Different styles of theology and different epistemological frame conditions may be more or may be less generous in terms of allowing for the physical articulation (''incarnation'') of that which is
considered
to be primarily spiritual.
Gumbrecht - Incarnation, Now - Five Brief Thoughts and a Non-Conclusive Finding
Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies Vol.
8, No.
2, June 2011, pp.
207?
213
Incarnation, Now: Five Brief Thoughts and a Non-Conclusive Ending
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
This article problematizes the renewed appeal of incarnation, a signifier that points to a vague desire in our present and perhaps, altogether, to an unclear future promise, rather than to the complex history of elaborate theological meanings with which the word had long been related. Incarnation is one among a number of concepts and topics that had become almost unspeakable since the eighteenth century*and that have recently returned to intellectual legitimacy. We propose to explain what could be the conditions of this rehabilitation.
Keywords: Incarnation; Enlightenment; Christianity; Presence; Constructivism
Ever since the age of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and all the other classical Protestant Reformers, the concept of ''incarnation'' had been an object of growing intellectual embarrassment, an embarrassment coming from the normative notion of Subject- hood that wanted to be ''pure'' in the sense of being exclusively synonymous with consciousness. This dynamic turned into phobia and reached an irreversible-looking point of culmination during the Enlightenment. Subsequently, the topic of incarnation receded into public oblivion, so deeply that it was of no concern at all (not even of negative concern) during those years of the twentieth century when the movement called ''linguistic turn'' not only bracketed the embodiment of spiritual phenomena as an impossible thought, but indeed surrounded the idea of any immediate experience of things material, physical, or carnal with an epistemological taboo. Today*one is almost tempted to say: today, all of a sudden*''incarnation'' is back, back as a signifier that points to a vague desire in our present and perhaps, altogether, to an unclear future promise, rather than to the complex history of elaborate theological meanings with which the word had long been related. It does not require any speculative genius to say that the desire behind this return of ''incarnation'' must have been provoked by an everyday environment which for most
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Gue ? rard Professor in Literature in the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at Stanford University.
ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association DOI: 10. 1080/14791420. 2011. 567815
? ? 208 H. U. Gumbrecht
of us, living in the early twenty-first century (not only for those in intellectual or formerly ''liberal'' professions), has become insuperably and thereby also sometimes grotesquely ''Cartesian,'' in the sense of making our lives indeed largely coextensive with the functioning of consciousness. Whatever our professions may be, we spend almost all of the assigned and necessary working time (and in many cases also: most of our leisure time) in front of screens, and those screens typically function as an interface between our consciousness and software. Nothing else seems to ''matter. '' In the process of Modernization, the dream of becoming perfectly ''Cartesian'' has thus been so perfectly fulfilled that we seem to have lost any material concreteness to hold on to (whatever this ''holding on to'' may exactly be and mean)*more so, perhaps, than we are able to existentially afford. For our bodies have been reduced to a mere energy base for our minds, struggling to find pleasures and a dignity of their own.
There is a second, probably complementary, and certainly more precise way of explaining the renewed appeal of incarnation. It has to do with a profound change that time has undergone as the form and condition under which we live our now mostly globalized world and produce experience (we may also call this change a transformation of our ''chronotope''). Within ''historical time,'' i. e. , within the chronotope that had been dominating Western culture since the early nineteenth century, we felt that we were constantly leaving subsequent pasts ''behind ourselves'' as we were moving into the future as ''open horizons filled with possibilities. '' This framework defined two operations to be performed by the Subject in a present that, between the receding past and the open future, appeared to be a mere moment of transition. The two functions were a constant adaptation of experience that had been valid for the past to the conditions of present and future and, based on our thus constantly adapted experience, a choice among the multiple possibilities that each open future was holding. Both operations. i. e. , the adaptation of experience and the choice among multiple future possibilities, have constituted and shaped our conception of what Subjectivity (and Agency) was supposed to be, while the narrow present of transition became the epistemological habitat of the Subject. This Subject- centered view of life and of the world, in which recycled experience from the past would be projected into the future, i. e. , in which images of the world would be produced within a closed Subject-based circle, may well have been the ground for collective and individual conceptions, such as ''Constructivism,'' ''Systems Theory,'' ''Pragmatism,'' and also ''Deconstruction,'' where human agency and world creation did no longer expect to encounter and to be challenged by a material world that was out of agency's control.
Since the third quarter of the twentieth century, I believe, that formerly dominating chronotope has undergone deep modifications. Instead of progressively leaving each past behind us, we are now increasingly unable to take distance from the past and find ourselves thus more and more surrounded by the accumulating remnants from past worlds that have become part of the present. At the same time, our future, instead of being open and filled with multiple possibilities, seems to have become a haunting horizon of multiple threats*think only of global warming as the most blatant example. Between this new future and that new past, our present,
instead of continuing to be that moment of constant transition, has become an ever- broadening present of simultaneities, an accumulation of what we can neither distance and nor avoid. This alone, i. e. , that the short present with its clear association to Cartesian Subjectivity and its agency function does no longer exist, obliges us to ask whether we have not moved on to a new type of human self- reference that is less purely Cartesian*and all those desperate (and often not very intellectually elegant) attempts within the academic Humanities to ''recuperate the body'' are indeed clear symptoms for a similar change having occurred. At the same time (and in a less deductive perspective of observation), we might say that those remnants of the past that we can no longer distance although we have no function for them, together with the challenging scenarios in our future, seem to come together in a new, more physical environment that summons more strongly again the bodily components of our existence. Without any doubt, this changed physical environment gives new currency, together with many other topics of ''materiality'' and of ''the body,'' to the intellectual motifs subsumed under the concept of ''incarnation. '' In other words: incarnation is one among a number of concepts and topics that had become almost unspeakable since the eighteenth century*and that have recently returned to intellectual legitimacy.
