John D. Caputo

Since I have Caputomania at the moment, and since it's gone beyond the scope of the Panikkar thread, I thought I'd give Caputo his own thread. He certainly is a stong/weak voice in revisioning Christianity. Below are excerpts from the former thread.

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Caputo, in the Introduction to his book The Weakness of God (IUP, 2006), defines God as an “event” rather than a thing with a name. Events, unlike names, are uncontainable and unconditional, open-ended. In that sense the open event is not “powerful” like a supreme being that forces specific things to happen for specific reasons. Rather it “is an irruption, an excess, an overflow…which tears open closed circles,” thereby “constituting an experience of the impossible” (4-5).

Hence the event can be rather fierce of fang in that it disrupts all of our expectations. It comes out of nowhere like a tornado and wreaks havoc in our lives. However it's weak in the sense that it isn't definitive, like God. It's more like the whisper of a voice just out of earshot, or an indistinct blur on the horizon at twilight.

“It is more like a ghost, the specter of possibility….a thin thing…of a call rather than a causality, of a provocation rather than of a presence or a determinate entity”(8).

Also recall Panikkar's comments on symbol and the “poetic word.” Here's more from Caputo in the chapter “The Poetics of the Impossible”:

“…a poetics is an evocative discourse that articulates the event, while a logic is a normative discourse governing entities….A poetics addresses the rule of the promise or of the call, the grammar of the weak force of the call, while a logic regulates the strong force of the world….a poetics describes the symbolic space that obtains in the kingdom, while a logic describes the ideal or normative rules that govern real or possible worlds” (103-4).

Caputo does a fine job in this book of elucidating a pomo mythos, logos and symbol. As did Derrida before him and from whom Caputo draws heavily.

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Caputo asks, as we have asked, if the name of God can be bypassed or surpassed, even within a theology of the event. He doesn't think so because the name is the conditional side of the conditional/unconditional relationship, and without it the latter is meaningless. Granted he accepts that the name itself can and will change-it doesn't have to be God-but the underlying concept naming this mysterious event gives the latter a “body,” so to speak (p. 3).

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I have to share this funny story from Caputo's book. He's discussing what if there really was one true name of God. Each religion would argue about in what language it would be spoken or written. However the negative theologians “would present a long, verbose, and particularly perplexing discourse on behalf of silence” (11).

Caputo then goes on to note that although he's using the term “weak” it does not mean that this is a theology without passion, without fire, without fang. He claims for it an “existential intensity” that “overtakes us and overturns us” (11), and entices us, as Star Trek has aptly put it, “to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

kela will be pleased to know that Caputo sees this as a “sacred anarchy” (13).

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Caputo has a delightful word for his theology of the event: hier(an)archy. He explains:

“Suppose we dare to think about God otherwise than metaphysics and metaphysical theology allow?…What then?” (23).

”Différance, we might say to Alice [in wonderland], is not so much the ‘foundation' as the agent provocateur for everything that follows in this wonderful upside-down land” (25).

“Damnable deconstructive trickery, sheer relativistic and nihilistic wordplay, thunders His (Right) Reverence [Wilber] from the pulpit!” (26).

“To be sure, by advocating différance Derrida does not advocate outright chaos. He does not favor a simple-minded street-corner anarchy (nothing is ever simple) that would let lawlessness sweep over the land, although that is just what his most simplistic and anxious critics take him to say. For that would amount to nothing more than a simple counter-kingdom, a reign of lawlessness….Just like a simple totalitarianism…the opposite way, a simple anarchy would break the tension between the arche and the an-arche, erasing the slash between power and powerlessness….in “Force of Law” Derrida made it plain that deconstruction is not a matter of leveling laws in order to produce a lawless society, but of deconstructing laws in order to produce a just society. To deconstruct the law means to ‘negotiate the difference' between law and justice, where the law is thought to be something finite, and ‘justice' calls up an uncontainable event, an infinite or unconditional or undeconstructable demand” (27).

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Postmetasalsa: a mythologeme to the core-a.

From Peter Heltzel's review of Caputo's book, in JCRT 7.2 (Spring/Summer 2006):

In a delicate dance with Catherine Keller's notion of creation ex profundis, Caputo imagines creation as a concert of fluid and free-floating forces that shape pre-existent elements into a new and good life. Like unto the Derridean khora, the pre-existent elements are “mythologemes” of uncertainty and undecidability (72). They bear prophetic testimony to the open-endedness and riskiness of material, human and divine life. Caputo is inspired by the “beautiful risk” of creation as the right way to think about the God-world relationship with the two partners functioning interdependently as the ebb and flow of two salsa dancers.

