitless.”19

15 Ibid., 119.16 Ibid., 119.17 Ibid., 119.18 Ibid., 119.19 Ibid., 158.

How tricky: how quickly the desire to unite with God ends in

evil. The impulse to purify oneself, or to prepare society for

this unity, can lead to force and destruction. Or so Simone Weil

and Friedrich Hölderlin warn us. If the world is truly the place

of good scattered throughout evil, one notices the precarious

nature of preservation. It requires the ability to discern

between the false infinity of evil (“the limitless”), the more

neutral limitations of human beings, and the good of God’s true

infinity. Within the limitations of being human, how might one

“rise up toward unity” without slipping “toward the limitless”?

Weil offers the ambiguous nature of purity as it seeks this

unity, “Evil can only be purified by God or by the social beast.

Purity purifies evil. So does force, in quite another way.”20

God’s purity seeks to unite us in our diversity, permitting the

infinite quality of creation. Purity in the hands of force,

however, strives to make creation “gloomy, monotonous, barren,

boring.”21 Evil often achieves this through violence, which would

seem to be its thrill. But evil is thrill that seeks stasis;

20 Ibid, 158.21 Ibid., 120.

divisions that seek false oneness. In contrast, the “real good is

always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”22

It is perhaps puzzling when Weil uses both infinity and

oneness to describe the good.23 Perhaps it is just as puzzling

when Hölderlin claims as “godlike” the capacity to “b[e] at one.”

The curious nature of their description is how their rhetoric

finds ‘near enemies’ in its distortions. Oneness can appear as

the imaginary good while actually manifesting real evil: the

totalitarian state, the violent purification of genocide, the

monotonous purity that force seeks. The collapse of imaginary

good into real evil thus suggests a oneness that has lost its

plurality. Evil transmutes the dynamism of diversity from “being

at one” to being falsely as one, as God. Perhaps Weil is drawing

upon, with Hölderlin, an understanding of divinity through

Heraclitus: “the one differentiated in itself.”24 Therefore, to

be at one is the capacity to be with all. As Hölderlin expresses,

“To be one with all—that is the life of divinity, that is the

22 Ibid., 120. As Hannah Arendt notes about totalitarian regimes, “Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being.” Origins of Totalitarianism (), 469.23 Gravity and Grace, 120.24 Hyperion, 109.

heaven of man.”25 If Weil articulates hell as the “condemn[ation]

to false infinity”26 it is in contrast to this infinity of the

One she names as the good. The good is the very condition of true

relationship, not the eradication of relation in favor of the One

Truth. This is Hölderlin’s assumption about creation as an

expression of Being: “Where subject and object are united

altogether and not only in part, that is, united in such a manner

that no separation can be performed without violating the essence

of what is to be separated.”27 However, it is not as if creation

is a totalizing synthesis. Hölderlin warns against confusing this

originary notion of Being as pure “identity.”28 Being is not

monotony.

If one makes the false assumption that Being must be radical

separation, then all is construed in harsh binaries, judgment as

pure good versus pure evil. If one makes the equally false

assumption that Being seeks identity or sameness, then all is

construed within a totality. Both conclusions can lead to the

25 Ibid., 12.26 Gravity and Grace, 119.27 Friedrich Hölderlin, “Judgment and Being,” Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. ThomasPfau (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), 37.28 Ibid., 37.

violent exile of those who do not fit within the logic of the

pure. Thus, both Hölderlin and Weil problematize any construal of

goodness as purity—insofar as it leads to a misunderstanding of

pure as separation or sameness. The good is the infinite in the

one; thus, if there is any purity to preserve, it is a

relationship of truly different shades of being. As Emmanuel

Levinas envisions, “The concept of the Good beyond Being and

beyond the beatitude of the One announces a rigorous concept of

creation, which would be neither a negation nor a limitation nor

an emanation of the One. Exteriority is not a negation; but a

marvel.”29 Levinas, Hölderlin, and Weil are each trying to urge

us beyond a conception of Being as the imitation or negation of the

One. That is, the One in its evil distortion: the illusion that

demands our negation of difference, or our totalizing of the

same. They each call for a return to the marvel that makes

possible our judgment of good and evil: the relationality of

difference—multiplicity.