Obviously, the history of the concept of ''incarnation'' has been almost entirely shaped by the Christian tradition. ''Incarnation'' indeed belongs to those notions that can help us understand the specific and specifically eccentric position of Christianity among the monotheistic religions. All monotheistic religions will draw an absolute ontological line of separation between the sphere of their God as a (necessarily? ) spiritual sphere (is the tendency towards incarnation a step towards polytheism? ) and the sphere inhabited by humans with their bodies. This means that each act of communication directed by a monotheistic God towards the humans will have the status of an exception, more precisely the status of an epiphanic event. Think of the burning bush in the Tora, and how astonishingly few the occasions are when God makes his voice heard; or think of the one book, the Koran, that the God of Islam, much more consequent in his isolation than the Jewish God, left for the humans. As the status of the world inhabited by humans, in the Jewish and later in the Christian tradition, was that of a world that had ''fallen'' from the innocent splendor of divine Creation; due to the ''original'' sin of the first humans, it also became a world to be redeemed. The promise of redemption brought forth the figure of the ''Messiah'' in the Jewish tradition and it appears that, within this tradition, the function and the status of the Messiah has been mostly oscillating between that of a purely spiritual and that of an embodied future presence.
If we can trust the Gospel as a historical document, then we may say that Christ's self-sacrifice on the Cross, as an act that was meant to redeem humankind from the original sin of its ancestors, was the beginning of a departure from that primary Jewish openness and oscillation as to the ontology of the Messiah. For it implied a logic according to which the redemption from the original sin, as a sin of the flesh, had to be purchased by an act of physical suffering*God needed to become flesh in order to be able to act as the savior of humankind. In addition, while the Jewish
Incarnation, Now 209
210 H. U. Gumbrecht
Messiah had always been an ephemeral figure positioned at the end of the world (as long as the end of the world would be fully synonymous with its redemption), and while the historical Jesus Christ may well have thought of himself along these lines, incarnation did acquire a new, unprecedented status when Christ, in Saint Paul's Epistles, was transformed from an ephemeral figure into a two-sided figure, a figure that would bring to an ending humankind's status of condemnation following from the original sin and open up, simultaneously, a time of waiting for the last judgment and for the postponed ending of a world that was now already redeemed (or that had at least been rewarded the potential of redemption through Christ's sacrifice). Immediately after Christ's resurrection, the time until the Day of Judgment had been expected to be very limited; then, with Pentecost and with the decades to follow, the time until the end of the world became an open time, i. e. , it grew into the Christian conception of history as a non-defined time of expectation towards the end, judgment, and ultimate redemption of the world (redemption as the full realization of a potential acquired through Christ's sacrifice). It was within that time of indefinite waiting that the Eucharist became so central, as an existential ''vademecum,'' as a possibility of producing and of endlessly renewing the physical (''real'') presence of God among humans. The sacrament of the Eucharist forever transformed the hitherto eccentric, i. e. , irruptive or ephemeral status of the moments of God's incarnation and presence among humans, into a permanent frame condition of life within Christian existence and culture. Only within Christianity did incarnation become an institutional potential.
What the sacrament of the Eucharist, as the institutional potential of producing and celebrating God's real presence in the world of humans, required as an ensemble of theological, conceptual, and anthropological conditions is easy to identify and to describe. It needed, in the first place and above all, a concept that would make plausible the possibility of transforming the substance of an object of reference from a first to a second status, i. e. , from symbolically ''standing for God's presence'' into ''being God's presence'' (bread and wine would become the flesh and the blood of Christ); at the same time, this concept had to make invisible the transformation that occurred (or, rather, it needed to provide an explanation for the assumption that a transformation/transubstantiation could have occurred although it did not leave any visible traces). Aristotle's concept of the sign fulfilled all these conditions because it brought together ''substance'' and ''form'' and would allow for the concept of ''transsubstantion,'' i. e. , for a substitution on the level of substance that did not necessarily leave traces on the level of form. In addition, words from the ''original'' situation of Jesus Christ's self-sacrifice (more precisely: from his last supper with the disciples as the beginning of the sequence of self-sacrifice) needed to be recited, as a magical formula, i. e. , with the pretense of being a literal repetition, in order to conjure up (to make ''really present'' again, as a magical spell) the original moment of God's incarnated presence among humans through Christ (it is telling that the Protestant Reformers redefined the Eucharist from an act of conjuring up into an act of commemorating the ''Last Supper'').
Once the Christian eccentricity of the concept of ''incarnation'' within the range of monotheistic theology and the different steps of its elaboration are understood, the notion may well look less complex and less stimulating than it first seemed to promise. Different styles of theology and different epistemological frame conditions may be more or may be less generous in terms of allowing for the physical articulation (''incarnation'') of that which is considered to be primarily spiritual. They either allow for incarnation as an institutional potential or for incarnation as an exception*tertium non datur. Catholic theology has been proverbially generous with this possibility, which has given Catholic culture its specific, often exuberant flavor; the structurally same and the culturally opposite goes for Protestant culture*and explains its aesthetic sobriety and its better intellectual reputation under conditions of Modernity. I also think that these two opposite uses of incarnation as a conceptual and institutional potential have charged certain historical processes with moral (or perhaps even: proto-ideological) values. Clearly, it has been the goal and the self-assigned glory of the process of Modernity to eliminate all remnants of incarnation, to spiritualize (''cartesianize'') the human self-reference and, through a combination of empirical observation and applied mathematics, extend this spiritualization to the human view of the world (the twentieth-century age of different ''Constructivisms'' that I mentioned before may well have been the high point of this tendency). From the same ''modern'' point of view, certain historical sequences, like that from Plato's to Aristotle's philosophy, or that from medieval Nominalism to medieval Realism, appeared like unwelcome relapses that the process of History had needed to ''correct. '' Of course it has always been possible (and it seems to have become almost intellectually fashionable as of recent) to apply the opposite scale of evaluation. Finally, Hegel's philosophical mythology of the spirit alienating itself into matter in order to return to itself from an angle that would allow for reflexivity, can be celebrated as the most beautiful attempt at reuniting both Christian conceptions of incarnation into a more complex synthesis.