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Here's Caputo on what I'd call the two-truths doctrine, from TWOG:

…rather than speaking of God's transcendence at all, it might be better to speak of God's in-scendence…or “insistence” in the world (45).

I steadfastly oppose a two-worlds theory, in which the kingdom of God is one thing and the world is entirely separate….The kingdom is the salt of the earth, the leaven of the world's bread…the outside that insists and insinuates itself inside the world and saves the world from itself (52).

The opening verses of Genesis make no use whatever of a metaphysical distinction between an eternal, infinite and supersensible being creating finite, temporal being, which is an un-Hebraic conception that is unconceivable outside of the two-worlds schema that Christianity inherited from Hellenistic metaphysics (62).

Re: John D. Caputo

kela said in the Panikker thread:

or how about “her- archy?”

This is indeed part of the sacred anarchy in the word hier(an)archy. You've heard history, now it's time for herstory.

Caputo, in his chapter of TWOG “The Beautiful Risk of Creation,” reflects on the Genesis myth. He uses Catherine Keller's Face of the Deep to show how her story is left out. She refutes creatio ex nihilio and instead posits creatio ex profundis. In the former's beginning something was created from nothing. In the latter there was already something there, and that something, according to the Bible itself, was the barren earth, the darkness over the deep waters and the restless air. It is from these elements that Elohim molded, as with clay, into lifeforms. Subsequent Christian interpreters completely left out these primal elements in their narrative, instead reducing them to “nothing.” And Keller ascribes the feminine to these primal elements, hence, the elimination of herstory by the later, second half of the second-century, metaphysical creatio ex nihilios.

PS: these elementals had cool Hebrew names: earth was tohu wa-bohu, the deep water was tehom and the air was ruach.

Re: John D. Caputo

Whenever I think of Caputo I think of Eckhart, and with respect to this thread, I'm reminded of Mathew Fox's “Creation Centered Spirituality.” Fox bases much of his work on Eckhart's teachings. Eckkart stressed a kind of “this worldliness.” For example, he rejects the orthodox commentary on Mary and Martha in which Martha is a mere novice relegated to peeling potatoes in the ashram kitchen, and Mary is the more “superior” bhakta because she is always at the feet of Jesus. For him, Martha is the “more advanced” disciple because she goes about doing her day to day activities; it is Mary that is the novice, the “needy” one. There are strong anarchic elements in Eckhart's teachings, and in some of his followers — such as the Friends of God, who were primarily women, if I remember correctly — these anarchic elements become even more pronounced.  I recently, happily ran across a felicitous phrase related to Eckhart: “Wandering Joy.” There is a similar phrase in the Chuang Tzu, one that I had applied to Ashtvakra in a chapter I wrote called “The Happy Wanderer.” Chuang Tzu stressed what he called “the crooked path” as opposed to the “straight and narrow.” There is an interesting image vis a vis Asthavakra, here. The name Ashtavakra means “crooked in eight limbs,” and “with eight limbs” is how the straight and narrow is often depicted in Yoga and Buddhism. And of course, the anarchic elements in the Asthvakra Gita and the Chuang Tzu are quite pronounced.

If you're interested in Caputo on Eckhart there is also this book.

Re: John D. Caputo

The other day I posted a link to the bio of Rev. Will D. Campbell, who took two quotes from the Gospel of Matthew, “Render unto Ceaser, etc.” and “No man can serve two masters…” and concluded that in order to be a true Christian…one who conducts their life by the teachings of their lord…one had to be an anarchist.

For those who are hard up for an excuse to justify for their anarchy those two are as good as any. I wonder, though, why everyone isn't hard up for excuses and justifications for being any other way.

Re: John D. Caputo

I was informed of Theopoetics.net in a response to my post on Open Integral about Caputo’s book. It is self-described as follows:

AN ELECTRONIC RESOURCE FOR REFERENCE AND DISCUSSION: Postmodern Thought, Theology, Poetry, Narrative, and (Re)Imagining the Divine

It also has a Google discussion group at this link:

From “Theopoetics: a manifesto in progress, Part 1”:

I think the language we use to describe God greatly affects our perspective and experience of the Divine. I believe that changing the means of communication about the Divine may in fact influence one's experience of the Divine.

