Rhythm: A Theological Category (Oxford Theology and Religion Monographs) 9780198828839, 0198828837

Table of contents :
Cover
Rhythm: A Theological Category
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PASCAL MICHON AND THE HISTORY OF A HAUNTING
THIS TEXT AMID THE WAVE
Outline of the Book
Part I: Experience
1: A Phenomenology of Rhythm
RHYTHM IN POETRY
The Synchronic Perspective
The Diachronic Perspective
Interruption
Poetic Rhythm
RHYTHM IN THE EVERYDAY
Rhythm and Language
Rhythm in Social Cohesion and Subversion
Part II: Philosophy
2: Synchronicity I: Rhythm as the Whole
BENVENISTIAN RHYTHM AND HERACLITEAN (ANTI)METAPHYSICS
Gilles Deleuze
Friedrich Nietzsche
Martin Heidegger
THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES
Catherine Keller
Erich Przywara
3: Diachronicity: Rhythm as Interruption
INTERRUPTIVE RHYTHM AND THE EXPERIENCE OF THE SUBJECT
Giorgio Agamben
Julia Kristeva
THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES
Connor Cunningham and John Milbank
Jean-Luc Marion
Erich Przywara
Part III: Theology
4: Synchronicity II: Rhythm as Hierarchy
AUGUSTINIAN RHYTHM AND THE HIERARCHY OF THE WHOLE
De Musica
Interpretations
THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES
John Milbank, Simon Oliver, and Adrian Pabst
Erich Przywara
5: Harmony and Interruption: Rhythm as Analogy
THE ANALOGIA ENTIS AS RHYTHM
Steven A. Long
Erich Przywara
THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES
Synchronic and Diachronic
Rhythmic Theology
Part IV: Reality
6: Rhythms of Creation
THE SYNCHRONIC: THE GENESIS 1 CREATION ACCOUNT
Theological
Intra-creaturely
THE DIACHRONIC: NATURE AND CULTURE
Keller and Augustine
A Rhythmic Doctrine of Creation
7: Rhythms of Salvation
THE SYNCHRONIC: HARMONY AND INTERRUPTION
Jenson and Congdon
The Ordinary and the Deformed
THE DIACHRONIC: CHURCH AND WORLD
Intra-Ecclesial Oscillations
Church and World
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Editorial Committee D. ACHARYA

M . N . A . BO C K M UE HL

M . J . E D W A RD S

P . S . F I D DE S

S . R . I . FO O T

D . N . J . M A C CU L LO C H

H . N A J MA N

G . WARD

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OXFORD THEOLOGY AND RELIGION MONOGRAPHS Qur’an of the Oppressed Liberation Theology and Gender Justice in Islam Shadaab Rahemtulla (2017) Ezra and the Second Wilderness Philip Y. Yoo (2017) Maternal Grief in the Hebrew Bible Ekaterina E. Kozlova (2017) The Human Condition in Hilary of Poitiers The Will and Original Sin between Origen and Augustine Isabella Image (2017) Deuteronomy 28 and the Aramaic Curse Tradition Laura Quick (2017) Sartre on Sin Between Being and Nothingness Kate Kirkpatrick (2017) Making Sense of Old Testament Genocide Christian Interpretations of Herem Passages Christian Hofreiter (2018) An Avant-garde Theological Generation The Nouvelle Théologie and the French Crisis of Modernity Jon Kirwan (2018) Jansenism and England Moral Rigorism across the Confessions Thomas Palmer (2018) A Redactional Study of the Book of Isaiah 13–23 Jongkyung Lee (2018) A Vaiṣnava Poet in Early Modern Bengal : Kavikarnapūra’s Splendour of Speech Rembert Lutjeharms (2018) :

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Rhythm A Theological Category

LEXI EIKELBOOM

1

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3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Lexi Eikelboom 2018 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2018 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018940944 ISBN 978–0–19–882883–9 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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To my parents, Kai and Elaine Grambart

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Contents Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1 4 14

Pascal Michon and the History of a Haunting This Text Amid the Wave

PART I EXPERIENCE 1. A Phenomenology of Rhythm Rhythm in Poetry Rhythm in the Everyday

23 25 45

PART II PHILOSOPHY 2. Synchronicity I: Rhythm as the Whole Benvenistian Rhythm and Heraclitean (Anti)Metaphysics Theological Responses 3. Diachronicity: Rhythm as Interruption Interruptive Rhythm and the Experience of the Subject Theological Responses

59 60 80 90 91 105

PART III THEOLOGY 4. Synchronicity II: Rhythm as Hierarchy Augustinian Rhythm and the Hierarchy of the Whole Theological Responses

123 125 135

5. Harmony and Interruption: Rhythm as Analogy The Analogia Entis as Rhythm Theological Responses

150 151 161

PART IV REALITY 6. Rhythms of Creation The Synchronic: The Genesis 1 Creation Account The Diachronic: Nature and Culture

173 174 183

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viii

Contents

7. Rhythms of Salvation The Synchronic: Harmony and Interruption The Diachronic: Church and World

200 201 211

Epilogue

227

Bibliography

231 245

Index

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Acknowledgments This project has taken shape over approximately five years and is therefore the shared product of several communities. I would like to thank the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford, which made this project possible both in its dissertation and monograph forms. In particular, I am grateful to Regent’s Park College, which supplied a much-valued desk from which to work and financial support in the form of the Henman Scholarship. I am grateful also for the conversations with and support from faculty members at Oxford, in particular Johannes Zachhuber, Joel Rasmussen, Matthew Kirkpatrick, Paul Fiddes, and Pamela Sue Anderson, and with fellow graduate students, including Emily Kempson, Taylor Knight, and Eleanor McLaughlin. I am indebted to Graham Ward, the supervisor for this project, who, in addition to reading and commenting on my work, filled that most important role of retaining the capacity to see where I was going even when I could not so that I was never at a loss for my next step. This book has developed significantly from the dissertation that it was thanks to feedback from Paul Fiddes and David Brown as well as John Betz, who has been especially helpful in thinking through my interpretation of Przywara. The development of this project has been made possible by the support of David Riggs and the John Wesley Honors College at Indiana Wesleyan University. Besides providing financial and community support, my post at the JWHC—an interdisciplinary environment if I’ve ever known one and therefore an environment particularly well-suited to this project—has given me the opportunity to teach classes in which I developed this project alongside student input. I am grateful to all of those students for their time and their enthusiasm. I am also grateful for feedback from colleagues at Indiana Wesleyan University’s Theology Research Seminar, most notably from John Drury and Patrick Eby. Finally, I would like to express ultimate gratitude to my parents, Kai and Elaine Grambart and Albert and Adriana Eikelboom, for the support which has made the completion of this project a reality, and to my husband, Paul, for the sacrifices that he has made to make this project possible.

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Introduction Imagine that I have recently moved to a new job in a new town and you ask me how I am settling in. If I were to tell you that I was getting into a rhythm, or, more likely, that I still needed to get into a rhythm but had not yet done so, you would probably know what I meant. Yet, if we stop to consider it, we find that what we mean when we refer to rhythm in this way is not at all clear. In this case, “getting into a rhythm” does not refer to an obviously rhythmic type of behavior like dancing. It does not refer to a given rhythm like that of a nursery rhyme or a piece of music with which I must synch up my behavior. Rather, I would be communicating something much more general, a way of approaching life that integrates routine and variation for maximum health, happiness, and productivity. But why do we express this idea through the concept of rhythm? And how do we all understand this idea even though we are only referring to something vaguely analogous to rhythmic entities like dances and nursery rhymes? What is this mysterious rhythm to which we supposedly have a relationship? And why is it so important to us? There is a quote by Jacques Derrida that reads: “rhythm has always haunted our tradition, without ever reaching the centre of its concerns.”¹ In part, Derrida is making a claim about his own tradition of French philosophy, in which a modest amount of literature on the topic of rhythm does exist but has not become part of mainstream discussion.² But I think Derrida is also making a point about the nature of rhythm more generally. Like a ghost, rhythm is barely visible and therefore rarely noticed, but it is also ever-present. Rhythm does not easily adhere to the channels through which communication operates. I can attempt to define it as a periodic oscillation between strong and weak beats, or point to repetitions of visual patterns but, as we will see and as ¹ Jacques Derrida, “Introduction” in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 33. ² Of the French texts that have been translated into English, for example, very few deal with rhythm directly. Exceptions include the essay “The Echo of the Subject” in Philippe LacoueLabarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), and Henri Lefebvre’s book Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

many of us may already suspect, these indications do not sufficiently capture all that is involved with rhythm. They do not, for example, explain why we talk about “getting into a rhythm.” Yet, for all its elusiveness, rhythm is also pervasive. Many of our bodily processes are rhythmic—pulse, heartbeat, brainwaves, breath, circadian rhythms—as are larger ecological and cosmic processes like seasons, soundwaves, light-waves, the movement of atoms, and forms of human communication such as speech and music.³ As with categories like space, time, language, and consciousness, rhythm is one of those phenomena in which human experience is steeped. Almost everything we do and the ways in which we understand the world are bathed in rhythm. It is part of the scaffold to which life clings, the lattice through which we connect with the universe. Thus, even if it is difficult to communicate the nature and meaning of rhythm, nature and meaning themselves appear to us through rhythm. Rhythm’s constant immediacy shows it to be an irreducible and indispensable dimension of what it means to be human, but this immediacy also makes it difficult to obtain enough critical distance for us to clearly see what it is. In other words, rhythm is both pervasive and elusive. It is everywhere but it is difficult to subject to scrutiny. Asking “what is rhythm?” is rather like asking “what is life?” or “what is space?” or “what is consciousness?” Such difficulties do not, of course, stop thinkers from asking and attempting to answer these questions. In fact, these questions about the elements of reality in which we are steeped but to which we do not give much thought are worth asking precisely because they are both fundamental to the nature of reality and yet are poorly understood. Rhythm falls into this same category of something that is an undeniable contributor to what it means to be human but to which we tend to give little thought (unless you happen to be a poet or a musician). The difference between these other categories—time, space, language, consciousness—and rhythm, is that all the others are already considered significant topics of study. They represent central philosophical categories. Rhythm, on the other hand, remains a ghost. Yet the ghost remains with us.

³ To take a single but fairly all-encompassing example, different languages have distinct rhythms, and these rhythms are significant enough that languages with very different rhythms can be identified even when all other cues are removed (Aniruddh D. Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 136.) Newborns are immediately sensitive to the rhythms of language. They are capable of discriminating languages only if those languages are of different rhythmic types, suggesting that rhythm is central to language acquisition (Patel, Music, Language and the Brain, 137. Thierry Nazzi, Josiane Bertoncini, and Jacques Mehler “Language Discrimination by Newborns: Toward an Understanding of the Role of Rhythm,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 24 3 (1998): 756–66; Thierry Nazzi, Peter W. Jusczyk, and Elizabeth K. Johnson, “Language Discrimination by English-Learning 5-Month Olds: Effects of Rhythm and Familiarity,” Journal of Memory and Language 43 1 (2000): 1–19; Jacques Mehler, Peter Jusczyk, and Ghislaine Lambertz, “A Precursor of Language Acquisition in Young Infants,” Cognition 29 (1988): 143–78).

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Introduction

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Therefore, just as we should not ignore questions of time, space, consciousness, and language when answering the big questions of human existence, our answers to these questions should likewise take rhythm into account. Rhythm haunts another tradition as well: that of Christian theology. Rhythm is the form of Christianity’s religious expression, its liturgies, rituals, calendars, music, and other artistic expressions. The pervasive rhythmic form of Christian worship and religious expression implies that it is a significant part of the human’s relationship to God. If Christian theology deals with the same relation to God that is practiced and expressed in Christian worship, then the form of such practice haunts not only practice but theology as well. If theology is talk about God by creatures, and about the difference that God makes to creatures, then understanding the creature’s rhythmic context is indispensable for understanding that God–creature relationship. The form is inextricably part of the relationship. It may, therefore, be worthy of doctrinal consideration. For this reason, theologians do sometimes attempt their Godtalk from the perspective of these liturgies, rituals, calendars, or artistic expressions. Some even reach for the idea of rhythm in their attempts to describe the nature of God or reality.⁴ Yet for all this haunting, rhythm has not been an object of direct, theological analysis; it has not entered the center of theology’s concerns. This book is an attempt to draw attention to the ghost of rhythm, to describe it and its effects theologically. As elusive as it is, the phenomenon comes with real theological implications. The ways in which rhythm is used ⁴ For example, John E. Colwell, The Rhythm of Doctrine: A Liturgical Sketch of Christian Faith and Faithfulness (Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007); Stanley Hauerwas, “The Liturgical Shape of the Christian Life: Teaching Christian Ethics as Worship,” in In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp 153–68. Certain theologians and philosophers of religion have recently used rhythm in their work. These include Paul Fiddes (most recently in Paul Fiddes, Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010). Two recent thinkers who have come closest to an investigation of rhythm itself are Jeremy Begbie and Catherine Pickstock. Begbie analyzes various dimensions of music, including rhythm, in order to draw out theological insights concerning the nature of reality (Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)). Nevertheless, his primary concern is not with the significance of rhythm for Christian doctrine as a general feature of the human encounter with the world, but with the contribution of music to theology more specifically. As such, his work does not involve an analysis of the nature and function of rhythm as part of reality more generally. Catherine Pickstock argues that the liturgical form is the appropriate form of thought and metaphysics (Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995)). She therefore points specifically to dimensions and features of rhythm that are part of the human experience of liturgy as having metaphysical and philosophical significance. In her concern for grounding attempts to make sense of reality in the movements of human experience and performance, Pickstock’s project is like my own. Nevertheless, like Begbie, her concern is ultimately with one particular rhythm, in this case that of church liturgy, and more specifically of The Roman Rite. My interest is in the theological significance of rhythm as such, of rhythm as a part of human experience.

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

and described differ based on a variety of metaphysical commitments with varying theological consequences. If theologians are to continue reaching for the idea of rhythm, then we ought to have a clear idea of the philosophical and theological implications of approaching rhythm in various ways. This book brings those implications out into the open and starts to re-think the big questions of Christian theology such as “what is the nature of the God–creature relationship?” from the perspective of rhythm. The goal is to make rhythm a fruitful category through which theology may make sense of reality, much in the way that categories like space, time, and language already function. As with any ghost, however, it will not work for us to attempt to pin rhythm down and observe it from a distance. Ghosts are best understood by understanding our own relationship to them, the ways in which they interact with us. Such interactions include both the phenomenological, the texture of our experience with rhythm in everyday life, as well as the history of human attempts to understand and study rhythm. While it may be haunting the tradition, there does nevertheless exist an ongoing conversation about the nature of rhythm, of which this theological text is a part. In order to begin engaging rhythm theologically, therefore, we must first understand the history of intellectual engagements with rhythm.

PASCAL MICHON AND THE HISTORY OF A HAUNTING The history of the study of rhythm is itself rhythmic; it has ebbed and flowed in a wave-like pattern. According to Pascal Michon, a contemporary scholar of philosophy and social theory and historian of rhythm, the reason for this wave-like pattern is that whenever Western society has understood itself to be undergoing significant change, the category of rhythm has become important. In contrast, attempts to maintain or aspire to social stability have little need to explicitly discuss the category. The story that Michon tells begins with a flurry of competing definitions of rhythm that emerges between the pre-Socratics, Plato, and Aristotle, cresting with Augustine. The conversation then largely goes silent until the eighteenth century. An interest in rhythm slowly begins to re-emerge leading into the nineteenth century, reaching its zenith at the beginning of the twentieth century when a diversity of disciplines begin investigating the phenomenon. This lasts until the end of the 1930s when interest again drops off. Then, around the 1970s and 80s, rhythm again becomes an object of study, this time for critical theory, but it is only in the twenty-first century, according to Michon, that this wave of investigation has gained coherence and momentum.

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Introduction

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Michon, therefore, identifies three primary waves, the first coinciding with the shifts that took place in culture as a result of Hellenization and the increase in written communication, the second coinciding with the momentous social and cultural effects of the industrial revolution, and the third with our own situation of increasing globalization. He suggests that we currently find ourselves at something like the crest of a wave with Michon himself riding the momentum of earlier philosophers and linguists such as Émile Benveniste and Henri Meschonnic, offering the most exhaustive study of the concept of rhythm in Western thought thus far. Whether or not one accepts Michon’s explanation for why these waves occur, he has nevertheless thoroughly investigated the literature on rhythm and work on the topic does fall into the historical clusters that he identifies. These waves are not, moreover, independent of one another. On Michon’s telling, the first, Greek-to-Christian wave was a philosophical debate about definitions and this debate sets the terms for all subsequent treatments of the category. It is primarily a debate between pre-Socratics, such as Heraclitus, and the Platonists.⁵ Michon takes his cue here from Émile Benveniste, who argued in 1966 that the Greek word rhuthmos did not originally indicate a regular beat or ebb and flow of waves, a form of regularity imposed on disorder. Even though this is the way we typically think of rhythm, it was not the original definition but a later, Platonic invention. Instead, the concept of rhythm was derived by the pre-Socratics from rhusmos, which was first used to denote a change in alphabetical characters.⁶ Rhusmos, therefore, suggests the shape of something that is fluid or in motion, and rhythm likewise “designates the form in the instant that it is assumed by what is moving, mobile and fluid, the form of that which does not have organic consistency . . . it is the form as improvised, momentary, changeable.”⁷ The Platonic meaning of rhythm, the traditional one with which we are familiar, emerges only in the mid fourth century BCE. According to the Platonic definition, rhythm is not an improvised, changing shape but an ordered sequence of movements subject to numbering. In other words, Plato introduced concepts like meter, number, and periodicity into the idea of rhythm for the first time.⁸ According to Michon, this became the dominant approach to ⁵ Aristotle’s treatment of the category is also significant but it is not taken up into the historical conversation as clearly. See Pascal Michon, “5. Aristotelian Rhythm in Rome (1st century BC–1st century AD),” Rhuthmos, 10 September 2016. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php? article1962 (accessed September 18, 2017). ⁶ Émile Benveniste, Problèmes De Linguistique Générale, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 332. ⁷ Benveniste, Problèmes De Linguistique Générale, 333. As well as with Henri Meschonnic who similarly argues for a rhythm beyond metrics and regularity, and indeed that the definition of rhythm itself is always in flux. Henri Meschonnic, Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1982). ⁸ Pascal Michon, Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation: Sur les forms anciennes et nouvelles des processus d’individuation (Paris: Rhuthmos, 2016), 453. “But when you have learned what

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

rhythm through neo-Platonism and into early Christian definitions, evident particularly in the work of Augustine, until the Romantic rediscovery of the pre-Socratics in the nineteenth century. Indeed, after Augustine, rhythm dropped out of concern almost entirely until the eighteenth century in part because the category was subsumed under other concepts like number and proportion and those categories became dominant, rather than rhythm itself.⁹ Michon reads the second wave of interest in rhythm as a development of these two Greek approaches in response to the social changes that led up to, were manifest in, and resulted from the Industrial Revolution. These include developments in the fields of both science and poetry. Generally speaking, the sciences advanced the Platonic definition of rhythm while poetics re-discovered the preSocratic definition. From 1760, rhythm became a helpful concept in the life sciences as a way to hold together the ideas of change and identity in the natural world. Serializing methods were particularly helpful to the life sciences because they allowed for standardized scientific description. Numeric measurement presupposes and reveals the Platonic understanding of rhythm. Michon suggests that this approach, in turn, quickly became part of society more broadly through the spread of mechanization.¹⁰ One particularly visible manifestation of this turn to rhythm in the life sciences is the proliferation of graphing machines in the mid-nineteenth century, detailed by the ethnographer Haun Saussy who says that “Graphic methods were the Big Data of their time.”¹¹ These machines subjected rhythms to a kind of writing, a visual code according to which the temporal relations between events could be precisely measured. The general category of machine for visually representing rhythms is known as a kymograph (wave writer), the first of which was Carl Ludwig’s 1846 kymograph, which measured variations in blood pressure. Different versions of the kymograph were quickly invented to measure a large range of bodily phenomena including speech inflections (Scott’s phonautograph, 1857), muscle twitches (Helmholz’ 1850

sounds are high and what low, and the number and nature of the intervals and their limits or proportions, and the systems compounded them, which our fathers discovered, and have handed them down to us who are their descendants under the name of harmonies; and the corresponding effects in the movements of the body, which they say are measured by numbers and must be called rhythms and measures; . . . when you have thus grasped the facts, you have become a musician” (Plato, Philebus, 17c–e, transl. Benjamin Jowett and Harold N. Fowler); “we said also that none of the other creatures attains a sense of order, bodily and vocal, and that this is possessed by man alone; and that the order of motion is called ‘rhythm’ . . . ” (Laws, 664a–665a, trans. R.G. Bury). ⁹ Pascal Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 6,” Rhuthmos, 1 September 2016, http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1983 (accessed June 28, 2017). ¹⁰ Michon, “Birth of a Rhythmological Conflict (1800–1830),” Rhuthmos, 1 June 2016, http:// rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1767 (accessed June 28, 2017). ¹¹ Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and its Technologies (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 93.

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Introduction

7

myograph), and pulse (Marey’s 1854 sphygmograph), as well as other phenomena like seismic waves. Saussy summarizes the machines as follows: The inscribing machines of the physiology lab transmit to paper a geometrical correlate of movements, or most often, of rhythms, repeated patterns of events that always return to their starting point and begin again: a cycle of four hooves touching the ground, a beating of wings, opening and closing of the mouth, diastole and systole. Each cycle or instance of the rhythm has its shape that can be compared with others; higher-order alternations and rhythms may appear. The graphic method enables us to see both the fine detail and the larger pattern.¹²

These devices work by spatializing time, by mapping out events that take place in time onto two-dimensional space so that the relationship between those events can be precisely measured. In describing the phonautograph, the kymograph for writing vocal sound, Saussay says it is essentially “a translation of sound into a visual analogue, reducing the three-dimensional orientation space of listening to the single dimension of graphic time.”¹³ It makes sense, given this methodology, that rhythm would be understood as something measurable and standardized. Particular instances of natural and physiological rhythms—speech, pulse, breath—are literally and precisely transcribed, represented, and therefore become subject to measurement and even prediction. Thus, the adoption of rhythm by the life sciences and the requirements of its methodologies led to its privileging of a sort of rhythm that is standardized and measurable; this is the sort of rhythm to which instruments like the kymograph are attuned.¹⁴ According to Michon, the nineteenth-century counter-weight to these scientific developments in the study of rhythm was the attempt, primarily on the part of poets, to conceptualize rhythm other than according to measurable number. This led to the revival of a more pre-Socratic approach to rhythm, even if it was not always recognized as such at the time. To ¹² Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm, 109. ¹³ Ibid., 91. ¹⁴ Such scientific research culminated in theories about biorhythms and circadian rhythms. In contrast to the reputable science of circadian rhythms, which also emerged during the long nineteenth century, biorhythm is now considered a pseudo-science. It was first propagated by Wilhelm Fliess, friend of Sigmund Freud, who, with the help of complex mathematical equations, argued that all of life—human, plant, and animal alike—is based on periodic cycles. In the case of humans, this is a cycle of 28 days for women and 23 for men. These cycles determine childhood development, sickness, death, and creativity, such that these events, contrary to their seemingly unregulated nature, can be predicted if one understands the cycles (Wilhelm Fliess, Der Ablauf des Lebens: Grundlegung zur exacten Biologie (Leipzig: F. Deuticke, 1906), 2–12). Fliess’s project is interesting because it represents an attempt to use the category of rhythm to make the vagaries of life predictable, to demonstrate mathematical order in the universe. Augustine uses rhythm to the same end in De Musica but the difference is that the mathematics of Fliess’s project is based on the empirical measurement of life processes rather than poetry and metaphysics. It represents an increasingly mechanized approach, shorn of all poetics. As such, while Augustine was likewise interested in rhythm as a principle of order, there is no evidence that he conflated such order with the possibility of human prediction.

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appearances, some poets, Baudelaire in particular, rejected the category of rhythm altogether. However, Michon argues that Baudelaire did not, in fact, reject rhythm as such but only the old metric rhythm based on symmetry, periodicity, number, and codified repetition. For Baudelaire, “Modern poetry is about taking advantage of the general [modern] de-rhythmization of life to create through language new rhythms or new forms of life . . . ”¹⁵ He, therefore, sought new modes of organizing poetic speech based on accent grouping and sound echoes, flowing forms, in other words. Arguably, this is a definition for what we now think of as free verse. Mallarme, in contrast, gives rhythm explicit theoretical primacy as the essential feature of language, evidenced by a letter written in 1886 that states “Poetry is the expression, through human language reduced to its essential rhythm, of the mysterious meaning of the aspects of existence: it thus bestows authenticity on our sojourn and constitutes the only spiritual task.”¹⁶ He likewise uses the term to describe human subjectivity: “Every soul is a braid of rhythms.”¹⁷ Thus, while Mallarme here takes the opposite tack to Baudelaire, elevating rhythm rather than rejecting it, the point that Michon seeks to make is that both poets nevertheless identify poetic speech with flowing form, which is the pre-Socratic definition of rhythm.¹⁸ Mallarme’s idea of the soul as a braid of rhythms suggests that the self is not for him a unified repetition, but plural, and thus requires a multifaceted, non-linear kind of rhythm, the same form that Baudelaire identifies, that of free verse: “A fortunate discovery, which has seemed more or less to bring previous efforts to a close: the vers libre, the free line of poetry—a modulation (as I often say) which is entirely individual because every soul is a braid of rhythms.”¹⁹ Michon’s prognosis is “Therefore, we certainly must recuperate both physical and poetic models of rhythm, which have been repressed for centuries by

¹⁵ Michon, Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 298. English reference: Michon, “New Artistic Rhythm Practices and Conceptions (1857–1897)—part 1,” Rhuthmos, 1 June 2016. http:// rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1770 (accessed June 28, 2017). ¹⁶ “La Poésie est l’expression, par le langage humain ramené à son rythme essential, du sens mystérieux des aspects de l’existence: elle doue ainsi d’authenticité notre séjour et constitute la seule tâche spirituelle.” Stephane Mallarmé, Lettre à Léo d’Orfer, 27 juin 1884 in Correspondance complete: Lettres sur la poésie (Gallimard, 1995), 572. Translation by Michon, “New Artistic Rhythm Practices and Conceptions (1857–1897)—part 1.” http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?art icle1770 (accessed June 28, 2017). ¹⁷ Stéphen Mallarmé, “Music and Letters” in ed. Mary Ann Caws, Mallarmé in Prose (New York: New Directions, 2001), 33. ¹⁸ Michon, writing on Mallarme and Baudelaire, says: “The same aim actually governs these apparently quite divergent attitudes: how to get rid of the traditional artistic constraints and rules? How to get rid of metric? Even when rhythm is decried or depreciated, artists are developing practices that make it actually close to rhuthmos.” Michon, “New Artistic Rhythm Practices and Conceptions (1857–1897),” Rhuthmos, 1 June 2016, http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php? article1770 (accessed June 29, 2017). ¹⁹ Mallarmé, “Music and Letters,” 33.

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an all-pervasive idealistic paradigm, but we should not disregard the very deep gaps between rhythm theories based on theory of language and poetics, on the one hand, and those based on mathematics, physics and living sciences, on the other.”²⁰ And thus, according to Michon, the nineteenth century bequeaths to us the opposition between traditional and free verse, repetition and improvisation, machine and liberty, science and poetry, with which we are all-too-familiar today.²¹ Nevertheless, this well-worn opposition may be a less accurate picture than we are inclined to think. Even in the nineteenth century, the apparent division between periodic and improvisational approaches to rhythm is in fact based on their collusion. Perhaps the most arresting illustration of this is that, according to Saussy, it was the graphing machine that settled the dispute, in the affirmative, over whether free verse was rhythmic at all. It was the phonautograph that showed free verse “had a repeatable, welldefined shape in time, recognized in practice even by readers who denied its existence.”²² The periodic, Platonic rhythms of free verse may have been undetectable by the human ear, they may have instead appeared as improvised shape, but this did not mean that they were absent altogether or that free verse had succeeded in rejecting such periodicity. It is perhaps not a coincidence that free verse emerged once the possibility of verifying its identity as verse was made possible by technological advances. This is merely one example of a far more general phenomenon. Free verse emerged not only in the context of the kymograph but also in the more general context of the machinic rhythms of the Industrial Revolution. While natural rhythms were obscured, urban society constructed new alternations, indeed alternations that were much more rapid and pulled even more strongly towards homogenization.²³ A poet like Baudelaire, in writing free verse, simultaneously represents the new society in which he lived, no longer dominated by natural alternations, while also seeking to counteract the mechanization of that society. Michon says that “The jolts and clashes of his poetic discourse simultaneously bear witness to the large socio-anthropological changes of his age and deploy a real ‘art of politics’ . . . ,”²⁴ an alternative to the rhythms of the press, of the urban, and of rampant commercialization.²⁵ At the same moment that the rhythms of nature were loosened, new machinic rhythms took their place and we see the drama between these two movements of the Industrial Revolution—freedom and standardization—play out in the interface between the scientific and the poetic. Even if nineteenth-century ²⁰ Michon, “Elements Rhythmology vol. 1—Conclusion,” Rhuthmos, 1 September 2016. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1987 (accessed June 29, 2017). ²¹ See, for example, Amittai Aviram, “The Meaning of Rhythm,” in Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch, eds. Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History, (New York: Continuum, 2002). ²² Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm, 112. ²³ Michon, Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 276. ²⁴ Ibid., 282. ²⁵ Ibid., 298.

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

scientific and poetic rhythms manifest to us as opposites, they are interdependent in that manifestation as opposites. The conversation regarding the nature of rhythm that was cresting towards the end of the nineteenth century continued for thirty or so more years into the twentieth century as society itself continued to undergo social and technological change. Besides the continued interest in rhythm in the life sciences, the category was also adopted by an increasingly wide variety of disciplines. Michon explains: rhythm had been very important in sociology, anthropology, history, as well as in psychoanalysis, critical theory and philology, at least until WW2. Something happened during those decades that triggered a new kind of interest for rhythm, something that was very close to our contemporary experience: urbanization, rapid social change, fluidity of communication, globalization, development of financial system, imperialism. Among the main authors of this era, many could be reread from a rhythmic viewpoint: Durkheim, Simmel, Tarde, Mauss, Granet, Evans-Pritchard or Tchakhotine, who explicitly considered rhythm as an important issue, but also thinkers that used rhythm in a more implicit way like Freud, Kracauer, Benjamin or Klemperer.²⁶

Michon discusses many of these thinkers in his book, Rythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, and there is no reason for me to recount them exhaustively here. Two developments are, however, of note. A second philosophical opposition, in addition to that between the pre-Socratic and the Platonic, developed at the beginning of the twentieth century. Prime representatives of this conversation were Edmund Husserl, William James, and Henri Bergson on the one hand and Gaston Bachelard and Marcel Mauss on the other. The Husserl–James–Bergson position is that consciousness, and even time and reality as such, have the form of a constant flow. Rhythm refers to variation of and in this continuous flow.²⁷ Gaston Bachelard, on the other hand, responds ²⁶ Pascal Michon, “A Short History of Rhythm Theory Since the 1970s,” Rhuthmos, 6 December, 2011. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article462 (accessed June 29, 2017). Michon discusses many of these thinkers in Rythme, pouvoir, mondialisation. Even more are listed in Marc Shell, Talking the Walk and Walking the Talk (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 7. ²⁷ Bergson thought about reality in terms of duration, as constant motion and flux, such that what we perceive as stable identities are in fact illusions. Duration is a current that flows continuously and animates objects during the interval of their existence, not as something that provides continuity, but is the impetus of absolute change (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 1–2). Nevertheless, we do not perceive reality this way because action in the world requires fixedness, such that thought must adopt the rhythm of action (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 324). The differing manifestations of life are characterized by different rhythms, which emerge through the restraining effect of matter on life. Matter splits life into various rhythms, which we perceive as individuals (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 265; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 207). Reality is given to us through the opposition of matter and duration. Pure matter is described as pure repetition or rapid pulsation (Henri Bergson, The

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that time, reality, and consciousness are not continuous but discontinuous. Reality is an interplay of opposing rhythms and these disparate rhythms come into conflict with one another. Apparent stability is, in fact, the stability of a rhythmic discord at a stalemate.²⁸ This philosophical conversation is significant because it points to the beginnings of a greater diversity of questions surrounding rhythm for which the pre-Socratic/Platonic schema does not account. Both Bergson and Bachelard can be thought of as espousing something like the pre-Socratic understanding of rhythm. The question becomes for them, “even if we think of rhythm in terms of a changeable, improvised shape, should we think of such change in terms of fluidity or fits-and-starts?” The conversation is likewise developed by Marcel Mauss, a significant source for Michon’s own thought, but this time in the direction of anthropology and sociology. Mauss creates a new methodological approach to rhythm that is likewise different from the Husserl–James–Bergson perspective. According to Michon, Mauss came to the concept of rhythm through his study of archaic societies in which he observed both a kind of temporal contraction and relaxation of social life correlated with the seasons, on the one hand,²⁹ and the importance of rhythm in ritual and social events across speech (chanting, prayer, incantation) and gesture (dance), on the other. Society produces group cohesion through these rhythms of language and body, which in turn form the individual as well.³⁰ Michon, therefore, describes Mauss’ rhythm as an intersection between the vertical axis of the social body and the horizontal axis of organized time.³¹ We see in Mauss’s work a change in the way that rhythm is approached and where it is located. Mauss approaches rhythm neither through poetic composition nor, indeed, as a phenomenon that can be abstracted from its

Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992), 109). Eternity, in contrast, is described as the “concentration of all duration,” which suggests both difference as well as an association with the whole of the system (Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 37). The whole of reality for Bergson is a series of interpenetrating rhythms, represented as a whole in eternity as the concentration of duration. ²⁸ Gaston Bachelard, Dialectic of Duration, Mary McAllester Jones, trans. (Lanham, ML: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 137–8. ²⁹ Pascal Michon, Marcel Mauss retrouvé: Origines de l’anthropologie du rhythme (Paris: Rhuthmos, 2015), 85. ³⁰ Michon, Marcel Mauss retrouvé, 97. Haun Saussy confirms this assessment by pointing to Mauss’s 1934 article “Les technique du corps” in which Mauss opens with a series of anecdotes surrounding how the body is trained in various rhythmic activities (swimming, walking) and how these change over the course of the development of a society, and how they differ between societies (France versus America). Bodily rhythms may therefore change due to changes in teaching technique or less conscious influences such as interference of the American film industry in French culture (The Ethnography of Rhythm, 163). ³¹ Michon, Marcel Mauss retrouvé, 124–5.

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

surroundings and measured scientifically, nor as a Bergsonian metaphysical category. Instead, Mauss approaches rhythm in terms of an intersection of a variety of phenomena: the linguistic, the physiological, and the social.³² Mauss’s approach is both broader and more specific than other approaches. On the one hand, it is a much broader vision than that which analyzes a single poetic or physiological rhythm shorn of context. Mauss makes clear for the first time how rhythm is a pervasive dimension of reality and a significant contributor to individual and social identity. On the other hand, however, Mauss is interested in the intersection of particular rhythms in specific rituals that make up certain societies and individuals. So, his understanding of rhythm is also more specific than that of a grand metaphysical category like Bergson’s flow.³³ The becoming of individuals and societies is not dissolved in a general, erratic flux but realized in relatively constant, identifiable, or describable ways in particular times and places.³⁴ Mauss’s work is arguably the first example of what one might call a phenomenological approach to rhythm, albeit a socially and politically inflected phenomenology. It is an approach that has been taken up again by the current wave of study, including by Michon and by another thinker, Henri Lefebvre, on whom I draw in this book. This difference between those who approach rhythm as an abstracted universal and those who study it as bound up with human existence in the world arguably forms the most significant fault line in this book between those who are faithful to the significance of rhythm and those who betray its nature in the process of articulation, with philosophical and theological consequences. To my mind, this distinction is even more important than that between the Platonic and the pre-Socratic. These conversations powered down from the Second World War only to start up again with Benveniste’s identification of the pre-Socratic definition in 1966. Nietzsche had identified a proto-version of the distinction at the end of the nineteenth century, but no one carried it forward and linguistically codified it until Benveniste. In Michon’s telling, the concept regained significance in the 1970s with the reaction to structuralism. Attempts like those of Foucault, Barthes, Meschonnic, Deleuze, and others to re-introduce concepts of flow, time, and creativity into the all-too static idea of “structure” invited the category to again come to prominence.³⁵ Meschonnic and Benveniste represent the first identification and codification of the here-summarized history ³² Ibid., 101–2. ³³ Ibid., 118. ³⁴ Ibid., 124. ³⁵ Michon, Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 444. Michon divides these theories of rhythm into two camps, that of theory including Foucault, Barthes, Serres, Morin, Deleuze-Guattari, and Meschonnic, on the one hand, and that of phenomenology, which includes less well-known French thinkers de Maldiney, Garelli, as well as Henri Lefebvre, on the other. Elsewhere, however, (Michon, “A Short History of Rhythm Theory Since the 1970s”) Michon differentiates between those who take a more linguistic or sociological approach—Foucault, Barthes,

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of rhythm. Moreover, Henri Meschonnic’s 1982 book Critique du rythme: Anthropologie historique du langage illuminates what is new in this final wave of the study of rhythm, namely the explicit call to abandon the Platonic understanding of rhythm as a series of strong and weak beats and to return to the pre-Socratic definition of rhythm as dynamic form.³⁶ The reasons for this explicit rejection, and for the current anti-Platonic consensus concerning rhythm, are three-fold. First, the Platonic idea of rhythm as metric does not sufficiently account for the nature of rhythm. It seeks to impose a regular structure on a phenomenon that is in fact often irregular, thereby either excluding large swaths of rhythms from consideration or misrepresenting their nature. Second, if we apply Plato’s idea of rhythm to reality as a whole, we end up with a reality in which many different dimensions are simply superimposed on one another as comparable without an awareness of the differences between them. The assumption becomes that all of reality can be neatly synched up with itself. Again, this is not always true to the nature of reality. We experience reality as including jolts, interruptions, and clashes between rhythms but a Platonic vision must either label these as evil or ignore them altogether. Finally, there is a political and ethical injunction buried within this approach to rhythm and exemplified, Michon thinks, by Plato’s own anti-democratic sentiments. A uniformly metric rhythm that can be scientifically predicted lends itself too easily to attempts to control others.³⁷ Any work on rhythm, including the present text, must take up these concerns; all of them are in fact addressed in various ways throughout the book, most notably in chapter four when I consider Augustinian manifestations of such Platonic rhythm and their theological consequences. According to Michon, most of this late twentieth-century work on rhythm, particularly that of Meschonnic, was not taken up as significant until only very recently. These post-structuralist forays into rhythm were originally dispersed, isolated from one another, and were not part of a general, organizing theory.³⁸

Meschonnic—and those, most notably Deleuze, who adopt a more metaphysical perspective. This latter categorization is closer to the categorizations with which I end up. ³⁶ “I define rhythm in language as the organization of the marks through which the signifiers, whether they are linguistic or extra-linguistic (in the case of oral communication), produce a specific semantics, distinct from the lexical meaning, and that I call the significance: i.e. the values that belong to one discourse and to only one. These marks can be located on any level of language: accentuation, prosody, lexicon, syntax.” (Meschonnic, Critique du rythme. Anthropologie du langage, 216–17). ³⁷ All three reasons are given in Michon, Rythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 452. One example of this is Matila C. Ghyka, Essai sur le rythme (Paris: Libraire Gallimard, 1938). The text unpacks the way in which Pythagorean geometry manifests the Platonic understanding of rhythm in both the spatial and temporal arts. But in so doing, Ghyka also declares that “it is the Greek geometry and the geometric sense that Plato’s Republic defines which (as predicted by Plato) gives the white race supremacy in technique and politics” (13, own translation). ³⁸ Michon, Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 443.

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

This is the task that Michon appears to take on himself.³⁹ He does not, however, consider himself alone in this, but sees the category gaining momentum, much as it did at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁴⁰ His explanation for this is that In the last quarter of the [twentieth] century, due to a new push towards globalization, we are in effect exiting the world of regular rhythms in which we had lived since the establishment of large international, national, sub-national, and individual systems of power since the end of the 1940s, and are entering a more fluid world, open and unstable, the nature and function of which we understand very poorly. The radical change has rendered most of our habits of thought, conceptual tools, and theories obsolete and we need to invent others. It is for coping with this new situation that we are today, necessarily, rethinking the notion of rhythm.⁴¹

An increasing number of disciplines are taking up rhythm as a significant category, although much of this work is taking place on the fringes.⁴² The haunting continues but appears to be increasing in its intensity due, according to Michon at least, to the period of social change in which we find ourselves.

THIS TEXT AMID THE WAVE If Michon is right, then the present book is part of a swell in the study of rhythm. It is a representation of theology’s recognition that our talk about God is now occurring in contexts that rhythm might help illuminate. If it is true that rhythm is becoming increasingly a part of the theoretical vocabulary that seeks to make sense of a changing world, then theology must at least consider rhythm. Theology attempts to make sense of the same world as other disciplines and if others have found new categories that help us make better sense of the world, then theologians ought to take notice. As Michon points out, ³⁹ Michon’s primary concern, besides outlining the history of the theory of rhythm, is to bring the category to bear on social science. Besides Meschonnic, he therefore seems to most closely identify with Mauss, Foucault, and Lefebvre (although he in fact talks about Lefebvre much less than I would have expected given their similarities). These associations are particularly evident in Pascal Michon, Les rhythmes du politique: Démocratie et capitalism mondialisé (Paris: Rhuthmos, 2015). ⁴⁰ Michon, “A Short History of Rhythm Theory Since the 1970s,” (accessed June 29, 2017). ⁴¹ Michon, Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 446. Own translation. ⁴² For example, Michon points out that in his own discipline, the social sciences, rhythm is not part of the professional manuals and dictionaries. Examples he gives include R. Boudon and F. Bourricaud, Dictionnaire critique de la sociologie (Paris: PUF, 1982, 2004); P. Bonte and M. Izard, Dictionnaire de l’ethnologie et de l’anthropologie (Paris, PUF, 1991); A. Akoun and P. Ansard, Dictionnaire de sociologie (Paris: Le Robert/Seuil, 1999) (Rhythme, pouvoir, mondialisation, 441).

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theorists in several different fields have made significant changes to the traditional way that we tend to think about rhythm. To simply ignore the conversation would be foolish. Nevertheless, theology has a different set of concerns than other theorists so it also cannot simply accept their definitions. To assume, without investigation, that new definitions can sufficiently serve theological concerns is likewise foolish. I mentioned that rhythm has not been an object of direct, theological analysis. However, the above-narrated history of rhythm likewise barely mentions theology. While Michon does an excellent job of incorporating theological voices like Augustine and Gerard Manley Hopkins⁴³ into his history, his concerns do not directly involve the theological significance of these discussions and I likewise do not know of any other philosophers, linguists, or sociologists who take up rhythm as a specifically theological concern. Nor should they, since they are not theologians. Nevertheless, the situation is such that on the one hand we have theorists of rhythm, exemplified by Michon, whose concerns are not theological, and, on the other hand, theologians who are using rhythm without much idea of the theory behind the phenomenon. My task is to stand in that gap. This book is an investigation of this concept of rhythm explicitly for theologians. It will be in conversation with other disciplines and the progress they have made in analyzing the category, but its concerns remain explicitly theological. The result is that my concerns depart somewhat from the direction of the current swell in the study of rhythm that Michon has identified. One such deviation is that this text does not share the push towards the preSocratic definition of rhythm over-against the Platonic definition. This is not to say that I attempt to do the opposite, to recommend the Platonic definition. Nor do I necessarily reject the pre-Socratic definition. My lack of concern for the Platonic/pre-Socratic distinction is, rather, due to a difference in methodology. Michon identifies three nesting oppositions associated with rhythm: “Platonic vs non-Platonic paradigms; among the non-Platonic paradigms, physical vs language-based paradigms; among the language-based paradigms, rhetoric vs poetics paradigms. . . . rhythmology should rest on the right part of each one of these alternatives.”⁴⁴ My understanding of rhythm likewise tends to fall on the side of the non-Platonic (though not necessarily the Heraclitean or pre-Socratic), the language-based, and the poetic. However, I begin with the poetic, rather than ending with it as Michon does and, in beginning with poetic theory, I find that there is yet another nested “opposition” within the poetic paradigm. I have designated this a relation between the synchronic and ⁴³ Pascal Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 4,” Rhuthmos, 1 September 2016. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1980 (accessed June 28, 2017); Michon, “New Artistic Rhythm Practices and Conceptions (1857–1897)—part 1.” ⁴⁴ Michon, “A Short History of Rhythm Theory Since the 1970s,” (accessed June 29, 2017).

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

the diachronic. As with the Platonic definition, the synchronic approach is a common methodological approach to rhythm in Western culture, the centrality of which I seek to displace for phenomenological and theological reasons. This distinction is closest to the difference between Bergson and Mauss, which I referenced in the previous section. My hope is that in my analysis of a diversity of philosophers and theologians, it will become clear that the synchronic paradigm accounts for some of the reasons that thinkers who espouse a non-Platonic paradigm may nevertheless end up with a less than satisfactory understanding of rhythm. I, therefore, find the difference between synchronic and diachronic approaches a more fruitful paradigm than the difference between Platonic and Pre-Socratic definitions. The thinker on whom I significantly rely is one whose use of rhythm has, to my knowledge, not been recognized by Michon or any other theorist of rhythm, namely the Jesuit theologian, Erich Przywara, whose most notable work is the Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm. He is, unfortunately, best known as Karl Barth’s primary Catholic interlocutor, whom Barth very probably had in mind when declaring “The analogia entis is the invention of the anti-Christ!”⁴⁵ Perhaps due to Barth’s towering reputation throughout the twentieth century, Przywara was fairly unrecognized outside Jesuit circles until recently.⁴⁶ Nevertheless, he has had a significant influence on several of the more well-known Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, including Hans Urs von Balthasar and Karl Rahner.⁴⁷ While the purpose of his text, Analogia Entis, is to describe and defend a Catholic metaphysical vision of reality using the doctrine of the analogy of being, I am interested, more specifically, in how Przywara uses rhythm in describing such a reality. Like other theologians who use rhythm, Przywara does not directly analyze or define the category, but he gives more than most. This is in part because he offers a theological critique of several other metaphysical visions and the understandings of rhythm on which they rely. Przywara explicitly rejects both the Platonic and the pre-Socratic approaches to rhythm for theological reasons. He instead implies in his vision of analogy a rhythm that involves the intersection of horizontal and vertical dimensions, perhaps, surprisingly, closest to the conception of Marcel Mauss, at least as ⁴⁵ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, trans. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (London: T. & T. Clark; New York: Continuum, 2004), I/1, xiii. ⁴⁶ His reputation in the English-speaking world has been significantly expanded thanks to the English publication of Analogia Entis by John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John R. Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015)). All English references in this book refer to this text. All German citations are from Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysik in Schriften vol 3 (Einsiedeln: Johannes-Verlag, 1962). ⁴⁷ John R. Betz, “After Barth: A New Introduction to Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis,” in The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God?, ed. Thomas Joseph White (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 40.

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Michon describes it. Przywara’s work on analogy, therefore, provides a platform for a theological analysis of rhythm and a constructive approach to the category for theology. While I use Przywara’s work, this is nevertheless not a book about Przywara himself; it remains a book about rhythm. My objectives are (a) to identify an approach (though not necessarily a definition) to rhythm that will serve the concerns of theological conversation and (b) to demonstrate the difference that including rhythm in such theological conversation makes to how we think about the enterprise of theology and to the articulation of doctrine. More than simply an attempt to understand the nature of rhythm from the perspective of Christian theology, this project is an argument for including rhythm in the articulation of Christian theology based on the fact that as creatures who are always already embedded in rhythm, our God-talk is always already rhythmic as well. Therefore, while the timing of this investigation may be due to social changes that have made the ghost visible, my claim for the significance of rhythm is not based in social context but in an enduring creaturely context.

Outline of the Book This book can be thought of in two parts, each correlated with one of the two objectives given in the previous paragraph. The first three sections, chapters one through five, constitute an attempt to identify an approach to rhythm that will serve the concerns of theology. Rather than beginning with the definitions given by ancient or modern philosophers, I begin with a phenomenology of rhythm, which I lay out in the first chapter. By this I mean that I first show how we experience rhythm as a part of everyday life by pointing to specific rhythmic events and features of reality—poetry, music, conversation, group identity—and unearthing the nature of the connections between mind and world, self and other, group and individual, that occur in those rhythms. I begin with two different possible approaches to rhythm in poetry, the synchronic and the diachronic. The synchronic approach analyzes the rhythm of the poem much like a kymograph, namely, in terms of the relationship between textual events laid out all at once and abstracted from the temporal experience of reader or hearer. The diachronic approach includes the temporal experience and performance of the reader or hearer. While the synchronic approach is helpful, it ultimately misses many of the dimensions of rhythm that the diachronic approach reveals, and many of these are aspects of rhythm that make it meaningful in everyday life. In chapters two through four, I use this synchronic–diachronic distinction to analyze how various philosophers and theologians approach rhythm as a feature of reality. If the diachronic perspective is indispensable for sufficiently understanding the nature of rhythm, then it ought to be included in any

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

attempt to use the category in a description of reality. However, most philosophical and theological uses of rhythm assume a primarily synchronic perspective. This is not only problematic for sufficiently understanding rhythm as a feature of reality, but I also show, with the help of Przywara, that it has problematic theological consequences. While a too-heavy adoption of either the synchronic or the diachronic leads to theological problems, I am more concerned here with an over-reliance on the synchronic, since it tends to be the default theological position yet its faithfulness to the nature of rhythm as encountered by human creatures is anemic. As such, I take a diachronically-inflected approach to avoiding these theological dangers that beset the category of rhythm. I argue that the theological response should not be to carve out a middle way between these approaches that could operate as a single, Archimedean point from which to grasp reality but to develop a pattern for moving between synchronic and diachronic perspectives. In focusing on the nature of the movement between perspectives, this approach is fundamentally diachronic. Since my theological evaluation of thinkers is in part based on Erich Przywara’s theological evaluations of various approaches to rhythm, I finally turn to his oscillating, intersectional approach in the fifth chapter. I argue that Przywara’s account of rhythm can be read as including both synchronic and diachronic perspectives with an emphasis on the diachronic. Przywara recognizes his own human perspective as an oscillating one that must move with rhythm rather than as one that stands outside rhythm, taking it in all at once. This, therefore, concludes my attempt to identify an approach (though not necessarily a definition) to rhythm that will serve the concerns of theological conversation. I base such an approach on both a faithfulness to the nature of rhythm as an irreducible phenomenological category and to certain theological commitments, such as maintaining the integrity of the creature and the creature’s otherness from yet intimacy with the divine. However, I do not set out to simply develop a definition of rhythm based on Christian theology, but to establish the importance of rhythm for thinking about doctrine itself. Chapters six and seven—the fourth section of the book— therefore, address my second objective: to demonstrate the difference that including rhythm makes to the theological conversation. My contribution to including rhythm in Christian theology takes the form of an articulation of two doctrines—creation and salvation—from the perspective of rhythm as set up in the previous chapters. Both of these chapters deal with rhythm in terms of an interface between harmony and interruption, the form of which changes over time, and which manifests in particular ways in the relationship between nature and culture, church and world, and the encounter of these intracreaturely relationships with the divine. The insight resulting from rhythm to which I seek to draw attention is that the interruptions, tensions, and changes that we experience as part of these intersections do not represent

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Introduction

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failures, but point to the rhythmic form of reality, which is the form through which God is encountered. In fact, I argue that the variability in approaches to and definitions of rhythm, which I spend the first five chapters of the book considering, are part of what gives the category its nature and significance. The diversity of rhythms appealed to manifests the diversity of the cultural rhythms out of which those accounts of reality are articulated. Doctrines of creation, and metaphysical visions more generally, are, in part, descriptions of the cultural rhythms in which a vision is formed. Doctrines of salvation can likewise be thought of as attempts to prescribe how the rhythms of the world ought to be formed, and are, therefore, manifestations of an ongoing engagement and negotiation with the rhythms of culture. Altogether, this book makes an argument for rhythm as a significant theological category, not merely an embellishment, but a concept that makes a difference, on the basis of three claims: (a) that rhythm is a pervasive dimension of human experience and relationship, demonstrated in chapter one, and is therefore involved in doctrines of creation and salvation insofar as those doctrines concern human experience and relationship as well, (b) that the way in which one conceptualizes and deploys rhythm has theological consequences, demonstrated in chapters two through five, and (c) that rhythm is illuminating for Christian understandings of creation and salvation, demonstrated in chapters six and seven. In reaching for rhythm, theologians are not merely appealing to a vague sensibility. As elusive as it is, the concept comes with real theological implications. The task of the chapters that follow is to bring those implications into the open and, in the process, to re-think doctrine from out of the rhythms in which we are always already embedded. My goal is to open a path through the diverse appeals to rhythm in order to reveal what is at stake for theologians in those conversations, equipping them to turn our relation to rhythm from a haunting into a fruitful collaboration for the purpose of making better sense of reality.

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Part I Experience

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1 A Phenomenology of Rhythm Merleau-Ponty compares reality to an architecture that we encounter through the body,¹ involving an “underlying movement through which we have installed ourselves in the world.”² Most of the time, an architecture is something to which we relate from the inside, as an organization of space that is navigated and encountered in time. An architect may abstract herself from it and view it from the outside, all at once, but such a perspective is an abstraction and decisions that are based on such a birds-eye perspective must always connect back to the spatio-temporal reality. If this is the form of experience, philosophy can be neither a search for essences that turns the world into an ideal object nor a fusion with reality. Rather, since the thinking being is always tied to the experience of particular times and places, it “discerns articulations in the world, it awakens in it regular relations of prepossession, of recapitulation, of overlapping . . . ” which may be dormant but nevertheless continue to function beneath the surface.³ For Merleau-Ponty, we encounter reality through a palpation that precedes vision or concept—a carnal involvement through mediating films that he calls “flesh.” Flesh is a sort of thickness or invisible skin that surrounds subjects and objects and makes the relationships between them possible without the mediation of concepts.⁴ However, rather than a substance, material or otherwise, Merleau-Ponty suggests we should think of flesh as like an element, “a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.”⁵ It is a medium that is a manner of being in the world, a style of being that makes the sorts of relations we experience possible.⁶ I propose to approach rhythm as a kind of flesh, in Merleau-Ponty’s sense. Neither material nor idea, but a kind of manner that mediates relation.⁷ ¹ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 114. ² Ibid., 104. ³ Ibid., 100–1. ⁴ Ibid., 144, 135. ⁵ Ibid., 139. ⁶ Ibid., 147. ⁷ Several scholars have suggested that rhythm is a significant underlying concept in Merleau-Ponty’s work (Jessica Wiskus, The Rhythm of Thought Art, Literature, and Music

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

The immediacy of rhythm to human experience makes it difficult for us to abstract ourselves from it and analyze it as an object of investigation.⁸ As such, attempting to absolutely disentangle rhythm from experience before analysis risks dealing with a false rhythm. As with the architect, any analysis of rhythm must continually refer back to the human experience of spacetime because rhythm’s immediacy to human experience is inescapably bound up with our knowledge of it. The question of how we come to know rhythm is a question of how we understand an architecture that we first encounter from inside, through the body. We must discern its articulations rather than attempting to determine the essence of rhythm from a distance. One particularly fruitful place from which the articulations are discernable is the human encounter with poetry, which can act as a reference point within experience, a particular architectural structure perhaps, from which certain characteristics that distinguish rhythm from other sorts of movement might be discerned. Just as Merleau-Ponty begins with the intersection of bodily experience and encountered resonances, I begin with the intersection between temporal experience and poetry. However, this will involve less an analysis of specific poems, and more an analysis of the ways in which prosodists describe poetic rhythms in general. I am analyzing the approaches of architects, so to speak, but I am evaluating them on the basis of how well they incorporate relevant dimensions of human encounter, such as temporality and embodiment, which are indispensable for the type of understanding that comes from within the reality.

after Merleau-Ponty (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013; Daniela Vallega-Neu, “Rhythm and Animality in Merleau Ponty’s Ontology of the Flesh,” 2007. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=zMWoS0pc-e8). ⁸ For example, it is impossible to know whether rhythm is a pattern of the natural world independent of human engagement, or a feature of the human mind and body through which we make sense of and interpret the world, or some combination of the two. One can make arguments for both theories based on empirical evidence. In theories of language, for example, Peter Auer argues, based on Gestalt-psychological research, that the mind relies on rhythmic pattern-making, evidenced by the fact that series of stimuli are always rhythmically grouped in perception (Peter Auer, Frank Müller, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, Language in Time: The Rhythm and Tempo of Spoken Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 5). Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen likewise suggests that rhythm in speech is only a perceptual and not an acoustic phenomenon (Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, English Speech Rhythm: Form and Function in Everyday Verbal Interaction (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1993), 14). James Bunn, on the other hand, argues that rhythm is part of the fundamental physical pattern of the wave, which, in the physical sciences, has replaced matter as the basis of physical reality. Speech is rhythmic not simply because the mind organizes perceptions through the lens of rhythm, but because it is performed in and through physical bodies and carrier-waves, all of which are based on the fundamental rhythmic pattern of the wave (James H. Bunn, Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Language (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1).

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RHYTHM IN POETRY In accordance with its ghostly nature, theorists are by no means agreed on what the rhythm of a poem is, especially since rhythm is a characteristic of many different kinds of poetry.⁹ I have chosen to group theories of poetic rhythm into two broad categories, which I call the synchronic approach and the diachronic approach. The synchronic describes rhythm from the outside, as a pattern of interlocking shapes, much the way an architect might look at a building plan. The diachronic approach foregrounds the temporal experience of encounter with a rhythm as one reads or listens through a poem similar to how one might describe an architecture from within as one traverses it. The former tends to emphasize rhythm in terms of the harmony and continuity produced by these interlocking shapes while the latter, by focusing on the experience of rhythm in time, notices an interruptive dimension to poetic rhythm.

The Synchronic Perspective Prosodists who approach rhythm from a synchronic perspective focus on the given structures of a poem that cause a reader or hearer to perceive the text as rhythmic. This includes noticing the various levels of movement operating in a poem, how these are related to one another, and the shapes that these relations produce. To think about rhythm synchronically is to think of it primarily as a shape rather than a progression, as a whole with one or more salient events or features around which others are organized.¹⁰ This approach depicts rhythm as a kind of unification, a pattern from which one can isolate out various components for the purpose of analysis.¹¹ By focusing on given structures, these theorists tend to analyze the poem much like a visual work of art or architectural plan in which the rhythm is understood primarily through the relations that make up the object, rather than through the temporal experience of the reader, although these two dimensions can never be absolutely divorced. These theorists do not locate rhythm primarily in meter or other periodic beats. Meter—a simple oscillation between weak and strong beats—is part of ⁹ See the introduction of Richard D. Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse (London: Longman, 1992), 7–70 for a good overview of the various theories of poetic rhythm. Schools of thought include the traditional Foot-substitution prosodists; Temporalists, who divide verse into measures; Slavic metrists, who apply analytical and statistical tools to meter conceptualized as a normative distribution; Intonationalists; and the generative metrists, who judge well-formed verse according to positions within the text’s linguistic structure. Ibid., 7–70. ¹⁰ Denys Clement Wyatt Harding, Words into Rhythm: English Speech Rhythm in Verse and Prose (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 15. ¹¹ Harding, Words into Rhythm, 6.

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

the rhythm, but only at the lowest level of a vertical hierarchy. In poetry without a metrical beat, the lowest level of the hierarchy is based on the oscillations of syntax and syllable emphasis instead.¹² They argue that even if there are elements of periodicity in all poetry, these are not sufficient to describe rhythm because, in some cases, the periodic elements are so qualified and relativized by other factors that their contribution to rhythm is not the dominant factor. This lowest level of movement may instead merely be operative in the background. It is not always perceived or felt because it is covered over by other, higher-level movements. These oscillations of beat or meter come into contact with other factors, producing a vertical shape as well as a forward momentum and it is in this intersection that rhythm is located. While a rhythmic shape may involve meter, meter is not necessary since rhythm is based on shape rather than repetition. Meter, and other forms of periodicity are thus only one factor in a larger pattern. The highest level of this vertical hierarchy is a teleological movement set towards a definite ending by the hermeneutical content of the poem. Richard Cureton calls it prolongation. Rather than a repetitive back-and-forth movement, the teleological arc moves in a single direction. The highest and lowest levels of the rhythm are therefore two different kinds of movement: alternation on the one hand and forward momentum on the other. These two layers are in tension with one another and are brought into relationship through intermediate groupings between these two poles; these groupings provide segmentation and structure to both movements, thereby creating the intermediate levels of the rhythm and bringing the upper and lower levels into harmony with each other.¹³ The groupings are created by the various ways in which unaccented beats are grouped around accented ones.¹⁴ It is these groups, rather than meter or syntactic oscillation itself, which are the most salient dimensions of rhythm. As such, a “leveled hierarchy of culminating phrases or goal-oriented regions,”¹⁵ such as those which exist in free verse, is just as rhythmic as poems that involve regular beat. Figure 1.1 is an example of how a rhythm, in this case the rhythm of the first verse of Gerard Manley Hopkin’s poem “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” might be represented synchronically. This is a simplified example of the sort of analysis that a prosodist like Cureton might undertake. I have not here included the entire poem, so the very top levels of the hierarchy are not represented, but the reader can nevertheless get a sense for what a synchronic analysis looks like. The bottom, metric layer of the rhythm is denoted by dots representing various strengths of emphasis that are translated into the metric oscillation between strong and weak beats.¹⁶ ¹² Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, 170. ¹³ Ibid., 125. ¹⁴ Ibid., 172. ¹⁵ Ibid., 425. ¹⁶ Hopkins devised a rhythm called “sprung rhythm,” in which feet begin with a strong beat followed a varying number of weak beats. This is primarily reflected in the metrical dots used to

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A Phenomenology of Rhythm s/a

w s

w

w

s

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s/+r

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w s w s w

s w w

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· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

w

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s/r

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· · · · · · · · · · · · · · Stones ring; like each tucked string tells,

s w

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· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

w/e

s/e w/=e

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w/+e

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· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

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s/=e

s w w w s w

w s

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xe s

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w s ws

· · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · · Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

Figure 1.1 Synchronic Analysis of “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”

The top layers of the rhythm, the layers of prolongation, which are based on the semantic content of the poem, in which developments are anticipated, extended, and arrived at, are indicated by letters (a, e, r). These are then subdivided into particular ways in which the poem may anticipate, extend or arrive at fulfillment, either as an equative prolongation in which anticipation or extension does not significantly move but simply repeats (=), as an additive prolongation which builds through analogy (+), or as a progressional prolongation which presents something strikingly new (x). Notice, for example, that I have indicated the lines “goes itself” and “myself it speaks and spells” as equative extensions (=e) because they merely repeat the idea of the verb “Selves.” I have indicated the final line “What I do is me for that I came” as a progressional extension (xe) because the change in voice, the transition to the speaking thing, is strikingly new. I have suggested that these are all extensions, rather than arrivals because the arrival is already achieved. The reader is invited to anticipate an answer to the implied question “what does each thing do?” and this answer is given immediately with “deals out that being indoors each one

denote syllable strength. The pattern at this level—with some important exceptions—is generally a strong beat, perhaps following a weak upbeat, followed by a weak, a slightly stronger, and another weak beat. However, once the oscillations between strong and weak are grouped into the first layer, the situation becomes more complicated in that syllables are grouped into smaller units that are organized around the relative strength of a beat such that weak and strong become distributed less predictably, demonstrating the tension between regularity and variation in Hopkins’ poem. In taking this approach, I am following Cureton’s own analysis of, “The Windhover,” another poem by Hopkins (323–78).

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Rhythm: A Theological Category

dwells.” All that follows is, therefore, an extension of this same idea, though it is noteworthy that the final phrase in the poem may still be significantly surprising even as an extension. Notice that, in contrast to meter, all of these determinations of prolongation are made on the basis of hermeneutics rather than on the basis of musical form. This semantic dimension is rhythmically significant because of the forward push of the expectation set up by the meaning of the words. In fact, Cureton says that “At the highest level, prolongation goals are usually not generated by the text at all but derive from our generic expectation of a certain sort of canonical global movement. We don’t infer these expectations from the rhythmic medium; we bring them with us and assume that they will be satisfied.”¹⁷ This is, therefore, an exception to the general synchronic tendency to locate the rhythm in the text itself rather than in the experience of the reader. As with Reuven Tsur’s cognitive poetics which I will explain below, Cureton here acknowledges that the expectations that the reader brings to the text interact with the features of the text, thereby generating the rhythm. This expectation is, however, folded into the map of the whole as a given and objective feature of the rhythmic picture. The groups that mediate between these two dimensions—semantic prolongation and meter—are represented in this figure by the lines. The lower-level groups, represented by solid lines, are groups primarily determined by the meter, groups of strong and weak syllables or beats. As the groups get larger, however, they become increasingly based on the semantic content. The highest level given here—represented by the broken line—is composed of groups based on whole lines. Eventually, these groups would encompass whole verse and the whole poem as well. The two types of motion—oscillating and teleological—are brought into contact with one another through these layers of groups. The crucial dimension of the rhythm for which grouping accounts is the overall harmony of the poem even amidst significant changes and disruptions at other layers.¹⁸ In “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” for example, the grouping movement changes drastically a few times throughout the first verse. The verse begins with alternations of strong–weak, then, after the enjambment between the second and third lines, the pattern changes to three beat groups in the third line (other than the enjambed “Stones ring”) before returning to the two beat groups in the fourth line. This time, however, in the fourth line, the two beat groups are in the reverse order: weak–strong. The second half of the verse then begins with a line of mirrored triplets, a new construction.¹⁹ Synchronic ¹⁷ Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, 149. ¹⁸ Ibid., 145. ¹⁹ I have here parsed the poem such that the lowest levels of grouping include no more than one relatively strong beat per group. This is Cureton’s recommendation because any additional strengths can be indicated at higher groups. Multiple strong points can be accounted for through multiple interacting layers. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that there are other parsing methods that have flatter constructions and thus do allow for groups with multiple strong beats (Ibid., 184).