Our problem is that none of these conceptions appears to be convincing any more. They all work well to mitigate certain tendencies to exaggerate on the one or on the other side (on the Catholic or on the Protestant side)*but not more. In Kierkegaard's philosophy and in Bultmann's theology, however (and I have no doubt that there must be other authors allowing for similar perspectives), I see a potential for taking the motif of incarnation seriously under present-day conditions and set it apart from that worn-out oscillation. Both Kierkegaard and Bultmann eliminate the possibility, traditionally inherent to any theology of incarnation, of switching from the human to the divine side and back within the ontological divide of Monotheism (perhaps we refer to this self-prohibition against using the metaphysical oscillation when we call them both ''existentialist'' theologians). Kierkegaard insists on the possibility of God ''himself/herself'' being an individual human (which is radically different from God becoming incarnated in a human body), an individual human with whom we would have to live in contemporaneity. For Bultmann, God's revelation is his acting in history, with other words: Bultmann means that we have to accept, as God's work and without any exception, whatever happens to us, collectively
Incarnation, Now 211
212 H. U. Gumbrecht
and individually. Both these premises, I suppose, make our world-view sober, realistic, and almost empirical*and they also cut off the possibility of returning (or escaping) to a human self-reference that would remain exclusively spiritual. For neither facing God as an individual human (according to Kierkegaard) nor facing God as the totality of that which happens to us (according to Bultmann) is compatible with a purely spiritual self-reference. At the same time, it appears clear (at least: it is very probable) that both challenges will exceed our human capacity of understanding, of explaining, and of coming to terms with what we encounter. Incarnation, then, is no longer switching from the spirit to the flesh (and back)*it is obliging ourselves to face what our spirit cannot control.
Trying to think through the consequences of the motifs from Kierkegaard and Bultmann that I am invoking as alternatives to an all too smooth alternating between ''Catholic'' and ''Protestant'' conceptions of incarnation, brings me to a view that bears similarity with the initial description of our broad present. On both horizons, on that of Kierkegaardian and Bultmannian existentialism, but also on that of our contemporary broad present, an ontologically heterogeneous (i. e. , spiritual and physical) human self-reference is facing an ontologically heterogeneous world, without any guarantee that full control or even full understanding of that world will ever be possible. This secularized, existentialist way of thinking about incarnation (''secular'' in the sense of no longer presupposing that the sphere of a spiritual God will be accessible to us) projects quite a messy picture, a picture that is a far cry from the neat separation between a spiritual God and his creatures made from dirt, complete with the occasional possibility of bridging their ontological distance through incarnation. This messy picture reminds me of what I consider to be the (not so frequently mentioned) central point of Martin Heidegger's ''Letter on Humanism'' from 1947. I am referring above all to Heidegger's astonishment about the fact that humans could ever have assumed (about the fact indeed that humans had consistently believed*and we may add: continue to believe today, due, probably, to some non-secularized religious presupposition)*I am referring to Heidegger's astonishment about humans assuming that their mental and intellectual capacities would match the challenges lying in the task of grasping the conditions of their individual and collective survival, and that thereby the possibility of maintaining their lives would be secured. How could we ever have trusted in a guaranteed adequacy, in an equal degree of complexity between our mental capacities and the conditions of our individual and collective survival?
Today, for this very reason, we do not need a concept of ''God'' anymore to speak of ''transcendence;'' transcendent for us are the mechanisms and events that must have a relevance for our existence but remain too complex or too remote for us humans to ever be able to ''grasp'' them. Seen from this angle, some key motifs from Heidegger's conception of ''Seinsgeschichte'' (''History of Being'') seem to offer the possibility of a sober reaction to the messy new appeal of incarnation in our broad present. In the first place and above all, I see an affinity between our situation and the motif that, within ''Seinsgeschichte,'' Being (so to speak) ''takes the initiative'' of unconcealing itself in the dimension of individual substantial phenomena, instead of
''waiting'' to be discovered and explained by the human intellect; this seems to correspond to the impression that there are always already more things happening to us than we want to know and than we can possibly process (''curiositas'' may continue to be a courageous attitude*but I think one should no longer praise it as a ''virtue'' under present conditions). Secondly, what reveals itself as substance and singularity will well be our ''Geschick'' (our ''fate,'' i. e. , that which is ''sent to'' us and determines us), individually and collectively, and fate will not patiently pause until we have managed to understand what it ''means. '' What unconceals itself (must not always but) can be brutally overwhelming. Thirdly, the fate happening to us will of course challenge both our mental and our physical capacities, as it may threaten our physical and mental survival. Under such conditions of ''Seinsgeschichte,'' what used to be History (i. e. , a dimension of our world that we believed to understand) would often be latency*and this is far from being the worst case. ''Latency'' are those situations when we have not yet managed to intellectually and physically grasp or process what had happened to us*without Being unconcealed having turned into irreversible fate and damage yet. Situations of latency produce a feeling of discomfort, a ''Stimmung'' of congestion, and they of course imply no promise for that feeling ever to cease.
Long lasting or potentially permanent latency is thus hard to bear*as we can see from Heidegger's posthumous interview, in which the impatience with his time's and with his own incapacity to produce and to embrace the self-unconcealment of Being provoked the notorious exclamation that ''only a God can help us. '' Faced with so much existential drama and its pathos, would it not be better to ignore all of this, to ignore Being and latency, and act, without much drama, as if we still believed that the world was our own construction and that the conditions of collective and individual survival were within our reach? Some will say that existentialist drama is more realistic*or simply more ''dramatic;'' others will find it just ''too much. '' It may all boil down to the aesthetic preference for one or the other tonality*as a tonality for life.
Incarnation, Now 213
Copyright of Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Different styles of theology and different epistemological frame conditions may be more or may be less generous in terms of allowing for the physical articulation (''incarnation'') of that which is considered to be primarily spiritual. They either allow for incarnation as an institutional potential or for incarnation as an exception*tertium non datur. Catholic theology has been proverbially generous with this possibility, which has given Catholic culture its specific, often exuberant flavor; the structurally same and the culturally opposite goes for Protestant culture*and explains its aesthetic sobriety and its better intellectual reputation under conditions of Modernity. I also think that these two opposite uses of incarnation as a conceptual and institutional potential have charged certain historical processes with moral (or perhaps even: proto-ideological) values. Clearly, it has been the goal and the self-assigned glory of the process of Modernity to eliminate all remnants of incarnation, to spiritualize (''cartesianize'') the human self-reference and, through a combination of empirical observation and applied mathematics, extend this spiritualization to the human view of the world (the twentieth-century age of different ''Constructivisms'' that I mentioned before may well have been the high point of this tendency). From the same ''modern'' point of view, certain historical sequences, like that from Plato's to Aristotle's philosophy, or that from medieval Nominalism to medieval Realism, appeared like unwelcome relapses that the process of History had needed to ''correct. '' Of course it has always been possible (and it seems to have become almost intellectually fashionable as of recent) to apply the opposite scale of evaluation. Finally, Hegel's philosophical mythology of the spirit alienating itself into matter in order to return to itself from an angle that would allow for reflexivity, can be celebrated as the most beautiful attempt at reuniting both Christian conceptions of incarnation into a more complex synthesis.
