MEMOIR 10
PREDESTINATION
Nothing could have been more alien to my earlier theological thinking
than a centering upon predestination, and this center arrived as an unexpected
and uninvited guest. It came first as a deep offense, perhaps the
deepest possible theological offense, and an offense seemingly making impossible
theological thinking itself. Why an offense? Quite simply because
it so ultimately assaults any possible subject of thinking, dissolving
every possible ground of that subject, and doing so by its affirmation
of the absolute sovereignty of grace, a sovereignty which is all in all.
Of course, such an offense occurs in Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Barth,
and perhaps ultimately even in Aquinas himself. So, too, I had become
persuaded that predestination is inseparable from any full and genuine
philosophy or theology of history, and that it is simply impossible to
understand our Western history without understanding predestination.
Yet predestination is most deeply an interior offense, one assaulting every
possible freedom, and every possible integrity or wholeness of consciousness,
thereby effecting an absolute negation if not dissolution of humanity itself.
Nonetheless, predestination is not fate, it is wholly different from every
possible positivism or reductionism, and this because it knows an ultimate
responsibility of the predestined, a responsibility whereby we are totally
guilty by way of an original and universal fall, and we repeat or renew
that fall in every negative or evil act. True, that repetition is
irresistible to us, and so far from being a conditioned repetition, this
repetition is a truly willed one, as first unveiled in Pauls Epistle to
the Romans, for our wills are divided at their very center, and so much
so, that as Augustine discovered, the actual freedom of our will is inseparable
from the ultimate impotence of our will. Indeed, the very discovery
of the freedom of the will in Paul is a discovery of the slavery of the
will, and only in the dogma of predestination is that dichotomy of the
will purely realized.
Nevertheless, the question arises as to how it is humanly or
interiorly possible to know predestination. How is it possible to
know that ones freedom is ultimately an illusion, or that ones purest
acts are predestined acts, or that God is that absolute sovereignty comprehending
every act whatsoever? A contrary question would be how is it possible
truly to know God without knowing predestination. Of course, Greek
philosophy could seemingly know God without knowing predestination, but
if only for this reason innumerable theologians have insisted that Greek
philosophy does not truly or actually know God, and cannot know God because
it cannot know revelation. Yet is it possible to know revelation
or to be open to revelation without incorporating an ultimate wounding,
an assault upon our deepest center, one absolutely debilitating in its
overwhelming power, and most debilitating to our most integral or most
interior power? There is a very good reason why the very word God
is so circumscribed in our world, almost never pronounced by those who
are wisest among us, and then only all too indirectly or elusively.
In a genuine sense this is our most forbidden word, so that a truly new
iconoclasm is pervasive among us, and most pervasive among those who are
seemingly most distant from God. Yet the theologian, too, is reluctant
to pronounce the name of God in our world, or the serious theologian, and
I suspect that I have been most offensive to my fellow theologians in so
frequently evoking God.
One of the ultimate paradoxes in our Western history is that
predestination and freedom have been so deeply conjoined, and this is true
not only of Paul and Augustine but also of Hegel and Nietzsche, and while
this is a uniquely Christian paradox, it has full counterparts in Buddhism
and Islam, just as it does in every genuine thinking of freedom.
Thus predestination can be understood as necessity, but only as an historical
rather than a natural necessity; thereby freedom itself is understood as
freedom and destiny at once, and a freedom impossible apart from the actualities
of history. Accordingly, this is a freedom alien to every possible
innocence, or every possible primordial condition. Hence it occurs
only in what the Christian knows as a wholly fallen condition, and here
freedom can actually occur or be realized only through grace. Nothing
is more primal for Paul than his insistence that if justification comes
through the law, then Christ died for nothing (Galatians 2:21). Only
the death of Christ is the source of justification or reconciliation, so
that we are justified only by his blood (Romans 5:9), and we are united
with Christ in a death like his, wherein our flesh or Old Adam is crucified
with him, so that we might no longer be enslaved to sin, for whoever has
died with Christ is freed from sin (Romans 6:5-11). Thus justification
is only by grace, and by the grace of Christ, and by the grace of that
Christ who was crucified for us.