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theorists like Cureton point out that these variations nevertheless hold together harmoniously because of the interactions between beat and other dimensions of the poem such as sound and meaning. Thus, the enjambment between the second and third line, with its drastically different beat, nevertheless involves a mirrored alliteration between the “r” and the “s” of “roundy wells” and that of “stones ring,” evoking a pivot. This enjambed pivot, moreover, takes place within the larger pivot of the whole third line, which separates the strong–weak from the weak–strong alternations using triplets, which themselves shift midway through from weak– strong–weak to strong–weak–weak. The line is enjambed on both ends, but just as continuity is maintained in the first transition from lines 2 to 3 through alliteration, the shift from line 3 to 4 involves rhyme between “tells” and “bell’s” and the weak ending of the line facilitates a push into the strong meter of line four (corresponding semantically with “swung”). The rhyme between “hung,” “swung,” and “tongue” also continues across the lines to hold them all together despite the changes in meter and the enjambment. This line is embedded further in rhymes extending across the verse, in the second half of the poem in lines 2 and 3 (“dwells” and “spells”), just as it appears in lines 2 and 3 of the first half, and just as “flame,” “name,” “same,” and “came” appear in the first and fourth lines of both halves. The transition from line 3 to line 4 creates the densest nest of rhymes in the verse thereby ensuring a strong harmony despite the multiple metric changes. The third line as a whole acts as a pivot, enjambed on both ends, yet maintaining harmony across these disruptions to the meter. My point here is to demonstrate how an approach to poetic rhythm that considers the whole synchronically is able to identify and attend to the detailed structures that make harmony possible even across serious metric discontinuities. Synchronic prosodists often literally emphasize this harmony through visual shapes created by the poem as a whole. Consider, for example, Eva Lilja’s analysis of Sylvia Plath’s free verse poem “Poppies in October.” Rather than attending to how the reader experiences the poem in time, Lilja analyzes the poem much like one would a painting. Looking at the poem as a whole, she identifies patterns in both the visual organization of lines and the semantic content, such as references to colour. She argues that the poem is rhythmic on the basis of a visual harmony: the verses are arranged as two intersecting, mirrored triangles, with the longest lines at the top and bottom and the shortest in the middle, although the top line remains slightly longer. Moreover, the colour red, associated with blood, poppies, and rushing emotions is evoked throughout, until the last word, which is a suggestion of blue—a moment of stillness and calm amongst the running reds. At the end of her analysis, therefore, we could very well replace the poem with a painting.²⁰ ²⁰ This is not a coincidence since the purpose of the essay is to compare the rhythm of this poem with the rhythm of a sculpture. The rhythm must be presented synchronically in order for

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Cureton and Lilja’s approaches represent two different ways of visually representing a poem’s movement so that the various shapes can be drawn, mapped, and analyzed without the limitations of memory. Attending to these various levels of rhythm allows for greater flexibility and complexity in one’s definition of rhythm than definitions that are tied to periodicity. Rather than limiting rhythm to a felt beat, synchronic theories recognize the tensions and resolutions that are operative outside conscious awareness but which influence the rhythm nevertheless. By including vertical extension and not merely temporal repetition, synchronic theorists can identify rhythm with a greater variety of temporal shapes. These shapes are not necessarily regular or periodic but are nevertheless rhythmic because of a “coherent asymmetry” in which various shapes intersect with one another in a way that is patterned, even if not symmetrical.²¹ Notice that on the one hand, the synchronic understanding of rhythm is much like a pre-Socratic definition of rhythm rather than Plato’s temporal periodicity. Rhythm is here defined according to shape. On the other hand, however, these shapes are not improvised. They do not unfold in time but are known all at once from the outside. In this way, the approach is more like that made possible by the nineteenth-century kymograph. Temporal events are represented visually, thereby making possible the measurement and analysis of those events and their relations to one another. This approach to poetic rhythms, therefore, does not map neatly onto Michon’s classifications, exhibiting some dimensions of a pre-Socratic definition but not others, and adopting an approach akin to a nineteenth-century scientific approach but without the Platonic reliance on periodicity. The primary limitation of this approach is that it is not always clear that such theories give an account of rhythm itself so much as a kind of map of a rhythm, a representation from a distance that loses something of its character in the process. The synchronic approach demonstrates the problem with attempting to analyze rhythm abstracted from experience. Any approach that maps out the structures of a rhythm such that they can be viewed all at once does not sufficiently account for the experience of encountering a rhythm as it unfolds in time, yet such unfolding is an essential dimension of rhythm. To know a rhythm as a thing laid out all at once before you is for the rhythm to cease to exist as the phenomenon that it is.²² That which Merleau-Ponty says of being may likewise apply to rhythm, namely that it cannot be contemplated from without and in simultaneity, but must be traversed because thought itself this comparison to take place. Lena Hopsch and Eva Lilja, “Rhythm and Balance in Sculpture and poetry” in Jan Hein Hoogstad and Birgitte Stougaard Pederson, eds, Off Beat: Pluralizing Rhythm (Amsterdam: Rodopoi, 2013), 114–17. ²¹ Cureton, Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, 141, 145. ²² Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 233. Merleau-Ponty here says that this is true of all things because all things are themselves in time.

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is always implicated in the movement.²³ A rhythm is only ever really known in the experience of its unfolding, gradually and never in its entirety.²⁴ A synchronic approach is not enough. This is where a diachronic perspective may add something to the conversation.

The Diachronic Perspective In contrast to the synchronic perspective, a primary emphasis of many (though not all) diachronic theories of poetic rhythm is periodicity: a regular or semi-regular stress in the flow of time, such that time moves forward through an alternation between strong and weak beats, or between the beginnings and endings of lines. I call these theories diachronic because they draw attention to the ways in which the reader or hearer experiences the movement of time as the poem unfolds. Much of the discussion in theories that focus on periodicity centers on the relationship between meter and rhythm. While Michon tends to ignore the differences in the way in which one can conceptualize meter, homogenizing all emphases on meter or periodicity under a Platonic approach to rhythm, meter is itself almost as variable a category as rhythm. While poetic meter is traditionally understood in terms of metric feet based on syllables and composed of alternations between arsis and thesis,²⁵ as with Augustine, there are in fact many ways of representing meter. Some argue that the traditional approach to meter is so abstract that it bears almost no relation to meter as it is felt, namely as beat and accent.²⁶ This is an understanding of meter based in the body. Whether in dance or typing, physicality expresses itself rhythmically.²⁷ Since language is produced by muscles in the body, which are regulated by the periodicities of breath and heartbeat, the identification of a linguistic rhythm as “metric” is likewise a judgment based in the body through “muscular empathy,” the impulse to move one’s body to a beat.²⁸ Periodicity is ²³ Ibid., 90. ²⁴ Ibid., 208. ²⁵ Arsis and thesis refer respectively to the longer, accented and the lighter, shorter syllables of a poetic foot (a combination of two or more long and short syllables). Encyclopedia Britannica “arsis and thesis,” http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/36376/arsis-and-thesis (accessed April 29, 2014). ²⁶ See Derek Attridge, Moving Words: Forms of English Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 111 and Philip Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form (London: Routledge, 1996), 5. Attridge’s approach to poetic rhythm is currently the most respected. His work is important because he is the first to base his analysis of poetic rhythm both on its relationship to the English language rather than on classical foot scansion, which originated from another language, and on its embedded-ness in bodily experience. In his later work, Attridge distances himself from the language of meter since it has been traditionally associated with foot scansion and elicits a dualistic opposition to rhythm that Attridge is eager to avoid. However, Cureton points out that Attridge’s concern with periodicity is essentially an interest in the metric dimensions of rhythm and is thus restrictive (Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse, 95–8). ²⁷ Harding, Words into Rhythm, 7. ²⁸ Attridge, Moving Words, 111, 123.

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therefore not necessarily an abstract grid-like foot-scansion, but a materiallybased phenomenon, which suggests that it cannot be ignored in considerations of rhythm as a dimension of experience. This association of rhythm with the body through such periodicity leads to a theory regarding the function of rhythm in poetry, namely, that rhythm functions to connect the semantic content of the poem to the emotion of the reader or hearer through the body. The capacity of rhythm to evoke emotion is located in its expression and representation of bodily motion and therewith the states of mind and affects that such bodily movements accompany. Rhythm reflects the levels of energy and the ways in which they are deployed in the expression of emotion,²⁹ thereby evoking these emotions in the reader or hearer through contagion. We interpret the rhythms of music, for example, through the lens of physical gait and movement, which express certain emotional states. By imperceptibly repeating these movements in our own bodies, we come to experience those emotions that we extrapolate from the movements suggested to us by the music.³⁰ However, those who emphasize periodicity do not limit rhythm to a given, biological phenomenon. Culture determines how exactly such periodicity is arranged.³¹ The periodists’ conclusion regarding the experience of rhythm is that rhythm is based in the configuration of the body according to periodic movement and is therefore universal, but it is also culturally and linguistically configured and interpreted such that there is no pure, universal rhythm available to experience. Derek Attridge, arguably the foremost theorist of periodic rhythm, says that in poetry, meter emerges from the nature of language itself, such that its definition varies based on the language of composition. Some languages and cultures tend to arrange periodicity through meter, others do not. This is part of the reason that meter and periodicity are not identical. In English, as in many other languages, there exists a tension between two kinds of energy pulses, or alternations between strong and weak: syllables, on the one hand, and stress or accent, on the other.³² In regular speech, syllables accommodate themselves to stress based on meaning, while in a poem with a strong beat, such as a nursery rhyme, the alternations of syllable and stress match up, such that the verbal accent falls on some of the strongest of these syllables. In between these two extremes, the interaction of these two alternations can be configured in a variety of ways.³³ Syllables may be accented according to a meter, or according to factors such as the sound of individual ²⁹ Prose acts this out on a larger scale in which much of it may represent the continuous flow of everyday life and speech, punctuated by expressive eruptions. Harding, Words into Rhythm, 150. ³⁰ Stephen Davies, “Infectious Music: Music-Listener Emotional Contagion,” in Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147. ³¹ Attridge, Moving Words, 112. ³² Ibid., 112. ³³ Ibid., 189.

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words or the conceptual or emotional content of the words.³⁴ For Attridge, meter represents the periodic alternation of strong and weak beats, while rhythm is generated in the interplay of regularity and irregularity,³⁵ thereby creating “a continuous movement in time, given forward impetus by a series of alternations.”³⁶ Notice that this definition interacts with periodicity but is not reduced to it. The emphasis here is, rather, on the way in which the time of the poem moves forward. While it is primarily this forward-movement that is at issue, diachronic theorists differ on how they think about the relationship between rhythm and meter. Some, much like Meschonnic and Michon, think that rhythm and meter are opposed to one another, the former representing organic movement and the latter a mechanistic grid.³⁷ Others argue that meter is not opposed to rhythm, but is itself a part of the organic process of rhythm,³⁸ which sometimes includes rejecting the language of meter while retaining its function (periodicity, regularity).³⁹ This latter group, which identifies regularity and irregularity as two dimensions of a single rhythm and of which Attridge is a part, helpfully demonstrate that rhythm is not so much defined over-against a different sort of movement but is a confluence of two types of movement that conspire together towards a certain effect. However, the inclusion of meter in one’s definition of rhythm does obscure the fact of non-metrical rhythm. It is possible for rhythm to be associated with movements other than a strong experience of periodicity, even if such periodicity is never entirely absent, as the kymograph has shown with respect to free verse. The question surrounding the relationship between rhythm and meter is not whether metric and non-metric verse are both rhythmic—all prosodists concede that both are—but which one is primary and which is merely a variation or a subset of the other. Those who emphasize periodicity argue that even in poetry that does not involve meter (narrowly-defined), there is always some form of periodicity and that such periodicity remains central to the experience of rhythm even if it is not experienced as periodicity.⁴⁰ Free verse, for example, is not structured according to syllable stress or accent but is nevertheless regulated by the experience of periodic, visual segmentation.⁴¹ Lines are read as units of ³⁴ Alfred Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat: A Manual of Prosody (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1998), 3. ³⁵ Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat, 6. ³⁶ Attridge, Moving Words, 150. ³⁷ Hobsbaum, Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form, 5. ³⁸ Christopher Francis Hasty, Meter as Rhythm (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). ³⁹ As do Aviram and Attridge. ⁴⁰ For example, in French and Japanese, languages in which there is no second stress-accent, rhythm is based only on the alternation between the language’s strong and weak syllables (Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat, 17). This is also the case for some English poetry written by those for whom English was a learned language, as with much contemporary Anglo-Indian poetry. See, for example, Peter Groves, “Subversive Rhythms,” in Hoogstad and Pederson, Off Beat, 123–34. ⁴¹ Attridge, Moving Words, 209; Harding, Words into Rhythm, 111.

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rhythmic pattern by their visual segmentation. As with meter, these units are played off other modes of unification, such as syntax or meaning.⁴² The resulting tension creates a movement of oscillation, from the end of a line to the beginning of the next and so on, such that there exists the same movement of alternation that drives the time of the poem in metric periodicity,⁴³ the difference being that this alternation is primarily visual. Thus, like synchronic prosodists, periodists emphasize the visual when locating the rhythm of free verse, but they emphasize the experience of oscillation generated as the eyes move to-and-fro in time rather than the shapes themselves. Even so, it is possible to approach rhythm diachronically without using periodicity as a central category. For example, the field of cognitive poetics developed by Reuven Tsur studies how the reader or hearer experiences a poem by applying cognitive theories regarding various mental processes to a reader’s interactions with the poem. He therefore, attempts to understand the nature of poetic rhythm without identifying categories of significance prior to actual human interaction with a poem. While periodic theories of rhythm are more aware of the whole body than cognitive poetics, which tends to focus on the mind, cognitive poetics supplies the important idea that the reader or hearer is not a passive recipient of the experience of rhythm in poetry but an active contributor to the manifestation of that rhythm. One of the theories of cognition most relevant to poetic rhythm is that of working memory. The resources of working memory must be allocated differently in poetry than in regular speech because the contextual cues and strategies for understanding and remembering everyday speech are not applicable to poetry. For example, in everyday listening, the brain can dispense with the precise order of words and store information as concepts, which are units of information that can be remembered more efficiently. The precise order of words need not be remembered. In poetry, however, not only the meaning but also the musicality of the words is important, such that words must be held in memory in the order in which they are presented.⁴⁴ As such, many of working memory’s processing capabilities are taken up in poetry by trying to hold together two different patterns: patterns of meaning on the one hand, and musical patterns, such as stress, accent, and phonetics, on the other. The limited energy of working memory is expended in poetry on the simultaneous perception of the sometimes conflicting patterns of stress and syntax.⁴⁵ This allocation of cognitive energy and space is what leads to a different experience of poetry than of everyday speech.

⁴² Ibid., 70–1, 154. ⁴³ The term verse from versus means “turning back.” Corn, The Poem’s Heartbeat, 7. ⁴⁴ Reuven Tsur, Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance: An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics (Brighton: Sussex Academic, 2012), 66. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 76.

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Rhythm is the way in which the reader holds these two patterns together. The poem is shaped precisely in such a way as to make it possible, but sometimes challenging, for the reader to hold prosody and semantics together. Accommodating the stress and pronunciation of words into a rhythmic pattern allows for enough space in working memory to also retain the meaning of the line. This is in part why the poem as a whole is grouped into smaller line-units. The length and division of the lines of a poem divide the words and patterns into chunks that can be held in working memory long enough for the reader to understand what is being said and long enough to perform the following line in a way that is rhythmically congruous with the previous one.⁴⁶ In cognitive poetics, then, the rhythm of free verse is not associated with the periodic segmentation of lines; such periodic segmentations are merely cues to guide the performance of the rhythmic resolution of tension. In Tsur’s approach, as with the synchronic approach, meter and other forms of periodicity may have a greater or lesser impact on the rhythm adopted by the reader depending on other factors involved in the poem, such as semantic meaning or rhyme. Even when meter is present, it can sometimes be unclear which rhythm the reader is supposed to adopt and there may consequently be a number of legitimate rhythmic options. If we take, as an example, three lines from Milton’s Paradise Lost: That shepherd who first taught the chosen seed In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of Chaos: or, if Sion hill

While all these lines are in iambic pentameter and the meter is therefore constant, the middle line presents a rhythmic challenge owing in part to the absence of a parallel “the” before “earth” and the strangeness of placing the required emphasis on the first “the” and “how,” which seem to run contrary to semantic emphasis. The reader may therefore either choose to read the line according to the same organization of beats, placing the emphasis on “the,” “‐ginning,” “how,” “heavens,” and “earth,” but the reader may also choose to change the pattern and emphasize “the,” “‐ginning,” “heavens,” “and,” and “earth” instead, thereby slowing down the end of the line and differentiating it from surrounding lines. While metrically, this solution is less elegant than the alternative because it breaks with the surrounding pattern, there are nevertheless plausible reasons for constructing the rhythm in this way. Besides the fact that continuing the pentameter in this line creates an awkward semantic emphasis, it can also become unpleasant to hear a meter emphasized too strongly for too long, so readers will often soften and slightly vary their accenting in order to give the piece a more fluid feel. Second, a natural point at which one might want to

⁴⁶ Ibid., 17.

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change the rhythm is a point at which one attempts to bring a line to the hearer’s attention. The above line is a natural candidate for such emphasis as a line from the biblical creation account surrounded by Milton’s own lines of prelude. Regardless, while the meter remains the same, the reader must make a choice regarding how to perform the accents, each leading to a different rhythm—one continuous and the other disrupted. This leads to another difference between the synchronic approach and Tsur’s cognitive poetics. For synchronic prosodists like Cureton, there is only one right way to parse a poem’s rhythm for maximum harmony. In Tsur’s approach, however, choices about rhythm are not made at the level of analysis but as real-time decisions during the rhythmic performance, and often without the benefit of hindsight. Rhythm is a process of negotiation between reader and text that takes place over the course of the poem, with the reader testing out various rhythmic configurations between syntax, accent, meaning, phonetics, alliteration, etc. There are therefore multiple possible rhythms that one could perform in response to a text. One may be able to later debate which was best, but this will not be obvious and, indeed, may depend on the time and place of the performance. To sum up using our Hopkins example, a diachronic perspective on rhythm would not attempt to understand a rhythm by mapping it out as I did with “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and as a result would pay less attention to the vertical structures at play and the written features that hold the rhythm together harmoniously. A diachronic approach to “As Kingfishers Catch Fire” would instead attend to the experience of moving through the poem—the tumbling feeling of the second line, the coming up short at the enjambed third line, the decisions that the reader must make as to how to respond to the enjambment and how to read the third line in a way that maintains the rhythm, and the satisfying rhythmic resolution that comes from repeating the tumbling rhythm of line four, which begins slowly and then picks up speed. The general momentum of the first half of the verse is one of tripping and tumbling down a hill. This is appropriate since the first-time reader will likely trip over the string of single-syllable images built of rhymes and alliterations with very few verbs guiding the placement of syntactic emphasis. Thus, since there is little semantic guidance in the third line and the organization of beats likewise changes, the effect for the reader will be a kind of tripping confusion until he or she finds the semantic and metric swing again in the fourth line, which lands the rhythm. What the diachronic approaches have in common, is that, rather than conceptualize rhythm in terms of the given features of a poem, they locate rhythm in the reader’s real-time interaction with the poem, whether through a beat felt in the body or cognitive negotiation and performance. These approaches concern the encounter between the architecture and the experience of moving through that architecture from within.

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This approach likewise does not map onto Michon’s distinctions. While the diachronic approach to rhythm includes what Michon would associate with a more Platonic emphasis on periodicity, it also includes approaches, like that of Tsur, which are more improvisational. The opposition between Platonic definitions of rhythm-as-meter on the one hand and pre-Socratic definitions of rhythm-as-improvised-shape on the other do not map neatly onto the synchronic and diachronic perspectives. Thinking about rhythm in terms of these two poetic approaches may, therefore, reveal dimensions of rhythm that the metric vs. improvised definitional binary tends to overlook. One such important dimension is the question of interruption.

Interruption My claim that one might deviate from a particular flow or pattern for rhythmic reasons when performing Milton points to an important feature of rhythm when viewed diachronically: interruption. Nevertheless, the inclusion of interruption in the category of rhythm is not an obvious move. Traditionally, we do not associate rhythm with interruption, but with regularity. The synchronic theorists like Cureton demonstrate this when they draw attention to rhythmic interruptions not as interruptions but as the continuation of harmony in spite of variation. A claim that interruption is an indispensable dimension of rhythm, therefore, requires some unpacking. If rhythm does include an interruptive dimension how are we to understand it? Poetic rhythm involves two sorts of interruption. First, a certain rhythm may interrupt one’s regular experience of life and time as a whole. A given rhythm may itself be as regular as a nursery rhyme but that regularity, that particular rhythm, may function as an interruption to something else, to the context in which it takes place. Giorgio Agamben, whose understanding of rhythm will be a subject of analysis in a later chapter, describes this phenomenon as follows: Yet rhythm—as we commonly understand it—appears to introduce into this eternal flow a split and a stop. Thus in a musical piece, although it is somehow in time, we perceive rhythm as something that escapes the incessant flight of instants and appears almost as the presence of an atemporal dimension in time. In the same way, when we are before a work of art or a landscape bathed in the light of its own presence, we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly thrown into a more original time. . . . We are as though held, arrested before something, but this being arrested is also a being-outside, an ek-stasis in a more original dimension.⁴⁷ ⁴⁷ Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 99.

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This is the reason we are able to distinguish the rhythm of a poem from the thought, conversation, and time that surround it. It is the reason we are able to identify a poem as a poem. The poem’s rhythm diverges from the movements and flows in which it is performed and its interruption to those surrounding flows enables one to identify it as a specific artistic artefact. The poem’s beginning and end mark a difference between the rhythm of the poem and the environment into which it is read; they mark a hiatus to some of the dimensions of that environment. This is not to say that the poem, or other artworks for that matter, are therefore sealed objects, or that they do not interact with their surrounding environments. A poem may speak to a situation, or mean different things in different environments and is therefore not absolutely cut off from that which surrounds it. However, the poem interacts with that which surrounds it as a poem, as something with a recognizable form, different from other forms. As such, its effect when read or performed is to temporarily suspend other rhythms or flows and set up a different pattern thereby inviting the reader or hearer into its world. For the poem to “work,” for it to be meaningful, the reader or hearer’s other, everyday concerns must be temporarily suspended. The reason that the poem is a strange rhythm that interrupts the rhythms of everyday life is that it draws attention to the medium, form, and movement of language itself by hollowing out the everyday uses to which language is generally put.⁴⁸ This is Tsur’s point as well. The ways in which cognition operates when engaging with poetic rhythm are different from the ways in which cognition operates when engaging with everyday speech. The poem de-familiarizes the subject’s regular use of speech, removing him or her from an everyday context into an experience of something different. Yet, because it is grounded in language itself, this otherness is not a violent overthrow of language, but an otherness that manifests within language, surpassing its everyday boundaries. In the same way, a particular, architectural organization of space, a church perhaps, does not overcome space altogether but organizes it in a way that suspends our typical experience of space and therefore paradoxically brings greater attention to it. Tsur argues that the disruption of the regular use of language in poetry, and therewith of regular cognitive processes and states, is how poets are able to evoke religious experiences.⁴⁹ The poetic interruption to what is usually the smooth functioning of cognitive processes evokes a sense of otherworldliness.⁵⁰ For example, there are certain background assumptions always at work in perception, of which we are unaware, which Tsur calls “appresentation.” We only become aware of this background when something peculiar

⁴⁸ Attridge, The Rhythms of English Poetry (London: Longman, 1982), 310. ⁴⁹ Reuven Tsur and Motti Benari, On the Shore of Nothingness: Space, Rhythm, and Semantic Structure in Religious Poetry and Its Mystic-Secular Counterpart: A Study in Cognitive Poetics (Thorverton: Imprint Academic, 2003), 55. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 59.

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happens to draw attention to it. When this occurs, an awareness of appresentation implicitly suggests an unseen reality beyond our perceptual boundaries, making us aware of the limits of our experience.⁵¹ Tsur’s primary example of this is the disruption of the appresentation of the smooth interplay between semantic and acoustic, which in everyday language works to move from the beginning to the end of a sentence as quickly and clearly as possible. In poetry, this process is disrupted by typographic patterning, caesurae, enjambment and other devices that require the reader or hearer to linger over and doubt the meaning of normally familiar words, causing a sense of epistemic insecurity.⁵² Rather than automatically choosing a single meaning based on context, the reader or hearer can see several meanings at once; boundaries dissolve, and uncertainty is created.⁵³ Thus, not only does poetic rhythm include disruptions, such disruption can serve to suggest transcendence and religious experience. These poetic devices themselves do not have theological content. Many of them are double-edged; they can evoke either the heavenly or the hellish.⁵⁴ Their character as one or the other is dependent on the larger pattern of structural and semantic movements of the poem as a whole.⁵⁵ Regardless, the function of the poetic interruption to everyday experience is to connect the semantic content of the poem to the experience of the reader. Rhythm creates resonances between the poetic artefact and the subject that are the result of an interruption to the information-conveying flow of language. The interruptive quality of rhythm is therefore not a quality or value unto itself but is executed for the purpose of a different sort of connection, not purely for the purpose of rupture. There is, moreover, typically some cooperation involved in such interruption. I must, to some degree, willingly enter the rhythm of the artistic artefact and allow my other flows and concerns to be suspended. It is possible that I may refuse this. I may ignore the poem because I have something on my mind, perhaps. Or I am a particularly rude person and continue to speak to my neighbor during a poetry reading. The interruptive capacity of rhythm in most encounters with art involves a participation on the part of the hearer, a willingness to be interrupted. Thus, while the reception of a rhythm that is not my own, that comes to me from elsewhere, causes an interruption to my other rhythms, its interruptive quality does in part depend on my availability and interaction. Another way of saying this is that such rhythmic interruption is not violent. It is not rupture. Rupture suggests a more violent and totalizing gash in experience while interruption is more provisional—it is neither total and opposed to harmony nor violent—yet it may be experienced as a shock or a surprise.

⁵¹ Ibid., 60, 73. ⁵⁵ Ibid., 179.

⁵² Ibid., 211.

⁵³ Ibid., 238.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 169.

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However, such cooperation, particularly if it is envisioned as an act of the will, should also not be over-emphasized. The experience of something like shock or surprise or coming-up short is important for an interruption to be interruptive. For one thing, while many of our encounters with art may be intentional, this is not always the case; the encounters that we remember, that affect us most profoundly, are those in which art stops us in our tracks. We were not necessarily looking or waiting for some other rhythm, but one encounters us anyway, and genuinely interrupts what we were doing or thinking. Even intentional engagements with art, however, include an element of this experience of being suspended by something beyond one’s own will. This is part of the pleasure of art. We cannot simply will ourselves to be interrupted independently of an encounter with something that can surprise us. I, therefore, disagree with Jeremy Begbie’s criticism of Tavener, Messiaen, and others whose music suggests a sense of space or motionlessness rather than the end-directedness of most Western tonal music. He argues that this approach appears to negate the temporality within which God has manifest God’s self through Christ by replacing periodicity and end-directedness with a barely discernible pulse.⁵⁶ This critique, however, is phenomenologically problematic in the way that it analyzes the rhythm of music only in terms of what occurs within the confines of the piece. When viewed in terms of its interaction with that which surrounds it, these capacious compositions may introduce rather a strong interruption into the flow of time by their difference from that time. They introduce what Agamben calls “a split and a stop.” The result is that time itself is made rhythmic through the oscillation between the directed flow of everyday time and the pause of the piece. Rather than a negation of time, such compositions have the effect of giving greater texture to everyday time, of introducing periodicity—stops and starts—into time itself precisely because these pieces do not exhibit these qualities and so are different from the time that surrounds them. This is the reason that I am attempting to understand rhythm in a much more general, phenomenological sense and I consider the diachronic perspective to be more helpful in this regard. Restricting observations regarding rhythm to particular artistic manifestations and attempting to draw doctrinal parallels on that basis can overlook the ways in which those particular rhythmic expressions are given their meaning based on their interaction with the rhythms that surround them, thereby overlooking their function and the possible theological significance of that function. Nevertheless, there is a second way in which rhythm includes interruption. On the one hand, one may experience an interruption by rhythm; a certain ⁵⁶ Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 139–46.

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rhythm might interrupt other flows. On the other hand, however, rhythm may also include its own self-interruption. It may involve an interruption of or to itself. Frequently, within a poem, a regular pattern that has been set up is interrupted by a rhythmic event that does not comport with the pattern given up to that point. The line of Milton indicated above, or Hopkins’ changes in metric pattern, may be experienced in this way. However, a more pronounced example of this is the common poetic device known as the caesura: a mid-line pause indicated by a punctuation mark that further breaks up a line-unit. One of these occurs in the third line of “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” after the enjambed “Stones ring” indicated by a semi-colon. The caesura is often experienced as an interruption to an established rhythmic flow. It intrudes upon the momentum towards completion, slowing the forward movement of the poem. The caesura is an example of a poetic event that interrupts the rhythmic pattern that the reader had established up to that point. From the cognitive-poetic perspective, when one is stopped short, one becomes very aware of the rhythm that has been interrupted, particularly that of the half-line that directly precedes the caesura. That half-line is forced “to reassert itself in the listener’s perception.”⁵⁷ The caesura slows the reader down, helping him or her to perform the rhythmic mediation of the two patterns—semantic and musical—by breaking up the semantic content into two more manageable chunks. The reader’s responsibility is to accommodate this interruptive event without entirely breaking with the rhythmic pattern thus far established. If the reader is successful, the pattern initially set up becomes more complex through the reader’s response to such events. Thus, here too, an interruption does not indicate an absolute break between an event and that which surrounds it; it is not a violent overthrowing of the established pattern but a temporary disruption of that pattern, which causes the pattern to change. Therefore, what qualifies as an interruption from the diachronic perspective may not be considered an interruption from the synchronic perspective. When a prosodist can see the whole of a rhythm at once as a pattern of shapes, he or she can see how events that might feel like interruptions are in fact part of the pattern of the rhythm itself. However, this does not mean that such events are not also genuine interruptions. Events like caesurae are experienced in time as interrupting a pattern that the reader is performing. An interruption is a fundamentally temporal phenomenon, an event that can only take place as an encounter in time. In retrospect, synchronically, we may be able to see the event as a merely temporary suspension of a certain dimension of the pattern but in the moment it is experienced as interruptive. Insofar as rhythm is not a map of events represented all at once but a particular form of temporal encounter, the interruptive quality of certain

⁵⁷ Tsur, Poetic Rhythm, 113, 15.

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events is significant. The rhythm is not given all at once at the beginning, but unfolds in time, over the course of the poem. This means that some events will disrupt the pattern with which one begins the poem and which has become the expectation. The beginning of the rhythm is not “it,” it is not the whole of the rhythm given all at once. The rhythm ought to deepen and complexify across the poem if it is to become complete and this is accomplished by introducing moments that interrupt the initial pattern. A rhythm itself does not exist without its temporal performance and that performance includes the negotiation of interruptive events. While I have indicated two different sorts of interruption—an interruption by a rhythm and an interruption within a rhythm—these are in fact two instances of the same type of event on different scales. Just as the interruptive caesura is not sealed off from the pattern that surrounds it, the formal rhythm of a poem and the environment to which it is an interruption are not absolutely sealed off from one another. If they were, the art piece would be incomprehensible. Instead, as with all phenomena, art is meaningful and touches us because it resonates with the rhythms of life. When our engagement with a work is complete and we return to our everyday patterns and flows, the rhythms of the artwork do not necessarily leave us. We may frequently remember them; we may hum or repeat them to ourselves. They are carried by the hearer into the future and become woven into the rhythms of everyday life. The rhythms of the artefact are meaningful because they resonate with the rhythms of life more broadly. Thus, just as an event within a poem may interrupt a previously established pattern but in so doing deepens and complexifies that pattern, so too does a work of art that arrests us for a time become woven into the pattern of time more broadly. Just as the interruptive event within a poem does not absolutely break with what came before it, but interrupts the pattern enough to invite a rhythmic response, our being interrupted by a work of art is not an absolute break but a suspension from the immediate that challenges us to weave the work’s rhythms into our own thought and movement. Therefore, while I suspect that many of us associate rhythm with harmony and regularity, it is important that we do not reduce rhythm to harmonious, repetitive pattern. The temptation to do so may be the result of a preference for conceptualizing rhythm synchronically, rather than attending to all that is involved in what it means to move through rhythm as it unfolds in time. Such synchronic definitions overlook the more interesting dimensions of rhythm as including not only pleasing harmony but also moments of discomfort and disruption that nevertheless interact with such regularity and harmony in fruitful ways. In rhythm, harmony and interruption are not two sides of a mutually-exclusive binary. Rather, each depends on the other in generating an experience of rhythm; harmony and interruption collude together in the construction of rhythms.

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Poetic Rhythm While the synchronic and diachronic approaches to rhythm lead to different understandings of rhythm, it is first worth noting that both approaches agree on the importance of tension for the production of a rhythm, particularly the tension between the musical and the semantic. The synchronic approach locates this tension between top and bottom layers of movement resolved through mediating shapes, while the diachronic approach locates the tension in the temporal disruption of a pattern that is resolved by the performance of the reader. The difference between the synchronic and diachronic theories of rhythm might, therefore, be characterized in terms of where they locate tension—spatially or temporally. These two theories are not mutually exclusive. Each perspective accepts something of the other, but it places the emphasis differently. The synchronic theorist would acknowledge that the reader’s experience of the rhythm of a poem, at least the first time through, does not include an awareness of all the levels of movement and their interacting shapes. However, they would argue that whether the reader knows it or not, his or her experience of the poem as rhythmic is made possible by the shapes created by the interactions of various layers of movement. Likewise, the diachronic theorists recognize that these various layers of movement are operative in the background, but they nevertheless argue that rhythm is primarily a certain kind of temporal experience, such that those factors that are salient in that experience should be foregrounded in describing a rhythm, whether that be a bodily feeling of periodicity or cognitive negotiations between reader and text. Other dimensions may be part of the poem, but they are not necessarily a part of its rhythm, since rhythm is a performed and temporally-encountered phenomenon. In poetry, then, the category of rhythm includes these two dimensions, each revealed by one of the two perspectives: a structure that guides the experience of rhythm, and an experience of that structure in time. The synchronic is concerned with the harmony of that structure, while the diachronic, focusing on its temporal experience, involves surprise, interruption, and an emphasis on the relationship between the poem and the everyday. Both perspectives are necessary for understanding poetic rhythm. The synchronic pattern enables one to understand why, in terms of the composition of the artefact, we experience a certain poem as a particular rhythm. Poetic rhythm requires form as well as temporal alternation. However, that form only ever manifests itself as a rhythm through its interaction with a diachronic performance or experience. Rhythm is irreducibly encountered in time; shapes on a page or measurable intervals are not a rhythm in their own right.⁵⁸ ⁵⁸ This recalls Merleau-Ponty’s question whether “the subject’s concentration on one point of the visual field—for example, the ‘analytic perception’ of the two main lines in Muller-Lyer’s

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Despite their mutual dependence, however, these two perspectives cannot be amalgamated into a single perspective. The reader or hearer cannot simultaneously experience the poem diachronically and see the whole of its structure. If we accept both positions as revealing something about rhythm, and yet as irreducible to one another, then a full understanding of the rhythm of a poem requires oscillating one’s perspective back and forth between the diachronic experience of the rhythm and a stepping back to understand how such rhythm is being formed and why certain movements are evoked. We, therefore, have a description of rhythm that includes both diachronic experience and synchronic form: in poetry, a rhythm is the intersection of diachronic experience and synchronic form, such that an oscillation between synchronic and diachronic perspectives is necessary to understand that rhythm. Notice, however, that since I suggest that our relationship to these two perspectives is one of an oscillation between them, I privilege the diachronic perspective as the heavier side of this dialectic. It is the diachronic perspective itself that encourages such oscillation. We oscillate between the two perspectives because we are inescapably embedded in time and therefore cannot see both at once. By suggesting that the phenomenon of rhythm is one that must be approached through such oscillation if it is to be understood correctly, I am ultimately arguing that the human cannot stand back and take in a rhythm synchronically, all at once, although that rhythm may include moments of synchronic vision. As a temporal entity, she must approach rhythm by understanding its various features in and through time. This is again an example of my approach to poetic rhythm, not in terms of sealed-off artefacts, but as comprehensible only in its interaction with and embeddedness in everyday life. Poetic rhythm does not reveal something about rhythm in general merely by analogy, but as itself coextensive with rhythm in general. Such poetic analysis is therefore insufficient for understanding rhythm as a more general feature of everyday life. Nevertheless, this analysis has enabled us to make a helpful theoretical, though not necessarily an actual, distinction between rhythm and non-rhythmic movement. Non-rhythmic movement does not include both synchronic and diachronic perspectives. For example, pure repetition, as of a metronome, does not qualify as a rhythm according to our description because a pure repetition does not form a shape. It is purely diachronic. Nevertheless, it is impossible to identify such a pure repetition in practice. If nothing else, the mind always supplies a shape to such pure repetitions.⁵⁹ As soon as the human encounters alternation, he or she makes optical illusion—do not, instead of revealing ‘normal sensation’, substitute an artifical set up for the original phenomenon” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 8). ⁵⁹ As suggested by the evidence of the mental grouping of series of repetitive stimuli into rhythms (Auer, Müller, and Couper-Kuhlen, Language in Time, 5).

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it rhythmic through the interaction. Likewise, a pattern laid out synchronically on a page is, theoretically speaking, not a rhythm but a map of a rhythm since the rhythm itself is a temporal event that unfolds in time. In practice, however, such a synchronic map is never apprehended absolutely synchronically, but always in time. As soon as one comes to it, one brings time to the pattern and therefore arguably always manifests something of the rhythm in engaging the pattern. Thus, while in theory, it may be possible to distinguish rhythm from nonrhythm, in practice rhythm is more like a spectrum on which certain movements can be classified as less rhythmic than others but not absolutely a-rhythmic. Less rhythmic movements lack a significant degree of either the diachronic or the synchronic. My evaluation of various approaches to rhythm will therefore not be based on assertions that certain approaches are or are not treatments of rhythm. Rather, it will consider the degree to which such approaches include a sufficient acknowledgment of both the synchronic and the diachronic and therefore are or are not true to the nature of the rhythms they employ.

RHYTHM IN THE E VERYDAY Before we undertake such evaluation, however, since we are concerned with understanding how rhythm, as a dimension of human experience, is significant for how we understand reality theologically, rhythm must be a part of human life more generally if it is to be theologically significant and not merely an illuminating aesthetic metaphor. The difference between artistic practices such as poetry and life more generally is by no means an absolute division, evidenced by our previous discussion of interruption. This is particularly the case because poetry is constructed from language, which is an important feature of human experience more broadly. Poetry foregrounds the musical dimensions of language, including rhythm, amplifying their effects, yet these rhythms function in everyday language as well. Language, broadlyunderstood, is the context in which relationship and social interaction are bathed, both at the interpersonal and the larger social levels. Therefore, if rhythm is a functional part of language, then it contributes to the functioning of relationships and societies as well.

Rhythm and Language Jazz improvisation, especially the role of the rhythm section in such improvisation, is an art form that embodies the continuity between the function of rhythm in art and the function of rhythm in everyday conversation particularly well. Jazz bridges the gap between a formal rhythm composed in advance

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and that which emerges in and facilitates improvised encounters such as conversation. Ingrid Monson has taken up the role of rhythm in improvisation precisely to correct an artificial opposition between these two components, the formal and the social. Form never exists without its social component, its dialogic relationship to the other forms of discourse in its social world, both in the present and over time. The improvisational process in jazz underscores this point in a particularly vivid manner: the shape of a musical performance is the product of human beings interacting through music both in time and over time.⁶⁰

Jazz musicians emphasize rhythm—which they take to include pulse as well as rhythmic phrasing and suspensions of pulse—rather than large-scale tonal organization, as the relevant framework for improvisation.⁶¹ Rhythm acts as both a form and a framework for guiding the social interactions through which improvisation takes place. This is known as groove, “a rhythmic relation or feeling existing between two or more musical parts and/or individuals.”⁶² It is a collectively-produced sense of time that holds the band together in a “mutual feeling of agreement,” suggesting not only the importance of rhythm for improvising harmony but the emotional and interpersonal character of the rhythm as well.⁶³ The same is true in conversation. Only recently have linguistic theories begun to consider language from the perspective of its use, rather than only as a system of semiotic relationships and only with this change has rhythm become part of such theories.⁶⁴ These linguists argue that rhythm serves to construct interactional meaning. Rather than merely an accessory to information, rhythm serves to contextualize what is said. Rhythm is “the process by which conversationalists enable each other to bridge the gap between what is meant and what is said.”⁶⁵ As in jazz, rhythm connects information to the context in which that information is being communicated by indexing interpretive frames that enable those in conversation to answer questions about what they are trying to achieve in a particular conversation and where they are in the process.⁶⁶ Two or more individuals in conversation undertake and undergo an adaptive process by which they synchronize the timings of their verbal and non-verbal behaviour.⁶⁷ Rhythmic patterns in conversation are set up and carried across speakers in order to signal mutual endeavour⁶⁸ and speakers indicate important points in their speech by establishing or inviting ⁶⁰ Ingrid Monson, Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 129. ⁶¹ Ibid., 28–9. In contrast to classical tonal works in music theory, which generally emphasize tonal organization. ⁶² Ibid., 68. ⁶³ Ibid., 68 (quote by Phil Bowler). ⁶⁴ Auer, Couper-Kuhlen, and Müller, Language in Time, 6. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 27–8. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 57. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 14–15. ⁶⁸ Ibid., 57–8.

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rhythmic patterns.⁶⁹ One way this is accomplished is through micro pausing. The use of almost unnoticeable breaks in speech can be used to link syllables and stresses together into a constant beat. The audience naturally follows the same rhythm established by the speaker, responding during pauses and listening for their rhythmic cues. If someone falls off the beat with an early or late stress, the rhythm is disturbed and the beat must be regained.⁷⁰ When such rhythmic integration is interrupted, which happens not infrequently, repair must be made through meaning explanation in order to ensure that everyone is at the same place in the conversation.⁷¹ In other words, rhythm is bound up with the relational and connective dimensions of language. Within the collectively-produced jazz rhythm, musicians make the same sorts of moves as one does in conversation. Richard Davis, for example, says that one person might create a rhythmic motif and the band then picks it up and “It’s like sayin’ that you all are talking about the same thing.”⁷² A particular theme is rarely restricted to a single instrument. Instead, one person will begin an idea and others will pick it up and take it in a direction through various interjections, thereby completing the idea.⁷³ Such back-andforth is not necessarily harmonious; it includes negotiation and struggles for control of the musical space. A particular musical interjection may be experienced as a friendly response, or as an interruption or challenge.⁷⁴ Regardless, the shared rhythm ensures that these musical moves all take place within a shared framework, as part of the same conversation. It connects the musicians to one another and to the larger musical context. Monson argues, based on research by Lila Abu-Lughod, Catherine Lutz, and Silverstein, that music, ⁶⁹ Ibid., 62. ⁷⁰ Ibid., 76. ⁷¹ Ibid., 70–1. This is especially important during the openings and closings of conversations because these are the times at which mutuality is first being tested and established, or mutually brought to a close. Ibid., 66–7. Auer illustrates the disagreement of rhythms during a phone-in radio show: so I think we’ll kick off; with er— /‘sexy Nora; who / /‘lives in Heaton Chapel. / /‘hi! Nora: ! (0.7) ‘hi (late) D: /‘hi! / (faster) /‘how are you / /‘Nora? / N: /‘oh hel-/ /’lo! / D: he-/ /‘hello, Dave:

When Nora initially responds to Dave with a delay, the rhythm is thrown off and Dave has to compensate in order to regain the original or a new rhythm. ⁷² Monson, Saying Something, 32. ⁷³ Ibid., 78. ⁷⁴ Ibid., 80.

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like conversation, can be involved in “the establishment and maintenance of human and/or spiritual relationships”⁷⁵ in large part because the communallyestablished rhythms indicate emotional meaning, thereby mediating and constructing relationships between performers. Rhythm, which we think of as a musical feature, functions not only aesthetically, but also pragmatically in establishing relational coherence. As an example of the connective capacity of rhythm in communication, Rowan Williams has recently cited the research of Phoebe Caldwell on interacting with those with Autism Spectrum Disorder, drawing conclusions about what it might teach us about the nature of language more broadly.⁷⁶ According to Caldwell, those with ASD will often create repetitive patterns in order to focus their attention, thereby protecting an over-stimulated brain. This is essentially talking to one’s self through repetitive rhythms of speech or gesture. Communication is only possible if one enters into this self-talk by repeating the individual’s rhythms. Responding to the rhythm of fingertapping with a similar pattern, for example, sets up a safe sensory space for communication.⁷⁷ It opens a way out of the distressed person’s world because it feeds information back that is familiar rather than threatening. Once this connection has been established, rhythms can then be subtly altered.⁷⁸ This is a highly controlled form of communication in which the communicator must learn a new language by figuring out the rhythm that has been devised to protect an overstimulated brain and so enter the world of the autistic individual.⁷⁹ In other words, communication in the case of ASD is only possible through the synchronization of rhythms. Such imitation communicates empathy, that one is entering into the experience of the other. Through repetition, one says, “I am here with you in this rhythm, in this language.” It is through this empathy that the ASD patient is then able to transcend his or her rhythmic-loop into new rhythmic variations. Imitative repetitions, and variation on such repetitions, are part of how rhythmic connection works more generally, both in jazz improvisation and conversational improvisation. Repetition of rhythmic phrasing is used, for example, by ensemble members to construct responses to one another.⁸⁰ Empathy in verbal communication is likewise based on mimicry. Emotional contagion, one of the elements of empathy, involves taking on the emotion of one’s interlocutor through imitating (intentionally or automatically) their ⁷⁵ Ibid., 181. ⁷⁶ Rowan Williams, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 95–103. ⁷⁷ Phoebe Caldwell, Finding You, Finding Me: Using Intensive Interaction to Get in Touch with People with Severe Learning Disabilities Combined with Autistic Spectrum Disorder (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2006), 105. ⁷⁸ Williams, The Edge of Words, 95–6. ⁷⁹ Ibid., 98. ⁸⁰ Monson, Saying Something, 89.

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physical gestures and movements in one’s own body.⁸¹ This suggests that one of the functions of poetic rhythm—emotionally connecting the reader or hearer with the semantic content of the poem—is an intensified instance of rhythm’s more general function of holding disparate things together, including the physical and the emotional, or the formal and the social.⁸² Empathy also requires that one suspend one’s own rhythms of thought and routine in order to enter into the experience of the other. In the case of ASD, this involves creating a shared flow in which the noise of internal conversation between brain and body is interrupted⁸³ and a bridge is built to the outside world.⁸⁴ This too is true of all conversation. Entering into a conversation requires the interruption of one’s own rhythms, not necessarily the rhythmic processes of one’s body, but the patterns of one’s thought and work. Musicians, likewise, must listen to one another rather than coming to the performance with a set plan to be performed; it may be the case that one intends to make a point but then the “conversation” goes in a different direction.⁸⁵ Monson says that jazz involves “a type of listening much like that required of participants in a conversation, who have to pay attention to what is transpiring if they expect to say things that make sense to the other participants.”⁸⁶ The emphasis in jazz is on the temporal response to “mistakes,” confusion, or jarring events, and the moments of musical ingenuity that emerge from such events. Such ingenuity would be impossible without close listening. While synchronicity between persons is the state that is created through the matching of rhythms, diachronically speaking, such matching includes an oscillation between one’s own rhythms and the suspension and re-direction of those rhythms for the sake of a shared rhythm. Thus, while the rhythms of jazz and of conversation make synchronicity between participants possible, this is nevertheless a synchronicity that is realized only through the unfolding of time, and the interruptions that such unfolding involves. In the context of improvisation, whether verbal or musical, the diachronic dimensions of rhythm are heightened since there is no pattern given all at once at the beginning. Thus, while the rhythms of language, a significant dimension of everyday life, are co-extensive with those of poetry, the absence of formal, given pattern highlights the rhythm’s diachronic properties.

⁸¹ Jean Decety and Andrew N. Meltzoff, “Empathy, Imitation, and the Social Brain,” in Coplan and Goldie, Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, 81. ⁸² As Raimon Panikkar says, “Rhythm is the reconciliation between physical processes and human feelings” (Raimon Panikkar, The Rhythm of Being: The Unbroken Trinity (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2010), 48). ⁸³ Phoebe Caldwell and Jane Horwood, From Isolation to Intimacy: Making Friends without Words (London: Jessica Kingsley, 2007), 26, 42. ⁸⁴ Ibid., 58–61. ⁸⁵ Monson, Saying Something, 81. ⁸⁶ Ibid., 84.

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Rhythm in Social Cohesion and Subversion The rhythms of an encounter, whether artistic or social, are not, however, limited to the encounter itself. They always extend beyond that encounter, connecting it to larger bodily and environmental rhythms. We have already considered what this means with respect to the performance of a poem, namely that it is not a sealed artefact but comes into contact with the rhythms—the breath and heartbeat—of the bodies it encounters, forming them in particular ways. Likewise, jazz improvisation is not merely a conversation between musicians; it connects musicians to an audience and even connects a particular performance to a larger musical and social landscape through evoking musical themes and employing certain rhythmic moves. Monson says that the relationships between interactive performance and intermusical associations “are part of the process by which communities grow out of the social activities and emotions of real people,”⁸⁷ and that “interactive musical conversation in real-time performance, combined with the intermusical and intercultural associations musicians and audiences bring to the conversation over time, have much to do with where the feeling in rhythmic feels comes from.”⁸⁸ The emotional bonds that rhythm facilitates are always created, maintained, or dissolved in larger social contexts.⁸⁹ Dance provides another example of the rhythmic relation between a specific form and larger social context. Kimerer LaMothe, in her writing on dance based on the work of Gerardus van der Leeuw, says that dance is a display of the medium of human life, namely the body. However, such a display is double-edged. In displaying the body, dance displays a connection between all humans in their bodiliness, while also being a singular articulation, an individual expression. Van der Leeuw says that a human senses the rhythms of a culture, senses her own similar rhythms, and then uses these to respond to the rhythms of that culture.⁹⁰ In so doing, the individual simultaneously associates herself with the culture and expresses the uniqueness of her own bodily identity. A dance is an enactment of the web of communal relations in which the body is embedded, revealing the unity of life even as it conceals it within a particular expression.⁹¹ Dance is a process of organization, ordering one’s own movements and those of the world into a whole.⁹²

⁸⁷ Ibid., 180. ⁸⁸ Ibid., 185–6. ⁸⁹ Ibid., 182. ⁹⁰ Gerardus Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty: The Holy in Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 14. Kimerer L.LaMothe, Between Dancing and Writing: The Practice of Religious Studies (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2004), 186–7. ⁹¹ LaMothe, Between Dancing and Writing, 180. ⁹² Van der Leeuw, Sacred and Profane Beauty, 14.

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These examples indicate that while we may know or think we know where an artistic artefact or performance begins and ends, the beginnings and endings of its rhythms are in fact woven into and interact with the movements of a larger context. The rhythms of performances, artefacts, and encounters are both shaped by other rhythms in which they take place, and themselves spill over into shaping larger social realities. If we take a step back from any particular rhythm, it appears as one form in a much larger web of intersecting rhythms. In the mid-twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre explored the possibility of studying sociological and geographical patterns in terms of their rhythms, which he describes as the motions of repetition and difference produced by the intersection of place, time, and energy. Lefebvre calls his method “rhythmanalysis.” When seen in this way, the everyday is a “polyrhythmia” of cyclical and linear, and of natural and machinic rhythms,⁹³ an interface between the linear rhythms of everyday life and cosmic cycles, involving both compromises and disturbances.⁹⁴ These rhythms make possible the synchronicities on which societies are based—between people, between people and machines, between people and nature, and between people and power—just as rhythm connects layers of different kinds of movement in a poem. In other words, rhythm not only generates inter-personal connections but also forms largerlevel social groups. According to Lefebvre, our theories of rhythm are founded on our experience of the body, a bundle of interacting biological, physiological, sociological, and psychological rhythms.⁹⁵ Each of us engages rhythms by referring them to our own rhythms of heartbeat, breath, walking, sleeping, etc.⁹⁶ The rhythmanalyst, beginning from his or her own rhythms, becomes attentive to the surrounding rhythms of the environment through these bodily rhythms, a process that reveals the ways in which everything is in motion. In short, the rhythmanalyst must think with his or her body and arrive at a knowledge of rhythms through experience.⁹⁷ Thus, while he says that one must, to an extent, be outside a rhythm to analyze it, in order to really grasp a rhythm one must have first been grasped by it.⁹⁸ Lefebvre’s own analysis involves a kind of “reading” of the intersecting stops-and-starts that make up the rhythm of the city from his balcony, as one might look over a poem to identify the intersecting oscillations of its rhythm. However, perceiving these rhythms requires their intersection with his own body first, particularly, Lefebvre says, in memory “in order not to isolate this present and in order to live it in all its diversity, made up of subjects and objects, subjective states and objective ⁹³ Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 25. ⁹⁴ Ibid., 18, 37, 41. ⁹⁵ Ibid., 77, 90. ⁹⁶ Ibid., 20. ⁹⁷ Ibid., 31. ⁹⁸ Ibid., 37.

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figures.”⁹⁹ The observer “takes his time as first reference, but . . . the first impression displaces itself and includes the most diverse rhythms. . . . Rhythms always need a reference; the initial moment persists through other perceived givens.”¹⁰⁰ Lefebvre’s rhythmanalyst therefore takes up a similar methodological relationship to the world as that recommended by Merleau-Ponty, for whom “The search for the conditions of possibility is in principle posterior to an actual experience.”¹⁰¹ One of the few places that Merleau-Ponty speaks about rhythm directly is in his description of resonance as that which makes sensing possible. He says that “in the sensible a certain rhythm of existence is put forward.”¹⁰² The possibility of sensing is based on the corporeal resonance of the body in response to a resonance in the world. One enters into this form of existence through resonance and is thereby brought into relationship with the other. One’s body becomes this rhythm, this particular way of vibrating.¹⁰³ In order to perceive the color blue, for example, the body must resonate with the particular vibration that presents itself as the color blue. Perception is based on this synchronicity made possible by the body’s own rhythms. In other words, the capacity to perceive anything requires that its rhythms extend beyond itself, that they are taken up by that which encounters it and thereby come into contact with all the other previous constitutions of the one who perceives, as a reconstitution of the sediments of all previous constitutions.¹⁰⁴ In other words, we can think about the relationship between the human and reality in general much in the way that we think about the relationship between the reader or hearer and poetic rhythm. Regardless of what one thinks of this theory of perception as it applies to things like the color blue, rhythm itself is perceived by bodily reconstitution or vibration. Nevertheless, Lefebvre has been critical of phenomenology for its toonarrow focus on the body–world relationship as isolated from larger realities of society and power.¹⁰⁵ Merleau-Ponty is almost exclusively focused on the intertwining of self and world in terms of the embeddedness of a lone body in an architecture of space-time. Lefebvre, however, points out that this lone body is always already formed by social relations and dynamics of power, and rhythm plays a role in this social-extensity as well. Rhythm is a form of control, and in order for there to be social change, an intervention must be made that imprints a new rhythm on persons.¹⁰⁶ Lefebvre calls this “dressage,” the production of bodies as social bodies, which determines the majority of ⁹⁹ Ibid., 45. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., 46. ¹⁰¹ Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 44–5. ¹⁰² Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 213. ¹⁰³ Ibid., 211–12. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 215. ¹⁰⁵ Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, Donald Nicholson-Smith (trans) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 183. Pierre Bourdieu makes this same criticism (see Andrew Blaikie et al., eds, The Body: Sociology, Nature, and the Body (London: Routledge, 2004), 296). ¹⁰⁶ Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 24.

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rhythms.¹⁰⁷ The basic, animal rhythms of hunger, sleep, excretion, etc. are modified and educated by social life. Training and education and the transfer of information all take place in rhythm.¹⁰⁸ Rhythm is such an effective social and political tool because it approaches the body and the crowd as essentially interchangeable. A society is composed of crowds, and crowds are groups of bodies just as bodies are groups of other bodies (cells, organs, etc). The rhythms that govern the “crowd” of the body also govern the crowds composed of such bodies. Govern the rhythms of the body, and you govern the movement of the crowd.¹⁰⁹ In other words, participation in a certain kind of rhythm furnishes one with a particular social and cultural identity. For example, Plato believed dance to be part of moral education, and therefore important for the ordering of society.¹¹⁰ Linguist Peter Auer says, “The ‘process of civilization’ (N. Eilias) is in essential ways a process of imposing socio-cultural rhythm on our lives.”¹¹¹ It is a powerful form of social identity construction and even social control. Rhythm’s capacity for unification is therefore not unequivocally positive, but is capable of slipping into hegemony—whoever controls the rhythm, controls society. The American enslavement of African peoples represents a historical example of the operation of hegemonic rhythms. This situation is perhaps unique in the history of slavery in part due to the extensive mechanistic rhythms that it involved. Martin Munro points out that the slaves were taken from their familiar rhythmic contexts and were subjugated by the alienating rhythms of the rigorous schedules set by machines because the slaves themselves were largely understood to be parts of a machine.¹¹² What is interesting about this situation is how slave communities were nevertheless able to rhythmically subvert the imposed rhythms by expressing their own rhythms that emerged out of both their African heritage and the new situation in which they found themselves. The rhythms of slavery were contested by the assertion of an alternative identity based on the democratic, collective expression of the group.¹¹³ For example, theorists of black aesthetics such as Fred Moten have pointed to the importance of the break, cut, or disruption in the music growing out of African-American slave culture. He says that the slave is a speaking commodity that disrupts the subjectivity generated by systems of capital and consumption through the materiality of his or her speech.¹¹⁴ The music that comes out of this tradition lingers in the cut or disruption to such systems. Moten says ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 49. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 52. ¹⁰⁹ Ibid., 51. ¹¹⁰ Plato, Laws 657d. ¹¹¹ Auer, Couper-Kuhlen, and Müller, Language in Time, 4. ¹¹² Martin Munro, Different Drummers: Rhythm and Race in the Americas (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 19–20. ¹¹³ Ibid., 20. ¹¹⁴ Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 12.

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that this is the space between meaning and expression. The shrieks and yells, the ways in which “musical abundance” cuts off words, are examples of these caesurae and interruptions generated by the materiality of speech.¹¹⁵ Moten calls this “an expressive procreativity improvising through opposition and relation of cut and suture.”¹¹⁶ On the one hand, the association of race and rhythm can be essentialist or even racist, yet it also indicates a kind of resistance and impenetrable subjectivity for many African-Americans.¹¹⁷ Since these rhythms have grown out of the African-American experience of slavery, they both signal a loss of identity and assert a new identity. Part of what Moten is here gesturing at is the unique historical situation of African-American music, which opens up spaces for negotiation both between African and European rhythms, as well as between the African-American identity as a whole and the diverse singularities of which that always-incomplete whole is composed. According to Christopher Small, while African-American rhythms are not the same as African rhythms, the African attitude towards rhythm in general, which approaches rhythm as a complex pattern of gaps in which one can improvise new rhythms, is preserved.¹¹⁸ This understanding of rhythm is perhaps what enabled the slaves to use rhythm as a channel for the interruption of hegemony and the negotiation of identity. It is an example of an approach to rhythm in which rhythm itself is used to break up an overly-tight, oppressive synchrony. In contrast to the mechanistic rhythms that were imposed on the slaves, African-American rhythm grew up as distinctively diachronic. It was opportunistic, improvisational, and evolving, seizing and creating available gaps in order to affect transitory communities. It was expressed and performed from out of the inside of an oppressive rhythm as its suspension, rather than imposed as a ¹¹⁵ Ibid., 89, 91–2, 105. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., 122. ¹¹⁷ Munro, Different Drummers, 4, 16. This is the difference between Munro and Moten on the one hand, and Amiri Baraka on the other. The latter approaches rhythm as an essentialist category that describes the African-American community as a whole (much like Heidegger, according to Moten, In the Break, 87). As an essentialist category, black music is for Baraka fundamentally different than, opposed to, and destructive of white forms, an “unmediated performance of essential blackness” (Moten, Different Drummers, 145). Moten says “That thinking is manifest precisely where Baraka establishes an ethos of violent differentiation by way of essentializing differences . . . that replicates the [oscillational form of the] ethos and thinking he would abdure” (Ibid., 125). Rhythm, for Baraka, is a racial differentiator, a valorized black pure process of improvisation is opposed to the white system (Amiri Baraka, Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), 25–37; Moten, Different Dummers, 130), while for Munro it is an ambiguous force that can be used for good or ill, as unifying and interruptive. Likewise, for Moten as described here, black music is not an opposition of one totality to another, but a process of cutting and disruption which opens spaces in which the relation between totality and singularity can be negotiated (Munro, Different Drummers, 98–207). ¹¹⁸ Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in AfroAmerican Music (London: Calder, 1987), 295. Small argues that this is particularly the case for musical styles such as ragtime.

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pattern from the outside. In other words, the interruptive capacities of rhythm were leveraged. This is the trouble with placing too much value on synchronicity in its own right. Synchronicity can tip over into hegemony. The interruptive dimension of rhythm is a corrective to this temptation. Moreover, while rhythm can be manipulated and used for problematic, hegemonic purposes, the interruptive dimension of rhythm means that it can only ever be controlled imperfectly; variations and improvisations serve to challenge, disrupt, and break up the oppressive uses to which it is put.¹¹⁹ It is therefore unsurprising that there is a fairly consistent tie between improvised music and marginalized communities and their attempts to construct alternative social configurations that challenge the status quo.¹²⁰ These possibilities for disruption are latent within the nature of rhythm itself. Rhythm is not a universal unifier. Rhythms are plural, and, as such, they simultaneously unite persons in a community and divide that community from those who do not participate in its rhythm.¹²¹ At the same time that rhythmic practices establish and maintain particular social configurations and identities, they also manifest social divisions.¹²² Even then, rhythm does not even overcome all disagreements and divisions within a particular community. Any unity that it can create is only ever local and provisional and attempts to make it otherwise may be the very thing that can lead to oppression. What this discussion demonstrates, however, is that rhythm is politically significant. Insofar as questions of identity are based on to what or with whom we belong, rhythm plays a part in constructing that identity. However, it does so in a way that is double-edged. The connections and structures established and maintained by participation in rhythmic patterns are not in and of themselves a good thing. Synchrony can be used for many different ends.¹²³ Nevertheless, the example of the African-American slave communities shows that where such rhythms are problematic, those rhythms can be used to interrupt and transect themselves by inserting rhythmic cuts and breaks that open up spaces for new rhythmic variations and improvisations. Successfully confronting hegemonic rhythms without the use of rhythm may not even be possible. Rhythm’s importance lies not in its being a self-referentially ¹¹⁹ Munro, Different Drummers, 216. ¹²⁰ See for example, Daniel Fischlin, Ajay Heble, and George Lipsitz, The Fierce Urgency of Now: Improvisation, Rights, and the Ethics of Cocreation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). Contemporary examples of this phenomenon might be hip-hop or rave cultures. See for example Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen, “Aesthetic Potentials of Rhythm in Hip-Hop Music and Culture: Rhythmic Conventions, Skills, and Everyday Life,” in Hoogstad and Pederson, Off Beat: Pluralizing Rhythm. ¹²¹ Hoogstad and Stougaard, “Introduction,” Off Beat, 23. ¹²² Small, Music of the Common Tongue, 67–74. ¹²³ Other examples are described in William H. McNeill, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 155–6.

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positive dynamic, but in its power. The value of any particular rhythm depends on its patterns, effects, and interactions with other rhythms. The simultaneous power of rhythm and the variability of its positivity are why we require attention to and a nuanced evaluation of rhythms. Once again, we have moved in the direction of the diachronic. As the scale of the rhythm changes from the microcosm of the poem to the networks of society, so too does our relationship to the rhythm. It is relatively easy to view the rhythms of a poem synchronically because one has a sense of where the art object begins and ends and the rhythms that can, therefore, be considered part of the pattern. In considering the rhythms of the world more broadly, however, the limits of what ought to be included for analysis are less clear, making synchronic analysis more difficult. A rhythm may create local synchronies, stable patterns of harmony, but these are provisional and local. They change over time and may even be interrupted. The diachronic perspective, therefore, becomes even more important when considering rhythm as a feature of reality more generally. At the broadest, phenomenological level, as a general feature of experience, our relationship to rhythm is always diachronic. We are always in the middle of ongoing rhythms, able to see local patterns but never the pattern of the whole. While the emphasis on diachronicity and improvisation increases as we zoom out in this way, rhythm in poetry and everyday life are coextensive. They exhibit the same features of harmony and interruption, of bodily encounter and cooperative construction. Philosophies that consider the rhythm of reality in general can, therefore, be thought of as analogous to poetic theories that attempt to identify the rhythms of poetry. Moreover, the connection between the importance of both the synchronic and the diachronic, but particularly the diachronic, for understanding both poetic rhythm and rhythm more generally reveals that philosophies can likewise be evaluated like poetic theories for their capacity to do justice to both dimensions. Just as poetic rhythms are analyzed through synchronic–diachronic theories, philosophic uses can likewise be evaluated as diachronic or synchronic perspectives on the rhythms of reality more generally. As we will see, most philosophical approaches to rhythm privilege the synchronic perspective. The following chapters are dedicated to demonstrating how and why this approach creates theological problems and to showing why the diachronic is not only a phenomenological requirement but a theological requirement for theories of rhythm that seek to serve human flourishing.

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Part II Philosophy

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2 Synchronicity I Rhythm as the Whole

Rhythm has enjoyed a recent upsurge in French and Italian postmodern philosophy, as exhibited in the work of thinkers such as Pascal Michon, but also Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, and Henri Lefebvre. The roots of this upsurge can be traced back to certain thinkers in previous generations of philosophers such as Émile Benveniste, Henri Meschonnic, and Friedrich Nietzsche and Henri Bergson even further back. This upsurge involves two competing depictions of rhythm and these are bound up with two different approaches to reality. They do not, however, map perfectly onto Michon’s pre-Socratic/Platonic distinction. Some philosophers do use the pre-Socratic concept of rhythm as it is described by Benveniste and Meschonnic including Gilles Deleuze, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, and Friedrich Nietzsche. For them, rhythm is a fluid form and is often associated with a Heraclitean metaphysic in which harmony is immanently and seamlessly generated from chaos or opposition. However, these thinkers also take a synchronic perspective on rhythm as described in the previous chapter and it is this approach, in particular, in which I am interested. The second approach to rhythm—used by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Julia Kristeva—includes a significant dimension of interruption and is more diachronic. Nevertheless, it is not Platonic, that is, it is not based on meter, number, or periodicity. My analysis is likewise both similar to and different from another theorist of rhythm named Amittai Aviram, who has performed a similar analysis of rhythm in continental philosophy. Like Michon, Aviram argues that rhythm can be understood in two ways: as the form of expression, or as a regular beat. The former is associated with the expression of the subject, while the latter is an interruption to the subject.¹ While I agree with Aviram that rhythm ¹ Aviram, “The Meaning of Rhythm,” in Massimo Verdicchio and Robert Burch, eds. Between Philosophy and Poetry: Writing, Rhythm, History, (New York: Continuum, 2002) 162.

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can be classified according to whether it functions as a form or as an interruption, I argue that whether a thinker ultimately articulates one or the other depends on whether his or her perspective on rhythm is primarily synchronic or diachronic. Most of the thinkers that I analyze in this and the following chapter include elements of both expression and interruption such that it is difficult to simply classify them according to the one or the other. Doing so ultimately results in an over-simplification of their thought, as I will particularly point out with respect to Nietzsche. The differences between them are ultimately more a matter of whether the interruption is described as a dimension of the whole viewed from the outside, or whether it is felt to be an interruption to the subject from within the rhythm. For example, although Nietzsche acknowledges interruption, such interruption is a function of the form of reality as a whole and I, therefore, consider him to ultimately approach rhythm synchronically, as form, contra Aviram. Likewise, while Aviram argues that Lacoue-Labarthe and Kristeva put forward rhythm as an expression of the subject, I will demonstrate in the next chapter that this is only a secondary dimension of rhythm. Its primary nature is disruptive, and this disruption cannot be reduced to the movements of reality as a whole. The synchronic–diachronic model, therefore, results in my classifying thinkers in a different way than both Michon and Aviram. This chapter is an analysis and theological evaluation of rhythm as Benvenistian form, philosophies of rhythm that rely on the Benvenistian definition of the rhythm of the pre-Socratics. The philosophies of Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Heidegger include different manifestations of this Benvenistian rhythm and operate as variations on a Heraclitean (anti)metaphysic. These thinkers approach rhythm differently from those in the following chapter, even though they may be similar in other ways and are often approached together under something like the idea of “postmodern” philosophy. What I hope this difference in approaches to rhythm will demonstrate is that “postmodern” philosophy is not homogeneous and cannot be treated as such by theology.