Our problem is that none of these conceptions appears to be convincing any more. They all work well to mitigate certain tendencies to exaggerate on the one or on the other side (on the Catholic or on the Protestant side)*but not more. In Kierkegaard's philosophy and in Bultmann's theology, however (and I have no doubt that there must be other authors allowing for similar perspectives), I see a potential for taking the motif of incarnation seriously under present-day conditions and set it apart from that worn-out oscillation. Both Kierkegaard and Bultmann eliminate the possibility, traditionally inherent to any theology of incarnation, of switching from the human to the divine side and back within the ontological divide of Monotheism (perhaps we refer to this self-prohibition against using the metaphysical oscillation when we call them both ''existentialist'' theologians). Kierkegaard insists on the possibility of God ''himself/herself'' being an individual human (which is radically different from God becoming incarnated in a human body), an individual human with whom we would have to live in contemporaneity. For Bultmann, God's revelation is his acting in history, with other words: Bultmann means that we have to accept, as God's work and without any exception, whatever happens to us, collectively
Incarnation, Now 211
212 H. U. Gumbrecht
and individually. Both these premises, I suppose, make our world-view sober, realistic, and almost empirical*and they also cut off the possibility of returning (or escaping) to a human self-reference that would remain exclusively spiritual. For neither facing God as an individual human (according to Kierkegaard) nor facing God as the totality of that which happens to us (according to Bultmann) is compatible with a purely spiritual self-reference. At the same time, it appears clear (at least: it is very probable) that both challenges will exceed our human capacity of understanding, of explaining, and of coming to terms with what we encounter. Incarnation, then, is no longer switching from the spirit to the flesh (and back)*it is obliging ourselves to face what our spirit cannot control.
Trying to think through the consequences of the motifs from Kierkegaard and Bultmann that I am invoking as alternatives to an all too smooth alternating between ''Catholic'' and ''Protestant'' conceptions of incarnation, brings me to a view that bears similarity with the initial description of our broad present. On both horizons, on that of Kierkegaardian and Bultmannian existentialism, but also on that of our contemporary broad present, an ontologically heterogeneous (i. e. , spiritual and physical) human self-reference is facing an ontologically heterogeneous world, without any guarantee that full control or even full understanding of that world will ever be possible. This secularized, existentialist way of thinking about incarnation (''secular'' in the sense of no longer presupposing that the sphere of a spiritual God will be accessible to us) projects quite a messy picture, a picture that is a far cry from the neat separation between a spiritual God and his creatures made from dirt, complete with the occasional possibility of bridging their ontological distance through incarnation. This messy picture reminds me of what I consider to be the (not so frequently mentioned) central point of Martin Heidegger's ''Letter on Humanism'' from 1947. I am referring above all to Heidegger's astonishment about the fact that humans could ever have assumed (about the fact indeed that humans had consistently believed*and we may add: continue to believe today, due, probably, to some non-secularized religious presupposition)*I am referring to Heidegger's astonishment about humans assuming that their mental and intellectual capacities would match the challenges lying in the task of grasping the conditions of their individual and collective survival, and that thereby the possibility of maintaining their lives would be secured. How could we ever have trusted in a guaranteed adequacy, in an equal degree of complexity between our mental capacities and the conditions of our individual and collective survival?
Today, for this very reason, we do not need a concept of ''God'' anymore to speak of ''transcendence;'' transcendent for us are the mechanisms and events that must have a relevance for our existence but remain too complex or too remote for us humans to ever be able to ''grasp'' them. Seen from this angle, some key motifs from Heidegger's conception of ''Seinsgeschichte'' (''History of Being'') seem to offer the possibility of a sober reaction to the messy new appeal of incarnation in our broad present. In the first place and above all, I see an affinity between our situation and the motif that, within ''Seinsgeschichte,'' Being (so to speak) ''takes the initiative'' of unconcealing itself in the dimension of individual substantial phenomena, instead of
''waiting'' to be discovered and explained by the human intellect; this seems to correspond to the impression that there are always already more things happening to us than we want to know and than we can possibly process (''curiositas'' may continue to be a courageous attitude*but I think one should no longer praise it as a ''virtue'' under present conditions). Secondly, what reveals itself as substance and singularity will well be our ''Geschick'' (our ''fate,'' i. e. , that which is ''sent to'' us and determines us), individually and collectively, and fate will not patiently pause until we have managed to understand what it ''means. '' What unconceals itself (must not always but) can be brutally overwhelming. Thirdly, the fate happening to us will of course challenge both our mental and our physical capacities, as it may threaten our physical and mental survival. Under such conditions of ''Seinsgeschichte,'' what used to be History (i. e. , a dimension of our world that we believed to understand) would often be latency*and this is far from being the worst case. ''Latency'' are those situations when we have not yet managed to intellectually and physically grasp or process what had happened to us*without Being unconcealed having turned into irreversible fate and damage yet. Situations of latency produce a feeling of discomfort, a ''Stimmung'' of congestion, and they of course imply no promise for that feeling ever to cease.
Long lasting or potentially permanent latency is thus hard to bear*as we can see from Heidegger's posthumous interview, in which the impatience with his time's and with his own incapacity to produce and to embrace the self-unconcealment of Being provoked the notorious exclamation that ''only a God can help us. '' Faced with so much existential drama and its pathos, would it not be better to ignore all of this, to ignore Being and latency, and act, without much drama, as if we still believed that the world was our own construction and that the conditions of collective and individual survival were within our reach? Some will say that existentialist drama is more realistic*or simply more ''dramatic;'' others will find it just ''too much. '' It may all boil down to the aesthetic preference for one or the other tonality*as a tonality for life.