From “Part 2”:

I have come to believe that the issue is not so much that speaking of the Divine is impossible, but rather that it is impossible to speak about with objective certainty. At best, theology becomes harder to do the more the theologian employs only the language of logic.

From “Part 3”:

I have yet to encounter a proof of God that gives me a shiver; I don't have any powerful experience of the Divine when reading logical proof of such. Perhaps there is a perfect proof, but it begs the question: What does a logical proof of God accomplish if it cannot tap into people's experience of the Divine?…I think it points to the eventual limitations of reason and logic.

From “Theopoetics: a clarification of terms”:

I fully intend to imply that theopoetics is nothing less than a means of “reading the world,” interpreting reality, creating meaning, and (re)imagining the Divine. A theopoetic worldview invites the construal and acceptance of an eternally changing existence; an in-process, event-based theology; a pluralistic approach to perception.

Re: John D. Caputo

kela referenced The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought by Caputo with the link. In reading a few pages into the referenced section on Eckhart’s On Detachment it would appear, at least by Caputo’s description, that Eckhart’s is more of a gnostic treatise on the complete separation of heaven and earth rather than their relation. For example:

“But detachment wishes to be neither above creatures nor below them. It wishes to have no relation at all to them” (13-14).

Re: John D. Caputo

Yes, indeed Ed, there are “ascender” transcendentalist elements in Eckhart's theology. I thought you might notice that, and, happily, you did. There is a similar tendency in the Ashtavakra Gita as well.  Franklin Jones said at one time that the AG is a text of pure ecstatic utterance (gita), with not prescriptive teaching. And yet the text abounds with Sanskrit formations in the opatative case and imperative cases.  Da's later point of view, that the Asthavakra Gita is not purely a “7th stage” text, is actually closer to the truth.

In the passage I linked, Caputo tends to emphasizes the negative moment of “cutting away,” of “detachment” (Abgeschiedenheit), of “letting go” in Eckhart's teaching. This is standard “kenotic” mystical Christianity – the teaching of “self-emptying.” Here anyway, Caputo does not bring out this positive moment of letting be, of acceptance, the teaching of Gelasseneheit.  With “letting be” the circle turns back from the 180 degree (mountains are not mountains) “about face,” and moves back toward the 360 degree (mountains are mountains).

Re: John D. Caputo

At the same time, I think that Caputo does seize upon an interesting idea here, namely, that letting go does not, and should not, imply rejection and its intentional counterpart, disgust.  “Neither grasping not rejecting” is another theme in this type of teaching, a theme also found in Dzogchen and anupaya Kashmir Shaivism. The idea is that the mystic sage here is not “better” than that from which he/she has removed himself. It simply that such things as “higher and lower” no longer matters. It is in this sense that the teachings of tulyata (equality) and samata (sameness) should be understood, IMO. They are not expressions of ethical ideals, but expressions of an ethos, and it is a reunciatory ethos. 

For myself anyway, this makes the political and, even ethical, applications of these ideals tenuous. I feel the same way about anarchism. Socio-anarchism is fine for bronze age man, and  for those, like Jesus' original little troupe of Jewish kynics, who wish to “tune in turn on and drop out,” but as a politic for post-bronze-age urban humanity, I have my doubts. That's why spiritually I'm an anarchist, but politically, I'm a social democrat.

Re: John D. Caputo

Jeffrey Robbins reviewing Caputo's book What Would Jesus Deconstruct (2007) says in “The hermeneutics of the kingdom of God: John Caputo and the deconstruction of Christianity” (the global spiral, 2/6/08):

The application of the gospel to concrete social and political issues: As the subtitle to the book suggests, while Caputo does try to demonstrate “the good news of postmodernism for the church,” and in that sense is a case of applied theory, he is not writing a “politics of Jesus” per se. As he makes clear, “I have avoided speaking of the ‘politics of Jesus,' an expression that I think is inherently ambiguous and too easy to abuse” (94). As a case in point, Caputo asks (and answers) the rhetorical question, “What would it look like if there were a politics of loving one's enemies, not of war, let alone, God forbid, preemptive war? Would it not be in almost every respect the opposite of the politics that presently passes itself off under the name of Jesus?” (87)