BENVENISTIAN RHYTHM AND HERACLITEAN ( A N T I )M E T A P H Y S ICS

Gilles Deleuze Gilles Deleuze is known as one of the most radical and direct proponents of a pure logic of immanence, out of which he develops a metaphysic or anti-metaphysic, depending on how one defines “metaphysics.” Deleuze uses rhythm as one of many perspectives from which to describe his complex

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system. Others include “the fold,” “the plane of immanence,” and the One-All that absorbs everything.² These images describe the nature of both thought and reality. In terms of thought, the plane of immanence holds concepts together and is the space from which they unfold. It is not itself a concept, but it is also not other than those concepts which it holds. The “concepts are like multiple waves, rising and falling, but the plane of immanence is the single wave that rolls them up and unrolls them.”³ In terms of ontology, modalities, like concepts, are expressions of the single, univocal substance that produces them. Each monad contains the same universe as all the others in different expressions and sequences of folds. Each of these modalities is a fold in a single fabric; there are no gaps between them. Together they make up the fold, a “coextensive movement of veiling and unveiling.”⁴ “Fold” therefore denotes the myriad folds beneath the surface, the larger folds of the monads which they generate, and the whole of the system. Thus, while the plane of immanence is an ontological univocity, it is also the principle of differentiation. It is an infinite movement of differentiation and dissolution, veiling and unveiling. However, such movements and differentiations are all of the same order. Reality is not tiered but is a single, infinite movement of becoming. Transcendence is merely an illusion that emerges when the movement of the One–All is perceived to be interrupted.⁵ Nevertheless, this plane of immanence takes on divine significance for Deleuze. He describes the unity of the folds as a “spiritual presence.”⁶ God is the process of folding and unfolding, perhaps even the Fold itself, which is everywhere, animating from the inside.⁷ Monads are themselves the passage of God because each coincides with the point of view of the divine.⁸ God is thus the whole of the system, which cannot be separated from the folding and unfolding process. The movement of the plane of immanence is generated by the interpenetration of opposites. Immanence is “the irruption of incompossibilities on the same stage,” where the principle of non-contradiction is overcome, and contradiction exists in unity.⁹ The plane of immanence has two sides or poles. These two sides are described as the virtual and the actual (or sometimes as matter and soul). The virtual is a horizontal field of originary, chaotic forces or intensities. It involves two movements in opposite directions between flux and identity: movements of organization and movements of dissolution. Movements of organization generate the second pole, the actual: that which we perceive as stable identities. The identities, however, are only vibrations, ² Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 44. ³ Ibid., 36. ⁴ Ibid., 30. ⁵ Ibid., 47. ⁶ Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Athlone, 1993), 125. ⁷ Ibid., 13, 73. ⁸ Ibid., 73. ⁹ Ibid., 82.

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“imperceptible rhythms” in the virtual field of forces.¹⁰ These two facets of immanence are not two realities, but two perspectives, two expressions of the one world, the one Fold, such that we cannot really distinguish where one ends and the other begins.¹¹ The plane of immanence is a to-and-fro movement between virtual and actual, organization and dissolution. Another pair of terms Deleuze uses to designate these movements are “difference” and “repetition.” The relationship between virtual and actual, on the one hand, and difference and repetition, on the other, is complex. Difference and repetition are here not properties of already-existing identities such that they would represent either the repetition of an identity or differences between identities. Rather, repetitions are repetitions of difference itself, repetitions within the flux of the virtual. The fixity of actualities is due to repetitions of the underlying movements of the virtual. The repetition of prior repetitions within this flux creates the illusion of a stable identity. Repetitions are therefore a designation for the movements towards organization between the poles of virtual and actual. There are three sorts of repetition, which correspond to what Deleuze calls three “syntheses.” The first two of these syntheses tend towards stability. The first is that of habit or contraction by which repetition is contracted into actualities, and past and future are contracted into a present,¹² they are the “presents that pass,” present passing into future. The second synthesis is the passing of the present, or more simply, the past. The past is a contraction as well, in which there are “an infinity of diverse degrees of relaxation and contraction at an infinity of levels.”¹³ Memory is the corresponding repetition.¹⁴ Thus, each of these two repetitions corresponds to the actual (present, habit, individuation) and the virtual (past, memory, flux). Likewise, we might say that each of these repetitions corresponds to each of the levels of the plane of immanence. Habits are the concepts, actualities, or monads that are infinitely differentiated from one another, while memory is the plane of immanence itself, or the lower folds—the originary chaos of the virtual. The third synthesis or repetition enables these two syntheses to relate to each other. The third synthesis is the unfolding of time itself, rather than of ¹⁰ Ibid., 77, 86. Deleuze’s thought is very close to that of Henri Bergson at several points. Bergson thought about reality in terms of duration, as constant motion and flux, such that what we perceive as stable identities are in fact illusions. Duration is a current that flows continuously and animates objects during the interval of their existence, not as something that provides continuity, but as the impetus of absolute change (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (London: Macmillan, 1911), 1–2). Nevertheless, we do not perceive reality this way because action in the world requires fixedness, such that thought must adopt the rhythm of action (Ibid., 324). ¹¹ Ibid., 119. ¹² Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), 74–6. ¹³ Ibid., 84. Deleuze is here relying on Bergson. ¹⁴ Ibid., 79.

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contents in time. It has the character of being “out of joint,” a static caesura between past and future.¹⁵ As the cut between the future, which is open, new, and linear, and the past, an absolute cyclicity, the third synthesis prevents time from becoming circular and orienting itself only towards the past and the same. The repetition of identities is consigned to the past and cannot be repeated in the future because the future is constructed of difference. However, the difference or movement between identities is repeated in the future.¹⁶ One side of the caesura represents repetition (past) and the other side is the newness of difference (future), but the caesura between them is the repetition of difference itself. While the caesura divides these two, it also holds them together, and in doing so it represents the whole of time—all of the events in the future, and all of the events in the past. The third synthesis operates in the “between” and in so doing comes to stand in for the whole of the system.¹⁷ Deleuze associates rhythm with this third synthesis. Rhythm is the relationship between the two different sorts of time: “presents that pass” and “pasts that are preserved.”¹⁸ He juxtaposes this rhythm with the symmetrical repetition of cadence, more akin to the first synthesis, which is merely the “envelope” for a more significant rhythmic repetition which is based on unequal accents that create inequalities and rhythmic “events.”¹⁹ Deleuze’s most thorough treatment of rhythm is found in his essay “1837: Of the Refrain” in A Thousand Plateaus, in which rhythm is bound up with the relationship between chaos and milieus. A milieu is a “block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component,”²⁰ a vibration. This is the cadencerepetition that Deleuze juxtaposes to rhythm. The milieu is open to the chaos out of which it emerges, but it counteracts that chaos through rhythm. He writes that milieus and rhythm are both born out of chaos as its ecstasies. Both chaos and rhythm exist between milieus. They are not opposites, but chaos becomes rhythm when two milieus, two “heterogeneous space-times,” communicate with one another through “transcoding.” Each milieu has particular patterns of repetition, which are like meter. These are transcoded when one repetition or code receives fragments of a different code without ceasing to become what it is. The piece of code from another milieu does not make the two homogenous, but it manifests in a new and unique way in the milieu into ¹⁵ Ibid., 88–9. ¹⁶ James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 102–3. ¹⁷ Deleuze also describes the third synthesis as the Fold or THE plane of immanence. See Deleuze, The Fold, 10 and Deleuze, What is Philosophy, 59 for examples of how the third synthesis comes to represent the all by standing between. ¹⁸ Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 106. ¹⁹ Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 21. ²⁰ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 313.

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which it has been transcoded such that an interaction between the two takes place. Rhythm is the difference between repetitions that ties them together as “heterogeneous blocks.” It binds them together without overcoming their heterogeneity and is, therefore, that which makes communication between them possible. Rhythm both divides milieus, distinguishing them from one another, and holds them together, allowing for communication. Rhythm is the between of milieus but also operates between chaos and the milieu. It operates between repetitions, but also between difference and repetition, as with the third synthesis. Deleuze and Guattari articulate this situation as a response to the problem of individuation, that is, the attempt to indicate individuation without individualism, which is based on an antecedent subject and on differentiation.²¹ Individuation, in contrast, occurs when pieces of milieus and the rhythms between them are territorialized. This too is an act of rhythm, but of a rhythm that has become “expressive.”²² An expressive rhythm is one that is the expression of the relationship of a territory to its external circumstances and internal impulses. Such territorialization means that all dimensions of an assemblage—the weather, environment, dangers, longings, emotions—all become rhythmic (as well as melodic).²³ Chaos and the territory are two movements—movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, harmony and opposition—which traverse all rhythms and milieus. They are the moves of organization and dissolution that shuttle between actual and virtual. This rhizomatic system is a “superposition of disparate rhythms, an articulation from within of an interrhythmicity, with no imposition of meter or cadence.” Territorialization “produces consolidation aggregates, of succession as well as of coexistence,” in which heterogeneous components are held together by “intercalary oscillations.”²⁴ In other words, rhythm is not a transcendent structure, but a harmony that emerges immanently from chaos; it is the relationships between the milieus that emerge from and exist in chaos. Out of these relationships, a rhythm may emerge that is capable of territorializing groups of milieus thereby individuating them without overcoming their differences. Rhythm is thus for Deleuze a principle of harmony that operates between difference and repetition, or between heterogeneous milieus. It is differentiated from cadence, repetition, or vibration that individuates actualities and is associated instead with the configuration of the flux or chaos between actual and virtual, which allows communication both between these poles

²¹ Pascal Michon, “A Rhythm Constellation in the 1970s and 1980s—Lefebvre, Foucault, Barthes, Serres, Morin, Deleuze & Guattari, and Meschonnic.” Rhuthmos, July21, 2017. http:// rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article2057 (accessed July 24, 2017). ²² Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 315. ²³ Ibid., 318–19. ²⁴ Ibid., 329.

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and between particular actualities. Notice that Deleuze is here using the Benvenistian, pre-Socratic definition of rhythm as fluid configuration, explicitly differentiating it from simple repetition or cadence.²⁵ This approach to rhythm has all the marks of the synchronic perspective. It eschews any periodicity and is instead interested in the configuration of the whole, captured under a single, static caesura. While Deleuze invokes the caesura or the cut, suggesting an interruption of some sort, this is not an interruption experienced in time, but a feature of reality that stands in for the nature of the whole itself. While Deleuze recognizes that this whole is in motion, that it includes movements of territorialization and deterritorialization, the perspective on those movements is a perspective from the outside that perceives the configuration of the whole. It is an assessment of the form of things in general, rather than of the temporal experience of encountering rhythm. Benvenistian rhythm functions metaphysically for Deleuze. Because the caesura between the two syntheses is not simply a division but represents the whole of the plane of immanence, a whole that is not other than the system but emerges from between its components, rhythm is likewise this reality-aswhole. Deleuze here applies Benveniste’s definition of rhythm as fluid configuration to the whole of reality. Moreover, this is a reality that is generated from the confrontation of opposites, the absolute difference between the two syntheses that the caesura of the third synthesis represents. In making this caesura stand in for the whole of the plane of immanence, the whole is constituted by the confrontation of these opposites. The principle of non-contradiction is overcome and contradictions exist in unity. Deleuze’s approach to reality rejects the Aristotelian metaphysical principles of non-contradiction, stability, and eternity in favor of movement and flux. Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return is often closely associated with

²⁵ This is also similar to Bergson’s theory that the differing manifestations of life are characterized by different rhythms, which emerge through the restraining effect of matter on life. Matter splits life into various rhythms, which we perceive as individuals (Bergson, Creative Evolution, 265; Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), 207). Reality is given to us through the opposition of matter and duration. Pure matter is described as pure repetition or rapid pulsation (Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Carol Publishing, 1992), 109). Eternity, in contrast, is described as the “concentration of all duration (Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. John Mullarkey and Michael Kolkman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 37). We can see the influence on Deleuze here, for whom objects are likewise associated with repetition, while rhythm is associated with the whole of the system. The whole of reality for Bergson is a series of interpenetrating rhythms, represented as a whole in eternity as the concentration of duration. Moreover, we can therefore classify Bergson as also adhering to Benveniste’s definition of rhythm in that rhythms for Bergson represent the particular relationship between motion and form that make up various dimensions of reality.

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this overcoming of Aristotelian metaphysics in an attempt to associate the whole of reality with the ebb and flow of the forces of “a physis that carries and dominates everything, generates and destroys.”²⁶ Deleuze carries this forward, suggesting that the identity of something is not dependent upon a stable presence, but on the possibility of its appearing repeatedly, eternally recurring at different times. Thus, changing objects are not dependent on a changeless Platonic Form, but receive their identity from their recurrence,²⁷ even as that identity is called into question by the process of recurrence. Deleuze appropriates Nietzsche’s eternal return as an example of his own immanent metaphysics and, in doing so, he argues that chaos and harmony are not opposites but mutually-dependent facets of the same process of reality.²⁸ This shift is associated with the philosophy of Heraclitus and several of the thinkers who reject Aristotelian metaphysics—Hegel,²⁹ Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Deleuze—tie their anti-metaphysics to the philosophy of Heraclitus. Heraclitus believed that flux and harmony are two mutuallyimplicating dimensions. While “all things are one,”³⁰ tension and change are necessary to preserve unity, and so the surface of things appears as a strife between opposite extremes.³¹ He says, “One must know that war is common and right is strife and that all things are happening by strife and necessity.”³² ²⁶ Karl Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, trans. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1997), 189. ²⁷ David Wood, The Deconstruction of Time (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2001), 31. ²⁸ “[Meschonnic] defended a linguistic anthropology against the Deleuzian ontology of power. As a poet and as a specialist of literature trained in linguistics, he considered that rhythm should be approached from a Humboldtian, Saussurean and Benvenistian viewpoint and not from a Nietzschean, Peircian and Austinian one. He never talked about it but I think he was indeed very suspicious about the kind of interpretation given to Nietzsche by Deleuze, who forgot that Nietzsche was a trained philologist . . . ” (Pascal Michon, “A Short History of Rhythm Theory Since the 1970s,” https://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article462 (accessed June 28, 2017)). ²⁹ Similar to the other thinkers described in this chapter, Hegel also uses rhythm to describe the whole, saying, “It is in this nature of what is to be in its being its own Notion, that logical necessity in general consists. This alone is the rational element and the rhythm of the organic whole . . . . The self-moving concrete shape makes itself into a simple determinateness; in so doing it raises itself to logical form, and exists in its essentiality; its concrete existence is just this movement” (G. F. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 36). Similar to Nietzsche, he argues that the opposition between the form of a proposition and the unity of the Notion is like the opposition between meter and accent (Ibid., 39). Hegel considers Heraclitus to be the first thinker to put forward dialectics, stating “Heraclitus at least understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic,” and even that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic” (G. W. F. Hegel, “Heraclitus” in Lectures on the History of Philosophy vol 1, trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 278; 279. http://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2165/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c= acls;cc=acls;idno=heb30754.0001.001;node=heb30754.0001.001%3A1;view=toc (accessed June 26, 2015)). ³⁰ Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments, ed. G.S. Kirk (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 65. ³¹ Ibid., 167–8. ³² Ibid., 238.

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Just as war is governed by unseen harmony, so too is the strife of the universe.³³ Justice is the strife of opposites, such that good and evil are both necessary in order for this strife to play out and result in harmony.³⁴ Strife and harmony are not opposed. Moreover, unity is determined by the Logos, a divine law of order described as the fire of harmony.³⁵ Thus, the process of harmony that comes about through strife is itself divinized.³⁶ Deleuze echoes this by suggesting that the oppositions of the two syntheses are really a manifestation of a larger harmony of differences in the plane of immanence. In fact, Deleuze says that “Heraclitus foresaw that there is no kind of opposition between chaos and cycle.”³⁷ Moreover, both Heraclitus and Deleuze divinize this process. Heraclitus, however, upholds the principle of strife to a greater degree than Deleuze, who only speaks of a gap or opposition, but not a productive strife. If we associate difference with opposition and repetition with harmony, then we see that Deleuze is not interested in the opposition between identities; he is not interested in contradiction. A contradiction is a negative difference, the negation of the essence of something. For Deleuze, however, identities do not violently come into contradiction with one another because they are too indeterminate to come into contradiction at all. Deleuze is interested in affirmative difference, the infinite generation of differentiation (the philosophy of “the and . . . ,” as in A Thousand Plateaus). Nietzsche’s eternal return is Deleuze’s model of this affirmative difference.³⁸

Friedrich Nietzsche Deleuze’s statement regarding Heraclitus comes from his book on Nietzsche, whom he credits as one of the influences on his thought. Deleuze associates his own system of the three syntheses with Nietzsche’s eternal return, saying that the eternal return is not a return of being, but a return of difference and becoming.³⁹ According to Deleuze, Nietzsche portrays time in a way that is beyond the opposition between linear and circular time. The eternal return is the return of the one and is thus circular. However, it is a decentered circle because the one which returns, which repeats itself, is the difference between singularities. The content of the eternal return is this system of difference, in which there is “no prior identity, no internal resemblance. It is all a matter of ³³ Adam Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians: The Divine Arche (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 28, 30. ³⁴ Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments, 180; Drozdek, Greek Philosophers as Theologians, 37. ³⁵ Ibid., 33. ³⁶ Heraclitus, The Cosmic Fragments, 166, 184. ³⁷ Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2006), 27. ³⁸ Ibid., 179. ³⁹ Ibid., 43–4.

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difference in the series, and of differences of difference in the communication between series.”⁴⁰ Repetition, the eternal return, is not anathema to this difference but is the natural product of it because each difference implicates the others and thus, secondarily, implicates and repeats itself as well, since it is itself implicated in the others.⁴¹ However, while the thought of Deleuze and Nietzsche are similar in some respects, Nietzsche is more comfortable with the dimension of struggle in Heraclitus’ philosophy than Deleuze, and the concept of rhythm is likewise caught up in the question of the degree to which struggle is a foundational principle of the cosmos. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche explains that his doctrine of the “Eternal Return of the Same” is something that could have been taught by Heraclitus and that the thoughts of Heraclitus are closest to his own because of the “Affirmation of transience and destruction, the decisive feature of any Dionysian philosophy, saying ‘yes’ to opposition and war, becoming, with a radical rejection of even the concept of being.”⁴² This is moreover based on earlier observations on Heraclitus: Heraclitus achieved this by means of an observation regarding the actual process of all coming-to-be and passing away. He conceived it under the form of polarity, as being the diverging of a force into two qualitatively different opposed activities that seek to re-unite. Everlastingly, a given quality contends against itself and separates into opposites; everlastingly these opposites seek to re-unite.⁴³

This association of Heraclitus with Dionysian philosophy is significant because it suggests a link in Nietzsche’s thought between Heraclitus and the kind of rhythm that Nietzsche associates with the Dionysian. In fact, Nietzsche himself describes Heraclitus’ “becoming” as the “eternal wavesurging and rhythm of things.”⁴⁴ In The Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian is described as the abyss of artistic chaos and disorganization which interrupts and overcomes the individual. It is those forces of death and chaos that are more primal than the individual and are therefore threatening to it. However, Dionysus also represents eros and affirmation of life. It is the play of opposites, simultaneously creative

⁴⁰ Ibid., 299. ⁴¹ Ibid., 300. ⁴² Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47–8. It has been suggested that Nietzsche’s philosophy did not actually concur with that of Heraclitus, but only with his own interpretation of Heraclitus in Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks. (Artur Przybyslawski, “Nietzsche Contra Heraclitus,” The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 23 (2002): 88–95). This is evident in the quote above in that Nietzsche suggests that Heraclitus rejected being, while we know that this is not the case. However, as will become apparent, Nietzsche adopted Heraclitus’ metaphysics in so far as it included elements of both strife and harmony. ⁴³ Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks trans. Marianne Cowan (Chicago, IL: Henry Regnery Company, 1962), 54. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 50.

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and destructive forces, a dangerous, “abominable mixture of sensuality and cruelty.”⁴⁵ The Apollonian, on the other hand, represents those images that create a veil over this Dionysian reality, leading us to believe in discrete objects with their own individual integrity. Apollo is only the appearance of things and not their reality; individuation is an illusion. However, while the Apollonian is an illusion, it is necessary because it makes possible the objects, concepts, and selves through which we grasp the world.⁴⁶ Both the Apollonian and Dionysian forces⁴⁷ are manifested in various artforms, the Apollonian in static and harmonious artistic practices such as sculpture, and the Dionysian in music and dance. Nietzsche associates both forces with two different kinds of rhythm. For Nietzsche, music is the paradigmatic form of Dionysian art, nevertheless, music is sometimes associated with the Apollonian, with respect to “the wave-like beat of rhythm.” Yet on the same page, he also notes that the Dionysian is the symbolic expression of the world of nature in the symbols of “the full gestures of dance, the rhythmic movement of all the limbs.”⁴⁸ Similar to Deleuze’s opposition between rhythm and cadence, Apollonian rhythm represents the static and predictable beat, whereas Dionysian rhythm is the flux of difference upon which the predictable beat depends. Here we have the same opposition between Platonic rhythm as beat and pre-Socratic rhythm as flux purported by Michon, Meschonnic, and Benveniste. Nietzsche explicitly differentiates between these two sorts of rhythm in some of his early notes and lectures. He differentiates the time-rhythmic, or quantitative rhythm, of ancient Greece on the one hand from a felt rhythm, in which quantitative rhythm takes account of Dionysian forces, on the other. In time-measured rhythmics, “the essence of rhythm is seen as the succession of even, often diverse, intervals of time. . . . Ictus and percussio then are intervals of time which the timekeeper set; we have no suggestion that these at the same time marked the rhythmical accents also.”⁴⁹ Time-rhythmic is purely a keeping of time through division rather than accentuation, and is the rhythm of ⁴⁵ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 25. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 21. ⁴⁷ There is some discussion as to whether these forces are metaphysical or psychological in nature. At the beginning of the Birth of Tragedy, the Dionysian is referred to as a “ground” that underlies experience, and therefore appears to have a metaphysical status. However, Nietzsche was suspicious of such grounds because he accepted Schopenhauer’s critique that such a metaphysical ground would escape experience. Thus, if these forces are in some sense “metaphysical,” they are so as parts of the physical universe, and not as a ground behind it. See David B. Allison, Reading the New Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, the Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and On the Genealogy of Morals (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 63–4 for this discussion. ⁴⁸ Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 26. ⁴⁹ James W. Halporn, “Nietzsche: On the Theory of Quantitative Rhythm,” Arion 6, no. 2 (1967): 238.

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post-Socratic Greece, particularly of the philosopher Aristoxenus.⁵⁰ However, when this marking of time comes into contact with Dionysian forces, through the Ictus or stress, it produces a more visceral rhythm. Beat is something felt in the body. He says that “A very different rhythmics is that of the balance of power. Here also, the unending diversity of nature is bound by certain basic forms (the regular oscillation of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’). Within these stabilizing basic forms, the largest dynamic diversity is experienced.”⁵¹ We cannot therefore straightforwardly associate rhythm in Nietzsche with the Dionysian or the Apollonian, as Amittai Aviram does when he associates rhythm with Dionysus and then accuses Nietzsche of being inconsistent in associating it with Apollo.⁵² Different types and dimensions of rhythm are associated with each figure. The regular time-keeping dimension of rhythm is associated with Apollo, while the primal, corporeal experience of the movement and interaction of forces, as experienced in dance, is associated with Dionysus. We can, however, say that Nietzsche prefers the Dionysian rhythm as that which is more true to the nature of rhythm. Nietzsche’s description of rhythm on this point is notably similar to that of Deleuze. Both associate the repetitive vibrations or wave-like beat of actualities with illusion, while true rhythm is associated with the flux of difference on which such regularity depends. There are several different kinds of possible relationship between these two rhythms. In his lecture “Rhythmic Investigations,” Nietzsche says: I suspect that the sensuous power of rhythm lies in the fact that the two rhythms that work effects on each other determine [bestimmen] each other in such a way that the broader one divides the narrower one. The rhythmic movements of the pulse etc. (the pace) are apparently re-organized as the step accommodates itself to the beat. . . . And since the entire body [Leib] contains an infinite number of rhythms in it, every rhythm will make a direct attack upon the body. Everything ⁵⁰ Friedrich Nietzsche, “Rhythmische Untersuchungen,” in “Nietzsches Werke: HistorischKritische Ausgabe. Electronic Edition.” Edited by Malcolm Brown (Charlottesville, VA: Intelex, 1995) (KGW II/3, S. 312). Elaine P. Miller, “Harnessing Dionysos: Nietzsche on Rhythm, Time, and Restraint,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies, no. 17 (1999): 2. ⁵¹ Ibid., S. 324. Own translation. ⁵² Amittai F. Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 115. Aviram argues that in associating rhythm with the Dionysian, which interrupts the individual, Nietzsche supports a definition of rhythm opposed to that of Benveniste, who associates it with form. We have seen, however, that while Dionysian rhythm is associated with the interruption of the individual, this is not the only definition of rhythm in Nietzsche. Without its association with Apollonian form, Dionysian rhythm is arguably not perceived as rhythm at all. Nietzsche never speaks about a pure Dionysian rhythm in his lectures, he only juxtaposes Takt and that rhythm which is influenced by the Dionysian. Interestingly, Pascal Michon argues the opposite of Aviram, that while Nietzsche ultimately espouses a Benvenistian definition of rhythm, in The Birth of Tragedy he primarily aligns rhythm with Apollo (Michon, “Rhythm from Art to Philosophy—Nietzsche (1867–1888)—part 1,” Rhuthmos, June 1, 2016. http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1817 (accessed July 7, 2017).

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suddenly moves according to a new law: not, indeed, as if the old ones no longer dominate, but rather in that they are fixed [or attuned, bestimmt].⁵³

In this passage, the relationship between the body’s infinite number of rhythms (the Dionysian) and the beat (the Apollonian order applied to Dionysian viscerality) is harmonious. The beat acts as a law that orders and directs the rhythms of the body without subjugating or diminishing them. This is similar to the way in which Nietzsche describes tragedy, namely as the collusion of the Dionysian chorus and the Apollonian image. According to Nietzsche’s definition, “drama is the concrete Apollonian representation of Dionysian insights and effects.”⁵⁴ The Dionysian cannot represent itself, so in tragedy, the Apollonian represents the Dionysian while also maintaining it as Dionysian in the same way that the beat in Nietzsche’s “Rhythmic Investigations” fixes the infinite rhythms of the body while still allowing them to dominate. The Apollonian does not capture the Dionysian but induces it to linger briefly in representation. It is that which enables the fluid and changeable to nevertheless have form. Tragedy achieves this through the phenomenon of “the Dionysian chorus which again and again discharges itself in an Apollonian world of images. So those chorus parts which are interwoven through tragedy are to a certain extent the maternal womb of the whole so-called dialogue.”⁵⁵ The Apollonian image depends on the Dionysian flux as a womb,⁵⁶ even as this flux continually interrupts the vision it has created. Nevertheless, this is not the most common relationship between Apollo and Dionysus. Nietzsche opens The Birth of Tragedy by saying that: To both of their artistic deities, Apollo and Dionysus, is linked our knowledge that in the Greek world there existed a tremendous opposition, in terms of origin and goals, between the Apollonian art of the sculptor and the imageless Dionysian art of music: these two very different drives run in parallel with one another, for the most part diverging openly with one another and continually stimulating each other to ever new and more powerful births, in order to perpetuate in themselves the struggle of that opposition only apparently bridged by the shared name of ‘art’.⁵⁷

⁵³ Nietzsche, “Rhythmische Untersuchungen,” 332. Translation from Miller, “Harnessing Dionysos: Nietzsche on Rhythm, Time, and Restraint,” 4. ⁵⁴ Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 51. ⁵⁵ Ibid., 50–1. ⁵⁶ Note that the Dionysian chorus to which Nietzsche refers acts as a sort of “maternal womb” which nourishes the Apollonian drama. This is not unlike the Platonic chora in the work of Julia Kristeva, which is a sort of semiotic, maternal matrix that interrupts symbolic reality. The difference between Nietzsche and Kriseva is in what each chooses to do with the image. Nietzsche uses it more metaphysically, turning it into a principle of the whole, while Kristeva restricts her analysis to the experience of the subject. ⁵⁷ Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, 19.

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The two forces finally gave birth to Attic tragedy, which is perfectly Dionysian and perfectly Apollonian, but this soon unravelled in what Nietzsche calls the Socratic tendencies of Euripides. Thus, the more common relationship is not the harmonious relationship of tragedy, but struggle. The Apollonian seeks to cover the terror of the Dionysian reality, and the Dionysian threatens the Apollonian individuation that makes society possible. Even in “Rhythmic Investigations,” Nietzsche refers to “the age-old struggle between the life of time and the life of sound.”⁵⁸ Moreover, it was only through the struggle between these two forces that the harmony of tragedy emerged. Nietzsche thus suggests a Heraclitean situation in which the strife of opposites is their harmonious unity. Now consider Nietzsche’s depiction of reality more generally: . . . a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself; as a whole, of unalterable size, . . . not something blurry or wasted, not something endlessly extended, but set in a definite space as a definite force, and not a space that might be ‘empty’ here or there, but rather as force throughout, as a play of forces and waves of forces, at the same time one and many, increasing here and at the same time decreasing there; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back, with tremendous years of recurrence, with an ebb and a flood of its forms.⁵⁹

This is a depiction of the eternal return, the whole as eternally changing and eternally flooding back. There are two dimensions to this description. On the one hand, there is the repetition or recurrence of the same forces at every moment. Nothing is added or taken away and so there is no change, although there is movement. It is a closed system that is absolutely immanent. Yet, Nietzsche says that this sea of forces is “eternally changing.” The eternal return includes both flux or chaos, as well as a certain stability. As with Heraclitus, all is movement, change, and flux, but there is nevertheless a hint of rhythm or harmony in the repetition. The eternal return is here described in terms that are relatively harmonious, much like Deleuze’s description. However, it has been argued by Karl Löwith, the most well-regarded interpreter of the eternal return, that the relationship between form and force is experienced as a strife of Apollonian and Dionysian due to the presence of the human within the system of the eternal return. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche gives the problem of the eternal return an existential flavor when he asks the reader “‘Do you want this again and ⁵⁸ Nietzsche, “Rhythmische Untersuchungen,” 323. Own translation. ⁵⁹ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968), 550.

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innumerable times again?’”⁶⁰ Struggle emerges because of the conflict in the eternal return between the lack of meaning in this doctrine of reality, and the human desire for meaning and purpose. The eternal return described only as a metaphysical principle is insufficient because it ignores the struggle that emerges from the human’s inability to will a meaningless reality.⁶¹ Löwith says that “The cosmic meaning clashes with the anthropological meaning, so that the one contradicts the other.”⁶² If we take the desire for meaning—the Apollonian in other words—into account, then the eternal return is the unity of a conflict, as with Heraclitus. It is this struggle between the will and the forces of life that produces reality as we know it.⁶³ From this perspective, any unity between the two forces is a unity of struggle because they are naturally opposed to one another. The ebb and flow of the forces of physis dominate reality, but when the individual human will emerges in this ebb and flow and comes into contact and conflict with the meaningless physis, the Apollonian-willed desire for individuation imposes form on its movement. By arguing in Ecce Homo that Heraclitus exhibits a Dionysian philosophy by affirming opposition, transience, and becoming, and by associating the Dionysian philosophy with Benvenistian rhythm, Nietzsche suggests that a Heraclitean depiction of reality includes this Dionysian rhythm as a play of forces given form in its struggle with the Apollonian. Reality is a dynamism of balances of forces mediated to human experience through forms that are constantly changing in response to this struggle. Thus, Nietzsche’s understanding of rhythm differs from that of Deleuze insofar as it includes an element of the psychological or anthropological, an account of the human experience of the architecture of reality. Nietzsche has arguably introduced something of the diachronic in his concern with the individual mind and will and its confrontation. Indeed, Pascal Michon distances Nietzsche from both Deleuze and Heidegger, who take a more ontological approach to rhythm. The difference, according to Michon is that, while the eternal return is certainly a speculative ontology, Nietzsche does not look to purely ontological conditions, but takes language and art seriously without raising them to the cosmic status that they have for Heidegger. While Nietzsche appears to raise language and art to such ⁶⁰ Friedrich Wihelm Nietzsche and others, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 194. According to Karl Löwith, this existential dimension also appears in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which the snake represents the eternal return and the vision in which the shepherd must bite off its head represents the struggle and decision that must be made with respect to the nature of reality as eternal return (Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 179–80). This is also suggested in the conversation between Zarathustra and the Dwarf regarding the moment (178) and in the conversation between Zarathustra and his animals (234). See also Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 69. ⁶¹ Ibid., 69. ⁶² Ibid., 60. ⁶³ Ibid., 191.

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cosmic status in associating them with the Apollonian and Dionysian in the Birth of Tragedy, Michon’s argument is that we should take into account Nietzsche’s earlier unpublished studies on the pre-Socratics and on language, where he does not do this.⁶⁴ Not unlike Löwith, Michon argues that there is an historical-anthropological background to Nietzsche’s project that has been suppressed, primarily by Heidegger.⁶⁵ The historic dimension refers for Michon primarily to Nietzsche’s understanding of Greek rhythm, which is not primarily Platonic periodic structure, but “irregular and asymmetrical temporal elements of various durations, modeled on the gracious movements of the bodies.”⁶⁶ Thus, some Greek meters involved conflicting feet or heterogeneity that broke the rhythmic continuity.⁶⁷ Michon would, therefore, interpret the two rhythms from Nietzsche’s Rhythmische Untersuchungen that I explicate above, not in terms of the Apollonian and Dionysian, but in terms of two historical approaches to rhythm—the modern periodic expression of emotion and the ancient control of passion. This historical perspective, in turn, leads Nietzsche to an anthropological one based on human language as “a rhythmic performance which involves body movements from the mouth to the limbs.”⁶⁸ According to Michon, Nietzsche claims that there is, on the one hand, a deep and unknown rhythmic drive that supports the production of language and therefore of emotion and thought, but also that, on the other hand, already formed languages and cultures have by their particular rhythms significant feedback effects on sensibility and behavior. . . . It is therefore possible to study man by observing 1. the rhythms that he imposes upon language; 2. those that his languages and cultures impose back upon him.⁶⁹

This is close to Löwith’s reading of Nietzsche as always including the anthropological, although Michon does not emphasize the element of strife that Löwith does. Nevertheless, he does say that “man is composed of a bunch of ‘forces, connected by a common nutritional process,’ which opposes, reformulates and evaluates all other forces he has to deal with” by projecting forms and rhythm onto them.⁷⁰ Michon’s interpretation thus locates the significance of Nietzsche’s study of rhythm within the subjective or anthropological dimension of Nietzsche’s thought that Löwith identifies and therefore

⁶⁴ “In [these] instances, as we see, Nietzsche is at odds with his other view on language. Most of his analyses remain elementary. But because he is then more of a philologist, a linguist and a poet than a philosopher, a semiotician and a rhetorician, his historical, anthropological and poetic insights are much more accurate and inspiring to us. It is a real pity that most of Nietzsche’s readers have concentrated on the former and ignored the latter” (Michon, “Rhythm from Art to Philosophy—Nietzsche (1867–1888)—part 7”). ⁶⁵ Ibid., part 11. ⁶⁶ Ibid., part 5. ⁶⁷ Ibid., part 9. ⁶⁸ Ibid., part 7. ⁶⁹ Ibid., part 10. ⁷⁰ Ibid., part 11.

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reinforces the possibility that perhaps Nietzsche is different than Heidegger and Deleuze in emphasizing a diachronic perspective more than might at first appear to be the case. What I think Michon succeeds in showing is that there are multiple trajectories running through Nietzsche, some of which could be taken in more fruitful directions than Nietzsche himself does.⁷¹ Nevertheless, I am interested in what Nietzsche himself ultimately does with his philosophy of rhythm, and it seems to me that Nietzsche tends to back off from such a diachronic perspective. Given his association of both rhythm and the eternal return with Heraclitus, I have here interpreted his understanding of rhythm ontologically. Nietzsche ultimately chooses to locate this perspective in the larger whole of the eternal return. The anthropological is more a feature of the whole viewed from the outside, less a description of an encounter in time. Michon points out that much of Nietzsche’s research on rhythm relies on historical and philological examinations of art, language, and poetry but nevertheless also admits that he “most often presupposes a theory of language which is subsidiary to ontology.”⁷² As both Michon and Löwith point out, this does not exclude a subjective dimension and perhaps even a diachronic perspective and this may suggest that Nietzsche gives us an alternative vision of the significance of rhythm, but, in the end, Nietzsche puts his work in service to the eternal return, thus adopting a synchronic, ontological perspective on the whole of reality. Michon himself confirms this reading at several points, for example, when he says “If we now look from the Notes on Rhythm back at The Birth of Tragedy, we realize that, in his early years, Nietzsche did not only assert the existence in ancient Geek art of two metaphysical principles, but that he philologically, linguistically and poetically showed how these two blended into one complex rhythmic.”⁷³ Nietzsche’s interest, in the end, is in this one complex rhythm. While he may, as Michon claims, identify a “rhuthmological” ontology, a shape that changes over time according to its own internal logic, it remains a metaphysical shape of the whole, viewed most often from a synchronic vantage point, albeit with some exceptions.

Martin Heidegger One of the other thinkers on whom Nietzsche had great influence was Martin Heidegger and Deleuze adopts certain concerns of Heidegger as well, albeit to a lesser extent.⁷⁴ Like both Nietzsche and Deleuze, Heidegger shows a certain preoccupation with the whole. Moreover, Heidegger’s only reference ⁷¹ Ibid., part 11. ⁷² Ibid., part 3. ⁷³ Ibid., part 9. ⁷⁴ For example, Daniel Barber points out that the convergence of difference and immanence that Deleuze takes up is first present in Heidegger. Daniel Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of

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to rhythm is related to Heraclitus. At one time in his career, Heidegger strongly emphasized the importance of Heraclitus, in particular, the idea of struggle in Heraclitus’ thought. While the emphasis on the struggle between earth and world settles in his later work into the more harmonious relation of the “fourfold,” Heidegger’s preoccupation with the Heraclitean flux of the whole remains. According to Heidegger, the Greeks called the emerging of all things physis, which is that by which entities assume their distinctive shapes and become what they are. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger calls this “earth,” and says that it is the ground of human dwelling.⁷⁵ He says that: Physis as emergence can be observed everywhere, e.g. in celestial phenomena (the rising of the sun), in the rolling of the sea, in the growth of plants, in the coming forth of man and animal from the womb. But physis, the realm of that which arises, is not synonymous with these phenomena . . . . Physis is being itself, by virtue of which essents become and remain observable . . . . This power of emerging and enduring includes ‘becoming’ as well as ‘being’.⁷⁶

Physis represents a whole in flux. More particularly, according to Heidegger’s interpretation of Heraclitus, physis is an oscillation: a hurling back and forth between oppositions.⁷⁷ Physis as emergence always implies its other side of death and decay, such that entities oscillate because they are held out into the possibility of non-being.⁷⁸ Physis is the one principle of all, the univocal law that includes the oscillation between the entity and the abyss of its non-being.⁷⁹ However, Heidegger states its conflictual nature even more strongly, saying that for Heraclitus “The true essence is time itself. . . . The oppositional is, conflict; the dialectical itself in the Hegelian sense. The movement of constant opposition and sublation is the principle.”⁸⁰ The term Heidegger uses for this sort of conflict is Heraclitus’ word polemos. Since polemos is the character of physis, it is the nature

God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 17–25. ⁷⁵ Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings: From “Being and Time” (1927) to “the Task of Thinking” (1964), trans. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge, 2011), 168. ⁷⁶ Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven, CN; London: Yale University Press, 1959), 14. ⁷⁷ Ibid., 134. This is how Heidegger describes the adage attributed to Heraclitus that “everything flows.” It is not pure impermanence, but a tossing back and forth between opposites, as on a wave. ⁷⁸ Ibid., 28. ⁷⁹ Martin Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar, trans. Eugen Fink (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 44–6. ⁸⁰ Martin Heidegger, Basic Concepts of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 50. Italics original. For Heraclitus, strife is a principle of the oppositions of apparent reality. However, Heidegger interprets Heraclitus according to his own purposes. For Heraclitus, strife is relativized by the underlying harmony, while for Heidegger strife is reality itself.

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of the whole. Identities, including the divine and the human, emerge from this conflict. Moreover, “Conflict does not split, much less destroy unity. It constitutes unity, it is a binding together, logos. Polemos and logos are the same.”⁸¹ Conflict both divides and individuates, on the one hand, and makes intimacy possible, on the other. Physis understood as polemos is, therefore, the 1936 Heidegger’s more radical equivalent of Deleuze’s opposition of the two syntheses or Nietzsche’s Dionysian force as both creative and destructive. The human’s encounter with physis is one of participation in this polemos, and is expressed primarily in art. Heidegger bases his description of art on his interpretation of Greek ideas about beauty. The function of art in Greek culture, Heidegger claims, is to open a space or world within physis. He states that “What the Greeks meant by ‘beauty’ was restraint,” involving struggle rather than repose.⁸² The struggle of artistic activity “is not a function of faculties that man has, but a [binding/bändigen] of powers by virtue of which the essent opens up as such when man moves into it.”⁸³ In “The Origin of the Work of Art” Heidegger adopts this Greek description, saying that the truth of art is the establishing of a clearing which takes a stand in being and attains constancy. Art uses physis “in the fixing in place of truth in the figure.”⁸⁴ Heidegger is here concerned to encourage a way of being that avoids the domination and control of the artist by suggesting that we are already in the middle of things, requiring the artist to be open to their happening.⁸⁵ The artist must establish a world in and through physis, as a passageway for the natural unity-in-conflict between the forces of earth (physis) and world (opening) to establish itself.⁸⁶ Insofar as art is the happening of truth, it must manifest this struggle because struggle is the essence of the truth of being. As with Nietzsche, the anthropological here involves struggle, but in this case, the struggle of the human is due to a correspondence with cosmic struggle, rather than a struggle against the nature of reality. Compare this description of art to Heidegger’s definition of rhythm, given in a lecture on Heraclitus: In connection with what has been said concerning language, I would like to refer to the lecture ‘Sprache als Rhythmus’ [Language as Rhythm] by Thrasybulos Georgiades . . . as well as his book Musik und Rhythmus bei den Griechen. In both works, he has spoken excellently about language. Among other things,

⁸¹ Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, 62. ⁸² Ibid., 131. ⁸³ Ibid., 157. ⁸⁴ Heidegger, Basic Writings, 189. ⁸⁵ Karsten Harries, Art Matters: A Critical Commentary on Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 60. ⁸⁶ Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art” in Basic Writings, trans David Farrell Krell. 1978. (London: Routledge, 2011), 174. George Pattison suggests that the struggle between world and earth is only a relationship within human experience (George Pattison, Routledge Philosophy Handbook to the Later Heidegger (London: Routledge, 2000), 101). However, this explanation does not account for the striking similarities between Heidegger’s description of the work of art and his description of ontology in An Introduction to Metaphysics.

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he asks about rhythm and shows that rhythmos has nothing to do with rheo (flow), but is to be understood as imprint. In recourse to Werner Jaeger, he appeals to a verse of Archilochos Fr. 67A, where rhythmos has this meaning. The verse reads . . . ‘Recognize which rhythm holds men.’ Moreover, he cites a passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus, to which Jaeger likewise has referred and in which the rhythmos or rhythmiso [bring into a measure of time or proportion] has the same meaning as in the Archilochos fragment . . . Here Prometheus says of himself ‘ . . . in this rhythm I am bound.’ He, who is held immobile in the iron chains of his confinement, is ‘rhythmed,’ that is joined. Georgiades points out that humans do not make rhythm; rather for the Greeks, the rhythmos [measure] is the substrate of language namely the language that approaches us.⁸⁷

First, notice that Georgiades’s definition to which Heidegger here refers is the same as that of Benveniste: not flow, but form. In fact, Georgiades proposes this definition in the same year as Benveniste. However, rather than describing this as a fluid, improvised form, Heidegger’s definition of rhythm, like his definition of beauty, is associated with restraint. While physis represents the chaotic, moving forces that give rise to beings, rhythm and beauty are that which restrain them, much like Nietzsche’s Apollo, but in so doing, they end up reflecting the struggle of physis itself through struggling against those forces.⁸⁸ Rhythm plays an analogous role to art in that just as art struggles against and binds the forces of physis, rhythm binds the forces of the human in language. In binding the human in language, rhythm, like art, opens up the world within which human dwelling is possible. At first blush, then, Heidegger’s rhythm appears to be a hybrid between the Benvenistian nature of rhythm as form, on the one hand, and the more traditional, Apollonian form-against-chaos or Deleuzian repetition of actualities, on the other. Rhythm is not under the control of humans but is something more primordial that they encounter in language, yet this primordiality is not chaos but the process of binding, of struggle.⁸⁹ Therefore, the relationship between rhythm and physis is not as opposed as at first appears to be the case. A restraint of physis can never be absolute. The rhythmic form is only ever momentary and conflicted. It is not rigid and immovable but emerges in and of the flux of physis, suggesting that it is more like Benveniste’s definition—a momentary, changeable form—than might first appear to be the case. Harmony emerges immanently from strife, through the process of the

⁸⁷ Heidegger, Heraclitus Seminar, 55. See also Pattison, Routledge Guidebook to the Later Heidegger, 135. ⁸⁸ “Heidegger considered language just as he did for Being, that is to say as a kind of nonhuman cosmic power. Language would disclose Being in ways that escape human beings and set the ever changing frame of their history” (Pascal Michon, “Rhythm from Art to Philosophy— Nietzsche (1867–1888)—part 3”). ⁸⁹ Again, Julia Kristeva also associates rhythm with the primordial and pre-linguistic, but for her it does not hold the subject in a kind of shape, but interrupts the subject.

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struggle to restrain. As with Nietzsche, rhythm represents the encounter between a form, such as that of art or language, and the struggling, chaotic forces of nature but in this case, the form is not a second dimension of reality but an event that emerges from the polemos of physis as itself a struggle. Nevertheless, Heidegger’s later work drops the concept of polemos and instead uses the categories of earth and world as two principles in his more peaceful description of reality in terms of the “fourfold.”⁹⁰ In his later work the idea of truth as Ereignis, a term that suggests a more passive or serene “happening” rather than a battle, comes to replace truth-as-strife.⁹¹ However, this only makes Heidegger’s work more similar to that of Deleuze and Nietzsche. The happening of truth in Heidegger’s later thought emerges out of the fourfold—two sets of polarities between earth and sky, and mortals and divinities—that “Preceding everything that is present, they are enfolded into a single fourfold. In the gift of the outpouring dwells the simple singlefoldness of the four.”⁹² He says that “None of the four insists on its own separate particularity.”⁹³ Rather, each is expropriated to the others in a kind of mirror-play or round-dance. Being is, for Heidegger, described in terms of opposites, the rhythmic cycle of the opposites of day and night and of the seasons; this is what the poles of the fourfold represent. Like Nietzsche and Deleuze, Heidegger here describes reality as an immanent whole that emerges out of movements between opposites, albeit no longer through struggle. There are ways in which Heidegger suggests that truth happens as an interruption of the flow of the everyday, taking a more diachronic perspective.⁹⁴ In particular, if rhythm is more primordial than human control, then the experience of it is confrontational. This is the dimension of Heidegger that Giorgio Agamben takes up as rhythm, which we will explore in the next chapter. However, the difference is that for Heidegger, these interruptions are not something other than the fourfold, but emerge within it, whether they are the product of mortals (art) or divinities (holy days). As with Deleuze, everything is a movement within or a dimension of one plane of immanence. Heidegger says that “Each thing stays the fourfold into a happening of the simple onehood of world,”⁹⁵ suggesting that particular identities, like those of Deleuze, are monads or repetitions, each of which is a recapitulation of the whole. When the later

⁹⁰ Pattison, Routledge Guidebook to the Later Heidegger, 98, 101. ⁹¹ Julian Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 64. ⁹² Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 2001), 171. ⁹³ Heidegger, “The Thing,” 177. ⁹⁴ For example, even in “The Origin,” Heidegger suggests that the world becomes conspicuous only when the flow of the everyday is disrupted and that this is the function of art (Poetry, Language, Thought, 66). See Pattison, Routledge Guidebook to the Later Heidegger, 177, 179, 180. ⁹⁵ Heidegger, “The Thing,” 179.

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Heidegger praises that art which presences the Other of beings, or the It that gives Being,⁹⁶ he is praising that which reveals Being as a whole in its mysteriousness and holiness. This Other of beings is Nothing. The Nothing is coincident with Being as a whole because it is that which is beyond the standards of intelligibility.⁹⁷ Just as Deleuze says that opposition itself is a harmony because it is not between determinate identities that could contradict each other, Nothing is not the opposite of Being for Heidegger because Being is not a determinate thing that can be circumscribed. Even an opposition between Being and Nothing is sublimated into the whole. Finally, as with Deleuze, the fourfold constitutes Heidegger’s most positive claims concerning the nature of the divine,⁹⁸ suggesting the divinization of the whole.

THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES The thinkers in this chapter apply the Benvenistian definition of rhythm to the nature of reality. All of the above examples describe rhythm in terms of a fluid form that comes to stand for the whole of reality. One of the differences, however, between the various Heraclitean thinkers here described is the role of conflict in their work. Deleuze ascribes the least amount of conflict to the whole, probably because the notion of conflict presupposes identities that are sufficiently individuated that they can negate one another, which Deleuze does not accept. The other extreme is the early Heidegger who, at the time of writing Introduction to Metaphysics, saw strife as the ontological principle of harmony. Nietzsche stands between the two, suggesting that strife is not an inherent principle of reality but an inevitable way of encountering the flux of reality from the perspective of the human subject, whose need for meaning is experienced as inherently at war with the forces of the cosmos. Nevertheless, these differences are simply various ways of dealing with differentiation within the one Heraclitean whole. Interestingly, all these thinkers exhibit some degree of ambivalence about the place of strife in their visions, perhaps because a vision of reality that is inherently violent creates ethical problems. Yet differentiation within a single harmonious system is a difficult phenomenon to express and I suspect that the ambivalence surrounding strife is reflective of this challenge. All turn to rhythm to help mediate this challenge. In Deleuze, rhythm encompasses both ultimate separation and unification, and in so doing ⁹⁶ A description of the It that gives the world can be found in Martin Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 254–5. ⁹⁷ Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, 99–108. ⁹⁸ S. J. McGrath, Heidegger: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2008), 120.

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represents the whole of reality. The principle of opposition is the principle of unity. For Nietzsche, rhythm mediates between force and form because different dimensions of its nature are part of both the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Rhythm is the hidden principle that holds together the various opposing elements of Nietzsche’s reality-as-eternal-return. Heidegger states that logos and polemos are one and the same, indicating that rhythm’s participation in a struggle against the forces of physis is at the same time a participation in the harmony and unity of the cosmos as well.⁹⁹ Moreover, the whole is often deified in some way. This is clearest in Deleuze, for whom God is the plane of immanence, the process of folding and unfolding. God is thus the whole of the system and each particularity coincides with the point of view of the divine. Heidegger’s Being in its onehood is likewise described in divine terms as an uncircumscribable mystery and holiness, from which the gods and their feast days emerge. The religious expression corresponding to a deification of the whole is union with the god of this process (which is why a violent process would be ethically problematic). This may take the form of the accommodation of one’s self to the whole, a kind of renunciation of one’s self and one’s own projects. We can see this in Nietzsche, for whom the ethical injunction in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra is for the human to come to terms with, give her- or himself over to, the difficult truth of the eternal return. Alternatively, it may also be a matter of moving forward, of realizing new possibilities latent within the system. For (earlier) Heidegger, the subject must enter into the cosmic struggle in order to open worlds for human dwelling while, for Deleuze, the implication of a system that generates ever new possibilities is that we ought to participate in this generation rather than attempt to solidify that which is fluid. In all cases, however, these are ways of participating in the rhythm of the whole. It should be clear from chapter one why this approach to rhythm is phenomenologically problematic. As with poetic theories that do not take sufficient account of the diachronic, these philosophers, in viewing rhythm synchronically, as a principle of the whole, at the very least risk misrepresenting rhythm. However, I am interested in offering more than merely a phenomenological appraisal. Since I am here concerned with the use of ⁹⁹ Notice that all of these thinkers admit of a kind of interruption in some way. Deleuze sees a gap or a caesura between repetition and difference. Nietzsche envisions the Dionysian constantly interrupting the Apollonian in tragedy. Likewise, Heidegger’s earth and world jut through each other, interrupt each other. Nevertheless, in each case these interruptions are merely movements within a larger system, or manifestations of the strife through which the whole system works itself out. My distinction between approaches to rhythm as form and approaches to rhythm as interruptive is therefore not a matter of whether a particular understanding includes the idea of interruption so much as whether such interruption is experienced as such, rather than simply covered over by the larger rhythmic form of the whole.

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rhythm in Christian theology, these various approaches to rhythm require theological evaluation as well. Christian theology includes mixed responses to the Heraclitean approach to the divine and to reality as a whole. I offer here the perspectives of Catherine Keller, a proponent of process theology, and Erich Przywara, a twentieth-century Jesuit. The former embraces a Deleuzian approach to reality and the divine, including his approach to rhythm, while the latter rejects the approaches of this chapter. Ultimately, I argue that the approaches of this chapter are at least insufficient to both Christian theology and the nature of rhythm itself.

Catherine Keller Catherine Keller is among those who adopt an approach to Christian theology similar to and based on the thinkers and principles described in this chapter. In putting forward a theology of creation based on the Spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep, Keller argues for a theology that understands God as a becoming-in-relation that folds in and out of chaos.¹⁰⁰ Keller insists that she does not worship chaos.¹⁰¹ It is not equal to God. Nevertheless, chaos precedes any ontological difference between creator and creation.¹⁰² She appeals to Deleuze in describing this chaos as depth that is without transcendence or verticality; depth that is a virtual matrix of difference itself. She even appeals to Deleuze’s use of rhythm, suggesting that rhythm and chaos are synonymous.¹⁰³ Creation is not an outside order imposed upon this Deleuzian matrix but is generated from within the matrix through oscillations that produce positive feedback, amplified into layers of oscillation in and out of chaos. God is the first oscillation between attraction and reception, invitation and Sabbath. Order and creation emerge in response to this first oscillation.¹⁰⁴ God is therefore described, not as a personal will that creates, but as a physical force of oscillating attraction within the process of the world’s becoming in relation to chaos. With this change in our conception of God, there is also a change in the our conception of rhythm. The “metric regularity of the whole order has been perturbed—from the beginning—by another rhythm.”¹⁰⁵ Notice here the relativization of the Platonic, regular, periodic rhythm in favor of a more chaotic rhythm. Keller identifies her approach with panentheism, or what she calls “creation as incarnation.” There are several variations on the idea of panentheism—the idea that God is in all—but Keller expresses her version as follows: If the godhead, or rather the godness, ‘in’ whom unfolds the universe can be theologized as Tehom, the ocean of divinity, the divinity who unfolds ‘in’ the all ¹⁰⁰ Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge), 40. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., 7. ¹⁰² Ibid., 163. ¹⁰³ Ibid., 168–9. ¹⁰⁴ Ibid., 198. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 115–16.

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is called by such biblical names as Elohim, Sophia, Logos, Christ. The all in the divine, the divine in the all: this rhythm of appellations does not name two Gods, or even two Persons. Yet it does echo the Trinitarian intuition of complex relationality immanent to an impersonal Godhead and personalized in the oikonomia of the creation. Their relation to each other . . . can be resignified only through the icon of the oscillating Spirit. So the names Tehom and Elohim may henceforth designate, if not ‘persons,’ two capacities of an infinite becoming.¹⁰⁶

God is both of these realities: impersonal matrix and personal God within the matrix, as well as the relation between them. In other words, God designates the whole of the system and encompasses its opposites. God unfolds in the all, such that chaos and God are two capacities of an infinite becoming held together by an oscillating Spirit. Thus, while God is not equal to chaos, God is the divinizing and creating impulse of it and in it, and it is included within God’s self-relations. God exceeds chaos but does not exceed the whole. There are dimensions of this kind of Heraclitean theology that are important. Keller’s rehabilitation of the dimension of chaos in the biblical creation narrative, and with it the possibility that God did not create out of nothing, but invited and attracted potentiality into various actualizations, is both a biblicallygrounded argument that requires consideration as well as theologically and socially significant. Furthermore, her non-personalist description of the Trinity as a matrix of “rhythmic interrelations”¹⁰⁷ is imaginatively compelling for its resistance to anthropomorphism. Finally, panentheism itself is a common and persuasive theological framework and one could read this book as contributing to a Christian panentheism. Nevertheless, Keller’s extension of these elements into a system in which God is identified so closely with the movements of the becoming of creation itself means that her theology is, in the end, an account of a unified whole in which gaps or ruptures are relativized and swallowed up in the grand movement of becoming. The possibility of any real rupture, interruption, or the coming of something utterly new or other to the system is foreclosed. While newness and difference may be generated from within the system, according to its own internal logic,¹⁰⁸ everything is already given by the whole, at least in the form of possibility. The new is therefore not an encounter with the other but refers to new beginnings that, from within, grow through nascent stages, develop, and die.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 219. ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 18. ¹⁰⁸ Daniel Barber argues, from an analysis of Deleuze that transcendence is not necessary for the breaking in of the new, suggesting that Deleuze’s entire system is predicated on differentiation, gaps, and interruptions between things, such that the new is generated immanently because it is generated out of a system of difference rather than sameness (Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God ). Nevertheless, as Keller points out, there exist two kinds of difference: ontological differentiation between Creator and creation, or the differential of the matrix (Keller, The Face of the Deep, 163). The differential of the matrix does not necessarily ensure the breaking in of the new.

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Keller does not consider the sort of confrontation that is based on historical encounter to be theologically significant. The absence of such historical encounter is particularly evident in Keller’s interpretation of incarnation. For Keller, the incarnation is not a historical event, a happening or an interruption, but an inclusive possibility, a way of thinking of the unfolding of reality in which God is within that reality. It becomes a symbol and is swallowed into the repetitions of the process.¹⁰⁹ If this is the case, however, then the incarnation is not an actual, historical event that can confront us as actual, historical persons. As with Deleuze, it is so indeterminate that it makes confrontation impossible. Its significance is limited to the symbolic and unconscious ways in which the incarnation forms us through our milieu. Incarnation is simply part of all of us, and can therefore not confront us as genuinely other, only as new permutations of the same.

Erich Przywara Erich Przywara, on the other hand, is critical of such Heraclitean approaches to reality. Among other things, Przywara is interested in how various philosophical systems hold together identity and contradiction, which is precisely what the philosophers considered in this chapter are attempting. His characterizations are therefore a second possible theological response to such systems. He identifies two opposite approaches to this problem, which are opposites by virtue of the degree to which they affirm contradiction. He designates these methods pure logic and pure dialectic,¹¹⁰ and he argues that, in the end, they collapse into the same vision.¹¹¹ ¹⁰⁹ Keller, The Face of the Deep, 220–1. ¹¹⁰ Przywara categorizes the ways in which philosophy negotiates the “between” differently in Polarity and in Analogia Entis. In Polarity, there are three pure types—immanent, transcendent, and transcendentality, which is an eternal striving for a unity of completeness, which never is, but is only a goal or unfolding. There are then nine fluctuating middles between different combinations of two types at a time (Erich Przywara, Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, trans. A. C. Bouquet (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), 12). In all of these systems, “God” is the name given to an absolutized version of union, distance, or striving. Analogy is something different than all of these, in that God is the only union between immanent and transcendent (Przywara, Polarity, 38). In Analogia Entis, on the other hand, Przywara says that one can negotiate the between either according to an immanent law such as “all is movement” or “all is rest,” or according to dialectic, which is simply a third immanent law “identity is contradiction.” These can be loosely mapped onto immanent (flow), transcendent (rest), and transcendentality (dialectic). However, in Analogia Entis, Przywara also identifies an immanent analogy that is nevertheless not the same as the Catholic analogia entis. This can cause some confusion because the way in which Przywara describes the pure logic of the immanentist religious position in Polarity can sometimes appear very similar to Aristotle’s immanent analogy, rather than Heraclitus’ flux. ¹¹¹ William Desmond’s work deals with similar analyses. While Przywara characterizes the two approaches in this chapter as “pure logic” and “pure dialectic,” Desmond calls them the univocal and the equivocal.

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Pure logic reduces opposite terms to an immediate law in which the principle of non-contradiction is equated with the principle of identity.¹¹² This means that there are no contradictions simply because nothing is sufficiently different from anything else to cause a contradiction. Everything is part of the same, immanent reality. In particular, essence and existence are the same; they form a single principle which governs the whole of reality. There are various instances of this single principle; the one that interests us here is Heraclitus’ “all is motion.”¹¹³ For Heraclitus, “real creaturely consciousness and being are characterized by a constantly surging flux of oppositions . . . a real rhythmic measure of opposites within the living fire.”¹¹⁴ This is the absolutization of pure becoming. Despite the flux of oppositions, everything is always in a state of becoming and so nothing solidifies enough to be contradicted. Deleuze is the example of this approach considered in this chapter. Reality is, for him, a single plane of immanence expressed in a single principle—the flux of opposites folding and unfolding—in which what we take to be identities are simply particular movements of energy. There is no strife in Deleuze’s system because there are no identities. Things are too indeterminate to be able to say of them that a property and its opposite cannot apply. According to Przywara, the result of pure logic is that being turns into nonbeing and truth into falsity without inhibition.¹¹⁵ We cannot identify truth, falsity, being, or non-being. Despite the flux of opposites, true opposition is therefore obliterated. It is worth noting that Przywara is not absolutely against this position. He points out that the overcoming of contradiction is acceptable with respect to potentiality because at the level of potentiality, everything is indeterminate; potentiality is an identity of opposites in which there is a possibility towards everything. In fact, Przywara can be quite positive about Heraclitus when his system is not absolutized.¹¹⁶ But the problem with pure logic is precisely that it reduces all of reality to a single principle. It makes potentiality the all. Actualization, which requires the realization of one possibility over others such that its contraries are excluded, is not a dimension of reality ¹¹² Przywara, Analogia Entis, 199E/106G. ¹¹³ Parmenides is an example of someone who espouses the opposite absolute principle. Przywara’s description of Parmenides is more akin to those systems that make all of reality an extension of the transcendent, in which everything participates in its rest. I will make this argument in chapter three with respect to Radical Orthodoxy and its Augustinian, musical ontology. Interestingly, this system also conceptualizes rhythm as a form, such that it is associated with the whole, although this form is more like a structure rather than fluid. Przywara’s interpretation of both Parmenides and Heraclitus is arguably reductionist, since both thinkers do admit some sort of relationship between flux and stability. However, the difference between them lies in how they conceive of the relationship between these two things, with Parmenides understanding flux as a veil that hides the true reality of stability, and Heraclitus purporting a tighter relationship between a stable Logos and the strife of opposites that emerges as a flux. ¹¹⁴ Przywara, Analogia Entis, E203–4/110G. ¹¹⁵ Ibid., 206E/112G. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., 473E/384G.

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according to pure logic.¹¹⁷ If it were, the principle of non-contradiction would have to apply. Pure dialectic is the antithesis of pure logic in that it takes opposites so seriously that they are in open conflict with one another. As with pure logic, there are various manifestations of pure dialectic. In the Heideggerian variation, antitheses are not resolved (as they are in Hegel) but are held together as an ideal way of knowing. In Hegel, the process of separation and discrimination guarantees resolution. The ordering of antitheses itself becomes the guarantee of proof. The contradiction itself reveals the identity of the Logos.¹¹⁸ In Heidegger, on the other hand, attempts to eliminate the principle of identity in favor of the becoming of the creature lead to a becoming that is of infinite intensity “as nothing but ‘ever its own possibility.’”¹¹⁹ In eliminating identity, contradiction becomes radicalized as a “Nothing” which itself is the fundamental principle producing all things. The contradiction is embedded at the most fundamental level where Nothing is Being; Nothing is the principle of identity.¹²⁰ According to Przywara, the principle of non-contradiction is thus violently overcome, not because things are too indeterminate for the principle to apply, but because the truth is arrived at through the identity of contradiction. Truth is contradiction. So, the Heideggerian Nothing becomes the principle of identity itself, that which produces and undergirds all becoming, in which essence and existence coincide. On this reading, the early Heidegger’s reality as strife continues in his later work in a different guise. Thus, Przywara argues that the “identity of contradictions” is simply a more complex version of univocal logic. Regardless of the differences in the degree of struggle exhibited in the thought of the philosophers described above, they end up in the same place with respect to the nature of reality as a whole, its relation to the divine, and the role of rhythm within the whole.¹²¹ Whereas the rhythm of pure logic is the immanent creaturely rhythm that has been imbued with divine significance or equated with God, pure dialectic is the rhythm of the divine itself, the identity of essence and existence in which opposites are held together, that is then usurped by the world. Hegel is the perfect example of this in that he ascribes a Trinitarian logic to reality as such, but we see this in

¹¹⁷ Ibid., E206–7/113G. ¹¹⁸ Ibid., 194–5E/101–2G. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., 202E/108–9G. ¹²⁰ Ibid., 202E/108–9G. ¹²¹ In Desmond’s language, the absolutization of univocity breeds equivocity and nihilism because no indubitable, univocal reason can be given for an insistence on univocity, such that in the end, an underlying doubt undermines absolute univocity into nothing (William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press,1995), 82). Equally, however, an absolutized equivocity beyond mediation is a new univocal law. Thus, while the above thinkers espouse equivocity beyond mediation as a way to counteract Cartesian univocity, such a wholesale dismissal of univocity simply sets up another closed, immanent system in its place, under the sign of difference.

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Heidegger as well when God (in the sense of the coinherence of essence and existence, of identity) is everything as Nothing, when “This ‘productive Nothing’ utters the ontic–noetic ‘I am who I am’ of the principle of identity.”¹²² Insofar as rhythm as fluid form lends itself to descriptions of reality as an immanent whole, it suggests a relationship to a God who is not other than the system but is the inner form of the system—the absolutization of the system.¹²³ It is the absolutization and deification of process, movement, and struggle itself. “[God] is, as ‘Rhythm,’ the unifying Force of the movement, but not beyond the movement.”¹²⁴ God is the law of the whole itself, worked out in its processes, representing the internal unity of the completeness and infinity of the rhythmic ebb and flow of the “in-and-beyond.”¹²⁵ Even if such a system recognizes a sort of self-transcendence—a reaching to the beyond of infinity—this self-transcendence is itself part of the process of the whole. There is no active otherness that could come to and interrupt the immanent from beyond itself. Przywara thinks that these attempts to hold the whole of reality together within a single, immanent system are theologically problematic for this reason. In other words, he considers the synchronic perspective, at least in this particular form, theologically problematic. Whether or not one believes this approach to reality is amenable to Christianity depends upon whether one believes it is necessary that God be other to creation, and whether the possibility of confrontation from something beyond the system ought to be maintained. My primary concern at the moment is not to argue that Christian theology must necessarily keep such a possibility open but to demonstrate the various theological systems that accompany concepts of rhythm and identify a conception that takes as many dimensions of Christian theology into account as possible. There are three reasons why I believe that the process theology description of reality to which Heraclitean rhythm lends itself does not do so satisfactorily and that it is, therefore, important for Christian theology to maintain the tradition of God as other. First, the experience of people in the world is diachronic in the sense that it is one in which persons are encountered by events. Regardless of the ontological reality or underpinnings of such events, we experience reality, at least in part, as encounters with events and identities that influence us not only through waves of generation and destruction but through our confrontation with them as concrete realities and their interruption to the flow of our experience. Keller does not account for this dimension of reality and her theology is therefore insufficient to human experience as temporal, and to ¹²² Przywara, Analogia Entis, 202E/108–9G. ¹²³ Ibid., 201E/107G; 204E/110G. ¹²⁴ Przywara, Polarity, 7. Robert Morrison argues that Nietzsche replaces the concept of God with a “dynamic theory of matter,” that this dynamic matter plays the same divine role in Nietzsche’s system that God might do for a theologian (Robert G. Morrison, Nietzsche and Buddhism: A Study in Nihilism and Ironic Affinities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 223–5). ¹²⁵ Przywara, Polarity, 15.

