1.2 The Semiology of Incarnation
1.2.1 A Volitional Withholding
Before we can analyze the semiological structure of Smith’s logic of incarnation, we need to understand what makes this semiological structure necessary. This structure of incarnation is important for Smith’s project because it explains how God can reveal Godself to finite beings,
52 Ibid., 9.
53 Smith, Speech, 166.
54 Ibid.
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“show[ing] up in terms that the ego can understand,” while also remaining transcendent.55 How can God show up in a way the ego can understand without suffering some manner of ontological, conceptual, epistemological, or phenomenological violence wherein transcendence is reduced to immanence?56 He argues that God is not subject to such violence because something of God remains absent in the incarnation.57 This absence, which prevents the metaphysical violence of reducing transcendence to immanence, is the basis of Smith’s logic of incarnation.
For the moment, let us set aside theological concerns about what of God could be absent in the incarnation, despite the creed’s insistence that Jesus is fully God and fully human,
presumably without remainder in either case.58 Let us set aside christological concerns about Smith’s position and the possibility of God’s divisibility, as if, perhaps, there were some “hidden divine essence that is untouched by this [incarnational] outgoing.”59 There is also the question of how Smith thinks that a certain absence protects against violence.60 I will refer to this violence as
‘metaphysical’ because (1) of Smith’s commitment to God showing up in terms the ego can understand, while wanting to avoid Levinas’s image of (2) forcing the Other to play a role in
55 Ibid., 49.
56 Ibid., 127.
57 Ibid., 126.
58 Smith claims to bracket all “strictly christological” issues from his own project, wanting to “invoke the Incarnation as a metaphor” (Ibid., 10). However, that metaphorical bracketing seems illegitimate given the
theological discussions of Gnosticism, Marcionism, the Barth/Brunner debate, and his later text, The Nicene Option.
The incarnation clearly functions as more than a metaphor in Smith’s work, albeit sans christology. Smith’s refusal to engage with christology creates numerous problems for his position.
59 Keen, “Transgression,” 92.
60 Is the incarnation, as a theological event, not a movement of divine openness, vulnerability, and eventually violence in the crucifixion? Does God really need to be saved? Can Smith’s God still be the God of all of the damned and Godforsaken? Can the God who is untouched by violence be in solidary with the marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed? Is it not the case that in the incarnation, “in Jesus Christ God suffers with suffering human being, God is rejected with rejected human being; in entering into human life as it is plunged into total destruction, God has ‘tasted damnation, death and hell’” (Ibid., 93).
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which it no longer recognizes itself.61 It often seems as if Smith imagines this violence in ontic or substantive terms, which is why he can declare confidently that God is not subject to such
violence. What preserves God from such violence while presumably not preserving the human other from such violence? Presumably it is because something of God’s being or nature is always withheld in revelation, while perhaps this is not the case for finite beings.62 Something of God is withheld precisely because God is transcendent. Therefore, because of that metaphysical
remainder, God cannot be reduced to a role in which God cannot recognize Godself. God has a metaphysical anchor that prevents God from being reduced to the Same. Hence, there will necessarily be a plurality of interpretations because no singular interpretation will contain God.
In his concern to avoid even a hint of Gnosticism, Smith wants to explain that this metaphysical remainder, which he often refers to as the divine withholding and which might be described phenomenologically as a lack of intuition, is in no way “a structural ‘poverty’ or
‘deficit’ attributed to the ego’s finitude.”63 We cannot blame the finite being for the divine remainder as if finitude was simply incapable of receiving the fullness of God.64 That incapacity
61 “But violence does not consist so much in injuring and annihilating persons as in interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance, making them carry out actions that will destroy every possibility for action.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Alphonso Lingis, trans. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969): 21. Levinas makes this statement in the context of war: “The visage of being that shows itself in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy” (ibid.). The highly metaphorical and poetic nature of the “Preface” renders its meaning challenging, particularly without appeal or reference to the remainder of the text.
62 Admittedly, Smith’s discussion of appresentation in ST makes it hard to argue that finite things do not also hold something in reserve. I am unable to give a charitable account of Smith’s position at this point. Therefore, it seems to me if we look too closely here, we may find an untangling of Smith’s project.
63 Smith, Speech, 53.
64 Perhaps this commitment that the finite should be capable of God is part of what leads Smith to critique Levinas’s doctrine of revelation, which derives from a concept of excess. To what extent must finite being be capable of all things in order not to be Gnostic?
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would strike of Gnosticism. But if the remainder or withholding is not due to the ego’s finite capacity, to what do we owe it? Why would God not fully give Godself? The focus is now on God’s volition. Smith says:
[I]t is the phenomenon itself which does not give itself entirely. The inadequacy of perception [signifies] . . . the phenomenon’s assertion of its right to privacy, its right to refuse to appear, its right to preserve itself as transcendent and thereby maintain its identity.65
Smith picks up this language of ‘rights’ from Marion’s “The Saturated Phenomenon,” where Marion was addressing the principle of sufficient reason in light of Kant’s definition of
‘possibility.’66 That does not strike me as the same thing as a ‘right to privacy,’ particularly within a contemporary geo-political context of state surveillance and digital tracking. Rather, it appears as if Smith may be using the language of rights equivocally to introduce a concept more in line with classical liberalism. Smith claims that his analogical logic, in which the transcendent subject appears and withholds itself, is based on the phenomenon’s right not to appear.67
If this reading is correct, then the reason that something of God is withheld is not
necessarily due to God’s metaphysical transcendence but rather it is due to God’s volition. That reading then raises questions about why finite beings cannot exercise a similar volition to privacy. This turn to classical liberalism, with language of rights and volition, within a larger phenomenological context is surprising. It seems to mimetically repeat the Medieval debates over whether the will or the intellect has priority in the divine life. And while John Duns Scotus
65 Ibid.
66 Jean-Luc Marion, “The Saturated Phenomenon,” The Visible and the Revealed, Christina M. Gschwandtner and Others, trans. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008): 21.