Here, we can discover the deep ground of a uniquely Christian
predestination, for if justification is only by grace, then it is wholly
and absolutely beyond our own power. As Aquinas himself remarks,
no one has been so mad as to hold that our merits were the cause of Gods
predestining the elect, it is Gods will alone that is the source of predestination,
therefore the foreknowledge of merits is not the motive or reason of predestination,
and yet what is from freedom and what is from grace are not distinct, for
that which occurs through our free will also occurs from predestination
(Summa Theologica I, 23, 5). Paul is here Aquinas primary source,
for predestination is unthinkable apart from the Crucifixion, that one
source of an absolutely undeserved grace, and a grace unveiling our ultimately
fallen condition. By knowing this grace we can know that it occurs
only in the depths of our fallenness, and thus to think the Crucifixion
is to know the absolute sovereignty of grace, a grace which we name with
the name of election or predestination. It is precisely when Crucifixion
is unthought that predestination is unthought as well; hence it is not
accidental that predestination is so absolutely primal in Augustine, Luther,
Calvin, and Barth, and so deeply absent in those very theologians who do
not think the Crucifixion. In one sense, the theological ground of
predestination is extraordinarily simple, but in another sense it is extraordinarily
complex, so it is that Barth is virtually alone as a theologian of predestination
since the Reformation. Inevitably, Barth is also alone as a truly
modern theologian in knowing the absolute No of God, and only that No makes
possible the predestination of the damned, a predestination apart from
which the predestination of the elect is wholly illusory, as affirmed by
every theologian of predestination.
Here, is the supreme scandal of Christianity, one deeply offending
everyone, Barth could profoundly transform this scandal with his unique
doctrine that it is only Christ who suffers damnation, but thereby he deepens
the inseparability of damnation and redemption. If we can only know
redemption by knowing the Crucifixion, we thereby know the absolute No
of God, and we can truly know that No only in Christ, and only in the Crucifixion
itself. Yet can we think the Crucifixion without thinking the death
of God? Here Barths Christomonism is most precarious, for how can
we think the totality of God in Christ without thinking the death of God?
We can see here a genuine reason why Christian theology has so overwhelmingly
known an ultimate distinction between the humanity and the divinity of
Christ, one wherein only the humanity and not the divinity of Christ suffers
passion and death, hence the orthodox condemnation of Patripassionism.
But that very condemnation confines the sacrifice of Christ to his humanity
alone, leading to the inevitable conclusion that it is only the humanity
of Christ that effects justification or redemption. Certainly such
a doctrine would be deeply alien to Paul, who had virtually no interest
in the humanity of Christ, but so likewise is it alien to every Christianity
which knows redemption as the act of God and the act of God alone, or to
every Christianity which knows predestination itself.
Yet thinking predestination is thinking that absolute No of God
which is the absolute Yes of God, here that No and that Yes are inseparable
if not indistinguishable, as most manifest in every genuine thinking of
the Crucifixion. If the Crucifixion realizes eternal life only by
realizing eternal death, that eternal death is absolutely essential to
this eternal life, so that here to think eternal life or redemption is
to think eternal death or damnation. Barth understood this profoundly,
but so, too, did Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, and here lies a clear
dividing line between a truly modern and all pre-modern Western thinking,
one most concretely manifest in the very movement of eternal return, an
eternal return which all pre-modern thinking knows as the very movement
of redemption itself, and an eternal return which is shattered in the very
advent of the modern world. Initially, this shattering is most openly
manifest in a negation of immortality, for with the closure of the backward
movement of eternal return there can be no return to an original or primordial
condition of immortality. Hence immortality becomes ever more deeply
manifest as an illusion, and as a pathological illusion turning us away
from the actuality of life and the world. Only then could theologians
identify immortality as a truly pagan belief, one the very opposite of
faith in the resurrection, and only then could theologians identify faith
itself as an eschatological faith, one directed to an absolute future rather
than an absolute or primordial past.
Yet once the movement of eternal return is profoundly challenged,
this brings a wholly new meaning to genesis itself, now genesis cannot
be an absolute beginning whose end is absolute beginning itself.
Every ultimate identity of Alpha and Omega is now ended, and therefore
Godhead itself can no longer be known as an eternal movement of eternal
return. Ever more gradually I became awakened to the necessity of
understanding the genesis of God, and not a genesis of God which is an
eternal genesis of God, but far rather a genesis of God which is a once
and for all genesis of God, one which as such can never be repeated or
renewed, and one whose inevitable destiny is the death of God. Now
it becomes overwhelmingly important to understand an eternal death of God
which is not the eternal resurrection of God, a death of God finally shattering
every possible movement of eternal return, and a death of God absolutely
necessary to apocalypse itself, and an apocalypse wholly and totally transcending
genesis itself. Only now did it fully become clear to me that if
the death of God has actually occurred then the very actuality of this
death is inseparable from the genesis of God. For only that which
has actually begun can actually die, and if God has truly and actually
died then God Himself is inevitably the consequence of a truly actual genesis
or beginning. Thereby I was given my most original theological idea,
for even if it is deeply grounded in both Blake and Hegel, so far as I
know it had never been given a fully explicit or systematic theological
formulation.