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the salvific encounters that the human experience of salvation involves. The biblical narrative describes the human relation to God largely in terms of such surprising and interruptive, historical encounters. Faithfulness to that dimension of Christian religious tradition and experience and to the form of relation represented in scripture therefore requires an account, not only of God as part of a whole or the whole itself, but God encountered as event in time. Keller does not supply such an account. Her perspective is only synchronic. Second is the problem of sin. While there is by no means consensus regarding what sin is, from the perspective of process theology, corruption and suffering have resulted from that which has been generated from within the system of creation. However, this means that to be efficacious, redemption or salvation cannot be reduced to yet one more process generated by the system. A process-generated redemption does not provide a sufficiently robust salvation narrative for a Christian theology that takes the concept of sin seriously because it is not clear how such a process within the system could sufficiently challenge other dimensions of the system, or how it could of itself resist the traps of evil and corruption that have overcome so many others. While I do not hereby suggest that such redemption must be wholly transcendent in a voluntaristic way—a total opposition to and overcoming of the world—I do think that an element of otherness to the system that generates pain and injustice is necessary. Without this element, it seems to be difficult, if not impossible, to give any kind of an account of Christian hope. Finally, the assumed human capacity to give an account of reality as a whole gives the human a transcendent perspective from which the whole is identifiable to human experience. This ultimately betrays the nature of the creature. As I indicated in the previous chapter, there is, from within the creaturely perspective, no universal rhythm, but a collection of overlapping and interacting local rhythms that only ever unite provisionally, such that it is disingenuous to human embedded-ness in rhythm to identify a single universal rhythm as the structure of reality in general, with no possibility of interruption from beyond that rhythm. While Benvenistian synchronic rhythm could affirm this claim based on its emphasis on difference, its proponents nevertheless assume a perspective from which the totality of these rhythms and their character are known as the nature of reality as such. They thereby give up their creaturely perspective. In other words, this perspective assumes, in giving an account of the whole, that it can see the limits of the rhythm. The synchronic perspective assumes a God’s-eye-view on the part of the thinker and also risks creating a metaphysics that is, for all its internal diversity, closed to change and interruption at the most general level and therefore at risk of hegemony.¹²⁶ ¹²⁶ Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 25, 97, 91–2. Interestingly, Badiou makes the connection between Deleuze’s univocity and a Neoplatonic emanation despite Deleuze’s avowed

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These objections show that while there may be dimensions of this Heraclitean account of reality and the rhythm that it involves that are appropriate to Christian theology, they remain insufficient to it. I have here demonstrated that Benvenistian rhythm characteristically accompanies these sorts of immanent processes, helping to describe the immanent generation of harmony from chaos. Nevertheless, the question still remains as to whether this is the necessary outcome of the Benvenistian definition of rhythm as fluid form. The answer depends on the degree of absolutization of this definition. If rhythm is only defined in Benvenistian terms and then used to describe the nature of reality as a whole, then reality will appear as fluid and improvised form in which all movement is simply incorporated into that form. However, while I have here argued that this understanding of rhythm is not sufficient to Christian theology, it is helpful and even necessary, when taken alongside other perspectives, as a way to perhaps describe certain limited dimensions or experiences of theology, salvation, creation, etc. The way in which these various dimensions of rhythm interact within theology will emerge in chapter five and beyond, while the next two chapters consider two other approaches to rhythm: one diachronic and the other synchronic.

anti-platonism. This is similar to my association of Deleuze’s synchrony with that of Neoplatonism in chapter four. Badiou suggests that for all its internal diversity, Deleuze’s system is not able to provide political confrontation since everything is valued equally. It therefore ends up simply affirming the status quo.

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3 Diachronicity Rhythm as Interruption

In contrast with attempts to use rhythm as a way of describing how various dimensions of reality are held together as a whole, other philosophers, including Giorgio Agamben and Julia Kristeva, emphasize the interruptive nature of rhythm, based on the way in which the subject experiences it.¹ Interestingly, these are thinkers that Pascal Michon does not consider in his survey of the study of rhythm. This is surprising since it is the group of thinkers who are most closely aligned with one of Michon’s own concerns, namely the role of rhythm in the construction of a non-traditional subjectivity. Nevertheless, while these thinkers certainly do not adhere to rhythm-as-periodicity, they also do not straightforwardly propose rhythm-as-fluid-form, but something different altogether, namely rhythm-as-interruption, a possibility not sufficiently accounted for by the Platonic/pre-Socratic schema. These thinkers are important for establishing the significance of rhythm because their attempts to make sense of reality are based in the movements and rhythms of the relationship between the person and surrounding reality, particularly the structures that have been constructed by human community. In so doing, they offer an argument for how one ought to make sense of the world, namely from within the socially-constructed structures and systems that govern everyday life. These thinkers affirm that the way in which we make sense of reality cannot be abstracted from the rhythms in which the human creature is embedded. Theological responses to these thinkers have been mixed. For example, while commentators are not in agreement regarding the compatibility of Agamben’s work with Christian theology, Agamben is nevertheless highly ¹ While there is contention surrounding the term “subject,” much work on rhythm is precisely an attempt to unsettle the subject that is often conceived of as discreet and autonomous, by showing its dependence upon rhythms that threaten and interrupt such independence. The approaches to rhythm considered in this chapter attempt to imagine a new subjectivity. The term will therefore be problematized over the course of the chapter.

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engaged with material from Christian traditions. I focus on his work in this chapter because his engagements with theology are connected to the way in which he conceptualizes and utilizes rhythm, and both rhythm and Agamben’s engagement with Christian traditions play an important role in his work more generally. Unlike the thinkers of the previous chapter, Agamben’s perspective is a creaturely one, a perspective from inside the rhythms of human structures that nevertheless strains beyond them. From his intra-creaturely perspective, Agamben identifies openings or caesurae within the rhythms of human structures and experiences. These caesurae are not God per se but ambiguous spaces from which to interrupt a hegemonic system, and they are thus spaces in which it is possible to encounter something beyond such human systems. I also include an engagement with Julia Kristeva in order to more clearly describe the relationship between such interruptions, the rhythms in which they occur, the subject that experiences them, and possible theological resonances.

INTERRUPTIVE RHYTHM A ND THE E XPERIENCE OF THE S UBJECT

Giorgio Agamben Agamben describes the interruptive nature of rhythm in his book The Man Without Content, in the chapter entitled “The Original Structure of the Work of Art,” a reference to Heidegger’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Heidegger states that the origin of the work of art is a question about the way in which art is an origin of our historical existence,² and Agamben too is interested in how we describe this originary nature or quality of the work of art. Like Heidegger, Agamben rejects the aesthetic interpretation of art in favor of understanding art as a more “essential” [essenziale] dimension of our experience in the world. He identifies two sides to the problem of aesthetics: that of the passive spectator/critic and that of the creative genius. Much of the book traces how these two constructs have reinforced each other and how they have together obscured the originary structure of the work of art. Contrary to aesthetics, Agamben says that to look at art is to be “hurled out into a more original time.”³ The work of art is the site of the origin of dwelling on earth

² Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans Albert Hofstadter. 1971 (New York: Harper & Row, 2001), 75. ³ Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, trans Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 101.

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and of truth.⁴ Both Heidegger and Agamben understand poiesis as that which opens a world for common human dwelling. However, differences emerge when we consider their descriptions of this originary space. For the later Heidegger, the original status of humanity’s dwelling on earth is in its encounter with the fourfold, with reality as a whole. The role of the poet is to bring the various poles of reality into contact with one another in order to make this encounter possible. The poet or artist, therefore, retains the privileged position of making dwelling possible. For Agamben, the emphasis is on the work of art itself, in which “artists and spectators recover their essential solidarity and their common ground.”⁵ Engagement with the work of art keeps humanity in the truth and gives its dwelling an “original status” because it is the rhythmicization of such dwelling. For Agamben, art makes the experience of living in the world rhythmic through introducing interruption. As with Heidegger, rhythm is something more original than human will, beyond human control. Agamben’s chapter on the originary status of the work of art is an exploration of the meaning of Hölderlin’s phrase “Everything is rhythm.”⁶ Based on his interest in this phrase, one might think that Agamben sets out to demonstrate how rhythm is a symbol for the Heraclitean whole. His conclusion about Hölderlin’s phrase, however, is somewhat paradoxical. Agamben explores, and rejects as merely aesthetic, definitions of rhythm as measure or number that hold things in place, as well as definitions of rhythm as flow. Rather, these things are themselves products of rhythm; flow and measure are themselves made possible by a more “essential” rhythm.⁷ Agamben describes this more “essential” rhythm in terms of interruption in the same section that I quoted in chapter one: Yet rhythm—as we commonly understand it—appears to introduce into this eternal flow a split and a stop. Thus in a musical piece, although it is somehow in time, we perceive rhythm as something that escapes the incessant flight of instants and appears almost as the presence of an atemporal dimension in time. In the same way, when we are before a work of art or a landscape bathed in the light of its own presence, we perceive a stop in time, as though we were suddenly thrown into a more original time . . . . We are as though held, arrested before something, but this being arrested is also a being-outside, an ek-stasis in a more original dimension.⁸

⁴ As with Heidegger, Agamben’s understanding of the “origin” is not a remote past but a “cultural and conceptual space that we might all share.” Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 35–6. ⁵ Agamben, The Man Without Content, 102. ⁶ Hölderlin, quoted in Bettina von Arnim and Karoline von Arnim, Die Günderode, vol. 1 (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1982), 331. ⁷ Agamben, The Man Without Content, 96–9. ⁸ Agamben, The Man without Content, 99.

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Rhythm is not here described primarily from the perspective of ontology, as something that holds reality together as a whole, but experientially, as that which splits and takes us outside the eternal flow. Based on this experience of rhythm as a stop, Agamben associates rhythm with the idea of epoche, which he says has the double meaning of both suspending and offering, giving and holding:⁹ If we consider what we have just said about rhythm, that it reveals a more original dimension of time and at the same time conceals it in the one-dimensional flight of instants, we can perhaps, with only apparent violence, translate epoche as rhythm, and say: rhythm is epoche, gift and reserve . . . . Rhythm grants men both the ecstatic dwelling in a more original dimension and the fall into the flight of measurable time . . . . It is the original ecstasy that opens for man the space of his world, and only by starting from it can he experience freedom and alienation, historical consciousness and loss in time, truth and error.¹⁰

Agamben thus interprets Hölderlin’s phrase not by describing how it is that rhythm is the whole, but by suggesting that rhythm is something other than the whole, something more primordial that makes the whole possible, yet also interrupts it.¹¹ Rhythm is a double-movement of revealing and concealing, or of giving and suspending. When this more primordial rhythm interrupts everyday reality, Agamben says that it introduces into time a split and a stop. Agamben’s understanding of rhythm is caesuric; it functions to open spaces. In The Idea of Prose, Agamben describes the caesura as follows: the poet rides asleep on the horse of the sound and vocal element of language, carried along by the regular movement of the “rhythmic succession of ⁹ Epoche is literally translated as suspension. It was used in Greek philosophy to denote the suspension of judgment regarding the outside world and therewith action in that world (and was later taken up by Edmund Husserl to mean the suspension, but not obliteration, of belief (see “Epoche,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/ 190459/epoche (accessed October 29, 2012))..However, it also refers to the instant of time that is the origin of a particular era, thereby acting as a reference point for the measuring of time (Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, Abridged: The Little Liddell (London: Simon Wallenberg Press, 2007), 677). This is the sense from which we derive our word “epoc” (Bonnie J. Blackburn and Leofranc Lahford-Stevens, Oxford Companion to the Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 880). Interestingly, a third sense of the word which Agamben does not mention is its use in music to denote a period of vibration (Liddell and Scott, Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon, Abridged, 677). ¹⁰ Agamben, The Man Without Content, 100. ¹¹ This is similar to Blanchot’s description of rhythm. Blanchot also considers Holderlin’s phrase “all is rhythm,” saying “How is this sentence to be understood? ‘All’ does not mean the cosmic in an already ordered totality which it would be rhythm’s job to maintain . . . . Rhythm, while it disengages the multiple from its missing unity, and while it appears regular and seems to govern according to a rule, threatens the rule. For always it exceeds the rule through a reversal whereby, being in play or in operation within measure, it is not measured thereby” (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 112).

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representations.” The poet is thus unaware of that which carries him, he is merely swept along. However, when the horse stops suddenly, the poet awakes and is forced to consider that which carries him, namely his own voice. This sudden stop of the horse, which engenders thought, is the caesura.¹²

Like rhythm in general, the voice is here described as that which both makes poetry possible as well as that which interrupts the process and progress of language, opening a space in which the possibility of representation itself is thought. Agamben takes this image from Hölderlin as well, who says: In the rhythmic sequence of representations, in which the tragic transport exhibits itself, that which one calls the caesura in poetic metre, the pure word, the counter-rhythmic interruption, is necessary; precisely in order to counter the raging change of representations at its summit so that it is no longer the change of representations but the representation itself which appears.¹³

The caesura introduces an interruption into the incessant sequence of representations, the run-away train of progress. Hölderlin’s understanding of rhythm always includes this necessary counter-rhythmic caesura, which, although “counter-rhythmic,” is itself part of this rhythm and reveals that which is more “essential.” The caesura is the place from which the possibility of poetry (voice, representation itself), can be contemplated and alternative possibilities envisioned.¹⁴ Agamben’s understanding of rhythm is thus fundamentally interruptive because it relies on a stop, a caesura within the flow. Rhythm is that which includes such moments of interruption within a flow and, as such, Agamben’s concern is to make the flows in which we are currently embedded rhythmic by identifying or setting up such rhythmmaking spaces.¹⁵ ¹² Giorgio Agamben, Idea of Prose, trans. Michael Sullivan, and Sam Whitsitt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 44. ¹³ J. M. Bernstein et al., Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 195. ¹⁴ Notice that Agamben’s interpretation of Hölderlin is quite different from others, including Pascal Michon, who interprets Hölderlin’s caesura as more like that of Deleuze—a division between two parts of a dramatic whole, which is precisely what makes it a whole (Pascal Michon, “Rhythm as Rhuthmos—The German Romantics (1785–1804),” Rhuthmos, 24 July, 2016 https:// rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1764 (accessed March 16, 2018)). I do not here mean to arbitrate between which interpretation is correct. I am interested in Agamben’s understanding of rhythm and only in Hölderlin insofar as he supports Agamben. ¹⁵ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe says that in the caesura, binaries are dissolved. The suspension does not eliminate oscillation, “It simply brings it to a halt, re-establishes its equilibrium; prevents it, as Hölderlin says, from carrying along its representations exclusively in one sense or another.” (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, trans. Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 235). Lacoue-Labarthe’s description of the rhythmic caesura, likewise based on Hölderlin, is thus similar to that of Agamben in that it is an opening of a more original lack, space, or zone of undecidability within the play of binary categories yet beyond their binary logic. Rhythm both makes possible the building of schemas through differentiation, and produces a residue or caesura that threatens

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While for the thinkers considered in the previous chapter, reality involves a fundamental division that rhythm must hold together, Agamben describes rhythm as “something that could be found only by abandoning the terrain of division ad infinitum to enter a more essential dimension.”¹⁶ This more essential dimension is mysterious. It appears to have religious connotations but Agamben is not interested in describing its nature or ontology. He is only interested in how it functions, in how this more essential dimension is encountered. In his later work, Agamben describes this more essential dimension as “the division of division,” a description based purely on operation. Rather than holding divisions together, rhythm divides them further thereby disrupting anything that is built on the foundation of their opposition. The religious connotations are, nevertheless, confirmed since Agamben describes the messianic remnant in his book, The Time that Remains, a commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, likewise in terms of this division of division. In his interpretation of Paul, secular time is governed by the law, which creates divisions between groups such as Jew and Gentile. The remnant is intimately bound up with the division between Jew and Gentile while nevertheless subverting it by further dividing it. Rather than fusing these divisions into the “all” or setting up some alternative, final ground, whole, or world, the remnant opens a space within the world in which these divisions are meaningless.¹⁷ Agamben calls this opening-of-space a “messianic division” or “messianic vocation.” The remnant thereby prevents “divisions from being exhaustive and excludes the parts and the all from the possibility of coinciding with themselves.”¹⁸ The result is that divisions are rendered inoperative, incapable of generating an ontology or politics. As such, Agamben characterizes the gospel as power that is actualized in weakness (2 Cor. 12:9).¹⁹ It does not establish something new but interrupts and frustrates the established.²⁰ While Agamben’s direct analysis of rhythm is largely restricted to his chapter in The Man Without Content, the way in which he approaches and envisions rhythm in that chapter is the same vision that guides his approach to political, social, and religious life. These two sides of his work inform one another. It is difficult to understand his political project without first understanding his vision of rhythm and its significance and, likewise, his project of making-rhythmic through the introduction of interruptions is politically motivated.

that same schema. It supports the system of representation while also suspending and interrupting it. ¹⁶ Agamben, The Man Without Content, 96–7. ¹⁷ Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 52. ¹⁸ Agamben, The Man Without Content, 56. ¹⁹ Ibid., 38. ²⁰ Ibid., 26.

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In Agamben’s discussion of the remnant, we begin to see the associations between the political and the ontological, and their relationship to rhythm. This is the nexus in which Agamben’s thought operates, most well-known in his Homo Sacer series. These books trace the divisions on which the power of the state depends. In Homo Sacer, Agamben points out that the state creates its space of power through the exclusion of an excess such that it retains power over what is excluded by this act of exclusion. The excluded remains in relation to the rule as its suspension.²¹ He says, “The exception is what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member and cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included.”²² Thus, in distinction from Deleuze and those who attempt to include all of reality within an ontological whole, Agamben points out that the concept of the whole is always problematic because it is a political concept based on a relation to that which is its exception.²³ Like political structures, ontological visions are human-made machines that operate by holding together divisions, just as the thinkers of the previous chapter attempt to do. Ontology operates according to oppositions that it attempts to unite into a whole, such as between actual and potential, human and animal, universal and particular, or immanent and transcendent. In fact, Agamben traces the indiscernibility in ontology between being and division, the one and the many, as represented in the previous chapter, back to Heraclitus.²⁴ His conclusion is that this relationship is misunderstood if it is thought to be the nature of being as such. It is, rather, social praxis becoming transparent to itself.²⁵ In other words, ontology is the self-reflection of social movements, of politics. Ontology is based on division because politics is based in division. The thinkers of the previous chapter who participate in this ontological attempt to hold together division and being or one and many, in fact, fall prey to a politics of exclusion. On my reading, it is, specifically, the transcendent and the diachronic-creaturely that are excluded in order to make their visions of the whole possible. Agamben is not concerned with the relationship between these divisions as such, but with how the relationship between them has been established by political machines and how they might be disrupted. His objective is to unmask the machine that generates Western politics and its ontology. This involves separating what the machine claims to unite (dividing the division).

²¹ Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 17–18. ²² Ibid., 25. ²³ Ibid., 37. ²⁴ Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 118; William Watkin, Agamben and Indifference: A Critical Overview (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 58–9. ²⁵ Agamben, Potentialities, 137.

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Much of Agamben’s philosophy is, therefore, an attempt to open various caesurae within these taken-for-granted oppositions. The caesurae are described as zones of “indifference,” “indiscernibility,” or “indistinction” between these terms, and are variously described as “the coming community,” “(im)potentiality,” “states of exception,” “infancy,” “the remnant,” etc. In Agamben’s hands, that which is excluded from the machine becomes its caesura, dividing the division through which it operates. The zone of indistinction, remnant, or state of exception, as might be expected, is ambiguous and double-faced. It manifests most clearly the underlying problematic ontological and political divisions, but it also represents sites of possible interruption to such binaries. At times, Agamben speaks of the zone of indistinction or state of exception in negative terms, as that upon which the totalitarian state builds itself. For example, it is associated with Auschwitz, which is “the extreme that has become ordinary”²⁶ and the reality of the impossible.²⁷ Limits, such as between human and non-human, life and norm, lose their meaning in this zone, thereby revealing how they otherwise collude to uphold the state. Nevertheless, Agamben seeks out these zones precisely because these are the points from which the machines that generated such states of exception in the first place might be rendered inoperative. As such, they are also spaces of hope insofar as they are the places from which we can begin to make possible something other than the conditions of current political organizations. This is the reason that such spaces are associated with the messianic remnant: “In the end, the remnant appears as a redemptive machine allowing for the salvation of the very whole whose division and loss it had signified.”²⁸ It is for this reason that Agamben is more interested in rhythm’s interruptive qualities than its harmonizing qualities. He considers his philosophical and political responsibility to be the disclosure of the split on which politics and ontology are based in opposition to those forces that attempt to cover it over.²⁹ He does not appeal to rhythm in an attempt to unify ontological divisions, as discussed in chapter two, but points to its capacity to open a space or stop in the midst of the flow of the machine, a space in which the divisions on which the machine is based become visible and the function to which they are put can be disrupted.³⁰ Notice that this is much like the way in which African-American slave rhythms functioned, as a means of disrupting the machinic rhythms of slavery through music, dance, poetry, and religious practice. Like the Homo Sacer, the

²⁶ Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999), 50. ²⁷ Ibid., 148. ²⁸ Ibid., 163. ²⁹ Agamben, Homo Sacer, 180. ³⁰ Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevil Attell (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 88.

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slave is included within the sphere of power as an exclusion or suspension from both the protection of the law and white Christianity and yet, by virtue of that exclusion, is tightly captured and enslaved within those systems as excluded. Interaction with a slave-as-slave is a human action which would otherwise be called violence but is not because, as exception, the slave does not fall under the legal or religious spheres that determine human–human interaction.³¹ The disruption to the machine based in the social praxis of a different rhythm occurred from within a zone of indistinction generated by a machine comparable to the machine that generated Auschwitz. Similar to the way in which Agamben says that the “Musselman” of Auschwitz disrupts the boundary that had been drawn between the human and non-human, Fred Moten points out that the slave disrupts the boundary between subject and object as a “speaking commodity.”³² This situation is maintained through the machinic rhythms of slavery, yet, from within this zone of indistinction between inclusion and exclusion, the power of these spheres is challenged by alternative rhythms performed in the gaps. As mentioned above, the relationship between rhythm and the political takes on theological inflections in The Time that Remains. As with other caesurae or zones of indiscernibility, the messianic not only divides the social division between Jew and Gentile but has an ontological function as well. The Messiah introduces another temporal dimension into chronological time, which acts as a scission between the messianic event (the crucifixion and resurrection) and its parousia, its full presence.³³ The image of this in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the Sabbath, which represents “that innermost disjointedness within time through which one may . . . grasp time and accomplish it.”³⁴ Messianic time is within chronos but exceeds it, and it is part of eternity but exceeds eternity as well. It is both immanent to chronos, as well as transcendent in that it enables one to transcend chronos. It is “a zone of absolute indiscernibility between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world.”³⁵ In other words, messianic time divides the division between time and eternity. The purpose of this scission is to make the parousia graspable by recapitulating each instant, making it contemporary with the Messiah in a constellation between the two times.³⁶ The division between the messianic, salvific event and its full presence divides the division of time and eternity and thereby opens a more original dimension in which moments are freed from the flow and made present to that messianic event. This is called kairos. As with rhythm, the messianic is not something

³¹ Agamben, Homo Sacer, 82. ³² Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). ³³ Agamben, The Time That Remains, 71. ³⁴ Ibid., 72. ³⁵ Ibid., 25. ³⁶ Ibid., 76–7.

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other than time, but a more essential dimension of time itself that disrupts time, opening a space in which new meaning is possible. This manifests an interesting relationship in Agamben’s thought between space and time, the two ingredients of rhythm. On the one hand, the kairos or caesura is a space opened up within time, and it is this spatial interruption to the temporal flow that creates rhythm. He says, Through this complicated to-and-fro directed both forward and backward, the chronological sequence of linear homogeneous time is completely transformed into rhythmic constellations themselves in movement . . . . What we have is the same time that organizes itself through its own somewhat hidden internal pulsation, in order to make place for the time of the poem.³⁷

The space is beyond time in the sense that it is associated with the end of time and it suspends the logic of sequence. However, it is not something other than time, just as the poem is not other than time, but a grasped and contracted time. The opportune time is therefore not really a time at all as if it were a second time alongside the first, but a space, a spaciousness, within time. However, just as the opportune time is time-becoming-space, the space of the beyond, the threshold, is a space-becoming-time. What one might be tempted to think of as a transcendent space is actually the movement or taking-place of crossing over to something other, the process of being interrupted. It is therefore always temporal; it cannot be envisioned spatially as if from the outside. Agamben, therefore, does not identify the zone of indifference as a transcendence in a theological sense. The zone is a threshold; it suggests something beyond itself, albeit more in the sense of a future beyond that is not yet realized rather than a given ontological beyond that can be spatially represented. He calls it “the experience of the limit itself, the experience of being-within an outside.”³⁸ Agamben, therefore, acknowledges something like transcendence from a radically intra-creaturely perspective which allows one to only describe the experience of moving towards a beyond, rather than a transcendent “space” itself. There is only the temporal experience of crossing over into something other that cannot be named, that does not adhere to the same logic, and is therefore experienced as a space, as an interruption. In other words, Agamben’s perspective is rigorously diachronic. The concepts that he uses are rarely intended as ontological absolutes or identities but are, rather, descriptions of particular experiences, operations, and encounters from within time. Nevertheless, he does rely on theological language to describe these spaces that both make time rhythmic and represent the hope of political and social change. ³⁷ Ibid., 82. ³⁸ Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 68.

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Agamben’s description of rhythm is not simply a fringe moment but is key to his work as the diachronic form through which the various movements of his thought are performed.³⁹ Agamben is primarily interested in means, rather than in the end. The concepts in his thought are not a-historical prescriptions but operations performed kairologically, only at the right historical moment. The form that guides this discernment is what Watkin calls “logo-poetic,” an interchange between enjambment and caesura, flow and arrest,⁴⁰ which is to say that it corresponds to Agamben’s initial definition of rhythm. Rhythm works to make new kinds of relationship possible by opening spaces within time and experience in which the usual categories determined by political machines can be transcended and re-imagined.

Julia Kristeva Julia Kristeva helpfully extends the theological resonances in Agamben’s use of rhythm through interrogating the movements of unification and interruption that traverse the subject in language—one of the most pervasive social structures. Both Agamben and Kristeva attempt to describe something of the subject’s experience of language from within language, that is, as an experience of moving through an architecture. Agamben turns away from language as logical operation, a system of signs viewed synchronically, and focuses instead on the “the practical activity, that is, the assumption of language by one or more speaking subjects,”⁴¹ just as he focuses on the function of ontology as a product of political praxis. He makes a connection between the caesura as a poetic device and the disruption of the subject, particularly in the pronoun “I,” which does not designate anything specific because its referent is different depending on who is speaking. Instead, the I designates the act of speaking itself, designates that I am in the process of communicating and that I trust the possibility of communication.⁴² The I is not a thing but is language taking place. The subject is not the master of language because the I is always something other than the speaking subject, even as it is the grounding of one’s subjectivity by indicating the self over-against others. This grounding of the subject is therefore simultaneously a de-subjectification, a distancing of the subject from itself. He says that “To speak, to bear witness, is thus to enter into a vertiginous movement in which something sinks to the bottom, wholly desubjectified and silenced, and something subjectified speaks without truly ³⁹ William Watkin, The Literary Agamben: Adventures in Logopoiesis (London: Continuum, 2010), 189. Watkin argues that we can see in “The Original Structure of the Work of Art” the basis of all of Agamben’s subsequent philosophy. ⁴⁰ Ibid., 197. ⁴¹ Agamben, State of Exception, 39. ⁴² Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 116.

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having anything to say of its own.”⁴³ In speech, the self is disrupted. A caesura opens up between the human subject and the inhuman desubjectified, between the flow of vital functions, and the flow of language and consciousness. The I is this caesura. In associating communicability with the caesura in the I, Agamben points to the rhythmic nature of communication. The I introduces a stop into the flow of language, making it rhythmic.⁴⁴ The significance of such caesuric language is one of Julia Kristeva’s primary concerns. According to Kristeva, the process of becoming a subject, which is coincident with acquiring language, is always based on a separation of one’s self from the mother and from reality more generally. The acquisition of language is therefore an interruption to the immediate presence of reality. Pre-linguistic life is characterized by a felt omnipotence, which “is the power of semiotic rhythms, which convey an intense presence of meaning in a presubject still incapable of signification.”⁴⁵ It is an absolute unification with reality. The image that Kristeva uses for this space of semiotic meaning is the chora, a primeval and maternal matrix of nourishment prior to any sort of god or metaphysics.⁴⁶ It is the drives, stases, and movements of energy that precede language and have not yet been socially organized. She says that it is “analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.”⁴⁷ In other words, the chora refers to the rhythmic dimensions of language, which are based in the body and the maternal space out of which we first acquire language.⁴⁸ Semiotic rhythms ⁴³ Ibid., 120. ⁴⁴ This move is again associated with Hölderlin, who extends the idea of the caesura to consciousness as well. He describes the unity of human faculties as a rhythm, while the caesura is the “counter-rhythmic rupture” that disrupts this unity (Friedrich Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin: Essays and Letters on Theory, trans. Thomas Pfau (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 109)..These moments are a kind of Dionysian chorus in the midst of dialogue, which are composed of nothing but space and time and in which “man forgets himself because he exists entirely for the moment” (Hölderlin, Friedrich Hölderlin, 107–8). ⁴⁵ Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 62. ⁴⁶ Julia Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, trans. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 191. ⁴⁷ Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 26. ⁴⁸ Some critics such as Judith Butler object to Kristeva’s association of the feminine with nature and the maternal body over-against culture because it leads to a kind of gender essentialism (Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 102–3). However, if we read Kristeva as doing something similar to Agamben, we can read her, not as making an argument that the feminine is necessarily and essentially associated with biology and maternity, but as recognizing that this is the role that has been assigned to it by the symbolic. In much the same way that Agamben uncovers the political and ontological oppositions that emerge not because they are necessary but because they make possible a particular system, Kristeva uncovers an opposition upon which patriarchal culture is built and finds the zones of their indistinction in which to open alternative spaces. Her approach is therefore a different kind of subversion than that of Butler in that it is less an overthrowing, and more an attempt to hollow out, render inoperative, and move beyond. The semiotic is a space or machine of change and subversion, not the ideal itself.

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are “the more essential dimension” that generate and exist within the structures of language. Signification first occurs through a “thetic” break in which the subject symbolically separates him or herself from objects in order to indicate them.⁴⁹ Interestingly, the thetic break is initiated by the drives of the semiotic chora itself. Language is dependent on the chora as the drives through which language and social relations are acquired and through which significance is constituted. Once such signification is possible, however, the chora loses its absolute hold.⁵⁰ This thetic break makes the symbolic possible, introducing a split between semiotic and symbolic in which the subject emerges. The semiotic chora, therefore, continues to operate alongside the symbolic once the thetic break has taken place, creating a dialectic between the two dimensions of the signifying process in which the subject is constituted.⁵¹ However, after the thetic break, the semiotic transgression of the symbolic order always appears as a breach, a threat, and the symbolic therefore always endeavours to cover it over.⁵² The semiotic chora, analogous to vocal or kinetic rhythm, is both the possibility of the subject and the continual threat of its dissolution.⁵³ Kristeva describes the relationship thus: the [semiotic] transgression breaks up the thetic, splits it, fills it with empty spaces . . . . The explosion of the semiotic in the symbolic is far from a negation

⁴⁹ Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 43. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 27. ⁵¹ Ibid., 24. ⁵² Ibid., 69. ⁵³ Ibid., 28. There are several other parallel associations between rhythm and the disruption of subject in philosophy. Kristeva’s account here is similar to the way that Derrida describes différance as an originary spatial-temporal movement that cannot be represented but both gives and disrupts representation. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s use of rhythm is intentionally associated with this Derridean approach. For Lacoue-Labarthe, the subject generates itself through mimesis in speech and writing (Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography, 179), and is thus not a given entity but an ongoing process. The subject socially generates itself by imitating the rhythms of others. Each subject, beneath the figure that he or she projects, is rhythm because it is rhythm that enables the development of this figure (which is the subject) in the first place (ibid., 198–9). However, since this rhythm is a sort of Derridean archi-ecriture—something more primordial that acts as a ground which is nevertheless unstable and cannot be grasped—it must be covered over because it is a threat to the subject. Rhythms are therefore domesticated, re-constituted in the service of the subject (ibid., 202). As such, there are two sorts of mimetic rhythm at work. One is the creation of order through the imitation of already-performed identities. The other is the more primordial rhythm that is simply mimesis itself, the imitation of imitation, “forever preventing it from being subject” (ibid., 202). Insofar as rhythm is this latter manifestation, it determines the subject as a preinscription of chaos that makes it inaccessible to itself (ibid., 202). While the subject is constituted by rhythm, that rhythm cannot be grasped and it therefore functions as an interruption to the subject and its attempts to grasp itself, to represent itself as a stable identity. In some ways this is also similar to Deleuze’s differentiation of repetition and rhythm. The difference, however, between Deleuze and Lacoue-Labarthe is that while Deleuze describes rhythm and the reality of which it is a part as if he has direct access to and knowledge of it, Lacoue-Labarthe is more aware of the elusive nature of rhythm, the knowing subject’s relationship to it, and consequently its interruptive quality. Rhythm grounds everything, but one can only encounter this grounding rhythm as a problematizing of the patterns, systems, and wholes that we generate.

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of negation, an Aufhebung that would suppress the contradiction generated by the thetic and establish in its place an ideal positivity, the restorer of pre-symbolic immediacy. It is, instead, a transgression of position, a reversed reactivation of the contradiction that instituted this very position.⁵⁴

There are, therefore, two movements of interruption in Kristeva’s thought. On the one hand, there is the initial thetic break that ruptures the unity of the presymbolic world but makes the subject possible. On the other hand, once this is accomplished, the semiotic then continues to interrupt any stable world of meaning which the symbolic endeavors to set up. There is no attainable or given unity, neither the pre-symbolic unity since it is always lost in the emergence of the subject nor the subject’s attempt to set up a symbolic unity, which is always frustrated by the semiotic, the very processes that made it possible in the first place. Most often, the semiotic manifests itself in art, specifically in what Kristeva calls “poetic language,” the trans-symbolic, dynamic dimensions of language. Art is the semiotization of the symbolic. It injects spaces into language, confronting order.⁵⁵ She says, “the unity of reason which consciousness sketches out will always be shattered by the rhythm suggested by drives: repetitive rejection seeps in through ‘prosody,’ and so forth, preventing the stasis of One meaning, One myth, One logic.”⁵⁶ Poetic language “introduces through the symbolic that which works on, moves, and threatens it.”⁵⁷ Poetically, language is capable of “shatter[ing] conceptual unity into rhythms.”⁵⁸ As with Agamben’s caesura, art makes reality rhythmic by manifesting the interruptions of a more essential dimension. Nevertheless, the initial, traumatic separation created by the thetic can also manifest itself in less productive ways through the semiotic, particularly in depression, in which the primary semiotic processes come into conflict with the adopted symbolic constructs.⁵⁹ Depression is a response to the initial thetic break that makes sadness the object to which one clings and with which one merges, substituting it for the lost pre-symbolic reality as “the real that does not lend itself to signification.”⁶⁰ Kristeva describes the role of rhythm in depression as follows: The surge of affect and primary semiotic processes comes into conflict, in depressive persons . . . with symbolic constructs (apprenticeships, ideologies, beliefs). Retardations or accelerations turn up, expressing the rhythm of the normally controlled primary processes and, undoubtedly, biophysiological rhythm. Discourse no longer has the capacity to break and even less so to change that

⁵⁴ Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 69. ⁵⁷ Kristeva, Black Sun, 81. ⁵⁸ Ibid., 186.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 80. ⁵⁹ Ibid., 65.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 148. ⁶⁰ Ibid., 13.

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rhythm, but on the contrary allows itself to be changed by affective rhythm to the extent of fading into muteness . . . ⁶¹

Art, “prosody, the language beyond language that inserts into the sign the rhythm and alliterations of semiotic processes,” is what Kristeva calls a counter-depressant.⁶² It is an example of how, when semiotic rhythms are formed by poetic discourse, depression is sublimated because the subject is not overwhelmed by the semiotic chora; the semiotic is mediated through syntax. Through linking the semiotic, expressed in vocal and kinetic rhythms, with syntax, the semiotic continues to disrupt attempts at symbolic unity but in a way that does not completely overwhelm the subject. It is sublimated into poetic rhythms. In her book, Black Sun, Kristeva appeals to the death of Christ as a paradigmatic image of both the thetic break and the counter-depressant, crisscrossed as the crucifixion is by a complex relationship of rupture and unification. On the one hand, the break between Christ and the Father is the paradigm for the Western subject: The break, brief as it might have been, in the bond linking Christ to his Father and to life introduces into the mythical representation of the Subject a fundamental and psychically necessary discontinuity. Such a caesura, which some have called a ‘hiatus,’ provides an image, at the same time as a narrative, for many separations that build up the psychic life of individuals . . . . Thus, psychoanalysis identifies and relates as an indispensable condition for autonomy a series of splittings . . . : birth, weaning, separation frustration, castration. Real, imaginary, or symbolic, those processes necessarily structure our individuation . . . . Because Christianity set that rupture at the very heart of the absolute subject—Christ; because it represented it as a Passion that was the solidary lining of is Resurrection, his glory, and his eternity, it brought to consciousness the essential dramas that are internal to the becoming of each and every subject.”⁶³

Christ’s death is here an image of the thetic break. Nevertheless, Kristeva also points to the unifying dimensions of the event. She appeals to the idea of redemption as “identification,” in which the subject is implicated “in Christ’s suffering, in the hiatus he experiences, and of course in his hope of salvation.”⁶⁴ In particular, the implicitness of love and consequently of reconciliation and forgiveness completely transforms the scope of Christian initiation by giving it an aura of glory and unwavering hope for those who believe. Christian faith appears then as an antidote to hiatus and depression, along with hiatus and depression and starting from them.⁶⁵

⁶¹ Ibid., 65.

⁶² Ibid., 97.

⁶³ Ibid., 132.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 134.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 134.

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Faith functions like art. Through identifying with Christ, his death acts as a counter-depressant, making depression the space of hope without simply covering it over. Identification with Christ here appears to do the same as poetry, acknowledging the disruption of unity while sublimating it into a new, more complex sort of connection. A final example of such a counter-depressant is forgiveness: Forgiveness is ahistorical. It breaks the concatenation of causes and effects, crimes and punishment, it stays the time of actions. A strange space opens up in a timelessness that is not one of the primitive unconscious, desiring and murderous, but its counterpart—its sublimation with full knowledge of the facts, a loving harmony that is aware of its violences but accommodates them, elsewhere.⁶⁶

Again, forgiveness is here a counterpart to the primitive unconscious; it has the same form as the semiotic chora but sublimates its destructiveness. Such a sublimation is again achieved precisely because forgiveness binds itself to those drives: “By including [meaning, melancholia, and abjection] it displaces them; by absorbing them it transforms them and binds them for someone else.”⁶⁷ Counter-depressants therefore function for Kristeva in much the same way that zones of exception or indifference function for Agamben, as ambivalent spaces that are not only terrible but also a source of the hope of moving beyond depression by both including and displacing the split between semiotic and symbolic, from which depression emerges, through new possible modes of connection. As the self is split from itself and reality is crucified on the I, a new sort of harmony emerges as possible. Like Agamben, then, Kristeva conceptualizes rhythm as a more fundamental operation than symbolic reality, which cannot be grasped all at once but introduces spaces into the symbolic machine. These breaks are ambiguous, either interacting with the surrounding patterns productively or destructively. Christ’s death is, for Kristeva, a paradigm of the ambiguity of this space just as the messianic remnant is for Agamben. This is not to say that either thinker is theological per se, but these resonances give an indication of how an interruptive rhythm could have theological significance.

THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES Agamben and Kristeva explore the relationship of rhythm to the subject’s experience, which is always diachronic. As in cognitive poetics, these thinkers talk about rhythm as an alternative configuration of space-time that encounters and interrupts language and system. As with the periodists, these interruptions set up rhythm as a diachronic oscillation of stop and flow between ⁶⁶ Ibid., 200.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 206.

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everyday movements and their suspension in a caesura. Notice, however, that this does not necessarily make of rhythm the numerical, regular beat of which Michon and others are critical. Such beat is rather the faux rhythm, a kind of shallow meter, the rhythms of the symbolic or of the machine, of which most contemporary thinkers are suspicious. The result is that rhythm is not an ontological process, the functions of which we observe at a remove. Instead, in beginning from our experiences as subjects that encounter rhythm, these thinkers include the quality of this encounter in their observations about its nature and significance. This is a description that attempts to make sense of an encounter with rhythm and the social and political uses to which it is put, rather than of rhythm simply as an abstract category. The consensus is that this experience always includes an element of interruption to or confrontation with the everyday flow of language, time, and experience, which are frequently based on processes of division and exclusion. Agamben’s thought has generated a variety of interpretations and reactions, including various theological appraisals. I have hinted at some of the theological themes in his work and how they might be theologically extended as Kristeva does, but what is yet required is a direct theological engagement with Agamben. The focus of my theological interrogation of Agamben’s depiction of rhythm is the nature of the interruption. If the theological criticism of Benvenistian rhythm is that it represents a closed, immanent system in which the divine is reduced to the whole of the system such that confrontation to that system is made impossible, then surely a rhythm that includes an interruption to the whole, the flow, and the self, would be welcome. Nevertheless, the character of these interruptions is not straightforward, and some have suggested that such disruptions are less a matter of redemptive confrontation and more movements of nihilistic destruction.

Connor Cunningham and John Milbank Conor Cunningham makes the most direct theological critique of Agamben, arguing that Agamben attempts to set up a world of undifferentiated potential in which there is no distinction between good and evil. He argues that Agamben inverts actuality and potentiality, such that what is potential is the real and what is actual is only mirage. Any actuality is simply the inhibition of potentialities, an “ontological pretence” that prohibits the existence of what could be otherwise. Cunningham’s conclusion is that Agamben would like to bring the world as we know it to an end and that he does not offer us a new one in its place.⁶⁸ ⁶⁸ Conor Cunningham, “Nihilism and Theology: Who Stands at the Door?” in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. Nicholas Adams, George Pattison, and Graham Ward (Oxford: Oxford University, 2013), 337–9.

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Likewise, John Milbank interprets Agamben apocalyptically, arguing that because Agamben envisions a space that is entirely free of laws and ends, it is a space that is necessarily free and independent of all language, culture, and human history. In attempting to abstract beings from Being, Milbank argues that Agamben is making extreme a “lack of mediation,” such that the only option open to him is the negative one of “apocalyptic refusal.” Everything must be overthrown and nothing positive can be done.⁶⁹ Colby Dickinson, while generally supportive of Agamben, says that there exists in Agamben’s thought a Spinozan–Deleuzian affiliation⁷⁰ and admits that there is a constant risk in Agamben’s work that his “philosophy suggestively ‘undoes’ theology, at least as we historically have known it, or that it perhaps threatens to remove its content while preserving its empty shell alone.”⁷¹ However, Agamben’s philosophy is not so straightforward to categorize. There is a strong thread of theological engagement in Agamben’s work that at least requires evaluation and dialogue. We have already mentioned his work on messianism in his book on Paul’s letter to the Romans. Other examples include his thoughts on Franciscan monasticism, sacrifice, judgment day, and salvation. Dickinson too draws several other theological parallels which Agamben does not explicate, but which are nevertheless convincing.⁷² These examples demonstrate at the very least that Agamben is attracted to religious, and particularly Christian, concepts in expounding his thought. Agamben is not unique among contemporary philosophers in this respect. For example, Žižek and Badiou also engage with the thought of Paul, however, while these thinkers self-identify as atheists or make explicit that their interest in Paul is not an interest in the message that Paul himself proclaims,⁷³ Agamben does not identify with any particular group, religious or atheist, nor does he distance himself from Paul’s message but tries to re-capture what he believes to be its essence.⁷⁴ Similarly, in The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben exposes the twists that the Christian concept oikonomia underwent soon after Paul’s use of it, which brought it into the service of managerial

⁶⁹ John Milbank, Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis, and Catherine Pickstock, Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos, 2010), 34–5. Milbank asks if there is a Levinasian echo here in Agamben. ⁷⁰ Ibid., 168. ⁷¹ Colby Dickinson, Agamben and Theology (London: T & T Clark, 2011), 8. ⁷² For example, “Parabasis,” the notion that a transcendent actor is transposed into the spectating audience in order to transform them into participants, is a possible way to think about the incarnation of Christ. See Ibid., 33. ⁷³ Alain Badiou, for example, says, “I care nothing for the Good News [Paul] declares, or the cult dedicated to him . . . . Basically, I have never really connected Paul with religion” (Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 1). Note also that Badiou attributes to Paul a message of universality, while Agamben does not. ⁷⁴ Agamben, The Time That Remains, 1.

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government.⁷⁵ So, whatever else his interests and alliances might be, he at least perceives himself as faithful to Paul’s intentions. His methodology with regard to Christian concepts and thinkers is thus less a simple looting of the tradition, as in the case of Badiou, and more an attempt to re-affirm what he believes to be the real, more originary, messianism that has been bent out of shape through its complicity with various anthropological and political agendas. Moreover, he seems happy to associate certain examples of messianic caesurae with certain strands of Christianity, such as the Franciscans.⁷⁶ This is not to say that Agamben is a Christian thinker, but his objections to Christianity lie with what he considers to be certain, specific and heretofore un-analyzed perversions of the gospel and not with Christ himself. He is, therefore, a thinker that cannot be so easily dismissed. Nevertheless, what I think the above critiques represent is a larger concern surrounding those postmodern movements that include something like Christian transcendence on the surface but, upon closer inspection, such transcendences are mere irruptions of an excess from within the system that have destructive, rather than redemptive, consequences. One example of this concern is the category of the “sublime.” John Betz, for instance, says that Heidegger exhibits an underlying aesthetic prejudice for the sublime against the beautiful, which translates into an ontological prioritization of potentiality over actuality, of the indeterminate over the determinate, and thus, ultimately, of the potentia pura of the creature (which is hypostatized as Being) over the actual, determinate plenitude of God himself—in a sudden reversal of two-thousand years of metaphysics since Plato.⁷⁷

By “sublime,” Betz here means the absence of form and representation. The sublime is a sort of transcendence but because thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the French immanentists reject the beautiful form in favor of the sublime absence of form, there is no longer a relationship between these two aesthetic moments. Instead, the sublime itself becomes so absolutely other

⁷⁵ Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 65. ⁷⁶ Agamben suggests that the Franciscan rule-of-life aims at a threshold of indifference between rule/liturgy and life (although it ultimately fails). The terms lose their original meaning and allow a third thing, “use,” to appear (Giorgio Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form of Life, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 71). The concept of use is important for the Franciscans in conceptualizing life itself as something that cannot be owned or appropriated. Moreover, it is particularly important that this is a common form-of-life, in that use is the way of life that is most common to all, and is thus most originary (ibid., xiii, 132). ⁷⁷ John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Asethetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two),” Modern Theology 22, no. 1 (2006): 16.

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that it collapses into nothingness, leaving us in immanence.⁷⁸ If transcendence becomes something about which we cannot speak and with which we can have no relationship, then any transcendence that supposedly remains, such as the sublime that Betz identifies, is a counterfeit transcendence—merely a rupture of nothingness within immanence. Milbank makes a similar argument with respect to the French immanentists. He argues that the re-conceptualization of transcendence as sublimity has made Heraclitean, immanentist philosophy possible because it allows for difference and otherness within immanence that is nevertheless not something other than immanence. Among other things, this re-conceptualization is bound up with the Cartesian “turn to the subject.” The sublime is conceived as the unrepresentable ground of the subject, which both gives rise to it as a ground, but also threatens and undoes it in its unrepresentability.⁷⁹ This is true of rhythm as a ground of the subject as it has been described by all the thinkers considered in this chapter. Re-casting transcendence as the unrepresentable ground of the subject reduces it to merely self-transcendence which, since there is nowhere to transcend to, is the mere dissolution of the subject into nothing.⁸⁰ Milbank is not suggesting that transcendence ought not include an account of self-transcendence. Without an account of self-transcendence, one would end up with the problem of a divinity that is so utterly outside representation that it has no draw on us whatsoever, encouraging self-absorption and naturalism. His argument is rather that self-transcendence must take place within a larger system of movement and representation, rather than as an eschewal of ⁷⁸ John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Asethetics of the Analogy of Being (Part One),” Modern Theology 21, no. 3 (2005): 375. The sublime has made an appearance in the work of contemporary French philosophers such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida. As a result, certain theologians, such as David Bentley Hart and John Betz, have noted this category and its metaphysical implications as a point of contention, in which this aesthetic category comes to stand as a sort of summary for the above thinkers’ systems of thought as a whole. These theologians argue for the metaphysical primacy of the beautiful as opposed to the sublime. However, this is not the only theological approach to the sublime. Paul Fiddes has explored the significance of the sublime in critical theory and theology in more appreciative ways. See for example Paul Fiddes, “The Sublime, the Conflicted Self and Attention to the Other: Towards a Theopoetics with Iris Murdoch and Julia Kristeva,” in Roland Faber (ed.), Theopoetic Folds: Philosophizing Multifariousness (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 159–78; Paul Fiddes, “The Sublime and the Beautiful: Intersections Between Theology and Literature,” in Heather Walton (ed.), Literature and Theology: New Interdisciplinary Spaces (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 127–51. ⁷⁹ John Milbank, “Sublimity: The Postmodern Transcendent,” in Transcendence: Philosophy, Literature, and Theology Approach the Beyond, ed. Regina M. Schwartz (New York; London: Routledge, 2004). ⁸⁰ William Desmond makes this same point in God and the Between, in which he argues that while there are three sorts of transcendence: the otherness of beings, human self-transcendence, and originary transcendence itself, the turn to the subject has meant that self-transcendence has become an “overreaching into emptiness,” rather than a movement towards transcendence as other. (22–23).

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representation. Sublimity, according to Milbank, was previously associated with the movement of the soul and included wounding and rupture, but such rupture occurred within a framework that guided movement through ordered forms towards the unlimited excess of that order.⁸¹ Self-transcendence, properly situated, is a movement that is the result of being pulled forward by the Other through ordered structure. A transcendence that makes God unavailable becomes an empty transcendence that is merely the sublime overthrow of representation. It becomes reduced entirely to the movement of the subject beyond its own individual identity into nothingness. I evaluate this assumed association between transcendence and ordered structure in the following chapter. For the moment, however, I simply want to point out that Cunningham likely has these sorts of concerns in mind when critiquing Agamben. As with Betz and Milbank’s concerns regarding the sublime, Cunningham critiques Agamben’s alleged liquidation of form, representation, boundary, and structure. For Cunningham, the caesura is only a rupture of nothingness within the immanent rather than something other to it. The implication for the subject is that any interruption by which he or she is capable of transcending the everyday flow of experience or structures of subjectivity is only an empty space that enables a self-transcendence to nowhere. Self-transcendence is therefore no longer a matter of relationship, of union with the transcendent, but a disruption of the categories of representation for its own sake. Any relationship between everyday reality and a “transcendence” of this kind is purely a relationship of opposition, threat, and destruction. The reason that all of this is theologically problematic is that if the only space for the divine in a thinker’s work is as the interruption and dissolution of form and of the subject, the divine becomes a threat to the world and to established reality; the interruption is not for the sake of any redemptive end. This “transcendence” has no content or character. No relationship to this “divine,” other than one of confrontation, is possible. While none of the above thinkers would directly associate rhythm with the divine or transcendence, it nevertheless has similar qualities to the above-described “sublime transcendence” in that it is a groundless ground and an otherness that is powerful enough to disrupt established systems. So, while these thinkers would not associate such disruptive spaces and movements with God in any straightforward sense, they carry divine resonances nonetheless. These divine resonances are considered threatening to Christianity by Cunningham and Milbank insofar as they replace the Christian God with a divinized empty space of disruption and dissolution that can offer no hope and no relationship.

⁸¹ Milbank, “Sublimity: The Modern Transcendent,” 213.

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Jean-Luc Marion However, these concerns overlook other, more theologically promising, dimensions of the interruptive rhythm of Agamben and others like him. First, these critiques do not do justice to the nuance and complexity of Agamben’s work. Milbank and Cunningham’s critiques fail to take into account Agamben’s refusal to participate in attempts to give an account of the whole. In fact, Agamben believes that this enterprise leads to violence. For Agamben, neither Deleuze nor Heidegger go far enough in their deactivations because they continue to attempt to give an account of the whole, and ultimately propose an ontology that is based on strife, as in Heidegger, or in the immanent movement of self-preservation, as with Deleuze.⁸² Agamben is precisely not trying to set up a world at all, whether of undifferentiated potential or of any other kind.⁸³ William Watkin affirms that Agamben suspends the differentiation between general and particular, for example, not by negating them but by applying these categories across their own logic.⁸⁴ The same is true of potentiality and actuality. The suspension between potential and actual is not a static situation but their coexistence through that which governs potential, namely dynamis or the movement of change.⁸⁵ Watkin points out that this is how Agamben is different than Deleuze. While Deleuze flattens reality, making of every event its own potential counter-actualization, for Agamben, events are historically determined moments, the meanings of which are located in their relation to other events in a constellation.⁸⁶ This is why the idea of a diachronic perspective on rhythm is particularly appropriate to Agamben since his approach to thought and politics, in general, is like moving through a poem in that certain ideas are only accessible at certain points in time, depending on one’s location in the constellation.⁸⁷ Agamben’s ⁸² Agamben, Potentialities, 237; Erinn Cunniff Gilson, “Zones of Indiscernability: The Life of a Concept from Deleuze to Agamben,” Philosophy Today, 51 (2007): 102. Claire Colebrook notes that Deleuze’s program of creating a philosophy of “higher deterritorialisation” and a postorganic future goes far beyond Agamben’s less prescriptive attempts to “describe the genesis of humanity, polity and lived worlds from the prior domain of potentiality” (Alex Murray and Jessica Whyte, The Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 57). Likewise, William Watkin, while he believes the thought of Agamben and Deleuze to be similar, nevertheless admits that Agamben rejects the ubiquity of life and permanent equilibrium of Deleuze in favor of a complex process based in history, aware of certain kairological moments, and directed towards a future (Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 153, 172–5). In other words, his approach is diachronic. The political result is that while Deleuze has the “strong” solution of the destruction of the same, Agamben opts for a weak suspension of difference that makes “evental change” possible (ibid., 148). ⁸³ Both Colby Dickinson (Agamben and Theology, 87), a theological commentator, and William Watkin (Agamben and Indifference, 137–8), who is by no means favorable to a theological interpretation of Agamben, likewise affirm that Agamben does not seek to reduce the world to potentiality as if it were a new ontological prescription of how the world is or ought to be. ⁸⁴ Watkin, Agamben and Indifference, 86. ⁸⁵ Ibid., 147. ⁸⁶ Ibid., 174–5. ⁸⁷ Ibid., 174.

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purpose is not to describe an ontology. Rather, it is more like a movement of strategy. He is not primarily interested in ends, in describing an outcome, but in means, the operation by which one seizes upon a kairos in order to open up a space. Watkin says that “Put simply, for Agamben, radical change comes from impotential suspension of difference and for Deleuze counteractual destruction of the same. Agamben’s is the revolution of the weak, while Deleuze’s is the counterinsurgency of the strong, suggesting of course a very different political makeup.”⁸⁸ This is what makes Agamben’s thought particularly amenable to theology in that it does not involve a competing vision of the eschaton but primarily an interest in how one interacts with the current historical situation with a view to that which is beyond, whatever that might be. It can therefore function as a supplement to a Christian vision of reality rather than as a competing vision. These theological criticisms also fail to account for the difference between obliteration and suspension. Agamben is not seeking to obliterate all opposition but is creating a zone of suspension in which the relations between these oppositions can be re-thought. For example, Milbank suggests that Agamben’s vision, following Benjamin, is apocalyptic. He takes as an example Agamben’s definition of kairos, interpreting it as an alternative time that is removed from any social and historical context.⁸⁹ As we have seen, however, the kairos, for Agamben, is not something that is other than time and is not intended to replace time and its social-historical context. It is, rather, a certain operation performed on time that is nevertheless part of time itself, configuring it as a poem, rather than a simple flow. This is precisely why Agamben designates this operation as messianic, in explicit distinction from apocalypse.⁹⁰ Agamben does not attempt to abolish history and difference in order that the world should become an immanent soup of indifference. He does not prescribe zones of indistinction as new wholes or a new system that ought to be followed or set up. He is only interested in disrupting already-existing categories. He prefers to speak in terms of deactivation and hollowing-out rather than destruction or overcoming because he is not intent upon overthrowing the world as we know it. Seeking to open spaces of indifference is not necessarily a threat to all order, but an opportunity to re-think orders and relationships so that they can be altered and replaced by new kinds of order and relationship. If we bear this in mind, Agamben’s work looks more like Betz’s relation between form and its sublime disruption, rather than the sublime overcoming of form. Moreover, the caesuric spaces opened up by primordial rhythm, both for Agamben and Kristeva, are not completely without character, not pure ⁸⁸ Ibid., 148. ⁸⁹ Milbank, “Paul against Biopolitics” in Milbanck et al., Paul’s New Moment, 51, n. 60. ⁹⁰ Agamben, The Time That Remains, 62–4.

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dissolution, and thus also do not present a nihilistic vision simply by virtue of not saying anything at all. Kristeva’s chora is explicitly described as a matrix of the rhythmic movements of maternal love. While it is a space that is presymbolic and pre-linguistic, it is composed of the rhythmic movements of the body and of original sociality. Kristeva intentionally puts forward this original place of love as an alternative to originary violence as in Heidegger. Thus, the space has a very particular kind of character, albeit one that is pre-symbolic. Likewise, Agamben envisions the more originary dimension that rhythm opens up as one in which persons can recover their solidarity. In The Coming Community, Agamben’s reasons for overcoming division are to enable a kind of belonging that is not based on any category other than being together.⁹¹ As with Kristeva, then, this space of dissolution is not entirely character-less but is intentionally aimed at particular kinds of relationship. While it is true that this does not include a direct relationship with the “transcendent” itself, this focus on relationality indicates that the space has a certain kind of relational or connective character beyond mere rupture. It is less like a rupture, and more like a poetic interruption to the everyday flow of time that I discussed in chapter one. Based on this more theologically promising interpretation, Agamben’s rhythm can be read in a way that is different than the nihilistic sublime described above, namely as an “immanent transcendence.” This is not an idea or a term proposed by Agamben, but there is a resonance between this idea and Agamben’s interruptive caesura. Maurice Blondel refers to the idea of immanent transcendence in his 1896 Letter on Apologetics. He argues that the field of knowledge proper to philosophy is the immanent, but that philosophy must nevertheless “find in itself that which goes beyond it, an immanent transcendence.”⁹² The method of immanence proper to philosophy proceeds from an examination of that which we will, think, and do. However, we quickly find that “even the complete knowledge of thought and of life does not supply or suffice for the activity of thinking or of living; that on the one hand what is immanent in us, action and living thought, is yet transcendent . . . in regard to that which it represents.”⁹³ Philosophy cannot itself investigate that which is beyond the limits of immanence, namely the nature of the transcendent. However, it nevertheless affirms the existence of that transcendent within itself.⁹⁴ The transcendent is here associated with a positive ⁹¹ Agamben, The Coming Community, 2–24. ⁹² Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics; &, History and Dogma, trans. Alexander Dru, Illtyd Trethowan, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 181. ⁹³ Ibid., 180. ⁹⁴ Ibid., 157. Blondel was one of those French Catholic philosophers who was influenced by Bergson and was later taken up by Chevalier in articulating a new Catholic philosophy of intuition and the individual based in French thinkers such as Bergson. In particular, Blondel took from Bergson the idea that the individual has within him or herself the possibility and structures for self-transcendence to a spiritual life (John Hellman, “Jacques Chevalier,

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content, namely, that which immanent thought and action represent, rather than nothingness, even if this is not something that can be thought or known. Notice that Blondel too begins with the life of the subject—its thought and action. The immanent transcendent is encountered precisely within the subject’s experience. Through his or her analysis of this experience, it becomes apparent that knowledge is not sufficient to thinking and living. There is a dimension of living in the world that escapes comprehension and is not reducible to analysis. Within the reality that is most immediate to the subject is buried something ineffable. In contrast to the immanent sublime, in which immanent and transcendent are absolutely divorced and the only possibility for otherness is the rupture of sublime nothingness, immanent transcendence is a transcendence with character, viewed nevertheless without theological presuppositions, from the perspective of immanence. Rather than making claims about the ontological character of the interruption, an immanent transcendence is an articulation of the immanent experience of such an interruption. Immanent transcendence remains open, rather than resolving into a larger harmony of either immanence or nothingness, and has a nature that is at least not incompatible with Christian ideas regarding the divine, even if the thinker propounding it does not him or herself make these associations. One might object that Blondel says that thought and life are transcendent by virtue of that which they represent, while for Agamben the more original dimension is other precisely because it does not represent anything, but suspends representation but this is ultimately an objection to Blondel rather than Agamben. The limit proposed by Blondel ends up being simply the limit between consciousness and the world. This is what Jean-Luc Marion calls phenomenological transcendence—that which is transcendent simply by virtue of being outside consciousness. It is therefore inadequate to God’s transcendence,⁹⁵ not really transcendent as such but only transcendent to consciousness. This is an important criticism if we want to maintain the interruptive nature of transcendence as that which interrupts from beyond the system, as genuinely new, and not merely from beyond a certain perspective. Jean-Luc Marion is a thinker who manages to speak about the transcendent while also not compromising its transcendence. He does so by speaking about it in the language of impossible possibility. This is an approach to transcendence that maintains the transcendence of the Bergsonism, and Modern French Catholic Intellectuals,” Biography 4, no. 2 (1981): 139, 141). Nevertheless, Blondel, arguably, was not influenced by Bergson himself, but by his own interpretation of Bergson, which tended to overlook his pantheistic tendencies (Pierre Lachieze-Rey, “Blondel et Bergson,” Les Etudes philosophiques 7, no. 4 (1952): 383–6). ⁹⁵ Jean-Luc Marion, “The Impossible for Man—God,” in Transcendence and Beyond: A Postmodern Inquiry, ed. John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 17–18.

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transcendent as beyond the conditions of the possibility of experience, yet as experienced nonetheless. Thus, rather than that which is simply beyond consciousness, the transcendent is beyond everything that makes consciousness possible, beyond the possible. Yet it is experienced nonetheless as an event that comes without preconditions of possibility, concept, or causation.⁹⁶ This is an event that gives itself without making itself comprehensible. The fundamental difference between Blondel and Marion is that Blondel ultimately ends up with an immanent transcendence viewed synchronically, despite the fact that he attempts to begin from within the creature’s experience. He identifies two realms and a limit between them. Marion, on the other hand, approaches the immanent transcendent diachronically. In approaching the transcendent in terms of possibility, Marion escapes the temptation of making the transcendent a passive realm that is subsequently penetrated and instead gives it a freedom that encounters the subject as a surprise.⁹⁷ As such, if Agamben’s zones of indiscernibility approach something like an immanent transcendence, it is not so much that of Blondel as of Marion. Agamben suggests in his discussion of the caesura that the caesura is an interruption to representation precisely because it represents the possibility of representation itself, which is unrepresentable. He, therefore, uses language similar to Marion’s possibility that escapes the limits of possibility. Moreover, Agamben says that it is important that one maintain “oneself in the right relationship with ignorance . . . . The art of living is, in this sense, the capacity to keep ourselves in harmonious relationship with that which escapes us.”⁹⁸ He calls this the zone of non-knowledge and contrasts it with knowledge which separates out what is unknown only so as to conquer and attain it. Instead, the zone of non-knowledge is a matter of gestures and our relationship to it is a dance. It is a matter of movement. In protecting the creaturely perspective, Agamben allows the diachronic movement to be intersected by a different kind of movement. The transcendent is not conceptualized here in terms of epistemology, but encounter. In this way, Agamben’s zone of nonknowledge or indistinction resonates with Marion’s account of transcendence. Moreover, the idea of this immanent transcendence does not unambiguously designate the divine in Marion either. For Marion, what he calls “the ⁹⁶ Ibid., 33. ⁹⁷ Marion says that surprise “challenges self-constituting polarity in [their interloque], and finally comprehends it starting from and in an event that the interloque itself does not in any way comprehend” (Jean-Luc Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and Phenomenology, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 201). This is similar to the way in which Przywara’s theological analogy intersects and disrupts the temptation of the intra-creaturely polarity towards self-enclosedness. ⁹⁸ Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Padatella (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 114.

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saturated phenomenon,” or “the event,” is anything impossible in the sense that it brings about something new without being a logical continuation of that which came before. Any number of events could be classified in this way. Agamben goes so far as to describe Auschwitz in similar terms.⁹⁹ Marion would not himself describe an evil event such as Auschwitz in terms of the event or the saturated phenomena precisely because this would suggest that no one could be held responsible.¹⁰⁰ Evil is the result of a particular and very tight logic and is thus the opposite of the impossible.¹⁰¹ Marion would be more likely to designate forgiveness as a saturated phenomenon since it is an interruption to the blame-shifting logic on which evil depends. Nevertheless, I think that Agamben would agree with this in that Auschwitz for him is the revelation of the logic of the machine according to which the state operates taken to its extreme; it is thus an outworking of that same logic. The difference is that Marion designates such atrocities as tight outworkings of a particular logic while Agamben, although not denying this, considers them both outworkings of a logic and gaps from within which such logic can be challenged and rendered inoperative such that something impossible might emerge. Even so, the event which Marion designates as the most extreme outworking of the logic of evil is the crucifixion of Christ,¹⁰² such that, given the resurrection, this event also becomes the place from which the tight logic of revenge and retaliation is rendered inoperative and overcome. In both cases, evil events are not in their occurrence instances of immanent transcendence or saturated phenomena but outworkings of too-tight machines of logic. Nevertheless, in both cases, such events harbor the possibility of opening something other than the system, something impossible, precisely at the point of their extreme, thus becoming spaces of “event” or “impossible possibility.” Thus, despite what might appear as differences between Marion and Agamben, both thinkers approach the transcendent, or zone of non-knowledge, in a similar way, as an interruption to the logic of the current situation, which is therefore designated impossible. For Agamben, the nature of such an immanent transcendence is a matter of social praxis, an imaginative possibility to be realized, rather than speculation regarding something given. Agamben might, therefore, be thought of as espousing an immanence that is more radical than that of Deleuze, not because he reduces everything to a soup of indifference but because he refuses at any point to compromise his immanent, diachronic perspective. In other words, Agamben at no point compromises his intra-creaturely perspective in ⁹⁹ Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 148. ¹⁰⁰ These points about Marion were made by Taylor Knight in correspondence from May 4, 2015. ¹⁰¹ Jean-Luc Marion, “Evil in Person,” in Prolegomena to Charity, trans. Stephen E. Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 1. ¹⁰² Ibid., 10.

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an attempt to give an account of the whole. The interesting thing about this approach is that it is this radical immanence that opens up the possibility of a beyond, albeit a beyond that is as yet without content. This is, of course, why Agamben’s project is not sufficient for theology. However, my contention is that it is a necessary perspective for theology in its attempt to inhabit a diachronic and rigorously creaturely perspective, thereby allowing for openness to the interruptive encounter. Agamben traces the kind of world that theology encounters and in which it is articulated, which is in part the world of the experience of human structures and machines that require such interruption and encounter. It is a movement encountered by non-knowledge itself; the theological retains enough independence from human knowledge and movement to interrupt and intersect it.