That being said, Caputo is not at all reticent when it comes to applying the message of Jesus to the social and political realm; indeed, in what is perhaps the most courageous and refreshing part of the book, Caputo directly takes up the questions of economic justice, militarism, patriarchy, abortion, and homosexuality. In his examination of these cultural hot-button issues, Caputo falls on the liberal-progressive end of the political spectrum. While Caputo is reliably or predictably (depending on one's own political persuasion) progressive in his social and political convictions, it cannot be said that he is ideologically rigid in his analyses. The difference is that a politics of Jesus would imply that the New Testament is straightforward, direct, and transparent when it comes to contemporary social and political issues, whereas an effort to apply the message of Jesus to the social and political realm acknowledges the need for interpretation. Put simply, a politics of Jesus would be too literaralistic, whereas Caputo's approach is hermeneutical. As he explains, “It is our responsibility to breathe with the spirit of Jesus, to implement, to invent, to convert this poetics into praxis, which means to make the political order resonate with the radicality of someone whose vision was not precisely political” (95).

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And then there's The Sleeping Giant has Awoken: The New Politics of Religion in the US (NY: Continuum, 2008). Caputo wrote the Introduction and This blog prints some of it:

But the dominant form of American Christianity today, the Christian Right, has sat down at the table with virtually every power and domination that Jesus contested in his own lifetime, with the very powers of imperial rule, the rule of the world, which took his life. It stands for authoritarianism, nationalism, and militarism that contradict the letter and the spirit of Jesus' words, who said to love one's enemies, and if one is struck on the cheek, to turn the other cheek. It enthusiastically supports a war that cynically flaunts the classical conditions of just-war theory, “just war” itself being a strange turn of phrase to be found on the lips of a follower of the author of the Sermon on the Mount. It marches arm in arm with an unbridled capitalist greed that has recklessly permitted the rich to grow ever richer while grinding up the poor-flaunting the very ministry Jesus announced for himself. By lending its shoulder to laissez-faire capitalism, the Right undermines the everything it might have been believed to stand for. Unchecked capitalism wrecks family values by impoverishing families and leaving children homeless and parentless. As Lou Dobb-not exactly a member of the Left-has documented, the economics pursued by the Right constitutes an all-out attack upon the middle class, where family life is the mainstay. Unchecked capitalism turns sexuality into commodity; it seeds the fields of abortion, prostitution, drugs, and crime by holding its heel to the neck of the poorest and most defenseless people in society. Where Jesus found strength in the weakness of God, in forgiveness and nonviolence, the Christian Right openly lusts for a Christian Empire, even as it was an earlier Empire that took the life of Jesus.

The cruelest and most bitter irony is that the Christian Right does all this in the very name of Jesus, asking us, “What would Jesus do?”-as if Jesus were a capitalist out to make millions and a militarist with aspirations for imperial power, in search of a kingdom very decidedly of this world. What is this if not the will of humans in love with bare-knuckled power, with themselves and their own will, cloaking themselves in the name of the weakness of God and the nonviolence of Jesus?”

Re: John D. Caputo

And this from a review of WWJD by Elizabeth McCullogh:

Helpfully, Caputo provides…examples of what the post-modernist, deconstructed gospel might look like in action.

[One] example is the pastorate of John McNamee, author of Diary of a City Priest, who serves a North Philadelphia parish of unspeakable poverty with “uncompromising compassion.” McNamee is a Christ-like figure, not in his perfection, but in his willingness to continue giving out of his emptiness, in the tenacity of his faith in the midst of despair, and in his radical hospitality. McNamee is purely orthodox in his doctrine, fully committed to his Church. Yet he does not place the Gospel's call to righteousness above its call for justice. Caputo marks the irony that McNamee and others like him can do their work only “in marginal Christian communities, out of power and out of the limelight, where the task of inscribing the mark of Jesus on the world is carried out quietly and without a lot of fanfare.”

Caputo admits, “We cannot know what Jesus would do in such an entirely different world as ours,” but he does propose that “he would deconstruct a very great deal of what people do in the name of Jesus, starting with the people who wield this question like a hammer to beat their enemies. My hypothesis is that the first thing that Jesus would deconstruct is WWJD itself, the whole ‘industry,' the whole commercial operation of spiritual and very real money-making Christian capitalists.”

Re: John D. Caputo

Hey,

Re: Caputo admits, “We cannot know what Jesus would do in such an entirely different world as ours,” but he does propose that “he would deconstruct a very great deal of what people do in the name of Jesus, starting with the people who wield this question like a hammer to beat their enemies. My hypothesis is that the first thing that Jesus would deconstruct is WWJD itself, the whole ‘industry,' the whole commercial operation of spiritual and very real money-making Christian capitalists.”