One of the deep challenges I faced in late middle age was the
probability that my thinking would become ever more fully unoriginal and
ever more deeply conservative. This is a virtually universal phenomenon
in the worlds which I have known, and it is surely true throughout the
world of modern theology. It is clearest in both Barth and Tillich,
the third volume of Tillichs Systematic Theology is not only truly conservative
but derivative and unoriginal as well; and we see this movement occurring
far more fully and decisively in Barths Church Dogmatics, as all the power
of its first three volumes appears to reverse itself in its fourth volume.
Even Bultmann illustrates the apparently demonic consequences of aging,
and in his final publication, a commentary on second Corinthians, he goes
so far as virtually to eliminate the Pauline ground of his Theology of
the New Testament by arguing that for Paul God only regarded Christ as
a sinner, as opposed to his earlier position that God made Christ to be
sin so that we might become righteous. Of course, Augustine did his
deepest theological thinking in his final years, but Augustine is far too
distant from me to be a possible model at this point, and as I observed
the contemporary world of theology, all of my fears were only deepened.
So even if the very idea of a unique and once and for all genesis of God
is a deeply demonic if not Satanic theological idea, I opened myself to
it as a gift of grace, and could assure myself that I was not yet dead
theologically.
I realized at once that this very idea brings a truly new meaning
to the absolute Yes and the absolute No of God, one making possible a realization
that it is only the genesis of God which makes possible a deep dichotomy
between the affirmative and the negative poles of the Godhead, so that
creation is not only fall, but as Blake knew so deeply, it is the fall
of Godhead itself. Yet finally this ultimate fall is a fortunate
fall, for it and it alone makes possible apocalypse itself. While
such thinking is potentially if not actually present in The Self-Embodiment
of God and History as Apocalypse, it is first systematically expressed
in Genesis and Apocalypse and The Genesis of God, and if nothing else the
writing of these books assured me that I was certainly not moving in a
conservative theological direction. The non-theologian cannot realize
how solitary this movement is in our theological world, or our manifest
if not our true theological world, and now I was coming to know a solitude
far deeper than I had previously known, just as I became ever more fully
possessed by an interior necessity to retire from the academic world.
Long before this I knew the necessity of solitude for genuine theological
work, this had been my primary motive in seeking a monastic vocation, and
I have always thought that a monastic vocation is more conducive to theology
than an academic vocation, so that I looked upon my academic vocation itself
as a decisive sign of failure, and this only deepened as I ever more fully
experienced the contemporary university world.
One of the lessons which I learned in the English department
at Stony Brook is the truly negative effect which academic life has upon
our poets, I came to rejoice that Blake had not had a single day of formal
education, and I struggled to find a non-academic theological style; this
partially occurred in my early decision to renounce documentation, but
it was most demanded in theological language itself, which I became ever
more fully persuaded had become poisoned by its academic robes. Here,
too, one can deeply venerate a Kierkegaard or a Nietzsche or a Wittgenstein,
just as one can long for an edition of the Summa Theologica which would
strip it of its scholastic setting, or a scholarly journal free of all
scholarly authority. The very question of authority is deeply important
here, raising the question of what could be a genuinely theological authority;
as everyone knows the Devil can quote scripture, and the theologian knows
this more deeply than anyone else, just as the theologian knows that there
can be a truly demonic theology, and if it is my theology which in our
world has most commonly evoked this identification, I came to see this
as a positive theological sign. Is it truly possible theologically
to think the death of God, and, if so, is not this very thinking a theological
warrant for thinking the genesis of God; for I became deeply persuaded
that it is not possible to think the death of God without thinking the
genesis of God, and this can only means that it is not possible to think
the crucifixion of God without thinking the genesis of God.
Sacrifice had long been a primal motif of my religious or theological
thinking. I had long believed that sacrifice is the deepest and the
purest movement of religion, and I had known that there are profound religious
traditions which center upon sacrifice as the original moment or movement
of creation. And if the sacrifice of God is the center of Christian
redemption, could not the sacrifice of the Godhead be the center of the
creation or of genesis itself? Creation is commonly known by the
theologian as an act of absolute power, but there are deep traditions which
know creation as a purely kenotic act of absolute self-emptying, and this
does make possible for the theologian an understanding of how God the Creator
could be the Crucified God, and of how the absolute sovereignty of God
could be inseparable from the absolute sacrifice of God in Christ.