Erich Przywara Based on this association between Agamben’s interruptive rhythm and a certain kind of immanent transcendence, I propose that interruptive rhythm is a manifestation of what Erich Przywara calls “intra-creaturely analogy.” Przywara identifies two analogies; each emphasizes a different relationship between immanent and transcendent. The theological analogy, which we will discuss in the following chapter, is the relationship between God and creature, while the intra-creaturely analogy is the tension of essence and existence viewed from within the creature’s life and open to something beyond itself, the nature of which is unclear from the perspective of the intra-creaturely itself. In contrast to a closed-in (anti)metaphysic in which the oscillation between essence and existence, form and chaos, etc., is absolutized into an immanent harmony, Przywara refuses to close the system in on itself and recognizes, instead, a fundamental openness in the tension between essence and existence such that essence and existence are related, but not fused into a whole.¹⁰³ Analogy is here a relationship between two poles in tension, maintained by keeping the oscillation open to something beyond itself.¹⁰⁴ Rather than two ¹⁰³ Erich Przywara, Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, trans. A. C. Bouquet (London: Oxford University Press: H. Milford, 1935), 85. ¹⁰⁴ This is not Przywara’s invention but is rather the initial, not-yet-theological definition that he draws from Aristotle. In this definition, “analogy” is the relation of things most different from one another, that is, it is a relationship that is more different than one based on number, form, or genus etc. “Again, some things are one numerically, others formally, others generically, and others analogically; numerically, those whose matter is one; formally, those whose definition is one; generically, those which belong to the same category; and analogically, those which have the same relation as something else to some third object. In every case the latter types of unity are implied in the former: e.g., all things which are one numerically are also one formally, but not all which are one formally are one numerically,” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 5 1016b). Thus, when Przywara uses this to indicate the relationship between two poles such as essence and existence in

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opposite sides of reality that are fused into a whole, the oscillation between the two poles in analogy is preserved by virtue of their being harmonized only by something beyond their division. Such a harmonizing function is beyond Agamben, but the tension of an immanent transcendence is nevertheless likewise how Agamben acknowledges something beyond the poles of current experience. Przywara likewise associates the intra-creaturely analogy with “transcending immanence.”¹⁰⁵ This transcending immanence is articulated in a way that is similar to the way in which Agamben conceptualizes rhythm. Przywara says: “Analogy appears here as an immanent transcending between movement and number,” by which he means that number and movement both transcend themselves toward the other, creating the back-and-forth dynamic of analogy.¹⁰⁶ Agamben defines rhythm through considering its association with both number or measure, on the one hand, and flow, on the other. In the end, he says that rhythm is beyond, something other than, both number and flow, as that which gives both number and the flow of time. In other words, Agamben suggests that rhythm is a more original or essential dimension of reality but refuses to associate this rhythm with the concepts of flow or measure that would make it subservient to conceptual or symbolic thought.¹⁰⁷ My identification of Agamben’s rhythm with immanent transcendence is therefore consistent with Przywara’s own association of transcending immanence with the rhythm of intra-creaturely analogy, a rhythm that transcends both number and flow nevertheless manifesting as an oscillation between them. I therefore propose that Przywara’s intra-creaturely analogy is more comparable to the way in which Agamben uses rhythm than to either the flux of chapter two or rhythm-as-measure in chapter four.

which difference and unity are maintained in tension, he is referring to a kind of unity that cannot be reduced to any of the others. As we will see, the question of what the third “object” is that mediates the relation in the case of essence and existence is a source of debate. Christian theology understands it to be only the divine, but this still raises questions. Ultimately, Przywara describes this third as a second oscillation between God and creature rather than as a divine object that could be grasped in itself. ¹⁰⁵ Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2014), 239E/ 143G. ¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 211E/117G. Italics original. The explanation comes from the translator’s footnote. An alternative interpretation might be that the oscillation between movement and number itself transcends both, pointing to a beyond. The point is simply that the rhythm of intra-creaturely analogy is described in similar terms to Agamben’s description of rhythm and that it is designated an immanent transcending. ¹⁰⁷ For more on the similarities between rhythm in Agamben and Przywara’s intra-creaturely analogy see Lexi Eikelboom, “Erich Przywara and Giorgio Agamben: Rhythm as a Space for Dialogue Between Catholic Metaphysics and Postmodernism,” Heythrop Journal 56, no. 3 (2014): 10.1111/heyj.12149.

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Przywara’s rhythm of the intra-creaturely analogy involves both an “upward” and a “downward” movement. In one sense, the intra-creaturely analogy is an analogy from below to above because it begins with the particulars of creaturely experience and recognizes the presence of a beyond from within this immanent reality. However, Przywara also describes it as a regressive rhythm, or “philosophy of the pure image,” a top-down movement that attempts to reduce all abstraction of logos to the contradictoriness of experience.¹⁰⁸ This regressive rhythm is appropriate to creaturely reality, and more honest than what Przywara calls idealisms or essentialisms—which express perfect harmony or coinherence—so long as such regressive rhythm is not metaphysically absolutized.¹⁰⁹ When it is not absolutized as a whole, Przywara is very positive about Heraclitus’s recognition of “an inner contradictoriness in the real itself.”¹¹⁰ The difference between the intra-creaturely analogy and the relationship between struggle and harmony in a Heraclitean metaphysic is admittedly subtle. John Betz, points out, for example, that Przywara’s analogy and the metaphysics of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the post-structuralists have the same rhythmic form.¹¹¹ The difference lies in the openness of these two rhythms, which, in turn, depends on the perspective of the account. Intracreaturely analogy is an immanent metaphysic that is not absolutized or closed in on itself. It is open to something beyond itself such that harmony between actuality and potentiality is not dependent upon immanent process but on something beyond the system, capable of mediating the two poles as well as disrupting unhelpful relations between them. Intra-creaturely metaphysics is therefore humble. In refusing to divinize itself, it remains open to a beyond, which is a posture made possible by a rigorous adherence to a diachronic perspective. This is precisely what I think Agamben manages to do. The two perspectives on rhythm, the Benvenistian and that of Agamben, are both attempts to describe the same creaturely rhythm, but they do so from two different perspectives, the former from without and the latter from within. Agamben recognizes a beyond from within immanence and makes no attempt to harmonize the contradictoriness of experience into a whole, preferring instead to draw attention to and open up such contradictions. Theologically, it is important that any such interruptions not be for their own sake but for the ¹⁰⁸ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 430E/335G, 436–7E/342G. ¹⁰⁹ Note that Przywara is not always consistent about which thinkers he places in which category. In this essay, he associates Hegel, Heidegger, Kierkegaard, and Plato with idealism, while elsewhere he associates Kierkegaard and Heidegger both with existentialism or realism. This difference can be explained by Przywara’s assertion that when absolutized, both alternatives collapse into one another. ¹¹⁰ Ibid., 473E/384G. ¹¹¹ Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two),” 16.

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purpose of ever new and redemptive actualizations. What I have attempted to show in this chapter is that while Agamben’s intentions with regard to purpose are unclear, his approach is at least not incompatible with such redemption. Doubt remains, however, regarding whether Agamben is able to achieve such new and redemptive situations without a positive vision of harmony such as that which theology supplies. This is the difference between the rhythm of Przywara’s transcending immanence and that of Agamben: the movement of the intra-creaturely analogy has an “inner end-directedness” such that the oscillation between actuality and potentiality is directed by something that is beyond it and within it.¹¹² In other words, Przywara’s beyond is efficacious, while Agamben must remain mute on this point given his immanent perspective. The double nature of the rhythm explored in this chapter gives it an ambiguous quality, which makes theology suspicious of it. These interruptions might be positive, even intimations of divine transcendence, but they might also be nihilistic, oppositional, destructive forces. Since Agamben’s rhythm escapes the categories in which we are used to thinking, it is fair to say that intra-creaturely, diachronically-viewed rhythm is not in itself an ethical or theological category insofar as such categories rely on the sorts of representations that rhythm disrupts. Thus, theology cannot simply adopt this understanding of rhythm without qualification. If rhythm is to be the form of the relationship between God and creature, it must be interpreted through the lens of that relationship, must be in service to its ends, the ends of redemption and salvation. Nevertheless, this is not to dismiss Agamben’s conception either. The Christian tradition requires that a degree of otherness, transcendence, or mystery be maintained with respect to God. Theology must retain a degree of apophaticism such that God is never circumscribed in doctrine because it is always articulated by creatures. In other words, theology must remember who is performing it, namely creatures, and remember what this perspective means for how we speak about God. While theology makes definite assertions about the goodness and love of God, it can never exhaustively explain what this means. So, there is always the possibility that those categories will be confronted and interrupted, even if not completely overturned. Acknowledging this dimension of the relation between God and creature is, therefore, necessary and intra-creaturely rhythm viewed diachronically provides a way to articulate the nature of such interruptions.

¹¹² Przywara, Analogia Entis, 209E/115G.

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Part III Theology

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4 Synchronicity II Rhythm as Hierarchy

Critics of Agamben’s immanent transcendence argue that it is impossible to have a relationship with such a transcendence because of its inaccessibility and emptiness. The result is that the dualism between immanent and transcendent hardens into an opposition. These critics, most of whom are proponents of the movement known as Radical Orthodoxy, prefer a metaphysics in which immanent and transcendent interact with one another according to an ontological hierarchy of participation, appealing to Neoplatonic and medieval theology to articulate and support their vision. This hierarchical metaphysics entails a third approach to rhythm articulated by Augustine. If chapters two and three outlined two possible approaches to an intracreaturely rhythm, the hierarchical approach attempts what Przywara calls the theological analogy. While the intra-creaturely analogy refers to the tension between the creature’s essence and existence unified in their difference by an as-yet-unknown third factor that transcends the creature, the theological analogy concerns an analogical relationship between philosophy and theology, which has the form theology-in-and-beyond-philosophy. The philosophical perspective on metaphysics approaches God as a limit-concept (as in chapter three) and attains its telos through theology, which is concerned with God in God’s self. However, the theological is realized only in and through the philosophical, or the creaturely.¹ As such, just as the intra-creaturely analogy cannot stand on its own, but requires at least an openness to a theological analogy, the theological analogy threatens to become an essentialism (a direct relation of the creaturely essence to the divine Essence) if attempted from any other perspective than the tensions of the intra-creaturely analogy. The rhythm of the theological analogy is by itself insufficient to Christian theology.

¹ Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2014), 174E/80G.

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I argue that such an essentialized theological analogy is also a synchronic perspective, albeit one of a different kind than that of Benvenistian rhythm. As with intra-creaturely analogy, theological analogy involves both a bottom-up and a top-down movement. It tends towards a “progressive rhythm” that seeks to move from the immanent, sensory world of images to the true, abstract, and eternal Logos:² “Through the theological, as its ‘inner telos’ (entelecheia), the ‘ascending movement’ (dunamis) of metaphysics arrives at its ‘definitive actualization’ (energeia).”³ However, this ascent is based on a top-down ontological movement from the “freely independent giving”⁴ of the transcendence of God to the creature.⁵ In this “a priori” approach to metaphysics, the grounded, directed, and determined is deduced from its ground, end, and definition. The relationship between God and creature that results from this top-down movement is “a oneness with a God of the ‘Ideas’ and of ‘Truth,’ to the point of reproducing [Mitvollzug] the groundedness, directedness, and determinateness of all reality from this God.”⁶ Each analogy has a different way of conceptualizing the way in which God is both in and beyond the creature. From the perspective of the intra-creaturely, God is within the creaturely as its (active) potency towards God, however, since God is not here known “in himself,” God is experienced as an interruption. God is only known as “above-and-beyond” and is therefore treated apophatically. Again, we could see this at work in the positions described in the previous chapter. The primary domain of enquiry for the theological analogy, on the other hand, is the beyond, namely God in God’s self and “the creaturely comes into question only as (and ‘insofar’ as it is) the site and way and mode of the self-declaration of the divine.”⁷ In this view, the creature is a manifestation of God’s own standpoint, God’s knowledge of what God has made.⁸ As with the synchrony of Heraclitean metaphysics, the risk to which an absolutized theological analogy tends is that of a God’s-eye-view. An attempt to articulate a theological analogy unmoored from the intra-creaturely has the form of the “philosophy of the pure concept.” Abstracted from its analogical relationship with the rhythm of the intra-creaturely analogy, theological analogy rationalizes the sensible world.⁹ It becomes a purely a priori metaphysic that seeks an absolute unity. Przywara names this danger “theopanism” in that “proceeding fundamentally [grundlegender Richtung] ‘from above to below,’ God becomes the all.”¹⁰ He criticizes various thinkers for falling into this kind of theopanism. Hegel, in particular, stands out as someone who “directly [unmittelbar] grasps the super-conceptual rhythm of the intra-Trinitarian life as the thought form governing the creature’s intellectual life [Geisteslebens],”¹¹ ² ⁵ ⁶ ⁹

Ibid., 434E/339G. ³ Ibid., 174E/180G. ⁴ Ibid., 217E/122G. James V. Zeitz, “Przywara and Von Balthasar on Analogy,” Thomist Press (2006): 484. Przywara, Analogia Entis, 156E/61G. ⁷ Ibid., 163E/68G. ⁸ Ibid., 158E/64G. Ibid., 430E/335G. ¹⁰ Ibid., 165E/70G. ¹¹ Ibid., 185E/91G.

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rather than allowing this to be relativized by mystery. Notice, then, that this is another manifestation of the same reductive, synchronic form that we identified in chapter two, which may take the form of either pure logic or pure dialectic, pantheism or theopanism. The difference between theopanism and the theological analogy located appropriately in the intra-creaturely is the difference between a “speculative theology” of a priori metaphysics, and a properly ecclesial theology, which Przywara describes as a theology of the divine made visible in the church, as it unfolds over the course of time. In other words, this is the difference between a theology that emerges out of the soteriological narrative of God’s engagement with history, as opposed to an independent and eternal structure. The problem with approaching theology from such an eternal structure is that it would imply a standpoint not only outside the tradition’s current, but one situated already at the end, at the very mouth of the stream. But this standpoint is God’s alone. For the creature, only something similar (though precisely for this reason essentially dissimilar) is possible: firstly, moving “with” the current, which is to say, maximally, giving oneself up to it [Selbstaufhörens]; secondly, moving “in” the current, which is to say moving in the conscious awareness that even the most vigorous attempt to move “with” the current never grasps the whole of it (because both its past as well as its coming possibilities always looms out of the reach of any attempt, concomitantly, to grasp it), but is instead ever more deeply grasped by it.¹²

My argument in this chapter is that those who (rightly) critique an absolutized intra-creaturely rhythm (even if they sometimes claim such absolutization where it does not exist) described in chapter three are themselves in danger of theopanism should they reject intra-creaturely rhythm entirely. At times, these theologians assume a position outside the flow that presumes to be capable of grasping the whole. The particular understanding of the nature of rhythm that accompanies this risk is drawn from a particular interpretation and use of Augustine’s De Musica. The rhythm that Augustine describes in De Musica is instructive in that it lends itself either to an appropriate theological analogy or to theopanism, depending on how one understands it.

AUGUSTINIAN RHYTHM AND THE HIERARCHY OF THE W HOLE Augustine is a thinker whom Przywara mostly lauds and draws upon in explicating his own thought. In the first part of Analogia Entis, Augustine is ¹² Ibid., 151E/56–57G.

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repeatedly referenced as one of the central theologians who understands and expresses the importance of analogy. Several of Przywara’s primary phrases in describing analogy come from Augustine: for example, God is “within everything because all things are in him, and outside everything because beyond all things.”¹³ However, Przywara draws a distinction between the early Augustine and the later Augustine. The early Augustine expresses an idealism or an essentialism, in which he postulates a divine absolute, which Przywara attributes to Augustine’s radical turning away from Manicheism and its dialectical deity.¹⁴ True existence is here associated with the ideal world of universal forms.¹⁵ Thus, the early Augustine tends to emphasize “revelation in spirit and truth,” perfect and immutable, and the human ascent into this ideal from out of the sensible. In contrast, Augustine’s later theology recognizes the realism of flesh and blood, a coincidence of all antitheses in Christ.¹⁶ The ascent of salvation occurs within and through the real and truth is given only within this downward, humbling movement. Przywara argues: If the idealism of the early Augustine represented the negative overcoming of his original Manicheism and its doctrine of primordial intra-divine antitheses (between a God of light and God of darkness), and if, for precisely this reason, his own idealism was in danger of degenerating into an integralism of pure “truth in the spirit”. . . , then Augustine’s realism of antitheses can be seen, by contrast, as a positive overcoming of his original Manicheism, redeeming the positive core that Manicheism had turned into an absolute.¹⁷

Whether one can divide up Augustine’s Christian thought into an early and late period is a matter of debate.¹⁸ In fact, even Przywara himself is not consistent in this division. While he distinguishes between the idealism of the early Augustine and the realism of the later Augustine in the above quote, in the main body of Analogia Entis, Przywara draws on Augustine’s works indiscriminately, often referring to the Soliloquia, for example, one of Augustine’s earliest writings as a Christian. Moreover, Przywara is not always consistent in associating various thinkers with one movement or another. Przywara’s various typologies (a priori and a posteriori, essentialist and existentialist, theopanism and pantheism) are ¹³ Ibid., 215E/120G. ¹⁴ Ibid., 509E/425–26G. ¹⁵ Ibid., 442E/349G. ¹⁶ Ibid., 514E/431–32G. ¹⁷ Ibid., 516E/433G. ¹⁸ See, for example, Carol Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology: An Argument for Continuity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Harrison notes the extent of the debate (5–6) and the important scholars (e.g. Brown) who identify a significant difference between Augustine’s early and late theology dating from the 390s (14–17) while herself arguing that there is no such turn but that both his Neoplatonism and his emphasis on sin and grace, and the insufficiency of reason for soteriological ascent are present in his thought from his conversion to Christianity in 386. However, she does acknowledge that Augustine becomes “increasingly aware of the irreconcilability of certain specific Platonic doctrines with the Christian faith,” including the doctrine of emanation (37). She states that “Neoplatonic ascents are juxtaposed with Christian faith in the authority of the incarnate Christ.” However, “he never actually leaves behind the ascensional schemes” (47).

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formal categories, which no one fits perfectly. Theopanism represents a particular kind of danger to which some thinkers are more prone than others. In the case of Augustine in particular, Przywara is not primarily interested in the historical Augustine’s intellectual trajectory, but in distinguishing his own use of Augustine from certain other uses and interpretations, particularly those that emphasize the unity of the transcendent and spiritual world as opposed to the disparate temporal world, which leads to theopanism, and from those who rely on a Neoplatonic reading of Augustine.¹⁹

De Musica Przywara does not explicitly consider Augustine’s writing on rhythm in De Musica. Nevertheless, De Musica is an example of rational and moral ascent according to a hierarchy that mediates the harmony of the eternal in relation to the disparity of the temporal. As such, Augustine’s description of rhythm is an example of the theological analogy—an account of creation based in an understanding of the divine—which, if it is not located in an intracreaturely analogy, leads to essentialism. Nevertheless, understanding the nature of this rhythm will help us to know the character of this theological “rhythmicization.” As an aside, the reader may notice that Augustine more often refers to numerus than rhythm, which is sometimes translated as number. Pascal Michon offers a compelling case for why numerus in De Musica should be translated as rhythm rather than number or harmony. First, while Augustine rarely uses rhythmus, when he does, he equates it with numerus. Second, there is a theological significance at work in numerus, which is obscured when translated variously as number or harmony. Augustine builds on Origen’s claim that God organizes and unifies the world by suggesting that this occurs through the application of numeri, which are explicitly compared to musical or poetic rhythms. Augustine is making the point that God not only organizes space but also time. Translating the construct as rhythm maintains Augustine’s introduction of time as a theological concept. Finally, as we will see, humans reach the divine through numerositas, through organizing their movement according to divine rhythms. As such, there is a single principle at work here in numerus–numerosus–numerositas that is held together when all are translated in terms of rhythm; if they are instead sometimes referred to as number and at other times as harmony, the nature of the relation between the

¹⁹ Przywara particularly attributes this to the Jansenists and the Reformation (Thomas F. O’Meara, Erich Przywara, S. J.: His Theology and His World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 78).

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three dimensions—divine, ontological, and anthropological—is obscured.²⁰ If numerus and rhythmus are translated as rhythm, then a remarkably coherent vision opens up, in which several dimensions of reality—theology, ontology, anthropology—are all conceptualized and held together through rhythm. The first five books of De Musica are a lesson in the division of sentences into feet, ratios of arsis and thesis which must be kept constant.²¹ This rolling forward in fixed feet is rhythm, while meter is a rational decision about how to measure out these intervals.²² Augustine’s rhythm is thus a simple alternation between two syllables at equal intervals, with no beginning, end, or differentiation.²³ The objective of meter is to measure intervals so that things move well or rationally²⁴ and rational movement occurs according to these measurable intervals or ratios.²⁵ Thus, while rhythm is undifferentiated and repetitive motion, meter holds and divides this oscillation according to rationality so that it moves well. While rhythm is characteristic of music, which is to say of mathematics, poetry requires meter, that is, additional periodic structure. In the case of Augustine, such meter follows primarily decimal and ternary principles, which reveal the divine by supplying form and measure to shapeless rhythms.²⁶ Nevertheless, it is worth noting that the two terms are not at odds with one another. Rather, meter is the fulfillment of that at which rhythm aims. Both, therefore, refer to a regular and proportionate succession of time-lengths. In fact, this is precisely the sort of rhythm that followers of Benveniste’s definition reject in that meter—regular divisions of time—is here made the paradigm of rhythm itself.²⁷ Augustine applies this understanding of rhythm to metaphysics in Book VI. He turns his attention to the rhythms of the body in breathing, heartbeat, etc., arguing that these rhythms are created in the soul for the ordering of the body according to equilibrium.²⁸ The soul moves the body and mediates between bodies, through number.²⁹ For example, sense is “an instrument of the body directed by the soul for its ordering so that the soul may be more prepared to act on the passions of the body with attention to the end of joining like things to like.”³⁰ Rhythm is that through which the soul is joined to and interacts with things outside itself. It brings things together through the order enacted by the soul. ²⁰ Pascal Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 3,” Rhuthmos, 1 September 2016: http://rhuthmos.eu/spip.php?article1979 (accessed July 24, 2017). ²¹ All quotes from De Musica come from Writings of Saint Augustine, The Fathers of the Church, a New Translation (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc, 1947). ²² Augustine, De Musica, 3.1.2. ²³ Ibid., 3.4.7. ²⁴ Ibid., 2.3.4. ²⁵ Ibid., 1.9.15. ²⁶ Pascal Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 2.” ²⁷ Pascal Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 2; part 3. ²⁸ Augustine, De Musica, 6.3.4. ²⁹ Ibid., 6.11.31. ³⁰ Ibid., 6.5.10.

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Such ordering is, however, made possible by a much larger rhythmic structure, a metaphysical hierarchy in which the higher layers of rhythm exert influence on the layers below. Thus, Augustine says, to each thing in its proper kind and in its proportion with the universe is given a sense of places and times, so that even as its body is so much in proportion to the body of the universe whose part it is . . ., so its sensing complies with the action it pursues in proportion to the movement of the universe whose part it is.³¹

The numbers of everything in the cosmos form a matrix of layers (rhythm) which make their ordering according to ratio and proportion (meter) possible. The soul is in the middle of this hierarchy. It must order the body, to which it is superior, but the soul itself should not be influenced by the rhythms of the body but by “the divine numbers of wisdom.”³² This order of influence is proper to the soul because the soul seeks constancy and eternity rather than temporality.³³ The ordering of the soul likewise takes place according to a hierarchy of rhythmperception, thereby connecting it to the rhythms of the cosmos. These layers include: “Rhythms of judgment,” which are images in the soul of the Divine rhythms, “progressive rhythms” by which the soul moves towards the body without being prompted by exterior sounds, “reaction rhythms” by which the soul controls rhythms received by the body, “rhythms of memory,” which record rhythmic perceptions, and “sound or physical rhythms,” acoustic rhythms that penetrate the body.³⁴ The top-level—rhythms of judgment—participate in both time and eternity and are thus a representation of the soul itself, which participates in the temporality of the body yet remains superior to it.³⁵ The judgment rhythms provide the soul with everything it needs to rhythmically order the human’s temporal life towards salvation.³⁶ Augustine’s rhythmic cosmology is derived from Neoplatonism and the Pythagoreans. At the end of his earlier work on the arts, De Ordine, Augustine references his dependence on the Pythagoreans,³⁷ who affirm a cosmic musical harmony based on number.³⁸ According to Henry Chadwick, “the ³¹ Ibid., 6.7.19. ³² Ibid., 6.4.7. ³³ Ibid., 6.13.40. See Robert Catesby Taliafero’s footnote 22 on page 378: “Augustine seems to be saying that the root of all dispersion is the temporal and that the spatial dispersion depends upon it. He then proceeds to enumerate the hierarchy of numbers. As Svoboda has pointed out, we can consider this as a hierarchy of rhythms since numerus is an ambiguous word.” ³⁴ Augustine, De Musica, 6.6.16. ³⁵ Augustine, De Musica, 6.7.18; 6.8.20. ³⁶ Michon even suggests that judgment rhythms may be a sort of ontological outworking of the logic of the incarnation (Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 4”). ³⁷ In particular, the Pythagoreans venerate the number 10, and Augustine too describes the act of counting as progression, the perfect progression being 1–2–3–4 (i.e. to 10) (Augustine, De Musica, 1.12.26). ³⁸ Robert J. O’Connell, Art and the Christian Intelligence in St Augustine (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978), 16. Since the text is not widely accessible, O’Connell refers to Tscholl’s pagination of the series of articles in Augustiniana.

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Platonists hold that the physical universe is constructed on the model of musical concords in harmonic ratios which are part of the fabric of the world-soul.”³⁹ Number is the principle of everything because while nothing can exist or be known without numbers, numbers are not dependent upon the existence of anything else.⁴⁰ We must therefore always remember that even if it makes sense to translate numerus as rhythm, Augustine’s understanding of rhythm always includes the concept of number. It is a numeric rhythm, that is, one defined according to the numbering of syllables. Further, Neoplatonism holds a distinction between intellectual and sensible music. Music-making was considered a disreputable occupation undertaken by the lower orders of society. Plato nevertheless believed that music could be studied as an abstract science, and later Pythagoreans likewise believed that the study of music was only acceptable if it was divorced from audible music. The music of the spheres, according to the Neoplatonist Simplicius, could not be heard through vibrations in the air, but only by “intellectual discernment of the harmonic ratios governing all cosmic order.”⁴¹ Augustine likewise sets out to convince us at the beginning of De Musica that music is a science, in the sense of the knowledge of numerical relations accessible only by reason,⁴² and that this is superior to musical practice.⁴³ He aligns musical performance with nature, rather than art, in De Ordine.⁴⁴ Augustine makes this distinction even more strongly in his commentary on Psalm 42, which expresses a similar theory to that of Simplicius. When someone comes to the very point of death, the mind becomes detached from this world and hears an intellectual music: “In our silence something sounds softly to us from above, reaching not our ears but our minds. Any who hear that music are so disenchanted with material noise that the whole of human life seems to them a confused uproar, which stops them hearing another sound that is delightful, a sound like no other and beyond description.”⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the fact that one here “hears” intellectual music points to an ambivalence on Augustine’s part regarding the corporeality and temporality of music, and, in turn, a way in which he is perhaps different from his Neoplatonic predecessors. Remember that sensing, including hearing, is, for Augustine, not ³⁹ Henry Chadwick, Boethius the Consolations of Music, Logic, Theology and Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 81. ⁴⁰ Ibid., 82. ⁴¹ Ibid., 80. ⁴² Augustine, De Musica, 1.2.2. Likewise “For Boethius the true musicus is not the executant but the one who understands the theory, as superior to practice as soul is to body (Ibid., I, 34).” Chadwick, Boethius, 87. ⁴³ Augustine, De Musica, 33; Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 7”). ⁴⁴ O’Connell, Art and the Christian Intelligence in St Augustine, 16. ⁴⁵ Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 42, 7 in The Works of Saint Augustine: A Translation for the 21st Century: Expositions of the Psalms, Maria Boulding (trans.), John E. Rotell (ed.) (New York: New City Press, 2000), 262.

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primarily a function of the body itself but first of the rhythms of the soul. Unlike Plato, for whom music possesses the soul against its will, Augustine’s soul actively participates in the development and influence of the rhythm.⁴⁶ This is why it is possible to “hear” both earthly and heavenly music. While Augustine considers the mathematical appreciation of music to be highest, in retaining the language of “hearing” (albeit a mental or spiritual hearing), which involves temporal progression, he nevertheless avoids an absolute, mathematical essentialism. Thus, on the one hand, Augustine repeatedly espouses the need to attend to the mathematical qualities of music beyond its temporal performance, but, on the other hand, musical and poetic rhythms can help in “tearing oneself from all the disordered movements which deprive the soul of the fullness of its being” and “converting her and restituting her to God,” an anticipation of eternal life.⁴⁷ Intellectual and sensible music are both distinguished from one another yet at points appear to operate in collusion through the mediation of the soul.

Interpretations Augustine’s theory of numbers was the most influential theory of music throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including for Boethius’ treatise on music.⁴⁸ All such theories retained the Neoplatonic and Pythagorean idea that numbers are eternal and divine, while sensible music and poetry are merely their shadows.⁴⁹ Nevertheless, despite this seemingly homogenous influence, Augustine’s description of rhythm has generated rather different interpretations, largely because of the uncertainty surrounding the degree to which he rejects temporality and materiality, exhibited in the discussion surrounding sensible and insensible music. All agree that, for Augustine, the temporal world must participate in the eternal if it is to be harmonious. However, they diverge with respect to the degree that this requires an ascent ⁴⁶ Michon, “7. Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 4.” ⁴⁷ Augustine, De Musica 6.11.13. ⁴⁸ William Bowen, “St Augustine in Medieval and Renaissance Musical Science,” in Augustine on Music: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays, Studies in the History and Interpretation of Music, ed. Richard R. La Croix (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1988). ⁴⁹ “Boethius’ introduction to musical theory is much more Pythagorean than Aristoxenian, and is accordingly a remove distant from the actual art on which he is not utterly clear, and of whose practice he is surely ignorant. Like Augustine he sets out to describe the science, not the art. The Pythagorean doctrine of cosmic harmony lies at its heart, and this came to him with the high authority of Plato’s Timaeus. It is not surprising that De institutione musica anticipates many themes which are restated in the Consolation of Philosophy: the harmony of the heavens and the seasons, the ‘love’ that produces concord out of the warring elements in the world, the binding of the elements by numbers, and the ‘consonant members’ of the world-soul. Arithmetic directs the mind towards immutable truths unaffected by the contingencies of time and space” (Chadwick, Boethius, 101).

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from or a devaluation of the temporal order. In the end, most interpreters, including Michon but with the exception of Catherine Pickstock, agree that the goodness of created time and number is at best provisional as a secondary remedy for the fall and that their function is to facilitate ascent. Jeremy Begbie, based on Chadwick’s interpretation of Augustine’s association with Neoplatonism, argues that Augustine’s positive regard for music is not related to music’s nature as a temporal art, but to how it is able to move us away from the temporal and to the eternal. Thus, while audible music is good insofar as it makes metric proportions available to the senses, the function of rightly-ordered audible rhythm is to train the mind to grasp immaterial reality and thereby ascend to the eternal.⁵⁰ Music is unique in its ability to enable ascent because it is independent of most of the senses and heavily dependent upon mathematics. It is therefore capable of moving us from the realm of sensible numbers to rational numbers. Such ascent is necessary because our immersion in temporal reality has made us unable to perceive the harmony of the cosmos.⁵¹ The application of rational ordering to dispersed time and number is analogous to a feeble apprehension of the unity of eternity from which we have fallen. Thus, the goodness of music does not lie in its embodiment of a good temporal order, but in its ability to carry the soul beyond this order, although Begbie admits that to what extent this involves leaving the sensible behind is unclear.⁵² In contrast to this interpretation, Catherine Pickstock reads De Musica more generously, down-playing the Neoplatonic creation-denying implications. She argues that Augustine’s objective is to “achieve the best possible representation of (and offering to) eternity,”⁵³ and that temporality is not associated with fallenness but is, in fact, particularly well-suited to the task of representing eternity because it acknowledges the nothingness and infinity in which creation is suspended.⁵⁴ Pickstock interprets Book VI not as a call for creatures to ascend beyond the created to the eternal but as an attempt, through the eternal, to occupy their proper place in space and time by moving towards a greater exactitude of their creaturely measure. Thus, the striving of every creature for its ultimate unity is not a striving beyond itself for the eternal, but a striving for its own proper place and time.⁵⁵ When we sense ⁵⁰ Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 81; O’Connell, Art and the Christian Intelligence in St Augustine, 65. ⁵¹ Augustine, De Musica, 6.11.30–3. ⁵² Begbie, Theology, Music, and Time, 82, 84. ⁵³ Catherine Pickstock, “Music: Soul, City, and Cosmos after Augustine,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Graham Ward, and Catherine Pickstock (London: Routledge, 1999), 247. ⁵⁴ Pickstock, “Music,” 248. ⁵⁵ Augustine, De Musica, 6.17.56; Pickstock, “Music,” 249. Pickstock contrasts Augustine’s rhythm to that of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, for whom, she argues, rhythm as absolute time is abstracted from public space such that it becomes a private movement of self-constitution which is nevertheless static because it is entirely elusive. Rather than the finding of one’s place within

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sound, it evokes the memory of divine transcendence in the soul. However, Pickstock argues that assuming this to be an ascent from the sensible through reason forgets Augustine’s association of reason with desire and of number with depth, meaning, and mystery, in contrast to our modern conception of number as cold and scientific rationality.⁵⁶ Begbie and Pickstock can be considered the extremes of interpretation. Most other commentators fall somewhere between their positions. Robert O’Connell, for example, reads De Musica as expressing a more amicable relationship between sense and reason than in Augustine’s earlier work, in which the sensible is merely a “herald” of the truth to which reason points.⁵⁷ In De Musica, the two work together more harmoniously, in that, as Pickstock points out, one moves toward the incorporeal not by moving away from the corporeal, but by moving through it. This is exhibited in Augustine’s pedagogical method in which he asks his student to listen to a verse in order to determine whether it sounds right before searching for the rational principle behind it. Nevertheless, reason remains the ultimate judge of beauty,⁵⁸ and “the soul’s involvement in the world of words and authority, of time and its measures, is the result of a fall. The point of De Musica, from start to finish, is to bring the soul to a recognition of its fallen state and thereby promote its return.”⁵⁹ Inferior numbers are good, but only as a secondary providence which is made necessary by our punitive immersion in time.⁶⁰ Thus, O’Connell here agrees with Pickstock that time is part of the natural order and not itself evil, but disagrees with her that this implies that our position within time is good. Rather, he believes that the whole temporal, human domain is a secondary concession by which we may purify our souls, rather than part of an original, good design.⁶¹ Carol Harrison, on the other hand, argues that in Augustine’s doctrine of creation, the necessary ontological difference between God as Being itself and creation as coming from nothing implies creation’s original temporality and time, as with her interpretation of Augustine, rhythm for Lacoue-Labarthe is the ever elusive origin of nothingness that is internal to the self, disconnected from the world (Pickstock, “Music,” 254). I think this interpretation misses Lacoue-Labarthe’s larger use of rhythm (see footnote 53 of chapter three). ⁵⁶ Pickstock, “Music,” 255–6. ⁵⁷ O’Connell argues that in Augustine’s early work on the liberal arts, De Ordine, true art is practiced by “knowing the numerical relationships responsible for such harmonious activity” (Art and the Christian Intelligence in St Augustine, 15). The arts train the mind in mathematical thought, which purifies the soul (16). However, Harrison argues that we must interpret this alongside Augustine’s other works of the same period, in which ascent to the truth is through faith in authority through the sacraments. Thus, while Harrison calls this an “odd tension” between reason and faith, she says that they are not mutually exclusive (Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 45). This reinforces Przywara’s dialectical interpretation of Augustine as including two movements, which I will lay out at the end of the chapter. ⁵⁸ O’Connell, Art and The Christian Intelligence in St Augustine, 68–9. ⁵⁹ Ibid., 71. ⁶⁰ Ibid., 84. ⁶¹ Ibid., 76, 88.

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mutability.⁶² With Pickstock and against O’Connor, she suggests that time is proper to creation, and is not a result of the fall. Nevertheless, she also says that God’s providence must happen within time only because “human beings have fallen ‘from paradise into the present world, that is, from eternal things to temporal,’” and providence must lead us back to the eternal.⁶³ In other words, time itself may be good, but our relation to time is not. Providence is the way in which God is a hidden presence within creation, as “order” and “form,”⁶⁴ by which we may regain our proper relation to time. As such, Harrison describes Augustine’s approach to the arts as follows: “[T]he liberal arts are useful in effecting this inward turn and ascent, as they facilitate the movement from multiplicity to unity, from temporal fragmentation to eternal simplicity and truth.”⁶⁵ Even in On True Religion, one of Augustine’s later works, he states that “because we have come down to the things of time and are being restrained by love of them from reaching the things of eternity, a certain time-bound method of healing, which is calling believers, not knowers, to salvation, comes first in the order of time, though not in natural excellence.”⁶⁶ This leads Harrison to conclude that divine providence as temporal enables humans to submit to an authority of unity, as opposed to multiplicity and disagreement.⁶⁷ All of this scholarship reveals an interesting tension in Augustine in that he affirms both the radical ontological divide between God and the created order such that the temporal is pitted against the eternal to the extent that it is at least questionable whether the temporal is the appropriate sphere of human action. Yet, temporal creation is beautifully ordered through its participation in God. God, as providence, is the hierarchy within time according to which we ascend to God. Harrison notes that due to God’s presence within and intimacy to the created realm as its order, the beauty of the created universe is not affected by sin. Instead, “it is as if everything, formed, ordered, and governed by divine Providence, serves to admonish human beings towards God. The whole of creation, from the lowliest worm to the highest rational angelic creature, is a ‘nod’ (nutus) in the direction of its Creator.”⁶⁸ Thus, on the one hand, there is very little affirmation of the created order on its own terms since the means by which we ascend is not the created order itself, but God’s providence within it as form. Yet, this providence at times also suggests an already-perfected world-order which calls us to take our proper place in it. Sin and fallen-ness would be no more if only we followed the hierarchy ⁶² Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 78. ⁶³ Ibid., 244, quoting from Augustine, On True Religion, 38. ⁶⁴ Augustine, On The Free Choice of the Will 2.17.45 in On The Free Choice of the Will, On Grace and Free Choice, and Other Writings, Peter King (trans. & ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65; Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 241. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 43. ⁶⁶ Augustine, On True Religion, 45. ⁶⁷ Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 246–7. ⁶⁸ Ibid., 244.

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available to us in creation. The ambivalence surrounding how one ought to interpret Augustine may therefore be due to the fact that he appears to value the created order at once too much and too little. The sensory and temporal order is only valuable as the location of the revelation of God as form and is not effectual in itself for leading us to God. Yet, because God is within creation as its form, creation is perfect and beautiful, such that there is little recognition of the possibility of sin or tragedy beyond humanity, in the created order more generally. As we will see, this same tension re-appears in contemporary theology that builds itself on Augustine’s “musical ontology.” Augustine’s description of rhythm as the matrix of layers of number organized according to a metaphysical hierarchy, which makes order possible through measure gives us a picture of rhythm as ontological form. On the one hand, there is something attractive about this depiction of rhythm, particularly in its association with a kind of cosmic empathy. Rhythm is that which holds the various layers of reality together through resonance. On the other hand, however, Augustine’s rhythm is bound up with the above-named tension in that his perspective does not admit of a good rhythmic response from nature itself because rhythmic form is associated only with God’s providence. Rhythm is thus reduced to a structure imposed from the top, and may, therefore, be approached as a unity that is perceived from outside the flow. Besides the two descriptions of rhythm as the immanent harmony of oppositions, and as interruption and flow, we now have a third definition of rhythm as the harmonization of ontological hierarchy. Rhythm, in this case, is associated with number and order and is the means by which the hierarchy holds together, thereby making movement and interaction between levels possible. Reality is here seen from the outside, such that rhythm appears as a holistic, harmonizing, and transcendent structure. Augustinian rhythm is, therefore, the closest to the synchronic perspective on poetic rhythm that I laid out in chapter one of this book. Not only is it a view of the whole, thereby emphasizing harmony, it likewise understands this harmony as a function of a hierarchy of layers. The interactions of the various movements are laid out and visible to the theologian; theology attempts to describe the contours of the whole.

THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES This does not mean that Augustine’s account is in itself unfruitful. My argument here is merely that Augustine takes a synchronic perspective toward rhythm as a providential structure, to which we have a responsibility to adhere. The potential problem with a synchronically-viewed ontological hierarchy is that it may tend to support tight, hierarchical systems of harmony and

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unity as good and interruptions to such premature harmony as always sinful, which is dangerous for the social-historical reasons described in chapter one. Nevertheless, such an account is problematic only if insufficiently embedded in the diachronic, intra-creaturely perspective. Such a diachronic perspective must be maintained because the intra-temporal relationship to the divine is not always experienced in terms of such unity. In fact, it is such a diachronic perspective that may be able to make sense of some of the tensions in Augustine’s vision. Below, I give two examples of possible theological visions emerging from Augustine’s “musical ontology,” one that maintains a diachronic perspective in relation to Augustine and another that does not.

John Milbank, Simon Oliver, and Adrian Pabst The proponents of Radical Orthodoxy appeal to Augustine as one of the primary sources of their theology. While there are some significant disagreements within this movement, and certain thinkers may be more or less guilty of exhibiting the sorts of tendencies for which the movement as a whole is sometimes criticized, generally speaking, Radical Orthodoxy is predicated on the adoption of Augustine’s “musical ontology,” in which peace, described as “a hierarchy of harmonious differences,” is ontologically basic.⁶⁹ John Milbank calls this “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism” and describes it as an attempt, on the part of Christianity, to embrace the creative flux and openness of postmodernism without the violence and the conflict that it usually implies.⁷⁰ I argue that the nature of their dependence on Augustine’s De Musica opens certain thinkers within Radical Orthodoxy to the sort of critiques that Przywara makes of an absolutized theological analogy as essentialist. This is not to say that any of the proponents want to eschew the created order in favor of a transcendent, atemporal one. Rather, they argue that participation in the transcendent establishes the immanent as valuable in itself, hence Catherine Pickstock’s desire to remove associations of world-denial from Augustine’s De Musica.⁷¹ However, there is a striking similarity between Augustine and ⁶⁹ Simon Oliver, “Introduction” and John Milbank “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism: A Summa in 42 Responses to Unasked Questions” in The Radical Orthodoxy Reader, ed. Simon Oliver and John Milbank (London: Routledge, 2009), 7, 52. ⁷⁰ Milbank, “Postmodern Critical Augustinianism,” 51. ⁷¹ Catherine Pickstock, since she is more attentive to the diversity of movements at work in a Christian account of reality, avoids some of the problems of which I am critical in this chapter. Her desire to avoid spatialization leads her to an awareness of the more diachronic perspective, which describes liturgical time as a stuttering, as involving segmentation and intervals and pauses as opposed to a simple unconscious, seamless flow (Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 190, 234). This form is based in the division and dissemination of Christ’s body (225) and the non-identical repetition of

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Milbank in their attempts to set up a total order of reality according to a hierarchical relationship between immanent and transcendent and, intentionally or not, for Milbank and others this does tip over into theopanism, into God-as-all. The major work associated with Radical Orthodoxy is John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory. The book argues that theology must not capitulate to other disciplines in constructing reality because the “secular” descriptions of reality that these disciplines assume are fundamentally opposed to theology. The secular gives ontological priority to violence and the theological to peace.⁷² If theology does not articulate its own depiction of reality, it will imbibe the assumptions of the disciplines whose methodologies it uses. This opposition turns on the secular’s rejection of transcendence, since, without it, there is only anarchy or a violent imposition of order. Milbank argues that the postmodern celebration of immanent difference is a situation of ontological violence in which differences are “equivocally at variance,” and infinity is described in terms of the anarchy of their relations.⁷³ The modern alternative against which this postmodern approach sets itself up is a “substantialist” metaphysics in which God is outside being, leading to a gulf, a dualism, between God as One, immutable, and immovable, and created being as many, differentiated, and temporal, thereby cutting off the possibility of participation and relationship. Such dualism requires that one side of the dualism subordinates the other side by force.⁷⁴ This was precisely the crux of the criticisms made by Milbank and others of the thinkers I considered in the previous chapter. Because God is outside of being itself, the division between immanent and transcendent is total, such that the relationship between them cannot but be one of violent opposition. In contrast, Milbank says that “the Christian social ontology, linked to the idea of an emanative procession of all reality from a single divine source, abolishes this duality which supports the idea of an ineradicable ontological the Resurrection (265–6). Nevertheless, she at times maligns movements of disjunction, pauses, and interruption saying that these are neutralized in the Trinity (206–7). Specifically, the character of the liturgical gift of being is that it is “uninterrupted,” a guarantee of peace. “Since any interruption here at any point—a moment before, beyond or without gift—would cancel gift altogether, to give or to be within the gift is to inhabit an harmonic flow and interchange which knows no interruption and which would have to experience a ‘stopping’ of the gift as violence” (250). She does not account for how these two positions are compatible. My proposal in this project is that while an uninterrupted gift is the sort of thing that one may want to affirm from a synchronic perspective, it is not true to the temporal human experience of salvation. It is therefore an eschatological claim extended too far. ⁷² John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 409. ⁷³ Ibid., 281. ⁷⁴ Ibid., 410. Milbank attributes this attitude to Augustine in his rejection of the heroic ideal as a virtue that is dependent upon evil and disorder for its manifestation and therefore presumes an ontology of forceful overcoming.

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violence.”⁷⁵ Reality is an analogical participation in the transcendent that positions all things within a proper order, “which still involves hierarchical subordination, yet no longer coercive suppression.”⁷⁶ Milbank appeals to Augustine’s De Musica in describing this hierarchy. Each thing in the world is positioned in a harmonious, flowing series, which progresses towards God.⁷⁷ This series is the mediation between immanent and transcendent and is identified with Christ, who conveys his mediation “as an endless series of new mediations.”⁷⁸ Thus, Christ as mediation between part and whole is not a once-for-all event but is creatively extended in time.⁷⁹ Milbank argues from Augustine that there are no discreet things, only “tensional ratios” which participate in divine creation. Creation is not static but continues to be creatively generated in time, unfolding out of itself through this participation.⁸⁰ The relational sequence “which endlessly threatens to break out of any totality” is given predominance over the part/whole ratio. This fluidity means that the part/ whole or immanent/transcendent duality is subservient to the larger movement of unity in difference, which is to say the Trinity. God is thus God’s self the mediation between unity and difference, even as this is a mediation that is not a static structure but is continually remade through creation. Unity is a dynamic movement of difference and order is a matter of relation rather than identity.⁸¹ Milbank calls this “Baroque Hierarchy,” and describes it as the appearance of the divine self-realization in finitude, and therefore as a vertical sequence up which each individual can contemplatively and actively rise. At its summit lies not a static completion, but a full participation in the suspension downwards of hierarchies (the aiding of others by charity) and a greater participation in the suspension forwards of the thearchy, God’s infinite self-realization.⁸²

For Milbank, the doctrine of creation ex nihilo means that there is no dualistic opposition, whether between spiritual and material, the One and the Many, or actuality and potentiality because there is no other that God must violently impose form onto. Instead, creation is merely the finite expression of God’s self-realization and, as such, creation is peaceful. It is generated out of nothing but is an expression of God’s own being. Milbank associates creation with emanation and, at times, he speaks of Christianity and Neoplatonism as though they were virtually synonymous.⁸³ Milbank, therefore, fits Przywara’s description of the unmoored theological analogy, that perspective in which the ⁷⁵ Ibid., 410. ⁷⁶ Ibid., 410. ⁷⁷ Ibid., 404–5. ⁷⁸ Ibid., 405. ⁷⁹ This musical mediation is also described as an economy of salvation or the “suspended middle,” a term which Przywara also uses. ⁸⁰ Ibid., 424–5, 428. Milbank does not attribute this part of his thought to Augustine, but to John Scotus Eriugena. ⁸¹ Ibid., 428. ⁸² Ibid., 429. ⁸³ Ibid., 295. Milbank distinguishes this Christian Neoplatonism from the Platonic understanding of the Good as an “untainted original,” but does not eschew its associations with emanation.

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creaturely is only thought about as the site and self-declaration of the divine, that the creature is a manifestation of God’s own standpoint.⁸⁴ Milbank’s hierarchy of emanation includes the complementary movement of anagogy, which Przywara also identifies as part of the theological analogy. The fact that creation is the self-realization of the infinite in the finite leads to the soteriological result of an unproblematic ontological ascent, since participation in divine self-realization is the mode of the creature’s ontology as a tensional ratio within the unified movement of difference. Milbank says that “the initial hierarchy involved is self-cancelling in the sense that the aim of a downwards transmission is to raise up the one beneath.” Milbank calls this a “pedagogic rhythm.”⁸⁵ It lends a democratic quality to Milbank’s hierarchy in which, although the cosmos is hierarchical, its temporal cycles of kenosis and exaltation create reversals of position, calling every static hierarchy into question.⁸⁶ The epistemological and political implication of this ontological rejection of dualism is the rejection of dialectics. Just as God is everything as the unity of the dynamic movement of difference, God’s salvation is total. Milbank asserts that Justice that is content with less than absolute social consensus and harmony is therefore less than justice, not because justice is only founded in conventional agreement, but because one has faith in an infinite justice, in the idea that there is a temporally ‘proper’ (even if changing) position for everything, without any chaotic remainder.⁸⁷

In accordance with this conviction, the objective of Radical Orthodoxy is to “reclaim the world.”⁸⁸ As I will discuss later, this tendency to an almost onefor-one correlation between ontology and politics is problematic, particularly in the moments when justice is located exclusively in the church. Milbank acknowledges at the beginning of Theology and Social Theory that “The saeculum, in the medieval era, was not a space, a domain opposed to the church but a time—the interval between fall and eschaton where coercive justice, private property, and impaired natural reason must make shift to cope with the unredeemed effects of sinful humanity.”⁸⁹ This is a promising ⁸⁴ Ibid., 163, 158. ⁸⁵ John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge), 182. ⁸⁶ Ibid., 183. ⁸⁷ Ibid., 410. ⁸⁸ Milbank, Ward, and Pickstock, ed., Radical Orthodoxy, 1. ⁸⁹ Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9. Milbank occasionally acknowledges a supplementary historical and eschatological side to his theology, which may go some way to relativizing the hints of political triumphalism. For example, in Being Reconciled, he acknowledges that while Christians believe peace to be ontologically primary, it is also the name for the eschaton. Thus, “Once there is violence, we are all inevitably violent. And violence can only be eradicated collectively, by a strange apocalyptic counter-violence, which is in the end a divine prerogative, yet is also obscurely anticipated within time” (Milbank, Being Reconciled, 42). He calls this a

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beginning to acknowledging a historical dimension of the relationship between ontology and politics but very little is subsequently said about this historical dimension that is not reduced to ontology with the consequence that the church’s ontology is confused with its historical and political movements in time. Some thinkers within Radical Orthodoxy acknowledge the significance of a historical element more than others. Simon Oliver expresses a variation of ontological hierarchy in his book Philosophy, God and Motion that includes even less recognition of an historical counter-rhythm. Oliver’s particular project makes a claim for a cosmology in which motion is ontologically primary. Motion is not opposed to a divine stasis but is an expression of divine movement as that through which participation in the divine is made possible. Oliver posits this cosmology in contrast to that implied by Newtonian physics in which motion is identified solely as resulting from the exertion of the force of one object on another in an otherwise static universe. In this sense, Oliver’s concerns are similar to those of Przywara and myself in seeking to understand the relationship between God and creation dynamically, in terms of motion, rather than according to static schemas. Oliver appeals to Plato’s concept of the world-soul in the Timeaus to describe the participation of movement in being in terms of hierarchy. For Oliver, the world-soul is the movement of the whole in which all other discreet movements participate. The movement of the world-soul is circular and creation participates in eternity through this perfect circular motion of the spheres, which mediate eternity to the lower orders of motion, thereby lending permanence and stability to the cosmos.⁹⁰ Circular motion is primary because it is always related to the central point of rest or eternity and unifies all other motions, which are like “irrational wanderings” that are only related to relative points of rest. Circular motion thus unifies all other motions.⁹¹ Natural motion thus proceeds in relation to a well-defined hierarchy in which the undetermined wanderings are located at the bottom, and the top is the circular movement of the spheres. Moreover, Oliver argues that in the Christian conception, God is not an unmoved mover since this would introduce too much of a gulf between moving creation and immutable transcendence, making participation difficult.⁹²

tragic deploying of the enemy’s means (43). However, while this admits that eschatological peace may have an interruptive quality, there remains the concern that this apocalyptic action is associated too closely with the Church, such that it flows in a uni-directional movement from Church to world. As such, Milbank may still not sufficiently recognize the difference between the now and the Eschaton as it regards the church (See Graham Ward, “Milbank’s Divina Commedia,” New Blackfriars 73 (2007): 311–18). ⁹⁰ Simon Oliver, Philosophy, God and Motion (London: Routledge, 2005), 96. ⁹¹ Ibid., 13–14. ⁹² Ibid., 44.

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Rather, as dynamic Trinity, a “motionless motion,”⁹³ God is intimate to and interior to creation as the motion that touches all things.⁹⁴ We have here the same concern as in Milbank to avoid a dualism, in this case between God as a simple unmoved mover and moving creation. In suggesting that created movement grows out of God’s own movement, Oliver identifies an exclusive participation in God that is similar to that put forward by Milbank. It is therefore not surprising that while Oliver’s study does not directly appeal to Augustine, Oliver is very concerned to demonstrate the Neoplatonic influences that Aquinas adopts as a corrective to Aristotle, particularly with respect to the concept of an unmoved mover. Thus, the Neoplatonic world-soul that orders the numbers that govern movement, and which is analogously a part of Augustine’s rhythmic cosmology as providence, is also the guiding image for Oliver’s Thomistic hierarchical system of motion. God is the dynamic form of creation. These concerns lead Oliver to the same system of emanation and return as that of Milbank,⁹⁵ such that Oliver’s depiction of motion is another description of a hierarchical cosmos in which all motion exists within and toward the motion of God. However, this hierarchy is arguably even more rigid than that of Milbank who describes the hierarchy in terms of creative extensions of difference. Oliver’s emphasis on the containment effected by circular motion implies a more strictly organized order of reality that pre-emptively contains motion rather than enabling its overflow into new creative expressions. This is particularly the case when we consider the khora. Oliver says that Violent motions are in a sense the lowest form of motion, reminiscent of those in Plato’s khora before the ordering work of the Demiurge begins: these are akin to ‘wandering’ or an imperfect stasis by the intimation of conflict rather than cooperation between the mover and the moved. Such motions prevent rather than provide fulfilment in a telos.⁹⁶

Oliver here describes an unnatural motion that does not adhere to the eternal, circular movement of the spheres and thereby reveals the totality and rigidity of the ontological hierarchy that he promotes. All movements that are wandering are considered violent until they are tamed by eternal circular motion. Motion is a top-down structure that determines in advance the legitimate possibilities at lower levels of the hierarchy. There is no creative movement of response from creation as other. Everything is subsumed. Another way to say this is to point out that Oliver’s account fails to acknowledge historical motion in that he does not give an account of how the movements of wandering and opposition that arguably constitute history are themselves made sites of healing and salvation. Indeed, Oliver’s system does not seem capable of accounting for the fact that movements of ⁹³ Ibid., 115.

⁹⁴ Ibid., 104.

⁹⁵ Ibid., 118.

⁹⁶ Ibid., 40.

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wandering, opposition, and interruption might themselves be salvific disruptions to those circular and repetitive motions that frequently characterize corrupt, historical systems. While Oliver’s project is a specific attempt to articulate the ontological significance of movement, Adrian Pabst sets out to describe a comprehensive hierarchical metaphysic. The rejection of movements of opposition and confrontation is even more pronounced in Pabst, who likewise speaks in terms of Neoplatonic emanation and hierarchy.⁹⁷ Pabst’s objective is to understand the nature of things not in terms of their substance but in terms of their “metaphysical positioning in relation to other things.”⁹⁸ Again, this objective is similar to Przywara’s use of rhythm as a way of describing analogical relationships both within the creaturely as well as between the creaturely and God. However, the way in which Pabst describes these relationships is more limited than Przywara’s description. Pabst, like Milbank, asserts that the opposition of principles such as the one and the many or immanence and transcendence produces a conflict based on the assumption that substance is prior to relationship.⁹⁹ Instead, the individuation of the many is made possible through relational participation in and elevation to union with God, which Pabst calls “the fusion of the divine with the human elevating the entire cosmos to union with God, as revealed and renewed by the unique event of the Incarnation of the relational Logos (John 1:1).”¹⁰⁰ Among the many thinkers Pabst considers, he appeals specifically to Augustine’s De Musica, arguing that Augustine’s articulation of everything in terms of numbers and ratios enables the co-originality of relationality and individuation, one and many:¹⁰¹ “Individual things are beautiful and harmonious insofar as they reflect the unity of oneness. The hierarchy of numbers and ratios is coextensive with the equality of all things compared with the perfection of the One.”¹⁰² Individual forms and their relations are determined by these ratios such that individuation is subordinate to the larger matrix of ratios according to which individuals are simultaneously individual and in relation. Neither is prior to the other because both are simultaneously engendered in the matrix of ratios, otherwise known as Being. This is similar to the way in which Augustine’s cosmological layers of rhythm enable a fundamental relationality that holds the various dimensions of the cosmos together, both material and immaterial. Pabst argues from Augustine’s statement in On True Religion that everything possesses three qualities: “it is a particular thing; it is distinguished from other things by its own proper form; and it does not transgress the order of nature.”¹⁰³ Measure, form, and order (elsewhere ⁹⁷ Adrian Pabst, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans, 2012), xxviii. ⁹⁸ Ibid., xxvii. ⁹⁹ Ibid., xxx. ¹⁰⁰ Ibid., xxxv. ¹⁰¹ Ibid., 85. ¹⁰² Ibid., 88. ¹⁰³ Augustine, On True Religion, VIII. 13.

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described as singularity, relationality, and overarching order) constitute the metaphysical structure of the world, blending diversity and unity and thereby reflecting Trinitarian relationality.¹⁰⁴ Pabst’s conclusion is that “Christianity outwits the oscillation between the One and the many.”¹⁰⁵ Nevertheless, while Pabst asserts equality and democracy within creation, as does Milbank, he never describes the way in which things relate to one another on this plane of equality. The result is that the privileging of relationality over substance is actually the privileging of a single kind of relationality, namely that of vertical participation. No intra-creaturely movement or relationality is identified. Oscillation is overcome, but with what is it replaced? This is again a case of the flow of creaturely reality seen from the outside, rather than from one’s movement with it. This is particularly evident in Pabst’s analogical extension of the Trinity into a creaturely structure. He begins from the Trinity and sees this structure emanating downward, such that the difference between God and creation is here more one of degree rather than one of difference encountered in concrete, temporal encounter. This is the criticism that Przywara makes of Hegel, namely that he directly grasps the rhythm of the intra-Trinitarian life as the thought form governing the creature’s life. For Przywara, the intra-Trinitarian is ultimately the divine mystery of God as beyond and not a rhythm that can be ontologically extended to the creaturely. Each of these thinkers relies on an Augustinian-Neoplatonic element that pulls towards the creation of a hierarchical system of ontological totality. The result is the same tension between a denigration of the temporal on the one hand and a premature eschatology on the other. While the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy claim that participation in transcendence is the only way to affirm the immanent as immanent, what is in fact here affirmed is the ordering form of the presence of the divine within the creaturely, the “divine self-realization” as Milbank says, and not the creaturely in itself, as other than transcendence. This leads to an ontological totality that does not deal in any significant way with historical, pre-eschatological realities and thereby eschews alternative forms of relations and movements which such a history might make necessary. I have already alluded that there is perhaps a problematic dimension to Milbank’s association of church with justice in contrast to the secular, however, this is part of the much larger problem of dualisms in Milbank’s work. Milbank wants to remove all dualisms from ontology. However, in doing so, Milbank has been critiqued for setting up a kind of monism in which participation leads to a lack of difference between God and creation.¹⁰⁶ Reality is a ¹⁰⁴ Pabst, Metaphysics, 90–1. ¹⁰⁵ Ibid., 450. ¹⁰⁶ Steven Shakespeare, Radical Orthodoxy: A Critical Introduction (London: SPCK, 2007), 170–1.

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single, emanating system of unfolding movements. We see this absolutization of a system in Pabst and Oliver also. Politically and historically, this manifests as a problematically close relationship between Christ and Church. Steven Shakespeare says “The way some of [Radical Orthodoxy’s] authors virtually identify the Church or the Eucharist with Christ risks abolishing the otherness of God and ignoring the Church’s own failings and blind spots,”¹⁰⁷ resulting in a mediation that is so close that there is no possibility of interruption. Mediation itself becomes a closed and totalized structure. Shakespeare suggests that this undermines the otherness which makes any sort of real forgiveness or relationship, notably interruptive events, possible.¹⁰⁸ Milbank wants difference, but he wants a sanitized difference that does not include real confrontation.¹⁰⁹ Thus, paradoxically, while these thinkers affirm the nonnegotiable significance of transcendence, they end up with the same product as those who reject transcendence: namely, a divinized whole. This is what Przywara designates theopanism, and it is significant that Przywara argues that theopanism and pantheism are two manifestations of the same problem: God is equated with the whole of the system. This totalization is, in fact, based on a system of dichotomies: church or nihilism; theology or philosophy/social theory; peace or violence. Since there is only one reality, the other in the dichotomy is rejected as non-existent or nihilistic. Thus, while the idea of participation overcomes dualism and violence within the Christian story, violence and dualism are simply re-instated at the edges of the story between Christianity, church, or theology, on the one hand, and whatever is outside them, on the other.¹¹⁰ There is thus a contradiction between Milbank’s declared objective and the mode of his exposition. Two thinkers who have made this criticism of Theology and Social Theory, in particular, are Rowan Williams and Gillian Rose. Both critique Milbank for not recognizing the historical process of negotiation with culture and contingencies in which the church and its self-understanding has emerged.¹¹¹ If the Church is constructed in the midst of violence and conflict, what Rose calls the ¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 116. ¹⁰⁸ Ibid., 166. ¹⁰⁹ Graham Ward hints at this critique when he asks “does Milbank’s theology of analogy think difference radically enough?” and “what enables him to write this Christian metanarrative from God’s perspective?” (Ward, “Milbank’s Divina Commedia,” 317). He also recognizes the absence of interruption when he asks “Is there no violence in the Christian story that is ontological? Could not the incarnation, the resurrection, and Christ’s miracles be described as violences? How is violence to be understood?” (317) and says that in Milbank, “there is no moment of revelation, no epiphany, no epistemological rupture. There is only mediation and mythologies . . .” (312). ¹¹⁰ Gavin Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism? (Louisville, KY: John Knox, 2007), 77. ¹¹¹ Rowan Williams, “Saving Time: Thoughts on Practice, Patience and Vision” in New Blackfriars 73 (1992): 320. Notice also that in his appeal to Nouvelle Théologie, Milbank focuses almost exclusively on de Lubac rather than his student Daniélou, who was far more aware of the significance of the historical in analogy.

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“broken middle,” then the character of its peace should not be one of perfect harmony, but of “healed history.” Rose criticizes Milbank’s ecclesial middle for its unequivocal lack of boundaries, belying the fact that it is not really a middle at all since it is un-locatable in the particularities of history and institution. It is an ideal, a mended or holy middle, but the reality is that this mended middle arises out of and is configured in the broken middle.¹¹² By ignoring this historical configuration in brokenness the middle becomes corrupt as a system of total domination without boundaries.¹¹³ Similarly, according to Williams, Milbank has made the mistake of assuming that theology’s rejection of an ontological primary violence must require a rejection of historical confrontation. Williams suggests instead that “It ought to be possible to say that a contingent world is one in which contestation is inevitable, given that not all goods are ‘compossible’, without saying that there can be no healing or mending eschatologically, or that conflict and exclusion have either a sacred or a necessarily liberating character.”¹¹⁴ Todd Breyfogle traces these criticisms to Milbank’s interpretation of Augustine, arguing that his interpretation of Augustine is one-sided and does not hold in tension the two dimensions of his thought: created and historical. Breyfogle says that for Augustine there is a tension between these two perspectives, but no synthesis. History interposes itself between ontology and eschatology such that there can be no project of simple, progressive, earthly transformation. Milbank, contrary to Augustine, collapses history and ontology leading to an immanent eschaton.¹¹⁵ While Augustine maintains a dialectic between church and state, or eschatology and history (as do Rose and Williams), Milbank’s privileging of Augustine’s musical ontology rejects this dialectic, leading to a premature consensus between them.¹¹⁶ Interestingly then, the rhythm of Augustinian musical ontology has a similar character to that of Heraclitean pantheism. Although Benvenistian rhythm is an improvised shape, while Augustinian rhythm is a hierarchy of layers, both rhythms are approached synchronically as intersections of movements that are laid out spatially. In both cases, rhythm is that which holds things together in harmony, although hierarchical metaphysics does so through number and ratio while Benvenistian rhythm does so as an improvised flux. In terms of religious expression as well, thinkers such as Deleuze, Nietzsche, and Heidegger encourage participation in the logic of the whole, whether through multiplying identities, accepting the eternal return, or being ¹¹² Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 285. ¹¹³ Ibid., 287. ¹¹⁴ Williams, “Saving Time,” 322. ¹¹⁵ Todd Breyfogle, “Is There Room for Political Philosophy in Postmodern Critical Augustinianism?” in Deconstrucitng Radical Orthodoxy: Postmodern Theology, Rhetoric, and Truth, ed. W. J. Hankey and Douglas Hedley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 36. ¹¹⁶ Ibid., 37.

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a conduit for the strife of the cosmos. The religious expression of Radical Orthodoxy is also participation in the whole, albeit a participation of peaceful acceptance of one’s proper place in the hierarchy. This is due to the fact that God, through rhythm, comes to stand in for the whole of the system such that participation in the order of things is tantamount to participation in God. Notice, for example, the similarities in the way in which Keller and Milbank deal with the incarnation as a pervasive dimension of the whole rather than in terms of a particular encounter in time. While Milbank wants to affirm temporality, he does so only from outside temporality, refusing to enter into the features of a particular, diachronic perspective. Finally, in both cases, this totality is dependent upon opposing dualities. The difference is that while the proponents of Heraclitean rhythm acknowledge this opposition, it tends to go underground and re-emerge as a performative opposition in Radical Orthodoxy. The consequence in both cases is that the whole is divinized and there is little room for interruption. God becomes equated with the whole rhythm or structure. Finally, notice the difference between Milbank and Agamben. Both Milbank and Agamben are suspicious of the totalizing political system and its reliance on boundaries between inside and outside. The difference, however, is that while Milbank opposes the church to this system, Agamben sees the way in which the church has been complicit with the system. He would likely characterize Milbank’s attempt to overthrow the secular and replace it with the church as a mistake of the same kind in that Milbank, like the political machine, is attempting to impose a total order on reality. Agamben sees true messianism as an attempt to undo and challenge such orders from the inside and thus opposes total theological economies just as much as total political economies. Agamben’s interruptive messianism is, therefore, an important corrective to the totalizing tendencies in ontological hierarchies of participation.¹¹⁷ This is not to say that the theological idea of participation itself is problematic or that interruptive messianism ought to negate or replace such participation altogether. The problem is rather with a particular kind of participation as an exclusive ontological form that does not recognize an intersection with other kinds of movement.

Erich Przywara Nevertheless, Radical Orthodoxy is not the only way in which Augustine’s rhythm can be theologically understood and incorporated. Erich Przywara ¹¹⁷ See Adam Kotsko, “Dismantling the Theo-Political Machine: On Agamben’s Messianic Nihilism” in Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, eds. After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 215, 221.

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weaves an interpretation of Augustine through his theology, yet ends up with a very different vision than that of Radical Orthodoxy. Indeed, Przywara designates philosophies of cyclical revolution, like that of Oliver, as a philosophical striving for an absolutum, marked by the desire of original sin to “unfold the coherence and meaning of being and history.”¹¹⁸ And, in contrast to Pabst, the form of oscillation such as between the one and the many, which Pabst claims Christianity overcomes, is, for Przywara, appropriate to the intra-creaturely perspective. Like Breyfogle, Przywara, therefore, identifies a dialectical element to Augustine’s thought. He uses Augustine to put forward “the dynamic ‘in-between’ of the (Platonic) progressive and (Aristotelian) regressive analogies.”¹¹⁹ He argues from Augustine, The most creaturely aspect of the creature (in view of which its ‘analogy’ to God would appear to be the severest conflict with God: intrinsic opposition versus unity, no versus yes, nothing versus Is)—precisely this is the site of the profoundest disclosure of God (the site, that is, of an ‘analogy to God’ not merely in the sense of ‘exemplarity,’ but almost in the sense of revelation’).¹²⁰

Przywara here emphasizes, not the ascent, but the way in which God is within creation as other. On the one hand, Przywara is here affirming that for Augustine, God is within creation as the hidden, inward presence of natural order, but is also within history through prophets, Spirit, Scripture, Church, and ultimately Christ, and finally, is within human memory as the turning of the soul to God.¹²¹ As described above, the created realm is presented as a perfectly-ordered hierarchy by which we can ascend to the creator. Even Christ is sometimes presented as measure, number, and order, especially in Augustine’s early works.¹²² On the other hand, however, the way in which God is within creation here is not only as its form but also as a confrontation (the point of severest conflict with God is the most profound disclosure of God). Przywara appeals to the extreme ontological difference recognized by Augustine between God as Being and unity, and creation as mutable and temporal and passing into nothingness. Nevertheless, the latter is not subsumed into order according to Przywara’s interpretation but is the site of the revelation of God as other than this reality. God is here revealed not only as providence, but as other, in fact, as other that leads to uncomfortable confrontations. As such,

¹¹⁸ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 405E/308–9G. ¹¹⁹ Ibid., 264E/166G. ¹²⁰ Ibid., 266E/168. ¹²¹ Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 241–3; Augustine, On True Religion, 51; Augustine, The Soliloquies, 1.1.3. ¹²² Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 256. See Marc Lods, “La personne du Christ dans la ‘conversion’ de saint Augustin,” Recherche Augustinienne 11 (1976): 33.