They describe goodness in terms of the infinite relation,

and thus as the perpetuation of desire for the good. Goodness is

29 Totality and Infinity, 292.

not achieved definitively, as if one quick swallow could grant

all knowledge and praxis. Goodness is achieved in the relation of

difference, emblematized in the Genesis creation myth. As Levinas

distinguishes,

Society with God is not an addition to God nor a disappearance of the interval that separates God from the creature. By contrast with totalization we have called it religion. Multiplicity and the limitation of the creative Infinite are compatible with the perfection of the Infinite; they articulate the meaningof this perfection. Infinity opens the door of the Good.30

Levinas suggests the limitation of infinity as endemic to its

creativity. This limitation exists because the infinite consists

in the relationship of the self and the injunction of the other.

Freedom is limited by responsibility to the other, such that my

individual freedom cannot become a totalizing force upon the

other. My responsibility keeps my freedom from annihilating the

other’s freedom. It is a difficult relation that takes into

account the infinity of difference within the imperative to act

justly. Thus, Weil in turn claims that this infinite can limit

evil. A paradox: “Only the infinite limits the limitless.”31 The

30 Ibid., 104.31 Gravity and Grace, 119.

difficulty arises when we ascribe infinite power to an evil

force; we permit its limitless activity and in turn take on the

limitations it will not impose upon itself.

Evil is this illusion: the imaginary infinity

(limitlessness) claiming to be the true infinity. Evil’s

limitless monotony can masquerade in duty’s limitations, even the

moral ought of deontology. As Weil elucidates, “When we are

victims of an illusion we do not feel it to be an illusion but a

reality….Evil, when we are under its power is not felt as evil

but as a necessity, or even a duty.”32 Thus there is no room for

reflection, nuancing. The limitless quality of evil manifests as

the fatum, or the non-negotiable deon. It claims both the right

of the One, and the force of the infinite, even as it totalizes

us into an unthinking ought. This is the very pattern in Simone

Weil’s assessment of “Factory Work.” The very conditions of the

worker are an abstraction, “factory workers are, in a sense,

truly uprooted beings.”33 In this setting, “Things play the role

32 Ibid., 121.33 “Factory Work,” Simone Weil Reader (Mt. Kisco: Moyer Bell Limited, 1977), 54.

of men, men the role of things. There lies the root of the

evil.”34

In evil, then, the illusory capacity of abstraction is most

at work: in a factory’s monotonous turning over of people’s “real

presence”35 into emptied things; in might’s exchange that “makes

a thing of anybody who comes under its sway.”36 Evil as illusion

enacts its abstraction in two ways. First, evil poses as the good

through an abstract appeal to purity; it presents cheap unity

through costly delusions. Second, evil abstracts personhood by

turning individuals into a monotonous ‘ought,’ an object bound by

the logic of the same. Levinas would add to Weil: this “ought” is

not the imperative of communication, nor of the infinite

relation. This ought is an illusion of morality in support of

totality.

II) “One language and the same words”: Illusion of Totality37

The “tower of Babel” does not merely figure the irreducible multiplicity of tongues; it exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating, of completing something of the order of edification, architectural construction, system, and architectonics….Beforethe deconstruction of Babel, the great Semitic family was establishing its

34 Ibid., 60.35 Gravity and Grace, 127.36 “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” Simone Weil Reader, 153.37 NRSV, Genesis 11.1.

empire, which it wanted universal, and its tongue, which it also attempts to impose on the universe. The moment of this project immediate precedes the deconstruction of the tower.38

Again, another tale from the book of origins. The tower of

Babel: the erection of unity at a site that would be cursed with

confusion. It is traditional to proclaim Babel as a curse. (Just

as one might claim Eve’s painful procreation, or Adam’s difficult

production, a curse.) But Derrida reads in this tale an

exposition on the illusion of totality. The diversity of

languages—and their resulting confusion—is less an affliction and

more a preservation of reality’s richness. Deconstruction, which

Derrida connects with the plurality of tongues, is a way to

ensure Levinas’ perfection of the infinite as: “Multiplicity and

the limitation of the creative infinite.”39 Insofar as Babel was

both a limit upon false unity and a proliferation of languages,

it reveals the function of what Levinas will call “discourse as

ethics.”40

According to Derrida, the evil at work in Babel is not the

curse of confusion, but the desire to be “as god.” And again, 38 Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, trans. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 104, 105-106.39 Totality and Infinity, 104.40 Ibid., 72-77.