Incarnation, Now 213
Copyright of Communication & Critical/Cultural Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
Incarnation, Now: Five Brief Thoughts and a Non-Conclusive Ending
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
This article problematizes the renewed appeal of incarnation, a signifier that points to a vague desire in our present and perhaps, altogether, to an unclear future promise, rather than to the complex history of elaborate theological meanings with which the word had long been related. Incarnation is one among a number of concepts and topics that had become almost unspeakable since the eighteenth century*and that have recently returned to intellectual legitimacy. We propose to explain what could be the conditions of this rehabilitation.
Keywords: Incarnation; Enlightenment; Christianity; Presence; Constructivism
Ever since the age of Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and all the other classical Protestant Reformers, the concept of ''incarnation'' had been an object of growing intellectual embarrassment, an embarrassment coming from the normative notion of Subject- hood that wanted to be ''pure'' in the sense of being exclusively synonymous with consciousness. This dynamic turned into phobia and reached an irreversible-looking point of culmination during the Enlightenment. Subsequently, the topic of incarnation receded into public oblivion, so deeply that it was of no concern at all (not even of negative concern) during those years of the twentieth century when the movement called ''linguistic turn'' not only bracketed the embodiment of spiritual phenomena as an impossible thought, but indeed surrounded the idea of any immediate experience of things material, physical, or carnal with an epistemological taboo. Today*one is almost tempted to say: today, all of a sudden*''incarnation'' is back, back as a signifier that points to a vague desire in our present and perhaps, altogether, to an unclear future promise, rather than to the complex history of elaborate theological meanings with which the word had long been related. It does not require any speculative genius to say that the desire behind this return of ''incarnation'' must have been provoked by an everyday environment which for most
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is the Albert Gue ? rard Professor in Literature in the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at Stanford University.
ISSN 1479-1420 (print)/ISSN 1479-4233 (online) # 2011 National Communication Association DOI: 10. 1080/14791420. 2011. 567815
? ? 208 H. U. Gumbrecht
of us, living in the early twenty-first century (not only for those in intellectual or formerly ''liberal'' professions), has become insuperably and thereby also sometimes grotesquely ''Cartesian,'' in the sense of making our lives indeed largely coextensive with the functioning of consciousness. Whatever our professions may be, we spend almost all of the assigned and necessary working time (and in many cases also: most of our leisure time) in front of screens, and those screens typically function as an interface between our consciousness and software. Nothing else seems to ''matter. '' In the process of Modernization, the dream of becoming perfectly ''Cartesian'' has thus been so perfectly fulfilled that we seem to have lost any material concreteness to hold on to (whatever this ''holding on to'' may exactly be and mean)*more so, perhaps, than we are able to existentially afford. For our bodies have been reduced to a mere energy base for our minds, struggling to find pleasures and a dignity of their own.
There is a second, probably complementary, and certainly more precise way of explaining the renewed appeal of incarnation. It has to do with a profound change that time has undergone as the form and condition under which we live our now mostly globalized world and produce experience (we may also call this change a transformation of our ''chronotope''). Within ''historical time,'' i. e. , within the chronotope that had been dominating Western culture since the early nineteenth century, we felt that we were constantly leaving subsequent pasts ''behind ourselves'' as we were moving into the future as ''open horizons filled with possibilities. '' This framework defined two operations to be performed by the Subject in a present that, between the receding past and the open future, appeared to be a mere moment of transition. The two functions were a constant adaptation of experience that had been valid for the past to the conditions of present and future and, based on our thus constantly adapted experience, a choice among the multiple possibilities that each open future was holding. Both operations. i. e. , the adaptation of experience and the choice among multiple future possibilities, have constituted and shaped our conception of what Subjectivity (and Agency) was supposed to be, while the narrow present of transition became the epistemological habitat of the Subject. This Subject- centered view of life and of the world, in which recycled experience from the past would be projected into the future, i. e. , in which images of the world would be produced within a closed Subject-based circle, may well have been the ground for collective and individual conceptions, such as ''Constructivism,'' ''Systems Theory,'' ''Pragmatism,'' and also ''Deconstruction,'' where human agency and world creation did no longer expect to encounter and to be challenged by a material world that was out of agency's control.
Since the third quarter of the twentieth century, I believe, that formerly dominating chronotope has undergone deep modifications. Instead of progressively leaving each past behind us, we are now increasingly unable to take distance from the past and find ourselves thus more and more surrounded by the accumulating remnants from past worlds that have become part of the present. At the same time, our future, instead of being open and filled with multiple possibilities, seems to have become a haunting horizon of multiple threats*think only of global warming as the most blatant example. Between this new future and that new past, our present,
instead of continuing to be that moment of constant transition, has become an ever- broadening present of simultaneities, an accumulation of what we can neither distance and nor avoid. This alone, i. e. , that the short present with its clear association to Cartesian Subjectivity and its agency function does no longer exist, obliges us to ask whether we have not moved on to a new type of human self- reference that is less purely Cartesian*and all those desperate (and often not very intellectually elegant) attempts within the academic Humanities to ''recuperate the body'' are indeed clear symptoms for a similar change having occurred. At the same time (and in a less deductive perspective of observation), we might say that those remnants of the past that we can no longer distance although we have no function for them, together with the challenging scenarios in our future, seem to come together in a new, more physical environment that summons more strongly again the bodily components of our existence. Without any doubt, this changed physical environment gives new currency, together with many other topics of ''materiality'' and of ''the body,'' to the intellectual motifs subsumed under the concept of ''incarnation. '' In other words: incarnation is one among a number of concepts and topics that had become almost unspeakable since the eighteenth century*and that have recently returned to intellectual legitimacy.