I find this kind of thought to be a little dis-integral and artless. Jesus would only be a demi-god, cult figure for various fringe groups if he couldn't promiscuously service all values. The fact that he puts out for the Ku Klux Klan and the Caputo Klan and Unitarian Jihad alike is what makes him a real God.

Re: John D. Caputo

On a tangential but related note, I just rented and viewed the movie Anamorph. It's a well-crafted murder mystery that goes into the artistic technique of anamorphosis. The movie's protagonist discovers that it depends on perspective as to how and what we see. And the antagonist uses a visual poetics to create his “art.”

See the wikepedia entry on anamorphosis, which describes it as “a distorted projection or perspective requiring the viewer to use special devices or occupy a specific vantage point to reconstitute the image.” One of the artistic examples in the entry was used in the movie, Holbein's The Ambassadors.

For me it relates to this thread in that it takes a different way of looking, a different perspective, a different methodology to see “god.” Although the movie's theme is a “distorted” means, it's another angle on perspectivism when viewed through the curvature of my own twisted sensibilities.

Re: John D. Caputo

Here's a video of David Bohm on perception, perspective, relativity and truth.

Re: John D. Caputo

Caputo on translating ethics into politics, from TWOG:
 

Hospitality is no less central to Derrida's thought, where it is pressed into service not only of ethics but also of politics….Politics today…turns on the war waged by the same on the other….So the biblical story of this mad wedding feast cannot be written off as an odd or extravagant parable, for it touches upon a crucial political idea, arguable the crucial political problem of our times (265).

But Derrida keeps pressing a further question on Levinas, how to translate his ethics of the other into a politics of the other, how to transport Levinas' biblical ethic of hospitality into a politics of hospitality….How can a sovereign nation-state practice an absolute, unconditional hospitality to the other (268)?

By advocating the free movement of human beings across the face of the earth, by speaking out for a daring politics that puts the various national identities and national languages at risk, which is a madness as mad as the wedding banquet whose doors are open to every passerby, Derrida explicates the politics of the kingdom. The name of God, the rule of God in his kingdom means, for Derrida, open doors in deed, not simply as edifying ethical discourse but as a political deed, facere veritatem. The kingdom of God is like a wedding feast to whom everyone in invited, and the least likely to be invited is a special guest of honor. Unconditional hospitality requires a politics without sovereignty. The politics of hospitality is not only the word of honor of a personal ethic but a political policy that embraces the unconditional admission of the foreigner into our land, sharing with them our jobs, our schools, the food out of our mouths (276).

Derrida presses the political paradox of hospitality more radically that does Levinas, presses all the more insistently to translate this ethics of hospitality into politics, to open the doors of this ethics to the demands of political hospitality….Derrida wants to sound an international alarm about the demands of hospitality, to stress national and international political structures to the precise point at which, short of breaking, they become more porous. He wants to break down the walls and barriers that nations build against the strangers whose weary faces glow, not with visible beauty-on the contrary!-but with God's glory, upon whom God makes his face to shine. Throughout the pages of Adieu migrant and immigrant bodies pass us by, pressing their faces against the windows of our quiet academic studies, regarding us as we write and talk and think in the comfort of our academic refuges, soliciting not words but deeds, not the word God but godliness. For God is not a semantic event, however overwhelming, but a deed. Derrida would finally demand a more or less direct political translation of the ethics of hospitality, and hence of the name of God, a risky and formidable translation that fills us with fear and trembling, like daring to hold a dagger over one's own, which would result in open doors, in nations without borders or national barriers (338).

Re: John D. Caputo

I'm reading a section of TWOG now (Metanoetics) that reminds me of last night's series finale of Boston Legal. Caputo is talking about how undeconstructable justice is not about a universal principle but that it's particular to the needs of each individual situation. In the BL episode Alan Shore is arguing in front of the US Supreme Court, making this very argument. And the Chief Justice responds that we cannot be concerned with individuals but rather that the law must adhere to general principles so as to have the broadest possible effects on “society” as a whole. Whereas Shore gives a very moving and impassioned speech that could've been right out of Caputo's mouth on this justice of the individual case. Shore pleads for the life of one man, his friend, because he loves him, because the irregular and unique individual is really the capstone of our legal system, not some uniform and inhuman “society.”