this desire to be as God comes to replace the relationship of

difference. In their very striving toward God as Absolute or

Universal Power, Babel’s “Semitic family” mistakes this power as

their own. The build ‘toward God’ (à-dieu) becomes a goodbye to

God (adieu). In Weil’s language, they choose the poorer imitation

of God. Instead of preserving God, they seek to preserve

themselves by annihilating God’s difference. The desire to build

“a tower with its top in the heavens” (proximity toward God)

comes to replace the desire to be God’s people. Instead of

bearing God’s unspeakable name, they seek, through their common

language and common building to “make a name for [them]selves.”41

This replacing that eradicates difference is the punished

presumption. Derrida claims that God’s proper name is

“confusion”—insofar as God resembles the infinity of

interpretations, tongues, possibilities. Thus, these ambitious

builders of totality are punished for desiring

to make a name for themselves, to give themselves the name, to construct for and by themselves their name, togather themselves there (“that we no longer be scattered”), as in the unity of a place which is at once a tongue and a tower, the one as well as the other, the one as the other. He punishes them for

41 NRSV, Genesis 11.4.

having thus wanted to assure themselves, by themselves,a unique genealogy.42

Whether out of jealousy, or out of the preservation of God’s

name as confusion, or even ‘the one differentiated in itself,’

God “at the same time imposes and forbids translation….Translation

then becomes necessary and impossible.”43 This impossibility of

fully translating the other into my language, or reducing the

other into the same, is somehow God giving us The Name in a way

we could not witness in totalizing schemes. Thus Levinas can

critique the one of “coherent discourse” or the “universal

thought” of rationality from an ethical perspective. “A universal

thought dispenses with communication” just as a totality

dispenses with the ethical relation.44 Such a community that

claims universality, say, in its systems of thought (as if the

tower were a logic of totality) would make “language as a

relation between beings impossible.” So it is not that God

imposes the impossibility of translation as a mischievous

thwarting, but as a restoration of the possibility for true

discourse. True discourse depends upon commerce, “Language, far 42 Acts of Religion, 107.43 Ibid., 108.44 Totality and Infinity, 72.

from presupposing universality and generality…presupposes

interlocutors, plurality.”45 Thus our construction of truth,

through discourse, cannot simply be the unfurling of

“prefabricated internal logic”—some blueprint for the tower of

Babel.46 And ethics (as discourse) cannot be some imposition of a

moral ought—a universal ‘language’ that denies the plurality of

concrete situations.

Propaganda is the illusion of such discourse. Concordantly,

a totalitarian state is the illusion of free society. These two

suppositions are rooted in one another for Levinas. For if

discourse is misconstrued as propaganda (one-sided speech that

fanatically ignores particularities outside of its ‘absolute’

claim), then truth (and power) rests dangerously in the One of

the totality. However, true “[discourse] is the constitution of

truth in a struggle between thinkers, with all the risks of

freedom.”47 Freedom is not a risk if one’s identity, within a

totality, is fixed. Freedom, thus construed, is as illusory as

the universalisms that claim to preserve it. Societies must

45 Ibid., 73.46 Ibid., 73.47 Ibid., 73.

preserve the “strangeness of the Other” because it is “his very

freedom!”48 The irreducibly strange tongues of Babel provide

resistance to totality’s illusion. It is the mutation of language

that makes mutuality, in its richest sense, possible.

Propaganda thrives on its thinness, its easy translation. It

is inflated language providing even poorer truth—and often with

the claim of being Absolute Truth in service of the Pure State.49

As Hölderlin aptly writes in the tongue of Hyperion, “The state

has always been made into hell because man wanted to make it into

his heaven.”50 The utopian vision that so often begets violent,

totalitarian regimes begins with an illusory understanding of

purity. If the totality, and its propaganda, perpetuates as an

illusory purity, it is because it has forgotten the “‘pure

knowledge’” of language which

consists in the relationship with a being that in a certain sense is not by relation to me…a being that stands beyond every attribute which would precisely have as its effect to qualify him, that is to reduce

48 Ibid., 73.49 Hannah Arendt observes its dangerous closure of communication as well in tyrannical governments. “[Total terror] substitutes for the boundaries and channels of communication between individual men a band of iron which holds them so tightly together that it is as though their plurality had disappeared into One Man of gigantic dimensions.” (Origins of Totalitarianism, 465-466.)50 Hyperion, 43.

him to what is common to him and other beings—a being, consequently, completely naked.51

Naked has two meanings, one allusory, another illusory. Allusory:

to preserve the other as transcending all qualifiers which one

would use to clothe or cover her difference. Illusory: to reduce

the other to what is common to all, thereby stripping her coldly

through language or knowledge down to her vulnerability. The

“pure knowledge” of language observes the precarious relation:

the other is not the sum of our translating symbols, no matter

how concrete; the other is also not to be stripped of her

difference, her particularity. Purity of this nakedness is

relation without relation.