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The word that best captures the essence of Augustinianism is therefore ‘night.’ . . . It is, to be more precise: the Easter vigil. The night following upon Good Friday: immersion in the absurdity—the ‘non-sense’—of a God put to death by his creation. The night in anticipation of Easter morning: rapture into the ‘supersense’ of a creation redeemed by God and into God by the killing of God. It is thus the ‘vigilant night’. . . . Vigilance in the negative sense: of the acutest consciousness of the abysses that have been torn open. And vigilance in the positive sense: of the night that is already day. It is the night in which the abyss of the creature (quid est profundius hoc abysso?) and the groundlessness of God (ut inventus quaeratur, immensus est) are unfathomably [unergründlich] one. The word ‘night’ thus indicates that the Augustinian analogy breaks through in both a downward and an upward direction: downward into the abyss of the creaturely, which—beyond an ‘ever greater dissimilarity’—is almost a ‘contradiction’; and upward into the immeasurability of God’s incomprehensibility, into which the creature is enraptured, such that—beyond even the ‘so great a similarity’ of ‘exemplarity’—one must almost speak of a ‘cessation into God.’¹²³

Notice that the side of Augustine’s theology expressed in De Musica is not negated. Creation is redeemed and we are enraptured into a “supersense.” However, he puts this upward movement beside a downward movement, which he describes as the non-sense of the historical event of Christ’s death. Przywara associates both of these movements with Augustine. This latter, historical, downward perspective corresponds to those places in Augustine’s corpus in which grace figures as interruptive, and in which conversion involves pain and discomfort.¹²⁴ Thus, Przywara argues that “The first trait distinctive to the Augustinian analogy is the emphatic notion of its ‘backand-forth’ ” between the spiritual and sensible.¹²⁵ The tensions that emerge in interpreting Augustine are made the site of a productive, multifaceted depiction rather than covering over those tensions by reducing them all to a single ontology. This interpretation points to the possibility that the rhythm of the ontological structure in Augustine is capable of recognizing a historical counter-rhythm in which creaturely reality is not subsumed under a larger ontological hierarchy but is confronted and interrupted through an encounter with God-as-other from within the oscillations of intra-creaturely reality. Przywara is also not alone in this interpretation of Augustine’s rhythm. Pascal Michon, too, in commenting on Augustine’s silent rhythms, argues that these silent, non-sensible rhythms, are not merely beyond the temporal and sensible world, but appear to already be manifest in the soul (“The soul, even in silence and without any memory, moves in rhythmic time intervals”).¹²⁶ These silent ¹²³ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 268–9E/170G. The citations are from Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 41.13 and Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, 63.1, respectively. ¹²⁴ Harrison, Rethinking Augustine’s Early Theology, 249–51. ¹²⁵ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 262E/164G. Italics original. ¹²⁶ Augustine, De Musica, 6.6.16.

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rhythms may, therefore, be something like non-temporal intervals within time, akin to Agamben’s caesurae, towards which the soul seeks to move, rather than an altogether separate sphere. Michon observes that if this is the case, then Augustine may acknowledge a sort of rhythm that is beyond metrics.¹²⁷ While his understanding of rhythm appears to be mostly Platonic, based on the imposition of ordered time intervals, these silent rhythms may suggest a kind of eschatological interruption to such metrics. Michon says: In other words, the “silent rhythms” of the soul seem to compound two opposite influences in Augustine’s thought. On their neo-Platonic side, they appear as regulated by divine rhythms according to traditional criteria mixing mathematics, rational proportion, symmetry, uniformity, regular order. But on their Christian side, they look much less constrain[ed] because what counts now is less an imitation of the perfect order of the universe than the re-actualization, in the tiniest utterance, of God’s speech power and, by doing so, the opening of a space within the becoming itself which prefigures the timeless and eternal life in God.¹²⁸

According to Michon, this tension is reflective of Augustine’s unique form of dualism, which is neither a strong dualism nor a Plotinian dualism at risk of collapsing into monism. Rather than keeping different dimensions of ontology apart or reducing them to the One, Augustine’s use of rhythm enables him to associate opposites through hierarchy, not in terms of unification but in terms of paradox.¹²⁹ Przywara’s interpretation of Augustine is, however, only part of his own, much more comprehensive theological vision and the rhythm it involves, which is the subject of chapter five. What I hope this chapter has shown is that when Przywara appeals to the idea of analogy, this is not the same as Milbank’s theological analogy of exclusive participation. Likewise, when Przywara appeals to Augustine, he does not use him the same way that Radical Orthodoxy makes use of Augustine’s “musical ontology.” The difference between the two is that while Milbank, Oliver, and Pabst subsume the movements of the historical within the movements of ontological participation, Przywara, and arguably Augustine himself, maintains the tension between these two movements by maintaining a diachronic perspective on these rhythms. Przywara, therefore, discerns in Augustine a vision in which diachronic and synchronic, intra-creaturely and theological, metaphysical and historical, both play a part. I now turn to what this rhythm looks like and why it is the approach to rhythm most appropriate to Christian theology.

¹²⁷ Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 5.” ¹²⁸ Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 7.” ¹²⁹ Michon, “Christian Rhythm at the End of Antiquity (4th–6th cent. AD)—part 4.”

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5 Harmony and Interruption Rhythm as Analogy

As the past three chapters have demonstrated, rhythm is a theologically significant category because different understandings of rhythm have different theological consequences. Each of the conceptions of rhythm that we have considered thus far, if adopted as the definition, exhibit problems from the perspective of Christian theology. For both the structural rhythm of theological analogy and the improvised rhythm of Heraclitean (anti)metaphysics, the divine is so closely equated with the goodness, structure, or processes of creation that the difference between God and creation threatens to become annihilated. This is exhibited in different ways in the process theology of Catherine Keller in chapter two and by John Milbank, Simon Oliver, and Adrian Pabst as described in chapter four. While Keller reduces God to part of the process of an unfolding world, the above proponents of Radical Orthodoxy reify reality into a hierarchy that suggests a completed whole and therefore a premature eschatology. This is problematic because, besides neglecting human experience, it precludes the possibility of divine confrontation with sinful systems, particularly in cases where they result from attempts to secure a premature peace. Both of these accounts of rhythm as form, whether fluid or structured, lead to such fusion because they use the category of rhythm to account for the totality of relations, such that God, described as the rhythm of the whole, is also reduced to this totality. My objections to these approaches, however, do not mean that I recommend the alternative of an arbitrary and voluntarist deity. The rhythm that is arbitrarily interruptive on its own lends itself to the opposite theological problem of a kind of total opposition between immanent and transcendent, characteristic of Barth’s Römerbrief, which severely limits the possibility of a genuinely transformative relationship. Agamben’s radical, intra-creaturely silence regarding the beyond, if left to itself, could tend in this direction, although I have endeavored to show that this is not necessarily the case. The solution to these theological dangers that beset the category of rhythm is not to carve out another middle way between these rhythms that could be

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seen from a single perspective. To do so would be to repeat the mistake of the synchronic: to attempt to describe rhythm at a remove without taking account of the rhythms in which one is always already embedded as a creature and the ways in which those rhythms influence one’s experience of reality. I, therefore, instead propose developing a pattern for the rhythmic creature to intellectually move between the two extremes of rhythm as totality of relation, on the one hand, and rhythm generated by interruptions from a beyond, on the other. This pattern comes from Erich Przywara, the theologian who has used rhythm most explicitly and extensively in his work and who does not dissolve the two rhythmicizations—intra-creaturely and theological—into a tertium quid. They are, instead, mediated only by the movement that the creature must make in Christ between them, such that each account of rhythm is maintained as a unique perspective that is nevertheless qualified by its other. This guards against the temptation for the theologian to use rhythm as a way of circumscribing the whole of reality under a single category, recognizing instead that the best accounts of the relationship between God and creation involve a multiplicity of perspectives that the theologian must move between. This is a way of describing what it means to say that Przywara’s analogia entis is the analogical relationship between intra-creaturely and theological rhythms. The rhythm of the relationship between God and creature is both related to but different from the rhythms of human life itself. This oscillating perspective suggested by Przywara is faithful to the nature of rhythm itself, which requires an oscillation between synchronic form and diachronic experience, as described in chapter one. While previously-discussed uses of rhythm have been insufficient to Christian theology, this chapter lays out and defends an approach that acknowledges the dimensions of those other articulations that are important yet goes beyond them in a way that, I suggest, is appropriate to Christian theology.

T H E ANALOGIA ENTIS AS RHYTHM Przywara describes the rhythms of theological analogy and of intra-creaturely analogy as two distinct “rhythmicizations” [Rhythmisierungen] of the one rhythm of the analogia entis. The intra-creaturely analogy from below and the theological analogy from above are both oscillations, the former between actuality and potentiality or essence and existence, and the latter between emanation and anagogy. Przywara comes to the conclusion that neither movement is sufficient on its own for describing the relation between God and the creaturely and thus concludes that there is a relationship between these two analogies which is itself analogical. The analogia entis is this

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oscillating tension between these two dynamic analogies.¹ It is this understanding of the analogia entis that is theologically central for Przywara and thus determines the way in which he uses rhythm.

Steven A. Long The doctrine of analogy is not a single doctrine but pertains to several different issues in Christian theology.² We are here interested in the metaphysical question regarding the relationship between the being of the human and that of God. However, even within the sub-category of metaphysical analogy, there are various ways in which the term “analogy” is understood. These include the analogy of attribution, the analogy of proportion, and the analogy of proper proportionality. The analogy of attribution is a way of speaking in which we extend a concept from a central case to its effects, causes, and signs. Health is Aristotle’s oft-used example of this analogy, in which health is primarily found in a person, but we also designate medicine, wholesome food, and exercise as healthy because they contribute to and represent the person’s health. The analogy of proportion indicates a determined relation, such as between numbers or currency. Finally, the analogy of proper proportionality is not a determined relation, but a mathematical term that indicates that a predicate applies to two cases proportionately.³ It has the form A is to B as C is to D,⁴ and an example might include that the wings of a butterfly are to the butterfly as the wings of a gull are to the gull. All of these forms of analogy apply to the relationship between God and creatures in various ways. For example, the creature has a determinate relationship to God as in the analogy of proportion, but God does not have a

¹ John R. Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being (Part Two),” Modern Theology 22, no. 1 (2006): 22. ² It includes the epistemological question of how it is that we know God, the linguistic question of how it is that we speak about God, and the metaphysical question of the way in which the being of God and the being of creation relate to one another. Of course, these questions are not entirely distinct from one another, since the way in which we are capable of thinking about the metaphysical analogy between God and creation is determined by the way in which analogy works in our language, and the question of how it is that we can actually have such knowledge in the first place. Nevertheless, the failure to distinguish between these different ways of using analogy has led to much misunderstanding and lack of clarity surrounding the term. White attributes much of the debate between Barth and Przywara on analogy to lack of clarity on both sides surround the use of analogy (Roger M. White, Talking About God: The Concept of Analogy and the Problem of Religious Language (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 7). ³ Steven A. Long, Analogia Entis: On the Analogy of Being, Metaphysics, and the Act of Faith (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 2–3. ⁴ Aristotle, Metaphysics IX 6, 1048a35–1048b9 in Aristotle: The Complete Works. Electronic Edition, Past Masters: Humanities Full Text Works (accessed July 10, 2013).

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determinate relationship to the creature because God infinitely transcends the creature.⁵ Likewise, the analogy of attribution designates God as the primary model and cause of such things as love and justice, and we indicate examples of love and justice in the world by way of an attributive analogy to such things in God. Stephen A. Long argues that in the case of being itself, however, the only appropriate analogy is that of proper proportionality. The creature’s relationship to God is only made possible by its receiving its own being from God, while the being of God is not received but simply is. Thus, the being of God is to God as the being of the creature is to the creature.⁶ The difference between God’s being and that of the creature is located in the relationship between act and potency. Potency defines the being of the creature as that which makes change and movement possible but does not exist in God since potency accounts for the possibility of limitation, change, and multiplicity, all of which are impossible for God.⁷ God is identical to pure being, and infinitely exceeds the being of the creature as the creature’s origin.⁸ This is the difference between created being and uncreated, self-sustaining being. The result is that God “exceeds all proportion.”⁹ Thus, although God and creature are both said to have being, this does not imply that being is a third category of which God and creatures are two types. Rather, as the creature is to its act, so is God to His act. For while what is affirmed is perfection in each case, the meaning and being of the perfection differ and differ infinitely; the meaning and being of the perfection of God is without any limit of potentiality, while the meaning and being of perfection in the creature involves limit of potentiality.¹⁰

Thus, while there can be an analogy of proper proportionality between God and creatures with respect to their acts, God in God’s self transcends and contains proportionate being, rather than vice versa, such that the creature is related to and depends upon God, but God is transcendent to and independent of the creature.¹¹ Long says that “The middle term is not a third thing under which both God and creature fall,” but a proportionate relationship between the perfection of the creature as is appropriate to the creature, that is as limited by potentiality, and the perfection of God as is appropriate to the divine, not limited by potentiality.¹² This principle is known as “similarity within ever greater dissimilarity,” after the Fourth Lateran Council, and it is one to which Przywara likewise appeals.¹³ Thus, according to Long, the analogy of the analogia entis is the analogy of proper proportionality.

⁵ Long, Analogia Entis, 3. ⁹ Ibid., 30. ¹⁰ Ibid., 33.

⁶ Ibid., 9. ⁷ Ibid., 24, 28. ¹¹ Ibid., 91. ¹² Ibid., 103.

⁸ Ibid., 31. ¹³ Ibid., 95.

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Erich Przywara While Przywara does not use the language of proper proportionality, this idea is included in his analogia entis, though it is ultimately insufficient for it. For Przywara, as with Long, the being of the creature is not self-sufficient and at rest, like that of God, but is an oscillation between essence and existence. More specifically, essence and existence have the relation to each other of in-andbeyond,¹⁴ with essence-in-existence corresponding to actuality, and essencebeyond-existence as corresponding to potentiality. The oscillation between these two is what Przywara calls the intra-creaturely analogy. God, on the other hand, is unity and wholeness because God’s essence equals God’s existence such that there is no distinction between actuality and potentiality.¹⁵ In traditional Thomistic language, Przywara says God is the “necessarily actual.”¹⁶ Thus Przywara does imply a kind of proper proportionality in which the mode of being proper to the creature is wholly dissimilar from the mode of being that is proper to God. Przywara is always very careful to emphasize the pole of ever greater dissimilarity over similarity, stating that “every last ‘attributive’ [zumessende] analogy (analogia attributionis) reduces to an incomprehensible ‘suspended’ [schwebende] analogy (analogia proportionis). To be sure, there is such a thing as a positive statement concerning God, but it is merely the basis of a negative statement concerning God’s absolute otherness.”¹⁷ Przywara would object, however, to equating proper proportionality understood as a mathematical principle with the analogia entis itself. In fact, he calls the final moment a “second attributive analogy.” Ultimately, a mathematical construction like that of Long does not take us very far. It tells us that God and creatures are dissimilar with each having a mode of being proper to them, but it gives little account of how God and creation are in relation to one another. Similarity cannot simply be proportionately balanced with dissimilarity as this makes a mathematical principle, rather than God, decisive for the relation between God and creature.¹⁸ Such a mathematical construction easily forecloses the possibility of intimacy because it mathematically relates two unrelated terms, freezing them into a system of opposition or contrast, while this is precisely what analogy attempts to avoid.¹⁹ Instead, Przywara believes that alterity can only be understood from the perspective of relation.²⁰

¹⁴ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 141E/46G. ¹⁵ Ibid.,160E/66G. ¹⁶ Ibid., 222E/127G. ¹⁷ Ibid., 231E/135G. ¹⁸ Ibid., 232E/137G. ¹⁹ Desmond, God and the Between, 124. See also Desmond, Being and the Between, 211, and Thomas A. F. Kelly, Between System and Poetics: William Desmond and Philosophy after Dialectic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 107, 229. ²⁰ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 287E/187G.

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In contrast to proper proportionality, Przywara describes his understanding of analogia entis as a relation of mutual alterity. It is a “relation” (of God to the creaturely, in that the creaturely is related to God as to its innermost and abiding principium et finis), and it is a “genuine” relation (i.e., to God as genuinely God) insofar as it expresses the fundamental “alterity” of God with respect to the creaturely. At its peak, the positivum of “relation” reveals itself as the negativum of “alterity.” But precisely as such the negativum of “alterity” is the sign of the fulfillment of the positivum of “relation.”²¹

Both relation and otherness are here affirmed in that even at the highest level of a participative unity of the creature with God, there remains an absolute difference between God and creature. There is no third principle that regulates the relation between God and the creature,²² no principle or mathematical structure that can act as a middle-vantage point from which these extremes can both be viewed. The immanence of intimacy and the otherness of transcendence are held together only in God.²³ Rhythm, however, is not a principle. It is a manner of movement. It is, therefore, more helpful than mathematics in describing the dynamics of this analogical intimacy in alterity. For Przywara, the intra-creaturely analogy has the form of an oscillation. The theological analogy, the relation between God and creature, cannot be thought of independently of this oscillating creaturely perspective and therefore also has the form of an oscillation, in this case between intimacy and alterity, or what Przywara calls God in-and-beyond the creature. Remember that Przywara describes these as two rhythmicizations of the one rhythm. Thus, Przywara says of the analogia entis, “This primordial oscillation between structures that are (themselves) oscillating is itself the primordial rhythm [Ur-Rhythmus] within the rhythm between metaphysics and religion.”²⁴ The relationship between the intra-creaturely (metaphysics) and theological (religion) is a rhythm, or indeed the primordial rhythm that constitutes reality because it is a relationship between two dimensions of reality that are themselves oscillating: the creaturely, and the relation of God to the creaturely. The two are not held together in a principle that could be observed at a remove, but through movements in which the human creature is always already embedded.

²¹ Ibid., 231-2E/136G. ²² Ibid., 234E/138G. ²³ Teran Dutari and Thomas F. O’Meara argue that Przywara’s analogy is an attempt to cover all the various types of analogy by developing the concept as a theology of incarnation (Thomas F. O’Meara, Erich Przywara, S.J.: His Theology and His World (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 76–7). Przywara’s analogy is not “a way of thinking or a form of logic but . . . both kinds of analogy, attribution and proportionality, point to something deeper, an exposition of the structure of created being as diverse but also as participative in God” (80). ²⁴ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 418E/323G.

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The oscillation of the creature introduces a dynamism into the Thomistic real distinction between God and creation. It requires that any articulation of analogy must include an expression of the dynamic relations between God and the creaturely.²⁵ In using rhythm to describe the analogia entis, Przywara attempts to indicate various movements and intersections between the oscillations of the creature’s potentiality, which Przywara describes as “essence-in-and-beyond-existence,” with the theological oscillation between God and creature: “God-in-and-beyond-the-creature.” This means that the relation between God and creature is formulated not as a relation between two identities, two things the nature of which is already known in advance of their being brought into relation with one another, but as an intersection of movements in and through which each is known. As such, the reader of Analogia Entis should be prepared for a rather dense and intricate discussion. ²⁵ Przywara’s conceptualization of the analogia entis as an analogy between two analogies is an elaboration of an idea that is already implied by Thomas Aquinas. Not only does analogy refer to the relationship between God and creation (ST. 1 Q. 4 A. 3), but the same form also maintains between the actuality and potentiality or essence and existence of the creature itself: “Neither in an angel nor in any creature, is the power or operative faculty the same as its essence . . . But in every creature the essence differs from the existence, and is compared to it as potentiality is to act . . . ” (ST. 1 Q. 54 A. 3). Aquinas therefore implies that intra-creaturely reality is related analogically to God as itself analogical. Reinhard Hütter puts it this way: “For Thomas, being a creature means, not to be identical with one’s esse, but to have esse. This esse is participated in by all creatures and hence is called esse commune . . . The esse commune is an effect of God’s creative agency and hence has no part whatsoever in God’s essence but participates in some of the perfections of the ipsum esse subsistens. Consequently, God and the esse commune are as fundamentally distinct from each other as cause and effect are. Moreover, the esse commune does not subsist on its own; rather, it is to be understood as a formal principle inherent in all beings” (Reinhard Hütter, “Attending to the Wisdom of God,” in White, ed. Analogia Entis: Invention of the Anti-Christ or the Wisdom of God? 231). Hütter likewise concludes that there are two related analogies: “And because there obtain two dimensions of participation, predicamental and transcendental participation, there are two corresponding forms of the analogy of being, one between substance and accident, and the other between God and creature” (233). And again: “Thomas conceives of created reality as esse commune in its differentiated unity and hence as a whole that as such is related to God as the first and universal principle of the actus essendi” (236). Whether or not this implies a rhythm or oscillation is less clear, belied by the fact that Hütter here repeatedly identifies the esse commune, which might be the same as Przywara’s intracreaturely analogy, with a formal principle, which it most definitely is not for Przywara. This may therefore be the point at which Przywara has made a genuine innovation on Thomistic analogy, even if it is arguably implied by Thomas. The clearest point at which Thomas indicates something like an oscillation is in his discussion of knowledge rather than ontology, although the two always imply one another. In discussing the question of whether or not the soul may know itself, he says that “the human intellect is only a potentiality in the genus of intelligible beings . . . ” Since the mind can only know that which is actual, “Therefore in its essence the human mind is potentially understanding. Hence it has in itself the power to understand, but not to be understood, except as it is made actual” (ST. Q. 87 A. 1). Thus, the intellect, the soul, cannot grasp itself since it is itself potential. It can only know itself in a secondary sense by way of its acts (ST. Q. 87 A. 3), implying a kind of oscillation of knowledge from potentiality to actuality and back again. Nevertheless, this seems to me to be a fairly paltry foreshadowing of the fundamentally rhythmic nature of Przywara’s analogy. Therefore, while he is not unfaithful to Thomas’ analogy, Przywara’s articulation of it is a genuinely new development.

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Przywara does not stand back from reality and analyze it from a distance, making all connections between parts and whole clear. Instead, his project is to indicate movements from within those same movements, which makes clarity a significantly more difficult task. The reader sometimes feels that he or she is being tossed about on the waves, but this experience is not insignificant; it is true to the reality that Przywara is attempting to articulate and our relationship to it. Przywara indicates the general shape of the movements as “a dynamic back-and-forth between the above-and-beyond (of a transcending immanence) and the from-above-into (of an indwelling transcendence).”²⁶ I will begin with the “from-above-into,” or “indwelling transcendence.” This movement refers to the way in which God is within the creaturely as the eternal actual (not as a divine potentiality) that makes possible the potentiality of the creature. This potential that originates from God is the “positive potentiality;” it is positive because of its intimate participation in God as its origin. Przywara says “For so little does the activity of the divine Is (Truth, etc.)—because it is the positivity of an Is—intend for the creature to sink back into nothingness, that, on the contrary, the (enduring) positivity of the creature mysteriously merges with God’s own (eternal) positivity.”²⁷ However, lest we think that Przywara here identifies the creature too closely with God, this intimacy is possible only by virtue of a greater alterity in which “the divine ‘Is (Truth, etc.)’ is the innermost efficient principle in the creaturely ‘is (valid)’ in the sense that God’s maximal proximity to the creaturely is the maximal liberation of the creature unto active, free self-movement . . . ”²⁸ This is the creature’s “negative potentiality.” The result is The one immediate “necessity” of the creaturely “is (valid),” to the point that there is a complete co-relation between spirit (mens) and God . . . , in the sense that this immediacy leads to the creature’s greatest possible independence—even to the creature having the property of being “self-caused,” indeed even to the point of the creature having the possibility of saying No to God . . . ²⁹

Because the creature’s potentiality is based in God, positivity enters into its form, but because that divine positivity manifests in the creature as potentiality and not actuality, the creature is also absolutely other than God because God in God’s self is always present to the creature as actuality and

²⁶ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 216E/121G. Italics original. Note that the “transcending immanence” is the same movement as that which I associate with Agamben in chapter three. It is the diachronic perspective of the creature. Nevertheless, as I explicate here, Przywara understands such transcending immanence in the light of the relationship of the creature to the divine, a perspective Agamben himself cannot inhabit. It is therefore likely most accurate to say that Agamben’s immanent transcendence is the moment of disruption to the intra-creaturely, which is only one moment in Przywara’s larger nexus of movements of the transcending immanence. ²⁷ Ibid., 224E/129G. ²⁸ Ibid., 230E/134G. ²⁹ Ibid., 230E/135G.

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therefore as other than the creature in its potentiality. God is both the positive potentiality of the creature’s necessity and the negative potentiality of the creatures’ independence, even to the point of saying No to God. This tension of the intra-creaturely in its relation to God between the merging of the positivity of the creature and that of God, on the one hand, and its maximal independence, on the other, has, for the creature, the form of an oscillation. The creature is this oscillation between necessity on the one hand, which is the impossibility of not being, and the possibility of non-being (potentiality) which remains because of the gratuity of the creature’s existence: Potentiality thus oscillates between a potentiality towards the “possibility of nonbeing” and a potentiality towards the “impossibility of non-being.” . . . But even then the full “negative potentiality,” as we sketched it out above, remains; the absence of any necessity that any creature whatsoever should exist . . . : the absence of any intrinsic connection of God to the creature . . . : Indeed, this negative potentiality is reinforced. For with respect to the intra-creaturely gradation between possible being and necessary being, it becomes clear that the expression “necessity” is really still intra-creaturely—that is, that God remains beyond even the opposition between “possible” and “necessary”³⁰

Since God is most intimate to creaturely potentiality not as divine potentiality but as actuality, and therefore in an ever-greater dissimilarity, the way in which God is within the creature (as the source of creaturely potentiality) is relativized by the greater way in which God is beyond the creature (as divine actuality). We, therefore, already have a complexity of movements and intersections at work between the theological and the intra-creaturely within the one rhythmicization of immanent transcendence. On the one hand, God is present to the creature as the origin of its potentiality but, on the other hand, God is present to the creature as its disruption, its possibility of not being. The one movement of God toward the creature includes two moments if viewed diachronically (which is, in the end the only way that the creature may view it, namely through oscillation), one of harmony and one of interruption. The result of this tension is that, as the most intimate depth of every creature that is nevertheless the most other from the creature, God points the creature beyond itself to God in God’s self.³¹ The tension of the first movement of God towards the creature generates a second movement in the other direction. This second rhythmicization is the above-and-beyond of the transcending immanence in which the creature, through its own intra-creaturely movements, which are nevertheless sustained in their radical alterity from God, opens beyond itself (above-and-beyond) to God in God’s self.

³⁰ Ibid., 225E/130G.

³¹ Ibid., 214E/119G.

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The creature becomes a transcending immanence, moving beyond itself towards the divine as its “end,” but in the sense of an end that is not proportionate to that which is measured. Thus, Przywara says, But, on the other hand—and here even this most intense negative potentiality becomes positive—this “supernatural” incorporates itself entirely into the relational edifice of the natural. It incorporates itself into the relational structure of end and means: the supernatural “concerns the end itself”, while the natural is “underway” to the end. It incorporates itself into the relational structure of how and what: in the supernatural lies the “correct mode”, in the natural the “correct content”. Logically, therefore, that which is most properly supernatural, the vision of God as Eternal Life, becomes the “ultimate perfection” of the natural . . . ³²

The theological analogy, which I take here to be the supernatural in relation to the natural just as the theological analogy is in relation to the intra-creaturely, is present to the creature not only as the ground of its potentiality but also as telos. This is the second movement generated by the same logic of similarityin-ever-greater-dissimilarity. This second movement gives the creature its particular sort of potentiality in which “its most extreme negative potentiality is at the same time the boldest of positive potentialities—a positive potentiality so bold so as to journey into the nature of himself. It is an insufficiency from one’s own ground . . . that is nevertheless a ‘capacity for . . . ’.”³³ In other words, the radical alterity of negative potentiality resulting from the movement from God to the creature is the launching pad, the catalyst, for the creaturely movement towards God. This second movement therefore again contains two movements, which, if experienced diachronically, move in opposite directions. Beginning from the negative potentiality, the creature becomes open to something beyond itself. This ecstatic movement is then met by a second descending movement, a second “attributive analogy” from God to the creature, which turns the creature’s negative potentiality into an “inner-end-directedness,” which is the creature’s “active potentiality.” Paradoxically, this second movement from God to creature is not a function of the creature’s own “passive potentiality,” but its negative potentiality, which is to say its nothingness or powerlessness. The implication is that active potentiality is only a divine gift of summons to service; the creature’s potentiality is active only on the basis of the negative potentiality that prevents it from fusing with God such that active potentiality is free to become service to God.³⁴ Przywara claims that “From the totality of these potentialities, we can read off the positive nature of our concluding analogy, which comprises the relation between the intra-creaturely analogy and the analogy between God ³² Ibid., 227/132G.

³³ Ibid., 228E/133G.

³⁴ Ibid., 229E/134G.

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and creature.”³⁵ In particular, active potentiality is the formula of the “concluding analogy,” the analogia entis. The form of the analogia entis is one that moves from an attributive analogy (similarity)—attributions to God made by the creature based on the impulse of the creature’s transcending immanence— to a suspended analogy (ever greater dissimilarity) due to the immanent transcendence of God which gives the creature its negative potentiality, its maximal independence from God. However, The illimitable “suspended” analogy . . . establishes a new “attributive” analogy, but one that reads not, as in the first moment, from below to above, but rather from above to below: from the Deus semper maior, the creature’s “realm of service” is “attributed” to it. This “service” is an active positivity that is another more acute form of the above-and-beyond of God.³⁶

In other words, the analogia entis swings in both directions. The two rhythmicizations intersect as similarity-within-ever-greater-dissimilarity in the form of an in-and-beyond, such that God is in-and-beyond the creature’s essence-in-existence and God is in-and-beyond the creature’s essencebeyond-existence. Since the principle of analogy is “similarity in ever greater dissimilarity,” the way in which God is in the oscillations of intra-creaturely potentiality (essence-in-existence) is relativized, but not overcome, by the greater way in which God is beyond the oscillations of intra-creaturely possibility (essence-beyond-existence). The analogia entis is an oscillation between two oscillations, “Augustinian ‘transcending immanence’ and Thomistic ‘indwelling transcendence’—and in that they reveal, by virtue of their reciprocal oscillation, the ‘ultimate oscillation,’ we are brought at last to the ‘primordial rhythm’ in metaphysics and religion.”³⁷ We have here a very different kind of “four-fold,” not one in which four poles encompass the whole of reality, but one in which the intersection of two oscillations generates two pairs of movements, themselves diachronically mediated by yet another back-and-forth between them. Notice, therefore, that the analogia entis is not, for Przywara, a relation between the movements of God and the movements of the creature, but a relation between the movements of the intra-creaturely and the movements of the relationship between God and the intra-creaturely. This is what gives the analogia entis its dynamic character; it is the movement between two motions, rather than two static realities. Przywara contents himself with a description of the movements in and through which the creature encounters God rather than attempting to directly grasp the relationship between God and creature as if from the outside, as if not embedded in those movements as himself creature. His focus on the movements in and through which God is known allows room for acknowledging the transcendent God as he is in himself, as “above-and-beyond,” but it ³⁵ Ibid., 231E/135G.

³⁶ Ibid., 235E/139G.

³⁷ Ibid., 418E/323G.

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preserves this transcendence precisely by referring to it only obliquely, through the concrete experiences of creaturely oscillation.

THEOLOGICAL RESPONSES Przywara’s response to the theological question of the nature of God’s relation to the world is to assert both poles, the in and the beyond, intimacy and alterity, in their extremes and to then identify the various movements of relation produced by the intersection of these poles. This approach is not necessarily unique; there are many theologians who would agree with all of these points, or adopt the similar approach of maintaining two poles in tension,³⁸ although Przywara of course includes many more than two. What is unique in Przywara’s thought, however, is his identification of rhythm as the way in which the various dimensions of reality are related to one another, thereby emphasizing their relation as experienced and performed, rather than conceptualized. This is arguably why the conceptualization is itself so difficult to follow. It is attempting to be faithful to complex temporal movements rather than reifying them into a system that might be easier to grasp. Rather than a mathematical balance between the otherness of God and the intimacy of God, Przywara’s analogia entis is an articulation of several moments within the relational movements between God and creature, between which the creature must oscillate, as Przywara himself does in his description. Therefore, the intra-creaturely analogy, its oscillation, determines the form according to which we may approach the relation between God and creature, a highly incarnational move on Przywara’s part. Yet at the same time, intracreaturely oscillation is itself interpreted through its contact with the movements between God and itself. Through Przywara’s many back-and-forths, the form of the analogia entis, and therefore of reality itself, shows itself to be a rhythm of intersecting oscillations. Przywara’s use of rhythm makes the best sense of rhythm phenomenologically and theologically because of the ways in which it incorporates both diachronic and synchronic perspectives on the tangle of oscillations that he identifies. He, therefore, presents a theological approach to rhythm that is better than accounts that rely too heavily on either the synchronic or the diachronic.

³⁸ Another example is Hans Urs von Balthasar’s emphasis on polarities (for example in Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theological Dramatic Theory, vol. 4 of Theo-drama, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1988), 116). Balthasar was directly influenced by Przywara in this. However, others such as Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Barth articulate a similar oscillation between poles, often in language of dialectic.

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Synchronic and Diachronic I described rhythm in chapter one as that which is approached through an oscillation between the synchronic apprehension of a pattern, shape, or form, and a diachronic experience of that pattern, shape, or form. Przywara’s description of the rhythm of reality likewise includes an oscillation between the diachronic and the synchronic, implied in the relationship between indwelling transcendence and transcending immanence. As described above, indwelling transcendence refers to the way in which God’s actuality is within the creature as its own-most potentiality such that the creature is so intimately connected to God that it is thereby enabled to be maximally independent of God. The intimacy of this rhythmicization is what makes attributive analogy possible, the capacity of the creature to understand something about God, itself, its reality, and the relationship between them. This first dimension of the indwelling transcendence makes possible a synchronic perspective on the part of the creature, in which the creature sees connections between God and the intra-creaturely, between layers or dimensions of reality. The creature sees something of the whole. This is the perspective to which thinkers like Milbank and others, as laid out in the previous chapter, tend to restrict themselves. However, the ever-greater-dissimilarity of this same rhythmicization is also what suspends every attributive analogy, disrupting all such synchronic perspectives. Insofar as it is truly a transcendence that indwells the intracreaturely and is, therefore, an ever-greater-dissimilarity, it disrupts and suspends the attributive pattern and the creature is initiated into a diachronic perspective through this interruption of the ever-greater-dissimilarity. Like Giorgio Agamben, who conducts operations from within reality that seize upon a kairos in order to open up a space, Przywara here identifies an excess that opens up the negative potentiality of the creature, its possibility of nonexistence, a caesura or interruption to the attempts at self-identity that characterize the subject. This diachronic experience of interruption propels the creature toward the second attributive analogy in the opposite direction, attributed by God to the creature, which Przywara calls service or gift. It is predicated on the creature’s diachronicity, its patience to receive the unknown future movements of a rhythm that it does not know all at once. In other words, suspensions of the ever-greater-dissimilarity are not absolute ruptures to the intra-creaturely but interruptions of the sort identified in chapter one, through which the creature is brought to a point of uncertainty and is thereby made available to receive a new modulation of the pattern; the creature’s negative potentiality opens it to receive its potentiality back in the form of service or gift. From the synchronic perspective, the creature begins with a pattern but in moving forward finds that this synchronic perspective is interrupted and

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suspended by that for which the pattern could not account. From the diachronic perspective, the creature begins from a place of uncertainty, from a suspension, and then receives a modulation of its intra-creaturely form from beyond itself, enabling it to move forward. In Przywara’s words, The rhythm of the first (ascending) “above-and-beyond” serves to overcome the excessive [Übermaßes] enclosedness of a totality. The rhythm of the second (descending) “above-and-beyond” tempers the excess [Übermaß] of a divine agency, which alone is efficacious, into the proportion [Gleichmaß] of a relative all-unity between Divine omnificence and the creature’s own proper agency.³⁹

Notice that there are here two “above-and-beyonds,” two movements of transcendence. This double transcendence is, in part, what suggests to me that Przywara’s approach to rhythm can be understood as including both a synchronic and diachronic perspective. Przywara is not here referring to two transcendences in the sense of two divinities, but two movements of transcendence or two perspectives on transcendence. The one refers to transcendence as that which unifies an oscillation and the other to the diachronic experience of the unknowable transcendence disrupting enclosed forms. Both are movements in the creature’s relationship with God. In this sense, the relationship between the intra-creaturely and the theological in Przywara’s analogia entis is much like the relationship between reader and poem. While accounts of reality based on an Augustinian musical ontology tend to think of reality in terms of the poem itself—every part of reality has its proper place in the larger structure of the whole, while God is the top layer of the rhythm that holds everything together and with which the other layers must be brought into harmony—the approach to rhythm that I discern in Przywara suggests instead that the intra-creaturely is not part of the poem itself but is the reader. The poem itself is the economy of relationships and movements between God and the creaturely, which includes counter-rhythmic interruptions and invites responses from the reader as he or she moves forward in time. The reader’s own bodily oscillations of language and breath come into contact with the oscillations of poetic events printed on the page just as the rhythm of the analogia entis is the intersection between creation’s own rhythms and the movements between God and creation. Poetic rhythm moves forward through the push-and-pull motions engendered by the relationship between reader and poem. In interrupting an established pattern, a rhythmic event like a caesura or an enjambment draws one’s attention to the rhythm’s pattern. It opens up a gap that invites the reader to become aware of the rhythm and to respond to it. The pressure applied by such interruptions strongly encourages a response from the reader that resolves the pattern. The disjunctions through which the rhythm is ³⁹ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 295E/193-4G.

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interrupted, therefore, give way to a diachronic performance of the rhythm, an attempt to resolve it in time. One can think of this oscillation between the pressure of the pattern and the responsive pressure of the reader’s rhythmic performance as an oscillation between the diachronic flow of time that comprises human experience and performance, and a momentary synchronic perspective on the pattern of the poem made possible by disruptions to that experience. Through interruptions from within the rhythm, the reader is enabled to step back from the flow in order to discern the rhythmic pattern beneath it on which he or she is otherwise simply carried along unawares; the required negotiation makes the reader a participant in the manifestation of the rhythm. The pattern that we know at any given moment is not the pattern of reality as a whole such that we could step outside it. The proper place of the creature is in dialogical responsiveness to the pattern as it is given in time. But a diachronic experience of rhythm also includes a place for moments of synchronic apprehension from within time, initiated precisely by rhythmic events that are diachronically experienced as interruptive to previous assumptions about pattern. The diachronic is not a unified perspective, not a single, unified flow, but is characterized by the oscillations of attention that move between particular rhythms and their larger rhythmic contexts.⁴⁰ In describing poetic rhythm, I am continually oscillating between synchronic and diachronic perspectives. On the one hand, such an analysis includes identifying the unity of the pattern of the relationship, including how experiences of interruption are part of the pattern. On the other hand, however, I am also indicating the creature’s experience of a back-and-forth between apprehension of pattern, disruption of pattern, reception of a new instantiation of the pattern, and so on. Likewise, there is one sense in which all of the different dimensions of the relationship between God and creature are true simultaneously. This was how I first described them when narrating Przywara’s thought. In this section, however, I described each potentiality as a moment in a series and am justified in doing so because Przywara himself describes these as poles between which the creature oscillates rather than as a simple, given situation. The theological tensions between intimacy and alterity, connection and otherness, pattern and interruption, are crisscrossed by the intra-creaturely oscillation of perspectives between discerning a pattern and experiencing a back-and-forth. Przywara’s employment of rhythm gives us ⁴⁰ Moreover, both types of interruption are possible within Przywara’s analogia entis. On the one hand, events of “negative potentiality” may be encountered as interruptions to experience in general, especially when such intersections frustrate attempts at self-enclosed identity. However, there may also be instances in which events of “negative potentiality” are not felt as threats to a self-enclosed identity but as operations from within the rhythms of the analogia entis and an opportunity to discern the pattern more carefully from within time, as a synchronic glimpse. In other words, whether such interruptions are experienced as interruptions to, from without, or interruptions of, from within, is due to the nature of one’s relation to them.

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a way to non-reductively envision the complexities of the divine–creature relationship and the synchronic–diachronic oscillation provides a way to make sense of these complexities.

Rhythmic Theology There have, of course, been many Protestant theologians—Barth, Bonhoeffer, Jüngel—who have been suspicious of the doctrine of the analogia entis, whether because it compromises God’s proximity or God’s otherness by interposing an abstract theory or archimedian point from which one can view the whole synchronically and, therefore, either get a handle on God or displace the actual, historic incarnation of Christ. More recently, David W. Congdon, following Bultmann and Jüngel, has rejected metaphysics entirely “as a mode of thinking that constrains rational inquiry from the outset with abstract, ahistorical presuppositions,” by constraining human historicity with a notion of human nature, for example.⁴¹ This is another objection to the analogia entis as a prior metaphysical framework within which Christ must fit; it prematurely constrains the historical appearing of God and the relationship between God and creature. One might, therefore, wonder about the degree to which Przywara’s understanding of rhythm is valid for those who do not subscribe to the doctrine of analogy. John Betz has already gone a significant way toward addressing these critiques with respect to Przywara and there is no need for me to exhaustively repeat them here, except to remind the reader that Przywara repeatedly states that the analogia entis is not a principle from which anything could be derived, in fact, is not a principle at all but simply an attempt to describe, a posteriori, the movements of experience.⁴² The intra-creaturely is characterized as “open” not as an abstracted, pre-given principle, but as a description of the actual tensions experienced from within time. Creation is precisely not a closed system into which Christ is made to fit. Instead, the analogia entis is an attempt to describe the state of affairs that Christ encounters and in which we encounter Christ.⁴³ Thus, while the rhythms of creation may be a kind of ontological context for the incarnation, this does not mean that they can constrain or anticipate it in any way.⁴⁴ Surprise and interruption are not precluded, particularly, as we have seen, in Przywara’s description. To come back to the example of the poem, while the rhythms that a poem sets up at the ⁴¹ David W. Congdon, The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch (Eugene, OR: Cascae Books, 2016), 20. ⁴² John R. Betz, “After Barth: A New Introduction to Erich Przywara’s Analogia Entis,” in Thomas Joseph White, ed. The Analogy of Being; Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God? (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2011), 55. ⁴³ Ibid., 84. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 81.

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beginning may be a preparation for their own interruption, the reader has no way of knowing this until he or she can see the effects of the interruption only in retrospect. Interruptions are not threatening to the form of intra-creaturely reality; they are events to which the unfolding pattern is responsive. The incarnation and resurrection are paradigmatic examples of such surprises. They are events that are simultaneously unexpected yet meaningful in part because the form of reality is such that it is responsive to such interruptive events as meaningful. In associating both proportion and interruption with rhythm, Przywara avoids identifying a single rhythmic form or structure in relation to which all disruption becomes extrinsic, arbitrary, or nihilistic. Instead, interruption is also a rhythmic movement. Its occurrence is not a threat to the pattern of relations as such; in fact, it may contribute to the developing pattern of those relations. This allows Przywara to acknowledge the disruption of balance and order as redemptive rather than destructive. Therefore, while he wants to avoid a transcendence that is an excessive divine agency, he is also wary of simply tempering divine otherness via order and balance. He says, Because it is synonymous with order . . . , relation seems to aim at balance and, in the final analysis, at a formula for such balance. And yet, it is characteristic of the relation in our perfectio universi that every closed system of mutual relatedness is exploded by an “above-and-beyond.” This, then, is what characterizes the universe as oriented “towards God.”⁴⁵

This explosion of balance as part of the rhythm of God’s relation to the world is what makes Przywara’s analogia entis different from the synchronic harmony of the previous chapter’s theological analogy. Insofar as it is a form, the analogia entis is a form that points beyond itself and surpasses itself.⁴⁶ In order to take the ever greater dissimilarity seriously, anything that we can recognize as harmony must always be relativized, open to divine excess. This is not to say that there is not beauty, harmony, or structure, but only that neither God nor even the creaturely experience of God are univocal with the provisional human identifications of such harmony and structure. In other words, we need not read Przywara as attempting to define human nature or reality as such in advance, but as describing the sorts of movements in which the human creature appears to come to be. With Congdon, then, this is the human creature understood in terms of history, in terms of movements apart from which we cannot talk about the creature. This is a metaphysics not very different from Congdon’s own in that Congdon himself declares the human and its perspective to always be historical,⁴⁷ which is no less a

⁴⁵ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 287E/187G. ⁴⁷ Congdon, The God Who Saves, 23.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 190–1E/95–6G.

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metaphysical constraint, no less a claim about human nature than Przywara’s intra-creaturely oscillations. While each element of the analogia entis is, objectively, first a principle of being, “temporally speaking, however, each is first of all a practical principle of orientation . . . and only subsequently by abstraction a theoretical principle of method.”⁴⁸ In other words, Przywara temporally privileges the diachronic perspective, which understands that theology is first a matter of practical orientation. The form of in-and-beyond is not a position from which to manage the whole, but an intra-temporal position that entails movement and oscillation on the part of the creature. The analogia entis is not a static, logical form but a dynamic, lived rhythm.⁴⁹ Rather than imagining analogy according to the furrow of a pre-established structure of correspondence between eternity and time in which created reality is merely a lesser manifestation of the form of eternity, Przywara invites us to imagine analogy as the rhythm generated by the encounter between the movements of the creature’s relationship to itself and the movements of the creature’s relationship to that which is beyond itself. While the analogia entis indicates a metaphysical situation, it does so only provisionally, as if indicating a paradox, and always for the purpose of opening the creature to this encounter. Przywara’s expectation is that in the course of this encounter, as it unfolds through time and as the ways in which the creature indicates this metaphysical situation change, the creature will occupy different perspectives. The analogia entis is the provisional account of the rhythm as it has thus far been encountered, which guides the rhythmic, forward motion of the creaturely. Przywara says that the history of the articulation of analogy shows, the range of oscillation proper to its varying emphases—but one that passes over . . . into a structure of differentiations, to the point of the unsystematizable surd left behind by the plenitude of historical configurations. In this respect, the analogia entis shows itself to be—in the strongest sense—a “creaturely principle” and, thus, as consisting in the illimitable openness of the movement of becoming . . . . It is not a principle that makes the creaturely comprehensible and thus manipulable, but one in which the creaturely oscillates [schwingt] unhindered in its utter [restlosesen] potentiality.⁵⁰

Rather than a system of pre-established possibilities that denigrates time, Przywara’s analogy is a creaturely, temporal principle. For the creature, it is not possible to grasp the whole of history, truth, and reality at once, but only to move with the current and to allow oneself to be ever more deeply grasped by it. It is a current that swells into different waves through the tradition of its articulation, always recognizable as waves but always slightly different in form. ⁴⁸ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 365E/264G. Italics mine. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 310E/206G.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 308E/204G.

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Analogy does not grasp the whole of the current but rides it faithfully. Przywara’s choice to articulate analogy through rhythm sets up analogy, not as an abstract pre-given constraint, but as a description of the intra-temporal conditions in which we happen to encounter the divine. As a creaturely principle, the function of the analogia entis is soteriological— to set the creature free for movement appropriate to it. It is not an attempt to grasp the nature of God or the nature of creature directly. Commenters say about Przywara that “His attention to the dynamic, living creaturely dimension of life has remained his primary concern.”⁵¹ The rhythmic movements in which humans are always already embedded make up the horizon of experience in which God is encountered.⁵² Przywara’s primordial, theological rhythm is not something different than rhythm as it is generally understood, as in art and anthropology, but is a vision of the nature and significance of those rhythmic movements in which humans are always already embedded as the site of connection with God including, at times, through a productive interruption to those everyday rhythms. Nevertheless, in the end my concern is not to defend the analogia entis per se. Accepting Przywara’s understanding of rhythm certainly does not require accepting the analogia entis as a principle, precisely because it does not function as a principle for Przywara. I am drawing on Przywara’s use of rhythm in explicating the analogia entis as an example of a theological approach to rhythm that helpfully includes both synchronic and diachronic perspectives and is, therefore, both appropriate to the actual human experience of rhythm and avoids the theological problems identified in previous chapters. One may decide the concept of analogia relationis, or something else altogether, best designates this relationship between God and creature, but this need not require dismissing Przywara’s understanding of rhythm on the basis of its association with the analogia entis since his use of rhythm reconceptualizes the analogia entis as a description under discussion rather than a principle requiring allegiance.

⁵¹ James V. Zeitz, “Przywara and von Balthasar on Analogy,” Thomist Press 52, no. 3 (2006): 484. ⁵² According to the way that Przywara describes it, then, the analogia entis is not a metaphysics of presence. In fact, I think it has more in common with Jean-Luc Marion’s Christian phenomenology than with a metaphysics of presence. In a footnote in his book In Excess, Marion praises Przywara’s Analogia Entis, “despite its title,” for indicating the ever-greater dissimilarity “in an exceptionally strong fashion” (Jean-Luc Marion, In Excess: Studies in Saturated Phenomena, trans. Robyn Horner and Vincent Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 158n68). Marion associates the ever-greater-dissimilarity with a “pragmatic theology of absence” which is “opposed to the ‘metaphysics of presence’ at least as much as deconstruction is” (157). A pragmatic theology of absence is the attempt to open the creature to an event that cannot be contained within the conditions of knowledge of experience but that nevertheless has an impact on the creature by making possible a new sort of knowledge and experience.

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My reading has been that in the process of articulating the relationship between the rhythm of God’s presence to creation and the intra-creaturely rhythms from within the dynamism of the intra-creaturely, Przywara reframes the doctrine of analogy as an ever-changing indication of our participation in the rhythms of reality as those rhythms unfold, develop, and interrupt themselves. This diachronic reframing is not merely phenomenologically motivated. It is, rather, based on the nature of the relation between God and creation themselves as revealed in the incarnation. The logic of this approach is as follows: Since for the “Ichts” of the “infinite greatness” of space and time, the critical point of intersection [Schnitt- und Brennpunkt] is the “infinite smallness” of the here and now qua “Nichts,” it is precisely here, in this focal point, that we see the ultimate and decisive “topos theios”: in God’s appearing as the “ever greater” within the “ever smaller” of his “Now and Here” within the “now and here” of space and time, and so of his “Ichts” within the “Nichts,” . . . Thus the human being who would wish to ascend into the eternity of the “ever greater” of the “Ichts”—in an attempt to overcome space and time—must descend into the “Nichts” of his “now and here”; for it is only in such a “nothing” of the “now and here” that he becomes conscious of this eternity—just as, in Christian theological terms, the “eternity” (of God in Christ), as a genuinely creaturely eternity, is in space and time as “now and here”: from the “now and here” of a birth in a manger and a death on a cross to the “now and here” of a real historical church under the sign of ever new “nihiliations,” until the complete “nothingness” of the destruction [Untergangs] of “the old heaven and the old earth” reveals the unveiled eternity of the “Ichts,” certainly as something “new,” but whose newness is that of a “heaven and earth” that is the “tabernacling of God with men.”⁵³

God sustains creation only by direct intersection with the point of nothingness, namely with that which is most different from God. Rather than talking about the relation between God and creation in terms of God relating to the whole, as typically is, or is thought to be, the case in doctrines of analogy, Przywara describes God as relating to the smallest point of particularity, an approach required by the event of the incarnation. In Christ, eternity enters time and space, which always means a particular point in time and space. If this is the moment according to which we interpret God’s self-revelation and if, in doing so, we take not only the content of that revelation, but also the form, seriously, then the creature does not encounter God in a general harmony, but in moving through particular here-and-nows. In the end, Przywara gives us not just a particular vision of analogy, but a way of approaching the practice of doctrine. Rather than attempt to articulate a doctrines as discreet, circumscribable objects, he approaches doctrine rhythmically, articulating it as a process of rhythmically moving ⁵³ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 592E/519G.

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between perspectives because one can never see the whole from a single position. In other words, Przywara’s rhythmic description of reality harbors within it an injunction for theology to work with the grain of the incarnation. Merely identifying rhythm is not enough. Since the theologian is always embedded in rhythm, the question becomes one of how to perform theology, how to articulate doctrines besides the analogia entis, in ways that acknowledge that the realities which theology indicates, the realities out of which theology is performed, are rhythmic. What follows from here on out is an attempt to take up this invitation.

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Part IV Reality

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6 Rhythms of Creation I have, to this point, been constructing a theology of rhythm, that is, the application of theological arguments and concerns to the category of rhythm. Given that rhythm is, phenomenologically speaking, a significant form of human reality and experience, it is a necessary category for any attempt to articulate theology from out of human creatureliness. Since a multiplicity of approaches to and assumptions about the metaphysical nature, significance, and function of rhythm already exist, putting forward an argument regarding how the category ought to be understood from within Christian theology has required an evaluation of the various ways in which it is already envisioned and used. If rhythm is to have theological significance as part of how we understand the relationship between the rhythmic, human creature and its Creator—in other words, if doctrinal articulations about the relationship between Creator and creature take up the rhythmic form through which that relationship is experienced and performed—then the theologian has to be clear about the understanding of rhythm to which he or she subscribes. Any vision of rhythm that becomes part of doctrinal discourse must betray neither the rhythms to which it seeks to do justice nor the requirements of Christian doctrine itself. This work of beginning to identify and describe the sort of rhythm appropriate to Christian theology is, however, only half of the picture. The other dimension of an argument regarding the relationship between rhythm and theology is to demonstrate that the category actually does some work, that it makes a difference to theology. One can do the work of articulating how Christians ought to understand the rhythmic form of their creaturely experience, but this only assigns theology as an interpretive lens to the category of rhythm. It does not demonstrate that the category of rhythm means anything to the enterprise of theology itself, does not show that to make it part of this enterprise would be to do more than add a non-operative, rhetorical supplement to a discourse already laden with such supplements. This is the dimension of the work that I begin here and carry into the final chapter, that is, to conduct theology with rhythm in mind. This is, in part, a question of performing doctrine using a methodology appropriate to the rhythms we are considering, namely one that takes both synchronic and

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diachronic perspectives into account. This chapter unearths what a focus on rhythm, both from the synchronic and the diachronic side, add to Christian doctrines of creation. As we have already seen, many doctrines of creation are attempts at synchronic perspectives on creation. While this frequently causes problems, synchronicity is not, in itself, problematic if it opens out onto a diachronic perspective. The limitation of a creaturely vision that attempts to circumscribe the whole too tightly is that it inevitably misses dimensions of the pattern. A more open approach to the pattern, which takes more resonances into consideration, is a more successful synchronic approach. The key to understanding the rhythm of creation is a synchronic perspective that does not attempt to view the doctrine of creation as an independent whole, but that places creation in a larger economy of movements, particularly the incarnation. The success of this synchronicity is indicated by its capacity to lead to the diachronic as an irreducible dimension of the pattern. As indicated in chapter five, such diachronicity is required by the incarnation with which the doctrine of creation is brought into conversation. The incarnate Logos, the pattern of reality appearing at a particular here and now within the pattern, is both that which enables the human creature to discern the pattern of the whole and that which disrupts attempts to reify one’s understanding of that pattern. Synchronic and diachronic are, therefore, in this case, not an oppositional binary, but are mutually implicating; they require oscillation.

THE S YNCHRONIC: THE GENESIS 1 CREATION A CCOUNT The Genesis 1 creation narrative is an indication of the most fundamental dimensions of the reality in which the human creature encounters the Creator. It was not written to function primarily in terms of a protology, the beginning of a diachronic narrative, but as an indication of an enduring economy, a general pattern. As a priestly vision, based as it is in the repetition of ritual, Genesis 1 indicates a cosmological economy of relations between God and creation. The purpose of addressing the beginning is to speak about the whole, to extend the way in which God was present to Israel in the temple or tabernacle to the whole of reality in a situation of exile in which the temple is no longer present.¹ The rhythmic dimensions of the account are therefore significant for understanding reality. ¹ Most commentators agree that Genesis 1 was written by a priestly source, likely while Israel was in exile. It serves as a claim that God can be trusted even against the evidence of a contemporary situation, that his word is creative and efficacious even in the midst of chaos

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Early Christian theologians approach the text accordingly, as part of a divine economy in which all of God’s actions, including those of creation, are integrated and share in the same logic of redemption in Christ. Cosmology was, for early Christians, as much about the incarnation and eschatology as it was about creation and, as such, creation narratives, including the Genesis 1 narrative, were never read without these resonances.² In other words, Genesis 1 was understood in terms of a larger pattern, viewed synchronically, rather than in terms of a linear progression. While we, today, tend to approach scripture in linear terms, evidenced by the popularity of narrative theology, early Christians were concerned with the intercommunication between narrative patterns, each supplying a layer of meaning.³ Such thickness is arguably better expressed through musical or poetic structures, rather than narrative ones. Narratives are themselves rhythmic phrases which, as different as they might be from one another, are nevertheless all connected by deeper meanings that evoke one another backwards and forwards. The early Christian synchronic interpretation of Genesis 1 is particularly reflected in its association with the theory of double-creation postulated by Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and Maximus the Confessor. For these thinkers, the idea of the initial moment of creation was problematic in its requirement that an eternal God come into contact with time, which would compromise that eternity by suggesting a change in God.⁴ Several theologians, including Augustine, Gregory, and Maximus suggest an intermediate, simultaneous or (Walter Brueggeman, Genesis (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 25–6). Eugene Roop expresses it thus: “to know that Gen. 1 stems from the Priestly tradition encourages us to think about how the seven-day account of creation fits with the cultic theology of ritual and sacrifice in Leviticus, as well as the emphasis on the centralized, priest-governed worship in Jerusalem found in the historical books of the OT. . . . the first and most important thing to say about the opening account of creation in Genesis is that it stems from a Priestly tradition that wishes to place temple and sacrifice at the center of our perceptions of the deepest logic and purpose of reality. The priestly theology of temple and sacrifice is the arche or beginning of the P account of creation” (Eugene F. Roop, Genesis (Scottdale, PN: Herlad Press, 1987), 24; Claus Westermann, Genesis 1–11, trans. John J. Scullion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1994), 1; R. R. Reno, Genesis (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001), 30–1). See also Mark S. Smith, The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2010), 87–93. ² Westermann, Genesis 1–11, 1–2; Paul Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy: Creator and Creation in Early Christian Theology and Piety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12, 14, 97. Irenaeus’ doctrine of recapitulation as it is developed by other theologians such as Origen and Maximus the Confessor seems particularly pertinent here as a vision of the events of the divine economy not in terms of linear progression, but collapsing the distance through evocation of meaning. See Ireneaus of Lyons, Against the Heresies 3.18.1–3.23.8 trans. Dominic J. Unger (New York: The Newman Press, 2012); Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: Vol. 1: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), vol. 1, 7.15–16. ³ Stephen D. Crites, “Unfinished Figure: On Theology and Imagination,” in Mark C. Taylor, ed., Unfinished . . . Essays in Honor of Ray L. Hart (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 159. ⁴ Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 142.

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potential creation that acts as an interval that mediates between the eternal God and a temporal creation. God’s will to create is eternal and simultaneous with God’s wisdom and power in the prior, atemporal creation.⁵ For Augustine, in particular, the first chapter of Genesis refers to this simultaneous creation as a synchronic pattern in contrast with the second chapter of Genesis, which refers to the other side of God’s double-sided creation, namely his administration of creation within space and time.⁶ Augustine argues that creation involves three things: unchangeable formulae for all creatures in the Word of God, works from which God rested, which is a making through the Word, and the ongoing administration of these works. As creatures, we only really know that administration of creation.⁷ Genesis 1 is an attempt to speak to the second of these, to mediate between the unchangeable forumulae and their administration. It is about the creation of the measures and numbers and patterns according to which time will unfold, but it is only a provisional glimpse. Genesis 1 is therefore not temporal but is primarily about a knowledge of sequence, a primordial template according to which our temporal version of seven days unfolds.⁸ To us, creation is known according to the course of time, according to its administration, but to God as well as the angels, it is known simultaneously, in rest.⁹ Thus, in both its composition and in early Christian interpretation, Genesis 1 is read synchronically, in terms of pattern.

Theological The rhythm presented in the Genesis 1 account follows an oscillating, liturgical pattern of call and response—the repetition of “Let there be . . . and there was . . . and God saw that it was good.”¹⁰ Creation then responds again with the “It was evening, it was morning, the . . . day.” The call-and-response oscillation between God and creation is taken up by creation as an intra-creaturely ⁵ Ibid., 146; Gregory of Nyssa, The Second Book Against Eunomius, 227–28 in Gregory of Nyssa, Contra Eunomium II: An English Version with Supporting Studies: Proceedings of the 10th International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (Olomouc, September 15–18, 2004), Stuart Hall (trans.), Lenka Karfiková, Scot Douglass, and Johannes Zachhuber, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 109; Maximos the Confessor, The Ambigua, 7.15–23. ⁶ Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis (New York: New City Press, 2002), 4.25.42–5.5.16. ⁷ Ibid., 5.12.28. ⁸ Ibid., 4.33.52–56. ⁹ Ibid., 5.4.10. ¹⁰ Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology Volume 2: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press,1999), 5; Jean-Louis Chretien makes a similar point in his book The Call and the Response, in which he suggests the idea of creation as conversational turn-taking (Jean-Louis Chretien, The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 5). Walter Breuggemann points out that reciting this liturgy between God and creation could function as a defense against chaos for its readers (Genesis, 30).

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oscillation between evening and morning. In Genesis 1, therefore, God is present to creation through rhythm and imparts this rhythm to creation as the context of creation’s response. We therefore here encounter Przywara’s two oscillations, the theological and the intra-creaturely, and creation emerges between these two intersecting oscillations. This section addresses the theological oscillation, while the next addresses the intra-creaturely response. Besides this oscillating form, the first few verses of the Genesis 1 account include several rhythmic images of God’s creative presence. In verse two, one of the most mysterious verses in all scripture, on which Catherine Keller relies heavily in her account of rhythm in creation, the Spirit or breath hovers or vibrates over the face of the deep. Breath is a rhythmic phenomenon and this rhythmic suggestion is enhanced by the Spirit’s vibrating motion. Interestingly, Gregory of Nyssa picks up this image to talk about the unity of creation as “co-breathing,” typically translated as “sympathy,” which is enabled by the power of God in sustaining all things.¹¹ This image suggests God is like the power of breath flowing through everything the way that breath flows through a body, maintaining everything together in harmony. In the following verse, God creates through speech. The relationship between these two verses is unclear, but some suggest that the two images ought to be read together as breath and speech, which together bring about form.¹² Kathryn Tanner has suggested that Word and Spirit (breath) never appear apart from each other in Christian scripture but always work together. The Son is the intelligible form of the Spirit in much the same way that human words form breath, and the Spirit is the expression and power of the Son just as breath is the power of speech.¹³ Tanner says that “the Spirit always makes its appearance in the form of the Son: the Son is the shape that such power ¹¹ Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 220; “For God, it says, taking dust from the earth fashioned man and by his own breath planted life in the creature which He formed, in order that the earthly element might be raised by union with the Divine, and so the Divine grace in one even course, as it were, might uniformly extend through all creation, the lower nature being mingled with that which is above the world” (Gregory of Nyssa: The Catechetical Orations of St. Gregory of Nyssa, ed. J. H. Strawley (London: London, Society for promoting Christian knowledge, 1917), 6); “It shows that the universe is a continuous whole and that the bond of reality admits no break; there is a sympathy of all things with each other. The whole is not released from connexion with itself, but all thing stay in being because they are held fast by the power of what really is. What really is, is Absolute Good, or whatever name beyond this one conceives to denote the indescribable Being” (Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes, 406,1 in Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes: An English Version with Supporting Studies. Proceedings of the Seventh International Colloquium on Gregory of Nyssa (St Andrews, 5–10 September 1990), Stuart Hall ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), 121.,1). ¹² Smith, The Priestly Vision of Genesis 1, 57, 64.; Psalm 33:6–7. ¹³ Job 33:4; Psalm 33:6; Gregory of Nyssa, “An Address on Religious Instruction,” in Hardy, Edward Rochie, and Cyril C. Richardson, eds. Christology of the Later Fathers (Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox Press, 1954), 271–3; John of Damascus, “The Orthodox Faith” in Frederic Hathaway Saint and Chase, eds. Writings (Baltimore, MD: Catholic University of

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takes,”¹⁴ thereby making the power of the Spirit available to corporeal creation. If Genesis 1:2–3 is read in this way, then the same conjunction of word and Spirit that characterizes the economy of redemption appears as God’s creative power in Genesis 1. This reading is of course contingent upon associating the speech of God with the Logos, a more fraught connection than associating the breath of verse 2 with Spirit. Theologians tend to be very careful to distinguish the pre-existent Son as “Word” from speech that occurs in time.¹⁵ However, for early Christians who do not read Genesis 1 as taking place in time, when God speaks, God speaks in the Word rather than in time. In early Christian doctrines of creation, the Son is precisely the one that mediates the relationship between eternity and time.¹⁶ The degree to which and ways in which theologians will associate the Logos with the intermediate moment of simultaneous creation vary as these theologians attempt to avoid both the accusation of postulating an eternal creation as well as avoid the subordination of the Son.¹⁷ Maximus the Confessor does identify this interval closely with the Logos in that simultaneous creation includes the implanting of logoi, the matrices for creatures’ interrelations with one another and with the Creator, which eternally pre-exist in God through their participation in the “incarnation” of the Logos.¹⁸ Simultaneous creation occurs as a kind of “incarnation” of space and time.¹⁹ While it may not occur in time or in matter, God’s speech nevertheless opens time and creates matter and therefore comes into relation with them. For Augustine, this mediating interval is not the Logos itself. It is, rather, preconceived eternally in the Logos, then made simultaneously through a created wisdom/light produced by the Logos (who is uncreated wisdom and light).²⁰ America Press, 2010), 174–5; Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 177. ¹⁴ Ibid., 169. ¹⁵ Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.2.5 in On Genesis (New York: New City Press, 2002); John of Damascus, “The Orthodox Faith,” 174–5. ¹⁶ However, Blowers points out that Origen goes further and associates the beginning itself with the incarnate Son, 141. Origen says “What is the beginning of all things except our Lord and ‘Savior of all,’ Jesus Christ ‘the firstborn of every creature’?” (Origen, Homilies in Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2010), 1.1). Ambrose carries this reading forward as well, in particular by associating it with Jesus’ claim to be the alpha and omega, beginning and end (Rev 22:13), a phrase spoken by not only the pre-existent Son but by the Resurrected Christ (Ambrose, Hexameron Paradise and, Cain and Abel (The Fathers of the Church vol. 42), trans. John J. Savage (Washington, DC: Catholic University of American Press, 2010), 1.4.15). ¹⁷ Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy,143. ¹⁸ Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: Vol. 1: The Ambigua, trans. Nicholas Constas (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 7, 1077C—1088A. ¹⁹ This is an excellent example of the kind of woven, patristic exegesis that I am attempting to indicate here as an example of a synchronic approach. Genesis 1 is understood in the context of its place in the larger pattern of scripture, in particular in its connection to the incarnation. ²⁰ Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.17.32, 2.8.16–18.