Obviously, the history of the concept of ''incarnation'' has been almost entirely shaped by the Christian tradition. ''Incarnation'' indeed belongs to those notions that can help us understand the specific and specifically eccentric position of Christianity among the monotheistic religions. All monotheistic religions will draw an absolute ontological line of separation between the sphere of their God as a (necessarily? ) spiritual sphere (is the tendency towards incarnation a step towards polytheism? ) and the sphere inhabited by humans with their bodies. This means that each act of communication directed by a monotheistic God towards the humans will have the status of an exception, more precisely the status of an epiphanic event. Think of the burning bush in the Tora, and how astonishingly few the occasions are when God makes his voice heard; or think of the one book, the Koran, that the God of Islam, much more consequent in his isolation than the Jewish God, left for the humans. As the status of the world inhabited by humans, in the Jewish and later in the Christian tradition, was that of a world that had ''fallen'' from the innocent splendor of divine Creation; due to the ''original'' sin of the first humans, it also became a world to be redeemed. The promise of redemption brought forth the figure of the ''Messiah'' in the Jewish tradition and it appears that, within this tradition, the function and the status of the Messiah has been mostly oscillating between that of a purely spiritual and that of an embodied future presence.
If we can trust the Gospel as a historical document, then we may say that Christ's self-sacrifice on the Cross, as an act that was meant to redeem humankind from the original sin of its ancestors, was the beginning of a departure from that primary Jewish openness and oscillation as to the ontology of the Messiah. For it implied a logic according to which the redemption from the original sin, as a sin of the flesh, had to be purchased by an act of physical suffering*God needed to become flesh in order to be able to act as the savior of humankind. In addition, while the Jewish
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Messiah had always been an ephemeral figure positioned at the end of the world (as long as the end of the world would be fully synonymous with its redemption), and while the historical Jesus Christ may well have thought of himself along these lines, incarnation did acquire a new, unprecedented status when Christ, in Saint Paul's Epistles, was transformed from an ephemeral figure into a two-sided figure, a figure that would bring to an ending humankind's status of condemnation following from the original sin and open up, simultaneously, a time of waiting for the last judgment and for the postponed ending of a world that was now already redeemed (or that had at least been rewarded the potential of redemption through Christ's sacrifice). Immediately after Christ's resurrection, the time until the Day of Judgment had been expected to be very limited; then, with Pentecost and with the decades to follow, the time until the end of the world became an open time, i. e. , it grew into the Christian conception of history as a non-defined time of expectation towards the end, judgment, and ultimate redemption of the world (redemption as the full realization of a potential acquired through Christ's sacrifice). It was within that time of indefinite waiting that the Eucharist became so central, as an existential ''vademecum,'' as a possibility of producing and of endlessly renewing the physical (''real'') presence of God among humans. The sacrament of the Eucharist forever transformed the hitherto eccentric, i. e. , irruptive or ephemeral status of the moments of God's incarnation and presence among humans, into a permanent frame condition of life within Christian existence and culture. Only within Christianity did incarnation become an institutional potential.
What the sacrament of the Eucharist, as the institutional potential of producing and celebrating God's real presence in the world of humans, required as an ensemble of theological, conceptual, and anthropological conditions is easy to identify and to describe. It needed, in the first place and above all, a concept that would make plausible the possibility of transforming the substance of an object of reference from a first to a second status, i. e. , from symbolically ''standing for God's presence'' into ''being God's presence'' (bread and wine would become the flesh and the blood of Christ); at the same time, this concept had to make invisible the transformation that occurred (or, rather, it needed to provide an explanation for the assumption that a transformation/transubstantiation could have occurred although it did not leave any visible traces). Aristotle's concept of the sign fulfilled all these conditions because it brought together ''substance'' and ''form'' and would allow for the concept of ''transsubstantion,'' i. e. , for a substitution on the level of substance that did not necessarily leave traces on the level of form. In addition, words from the ''original'' situation of Jesus Christ's self-sacrifice (more precisely: from his last supper with the disciples as the beginning of the sequence of self-sacrifice) needed to be recited, as a magical formula, i. e. , with the pretense of being a literal repetition, in order to conjure up (to make ''really present'' again, as a magical spell) the original moment of God's incarnated presence among humans through Christ (it is telling that the Protestant Reformers redefined the Eucharist from an act of conjuring up into an act of commemorating the ''Last Supper'').
Once the Christian eccentricity of the concept of ''incarnation'' within the range of monotheistic theology and the different steps of its elaboration are understood, the notion may well look less complex and less stimulating than it first seemed to promise. Different styles of theology and different epistemological frame conditions may be more or may be less generous in terms of allowing for the physical articulation (''incarnation'') of that which is considered to be primarily spiritual. They either allow for incarnation as an institutional potential or for incarnation as an exception*tertium non datur. Catholic theology has been proverbially generous with this possibility, which has given Catholic culture its specific, often exuberant flavor; the structurally same and the culturally opposite goes for Protestant culture*and explains its aesthetic sobriety and its better intellectual reputation under conditions of Modernity. I also think that these two opposite uses of incarnation as a conceptual and institutional potential have charged certain historical processes with moral (or perhaps even: proto-ideological) values. Clearly, it has been the goal and the self-assigned glory of the process of Modernity to eliminate all remnants of incarnation, to spiritualize (''cartesianize'') the human self-reference and, through a combination of empirical observation and applied mathematics, extend this spiritualization to the human view of the world (the twentieth-century age of different ''Constructivisms'' that I mentioned before may well have been the high point of this tendency). From the same ''modern'' point of view, certain historical sequences, like that from Plato's to Aristotle's philosophy, or that from medieval Nominalism to medieval Realism, appeared like unwelcome relapses that the process of History had needed to ''correct. '' Of course it has always been possible (and it seems to have become almost intellectually fashionable as of recent) to apply the opposite scale of evaluation. Finally, Hegel's philosophical mythology of the spirit alienating itself into matter in order to return to itself from an angle that would allow for reflexivity, can be celebrated as the most beautiful attempt at reuniting both Christian conceptions of incarnation into a more complex synthesis.
