Every era has to rein­vent the project of “spir­i­tu­al­ity” for itself. If you abol­ish the sym­bols, then you tear down the walls of your own house. There is, then, a ques­tion as to whether your god is really God.

As Niet­zsche says: “Our pre-​eminence: we live in the age of com­par­i­son, we can verify as has never been ver­i­fied before.” This is an objec­tive ques­tion that tran­scends what is set­tled by your own psy­cho­log­i­cal state, as the activ­ity of the mystic must end in a via neg­a­tiva, a the­ol­ogy of God’s absence, a crav­ing for the cloud of unknow­ing beyond knowl­edge and for the silence beyond speech. Make holy this song.

(Then there are those whom we might call, in the fash­ion of Richard Rorty’s own self-​description, the “reli­giously tone deaf”….I wish them well, but I feel obliged to warn them not to waste their time by read­ing on.)

*

The scene changes to an empty room.

The first thing to under­stand is that “God,” if it is a name at all, is not an ordi­nary proper name like “Judas Mac­cabeus,” “Samuel John­son,” or “Kurt Gödel.” Lan­guage is expe­ri­enced not merely as some­thing shared but as some­thing cor­rupted, weighed down by his­tor­i­cal accu­mu­la­tion, by cat­a­stroph­i­cally sanc­ti­fy­ing the metaphors, by inter­pen­e­trat­ing the coital clus­ter, by singing out love’s ancient evidence.

Con­tem­pla­tion, strictly speak­ing, entails self-​forgetfulness on the part of the spec­ta­tor: an object worthy of con­tem­pla­tion is one which, in effect, anni­hi­lates the per­ceiv­ing sub­ject. If “God”—you praise, you mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, you unbear­able cre­ative moment, you con­sum­ing sac­ri­fi­cial force—were an ordi­nary proper name, then the var­i­ous monotheisms might suc­ceed in refer­ring to, address­ing, and wor­ship­ping the same God, despite their very dif­fer­ent and incon­sis­tent col­lec­tive beliefs about his nature and intentions.

The High­est One cannot be manip­u­lated by any cult; his appear­ance is a grace of for­tune. You lan­guage coming in and you priests serv­ing God: silence exists as a decision.

*

You should unfold the core of the sym­bols. Sup­pose, just for the sake of illus­tra­tion, that in fact it is Allah and not the Holy Trin­ity who is the High­est One. Rim­baud has gone to Abyssinia to make his for­tune in the slave trade. (Make holy you fires, you heat, you win­ters, you hot sum­mers, you dews and den­dritic frosts.)

Chris­tians—you sad sewage foam­ing and you amy­la­ceous wastes cur­dling—would not even be address­ing God. But there is no abol­ish­ing a min­i­mal trans­ac­tion, a min­i­mal exchange of gifts.

And it leaves the ques­tion: What could pos­si­bly count as evi­dence that you believe in God? From then on, any of the activ­i­ties therein sub­sumed becomes a pro­foundly prob­lem­atic activ­ity, all of whose pro­ce­dures and, ulti­mately, whose very right to exist can be called into question.

What could or would jus­tify that belief is a cold, hard look at what we do wor­ship: you inno­va­tion of flying, you lum­ber­ing beasts of the land, you cattle sweet as grass, and you coquet­tish, even cheer­ful nihilism.

Could it be like that with “God”?

*

All the gods of the gen­tiles are idols. (Psalm 96:5)

At the moment when “art” comes into being, the modern period of art begins. The sub­stan­tial ques­tion then becomes: Who or what is God? The silence of eter­nity pre­pares for a thought beyond thought. Stand­ing at the end of this jour­ney, we no longer con­ceive of God as the head of a coun­cil of gods:

you anuses extrud­ing that vital­iz­ing hash
you necrophagous moon­light fruits
you eaters of the dead and you living thing
you caloric scav­engers and you sex scroungers

Is that descrip­tion on its own ade­quate to cap­ture the sense of “God”?

(I am allud­ing, at this point, to the soci­o­log­i­cal con­text of the con­tem­po­rary ambiva­lence toward lan­guage.)

You mind imag­in­ing this: we must destroy continuity.

*

There remains the inescapable truth about per­cep­tion: the pos­i­tiv­ity of all expe­ri­ence at every moment of it. What you need to do is inten­tion­ally con­nect to a chain of ref­er­ence that leads back to an orig­i­nal use of the name in ques­tion: you intox­i­cated cen­tral ner­vous system, you flow­ers dis­play­ing and you pol­lena­tors, you song­birds in sexual colors.

Though no longer a con­fes­sion, art is more than ever a deliv­er­ance, an exer­cise in asceti­cism. And no reli­gion, how­ever appeal­ing, can make itself enlivened by God’s self-​revelation, by ward­ing us with charms, by stitch­ing us alpha­betic tal­is­mans from strands of DNA, by form­ing tissue from moon spores and rubber, by lead­ing us on, by thinking.

We might develop those anx­i­eties in this way: plenitude—experiencing all the space as filled, so that ideas cannot enter—means impen­e­tra­bil­ity. How­ever, that is not how “God” works. More typ­i­cally, he con­tin­ues speak­ing, but in a manner that his audi­ence can’t hear. (You sweet fuckers.)

Sim­i­larly, there is no such thing as empty space. This is because the exis­tence and nature of math­e­mat­i­cal real­ity in no way bears on our sal­va­tion. In this view, the “silence” of things, images, and words is a pre­req­ui­site for their pro­lif­er­a­tion. Were they endowed with a more potent, indi­vid­ual charge, each of the var­i­ous ele­ments of the art­work would claim more psy­chic space. They would be mis­takes as to the the­o­log­i­cal facts of the matter: you mul­ti­cel­lu­lar forms, you bodies, you polyps, you worms, you insects, you clams, you sponges, you spi­ders, you leeches, you backbones.

*

The wrong god may have cap­tured your atten­tion and your heart. But this prospect depends, per­haps, on the via­bil­ity of irony itself. That is why belief in God may be a much rarer thing than has been almost uni­ver­sally sup­posed. Make holy this song.

*

What we there­fore need, in order to clar­ify the mean­ing of “God” thought of as a descrip­tive name, is a con­junc­tion of descrip­tions. Human beings are so “fallen” that they must start with the sim­plest lin­guis­tic act: the naming of things, by bind­ing pack­ets of bright par­ti­cles sped down to the brood­ing earth with data of the life mass.

Art con­ceived as a spir­i­tual project is no excep­tion. There is no chance, you firestarters, you set­ters ablaze of things, of believ­ing in God, unless God has dis­closed him­self to us. Explic­itly in revolt against what is deemed the dessi­cated, cat­e­go­rized life of the ordi­nary mind, the artist issues his own call for a revi­sion of lan­guage. For it is think­able, indeed more than think­able, that God (you tele­scope of time, you notion of cre­ation, you most antique ledge of energy it peers toward, you aeonic dis­dain, you horror torus) exists but has no inter­est in our salvation.

This may seem to be a point­less approach, unless art itself becomes a kind of counterviolence.

So praise. Ana­nias, Azarias, Misael. Bless the Lord. Praise and exalt him forever.

+++

All text bor­rowed from:

+ Peter O’Leary’s Benedicite.
+ Susan Sontag’s “The Aes­thet­ics of Silence.”
+ Mark Johnston’s Saving God.

See the next page for high­lighted borrowings.