67 Note again that this ‘right’ would presumably apply to any phenomenon.
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maintained a sophisticated account of divine freedom, which was not reducible to choice,68 doctrines of theological voluntarism, in which the good stems from the divine will, were sure to follow.69 In the context of the debates over intellect and will, if we give priority to the intellect, then God seemingly must recognize an external, higher authority.70 If, however, God’s will has priority over God’s intellect, then God remains sovereign at the cost of a certain moral and epistemological arbitrariness. Now, in a phenomenological context, God exercises the liberal privilege of any phenomenon, which is its right not to appear, except in Smith it seems reserved for God alone. Is this ‘right’ exercised in the incarnation? Why can I or you not exercise this
‘right’?
This issue arises because Smith seems to anthropomorphize the phenomenon. He says that “the phenomenon must give up its transcendence in order to make a showing.”71 Here we find a potential reason why God can exercise this right when you and I might not. God is transcendent in ways that you and I are not transcendent. God gives up this right to appear and asserts this right to remain transcendent. In contrast, what Levinas and Marion are saying is that, epistemologically, for the Same to understand the Other, the Same must truncate the Other, reduce the Other to the Same’s totality. There is something of Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception at play in Levinas’s claim. The Same can understand the Other by applying
68 Thomas A. Shannon, The Ethical Theory of John Duns Scotus: A Dialogue with Medieval and Modern Thought (St. Bonaventure: Franciscan Institute Publications, 2013): 49.
69 Suarez states, “. . . the whole basis of good and evil in matters pertaining to the law of nature is in God’s will, and not in a judgment or reason, even on the part of God Himself.” Francisco Suarez, “A Treatise on Laws and God the Lawgiver,” Selections from Three Works of Francisco Suarez, Thomas Pink, ed. (Carmel: Liberty Fund, 2019): 210.
70 Scotus insisted that “none of God’s knowledge is caused by anything external to himself.” Richard Cross, Duns Scotus (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 48. Nevertheless, other Medievals, such as Henry of Ghent do make God’s intellect passive, entailing that divine knowledge can be caused by things external to God (ibid., 50-51).
71 Smith, Speech, 7.
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concepts to the Other. Then the Other appears as an experience, but in a way that the Other no longer recognizes itself. The agent here is the Same, the self, the unified, monarchial subject.
This is the violence that appropriately concerns both Levinas and Marion.
In contrast, Smith places agency – in this case, but not consistently in every case – with the phenomenon rather than the subject. The phenomenon, says Smith, has a ‘right to appear’ as well as a ‘right to privacy.’ When the phenomenon is forced to give up its transcendence in order to appear, then the phenomenon is subjected to violence. We might consider it to be a mode of exploitation, though Smith does not use that word. Here we encounter a fundamental source of misunderstanding between Smith and Levinas. Smith’s semiology turns out to be a recognition that our hermeneutical totality does not encompass the fullness of the Other, which is of course true. But is that enough to preserve transcendence and to protect against metaphysical violence?
That is the question. In contrast to Smith, Levinas, argues that the Other has the capacity to call the Same beyond its enclosed hermeneutical totality through its questioning and critique of the Same’s reductive interpretation of the Other. Smith and Levinas are making wildly different claims, phenomenologically and hermeneutically speaking.
It is because Smith is still working from a modern, liberal-economic model that he can speak of transcendence in this giving-withholding structure or rhythm. He must emphasize the primacy of the will and of phenomenal rights to do so. Isolated subjects/objects have rights to their private property, foremost of which is the appearance of their own physical bodies. There is an epistemological consequence for Smith’s position. We can never know anything with
certainty, which is the consequence of modernity generally. Smith accepts this consequence by arguing that pluralism is God’s intention for creation. Consequently, the quest for certainty yields conceptual violence, which is the nature of epistemological imperialism. Smith’s decision
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is to embrace skepticism by displacing concepts with signs or icons. ‘Concepts’ only formally indicate their referent.
That said, when Smith goes on to claim that “God reduces himself to the sphere of immanence,” that is a different claim altogether.72 Smith insists that God must appear in a way finite being can receive God by validating finite being where and as it is, without obligation to deny one’s finite self. And even though God must appear this way, it is still God’s choice, Smith says, to condescend to appear “under finite conditions.”73 Presumably, God is happy to do it. But if this position yields the type of epistemological colonialism or imperialism that Levinas claims, then can Smith’s position differ significantly from the colonial British or Americans claiming that Africans are happy as slaves? Is Smith’s position more than a scandalously weak
justification for theological exploitation? Is kenotic self-giving the same as enforced reduction?
Imperialism, colonialism, and exploitation are the necessary outcomes of classical liberalism.
Choice is the justifying apparatus par excellence of modernity. Choice, linked fundamentally to the economic liberalism of rights and private property, which are the mechanisms of imperialistic violence.