It is true that language, as a system of symbols and

qualifiers, is drawn up in the interaction of shared expressions

and unshared experiences. The abstracting quality of language is

neutral, or perhaps, better said, necessarily ambiguous. A word

can be selected, drawn out of (abstractus) a whole network of

possible words. One must abstract somewhat in order to

conceptualize, to acquire knowledge, to communicate. However,

this abstracting process loses its neutrality in illusion. 51 Ibid., 74.

Illusion forgets that the abstraction relates to a web from which

it is extricated. A word is always implicated by other words,

just as a human being is implicated by other human beings, other

species. A concept cannot be thought without its shades of

meaning, and even its shades of opposite meaning. We are crafted

by infinite shades of light: dimensional, dynamic, shifting

(ambiguus). Thus will our words and concepts be. The illusion,

however, chooses the Absolute over against ambiguity. Illusion

claims to get at the “essence” of a being by abstracting it from

particularity, and from the irreducibility of the other’s

strangeness. With the essentializing abstraction comes the

impossibility of perception. In trying to strip the other to

naked essence, the other becomes invisible as person—and perhaps

only visible as object.

III) “Bent on evil”: Illusion of Idolatry52

The deep sense of mortality, of change, of his temporal limitations enflames man so that he attempts much….In good times there are seldomany enthusiasts. Yet when man lacks great, pure objects then he creates some phantom out of this or that and closes the eyes in order to be able to take interest in it and live for it.53

52 NRSV, Exodus 32.22.53 “Reflection,” Essays and Letters, 48.

Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida are concerned—as Simone

Weil and Hannah Arendt are—with the reduction of the other into

the same, the infinite into the finite.54 However, the contrary

move is equally illusory. One can lift what is finite into the

level of the infinite. One can make one’s abstraction have the

quality of an Absolute. This is the illusion of idolatry, or the

demonic, as Paul Tillich names it. The demonic resists ambiguity;

but in trying to attain the unambiguous, it actually occludes it.

The process of demonization occurs “when religion as a social and

personal reality makes this claim [of superiority] for itself and

the finite forms which by which it points to the infinite.”55

When religion confuses its finite, profane forms with the

infinite Holy, the symbolic order is broken. Holy forms “become

demonic at the moment in which they become elevated to the

unconditional and ultimate character of the Holy itself.”56

Demonization not only inflates the finite into a false infinite;

it short circuits desire. The demonic closes the perpetual,

54 “Ideology and Terror,” Origins of Totalitarianism, 461-479.55 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume III (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1963), 105.56 Paul Tillich, “The Nature of Religious Language,” The Essential Tillich (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 51.

erotic striving of the finite being toward the infinite. God is

no longer what “ultimately concerns” us, but what we ultimately

dictate to others.

This maneuver is not a strictly theological one. It is

certainly implied within propaganda and limiting ideologies

(racism, sexism, anthropocentricism): one experience, poorly

reduced, is then lifted, inflated, and generalized to all. But if

prior sections have helped enunciate the reductive capacity of

illusion, this section will briefly mention the inflating

capacity of illusion. Naturally, both reduction and inflation

convey an impoverishment, and are related impulses. However, to

help make the distinction, we return again to a Biblical allusion

made strange.

In his three-act opera, Moses und Aron, Arnold Schoenberg re-

presents humanity’s struggle to articulate God.57 In the first

act, the Israelite community discusses their many manifestations

of God. One man speculates that this plural God is too diffuse to

57 Though Schoenberg comes before the time of Arendt, Weil, and Levinas—he shares there initial concerns about Jewish identity within a German totality. Already, bythe time he is composing this opera, he has suffered the reduction of his Jewish identity into the German totality. Aaron Tugendhaft, “Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,” The Chicago Undergraduate Journal of Jewish Studies 3 (1997).

protect the Israelites; they need to adopt the idea of a single

God whose power is consolidated against the Egyptian gods.