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God saying “Let there be light” is an eternal event that takes place in the Word.²¹ When God speaks various dimensions of creation into being, God speaks in his Word, which does not occur in time.²² Therefore, even if one does not directly identify God’s creative speech with the eternal Logos, that speech nevertheless occurs in and through the Logos as the mediator between form and formlessness, eternity and time, and is therefore associated with God’s presence to creation. This suggests that the Spirit–Son reading of Genesis 1 is an appropriate extension of this form in the economy of salvation because even if we do not directly associate the speech of God with the pre-existent Son, the Son is still the Wisdom that forms this creative speech. In fact, Augustine indicates that God works through the “formulae” of the Word and brooding love of the Spirit.²³ Therefore, when God speaks each dimension of creation into being, Augustine says that both Word and Spirit are implicated, the Word in God’s speech and the Spirit in the “good” that God pronounces it to be.²⁴ This discussion of the relationship of Logos to speech and of Spirit to breath in Genesis 1 is, I think, significant for its capacity to re-frame how we think about God’s creative speech. Logos is here depicted as connective rather than merely informational. Rather than focusing on the content of the invitation (light, land, water, firmament, stars, etc.), we are instead invited to attend to its rhythmic form–speech animated by breath–which may affect how we think about creation itself. Remember from the first chapter of this book that rhythm serves to connect speaker and hearer by relationally contextualizing information. Rhythm functions to hold disparate things together, including different people, as well as the informational, the bodily, and the affective dimensions of interaction. If the image of creation-through-speech is understood rhythmically, it likewise suggests an ongoing process of bringing disparate dimensions of reality into relationship, including the material and the immaterial, the animate and the inanimate, but particularly the absolutely different: eternal Creator and temporal creation.²⁵ This is precisely what Augustine and Maximus suggest in giving such prominence of place to the problem of this creative relationship between temporal and eternal; one of the most significant dimensions of the narrative is this relationship between such absolute alterity. It is likewise what Gregory of Nyssa foregrounds with his image of co-breathing. The rhythmic breath-speech suggests synchronicity within creation and between creation and Creator, such that the divine rhythms of Genesis 1 mediate both intra-creaturely relations and the absolute intimacy in absolute alterity between theological and intra-creaturely, just as it does in Przywara. ²¹ Ibid., 1.2.5. ²² Ibid., 1.4.9. ²³ Ibid., 1.18.36. ²⁴ Ibid., 2.6.14. ²⁵ Moreover, I mentioned above Gregory of Nyssa’s idea of co-breathing, which is God’s animating power through which all of creation is brought into harmony. This is an example of the larger theme of cosmic sympathy in patristic doctrines of creation in which the divine economy works to bring various dimensions of reality into harmony with one another, particularly the corporeal and incorporeal. See Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 218–21.

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The third image in this triad of rhythmic imagery is that of light. Biblically and theologically, light has always been a significant image, communicating both the immanence and the transcendence of God.²⁶ According to Augustine, the light is not the Logos itself, but the Logos sources the light and operates through it as created wisdom and presence.²⁷ The rest of creation is made in this light, while the light is itself made only in the Word.²⁸ Bonhoeffer makes this same connection, suggesting that light communicates God: “In his created light the creation sees his light.”²⁹ This light does not correspond to the natural light of the sun but to a more fundamental, spiritual reality, namely the presence of God to creation. This incorporeal light is the source of the oscillation between day and night, which is the pattern in which the rest of creation emerges.³⁰ Night and day are, again, not temporal, but nor are they mere metaphors. They are spiritual realities, pertaining in particular to the oscillation between form and formlessness and to ordered succession.³¹ We have here, in the first verses of Genesis, a trio of rhythmic images in which the presence of God to creation is communicated in successive verses through three successive rhythmic images: breath → speech → light. Breath suggests the presence of God to creation in an oscillating motion. Together with speech, it holds together the various dimensions of creation as well as God and creation in an intimacy in alterity. Light is the presence of God through which time, form, and space are mediated. As the source of the oscillation between day and night that becomes the pattern within which the rest of creation emerges, light is, therefore, portrayed as the source of creation’s rhythm and as the rhythmic form of God’s presence to creation. It is the oscillation between the theological and the intra-creaturely.

Intra-creaturely Creation’s first and recurring response is that other refrain that repeatedly punctuates the narrative: “it was evening, and it was morning.” Since the creation of light in verse three indicates something more fundamental than the light of the heavenly bodies, this first oscillation between morning and evening likewise refers to a more fundamental oscillation than that provided by the heavenly bodies, which have not yet been created. Bonhoeffer refers to this in his book Creation and Fall, saying that the day ²⁶ Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy 119. See also Pseudo-Dionysius, On the Divine Names, chapter 4 for an example. ²⁷ Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, 1.17.32. ²⁸ Ibid., 2.8.16. ²⁹ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, Temptation: Two Biblical Studies, trans. John C. Fletcher (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 24. ³⁰ Augustine, On the Literal Meaning of Genesis, 4.28.45–32.50. ³¹ Ibid., 1.17.34.

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is the great rhythm, the natural dialectic of creation. In the morning the unformed becomes form and then by evening sinks back into formlessness. The bright polarity of light dissolves into unity with the darkness. . . . The rhythm—the repose and movement in one—which gives and takes and gives again and takes again, which thus eternally points towards God’s giving and taking, to God’s freedom on the other side of repose and movement—that rhythm is the day.³²

Bonhoeffer here points out that the significance of the day is not in marking out seven literal days but in indicating the oscillating rhythm in which creation emerges. It is only after this rhythm is set up that the heavenly bodies appear and along with them, fixed and measurable number.³³ These poles of night and day are placeholders for designating a fundamental motion that is prior to and pervades all numeric and material creation. As with Agamben, this is a rhythm more essential than number. To what exactly this primordial oscillation refers is a matter of debate for early Christians. Interestingly, Augustine suggests that it refers to an oscillation in perspective between creation and Creator, perhaps originally the perspective of the angels. They would look toward the Creator in expectation in morning, referring to the motion of rising, and they would contemplate the creation that was made in the evening, their countenance moving downward like the setting sun.³⁴ The day and the night, therefore, refer to the knowledge of the Creator and the knowledge of creation.³⁵ The reader is thus encouraged to adopt the same objects of attention. The implication of this primordial oscillation for creatures is that they can encounter neither created reality nor the divine independent of this oscillation. Regardless of the precise referents for day and night, rhythm appears in Genesis 1 as the matrix of space-time and, as a result, space-time is depicted, not simply as a container, but as the rhythmic form that makes it possible for the human creature to think relatedness through patterns of space-time.³⁶ As the basic form of space-time, rhythm operates below our awareness as the form of connection and communication between Creator and creation and within creation, mediating and shaping that encounter. We see Przywara’s rhythmic form reflected here in the first chapter of Genesis. In the oscillation between day and night, we see the connective, rhythmic form of intimacy in alterity occurring, not only on the divine side (the breath-speech that occurs in the Logos), but as proper to the intra-creaturely reality as the form of spacetime. The patristic doctrine of double-creation on which I have here been relying, strange as it may seem, can be read precisely as such an attempt to understand creation from within the fundamental oscillation of creation itself. It is here helpful to remember that while early Christians were attempting to ³² Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 29. ³³ Ibid., 31. ³⁴ Augustine, Literal Interpretation of Genesis, 4.28.45. ³⁵ Ibid., 4.32.50. ³⁶ Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), 83.

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construct a rigorously synchronic perspective, they were primarily interested in understanding the divine economy from within, as participants in that economy.³⁷ A particular example of this phenomenon is the development of the liturgical calendar in which the Paschal mystery was not only about the inauguration of new creation in Christ’s death and resurrection but also an observance of the true significance of God’s creative work in the beginning, the “birthday of the cosmos” at the vernal equinox “when day and night were in perfect equilibrium and order preempted chaos.”³⁸ It is therefore consistent with early Christian concerns to ask how a doctrine like that of doublecreation served to help early Christians locate themselves within the divine economy, with the answer here being “through oscillation.” The double-sided theory of creation, if understood as a cosmological claim from inside creaturely temporality rather than a protological claim from outside temporality, accords with the oscillations of Przywara’s intra-creaturely, an oscillation between the two moments of creation, actuality (essencein-existence) and potentiality (essence-beyond-existence). These two sides correspond to the two sides of double creation, simultaneous creation in its potentiality, on the one hand, and its temporal unfolding into actuality, on the other. The creature is itself a double movement: possibility actualizing itself and actuality exceeded by possibility.³⁹ What might, therefore, seem outlandish as a protological claim is more credible when read as a claim about the temporality of creatures that cannot comprehend both time and eternity, synchronicity and diachronicity, simultaneously. Creation appears double from the inside but these two movements are themselves both part of the same economy, which is a harmonious unity from God’s perspective, but a paradox requiring oscillation from the creature’s perspective. The creature cannot hold these two sides together in a unity in and of itself but relies on a transcendence for such harmonization. Double-creation is not about two successive events but an enduring situation of oscillation. In one sense, viewing the theory of double-creation as an enduring situation is to see it as a synchronic pattern, one that does not develop over time. From inside creation, however, this is only a provisional synchrony that is, in fact, viewed from a diachronic perspective. If, in contrast to these early Christian thinkers, one approached the doctrine in terms of protology, this would assume a certain diachronic perspective in that creation would be the beginning in a sequence of events. On the other hand, however, this too assumes a synchronic perspective in the sense that to see the beginning as a beginning requires standing outside the sequence. The patristic reading is a synchronic claim made from a diachronic perspective, rather than the reverse. The best ³⁷ Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 5–8; 314–15. ³⁸ Ibid., 336–7. ³⁹ Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2014), 208–9.

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synchronic approach to a Christian doctrine of creation is one that is selfconsciously synchronic in this way, one that intentionally locates the movements of creation in a larger pattern of movements between God and creation from within the pattern because it is a synchronic perspective that does not usurp the position of God and elide that of the creature. Such synchronicity rightly-attended leads one to take up a diachronic perspective on creation appropriate to the creature, represented most commonly for the early Christians in liturgical performance.

THE D IACHRONIC: NATURE AND CULTURE Genesis 1 tells us very little about the nature of creation’s rhythm, only that creation is rhythmic and that this rhythm is significant in the relationship between God and creation. We are, therefore, left with questions about how we, as creatures formed by an oscillating space-time, encounter this economy of rhythms from within that economy. According to a diachronic perspective, I locate myself within creation’s rhythm as I might locate myself within the rhythm of a poem as I am performing it. From here, I cannot see the whole of the rhythm but only some of the movements through which I have already come, and I can see most clearly the rhythms of my immediate vicinity. Creatures never really experience the rhythms of all of creation; they experience the rhythms of their particular time and place. This brings us back to the phenomenological perspective with which I began this book. For both Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty, “The search for the conditions of possibility is in principle posterior to an actual experience.”⁴⁰ The search for a theory of rhythm or a rhythmic account of creation will always be posterior to the human experience of rhythm. However, since this human experience is never an experience of rhythm as such, a theory of rhythm or a rhythmic account of creation will always be posterior to the human experience of a particular rhythm. The distinctiveness of particular rhythms is the result of the interaction of nature with human culture. Fundamentally, according to Lefebvre, our theories of rhythm are founded in our experience of the body, a bundle of interacting biological, physiological, sociological, and psychological rhythms.⁴¹ While some of these rhythms are shared, they are never purely natural but also culturally mediated and constructed. Culture imprints rhythms on the natural rhythms of the body so as to form its movement through spacetime in particular ways. Nature and culture are, moreover, two dimensions of ⁴⁰ Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. an Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 44–5. ⁴¹ Ibid., 77, 90.

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the Christian concept of creation. We sometimes mistakenly think of creation as equal to the natural world to the exclusion of culture, however, since humans are also creatures, creation includes that which human creatures produce. Thinking about creation in terms of rhythm blurs the lines between nature and culture because we do not experience the rhythms of nature and culture as distinctly as we may conceptualize them. They intertwine and exert mutual influence on one another and are together present to us simply as space-time, as the shape of human experience in this particular here and now. In his book on the pervasiveness and significance of the wave-form, James H. Bunn highlights the ways in which wave-forms present in nature exert pressure on the ways that cultures form themselves. For example, the periodic cycles of the sun’s motion have often been considered a kind of universal syntax for planning the timing of a culture’s acts within the recurrent cycle of seasons.⁴² Primal cultures often artistically translate this solar periodicity into the four-legged shape of animal bodies, which use these four legs to move through space in a wave-like pattern; the rotations of the joints moving in opposite directions translates into a forward motion through the wave-like movement of the body.⁴³ One such shape that appears in ancient, Pacific cultures has been called a hocker, after the joint (hock) in a quadruped’s leg that bends backwards. It is a symmetrical four-quartered image of the limbs that “propel bodies in rhythmic patterns of alternating gaits.”⁴⁴ While these art forms meant different things in different cultures, they were often associated with genealogy and reproduction. Wherever they appear, they signal a point of connection between a culture and its environment, the motions through which the cycles of nature are translated into forward motions, such as the progression of generations: “Joints are pivots that transform the circular rotation of shoulders and arms into the propelling line of a leap, an arrow, or a javelin,”⁴⁵ just as the circular rotations of days and seasons are transformed into the succession of generations. However, this influence also travels in the other direction. The rhythms of a constructed culture form space-time in particular ways. For example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer laments that though the day determines “the essence of our world and of our existence,” humans today tend to subject it to technology rather than allowing ourselves to be determined by it and to live it.⁴⁶ The basic rhythm of oscillation between day and night no longer determines human experience to the extent that it once did because cultures have formed that rhythm differently through technologies like the electric light, thereby changing the human experience of space-time. ⁴² James H. Bunn, Wave Forms: A Natural Syntax for Rhythmic Languages (Sanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 147. ⁴³ Ibid., 150. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 156. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 158. ⁴⁶ Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Creation and Fall, 28.

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Changes in cultural rhythms can, therefore, have a significant impact on how it is that one experiences and conceptualizes space-time, and may even have a significant impact on the form of thought in general. David Abram suggests an interesting example of this phenomenon. In contrast to oral cultures that consider language an extension of the rhythms of living bodies, the development of written language has isolated the meaning of language from its participation in bodily and ecological rhythms, instead turning it into a map-able structure of codes and formal rules.⁴⁷ The result is that we conceptualize the world as inert, mechanical, and determinate.⁴⁸ Abram says that the more prevalent view of language today considers any language to be a set of arbitrary but conventionally agreed upon words, or “signs,” linked by a purely formal system of syntactic and grammatical rules. Language, in this view is rather like a code; it is a way of representing actual things and events in the perceived world, but it has no internal, nonarbitrary connections to that world, and hence is readily separable from it.⁴⁹

We also tend to think about doctrine in ways that are shaped by this view of language. While most theologians would not say that doctrines are arbitrary, they are nevertheless thought of as a system of codes that represents reality and events from a distance. Doctrine is thought of as a mirror rather than as an extension of the reality about which it speaks. I am suggesting something similar about rhythm to what Abram suggests about language. Rhythms are only ever shared at a very general level, which is why only a cursory account, like that of Genesis 1, can be given about rhythm in general. When thinkers move beyond such cursory descriptions, we end up with a situation in which persons shaped by particular rhythms form theories about rhythm as such out of those particularities. If Lefebvre and Merleau-Ponty are right about the nature of human interaction with rhythm, about the conditions of the knowability of rhythm, then the rhythms in which one exist become one’s particular way of existing, which is inevitably implicated in any attempts to make sense of the world. Attempts to articulate doctrines of creation that are abstracted from material creation therefore merely cover over the phenomenological origins of the doctrine. As with any cultural product, doctrine is always shaped by the rhythms of the particular social and cultural milieu in which the doctrine is conceptualized, the rhythms in which the theologian has been formed. Since the thinking being is always tied to the experience of particular times and ⁴⁷ David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 79. In contrast, oral cultures consider language an extension of the rhythms of the living bodies of the world through prayer, story, and song. These linguistic expressions are thought to be particular incarnations of a much more extensive bodily repertoire of rhythmic expressions (89). ⁴⁸ Ibid., 71. ⁴⁹ Ibid., 77.

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places, it “discerns articulations in the world, [thinking] awakens in [the world] regular relations of prepossession, of recapitulation, of overlapping . . . which may be dormant but nevertheless continue to function beneath the surface.”⁵⁰ In accordance with this phenomenological method of locating rhythm in the embeddedness of the encounter between self and world rather than being satisfied with synchronic determinations of its essence, I here seek to understand doctrines of creation, not as entities postulated from a distance, but as rhythms of experience that frame a theologian’s articulation of the relation between God and creation. The category of rhythm opens a way to re-conceptualize doctrine as inherently tied to the movements of creation rather than as an abstracted map-making that represents reality from a distance.

Keller and Augustine Augustine and Keller, centuries apart, both use rhythm to describe the nature of reality, although they do so in virtually opposite ways. That rhythm should feature in both of their visions, which are typically understood to be antithetical to one another, is remarkable, suggesting that the debate between traditional approaches to the doctrine of creation and those of process theology includes a debate about the nature of the rhythms of creation. However, our identification of rhythm as a significant category for creation in Genesis 1 does not help mediate this debate. It tells us that rhythm is significant but not necessarily its role in creation more specifically. It is possible to interpret the rhythms of creation as articulated by Genesis 1 in terms of either chaos or hierarchy. However, while there are certainly theological arguments that one could make for either approach, I propose that part of what accounts for these different visions of rhythm are the cultural rhythms that have formed how each thinker conceptualizes space-time. Scholars of human and cultural geography have begun to identify the ways in which contemporary technologies form the rhythms of space-time. Nigel Thrift argues that the pre-cognitive dimensions of the world in which thought is framed are currently undergoing radical revisions because of technological advancement. The background to human activity at one time consisted primarily of natural forces but that background has now been filled with artificial dimensions that function in much the same way. Thrift calls these “paratexts, ‘invisible’ forms that structure how we write the world but which generally no longer receive attention because of their utter familiarity.”⁵¹ These forces form

⁵⁰ Merleau-Ponty, Visible and Invisible, 100–1. ⁵¹ Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York: Routledge, 2008), 91.

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a background to which we only pay attention if it is interrupted.⁵² As mentioned, Abram’s particular example of such a paratext is that of writing and he says that it was and remains very difficult to perceive the extensiveness and depth of the impact that this change had on perception and contemplation. Although these paratexts are largely unconscious, they nevertheless shape our understanding of space, time, and movement. They are the real winners of ontological wars because they are the conditions that determine how any situation appears to us.⁵³ Abram says that, as with the development of writing, “we are simply unable to discern with any clarity the manner in which our own perceptions and thoughts are being shifted by our sensory involvement with electronic technologies, since any thinking that seeks to discern such a shift is itself subject to the very effect that it strives to thematize.”⁵⁴ Thrift nevertheless attempts to discern this shift in space-time, despite the difficulty. He points to a situation of almost continual calculation, which operates behind the scenes of everyday life, forming our experience of space-time as a never-ending flux: In contrast to the temporality and spatiality of the narrative, playing out once and for all, we find a progression based on a shifting between loops which are all active simultaneously, which are constantly changing their character in response to new events, and which can communicate with each other in a kind of continuously diffracting spatial montage. There are no longer calculations with definite beginnings and ends. Rather there is a plane of endless calculation and recalculation, across which intensities continually build and fade.⁵⁵

The amount of calculation going on in the world has increased significantly since the application of computing power to mundane activities.⁵⁶ Think, for example, of the increasingly common use of the GPS, a nexus of continual calculation taking place in response to one’s movement through the world. All places are now, at least theoretically, not only locatable in an absolute space but transposable into a geography that is relative to an ever-moving self. The interesting effect of this increase in calculation is therefore not increased rigidity but increased flux, what is sometimes called “flow architectures.” Thrift says that “A carefully constructed absolute space begets relative space.”⁵⁷ He calls this “qualculation” because this numerical flow has produced new qualities of existence, “new kinds of perceptual labor and expertise which . . . are producing a shift in understanding the world similar to that which attaches to the move from oral to literate cultures.”⁵⁸ Space is open-ended and relative, emerging as improvised through various encounters;

⁵² Ibid., 92. ⁵³ Ibid., 93. ⁵⁴ Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, 115. ⁵⁵ Thrift, Non-Representational Theory, 97. ⁵⁶ Ibid., 93. ⁵⁷ Ibid., 98. ⁵⁸ Ibid., 97.

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reality is perpetual becoming.⁵⁹ The effect of the GPS, for example, is that the work of navigation becomes automated and makes the need for routeplanning obsolete. One is thereby freed to move through the world in less linear and more improvised ways, according to a “nomadologic.”⁶⁰ The labor of route-planning is replaced by the labor of improvisation as places present themselves not as pre-existing locations but as opportunities for intervention in the flow.⁶¹ The GPS is, however, merely a recent example of this more general development. The automobile already began organizing space and mobility as a network of fluid connections.⁶² We can now move through space largely when and where we want to, without adhering to the rigid temporality of train schedules. As such, urban landscapes have “‘unbundled’ territorialities of home, work, business and leisure that historically were closely integrated . . . .”⁶³ Movement operates according to the rhythm of the road, between the speeds of 30 and 70 miles per hour, with stops and starts dictated by traffic laws. Indeed, slower rhythms—those of pedestrians, school children, postal workers, garbage collectors, farmers, animals—are interrupted and sometimes threatened by car traffic.⁶⁴ All of this has an effect on the comportment of the human body in space and the human experience of the world due to the infrastructure, the social institutions, and conventions of movement that make cars part of the fabric of society.⁶⁵ These devices all work together to form a network, an electronic paratext. Inventions such as portable music devices and smartphones, which likewise operate according to continual calculation, now make it possible to create private bubbles for moving through public space even without the physical bubble of the automobile. We inhabit space through privatization, increasingly able to and desiring to make the “public” spaces private.⁶⁶ Space has become more open and fluctuating because it is more egocentrically organized and we expect the kind of flux that enables us to move through the world when, where, and how our desires dictate. According to Thrift, this electronic paratext has the same feel as a natural environment—live forces blowing this way and that—independent of, though responsive to, any given person’s intervention. In the case of an electronic paratext, however, this environment regularly acts as a cognitive and bodily prosthesis.⁶⁷ Space is determined less according to an absolute grid as in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and is instead experienced as axial extensions of the body that orient one in relation to other bodies as one moves through the world.⁶⁸

⁵⁹ Ibid, 102. ⁶⁰ Ibid., 96. ⁶¹ Ibid., 98. ⁶² Mike Featherstone, Nigel Thrift, and John Urry, eds. Automobilities (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2005), 27. ⁶³ Ibid., 28, 31. ⁶⁴ Ibid., 29. ⁶⁵ Ibid., 74–5. ⁶⁶ Ibid., 255. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 98. ⁶⁸ Ibid., 105.

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While Thrift does not explicitly describe these pre-cognitive forces in terms of rhythm, they do bear resemblance to the kind of chaotic rhythm to which Keller appeals: ever-unfolding, improvised loops of resonance and intensity. This is because Thrift’s description of our current experience of spacetime mirrors the thought of Gilles Deleuze, to whom he explicitly refers when he says, for example, that his approach to the fusion of technological and organic is inspired by process or motion philosophy “which stress a recursive metaphysics of association,” and assumes a relational theory of reality and invention as an ultimate metaphysical principle.⁶⁹ Deleuze uses rhythm as a metaphysical category to describe just such a reality of perpetual flux and improvisation. Thrift’s research suggests that in the articulation of his metaphysic, Deleuze is in part describing or extrapolating from the paratexts which are emerging as he writes and in which he is embedded. Deleuze extrapolates an enduring metaphysical situation from the particular rhythms of late modern Western space-times. Therefore, when someone like Catherine Keller articulates an account of the Creator–creature relationship using Deleuze’s understanding rhythm, she is likewise describing how it is that the Creator may be understood to engage with the current rhythms of the paratext that frames our experience. In this sense, she may give us something quite helpful. If creation does include both nature and human culture, then the particular creaturely context in which humans currently encounter the divine is very much the way Keller describes it. Those who quickly dismiss Keller as heretical fail to deal sufficiently with this historical and cultural reality. Keller may not, despite her own understanding of what she is doing, be describing a protology or an enduring situation so much as the nature of creation as it appears to us in the West now, and how we therefore currently experience the relationship between Creator and creation. The same is true of Augustine. His reliance on the cultural constructions of his own milieu is implied in De Musica itself in that Augustine explicitly uses the prevailing cultural approach to prosody as division by number to propose an ontology and a vision of providence. More broadly, however, historians have begun to include constructed and geographical space in their study of late antiquity⁷⁰ and we can glean even more from these studies about Augustine’s experience of space-time and how this may influence his conception of rhythm. Between the third and fourth centuries, Christianity gradually began to develop a notion of sacred space, including both local cults of the saints and pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Previously, early Christianity had not been ⁶⁹ Ibid., 169. ⁷⁰ Juliette Day, Raimo Hakola, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ulla Tervahauta, “Introduction” in Spaces in Late Antiquity: Cultural, Theological, and Archeological Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2016), 1.

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interested in creating a sacred geography because it was understood that God transcends place.⁷¹ Around the time of Constantine, a shift took place that “transformed the sacred geography of Christianity from one of relative uniformity, where God could be worshipped anywhere . . . to one incorporating the notion of privileged holy space and of local sanctity.”⁷² Scholars do not know why exactly the shift occurred. There were likely many contributing factors: Constantine’s enthusiasm, Jewish or pagan influences, the cult of the saints, and an increased formalization of the doctrine of the incarnation with a resulting focus on matter as a possible medium of divine presence. Regardless of when pilgrimage and the construction of Christian sacred space began or the reasons for its development, it was an ongoing concern by the time that Augustine was writing.⁷³ In fact, it was a concern in the sense that many Christian leaders opposed pilgrimages to Jerusalem sometimes for political reasons, but also sometimes due to a theological objection to the privileging of specific places. Interestingly, however, all of these thinkers promoted sacred space in terms of spaces tied to the local cults of the saints. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, repudiates pilgrimage to Jerusalem but “substitutes a new network of holy places associated with the cult of the martyrs in Cappadocia, of which he and Basil were leading supporters.”⁷⁴ Augustine, likewise, while saying nothing about pilgrimage to Jerusalem, “encouraged the cult of the martyrs in his bishopric in North Africa, as is reflected in the many sermons he delivered on feast days during his forty years of service in the Church.”⁷⁵ The difference is that Augustine dissociates the cult of the martyrs from geography and associates it with piety instead.⁷⁶ This is not to say that Augustine had no concern for geography at all but he seems to spiritualize it, suggested, for example, by the fact that he seems to interpret all scriptural geographical references in spiritual terms.⁷⁷ Perhaps due to this tension between Jerusalem and local devotional sites, many of the pious practices and spiritual advantages associated with pilgrimage to Jerusalem were exported to local sites over time, thereby exporting a unified sense of time and place across the Christian world as ⁷¹ For example, geographical orientation towards the east was important during prayer precisely in order to relativize all other forms of holy space by prioritizing a transcendent, sacred center (Glen Warren Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Graber, eds., Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 650). ⁷² Glen Warren Bowersock, Peter Brown, and Oleg Graber, eds. Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 42. See also Jan Willem Drijvers, “Transformation of a City: The Christianization of Jerusalem in the Fourth Century,” in Richard Alston, Onno M. van Nijf, Christina G Williamson, Cults, Creeds, and Identities in the Greek Cities after the Classical Age (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 309–29. ⁷³ For a source covering this debate see Brouria Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred: The Debate on Christian Pilgrimage in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005). ⁷⁴ Ibid., 56. ⁷⁵ Ibid., 110. ⁷⁶ Ibid., 126. ⁷⁷ Ibid., 118–19.

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well. Bitton-Ashkelony concludes her book on the tensions surrounding pilgrimage by arguing that the dilemma surrounding the Holy Land led to the rise of a new concept, that of a Second Jerusalem, referring to neither the earthly nor the heavenly Jerusalem but the multiplicity of holy places, “bringing in its wake ‘the duplication of sacred places—the medieval translation of Jerusalem to various European cities’—and giving birth to the fully developed notion of multiple Jerusalems.”⁷⁸ In associating all the local sacred sites with Jerusalem, the early Church managed to unite the multiplicity of sites to one Christ.⁷⁹ In order for this more extensive network of Holy places to emerge, connections had to be made between these sites and the incarnation of Christ, whether through connections to the Holy Land or to saints belonging to the body of Christ (such as in monastic and ascetic holy men who were considered conduits between heaven and earth⁸⁰). The intersection of pilgrimage and the liturgical year was particularly helpful in this regard. In the Holy Land, pilgrims connected with biblical events by moving between sites during the liturgical year. Then, as relics were transported throughout Christendom, sacred geography and the liturgical calendar were transported as well, contributing to a more uniform liturgy and the possibility of local pilgrimages.⁸¹ In Rome, for example, as sites of specifically Christian worship became more numerous, a liturgical topology known as a “stational” developed, in which certain festivals were celebrated at certain places.⁸² In some instances, connections to the Holy Land were duplicated quite formally through the transport of architectural forms. Alan Doig says that Once authenticated and framed architecturally and liturgically, the place, as a point of connection with the worship of heaven, could paradoxically become highly portable, in images on ivories, through repeated references to their particular architectural form, or if a physical connection could be made by means of ⁷⁸ Ibid., 205–6. ⁷⁹ With respect to communion, for example, once consecrated, bread was sent to surrounding parish churches in order to unify the celebration of mass across space (Allan Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle Ages (Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2008), 92). Moreover, the ordering of one’s self in relation to the divine through asceticism was co-extensive with attempts to organize space and time in relation to the divine. Asceticism was a matter of renouncing the old order and initiating a new one, and attempt to enact a realized eschatology of continual liturgy within the body as a microcosm of a cosmological battle against Satan, just as the church was attempting to bring all of space and time under the Lordship of Christ, under the logic of the incarnation. Late Antique Christian literature advocated Christian life as necessarily ascetic. Monasteries became the center of civic life and theologians like Ambrose and John Chrysostom advocated that the city should become a monastery (Bowersock, Brown, and Graber, Late Antiquity, 318). In short, the divine economy was expected to order everything. ⁸⁰ Bitton-Ashkelony, Encountering the Sacred, 189. ⁸¹ Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle Ages, 37. ⁸² Bertrand Lancon, Rome in Late Antiquity: Everyday Life and Urban Change 312–609 (New York: Routledge, 2009), 138.

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a relic . . . . By these means, sacred geography would continue to spread across the Holy Roman Empire through architectural references . . .⁸³

We know that the connection to the divine was conceptualized at least in part through verticality in that vertical architectural forms connect the buried dead with depictions of heaven on the ceilings directly above them. Once a vertical connection was established, this connection was then transported laterally as a means of unifying space through this vertical connection. Sacred geography was transported laterally through the dissemination of these same, vertical architectural forms.⁸⁴ As mentioned above, Augustine himself was suspicious of the idea of holy geography, instead arguing that God’s presence is everywhere, particularly in his people. Nevertheless, the way in which he thought about God’s presence to space-time follows the ways in which his culture attempted to bring space into contact with the divine. If a new organization of time and space was emerging during Augustine’s life through this process of bringing specific places into participation with a heavenly reality through architectural forms and relics, it makes sense that Augustine would likewise conceptualize space-time in terms of lateral harmony achieved through heavenly participation. Just as the church was endeavoring to unify space-time through a common liturgy and a sacred topography, Augustine is likewise concerned in De Musica with the unification of reality. Rhythm, for him, is that which makes organization and communication between bodies possible. It is also likely no coincidence that in the fourth and fifth centuries on the heels of the unification of sacred space, the sacred liturgy also began to assume its final form. Dom Gregory Dix, in his magisterial book, The Shape of the Liturgy, says that “As the church came to feel at home in the world so she became reconciled to time,” such that eucharist shifted from being an eschatological transport of the faithful beyond a hostile world to being a representation of the historical process of redemption.⁸⁵ Among other developments, the rise of monasticism with its dedication of the whole of life to God had an effect on the worship of the church as a whole. The daily office “enabled the church to set about sanctifying human life within time by consecrating the chief natural points of every day” while the liturgical cycle sanctified the seasons of the year “and set out to imprint on the rhythm of nature and its reflection in social life the stamp of distinctly Christian ideas.”⁸⁶

⁸³ Doig, Liturgy and Architecture from the Early Church to the Middle Ages, 52. ⁸⁴ Ibid., 39, 42. Church architectural styles first started in the Holy Land, and were then exported to imperial capitals and eventually to the rest of the empire (Bowersock, Brown, and Graber, Late Antiquity, 376). ⁸⁵ Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, second edition (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2005; 2016), 305. ⁸⁶ Ibid., 333.

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Just as Augustine says the soul must impress the heavenly numbers onto the body, the church was in the process of impressing the sacred divine economy represented by the liturgical year onto time and geography.⁸⁷ This gives new meaning to Augustine’s claim that “to each thing in its proper kind and in its proportion with the universe is given a sense of places and times, so that . . . its body is so much in proportion to the body of the universe whose part it is . . . ”⁸⁸ It is no wonder that, given the large-scale attempt to harmonize sacred space through liturgy, relics, and architecture, space-time itself would appear to Augustine in terms of that which makes harmonization possible. This was, after all, the use to which it was being put at the time. De Musica utilizes the concepts of space and time that were emerging in Augustine’s context in order to put forward a vision of the cosmos. This draws attention to an important difference between Augustine and Keller, namely what it is they are attempting to do with their doctrine, what their theological and cultural concerns are. Those concerns are shaped by the church’s relationship to its particular culture, mediated through organizations of space-time, rhythms of movement that are encouraged and discouraged. Paul Blowers points out that in the case of Irenaeus, a century or so prior to Augustine, his concern was to isolate the dramatic plot of scripture in order to counter the confusion and error generated by heresies and the lack of a closed canon. He was at the beginning of trying to work out “the total redefinition of history and reality demanded by the Creator’s having become flesh.”⁸⁹ This reflects the Christian concern that developed during Augustine’s lifetime for the reorganization of time, space, and the rhythms of the body in order to bring them into participation in the cosmological economy that was being theologically developed and defended. Augustine finds himself near the beginning of the establishment of the rhythms of the church’s life together in the wake of the momentous events of incarnation, resurrection, ascension, etc. He participates in attempts to extend these events forward in time and outward in space in order to bring reality into this divine economy in accordance with the incarnation. Rhythm functions in service to this end in his milieu and is thus meaningful to him in relation to this function. Keller’s concerns are different because her cultural and theological situation is different. In contrast to Irenaeus and Augustine, many modern and contemporary theologians feel the closure of the canon more acutely than its open possibilities because open possibility no longer harbors the same sort of threat to Christianity. Theologians are often less focused on establishing and

⁸⁷ “The Peace of Constantine brought with it an increasing sense—undoubtedly still tentative for many ascetics—that the church was now more at home in the world and that its vocation was not just to transcend the cosmos but to participate in its transformation” (Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 322). ⁸⁸ Augustine, De Musica, 6.7.19. ⁸⁹ Blowers, Drama of the Divine Economy, 377.

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protecting a Christian identity and tradition, since this has long been established; they are thus more interested in Christianity’s new possibilities and its capacity for self-interruption. We now fear the totalitarianisms in which the church has too often been complicit rather than the chaos of heresy, which was a very real threat to burgeoning Christianity. Our contemporary paratext is similarly concerned to open possibilities through the accommodation of time and space to individual movement. We tend to resist rigid organizations of space-time that determine individual movement and prefer improvised connections. These contemporary concerns can make the early Christian attempts to realize the economy of salvation spatiotemporally appear austere, hegemonic, or even totalitarian if attempted today because they are dissonant with our current organizations of space-time. It ought, therefore, to be unsurprising that some current Christian theological work, such as that of Keller, involves attempts to inhabit a kind of openness and flux rather than attempts to bring a pre-established pattern to bear on space-time. This is the context, the creation, in which we currently encounter the divine. Thinkers in each camp, the traditional and the contemporary, often malign the tendencies of the other. Traditionalists argue that the fear of order involves a problematic conception of libertarian freedom that enables the creature to be the harbinger of its own self-destruction in its attempts to live without constraint, to continually please itself and not submit to any order. Those on the other side malign the traditional approach to Christianity as totalitarian, a hegemonic attempt to impose a certain concept of order on reality as universal, which in fact serves the interests of only a particular group of people. Naturally, both of these concerns ought to be heeded. However, another dimension of this difference between the traditional and the contemporary that seems to get lost in attempts to argue for one position or another is the fact we cannot simply shift the concerns of one space-time to align with those of another. If doctrine does indeed emerge from one’s particular experience of space-time, then there are limits to the degree to which one can inhabit other visions in a meaningful way. Historical theologians like Paul Blowers will often chide critics for not taking church fathers on their own terms, instead imposing impossible modern expectations on them. The inverse, however, is also true. In Late Antiquity, the synchronic pattern of the divine economy still required identification. The canon was only recently closed and creeds were still under construction. These processes included attempts to realize in space and time the pattern of the economy of salvation that was being discovered. It is impossible for us to go back to a place of such newness. We can no more return in lock-step to the concerns of those who had not yet or had only recently closed the canon and were attempting to secure a very new Christianity from heresy and paganism than expect the church fathers to take on the concerns of those who are attempting to respond to abuses of structure. We have a whole historically-lived dramatic pattern

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intervening between ourselves and the events of the incarnation. We are at a different point in the unfolding rhythm of the incarnational poem. In reading a poem, it makes sense at the outset to establish the pattern. It makes sense later in the poem to challenge the pattern, to complicate the rhythm. Theologians on the traditionalist or classical side often argue that classical approaches to creation, if understood correctly, do not suggest a deterministic blueprint according to which creation unfolds without freedom, but argue that the overall pattern of creation always incorporates and presupposes change, freedom, and the self-actualization of creatures. However, these theologians tend to argue for and describe this creaturely development in terms of individual creatures that unfold over time in freedom and are then held together within a single, harmonious pattern.⁹⁰ In other words, the idea of development over time is not typically, explicitly applied to the pattern itself. While a continual self-attunement is assumed due to bottom-up changes, this suggests the maintenance of a harmony in equilibrium rather than development over time.⁹¹ To think about creation diachronically, however, requires attending to, not only the change involved in the self-actualization of particular creatures, but changes in the pattern itself. In other words, if creation includes not only nature but also culture, and not only space but also time, then history itself is a dimension of creation, of ontology. Viewed diachronically, changes in the doctrine of creation as exemplified by Augustine and Keller are not free-floating theories but are representations of changes in the overall pattern, in the rhythms of creation itself.

A Rhythmic Doctrine of Creation The fact that both of these thinkers, so different in their approaches and centuries apart, both draw on the category of rhythm points to its enduring significance for mediating reality to us. The malleability of its nature and function in these accounts is a result of its malleability in human culture. While there may be consistent features associated with it—the enduring concern for the harmonization of tensions, for example—rhythm is nonetheless shaped into different patterns that frame the human experience of creation. While Augustine’s and Keller’s accounts appear diametrically opposed, they are both accounts that draw from rhythms in which their thought is embedded and within which they encounter God’s providence.

⁹⁰ See ibid., 155–9; David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2003), 409–10; Rowan D. Williams, “Good for Nothing?” Augustinian Studies 25: 9–24 (1994), 14. ⁹¹ Ibid., 14–15, 19.

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Both Augustine and Keller, however, also seem to share the assumption that they are giving an account of the whole of reality as if from the outside, apparently unaware that the ways in which their own human cultures have formed the rhythms of space-time are the cradle of their understanding of creation’s form. Keller’s and Augustine’s attempts to describe an eternal metaphysical situation are problematic because there simply is no such thing for a creature speaking diachronically, and the creature is always, ultimately, speaking diachronically. Therefore, rather than total and opposed ontologies, if both accounts are in fact formed by particular, creaturely organizations of space-time, then both may be true but limited. Both refer to something true about the nature of creation but they do not represent the fullness of its manifestations. These accounts are not views of the whole, as they suggest themselves to be, but descriptions of the particular rhythms through which a society encounters the Creator, that form the way a society encounters the Creator in particular ways. Rhythm, by making a connection between a vision of reality and the cultural space-times from which it emerges, shows that accounts of creation are not abstract, synchronic doctrines but are always borne out of the particular rhythmic form of the relation between God and creation at a particular time and place. I am not, however, suggesting that these human constructions are independent realities that cannot be evaluated.⁹² While culture exerts influence on other dimensions of creation, those other dimensions may push back. The metaphor of the poem is again helpful here, just as it was when explaining the analogia entis. The human formation of space-time is much like a reader’s rhythmic response that he or she forms in order to move forward through a poem. Poetry includes rhythmic pressure points, devices such as enjambments and caesurae, which introduce gaps into unexpected places, encouraging certain rhythmic responses on the part of the reader. Such responses are opposing pressures that allow the rhythm to maintain its coherence. This push-and-pull between textual events and the reader’s experience establishes

⁹² T. F. Torrance, for example, makes this criticism of Newton who “operated with an idealized geometry detached from experience and [formed it] into an independent conceptual system and then used this as a homogeneous framework in which all physical knowledge was pursued and organized” (Thomas F. Torrance, Reality and Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation (Dwners Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1999), 11). Torrance’s assessment is that there is an independent reality, to which the rigidity of Newton’s system did not submit and, as such, it ultimately failed. Newton’s failure lies in the fact that he did not subject his system to a reality that transcends the system. This assessment is true but it overlooks another consideration, namely, that while Newton’s epistemic system ultimately failed because of its unresponsiveness to reality, it nevertheless shaped society’s experience of reality in the meantime, including society’s conceptualization of the relationship between Creator and creation, so that spacetime came to appear increasingly like Newton’s system. Most now consider this Newtonian influence on culture and doctrine unfortunate, rather like a bad performance of a section of the poem to which the rest of the performance must now nevertheless respond.

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the rhythm of the particular poem. One cannot extract the rhythm of the poem itself from the ways in which the rhythm is formed through its performance. In the same way, the push-and-pull between the natural pressures of space-time and the human response in the construction of culture generate the particular rhythm through which reality appears. We move through creation by construction in the way that one moves through a poem through actively constructing responses to what the author has given on the page. While the author creates the rhythm of the poem in writing it, there are also genuine creative developments that the reader makes in performance, and the poem will then push back in ways that are different than if the reader had performed it otherwise. However, if the reader does not respond to the pressures of the poem, then the rhythm becomes incoherent and comprehension is impeded. The same could be said for human construction in response to nature. There are constraints, but we do not necessarily know at the outset which features of reality, if any, are eternally inviolable. My point is therefore not that human creatures are demi-gods whose constructions shape an absolutely malleable nature. But nor is there an enduring natural pattern that can be abstracted from culture, identified, and set up as atemporal and universal. Rather, the construction of rhythms is the mode in which we move through space-time as the particular sort of creatures we are, and space-time itself cannot be abstracted from those constructions. Rhythm appears as such a variable and unsteady category within doctrines of creation precisely because the conversation between Creator and creature changes across time through the changes of these rhythms. The accounts of rhythm with which I engaged in the first part of this book, therefore, turn out not to be merely attempted reflections of reality, but, if read diachronically and, in some cases, against the grain of the ways that they have been put forward, such accounts are extensions of the particular rhythms from which they are articulated. The variability of the category is not inconsequential but points to its particular contribution to doctrine. Rhythm locates doctrines within their spatio-temporal contexts, namely as articulations by rhythmic creatures. This suggests a different way of thinking about ontology on the basis of the rhythmic form of creation. Because creation is rhythmic, ontology does not give us a single, stable, overview of the relationship between God and creation in general, but a snapshot of a particular moment of that relationship. The form of reality is not simply a given all at once but is a changeable form, molded through human cooperation. The form itself, rather than only the particulars, unfolds in time through our own participation in the construction of that form. Although it is a form that is given by God at the outset, it is given as malleable, not necessarily in an absolute sense, but in a responsive sense. If rhythm is an ontological reality, then its diachronic dimension is likewise an ontological reality, a dimension of creation itself. The rhythm of the pattern unfolds over time and, indeed, unfolds differently in different times and places.

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If the rhythms of creation, this matrix of nature and construction, are “the real winners of ontological wars,” then making such rhythms an object of explicit consideration reveals something about what doctrines of creation really do: they reveal a culturally-given relational index between creation and Creator. As in conversation, rhythm points to the shared context of the participants; it signals their shared endeavor and where they are in the process. As the relational contextualization of doctrinal information, the rhythms implied in those doctrines indicate the interactional meaning between God and creature just as they do in conversation. In unearthing rhythm, we unearth the pattern of the shared space of the conversation at this particular time and place, which is how the connection between Creator and creation is being achieved at a particular time and place. Rhythm is the incarnational index of doctrines of creation. Such an approach is therefore consistent with the foundational assumption of Christian theology, namely, that because God reveals God’s self in Jesus Christ, the Creator interacts with creation incarnationally, that is, in particular here-and-nows rather than primarily through the mediation of an atemporal pattern. Particular here-and-nows are different from one another, so to articulate doctrine in accordance with the incarnation is to account for such differences. This, of course, does not mean that general pattern is absent, but it unfolds only as it is generated by these intersections. Doctrines of creation are not enduring patterns applied to particular here-and-nows so much as insights about the pattern that emerge as we travel through its unfolding. The fact that rhythm is a significant category of creation is an insight given by Genesis 1 but how precisely that rhythm appears and functions is different at different times and places. This has two implications for theology. On the one hand, if positions on the nature of the Creator–creation relationship are less abstract arguments and more claims made from out of particular points within a poem, then our best shot at understanding the pattern synchronically is to understand and appreciate these various positions, not as abstract alternatives from which we choose, but as indications of particular rhythms that may, in the end, harmonize into an eschatological rhythm that we currently cannot see. To see a pattern from the inside is not to see the whole as established so much as to discern the development of where we have come from, not assuming we have arrived at the end, but that the pattern that we discern now likewise remains provisional. On the other hand, if the accounts of rhythm invoked in doctrine are not merely conceptual but refer to the physical organizations of space-time through which creation is mediated to the creature and then extended through doctrinal discourse, then conceptualizing the Creator–creature relationship well is not only a matter of abstract doctrine but a matter of the rhythms in which the community that forms doctrine is embedded. Human cultural constructions are as much a determinant of theology as concerted attempts

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to sit down and think about the Creator–creature relationship. The rhythms in which doctrine is formed must, therefore, be interrogated as much as doctrines themselves since it is these rhythms that form the contexts that enable one to make certain observations and not others, that make certain visions, rather than others, compelling. How to affirm both of these things together: that the variety of doctrines of creation tell us something important about the ways in which we encounter God out of our created context and that those contexts should be subject to theological and ecclesial evaluation is arguably one of the primary challenges of theological discourse. It is this challenge that calls for a final chapter on rhythm. Any attempt to make evaluations of such spatio-temporal organizations includes yet another dimension, namely, how we understand the rhythm of the church itself in the midst of creation’s nature-culture. If doctrine is not merely reflection but is grounded in the rhythms of our construction of space-time, then we must attend to those constructions that influence doctrine. In Christianity, the identification and implementation of rhythms that effectively encourage the relationship between creature and divine at different times and places is a role that belongs to the church. Attempts to be more specific about how Christians evaluate rhythmic performances of creation and how they perform some rhythms and interrupt others requires understanding the church’s relationship to the rhythms of nature-culture.

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7 Rhythms of Salvation Which rhythms are most conducive to the relationship of intimacy-in-alterity between God and creation? Which rhythms mediate this relationship well or poorly? From the perspective of Christian traditions, these questions are, indirectly perhaps, questions about what it looks like for the rhythms of creation to participate in salvation, about how creation’s rhythms are configured through the process of salvation. Therefore, if doctrines of creation are, in part, descriptions of the cultural-natural confluence of rhythms mediating the God–creature relationship at particular times and places, then doctrines of salvation are different prescriptions for how those rhythms ought to be formed. These soteriological doctrines that concern how the rhythms of creation ought to be formed emerge from the rhythms of ecclesial contexts. Just as understanding doctrines of creation requires taking seriously the textures of space-time out of which those accounts emerge, understanding doctrines of salvation requires taking seriously the ways in which the church, as the spatio-temporal manifestation of redemption, is involved in organizing space-time. Since God is revealed in the incarnation, the revelation to which the church responds is not merely a verbal revelation. It is also material, as acknowledged in the celebration of the eucharist, the body of Christ. But materiality, embodied-ness, is also more than materiality, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us. It is rhythm, which is to say world-connectedness. Therefore, just as thinking about the doctrine of creation from the perspective of rhythm required a synchronic perspective that was broad enough to consider creation in terms of its connections with the incarnation, salvation is likewise not a doctrine understood through abstracting it from the broader rhythms of creation. As a possibility associated paradigmatically with the incarnation in Christian traditions, salvation is approached through its world-connectedness, which means connections performed through rhythm. Just as the church proclaims a verbal revelation and encounters the materiality of revelation, so too does it perform a rhythmic revelation.

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THE S YNCHRONIC: HARMONY AND INTERRUPTION Formally speaking, salvation is a constellation of events, operations, patterns, or movements that is applied to or occurs in the context of creation. It is therefore impossible to talk about salvation independently of creation. The doctrine of creation, viewed synchronically, can be thought of in terms of form, as a doctrine that indicates a fundamental rhythmic form of reality through which creation relates to itself and encounters the divine. The doctrine of salvation is likewise, viewed synchronically, a matter of form, in this case, a matter of the formation of the rhythms of creation. A constellation of events—incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, eschaton—somehow reach forward in time, in and through the patterns of creation. It is precisely this “somehow” that is the nexus of the conversation surrounding doctrines of salvation. What effect, precisely, does this constellation have on reality? Primarily, conversations about this relationship between salvation and creation surround the degree to which these events function as an operation that brings harmony and the degree to which they interrupt reality. Since rhythm is a form that traffics in precisely this relationship between harmony and connection, on the one hand, and interruption, on the other, it provides the most nuanced and helpful form for understanding how these seemingly opposed movements work together in the events and processes of salvation. We find such an example of the tension between form and interruption in the doctrine of salvation in the work of Przywara. In the movement of transcending immanence, the creature moves beyond itself to an end that is not proportionate to itself. Such transcending is the result of the presence of the divine transcendence indwelling the intra-creaturely in a way that both sustains its movements but also disrupts any attempts at self-enclosure due to its ever-greater-dissimilarity. The divine gift given to such openness is the “summons to service.” This description is a relatively general expression, but Przywara describes salvation in more particularly Christological terms in an essay called “Philosophies of Essence and Existence,” namely in terms of original-sin-and-redemption. Original sin is the creature’s attempt to locate its identity within itself, to absolutize itself.¹ Such attempts betray the nature of the creature and attempt to usurp the nature of the divine. Redemption from original sin is, therefore, redemption from the attempt to be like God and is for the creature’s own proper movements. Thus, knowing what the creature’s own proper movements are will indicate how the rhythms of the creature and its

¹ Erich Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. John Betz and David Bentley Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm B. Eerdmans, 2014), 339–40E/ 237–38G.

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environment ought to be formed. So, the natural next question is “what are the creature’s own proper movements?” Przywara looks to Christ in whom the confrontation between original sin and redemption becomes manifest, rather than to creation itself, to identify these proper movements. According to Przywara, Christ accomplishes redemption through exchange.² Christ preserves what is distinctive to the creaturely by assuming it in the incarnation, thereby enabling creatures to encounter the divine.³ In appealing to the idea of exchange, Przywara is relying on the Christ hymn in Philippians 2 in which Christ, “who is the love of God, which for the sake of redemption empties itself out into nothingness and for nothing.”⁴ Precisely in not grasping his own equality with God, Christ confronts original sin, the attempt to be like God, and takes on the movements proper to the intra-creaturely instead. Przywara, therefore, describes the incarnation as “the patience of resting in the ordinary.” Redemption occurs precisely through Christ’s patience, resting in human ordinariness, as “a man like any other.”⁵ In doing so, Christ reveals that the creature’s own proper movements are those in and through which it receives salvation. When the creature rests in the ordinary rather than attempting to be like God, creaturely limitation itself comes to serve the redemptive purposes of God. The rhythms of redemption are therefore not something different than the rhythms of the intra-creaturely properly understood. Based on the movements of Christ, a provisional response to our question “what are the creature’s own proper movements?” is therefore that they are those that patiently rest in the ordinary. However, the situation is more complicated than this. As the Philippians 2 hymn points out, the exchange in which this form of the creature’s own proper movements is revealed leads to Christ’s obedience to death, the point of highest contrast between original sin, which accepts no creaturely limitation, and the exchange of redemption in which the one who is unlimited not only takes on the “‘form of a man like any other,’ but the ‘form of a slave,’ as the ‘worm’ that was crushed in the ‘scandal;’ of ‘death on a cross’ . . . ,” the most extreme limitation of “deformed form.”⁶ The proper movements of the creature therefore here appear to be revealed not merely as a patient participation in the ordinary, as openness to God, but extreme limitation and deformed form. Przywara confirms this when he says that he who alone is unlimited in form and being (essence and existence) appears in the patience of the longsuffering of the most extreme limitation . . . so that in the continuation of this form and this being within a deformed church, which as the

² Ibid., 337–39E/235–37G. ³ Ibid., 345E/243G. ⁴ Ibid., 337E/235G. The translators note that this last word (Umsonst in German) suggests both gratuity and futility, in that Christ both gives himself freely and is rejected. ⁵ Ibid., 346E/245G. ⁶ Ibid., 346–7E/245G.

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body of his members is “dying” ever anew, the patience of creaturely limitation might render service to this redemptive patience of God.⁷

This is no ordinary form. The proper movements of the creature are not merely a resting in the ordinary. To continue the form of Christ is to be deformed, “dying” ever anew. One might rightly object here that, far from this representing the creature’s own proper movements, such a close identification between the suffering of Christ and the identity of the church suggests a life of harm to the creature. If this is the ordinary, then there is no true redemption because no hope beyond participation in suffering is offered. God is encountered from the here-and-nows of Christ’s life: to the “now and here” of a real historical church under the sign of ever new “nihiliations,” until the complete “nothingness” of the destruction [Untergangs] of “the old heaven and the old earth” reveals the unveiled eternity of the “Ichts,” certainly as something “new,” but whose newness is that of a “heaven and earth” that is the “tabernacling of God with men.”⁸

Such nihilations seem more apocalyptic than ordinary. The question of salvation from the perspective of rhythm is, therefore, the question of the relationship between ordinary rhythms and their interruption. This tension between harmonious redemption and apocalyptic overcoming is a common opposition around which discussions about the doctrine of salvation take place. On the one hand, there are those who argue that salvation makes creation the best version of itself (Przywara’s first emphasis) and, on the other hand, there are those who articulate salvation more apocalyptically: creation is in some way overcome, it participates in Christ’s death. Both approaches on their own exhibit problems, which is no doubt why Przywara presents both dimensions. The question is how we understand these two movements playing out in the course of life, in the experience of salvation. Approaching this relationship in terms of rhythm clarifies the tension in the intra-creaturely context of space-time.

Jenson and Congdon Viewed rhythmically, this tension between the patience of resting in the ordinary and the ever new nihilations of deforming limitation is a question about the role and nature of interruption in salvation. To what degree and in what way is salvation the preservation and harmonization of the rhythms of creation, a patterning of some sort, and to what degree and in what way is salvation an apocalyptic interruption that deforms creation as we know it in ⁷ Ibid., 347E/246G.

⁸ Ibid., 592E/519G.

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confrontation with its corruption? There are contemporary examples of both approaches. Narrative theology, particularly that of Robert Jenson, is a good example of those who downplay elements of interruption and instead emphasize harmony and continuity. Jenson opposes Bultmann and others who view eternity as an interruptive, timeless moment. In Bultmann’s case, eternity takes the form of a timeless moment of decision, located on a timeline but not coextensive with it. It always occurs as an interruption because, as eschatological, it cannot be made co-extensive with the time in which it occurs. Jenson, in contrast, refuses an opposition between time and eternity, suggesting that eternity should be thought of as interacting with created reality in narrative terms, rather than as a timeless moment, as “something that cannot essentially be narrated.”⁹ God’s eternity is more like a kind of temporality without limitation that makes space for created time. Coherence and continuity are, according to Jenson, inherently good, although our attempt to locate coherence in ourselves threatens disintegration.¹⁰ God (and nothing intra-creaturely) is the guarantor of the creature’s continuity because “to be a creature is to belong to the counterpoint and harmony of the triune music.”¹¹ Such harmony is necessary for Jenson because “Human life is possible only if past and future are somehow bracketed by reality that reconciles them in present meaning, so that sequences of events have plot and can be narrated.”¹² God meets this need in that “God himself is identified by and with the particular plotted sequence of events that make the narrative of Israel and her Christ.”¹³ As such, narrative is not only an intra-creaturely form but a divine form as well: “The life of God is constituted in a structure of relations, whose referents are narrative. This narrative structure is enabled by a difference between whence and whither, which one cannot finally refrain from calling ‘past’ and ‘future,’ and which is identical with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit.”¹⁴ In other words, Jenson articulates the nature of time—both eternal and created—according to the narrative form, which unfolds in harmony and continuity. Interruptive events are either threats to divine coherence as with Bultmann’s interruptive moments of eternity, or, in the case of miracles, for example, are described primarily in terms of their harmony with a larger unseen structure.¹⁵ In this, Jenson’s perspective appears to be particularly synchronic. It resonates strongly with the way that Cureton approaches the

⁹ Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology vol. 1: The Triune God (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999), 169. ¹⁰ Ibid., 222. ¹¹ Robert W. Jenson, Systematic Theology vol. 2: The Works of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 39. ¹² Ibid., 55. ¹³ Ibid., 60. ¹⁴ Ibid., 35. ¹⁵ Ibid., 44–5.

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rhythm of poetry: rhythmic disruptions at lower levels are always harmonized at higher ones. There are dimensions of Jenson’s theology that are more diachronic. Jenson’s transcendence, for example, is a diachronically-envisioned transcendence; it is always articulated with reference to the creature’s temporality.¹⁶ The resurrection is not an obvious consequence of Christ’s deity but is an amazing and surprising triumph,¹⁷ suggesting that Jenson is not interested in simply making claims about God as such, independent of the diachronic, historical story from within which creatures encounter God. The resurrection is a surprise precisely because it was a truly temporal event. Nevertheless, Jenson unhelpfully opposes temporal narrative and punctual moment. First, it is not at all clear, either from the nature of the human experience of time or from the form of scripture itself, that narrative is the form that ought to be privileged and therefore that harmony and continuity likewise ought to be privileged in our attempts to understand the nature of salvation. One might argue that our experience of time is not harmonious at all, but made up of fits and starts, flows and gaps. One could likewise argue that, in Scripture, the poetic and prophetic forms are just as prominent as the narrative form and it is therefore not clear why the narrative form ought to be privileged. As such, it is also not a given that the form of the eschaton is coextensive with time as temporally-extended narrative. Second, accepting the interruptive moment does not necessarily compromise all continuity; Jenson unhelpfully presents these two phenomena as mutually exclusive. The “moment” need not indicate a timeless eschaton but may refer to an alternative time or dimension of time, as with Agamben, that cannot be simply accommodated to created time and therefore appears as an interruption within its fabric. This does not mean that it is opposed to historicity and narration, but may be in some other productive relationship to it. The poetic form allows for this possibility since its harmony is not predicated on a continuous narrative. The advantage of the poetic form is precisely its capacity to include counter-voice and disruption without compromising harmony. Thus, while Jenson’s understanding of salvation certainly encourages the patience of resting in the ordinary, that is, in time itself, there is no indication here of deformed form. Alternatively, some emphasize interruption as part of a salvific apocalypticism. One of the most recent versions of this is David W. Congdon’s book The God who Saves. Put forward as a defense of universalism (on which I will not comment here), the book is also interesting for the depiction of salvation on which it relies. According to Congdon, “salvation in the New Testament is fundamentally a matter of eschatology, wherein one is saved through the

¹⁶ Jenson, Systematic Theology vol. 1, 219.

¹⁷ Ibid., 48.

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inbreaking apocalypse of God.”¹⁸ The kingdom of God breaks with all expectations; it does not set up a power structure among others but “brings the world as such to an end.”¹⁹ At points, Congdon sounds like Przywara, for example, when he says that “To encounter the parousia in all its disorienting and scandalous strangeness—that is to say, to be placed outside ourselves—is to participate in the salvific event of Christ, with whom one is crucified in the existential apocalypse of faith” and is therefore a salvation “from the illusion that we belong to ourselves, from the anxious attempt to secure ourselves, from the desire to possess our identity . . . ”²⁰ And again: “We are thrust out of ourselves and into the hands of God, only to find ourselves commissioned for a new existence within the world.”²¹ At other moments, however, Congdon’s total rejection of metaphysics leads him to articulate a soteriology that is almost entirely apocalyptic. The patience of resting in the ordinary is most definitely not part of his conception. Congdon is not willing to identify any cosmic, metaphysical, ontological, or creation-related element of soteriology, arguing instead that it is purely existential. This would be a helpful diachronic perspective except that Congdon does stray into talking in cosmic, metaphysical, or ontological modes precisely for the purpose of overcoming or rupturing cosmic reality.²² He is therefore not merely talking in terms of human experience but extrapolates to a cosmic, synchronic perspective on the overturning of all creation. This is particularly evident in Congdon’s chapter on creation, which he prefers to call “unnature.” If we read creation through salvation as Congdon understands it, then creation is simply crucified and nullified.²³ Salvation teaches us nothing about creation other than that it is overcome. There are two problems with this. First, it takes a rather Marcionite view of the Old Testament, particularly the creation narratives. The point of early Christian readings of creation through redemption was precisely to read creation, not to scrap it altogether. If Congdon is right, it is then not clear why we talk about new creation at all; one may as well merely talk about annihilation. Second, Congdon overlooks the possibility that such an eschatological interruption may, in fact, reveal to us something about the nature of creation itself, namely that we may find creation to be responsive to interruption, that such interruptions are in some way appropriate to creation. Indeed, if this were not the case, then it is not clear how we would even be able to designate apocalypse as good or as redemptive; it would be purely a violent threat. At times, Congdon does come close to this assertion: “The possibility of becoming truly human is more violent purgation than pleasant donation; it ¹⁸ David W. Congdon, The God Who Saves: A Dogmatic Sketch (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016), 64. ¹⁹ Ibid., 67. ²⁰ Ibid., 75–6. ²¹ Ibid., 89. ²² Ibid., 82, 187. ²³ Ibid., 203.

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manifests itself as existential crises rather than evolutionary progress.”²⁴ Yet this violence supposedly makes us truly human, which Congdon seems to presume is a good. How is he able to recognize it as such if everything he is, as a creature fully enmeshed in creation, is threatened? Congdon is here assuming the same opposition between interruption and continuity as Jenson does; he simply comes out on the other side. Contrary to Congdon, part of what it means to be a historical creature, to speak diachronically rather than synchronically, is that no moment, even if interruptive, is absolutely distinct from that which surrounds it. For Congdon, any relationship between such interruptive moments and a larger pattern besides rupture is missing such that there is no functional understanding of how the eschatological in-breaking is in relationship to the ordinary other than in terms of a violent overcoming.²⁵ This is existentially problematic since just as humans do not experience time in terms of a perfectly continuous narrative, they also do not experience time in terms of absolutely discreet moments but in terms of patterns, such that any existentially meaningful account of salvation must become meaningful for those patterns. While I agree that we must be very careful in articulating such patterns at the outset or in general, that we ought to do so primarily diachronically in other words, this does not mean that such patterns are non-existent or can be ignored altogether. To do so is to overcome the very historicity of the creature that Congdon claims to protect. The interruption must become meaningful for the next moment if it is to have redemptive significance for the movements of the creature. At moments, Congdon does seem to acknowledge the possibility that interruption might itself be appropriate to the nature of reality. He says, for example, that “the world is the creation of God insofar as it is the place where God interrupts us, where the future comes to meet us.”²⁶ From this perspective, it is not so much that the apocalypse interrupts some reality independent of us. Rather, it interrupts our attempts to think about creation as having a nature at all, by which he means the structures that we erect to protect ourselves. By confining interruption here to the existential rather than the cosmic or ontological, Congdon at least leaves open the possibility that creation or the cosmos may participate in salvation in ways we do not yet understand.

²⁴ Ibid., 213. ²⁵ A characteristic example of this is when, in discussing the church, Congdon quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer who says that the church is “Christ who has taken form among human beings . . . . The church is nothing but that piece of humanity where Christ really has taken form.” Congdon, curiously, re-phrases the quote without any explanation to refer to interruption rather than form, even saying that the Christian community has no cultural form. It is not at all clear that form and interruption can be used synonymously here and betrays that Congdon has not sufficiently conceptualized the relationship between form and interruption (Congdon, The God Who Saves, 185). ²⁶ Ibid., 234.

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Nevertheless, Congdon himself does not pursue this and he frequently enough tips over into the former perspective that his apocalypticism is in danger of becoming as total as the systems that he claims it interrupts. The resulting relationship between pattern and interruption in Congdon’s thought is interesting because it betrays this totality. For Congdon, interruption is categorically positive as that which makes Christ present, while pattern is almost categorically negative as it is associated with egocentric reflection.²⁷ Congdon’s soteriology, therefore, appears more as rupture than as interruptions that productively deepen unfolding patterns. This may be because he thinks that one can only speak existentially and, existentially, such interruptions always feel like rupture and overcoming. This would be fine but, as I have pointed out, he carries this over into a cosmic situation, rather than articulating it merely as a feature of human experience. Salvation is associated only with eschatological in-breakings, while the ordinary is consigned to the garbage heap of “the old man.”

The Ordinary and the Deformed According to Przywara, the cross is the moment of exchange when the form that Christ takes on is not merely natural and ordinary, but in fact a form of extreme limitation in death and deformation, such that, in participating in the divine through Christ, we are initiated into that same deformation. The difficulty is how to understand this movement as redemptive, since an overemphasis on this moment very quickly obscures any redemptive dimension at all, yet to minimize its extreme force would likewise obscure a significant dimension of salvation. My alternative to both Jenson and Congdon is that the salvation of the rhythms of creation is in making those rhythms receptive to theological interruptions and that this receptivity is what it means to rest in the ordinary. This is not an apocalyptic overcoming of creation but ultimately creation’s freedom for its own proper movements through interruptive, deforming limitations. I do not deny that eschatological interruptions may be experienced as apocalyptic, particularly in cases where patterns of control are especially ingrown. Freeing the creaturely for itself may be felt in terms of an opposition to the creature in its attempts to be like God. Due to original sin, the responsive, dialogical process of creation itself often becomes unwelcome; the ordinary becomes unwelcome. Redemptive disruptions that might otherwise be understood as formations of creation are instead experienced as painful “nihilations.” However, this does not mean that the deforming ²⁷ Ibid., 98–9.

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limitation, the ever new eschatological nihilations in which we participate when co-crucified with Christ, are contrary to the movements of creation as such. We are not consigned to the false binary of salvation as either mere affirmation of the patterns of creation, culture, society, etc. or mere destruction of those patterns. This is where the caesura is a particularly helpful concept. The caesura is not reducible to the rhythm itself since it is an interruption to that rhythm. It is counter-rhythmic, interruptive, perhaps even deforms the rhythm, and yet, by its very contradiction, it forms and defines the rhythm of which it is a part as the rhythm responds to the caesura as the rhythm that it is. The incarnation, and the cross to which it leads, is a counter-rhythmic caesura to creation, an extreme limitation in the sense that it pulls the rhythm up short, deforms it even, in the sense that it interrupts the rhythms of creation rather than allowing them to congeal into a form. At the cross, the ordinary intracreaturely form becomes a deformed form in death and extreme limitation because this is the outcome of the hegemonic rhythms of original sin. Yet, this deformation participates in the eschaton and is therefore also capable of interrupting those hegemonic movements that caused it. As with Agamben, Kristeva, and Marion, the place of the worst deformation becomes the possibility of disrupting the pattern that produced such deformation. For Agamben, as well as Marion, the point at which the deformed, dehumanizing logic has come to its fullest manifestation and revelation—whether in crucifixion or Auschwitz—makes possible the impossibility that contradicts what is possible within the system. Julia Kristeva, likewise, considers the crucifixion under the sign of the counter-depressant, as both the paradigm of suffering and the possibility of a new harmony. So she says that “Christian faith appears then as an antidote to hiatus and depression, along with hiatus and depression and starting from them.”²⁸ Salvation is Agamben’s division of division, rather than either a simple overcoming or unification of the whole. By interrupting the rhythms of creation, the movements of salvation draw attention to those rhythms, opening and deepening them, freeing them from the hegemonic uses to which they are put. Przywara ends the first part of Analogia Entis by saying: Ontically as being and noetically as thought, [analogy] is ‘principally’ the mystery of the primordial music of this rhythm—as with the fugues in Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” which interweaving one another, pass beyond themselves into “great silence.” The “resonant analogy” is fulfilled in this “silent analogy.”²⁹

²⁸ Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 134. ²⁹ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 314E/210G.