Our problem is that none of these conceptions appears to be convincing any more. They all work well to mitigate certain tendencies to exaggerate on the one or on the other side (on the Catholic or on the Protestant side)*but not more. In Kierkegaard's philosophy and in Bultmann's theology, however (and I have no doubt that there must be other authors allowing for similar perspectives), I see a potential for taking the motif of incarnation seriously under present-day conditions and set it apart from that worn-out oscillation. Both Kierkegaard and Bultmann eliminate the possibility, traditionally inherent to any theology of incarnation, of switching from the human to the divine side and back within the ontological divide of Monotheism (perhaps we refer to this self-prohibition against using the metaphysical oscillation when we call them both ''existentialist'' theologians). Kierkegaard insists on the possibility of God ''himself/herself'' being an individual human (which is radically different from God becoming incarnated in a human body), an individual human with whom we would have to live in contemporaneity. For Bultmann, God's revelation is his acting in history, with other words: Bultmann means that we have to accept, as God's work and without any exception, whatever happens to us, collectively
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and individually. Both these premises, I suppose, make our world-view sober, realistic, and almost empirical*and they also cut off the possibility of returning (or escaping) to a human self-reference that would remain exclusively spiritual. For neither facing God as an individual human (according to Kierkegaard) nor facing God as the totality of that which happens to us (according to Bultmann) is compatible with a purely spiritual self-reference. At the same time, it appears clear (at least: it is very probable) that both challenges will exceed our human capacity of understanding, of explaining, and of coming to terms with what we encounter. Incarnation, then, is no longer switching from the spirit to the flesh (and back)*it is obliging ourselves to face what our spirit cannot control.
Trying to think through the consequences of the motifs from Kierkegaard and Bultmann that I am invoking as alternatives to an all too smooth alternating between ''Catholic'' and ''Protestant'' conceptions of incarnation, brings me to a view that bears similarity with the initial description of our broad present. On both horizons, on that of Kierkegaardian and Bultmannian existentialism, but also on that of our contemporary broad present, an ontologically heterogeneous (i. e. , spiritual and physical) human self-reference is facing an ontologically heterogeneous world, without any guarantee that full control or even full understanding of that world will ever be possible. This secularized, existentialist way of thinking about incarnation (''secular'' in the sense of no longer presupposing that the sphere of a spiritual God will be accessible to us) projects quite a messy picture, a picture that is a far cry from the neat separation between a spiritual God and his creatures made from dirt, complete with the occasional possibility of bridging their ontological distance through incarnation. This messy picture reminds me of what I consider to be the (not so frequently mentioned) central point of Martin Heidegger's ''Letter on Humanism'' from 1947. I am referring above all to Heidegger's astonishment about the fact that humans could ever have assumed (about the fact indeed that humans had consistently believed*and we may add: continue to believe today, due, probably, to some non-secularized religious presupposition)*I am referring to Heidegger's astonishment about humans assuming that their mental and intellectual capacities would match the challenges lying in the task of grasping the conditions of their individual and collective survival, and that thereby the possibility of maintaining their lives would be secured. How could we ever have trusted in a guaranteed adequacy, in an equal degree of complexity between our mental capacities and the conditions of our individual and collective survival?
Today, for this very reason, we do not need a concept of ''God'' anymore to speak of ''transcendence;'' transcendent for us are the mechanisms and events that must have a relevance for our existence but remain too complex or too remote for us humans to ever be able to ''grasp'' them. Seen from this angle, some key motifs from Heidegger's conception of ''Seinsgeschichte'' (''History of Being'') seem to offer the possibility of a sober reaction to the messy new appeal of incarnation in our broad present. In the first place and above all, I see an affinity between our situation and the motif that, within ''Seinsgeschichte,'' Being (so to speak) ''takes the initiative'' of unconcealing itself in the dimension of individual substantial phenomena, instead of
''waiting'' to be discovered and explained by the human intellect; this seems to correspond to the impression that there are always already more things happening to us than we want to know and than we can possibly process (''curiositas'' may continue to be a courageous attitude*but I think one should no longer praise it as a ''virtue'' under present conditions). Secondly, what reveals itself as substance and singularity will well be our ''Geschick'' (our ''fate,'' i. e. , that which is ''sent to'' us and determines us), individually and collectively, and fate will not patiently pause until we have managed to understand what it ''means. '' What unconceals itself (must not always but) can be brutally overwhelming. Thirdly, the fate happening to us will of course challenge both our mental and our physical capacities, as it may threaten our physical and mental survival. Under such conditions of ''Seinsgeschichte,'' what used to be History (i. e. , a dimension of our world that we believed to understand) would often be latency*and this is far from being the worst case. ''Latency'' are those situations when we have not yet managed to intellectually and physically grasp or process what had happened to us*without Being unconcealed having turned into irreversible fate and damage yet. Situations of latency produce a feeling of discomfort, a ''Stimmung'' of congestion, and they of course imply no promise for that feeling ever to cease.
Long lasting or potentially permanent latency is thus hard to bear*as we can see from Heidegger's posthumous interview, in which the impatience with his time's and with his own incapacity to produce and to embrace the self-unconcealment of Being provoked the notorious exclamation that ''only a God can help us. '' Faced with so much existential drama and its pathos, would it not be better to ignore all of this, to ignore Being and latency, and act, without much drama, as if we still believed that the world was our own construction and that the conditions of collective and individual survival were within our reach? Some will say that existentialist drama is more realistic*or simply more ''dramatic;'' others will find it just ''too much. '' It may all boil down to the aesthetic preference for one or the other tonality*as a tonality for life.
Incarnation, Now 213
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Different styles of theology and different epistemological frame conditions may be more or may be less generous in terms of allowing for the physical articulation (''incarnation'') of that which is considered to be primarily spiritual. They either allow for incarnation as an institutional potential or for incarnation as an exception*tertium non datur. Catholic theology has been proverbially generous with this possibility, which has given Catholic culture its specific, often exuberant flavor; the structurally same and the culturally opposite goes for Protestant culture*and explains its aesthetic sobriety and its better intellectual reputation under conditions of Modernity. I also think that these two opposite uses of incarnation as a conceptual and institutional potential have charged certain historical processes with moral (or perhaps even: proto-ideological) values. Clearly, it has been the goal and the self-assigned glory of the process of Modernity to eliminate all remnants of incarnation, to spiritualize (''cartesianize'') the human self-reference and, through a combination of empirical observation and applied mathematics, extend this spiritualization to the human view of the world (the twentieth-century age of different ''Constructivisms'' that I mentioned before may well have been the high point of this tendency). From the same ''modern'' point of view, certain historical sequences, like that from Plato's to Aristotle's philosophy, or that from medieval Nominalism to medieval Realism, appeared like unwelcome relapses that the process of History had needed to ''correct. '' Of course it has always been possible (and it seems to have become almost intellectually fashionable as of recent) to apply the opposite scale of evaluation. Finally, Hegel's philosophical mythology of the spirit alienating itself into matter in order to return to itself from an angle that would allow for reflexivity, can be celebrated as the most beautiful attempt at reuniting both Christian conceptions of incarnation into a more complex synthesis.