Already the stage is set for the question: What manifestation of

God can we rally behind? By the time of the second act, the

Israelites are in the desert. Here God manifests as disconcerting

absence. Hardly an empowering God: the God of unbearable longing.

During the absence of God, the people are unruly, licentious, and

distrustful of Aron. They need a phantom God to assuage them in

the interim. To prevent the people from killing the priests, Aron

offers them the golden calf. A youth protests the worship of the

calf and is killed by tribal leaders; the priests in turn

sacrifice four virgins. Another duplicity: the worship of the

idol requires the death of the pure; but it also gives ways to a

wild orgy. It is a scene of Weil’s “limitless” evil joining with

its false, and violent, consecration of purity.

What is perhaps most significant in the illusion of idolatry

is its response to the distance or deferral of God’s

manifestation. Moses and Aron respond differently but fall into

the same crux. Moses comes down from the mountain with his laws,

and chastises Aron for giving the people an idol. Aron in turn

chastises Moses: are not the tablets an idol, too? Are they not

the attempt to put in words or images a God who is absent,

indescribable, irreducible? Is not Moses simply defending his

idea of God? And what makes his understanding definitive? The

struggle for a definitive portrayal of the Infinite Other leaves

Moses lamenting the burden of immediacy. How can he communicate

with impure images the purity of an Absolute God? At this point,

all abstraction seems bound to either illusion’s reduction of the

concrete or idolatry’s inflation of the concrete. But this

assumes the impossibility of an allusion. Perhaps there can be a

playing-with—a translation between the logos and the flesh—that

reinstates the possibility of goodness within the concrete. Not

all abstractions are idols or illusions of the go(o)d.

IV) “Show us the father and we will be satisfied”: Allusion as

Incarnation58

[The prophets] fell silent [because] they looked into the hidden truth and saw there the mystery of God, without being able to put it into words. But occasionally it happened that they turned outside themselves and spoke, but then they lapsed into gross matter and wanted to teach us to know God through lowly creaturely things, since there was nothing that could adequately capture the truth.59

58 NRSV, John 14.859 Hyperion, 15.

Since at least the 16th century, “abstraction” names what is

removed from practical matters or withdrawn from the concrete.

However, there is yet another definition of abstraction, naming

the possible reality of “a smaller quantity contain[ing] the

virtue or power of a greater.”60 Abstractions can be finite

markers of the infinite, traces that trail into (play with) the

plurality and ambiguity of their concreteness. As the Christian

contemplative, Meister Eckhart suggests, between silence and the

unspeakably infinite nature of God, the prophet chooses the

ordinary to animate mysterious truths. The non-adequation between

“gross matter” and God startles.61 The move from what can seem so

abstracted—so distant from our depictions—requires speech that

preserves this distance. The more concrete the symbol, the more

spacious its opening for the divine. This is a paradox that poets

and prophets know. As Hölderlin writes in his poem, “The Titans”:

Even mortals must feelThe presence of something higher.Which is why they build housesAnd run workshopsAnd send ships across the sea.

60 Samuel Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language, Vol. I (London: J.F. and C. Rivington,1785), 85. This usage survives today in the ‘call for abstracts’ in academic conferences.61 Meister Eckhart, Selected Writings (New York: Penguin Books, 1994), 137.

And men offer their handsIn exchange, the earth is absorbedIn thought, eyes castTo the ground for good cause.

Yet you also feelA presence of a different kind.For gross things must also enterThe balance, if there is to beEvidence of the pure.62

Here Hölderlin depicts a different oneness of humankind. It is

not the “root of evil” that fixates on one claim and imposes it

upon all else. It is not a limitless expansion of power, as Weil

suggests. But rather, the poem depicts a relation between humans

and their infinite projects. The relation spans the distance

between eyes cast to the ground and earth absorbed in thought.

Between humble engagement and lofty speculation: all of these

projects bespeak the “offer[ing of] hands in exchange.” And the

exchange stretches, like Levinas’ commerce of language, into

one’s own and into the foreign.63 The home and across the sea,

the earth and beyond the earth. “A presence of a different kind” 62 Friedrich Hölderlin, “The Titans,” Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 147-148.63 “To recognize the Other is therefore to come to him across the world of possessed things, but at the same time to establish, by gift, community and universality. Language is universal because it is the very passage from the individual to the general, because it offers things which are mine to the Other. To speak is to make the world common, to create common places.” (Totality and Infinity, 76).

is sensed but incompletely seen. It is not beheld in unmediated

purity, but in the evidence of “gross things”—so intimately near

as to “balance” the radically far. The poem does not end here, of

course, but gestures in concluding fragments to a “mover and

shaker” who

Reaches into depthsTo give life, they thinkThe god is going downTo the dead, and the abyss,Unbound, all-fathoming,Seethes with light.