Thereby God the Creator and God the Redeemer could truly be known as one
God, and the death of God could truly be known as the death of God.
Insofar as the Creator is known as an absolutely transcendent and absolutely
sovereign Creator there can be no possibility of the Creator being known
as the Crucified God, nor an actual possibility of knowing God the Creator
as God the Redeemer, or not insofar as redemption occurs through the Crucifixion,
or through the sacrifice of God. But insofar as creation itself can
be known as sacrifice, and as an absolute sacrifice, then God the Redeemer
can be known as God the Creator, and the Godhead of Christ be known as
Godhead itself.
This has always been extraordinarily difficult in Christian theology,
hence Arianism has long been the deepest Christian heresy, and the mother
of all heresies, but Christian orthodoxy itself can be identified as Arian
insofar as it refuses the Crucified God as God, or insofar as it refuses
the sacrifice of Christ as the sacrifice of God. While it is true
that neither the image nor the idea of the Crucified God are born until
the full advent of modernity, modern theologians beginning with Luther
can know the Crucified God, and know the Crucified God as deeply Pauline
theologians. For if God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself,
and doing so solely through the death of Christ, then how could the crucified
Lord not be God Himself? True, this could only be an absolute offense,
but the Crucifixion itself is an absolute offense, and is called forth
as such by Paul himself, and an offense not only to reason but also to
faith, or to every faith not deeply and ultimately grounded in the Crucifixion.
Genuine offense is an offense to theological thinking itself, so to think
theologically in this sense is to think so as to assault oneself, and this
could only be a deep assault upon every interior depth to which one is
open, and therefore an assault upon everything which we can apprehend as
God. Only such an assault can make possible the depths of offense,
so that here theological thinking is inevitably a purely negative thinking,
and finally it can think only by assaulting Godhead itself.
And what could be a greater assault upon Godhead itself than
thinking the genesis of God? This is a far graver assault than any
possible atheism, or any possible pure atheism; for it thinks not so as
to dissolve the Godhead, but far rather to reverse Godhead itself, and
to reverse the eternity of Godhead itself, an eternity inseparable from
everything which we have apprehended or known as the Godhead. The
opening chapters of Genesis and Apocalypse most deeply intend to reverse
the primordial movement of eternal return, a movement which has been an
ultimate ground of everything that we have known as the Godhead, and a
movement which is here understood to have been absolutely reversed by genesis
or absolute beginning, an absolute beginning which is the absolute ending
of eternal return, and therefore the ending of every possible primordial
eternity. More concretely, this is an attempt to reverse everything
that Eliade understands as eternal return, and everything that Hegel understands
as eternity itself; for even if Hegel could profoundly reverse that Bad
Infinite which is the very opposite of the finite, he could never reverse
eternity itself, and therefore could only finally know the crucifixion
of God as the resurrection of God. No, if the death of God is an
ultimate and final event, then eternity itself is shattered, and that shattering
most deeply occurs at the center of Godhead itself, and at the center of
that Godhead which is known or manifest as an eternal movement of eternal
return.
Both Genesis and Apocalypse and The Genesis of God attempt to
understand a primordial totality or a primordial eternity as that very
totality which is ultimately and finally shattered and reversed by the
absolute act of genesis itself. Therefore it is primordial totality
itself which is shattered by the Creator, a primordial totality which is
primordial Godhead, so that the Godhead of the Creator is a reversal of
the primordial Godhead. How is it possible to think this? First,
and perhaps most important, is the necessity of establishing a real and
actual distinction between God and the Godhead, or between the Creator
and a primordial totality, with the consequent necessity of understanding
how the Creator evolves out of the Godhead. Ancient Neoplatonism
could do this in its understanding of the emanation of the Godhead, an
understanding deeply paralleled in both Hindu and Buddhist philosophy,
and one which is seemingly resurrected or renewed in the deeper or more
mystical expressions of Christian Neoplatonism. But all of this thinking
is a thinking of eternal return, as most openly manifest in its ultimate
identification of Alpha and Omega, or of an absolute beginning and an absolute
ending. Even Hegel succumbs to this thinking in the Science of Logic,
and if this is a deeply circular thinking which is a cyclical thinking,
it finally thinks eternal return and eternal return alone, or does so apart
from its most subversive sections.