Our problem is that none of these conceptions appears to be convincing any more. They all work well to mitigate certain tendencies to exaggerate on the one or on the other side (on the Catholic or on the Protestant side)*but not more. In Kierkegaard's philosophy and in Bultmann's theology, however (and I have no doubt that there must be other authors allowing for similar perspectives), I see a potential for taking the motif of incarnation seriously under present-day conditions and set it apart from that worn-out oscillation. Both Kierkegaard and Bultmann eliminate the possibility, traditionally inherent to any theology of incarnation, of switching from the human to the divine side and back within the ontological divide of Monotheism (perhaps we refer to this self-prohibition against using the metaphysical oscillation when we call them both ''existentialist'' theologians). Kierkegaard insists on the possibility of God ''himself/herself'' being an individual human (which is radically different from God becoming incarnated in a human body), an individual human with whom we would have to live in contemporaneity. For Bultmann, God's revelation is his acting in history, with other words: Bultmann means that we have to accept, as God's work and without any exception, whatever happens to us, collectively
Incarnation, Now 211
212 H. U. Gumbrecht
and individually. Both these premises, I suppose, make our world-view sober, realistic, and almost empirical*and they also cut off the possibility of returning (or escaping) to a human self-reference that would remain exclusively spiritual. For neither facing God as an individual human (according to Kierkegaard) nor facing God as the totality of that which happens to us (according to Bultmann) is compatible with a purely spiritual self-reference. At the same time, it appears clear (at least: it is very probable) that both challenges will exceed our human capacity of understanding, of explaining, and of coming to terms with what we encounter. Incarnation, then, is no longer switching from the spirit to the flesh (and back)*it is obliging ourselves to face what our spirit cannot control.
Trying to think through the consequences of the motifs from Kierkegaard and Bultmann that I am invoking as alternatives to an all too smooth alternating between ''Catholic'' and ''Protestant'' conceptions of incarnation, brings me to a view that bears similarity with the initial description of our broad present. On both horizons, on that of Kierkegaardian and Bultmannian existentialism, but also on that of our contemporary broad present, an ontologically heterogeneous (i. e. , spiritual and physical) human self-reference is facing an ontologically heterogeneous world, without any guarantee that full control or even full understanding of that world will ever be possible. This secularized, existentialist way of thinking about incarnation (''secular'' in the sense of no longer presupposing that the sphere of a spiritual God will be accessible to us) projects quite a messy picture, a picture that is a far cry from the neat separation between a spiritual God and his creatures made from dirt, complete with the occasional possibility of bridging their ontological distance through incarnation. This messy picture reminds me of what I consider to be the (not so frequently mentioned) central point of Martin Heidegger's ''Letter on Humanism'' from 1947. I am referring above all to Heidegger's astonishment about the fact that humans could ever have assumed (about the fact indeed that humans had consistently believed*and we may add: continue to believe today, due, probably, to some non-secularized religious presupposition)*I am referring to Heidegger's astonishment about humans assuming that their mental and intellectual capacities would match the challenges lying in the task of grasping the conditions of their individual and collective survival, and that thereby the possibility of maintaining their lives would be secured. How could we ever have trusted in a guaranteed adequacy, in an equal degree of complexity between our mental capacities and the conditions of our individual and collective survival?
Today, for this very reason, we do not need a concept of ''God'' anymore to speak of ''transcendence;'' transcendent for us are the mechanisms and events that must have a relevance for our existence but remain too complex or too remote for us humans to ever be able to ''grasp'' them. Seen from this angle, some key motifs from Heidegger's conception of ''Seinsgeschichte'' (''History of Being'') seem to offer the possibility of a sober reaction to the messy new appeal of incarnation in our broad present. In the first place and above all, I see an affinity between our situation and the motif that, within ''Seinsgeschichte,'' Being (so to speak) ''takes the initiative'' of unconcealing itself in the dimension of individual substantial phenomena, instead of
''waiting'' to be discovered and explained by the human intellect; this seems to correspond to the impression that there are always already more things happening to us than we want to know and than we can possibly process (''curiositas'' may continue to be a courageous attitude*but I think one should no longer praise it as a ''virtue'' under present conditions). Secondly, what reveals itself as substance and singularity will well be our ''Geschick'' (our ''fate,'' i. e. , that which is ''sent to'' us and determines us), individually and collectively, and fate will not patiently pause until we have managed to understand what it ''means. '' What unconceals itself (must not always but) can be brutally overwhelming. Thirdly, the fate happening to us will of course challenge both our mental and our physical capacities, as it may threaten our physical and mental survival. Under such conditions of ''Seinsgeschichte,'' what used to be History (i. e. , a dimension of our world that we believed to understand) would often be latency*and this is far from being the worst case. ''Latency'' are those situations when we have not yet managed to intellectually and physically grasp or process what had happened to us*without Being unconcealed having turned into irreversible fate and damage yet. Situations of latency produce a feeling of discomfort, a ''Stimmung'' of congestion, and they of course imply no promise for that feeling ever to cease.
Long lasting or potentially permanent latency is thus hard to bear*as we can see from Heidegger's posthumous interview, in which the impatience with his time's and with his own incapacity to produce and to embrace the self-unconcealment of Being provoked the notorious exclamation that ''only a God can help us. '' Faced with so much existential drama and its pathos, would it not be better to ignore all of this, to ignore Being and latency, and act, without much drama, as if we still believed that the world was our own construction and that the conditions of collective and individual survival were within our reach? Some will say that existentialist drama is more realistic*or simply more ''dramatic;'' others will find it just ''too much. '' It may all boil down to the aesthetic preference for one or the other tonality*as a tonality for life.
Incarnation, Now 213
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