The infinite reach between humans in relationship, then between

humans and the earth, then between the earth’s evidence and the

“presence of a different kind”: this is an abstraction of

allusion. Every move outward is a playing-with, not an

eradication of, difference. And just so, this relation of parts

within the whole is further stretched; it is not a totality, but

a relation at the point of each boundary. The horizon of

mortality echoes back with the divine. As humans expand outward

in love and effort, they prepare for the one who would “mov[e]

and shak[e]” every totality. They prepare for the holy who is

“going down to the dead”—the infinite who comes to limit the

limitless cancer of evil.

Hölderlin does not explicitly name ‘the god’ as Christ. Nor

would this be his poetic vocation. He understands the poet to

prepare the arrival of the gods; and “the time has not yet/ Come”

for their arrival.64 Though Hölderlin’s imagery suggests Christ

(or as even the early Christians depicted him, Orpheus),

Hölderlin refrains from the name. He withdraws so that no

Christian can think their work complete. (‘I know this is about

Christ. I have figured out the poem,’ easily becomes, ‘I know who

Christ is. I have my absolute interpretation set.’) The poet does

not dictate; the poet sings. Song: a saying that preserves the

holy between what is said and what is unsaid, what has been and

what is yet to come. Hölderlin does not have the illusion that

what he sings can “set the spirit loose.” And yet, he still sings

the traces of God tracked upon the earth:

God reveals many things.And clouds have longEffected things below. And the holy wilderness takes root, rich in promise.So rich it burns….….Godly fire cannot

64 Ibid., 145.

Bear captivity.65

The poet may not be able to bind the holy flame in his song, but

he can testify to the richness of signs, made perhaps more rich

by God’s apparent absence. Again, the non-adequation between God

as withdrawn from the world, and God’s evidence in the world

provides the spacious speech in which a God may be conceived,

even lived. The holy is riddled with holes; and thus no totality

has its hold.

In absence of an Absolute Go(o)d, we may scramble for our

idols and illusions. They satisfy our need for absolute

knowledge. But perhaps it is the virtue of Christ that he both

reveals and seems to conceal God. He does so not by presenting

God as knowledge (gnosis), but as love. Even Philip had before

him Christ—the allusion to God (play between humanity and divine)

—when he pleaded, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be

satisfied.”66 But the virtue of Christ as allusion is his

incapacity to satisfy. He answers Philip by depicting God as a

dwelling with many rooms, infinite rooms even. Perhaps this

plurality dizzied Philip; but perhaps Christ intended to show him65 Ibid., 145.66 NRSV, John 14:8.

that ‘satisfaction’ is not the business of God. The mutual

indwelling of infinite rooms is.

Satisfaction is for the idols, and for the illusions that

satiate themselves on vacuous, bloodthirsty abstractions.67 Even

the laws of purity, meant to ‘satisfy’ God, come down to concrete

demonstrations of holiness. What begins with the injunction, “You

shall be holy for I the Lord your God am holy,”68 ends with

Christ’s injunction for a law never fulfilled, the infinite

relation par excellence, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with

all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your

mind….You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’”69 This will

require a different understanding of holiness as desire for the

other, an exercise in beauty even.

VI) “Carrying inside him for ages”: Allusion as Beauty70

The [one] who has not at least once in his life felt full, pure beauty in himself when the powers of his beings played into one another like the colors in a rainbow…this man will not even be a philosophical skeptic…For, believe me, the skeptic finds contradiction and flaw in all that is thought only because he knows the harmony of flawless beauty, which is never thought. He disdains the dry bread that well-meaning human

67 “Power of Words,” Simone Weil Reader, 281.68 NRSV, Leviticus 19.1.69 NRSV, Matthew 22.40.70 Plato, Symposium, trans Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company), 209C.

reason offers him only because he feasts in secret at the table of the gods.71

Holiness often takes on the characteristic of abstraction;

it stems from the notion of being set apart. Thus the move of

withdrawal from the world, or preservation of a Being beyond,

seems perhaps the best definition of holiness. But if this is not

to perpetuate the illusion of God as another totality—brought

conveniently down to fortify our own totalities—this definition

must shift. Holiness must be cleansed of its manifestations as

Absolute, and brought rather into the sphere of erotic allusion:

playing with as dining with, at the “secret table of the gods.”