Is there no way to establish a real distinction between God and
the Godhead without thinking eternal return, or could there be any genuinely
theological thinking which is not the thinking of eternal return, and not
the thinking of the eternal return of that Godhead which is primordial
totality itself? Here, it becomes overwhelmingly important to understand
genesis or absolute beginning as a once and for all event, an understanding
absent in every genuine thinking of eternal return, so that not only is
it absent from the Science of Logic, but it is also absent from every non-Christian
or non-Jewish or non-Islamic thinking, and every thinking truly independent
of the Bible. Yet if the thinking of eternal return is a profoundly
non-Biblical thinking, how did it so fully enter Christian theology?
Is this the inevitable consequence of the advent of philosophical theology,
and hence the necessary consequence of pure thinking itself? Or is
it the inevitable consequence of thinking pure transcendence itself, one
which occurs only after the advent of Christianity, for it is certainly
absent in all pre-Christian philosophical thinking, and at no other point
did Plotinus so deeply differ from Plato. Indeed, an actual thinking
of eternal return does not occur in the West until the beginning of the
Christian era, so that one might justly think that it does not and cannot
occur in the West apart from the Christian God, although here the Christian
God deeply differs from the Biblical God, or from that Biblical God who
is the Creator.
Hence an assault upon eternal return could be understood as a
witness to the Biblical God, and here that assault must occur most fully
within theology itself, and within every theology which is a theology of
eternal return, or every theology ultimately and finally bound to a primordial
eternity. Of course, this includes virtually every theology upon
our horizon, and every theology thinking what we have most deeply been
given as Godhead itself, an absolutely eternal and an absolutely transcendent
Godhead, and one whose only movement is the movement of eternal return.
Already Luther could know every reason as purely idolatrous, as an absolute
rebellion against revelation, and Luther was not philosophically ignorant,
he had been deeply trained in that new philosophy of Occamism, a philosophy
truly knowing the absolute transcendence of God. Is it that absolute
transcendence itself which is our purest idol, and could it be said that
it could only truly be manifest or real as a consequence of an ultimate
and final fall, a fall wherein Godhead itself can only be known as absolute
transcendence? Such a pure and radical transcendence is wholly opposed
to that total presence which is the presence of primordial Godhead, just
as it is wholly opposed to the total presence of apocalyptic Godhead or
Omega. Thus the pure transcendence of God is truly other than Godhead
itself, and if this transcendence itself is the consequence of an ultimate
fall, that could only be a fall from primordial Godhead, or a fall dividing
and dichotomizing Godhead itself. And if such a fall could be understood
as a once and for all fall, or an absolutely unique as opposed to an absolutely
eternal fall, or as that fall which is the absolute act of absolute beginning,
then that beginning could not be an eternal beginning, just as its ending
could not be only a repetition of absolute beginning. For this fall
could occur only by way of an absolute disruption of eternal return, and
therefore an absolute reversal of the eternal return of Godhead itself.
Is it possible to realize a theology which is a true disruption or reversal of eternal return, a theology genuinely reversing the eternal return of the Godhead, and thereby reversing eternal return itself? Nietzsche is a supreme challenge here, is his vision of eternal recurrence a resurrection or renewal of the primordial vision of eternal return, or is it the very opposite of every movement of eternal return, and opposite insofar as it is a forward rather than a backward movement to eternity? I ever more fully came to understand that Nietzsche's revolutionary thinking of eternal recurrence embodies our most ultimate unthinking of eternal return, and does so most clearly in its inseparability from Nietzsches proclamation of the death of God. Here only the death of God makes possible an enactment of eternal recurrence, an enactment which is an absolute Yes-saying to an absolute immanence, and an absolute immanence which is the consequence of the death of God. No thinker has more deeply unthought an absolute transcendence than did Nietzsche, and this most deeply occurs in the thinking of eternal recurrence, an eternal recurrence absolutely ending all transcendence, and doing so by reversing every backward movement to eternity, or by reversing every movement of eternal return. Yet Nietzsches vision of eternal recurrence can also be understood as a uniquely modern enactment of predestination, as I attempt to do in the chapter on Nietzsche in Genesis and Apocalypse. Here, too, we find an ultimate enactment of an absolute Yes-saying which is an absolute No-saying, and one which is not only absolutely necessary, but now absolutely inescapable for everyone as a consequence of the death of God. No thinker has understood the Crucifixion so purely as did Nietzsche, and no other thinker has so purely understood predestination itself, a predestination which is not only an absolute necessity, but it only fully or truly becomes manifest as that necessity with the uniquely modern realization of the death of God, a death of God hurling us into a new and absolute nothingness, yet that nothingness is the very arena of that predestination which is eternal recurrence. Nietzsche, too, deeply understood the genesis of God, although he never spoke of it as such, he rather knew that genesis as an ultimate genealogy, a genealogy revolving about the advent of No-saying or the bad conscience, an advent which is the advent of interiority itself, an interiority whose only real movement is ressentiment, and a ressentiment only made possible by an absolute No-saying, which is Nietzsches deepest name of the uniquely Christian God.