In Plato’s symposium, Eros (not unlike Christ) mediates

between mortals and the divine.72 Eros preserves radical

difference even as it draws together in beauty. It is this

intimation of “pure beauty” that can absolve the Absolute its

violence. Pure beauty, as Hölderlin observes, is not thought, but

felt as fullness, accord, interplay of difference. Thus it is not

an abstraction of totalizing logic or a violent seizure of truth.

A common critique of Plato, and of the Christian tradition as it

71 Hyperion, 109.72 Symposium, 202E, 205E.

adopts Platonic strands, is actually a critique for Manichaeism.

Plato’s eros for the “good beyond being” is not Mani’s salvation

by knowledge (as Gnostic Christians later adopted). In

Manichaeism, religion is based on pure reason: “it ha[s] an

answer for everything and despise[s] [the mysterious strands] in

Christianity.”73 Plato’s forms are not unmediated secrets, but

invitations extending desire toward the good. The extension, yes,

reaches beyond this world, but only through beauty’s interaction

between the concrete and Ideal Goodness. Beauty is not a

convenient appeal to the other-worldly, but rather leverage for

an otherwise world. In its mysterious lure, beauty preserves what

is unthinkable by perpetuating the desirable.

With Diotima’s speech in the Symposium, we come to

understand Eros as what allows us to move infinitely toward the

good: moving from concrete love of one beautiful body, to many

beautiful bodies, to beautiful customs, to beautiful concepts, to

Beauty in its essence.74 Many perceive these stairs as a move

from the concrete to the Absolute or Essential. However, the

73 Manichaeism, The Catholic Encyclopedia, http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09591a.htm (accessed December 1, 2012).74 Symposium, 211C-D.

effect of this drawing upward is an insemination inward, later

giving birth out into the world through virtue.75 Beauty beheld

in its pureness can only be reached by beauty loved in its

“pollut[ion] of human flesh.”76 The dimensions play with one

another unabashedly; like prophet’s stories or Hölderlin’s god,

they go down to give life. Each step on the staircase is not

simply transcendence, but a hollowing out; each step in desire

prepares one to host beauty as goodness. As Levinas writes, “The

true desire is that which the desired does not satisfy, but

hollows out. It is goodness.”77 Desire is hollowed out by its

desired aim, and yet lacks nothing. It learns the “insufficiency

of being self-sufficient.”78 It finds the Absolute utterly

insufficient to its hunger; illusions are over-processed,

stripped of nutrition. Given illusions, desire would rather be

hungry—would rather host the stranger, than deny the chance to

play with difference.79

75 Ibid., 209C, 212B.76 Ibid., 211D.77 Collected Philosophical Papers, 57.78 Ibid., 57.79 Insofar as Diotima’s stairs connote progression and not relation, one could accuse Plato of denigrating concrete, sexual love in favor of love directed towardthe Beauty of the good. However, we must remember that even Plato gives the last word to Alcibiades. It is Alcibiades who beholds the beautiful within Socrates’

Beauty is the model of allusion’s capacity to be one and

many—concretely one form, then multiply, perpetually experienced.

It is in our preservation of beauty, our hosting of its strange

allure, that we make way for the stranger. Beauty is what we

cannot swallow, but what we can behold, as a mirror for

remembering the good. It has all the awe of holiness, without

falling unevenly to either an abstract form or dismissed

concreteness. Beauty operates as widening room: the concrete form

opens one’s relation to the unsatisfiable, immemorial longing for

the good. It forges a desire that is without object, illusion, or

idol to satisfy it. Beauty cannot be assimilated, nor perfectly

translated: unsatisfying because immeasurable, impure. Holy

beauty is the impurity of play: God soiled with garden, with

life.

profane, Silenus-like exterior. He sees the beauty giving birth within; and he also notes that Socrates’ eros functions as allusory. It claims to lust after beautiful boys, but yet resists satisfaction through them. Because Socrates never lets loose his love of the concrete or of unsatisfiable Beauty, he baffles. Symposium, 216E.