So that here the Christian God is wholly inseparable from an original
and absolute fall, a fall which is the advent not only of history but of
a purely negative interiority, and no thinker has known an original fall
more deeply or more comprehensively than did Nietzsche. Theologically,
that fall could only be the fall of Godhead itself, and while Nietzsche
did not actually say this, his very language about God-- and Nietzsche
speaks of God more fully than any other philosopher except for Spinoza
and Hegel-- is a purely negative language, one calling forth only an absolutely
lacerating or absolutely negative power. Only Joyce rivals, if he
does not surpass Nietzsches blasphemy, and just as Joyce enacted an eternal
return in his epics, this return is not a backward movement to eternity,
but rather a forward movement to an absolute chaos, an absolute chaos which
is apocalypse itself, so that here, too, we discover the forward movement
of eternal recurrence rather than the backward movement of eternal return.
Both in Joyce and Nietzsche, eternal recurrence is a purely and ultimately
apocalyptic movement, one finally ending every possible transcendence,
and one finally realizing a truly new world or new creation, but only insofar
as the old creation comes to an end, or only insofar as the original Creator
is dead. Yet that Creator could truly die only if that Creator has
truly begun, and if it is truly possible to apprehend an absolute beginning,
then that absolute beginning must truly transcend eternity itself, or truly
transcend a primordial eternity or a primordial totality, a transcendence
which it is possible to know as the genesis of God.
Or is that an actual possibility, and an actual possibility for
theology itself,? Even if this would be an understanding of God the
Creator as the Crucified God, and hence an understanding finally knowing
crucifixion and creation as one act, how is it possible to understand an
ultimate identity between creation and crucifixion? First, this could
be possible because it understands the act of creation as an absolutely
self-negating or self-emptying act, an act wherein and whereby a primordial
eternity or totality absolutely negates itself, and only this self-negation
truly ends that totality. But this is an ending reversing that totality,
and one giving birth to absolute transcendence itself. Second, this
also could be possible if it makes possible an understanding of absolute
act itself, an act absolutely transforming everything whatsoever, and therefore
an act which is absolutely new, and whose very absolute newness is an absolute
reversal of eternal return, an eternal return foreclosing every possibility
of the actually or truly new. Third, only an understanding of the
genesis of God makes possible an actual understanding of the death of God,
so that to accept the death of God in the Crucifixion as the true center
of faith is to accept the necessity of understanding the genesis of God,
and the death of that Creator who is destined or predestined to eternal
death. Finally, only an understanding of the genesis of God makes
possible a truly or fully apocalyptic theology, one knowing the absolute
future as the absolute ending of every past, and above all of every past
which can be known or apprehended as a primordial past, or of that past
which is the primordial movement of eternal return.
While these are all powerful motifs for me, I must confess that
I have had little success in communicating them to others. This has
often led me to the verge of despair, but I have not been suicidal in my
later years, not even tempted by suicide, I must confess, which sometimes
makes me wonder if I am truly serious. I have a genuine confidence
in the solidity and the responsibility of my theological vision, and while
I am deeply critical of most of my executions of that vision, and often
think that impatience is my worst fault, I fully confess that I think that
excess is far preferable to reticence, or is so for me, and this largely
because we have been thrust into such a deep theological void. I
am sometimes asked why I do not couch my theological language in the form
of thought-experiments, or even in the form of a Wittgensteinian game,
but I doubt if my Calvinism would allow this, and that very Kierkegaard
who wrote of thought-experiments never actually employed such language
in his own real thinking, even if he could effectively employ it in his
assaults upon Hegel. No, Stonewall remains my deep ancestor, and
I, too, am called to battle, and even a murderous battle, for I most deeply
know the true theologian as the murderer of God.