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This silent analogy indicates an eschatological relationship between the intra-creaturely and the theological, the form of which is as yet unknown, silent, and other than the rhythm in which the creature currently finds itself, just as the end of the rhythm of a poem or a fugue is silence, a silence that nevertheless is present with and penetrates the form of the poem all along. The caesura is, therefore, an eschatological image different from Congdon’s apocalypse.³⁰ As a silence, a counter-rhythm within the rhythm of the poem, the caesura is the end of the poem that has broken into the middle. To save creation’s rhythms is to enable them to end well rather than merely cease. If they merely cease, this means their attempts at self-enclosure have solidified and the ending cannot be but a truncation, but if they can become receptive to their end through interruptions, then they are saved—they participate in their own end. The purpose of the disjunction between resurrection and parousia is to make the end graspable through the introduction of a kairological caesura into chronological time. Rhythmically, this is what salvation effects in the here-and-now, namely a caesura that makes the end an event of time, rather than simply the cessation of time, through the disjunction between these two mutually-implicating times.³¹ The way in which Jenson, Congdon, and myself conceptualize the rhythms of salvation has much to do with how we understand the relationship between history and eschatology. Jenson thinks of them as related to one another coextensively and harmoniously under the form of narrative while Congdon relates them oppositionally, such that the eschatological inbreaking is always an apocalyptic nullification. The eschaton is thus portrayed either as a kind of extension of time or as a rupture to time. Conceived rhythmically, however, the eschaton is neither. Time and eschaton are not two separate realities, but a disjointed unity, neither co-extensive nor opposed. Neither a narrative or ³⁰ In his book The Time that Remains Agamben explicitly describes the poem in terms of eschatology: the poem is “. . . an organism or a temporal machine that, from the very start, strains toward its end. A kind of eschatology occurs within the poem itself ” (Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 79). His essay “The End of the Poem” in a volume of the same title interrogates what exactly it means for a poem to come to an end and how it strains toward this end. He argues that the poetic nature of the poem, the principle that makes it poetry rather than prose, is the disjunction and tension between the flow of meaning on the one hand and metric structure on the other, which we experience particularly at moments of caesura and enjambment (Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel HellerRoazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 109, 112). This tension is the temporal engine that drives the poem forward as it searches for a harmonious resolution between sound and sense. The poem finds such resolution at its end, which is also the moment when poetry passes over into prose, since its distinctive marker—the possibility of enjambment—is no longer possible. ³¹ While we often think of repetition as opposed to surprise, in poetry recurrence and allusion can create a saturation that deepens surprise by making it an experience of recognizing what was in fact always there to be seen (Jane Hirshfield, Hiddenness, Uncertainty, Surprise: Three Generative Energies of Poetry (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2008), 55).

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metaphysical theology that emphasizes continuity at the expense of interruption, on the one hand, nor an apocalyptic theology that emphasizes interruption and devalues all form, on the other, can make sense of the double-edged nature of redemption. But the fact that rhythm is itself double-edged, that it is both form and operates as an interruption to form, makes it an ideal approach for making sense of both the freeing of the creature and the limitation and deformation of the creature as two movements of salvation that are neither unified nor opposed but conspire together. The world, the rhythms of the intracreaturely, is both the sphere in which God is made manifest and the sphere of death. Any salvific intersection with the rhythms of the theological must include movements that address both of these realities. We, therefore, have an indication as to how the rhythms of creation ought to be evaluated from the perspective of salvation, namely according to the following question: do the rhythms in which we are embedded encourage us to encounter and embrace the limitations of deformation, not for their own sake but as the site of the exchange, change, confrontation, and overcoming of the rhythms in which we are tempted to cocoon ourselves, precisely so that we are free to receive new rhythms that we may have overlooked, but which will contribute to our own proper movement? If creation is rhythmic by nature and therefore responsive to interruption, salvation takes advantage of this form and complexifies its rhythm by maintaining or re-establishing this responsiveness to interruption. The question, in other words, is whether our rhythms are too tight, or whether they are capable of receiving interruption as formation rather than deformation. Maintaining both of these movements in tension again drives us toward a diachronic perspective, into the here-and-now of space-time in order to work out their relationship in each particular time and place. The best way to understand how these movements involved in salvation work together is through the rhythms in which we are already embedded. In saying that salvation frees the creature for its own proper movements, Przywara is pointing out that salvation does not bring a new rhythm but is an interruption within the rhythms of creation. Just as the use of rhythm in doctrines of creation reveal that those doctrines include particular, historically-situated organizations of space-time, rhythm likewise makes sense of how movements of resting and deformation conspire together by locating them concretely in an historically-situated and historically-manifested salvation.

THE DIACHRONIC: CHURCH AND WORLD The church is the practice of receiving interruptions as constitutive of creatureliness, impelling the creature to move forward through the rhythms of

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nature-culture differently than before. Przywara points out that, not only is Christ a deformed form, but the church, as the body of Christ, likewise takes on this deformity in “the ‘now and here’ of a real historical church under the sign of ever new ‘nihiliations’.” The church comes under this same form because the Holy Spirit repeats this caesura forward.³² Determining the movements of salvation—interruption and harmony, rest and deformation—within the context of a concrete here-and-now, therefore requires considering the relationship between church and world, the concrete site of the intersection of these movements. Nicholas Lash says that to know the unknowable God in a way that is redemptive and transformative is to be in a human community that does not conceive of itself as a reified object but as movements of encounter that push beyond themselves to open up intimate union with God and between all of humanity. Human community is, therefore, according to Lash, a necessary condition for prayer,³³ in other words, for the manifestation of salvation. Lash here describes the significance of the church rhythmically, as a human community that is not defined in terms of boundaries but in terms of certain sorts of movement. To approach the church as the body of Christ is not to approach it as a delineated object opposed to its cultural environment but as an everchanging confluence of rhythms. Notice, however, that I do not say that the church is a new or distinct rhythm, but a particular confluence of rhythms. Kathryn Tanner points out that Christians are precisely those who do not attribute their identity-asChristian to social binaries (male–female, Jew–Greek, slave–free). It is the division of such divisions, as Agamben would say. Identifying the church itself in terms of social distinction, therefore, contradicts its own logic.³⁴ Congdon likewise, pace Jenson, points out that the church is not a new polis; it is not an alternative culture that is identical to Christ.³⁵ The church has no independent existence but is part of God’s dealings with the world. It is not a separate, stable society, but an event.³⁶ In the same way, the church is not a new rhythm directly inaugurated in salvation; it is not a second rhythm over-against creation. If one could identify the rhythm of salvation as a discreet pattern, this pattern would threaten to replace God as the agent of ³² Congdon, in saying something similar, appeals to Agamben’s characterization of the messianic as a “. . . kairos that ‘stretches’ the historical arrival of the Messiah by ‘seizing hold’ of an instant of time and ‘bringing it forth to fulfillment.’ The kairotic, parousial Spirit does not add anything to the original event but stretches the event to include new historical contingencies. She thereby interrupts each moment with the presence-in absence of God” (Congdon, The God Who Saves, 145). ³³ Nicholas Lash, Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 252–3. ³⁴ Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapols, MN: Fortress Press, 1997), 100. ³⁵ Congdon, The God Who Saves, 175–6. ³⁶ Ibid., 183; 197.

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salvation.³⁷ Differences between church and culture cannot be determined synchronically as givens, but are likewise events, productions, and performances in the context of particular cultures.³⁸ The rhythm of the church cannot be identified and circumscribed at the outset but is discerned in the process of its making. Przywara says that in Christ, the God who alone is “wholly God” appears as “wholly man,” and “wholly Christ” precisely as “head and body,” i.e. In the invisibility of an earthly, human church, “of mere men of mere earth,” so that in precisely this way the creature, who wants to be like God, might learn simply to be a “man upon the earth” . . .³⁹

The church participates in the ordinariness of the humanity of Christ in opposition to attempts to be like God, precisely as part of the world, as a form that does not swallow up or displace creatureliness but seeks to open for creation the possibility of being itself. It does so, not as a new rhythm overagainst creation, but in local arrangements, nodes in which the rhythms of everyday life come into contact in particular ways. If the church is not a brand-new rhythm unto itself, however, then it is also not a movement that binds intra-creaturely rhythms together into a unified whole. Only the eschaton, the end of the poem which is not the poem, unifies creation’s rhythms, and the church is not the eschaton. This is why Przywara talks about the church as under the sign of “ever new nihilations.” Any attempt on the part of the church to enclose or absolutize is a function of original sin that must be disrupted. There is no sharp division between a world that experiences God’s grace as interruptive and a church that experiences it as harmonizing. The church, in contrast to Milbank’s intimations, recognizes itself as a human process and not as identical to the Word to which it is witness. I propose that the church amplifies intra-creaturely oscillations by introducing another intersection of oscillations into the rhythms of creation in which it finds itself. In so doing, it makes it more difficult for intra-creaturely rhythms to self-absolutize, thereby participating in the salvific movement of freeing them for their own proper movement. Rather than neatly binding up the intersecting oscillations of the intra-creaturely and the theological— precisely the temptation of original sin—the church disrupts them, which in turn complexifies them. This approach to the church follows the same logic as Agamben’s diachronic approach to the messianic. According to Agamben, the effect of the messianic on time is that it divides divisions, thereby rendering them inoperative, incapable of generating an ontology or politics. If the church follows this messianic vocation, it does not bind theological and ³⁷ Tanner, Theories of Culture, 136. ³⁸ Ibid., 111. ³⁹ Przywara, Analogia Entis, 346E/244-45G.

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intra-creaturely, but divides the division between them, or, in terms of rhythm, multiplies the oscillations so that theological and intra-creaturely cannot relate to one another in terms of a binary that could generate an ontology or politics that covers over or excludes certain dimensions of reality. The church is not an ontology or a politic. It is a site of crossings and oscillations that frustrate binary stand-offs. If the church is a second intersection of oscillations that divides the first, then the “vertical” oscillation is that between church and world, between the systole of ecclesial gathering and the diastole moving out into culture. However, we have already seen how culture represents a diversity of forms of intracreaturely oscillation. Likewise, the ecclesial pole includes an intra-ecclesial oscillation between the diversity of its rhythmic expressions that emerge in relation to cultural constructions of space-time. This intra-ecclesial relation is the “horizontal” oscillation. This does not mean that the theological is analogous to the ecclesial such that the creature simply oscillates between the intracreaturely and the intra-ecclesial as between the intra-creaturely and the theological. The church never relates directly to the theological independent of the intra-creaturely. Rather, the theological is maintained in its own right while the intra-ecclesial is a second oscillation within the intra-creaturely such that it is related both to itself (church) and to the whole analogia entis, the intra-creaturely-theological intersection of oscillations (world). The form of salvation in the church is therefore consistent with the rhythmic form of Przywara’s analogia entis as an oscillation between two oscillations: intraecclesial and church-world. Its presence within the analogia entis frustrates any attempt to make of the analogia entis a metaphysical binary, thereby preserving it as the form of the ordinary, sometimes by deformation where necessary.

Intra-Ecclesial Oscillations My claim that no new rhythm is directly inaugurated in the church may be surprising. After all, the church, inaugurated by the events of Christ and Pentecost, can arguably be thought of as a collection of liturgical rhythms, the rhythms of the church calendar, of rituals like baptism and eucharist, of congregational liturgies. Nevertheless, all of these rhythms exist in interaction with the local, cultural rhythms in which they are manifest. They are always mediated. Moreover, while these rhythms are important for understanding the church as rhythmically significant, the diversity of these rhythms among churches, both for doctrinal reasons and due to differences in place and time, make it difficult to argue that any particular one of these has itself been directly inaugurated by Christ. While one might claim that certain of the church’s acts, baptism and eucharist, for example, have been inaugurated

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by Christ and Spirit, rhythm concerns the how, the form, of these rituals and it is much more difficult to claim that the form has itself been set up by Christ. To claim that one version of these rhythms is closer to an originary rhythm that Christ has established would be difficult to sustain. Virtually every variation of a liturgy or sacrament claims to continue the truth, the significance, or the true form of original practices in some way, whether through unbroken tradition or by recapturing original intentions over-against historical perversions. Nevertheless, these rhythms do share similar objectives and even, to some degree, recognizably similar patterns. So, when I say that the church is not its own rhythm over-against cultural rhythms, I do not mean that church’s rhythms are not distinctive, only that it is not a single pattern identifiable in advance and independent of the cultures in which it is embedded and from which it draws. There is no originary rhythm that each church simply performs. No specific rhythms for entering salvation are prescribed. We have, instead, a collection of church rhythms, within and between congregations, related to each other in particular ways. Rather than attempting to capture an original rhythmic, ecclesial form, I recommend that we understand ecclesial rhythms as cultural, human-creaturely, responses to caesuric encounters with Christ, as particular ways of attempting to rest in the ordinary, which open the rhythms of culture to something beyond themselves. The intra-ecclesial oscillation is an oscillation between sameness and difference, tension and harmony. To approach the church from the perspective of rhythm is to approach it in terms of these movements of both continuity and change, harmony and tension. The church includes both a long, consistent, rhythm, on the one hand, and a diversification of rhythms, on the other. There is no consensus over exactly where and how Christ is encountered. Protestant theologians like Congdon associate this encounter with the preaching of kerygma, while Catholic theologians like Marion are more inclined to associate it with the Eucharist.⁴⁰ The church has seen real divisions over liturgical performance. Nevertheless, there are arguably certain shapes— recurring sections of rhythm or rhythmic moves—that reliably occur across different ecclesial contexts. Gordon Lathrop argues that there is a general shared outline or liturgical shape of the church. First, all churches believe that there is more to time and to life than what is given by cultures and this “more” is identified in Jesus Christ,

⁴⁰ Jean-Luc Marion describes the way in which Christ comes to the church as that which exceeds empirical reality in the eucharist, the eschatological presence of Christ that saturates the horizon of the church’s temporality. The eucharistic “moment” does not begin from a “here and now” but results from the memorial and the eschatological announcement of the eucharist (JeanLuc Marion, “The Present and the Gift” in Neal Deroo and John P. Manoussakis, eds. Phenomenology and Eschatology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 204).

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the crucified and risen one.⁴¹ In other words, there is some agreement about what churches are responding to. Second, a church always both adopts and transforms the socio-cultural patterns in which it finds itself in order to make them bearers of hope.⁴² Every liturgy includes both continuity and transformation of cultural patterns. This is not to say that every or even any church manages this successfully in all areas but most would agree that a reliable indication of a salvific rhythm is that it maintains a productive tension with culture and that where this is not taking place, critique must be turned on the church itself. Third, churches are one because they participate in one baptism, one word, and one table. While these are enacted differently across time, space, and denomination—languages, local water, local elements of a meal might all be different, for example—their shared significance links these assemblies in time and space.⁴³ Lathrop argues that word, bath, and table together form a shared response to the human longing for unity, such that while the liturgical assembly is not itself unity, it may nevertheless be an instrument for unity through these universal but differently manifested dimensions of human experience.⁴⁴ While all of this so far is fairly general, there is one insight from Lathrop about a common feature across the diversity of church liturgies that is perhaps rhythmically significant: the rule of juxtaposition. Lathrop says in the history of the Christian liturgy, the essential matters are always juxtaposed to each other and are always themselves made up of at least two juxtaposed elements: reading and preaching, teaching and bathing, thanksgiving and receiving the food. The Christian ordo is the simple pattern that results when these basic things are done side by side.⁴⁵

In other words, the ordo itself is made up of pairings, of oscillations. Thus, Our words need to be paired with signs, our baptisms paired with formation in the stories and words, our meals with preaching, our ministers with assemblies, our gatherings with recognized ministers, our feasts with ordinary days, our days with the festal assembly, in order to speak not ideology, not locally protected, denominational truths, but the truth about God as God is known in Jesus.⁴⁶

Such juxtaposition is a liturgical form of intra-ecclesial oscillation. However, it applies to church-world oscillation as well. All communities juxtapose word, bath, and table to local meanings and juxtapose Sunday to the local week, for example.⁴⁷ “These things may be done slowly or rapidly. They may be done in received ancient patterns or in rich local elaborations or in some combination of the two.”⁴⁸ Precisely because these are local juxtapositions, the rhythms that emerge differ. Thus we see here, already, in the form of liturgy, the two ⁴¹ Gordon W. Lathrop, Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2006), 44. ⁴² Ibid., 40. ⁴³ Ibid., 65. ⁴⁴ Ibid., 11. ⁴⁵ Ibid., 113. ⁴⁶ Ibid., 127. ⁴⁷ Ibid., 127–8. ⁴⁸ Ibid., 202.

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intersecting oscillations that I have identified: the intra-ecclesial and that of church-world. However, even if we can identify such a general outline synchronically, as Lathrop does, diachronically speaking, differences between congregations have been stark and have included serious divisions rather than mere peaceful diversity. Differences in interpretations and practices, sometimes (though not always) codified denominationally, have only become more numerous with time. As Przywara says, we recognize an “unsystematizable surd” that continues to drive the conversation forward. This unsystematizable surd prevents us from resting with a synchronic overview of the kind that Lathrop provides. If the church is an instrument for unity, it is only ever as a frustration to attempts at self-enclosure, as a forerunner to the eschaton with which it is not identical. If it is a sign of unity, it is so as an opportunity to look past our assumptions about the nature of unity itself. It may therefore often not feel like unity. In volume XXII of his Theological Investigations, Karl Rahner makes this point about reality in general, that it is “incomprehensible, forever unfinished, forever resisting a harmonious synthesis. All of this is getting worse today in a way that could not have been imagined in former times. While more and more of reality falls within human powers, at the same time it remains as incomprehensible and unfinished as ever.”⁴⁹ Conflict exists precisely because of this general situation because the many dimensions of reality do not constitute a harmony and people, therefore, disagree about how these dimensions ought to fit together.⁵⁰ If the church is a confluence of rhythms within this intra-creaturely situation, then it ought not to be surprising that the church too involves such conflict. While the impulse towards ecumenical dialogue and increased intraecclesial harmony is important, it ought not to be an impulse that seeks to cover over the situation of incomprehensibility. To set up an enclosed frame of reference in which there is peace is not only disingenuous, it is also a participation in the very moves of power and competition that give rise to hegemonic systems in the first place because it suggests that our peace is more important than being present to the other.⁵¹ Whatever encourages us to seek out or think we have achieved an environment without friction is a denial of the nature of reality and encourages language about the other that is easy and uninterrupted.⁵² An insistent pursuit of consensus may, in fact, be an attempt to nail down the difference between church and world and would, therefore, ⁴⁹ Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations: Humane Society and the Church of Tomorrow, trans. Joseph Donceel (New York: The Crossroads Publishing Company, 1991), 34. ⁵⁰ Ibid., 38–9. ⁵¹ Rowan Williams, Lost Icons: Reflections on Cultural Bereavement (London: T&T Clark, 2003), 105–6. ⁵² Ibid., 113.

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be antithetical to the openness to God required for Christian discipleship.⁵³ Some attempts at harmony are in fact violent self-enclosures. I have, at several points, appealed to the relationship between poem and reader when attempting to diachronically describe the relationship between two oscillations. In chapter five, I suggested that the theological analogy is like the poem, which initiates movements and interrupts the intra-creaturely while the intra-creaturely is the reader, responding to those events out of its own rhythms. Likewise, in chapter six, I suggested that we think about the relationship between nature and culture as a relationship between poem and reader. Nature may include a kind of basic set of possibilities that both encourages and pushes back against certain human constructions while human culture is like a reader that constructs rhythmic responses and it is only through this cultural performance of rhythm that the poem’s space-time is made manifest. In the case of the intra-ecclesial, however, I am drawing attention not only to a relationship between two rhythms—church and world, for example—in which the church might be thought of as a reader in relationship to a world-poem—but also to relationships of tension and harmony between multiple congregations and denominations. While it is true that both of the “readers” in the other two examples are not monolithic, the emphasis in each case was on their oscillating relationship to something different from themselves. So long as that was the case, the metaphor worked. Here, though, my emphasis is on the relationship within and between churches and, as such, the other artistic metaphor from chapter one—that of jazz improvisation—is more applicable. In jazz improvisation, there is both a sense of a common project in that all performers agree that they are performing the same piece and in this way, there is a distinction between the group and those outside the group. However, there are also differences within the group as well as continuity between the musicians and those outside the performance, whether that be the audience, other musicians who have taught the performers, writers of the original standards, etc. Moreover, the performers disagree among themselves about appropriate developments in the rhythm. But this is not problematic, it is, rather, endemic to the form of improvisational jazz. There is a diachronic element to this disagreement. Musicians do not know where they are going at the outset and there are no guarantees about how it will end. When the group first starts playing, its rhythm may begin as relatively homogeneous. Participants agree on the piece that they are playing and they begin by establishing the pattern. A groove holds everyone together in harmony. But this harmony is minimal and once that groove is ticking along, rather than becoming a system unto itself, the rhythm begins to interrupt itself. Rhythmic events

⁵³ Tanner, Theories of Culture, 171.

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occur, participants attempt to introduce changes or even interruptions, and counter-rhythms emerge. Musicians must adjust their rhythms to what those around them are doing, which may sometimes involve self-correction as well as attempts to influence others in particular directions. Participants can see what has come before but not necessarily where the rhythms are headed and where or how they will resolve. On the one hand, these are competing rhythms. Jazz improvisation involves much interruption, competition, even some aggression in making one’s own vision heard. However, if players negotiate these events and incorporate one another’s counter-rhythms successfully, these competing rhythms become, over time, different layers of one rhythm, which includes points of tension and interruption. To see these rhythms in relation to one another as in a successful jazz performance is to understand them, not as mutually exclusive, but as conspiring together for the sake of the rhythm of the whole. From within the unfolding of the piece, however, the participants cannot see the resolution of these tensions but the fact of the performance itself indicates a faith in such resolution. Correlations to intra-ecclesial relationships should be clear. There are ways in which churches understand themselves to be engaged in a common project, but they disagree about how it ought to progress and those disagreements are not merely doctrinal but performative, indeed, evident specifically through the multiplicity of ecclesial rhythms. The church does not merely perform a given pattern; it must responsively create the pattern over the course of space-time. It may follow certain rules like Lathrop’s rule of juxtaposition, just as musicians follow musical rules, but these, too, are minimal. As with a piece of improvised jazz, ecclesial performance may have begun fairly homogeneously when the church was new, but variations quickly emerged. Eventually, differences became divisive. A variety of events—the split between East and West, the reformations, the proliferation of denominations, European colonization, and increasing influence from non-European cultures—interrupted attempts at homogeneity. In response to these events, cased in fraught political clashes, the diversity of ecclesial rhythms proliferates. Attempts on the part of different congregations to form intra-ecclesial rhythms in certain ways sometimes collide. For example, one significant difference between Catholic and Protestant, namely their approach to tradition, can be expressed rhythmically. The Catholic tradition attempts to keep the rhythm as stable as possible, making changes only gradually, while certain Protestant rhythms may be more inclined to include sudden changes as a kind of responsiveness to new manifestations of revelation. Such characterizations could equally be made of musicians improvising and negotiating rhythms together. According to the jazz metaphor, changes in church rhythms and congregational conflicts both proliferate and are resolved in real time. While we may frequently experience these differences in terms of tension and division, the jazz metaphor suggests that these tensions can become

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catalysts for a more complex rhythm that includes a multiplicity of dimensions if all players negotiate tensions, respond to events, and incorporate counterrhythms successfully. This is perhaps an awfully idealistic vision of ecclesial divisions. The “if ” in “if all players can negotiate one another’s rhythms successfully” is no small condition. Yet there are two things to keep in mind that make the metaphor appropriate nonetheless. First, remember that the jazz musicians do not know how the pattern will resolve and there is no pre-given pattern to ensure resolution. There is genuine risk involved. Yet their very participation in the shared endeavor signals a faith in such a resolution. In the case of the church, the resolution is eschatological. There is a sense in which the resolution is not identical to the performance of the church. It is not a simple relationship between cause and effect. In one sense, however badly churches are improvising together is immaterial so long as they continue the endeavor thereby expressing faith in the possibility of resolution. As Rahner says, we should not expect resolution within history. This at once makes participation in the improvisation both more and less idealistic. On the one hand, we can have confidence that there will be a resolution regardless of how well we negotiate our rhythms. One may even object that genuine risk is to some degree overcome. On the other hand, however, and this is what makes this situation no mere fantasy; this confidence is what requires us to continue in this shared improvisation no matter how bad things are. This is only possible if harmony and resolution are eschatological. The church must be aware that, from its diachronic position, it does not know what resolution and harmony will look like. To stop the endeavor, therefore, would be to definitively declare that one does know what this harmony is and that the church cannot participate in it. This would be to take an inappropriately synchronic perspective. This brings me to the second point, which juxtaposes with the first. Rahner has pointed out that our concept of unity itself has changed over the course of time. He suggests that it was previously possible for a single person to know most of the knowledge available, such that, whether or not it was true, they had the sense that they could see the whole of things and assume mutual understanding since they were operating out of the same frame of reference.⁵⁴ “Such a world view referred to a geographically and historically limited area. That is why it was easy to view it as a whole and not too difficult to defend it in controversies.”⁵⁵ Today, however, we know far more collectively and thus each individual knows less with the result that we have lost this sense of certainty. In other words, we are at a particularly cacophonous point in our improvisation. This decreased certainty, however, opens up the possibility of a new type of unity.

⁵⁴ Rahner, Theological Investigations, 69.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 70.

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It is certain that in many questions or controversies theologians are not yet in total agreement. But the climate of their conversations has fundamentally changed in comparison with the time of the Reformation. They faced each other with positions which the other side always called objectively and absolutely irreconcilable with the foundations of Christianity. . . . Today theologians whose tenets may not yet be totally reconcilable take a different stance toward each other. Both sides take into account not only that a mysterious subjectivity exonerates at times the other before God and before the truth of the Gospel but also that the statements of both sides, when further developed and understood in a wider context, sometimes do not really contradict each other, even when one does not yet clearly see that, in such a wider interpretation, the two sides positively agree.⁵⁶

All that is required in this situation is that no church declares that a statement that is binding for another church be absolutely irreconcilable with its own faith.⁵⁷ Therefore, while the diachronic unfolding of the church includes splits and conflict, Rahner points out that along with that history come possibilities for new types of unification. As in improvised jazz, possibilities for unification emerge from out of the unfolding itself, emerge as responses to the interruptions within the pattern. In other words, these opportunities for unity are genuinely new possibilities. They were not possible at previous moments of the unfolding. Encountering them, therefore, requires moving through tension. Such grace means that harmony may not be so hopeless as it appears at any given moment. The church’s divisions, contradictions, and interruptions are not permanent states of being but events that are being negotiated in real time, as in a jazz performance. This point is not antithetical to my previous point—that harmony is eschatological—since such an eschaton is not absolutely out of touch with time. As with the caesura, to briefly switch metaphors, it erupts into time, which is what will allow the improvisation to properly end rather than merely cease despite the eschatological character of this end. When the fulfillment takes place, we will be able to see it as a fulfillment rather than a truncation because of such caesuras, such new possibilities for unity. Lathrop thinks of the unity of the church in terms of a network which, he argues, is “neither mystical, hierarchical, organizational, nor invisible, but rather theological and liturgical.”⁵⁸ Lathrop himself does not clarify what this means, but it seems to me to be a unity that is (a) located eschatologically in the theological analogy that comes to us from the future (theological) and (b) that it is worked out in time (liturgical). Such a diachronic vantage point makes visible why this ecclesial process of salvation involves both the patience of resting in the ordinary and the extreme limitation of deformed form. The history of the church does include ever new nihilations, perhaps even near-continual ⁵⁶ Ibid., 74.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 73.

⁵⁸ Lathrop, Holy People, 54.

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cacophony. Forms that are established, partial harmonies that are arranged, become deformed and undone in the course of time. The more one attempts to maintain them across such change, the more deformed they become. To wait patiently in the ordinary is to persist in the endeavor even in the midst of cacophony. However, as Rahner points out, part of what changes through such improvisation is not only the church but the cultural conceptions of space-time in which it is located. This is what makes the performance so complicated, so impossible to grasp synchronically. The improvisation is never sealed off from surrounding context and forces, but responds to those as well, albeit in a different sort of way than the musicians respond to one another. Intra-ecclesial oscillations are therefore never properly understood independently of the oscillations of the world in which they are couched.

Church and World The nature of salvation ultimately concerns the relationship between church and world because the church-culture constellation is where we concretely encounter such salvation. Taking rhythm into account when considering soteriology does not let us dwell long with the salvation of individuals. Viewed rhythmically, a person is never an individual separable from his or her environment and relationships. His or her identity is always formed by and extended in the rhythms of relationship, education, media, manners, conversation, and the natural-cultural structures of space-time. The result is that if a person is brought into salvation, which rhythmically means that he or she is confronted by Christ as counter-rhythmic caesura and thereby both interrupted and freed for his or her own proper movements, then the surrounding rhythms in which he or she is embedded are always implicated. Graham Ward describes this using the image of a transistor: “we live and act as transistors for the transformation of the world through Christ. It is not just the individual who is being conformed to Christ; it is the whole of creation. Indeed, it is only as individuals give back to Christ the world in which they subsist that they themselves are transformed.”⁵⁹ Just as a transistor mediates content through sound waves, a person mediates reality through rhythms. Such transformation might also include the ways in which space-time is organized and negotiated through information media, transportation technologies, architectures, and patterns of work and rest. They may also include the rhythms involved in communication and group identity-formation such as song and dance, gift exchange, and communication. That which is interrupted and that which ⁵⁹ Graham Ward, The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2009), 282.

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constitutes the ordinary in which one rests are all located in this constellation of rhythms. No leap of action from the individual to the world in the form of choice or behavior that “makes a difference” is required. The world simply is already implicated in salvation through rhythm because one cannot be separated out from these rhythms that connect us to the rest of the world. The rhythms of the intra-creaturely are amplified and complexified through encountering intra-ecclesial rhythms. While the rhythms of the world may be implicated in each specific person, those rhythms are shaped in particular ways through assembly, by coming into contact with the rhythms of the church through each person in the pews and perhaps in other ways as well. As Lathrop says, the nature of the cycle of the week is formed differently if it is juxtaposed to the assembly of Sunday. Moreover, while these assemblies form the rhythms of space-time in particular ways in particular times and places, they participate in a common endeavor, even if that common endeavor frequently includes interruption, division, and contradiction. Lathrop says that “The network of assemblies is beginning to hold the whole earth before God, as if the earth itself were Jerusalem, the place of assembly to hear the lifegiving Word.”⁶⁰ This suggests that simply in taking place, ecclesial, rhythmic assemblies make connections with the rhythms in which they take place, opening those rhythms to the theological analogy. Bruno Latour gives us a helpful way to think about this relationship between church and world, about the fact that mere assembly may form a rhythm in new ways, even when it feels like mere assembly does nothing. Although Latour himself has no interest in the church, like Lathrop, he appeals to the idea of a network. Latour envisions all of reality in terms of a network in which all manner of objects—persons, trees, cars, animals, perhaps even images and concepts—interact with one another as agents in and through the network as a whole. He calls this Actor Network Theory (ANT): “an actor-network is what is made to act by a large star-shaped web of mediators flowing in and out of it. It is made to exist by its many ties: attachments are first, actors are second.”⁶¹ In other words, form, perhaps even rhythmic form (webs of flows), is always prior to specific agents. These effects, agencies, and interactions are not homogeneous but vary in terms of force, number, visibility, timing, frequency, manner, etc.⁶² Latour attempts, in this way, to keep reality flat, to resist thinking of it in terms of the opposition between local and global. Every event is both local (occurring at a particular point in the network) and global (involving the whole or large portions of the network) through the diverse influences of each agent. ⁶⁰ Lahtrop, Holy People, 53. ⁶¹ Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 218. ⁶² Ibid., 200.

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Latour would simply locate God as an agent within this network, only distinct in the sense that everything is distinct from everything else. While I believe this causes problems for Christian theology of a similar sort to that which I critiqued when engaging with Keller in chapter two, Latour’s vision is nevertheless a helpful perspective for envisioning ecclesiology in rhythmic terms. The virtue of ANT is that it immediately returns us to the particulars, to the diachronic perspective, while also providing a synchronic language to be able to say something about the nature of the relationship between church and world. According to this model, each church is absolutely local and unique because of where it is located in the network and its relationship to surrounding actornetworks. However, each church also acts as agent as church through its unique connection to others. Churches therefore share commonalities in terms of how they interact with that which surrounds them, for example through the ways that local realities are both included and critiqued through word, bath, and table. Church interacts with the world not in any general, topdown sense but as particular types of actor-networks within a network of actors, influencing the network simply by being within the network. While each actor is an agent in its own way, Latour identifies two different sorts of agencies—intermediaries and mediators—and I suggest that for the church to be the sort of actor-network that it is, to form rhythms for the purpose of salvation, it must be composed of mediators. The intermediary is a transparent agent which “transports meaning without transformation” while mediators “transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry.”⁶³ What makes something a mediator is the unpredictability of the results of the input enacted on it. The outcome is not a given that is known in advance and faithfully reproduced. For example, we may be tempted to think of the eucharistic bread in terms of an intermediary that makes present the body of Christ in the same way at all ecclesial times and places but it is possible, instead, to think of the eucharistic bread as a mediator that makes the body of Christ manifest in unpredictable ways. This body manifests differently each time, depending on the nature of the relationships between community members and events at each time and place. Rowan Williams points out that the practices of the church, and the eucharist in particular, act as sites that encourage interruption by the risen Christ. We cannot predict how Christ will appear; we meet Christ as a stranger.⁶⁴ Harmony does not predictably occur as a result of the performers’ inputs. According to Williams, this is a function of the fact that the movements of these mediators—prayer, liturgy, and eucharist—operate between two contradictory poles: Gethsemane and Emmaus, betrayal and forgiveness,

⁶³ Ibid., 39.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 85–6.

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connection and confrontation, oppressor and penitent.⁶⁵ The eucharist requires an oscillation between the two poles of the participant’s identity as both betrayer and restored penitent.⁶⁶ The identity of the church is based in the belief that a recognition of failure, betrayal, and collusion with violence is the basis of hope, that salvation is based on a disruptive confrontation with Christ,⁶⁷ that Christ is mediator between the deformed limit of the cross and a new hope for resting in the ordinary without limit. The church deals with the same domain as everything else, it simply operates through particular mediators that rest in the ordinary by way of oscillation. The particular way in which the participants in relationship are formed according to salvation is therefore through magnifying oscillation, the oscillation between the ordinary and the deformation. The oscillation between church and world that intersects intra-creaturely oscillations, on the one hand, and intra-ecclesial oscillations, on the other, is the intersection between the oscillation of assembly and dispersal, and the oscillation between betrayer and penitent.⁶⁸ When the world’s rhythms come into contact with the intraecclesial rhythms, which are simply another permutation of themselves, they are simply maintained as what they are, as oscillations, over against their attempts to be otherwise. The church is deformed because it cannot merely identify itself with Christ’s resting in the ordinary. As a crisscrossing within the intra-creaturely, it participates in the same movements that deform creation’s movements of the ordinary, the movements of betrayal. The difference is that the church is able to recognize its deformations because it has encountered the deformed form as caesura that interrupts the hegemonic rhythms that have deformed it, a mediator that transforms betrayal into hope. If Christian salvation is ⁶⁵ Julie Gittoes argues that Williams provides what Catherine Pickstock’s theology of the eucharist lacks, namely specific social and political effects (Julie Gittoes, Anamnesis and the Eucharist: Contemporary Anglican Approaches (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 112). ⁶⁶ Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 58. ⁶⁷ Ibid., 62. ⁶⁸ Like Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste has a sense of the necessary oscillation of the creature in prayer between experience and its suspension; the appearance of anything is always a temporal event because it requires mutually-exclusive perspectives that cannot be inhabited simultaneously (Jean-Yves Lacoste, “The Phenomenality of Anticipation” in Neal Deroo and John P. Manoussakis, eds. Phenomenology and Eschatology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), 16). The divine is for Lacoste a transgression of the field of experience itself, as it is for Marion. There can be no equivocation between the way in which God is present to the human in time and the way in which other things are present (Jean-Yves Lacoste, Experience and the Absolute: Disputed Questions on the Humanity of Man, trans. Mark Raftery-Skehan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 22, 43–7). Prayer therefore includes a bracketing of the world that frees one from the usual forces shaping one’s responses such that one is suspended into a new space in which different responses are made possible (Ibid., 95). Lacoste says that such liturgy is a knowledge without experience, and therefore the opening of a gap in the flow of experience (Ibid., 47).

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performed in the rhythms of the church, which are themselves symbolized by the eucharist, then salvation is an oscillation between interruption to identity through confrontation with pain and failure and an affirmation of harmony in Christ. It is here, at the crossroads of church and world, that we see salvation as both a resting in the ordinary and a deformed form. The shape of rhythm is that of intersecting oscillations; it is the shape of a cross. And rhythm, like the cross, is that form which includes both resting in the form and its own deformation. Our capacity to say very much about this rhythm in general is limited. The relationship between church and world depends on the church’s relationship to the particular cultural rhythms in which it finds itself, as per the methodological requirement of the incarnation; to find the truth is to go ever deeper into the here-and-now of space-time. But this is about as far as we are able to go into the here and now within the confines of this project. We are, at this moment, passing over into a different book—a work of contextual theology— which the present book is not. While I have consistently indicated the significance of the diachronic perspective, its basic orientation and experience, its requirements and general conclusions, I have not been directly performing theology diachronically. This book has been an analysis of rhythm in theology as such and not an engagement with the rhythms of a particular here-andnow, which is ultimately what is necessary if one wishes to say much more about rhythms of creation, salvation, church, or any other doctrine. My task has been to set the stage for our rhythmic performances. The instruments are tuned. The musicians are present. The piece has been chosen. The groove is in motion. So, what is left is for us to listen together—what are the events of rhythmic significance? And what will be our rhythmic response?

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Epilogue My attempt to address rhythm and its theological significance has involved a tension between description and construction. On the one hand, I merely point to rhythm as the ghost haunting theology, describing its varying forms and its effects on that with which it comes into contact. But the other side of this investigation has been a constructive attempt to put together a few of the pieces of what theology would be like if it were performed while keeping one eye on the ghost. The reader may have noticed that in doing so, I have, as far as possible, avoided explicitly aligning myself with any particular theological school, position, denomination, etc., although I offer critiques of certain projects and thinkers. I have, instead, borrowed liberally, though I hope not incoherently, from a wide range of eras, denominations, and theological commitments. The reason for this is that I have attempted to investigate the diversity of approaches to rhythm across Christian theology. Since there exists such a variety of approaches to rhythm, the category is clearly not restricted to a particular theological project. I want this book to reflect that diversity, not to make rhythm the concern of only a subsection of Christian theology. I want to avoid this project becoming absorbed into any particular theological project as a category associated with and somehow belonging to that project. The great advantage of rhythm’s diversity of manifestations is its potential to provide a common language across a variety of positions. For example, Przywara scholars may be able to use this research in explicating Przywara’s work in that I have illuminated the significance, context, and ongoing conversations surrounding this one category that repeatedly appears in Przywara’s thought. This may, in turn, contribute to our understanding of the significance of Przywara’s place in Catholic theology. It may also provide Catholic theology with a category for re-imagining or re-articulating its doctrine of analogy, perhaps in ways that avoid some of the critiques that have been leveled against it. Przywara’s use of rhythm may help Catholic theology to index its project, not as the constructions of metaphysical visions from the outside in which the whole of the pattern is known and given in advance as is so often the critique, but as attempts to identify the nodes of a pattern, the whole of which we cannot see from within space-time, as part of an attempt to liturgically inhabit

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that pattern well. Rhythm may, therefore, offer a point of connection between Catholicism’s rich liturgical tradition and its systematic endeavors. However, this research could also be used in projects with commitments and concerns generally thought to be opposed to Roman Catholic theology, such as those associated with “process theology.” Rhythm is a natural category for such projects given its associations with change, interruption, flow, and improvisation, which is no doubt why Catherine Keller appeals to it. While I have been critical of Keller in particular, there are many versions of process theology, some of which may benefit from the approach to rhythm that I here propose. John Polkinghorne, for example, believes that God may act as one cause among created causes by kenosis and not by nature, meaning simply that God may always act differently in the future than has been the case in the past.¹ This is an example of a more process-like approach that takes the diachronic into account by leaving the future open. Rather than speaking from a point that can see the totality of processes, as Keller does, such that newness can only ever come from already ongoing processes, Polkinghorne occupies a more diachronic position that does not betray the nature of the creature and leaves open the possibility of interruption to processes rather than only development from processes. I, therefore, do not intend to rule out the possibility that rhythm, as I have here approached it, may be a useful category for projects within process theology as well. In other words, I have no desire to be prescriptive about how rhythm ought to be used along the lines of existing theological projects. My one concern has been to ensure that any use of the category is faithful to our phenomenological experience of it and to the requirements of shared Christian commitments, which includes, in particular, avoiding the theological problems of hubris and over-determination that an over-reliance on the synchronic creates. Disagreement over the nature of the rhythm will continue. My thought, however, is that identifying theologically appropriate approaches to rhythm ensures that better versions of a variety of theological projects, versions that take the diachronic seriously, will be put forward as part of this disagreement. My hope is therefore that this research breaks through some of these divisions by beginning conversations around a shared category that is nevertheless imagined differently by different groups. This task is appropriate to the double-edged nature of rhythm itself as disruptor and connector. Rhythm may be capable of disrupting the divisions according to which theological conversation has been structured while connecting diverse projects and voices to one another in new ways. If rhythm is indeed capable of this, it will do so, first, by connecting theology to its own embeddedness in particular organizations of space-time. ¹ Polkinghorne, “Kenotic Creation and Divine Action,” Polkinghorne, ed. The Work of Love: Creation as Kenosis. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B Eerdmans, 2001.

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At a time when public discourse is disintegrating all around us, becoming hardened into camps that do not constructively converse with one another but either ignore or vilify each other, opportunities for constructive theological dialogue should not be squandered. Rhythm presents such an opportunity. We should not be afraid of the interruptions, tensions, and changes that will inevitably accompany such conversations. These do not represent failures, but themselves point to the rhythmic form of reality, the same form through which God is encountered.

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Index accent 8, 31–4, 36, 66 Agamben, Giorgio 123, 146, 150, 157, 225 and Heidegger 79, 91–2 and theology 90–1, 105–10, 112–13 on art 37, 91–2 on interruption 37, 40, 59, 91–3, 97, 101, 111, 113, 115, 205 on language 100–1 on poetry 210 on rhythm 37, 91–2, 100–3, 181 on the beyond 115–20, 150 on the caesura 91, 93–4, 97, 99, 113, 115, 149 on the division of division 95–6, 209, 212 on the Homo Sacer 96 on the kairos 99, 122, 162 on the messianic 95, 112, 212–13 on the remnant 96–7, 105 alliteration 29, 36 alterity 154–5, 157, 158, 161, 164, 179, 180, 200 see also: otherness alternation 26, 31, 33–4, 43–4, 128 see also: oscillation anagogy 139, 151 analogia entis 16, 84, 151–6, 160–70, 174, 196, 214 see also: analogy analogy and Augustine 126–7, 147–8 and eschatology 209–10 and Radical Orthodoxy 136, 138–9, 144, 149 as additive prolongation 27 doctrine of 16, 152, 167, 169, 227 dynamic of 118 in Aristotle 84, 117, 147 in Przywara 16–17, 84, 119, 123–5, 149, 154–66, 165–9, 209 in Thomas Aquinas 156 intra-creaturely 117–20, 123–4, 127, 151, 154, 155, 156, 159, 161, 218 of attribution 152 of being 16, 156 of proper proportionality 152–5 suspended 160 theological 115, 117, 123–5, 125, 127, 136, 138–9, 149–51, 155, 159, 166, 218, 221, 223 see also: analogia entis

Apollo 69–71, 78 see also: rhythm, apollonian appresentation 38–9 architecture 222 flow 187 in Late Antiquity 191–3 in phenomenology 23–5, 36, 52, 73, 100 Aristotle 4, 5, 65–6, 84, 117, 141, 147, 152 arsis and thesis 31, 128 art encounter with 40, 42 in Agamben 91–2, 115 in Augustine 129–34 in Heidegger 77–80 in Kristeva 103–4 in Nietzsche 68–9, 71, 73, 75 rhythm in 13, 39, 42, 45, 56, 103–4, 168 visual 25 work of 25, 37–9, 40, 42, 44, 51, 56, 77, 91, 92 see also: jazz, music artist 77, 92 ascent 124, 139, 147 in Augustine 126, 127, 131–4 Attridge, Derek 31–3, 38 Augustine of Hippo 4, 15, 195–6 and Przywara 125–7, 146–9 interpretations of 131–5 on de musica 125, 127–31 on hierarchy 123, 129 on order 7, 128 on rhythm 17, 27, 128–31 on simultaneous creation 175–6, 178–81 social and religious context 189–90, 192–3 use in Radical Orthooxy 124–42, 125–38, 145, 147 Aviram, Amittai 9, 33, 59–60, 70 Bachelard, Gaston 10–11 Badiou, Alain 88, 107–8 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 16, 124, 161, 168 Barth, Karl 16, 150, 152, 161, 165 Baudelaire, Charles 8–9 beat 1, 5, 7, 13, 25–31, 35–6, 47, 59, 69–71, 106 heart 2, 31, 50, 51, 128 beauty 77–8, 133–4, 166 Begbie, Jeremy 3, 40, 132–3 Benveniste, Émile 5, 12, 59, 65, 69, 70, 78, 128

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246

Index

Bergson, Henri 10, 59, 62, 65 Betz, John 16, 108–9, 110–12, 152, 165 Blondel, Maurice 113–15 body and language 101, 113 in Augustine 128–31, 192–3 in movement 50, 184 in Nietzsche 70–1, 74 in society 11, 53, 183–5, 188 of Christ 191, 200, 203, 212–15, 224 rhythm experienced in the 24, 26, 31–2, 49, 70–1, 74, 113, 128 Boethius 130–1 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 165, 180–1, 184, 207 break apocalyptic 138, 206–10 in a pattern 35, 41–2, 138 in slave rhythms 54–5 in speech 47 thetic 102–4 breath 2, 7, 31, 50–1, 163, 177, 178–80 Bultmann, Rudolf 165, 204 cadence 63–4, 65, 69 caesura 106 as disruption to meaning 39, 100, 115 as interruption 41–2, 94, 113, 115, 162, 209 as nothingness 110 eschatological 210, 212, 221–2, 225 in Agamben 91, 93–4, 97–9, 100, 149 in Deleuze 63–5, 81 in Kristeva 101–4 in poetry 39, 41, 94, 163, 196 in politics and ontology 97–9 messianic 98, 108 chaos and God 83 and harmony 59, 66–7, 89, 117 in Deleuze 62–4, 66–7 in early Christian thought 175–6, 182, 194 in Heidegger 78 in Heraclitus 59, 66–7, 72 in Keller 82–3 in Nietzsche 68, 72 chora 71, 101–5, 113 church 211–26 and world 18, 199, 211–14, 216–18, 222–6 architecture 38 division 217–20 doctrine of the 125, 139–40 in Late Antiquity 191–4 in Przywara 169, 202–3, 213 in Radical Orthodoxy 139–40, 143–7 liturgy 3, 199, 214–16 cognition 34, 38

communication 1–2, 71, 222 between Creator and creation 181 in Agamben 100–1 in Augustine 192 in Autism Spectrum Disorder 48 in Deleuze 64, 68 rhythm in 48 technologies of 10 verbal 13, 48 written 5 conflict 103, 147 as metaphysical principle 73, 76–8, 80, 86 church 217, 219, 221 in patterns 11, 34, 76 in Radical Orthodoxy 136, 144–5 Congdon, David W. 165–6, 203–10, 212–13, 215 continuity 45, 62 in a rhythm 25, 29, 32–3, 74 in Robert Jenson 204–7 of tradition 215–18 contradiction 103, 119, 144, 221, 223 as metaphysical principal 67, 84–6, 148 law of non– 61, 65 see also: conflict control 208 in Heidegger 77–9 struggle for 47 using rhythm 13, 52–5, 74, 77–9, 92, 129 conversation 38, 45–50, 201, 217, 222 about rhythm 4, 10–12, 15 between God and creation 176, 197–8 theological 17, 18–19, 201, 217, 221 creation as co-extensive with God 82–3, 138–43 as other than God 87, 208 as relating to God 151–6, 163, 169, 200 biblical accounts 36, 83, 174–83 doctrine of 18, 19, 88–9, 108–13, 165, 169, 174–89, 194–9, 200–1, 206, 226 in Augustine 127, 132–4, 147–8, 189, 192–3 in Gregory of Nyssa 177, 179 in Keller 82–3, 189 in Maximus Confessor 178 in Przywara 147, 151–6 in Radical Orthodoxy 43, 138–43, 150 salvation of 201, 203, 206–7, 208–13, 222, 225 simultaneous 175–6, 178, 182 creator 82, 134, 147, 173–4, 178–9, 181, 189, 193, 196, 199 creature becoming of the 86, 108, 132, 156, 159, 194–5, 201 creation of the 176–80

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Index experience of the 115, 119, 166, 173, 183 nature of the 88, 123, 134, 157–8, 160, 182, 197, 201–3, 204–11 otherness of the 18, 160 perspective of the 88, 91, 99, 115–17, 147, 162, 164, 174, 176, 182–3, 196 relation to God 117, 120, 124–5, 139, 143, 148, 152–69, 173, 189, 197–9, 200 rhythms of the 3–4, 17–18, 86–90, 119, 124, 151, 156, 181, 201–3 salvation of the 204–11 talking about God 3, 120, 160 cross 169, 202, 208–9, 225–6 crucifixion 98, 104, 116, 201, 209 culture 5, 11, 16, 32, 53, 77, 101, 107, 144, 209, 212 relation to nature 18, 183–99, 212, 218 Cunningham, Connor 106, 110–11 Cureton, Richard 25–31, 36–7, 204 cycle 7, 51, 67, 79, 139, 184, 192, 223 dance 11, 31, 50, 53, 69–70, 79, 97, 115, 222 Deleuze, Gilles 88, 94, 145, 189 And Heidegger 77, 79, 175 and Nietzsche 12, 59, 66–8, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79 difference from Agamben 96, 102, 111, 112, 116 on chaos 63–4 on Heraclitus 66–7 on immanence 60–1, 81, 85 on repetition 63–4 on rhythm 63–6, 80 on the divine 61, 81, 85 on the fold 60–1 on the third synthesis 62–3 on virtual and actual 62 use by Keller 83–4 depression 103–5, 209 Derrida, Jacques 1, 102 Desmond, William 84, 86, 109, 154 diachronic 54, 56, 228 approach to poetry 25, 31–7, 40–1, 43, 44–5 as distinguished from synchronic 16–18 as intra–creaturely 136 in Agamben 99–100, 105, 111, 115–17, 119–20, 213 in conversation 49 in doctrines of creation 174, 182–3, 197 in doctrines of salvation 211, 220–1 in Heidegger 79, 81, 87, 89, 96 in jazz 49, 218, 220–1 in Jenson 205–6 in Marion 115

247

in Nietzsche 73, 75 in philosophy 59–60 in Przywara 149, 151, 157, 161–5, 167–9 theological significance 18, 146, 197, 211, 226 dialectic 44, 66, 84, 86, 102, 125, 145, 161, 181 dialogue, ecumenical 71, 101, 107, 217, 229 Dickinson, Colby 107, 111 Dionysus 68, 70–1 discipleship 218 disruption 60, 110, 112, 142 in African American rhythms 53–5 in Agamben 11, 98, 102 in Kristeva 105–6 in poetry 28–9, 38–9, 41–3 in Przywara 157–8, 164, 166, 205 see also: interruption, caesura dissimilarity, ever–greater 148, 153–4, 158–60, 162, 165–6, 168, 201 division 9, 45, 55, 118, 126, 136–7, 213, 228 church 215–23 in Agamben 95–8, 106, 113, 209, 213 in Deleuze 65, 69, 95 messianic 95–8, 212–14 poetic 35, 128, 189 double creation, doctrine of, see: creation, simultaneous dressage 52 duration 10, 62, 65 ek-stasis 37, 92 emanation 88, 126, 138–9, 141–2, 151 emotion 29, 32, 39, 48, 50, 64, 74 empathy 31, 48, 135 energy 32, 34, 51, 72, 85, 101 enjambment 28–9, 36, 39, 100, 163, 209 environment 38, 42, 51, 64, 184, 188, 202, 212, 217, 222 epoche 93 eschatology, doctrine of 143, 145, 150, 175, 191, 205, 209–10 eschaton 112, 139, 145, 201, 205, 209–10, 213, 217, 221 essence 76–7, 107, 184 and existence 85–7, 117, 123, 151, 154, 156, 160, 182, 202 in Przywara 117, 123, 151, 154, 156, 160, 202 of rhythm 24, 69, 186 Eucharist 144, 215, 225 everyday, the as polyrhythmia 51 as socially–constructed 90, 187 church in 213 continuous flow of 32, 40

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248 everyday, the (cont.) in Heidegger 79 interruptions to 38–9, 42, 93, 106, 110, 113, 168 life 4, 77 rhythm in 4, 17, 44, 56 speech 34, 38, 45 exception, state of 28, 96–8, 105, 132 experience 69, 150, 210, 216, 228 and doctrine 88–9 as discontinuous 13, 18 as rhythmic 19, 45, 106, 173 beyond 118 constructed nature of 188 contemporary 10 creaturely 119 diachronic 44, 65, 87, 99, 105, 151, 159, 162–4, 226 everyday 37, 110 in Agamben 91–3, 99 in Heidegger 77–80 in Kristeva 100, 104 in Marion 114–15, 117 in Nietzsche 70–3 in Przywara 157, 161, 165–6, 168 of creation 195 of interruption 47, 106, 114, 124, 208, 213 of periodicity 33–4 of relation to the divine 136, 213, 225 of space–time 184–6, 187, 189, 194 of the body 32, 51, 183 of the other 48 of the reader 28–9, 31, 34, 43–4, 196 of time 17, 31, 205–7 see also: time religious 38–9 rhythm as 90 theory posterior to 52 expression 3, 8, 50, 53–4, 59–60, 69, 138, 140–1, 156, 177 in Deleuze 61–2, 64 of emotion 32, 81 of the subject 59–60 religious 3, 81, 145, 146 rhythmic 40, 185, 215 Faith 3, 105, 152, 177–8, 235 feet, metric 31 see also: foot scansion flow 12, 112 architectures 187 ebb and 87 immanent 84 in Agamben 92–4, 97–100, 118 in Bergson 10

Index in Deleuze 61–2, 64–6 in Heidegger 76, 78–80 in Kristeva 101 in Nietzsche 69–73 interruption to 41, 87, 92, 94, 99, 101, 106, 113 of experience 10, 225 of language 39, 101, 106, 210 of life 32, 188 of time 31, 37, 40, 106, 164 outside the 125, 135, 143 rhythm as 69, 70, 92, 118 seamless 136 shared 49 stop and 105, 205 flux, see: flow form 18, 105, 117, 136, 222 absence of 108 and formlessness 179–80 architectural 191–2 art 45 as social 46, 50–1 creation as 201 deformed 202–12, 221, 225–6 diachronic 100 disruption of 112 dissolution of 110 distincive 38, 50 divine revealed through 128 dynamic 13, 141 fluid 5, 8, 10, 59, 71, 80, 87, 89–90 God as 134–3, 147 imposition of 5, 138 improvised 78, 89, 218 individual 142 in Deleuze 65–6 in Heidegger 78–9 in Nietzsche 68–73, 81 in poetry 43 in Przywara 155–8, 160–3, 166–7, 169 intra-creaturely 163, 166, 204, 214 liturgical 3, 215–16 musical 28 narrative 204–5, 210 of analogy 123–4, 152, 160–1, 166–7, 214 of church 213, 215 of experence 173 of relation 88 of salvation 214 of the ordinary 214 ontological 146 oscillating 177, 214 ordered 110, 134, 142–3 Platonic 66

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Index rhythm as 5, 46, 59–60, 78, 85, 120, 150 rhythmic 3, 9, 78, 119, 135, 166, 173, 177, 179, 181, 197, 201, 214, 223, 229 synchronic 44, 125, 151, 162 thought 143 wave 184 fourfold, the 76, 79, 80, 92 Fourth Lateran Council 153 freedom 9, 93, 115, 181, 194, 195, 208 geography 186–7, 193 sacred 190–2 God 91, 181, 223–4, 228–9 and time 40, 175–6, 204–5 as creator 127, 176–80, 182, 197 as confrontation 147, 206 as form 134–5 as interruption 124, 207, 213 as rhythm 86–7 as other 87, 134, 137, 144, 147, 155, 158, 161, 169 as the whole 87, 134, 137, 139, 144, 146 attempts to be like 201–2, 208, 213 being of 133, 153–4, 156 creation as mediating 183, 211 doctrine of 87, 123–6, 147–9, 186, 198, 212–18 encounter with 19, 88, 168–9, 199, 203, 205, 229 eternity of 204 in Deleuze 61, 81 in Heidegger 87 in Keller 82–4, 150 in Przywara 147–9, 150–63, 165–6, 168–9 in Radical Orthodoxy 137–43, 150 intimacy with 157, 161–2, 180, 212 kingdom of 206 love of 202 philosophical study of 123 power of 177 presence of 157–9, 174, 177, 180, 192, 203, 225 providence of 124, 134–5, 147, 195 relation to 3–4, 88, 117, 120, 124, 131, 140, 142, 151–69, 174, 186, 196–7, 200 revelation of 147, 169, 198, 200, 216 Spirit of 82, 178 talk about 3, 14, 17, 120 transcendence of 110, 114, 120, 124, 160, 162, 180, 190 union with 142–3, 206 unknowable 212 word of 176 Gregory of Nyssa 175–7, 179, 190

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harmony 114 absolute 139, 145 and interruption 18, 37, 39, 201, 212, 215 and rhythm 42 ecclesial- 145, 217–20 eschatological 220–1 improvising 46 in Augustine 127, 129, 131–2, 135, 192 in chaos 59, 89 in Deleuze 64, 66–7 in Gregory of Nyssa 177, 179 in Heidegger 76, 78, 80 in Heraclitus 59, 66–8 in Kristeva 105, 209 in poetry 26, 28, 36 in Przywara 158, 163, 166, 169 in strife 67–8, 78, 80, 119 maintenance of 195 of essentialism 117, 119 of narrative theology 204–5 of the synchronic 25, 26, 36, 43, 201 premature 136, 218 provisional 56 theological significance 120 visual 29 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 66, 86, 119, 124, 125, 143 hegemony 53–5, 88 Heidegger, Martin 54, 113, 115, 145 and Agamben 91–2, 111 and Benveniste 59–60, 78 and Deleuze 75, 79 and Heraclitus 76–7 and Nietzsche 73–5, 79 and Przywara 119 on art 76–7, 80 on conflict 80, 86–7 on divinity 81 on identity 86 on Nothingness 80, 86–7 on physis 76–7 on polemos 76–7 on rhythm 19, 59–60, 77–8, 79 on the fourfold 76, 79 rejection of Aristotle 66 Heraclitus 5, 66–8, 72–3, 75–8, 84–5, 96, 119 hiatus 38, 104, 209 see also: caesura, disruption, interruption hierarchy 123, 125, 138, 142 history 11–12, 107, 166, 193, 195, 220–1 and eschatology 210 God’s engagement with 125, 147, 193 in Oliver 141–3 of analogy 167 of liturgy 216

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history (cont.) of rhythm 4–15 of slavery 53 of the church 221 theological importance of 145, 147 Hölderlin, Friedrich 92–4, 101 Homo Sacer 96–8 hope 88, 203, 216, 225–6 spaces for 97, 99, 104–5, 110 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 15, 26, 36, 41 horizontal 11, 16, 61, 214 Husserl, Edmund 10, 93 identity 6, 61, 102, 162, 203, 222, 225–6 and contradiction 84–7 and difference 62, 138 bodily 50 Christian 194, 212 contesting 53–5 formation 222, 225 group 12, 17, 53, 55 in Deleuze 61–2, 66 in Nietzsche 67 individual 12, 110 self-enclosed 64, 162, 201, 206, 226 through change 6 imitation 48, 102, 149 immanence 118–20, 142, 155, 162, 180, 201 in Agamben 98, 116–17 in Blondel 113–17 in Deleuze 60–7, 75, 79, 81, 85 theological critique of 109 transcending 118–20, 157–60, 162, 201 improvisation 9, 37, 54–6, 188–9, 228 jazz 45–50, 218–22 incarnation and creation 174–5, 178, 198 and rhythm 127 and violence 144 as caesura 209 as revelation 169, 226 diachronicity and 174 doctrine of: 190–1, 200–2 historical 165–6, 170, 193, 195, 201, 226 in Agamben 107 in Augustine 127 in Keller 82, 84, 146 in Milbank 146 in Przywara 155, 161, 202 indistinction, zone of 96–8, 101, 112, 115 interruption 45, 194 and harmony 18, 56 as diachronic 43, 59, 162 as part of the whole 60, 65, 81 as rhythmic 60, 90, 106, 209 empty 110, 119–20

eschatological 149, 203–6, 208–11 existential 207–8 God as 124 in Agamben 92, 94–5, 97, 99, 115–17 in Deleuze 65 in Heidegger 79 in Kristeva 101–5 in Nietzsche 60 in poetry 37–42, 113, 163–4 in Przywara 158, 162, 164–6, 168, 201 incarnation as 84 see also: incarnation, as interruption the foreclosure of 83, 88, 135–6, 142, 144, 146 to experience 87, 106, 113–14 to the subject 70, 91, 101–5, 110 transcendence as 116, 151 see also: caesura, disruption, hiatus intimacy 154, 161 and alterity 155, 157, 164, 179–81, 200 in Heidegger 77 of God with creation 134 of indwelling transcendence 162 with the divine 18 James, William 10 jazz 45–6, 219–21 Jenson, Robert 176, 203–5, 207–8, 210 Jesus Christ 83, 226 and church 144, 207, 215 as deformed form 209, 212 as mediator 138, 151, 225 as revelation 40, 147, 198, 202, 216 body of 136, 191, 200, 212, 224 confrontation by 222, 225 death of 104–5, 116, 148, 202–3 form of 203, 208, 212 in Agamben 108 in Augustine 126 in Przywara 202 in Radical Orthodoxy 144 incarnation of 107, 165, 169, 191, 200, 202, 207, 213 redemption through 175, 202, 206 resurrection of 205, 224 suffering of 203, 208 see also: cross, crucifixion, incarnation kairos 98, 99, 112, 162 Keller, Catherine 82–4, 87–8, 146, 150, 177, 186, 189, 193, 195–6, 224, 228 kenosis 139, 228 kerygma 215 knowledge 196, 220 analogy as 156 and creation 176

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Index and experience 24, 51, 168, 225 and music 130 in Agamben 114–17 of God 124, 181 of forgiveness 105 of rhythm 24, 51, 202 proper to philosophy 113 Kristeva, Julia 59, 60, 71, 78, 90–1, 100–6, 109, 112–13, 209 kymograph 6–7, 9, 17, 30–3 Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillipe 1, 59–60, 94, 102, 132 language 2–4, 107, 216, 217 analogy of 152 as embodied 11, 31, 163 common 224, 227 everyday use 45, 96, 106, 185 in Agamben 93–4, 99, 100–1 in Heidegger 75–8 in Kristeva 102–5 in Nietzsche 73–5 in poetry 8–9, 32, 38–9, 45, 49 rhythm in 13, 24 Late Antiquity 189–94 Latour, Bruno 223–4 Lefebvre, Henri 12, 14, 51–3, 59, 64, 183, 185 life 2, 72, 111, 204, 215, 223 affirmation of 68 bdoyy as medium of 50 eternal 131, 149, 159 everyday 4, 17, 32, 37–8, 42, 44–5, 49, 51, 56, 90, 187, 213 see also: everyday, the forces of 73 In Bergson 65 in Blondel 113–14 intellectual 53, 95, 192 interrupted 97 modern 8 of Christ 104, 203 of the creature 117, 143, 168, 177 pre-linguistic 101 religious 95, 191 rhythms of 42, 151, 193 sciences 6–7, 10 social 11, 53, 95, 192 temporal 129–30 trinitarian 124, 143 way of 1, 108 whole of 192 light 37, 92, 126, 157, 178–81 electric 184 waves 2 liturgy 3, 108, 136, 176, 224–5, 228 earl Christian 182–3 diversity of 215–16

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logoi 178 Logos 83 eternal 124, 178–80 incarnation of 142, 174 in Heidegger 77, 81, 86 in Heraclitus 67, 85 machine 101, 105 Auschwitz as 98, 116 graphing 6–7, 9 ontology as 96–8 poem as 210 political 96, 100, 146 rhythms of 51, 53, 100, 106 Mallarmé, Stéphan 8 Marion, Jean-Luc 111, 114–16, 168, 209, 215, 225 Mauss, Marcel 10–11, 16 Maximus the Confessor 175, 178 mediation 86, 144, 198 actor network theory 223 as totalized 144 by Christ 138, 224–6 by rhythm 41 by the soul 131 God as 138 in phenomenology 23 lack of 107 through logos 179 memory 30, 51 in Augustine 129, 133, 147–8 in Deleuze 62 working 34–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 23–4, 30, 43, 52, 183, 185–6, 200 Meschonnic, Henri 5, 12–14, 33, 59, 64, 66, 69 metaphysics 7 apriori 125 Aristotelian 66 Heraclitean 119, 124, 145, 150 hierarchical 123, 137, 145 intra-creaturely 119 of Augustine 128 of Deleuze 60, 66, 68, 88, 101, 108, 189 of presence 168 of Radical Orthodoxy 3, 123 rejection of 165–6, 206 rhythm of 155, 160 theological 124 meter 25–37, 59, 128–9 metronome 44 Michon, Pascal 17, 33, 64, 66, 78, 94, and Benveniste 5, 12 and Mauss 11–12 and subjectivity 90 and theology 115

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Michon, Pascal (cont.) approach to rhythm 15, 37 on Augustine 127–32, 148–9 on meter 31, 33, 106 on Nietzsche 70, 73–5 on Platonic and pre-Socratic rhythms 30, 31, 37, 56, 60, 69 on poetry 8–9 on the history of rhythm studies 4–14 middle 29, 56, 77, 153, 155, 210 as the soul 129 broken 145 fluctuating 84 in analogy 138, 153, 155 suspended 138 way 18, 150 Milbank, John 106–7, 109–12, 132, 136–9, 141–6, 149–50, 162, 213 Milton, John 3, 35–7, 41 moment 101, 197, 221 eschatological 210, 212 eucharistic 215 historically determined 111, 221 in Agamben 98, 100, 111, 210 in Nietzsche 73 in Przywara 160, 164, 169 in the 41, 221 initial 52 kairological 98, 100, 111 of creation 175, 178, 182 of exchange 208 of harmony 158 of interruption 42, 94, 144, 157–8, 210 of revelation 144 of vision 44 timeless 204–5, 207 momentum 4–5, 14, 26, 36, 41 movement 2, 9, 109 between perspectives 18 circling 140–1 conventions of 187–8 creaturely 120, 158–60, 166, 182, 201–3, 207, 222 deification of 87 diachronic 115 disordered 131, 141–2 double 93, 182 downward 119, 124, 148, 159 ecclesial 215, 224–5 economy of 174 ecstatic 159 free 157, 168, 194, 208, 211, 213, 222 hegemonic 209 historical 140–1, 149 in Agamben 93, 96, 99–100 in Augustine 127–9, 131–5

in Bergson 10, 62, 65 in Deleuze 60–6 in Heidegger 76, 79 in Kristeva 101–3, 106 in Nietzsche 69–70, 72–4 in phenomenology 23–4, 25 in poetry 25–8, 30–4, 38–45, 163, 218 in Przywara 151, 153, 155–63, 165–8 in Radical Orthodoxy 138–46 layers of 41–3, 51 non-rhythmic 44–5 of analogy 120 of becoming 61, 83, 167 of change 111, 115 of creation 183, 186, 208–9 of difference 138–9 of energy 85, 101 of experience 3 of God 141, 158, 159, 160 of interruption 103, 117 of opposition 201 of salvation 209, 211–13 of strategy 212 of the body 6, 32, 49–50, 69–70, 74, 183 of the soul 110 ontological 140–1, 149 oscillating 26, 28, 34, 62, 180 see also: oscillation rational 128 representation of 7 rhythmic 113, 128, 166–8, 181, 193 sequence of 5 teleological 26, 28, 41, 120 transcending 118, 163 unfolding 144 upward 124, 148 wave-like 184 music 32, 93, 188, 204, 209 Dionysian 69, 71 from out of slavery 53–5 in Augustine 127–35 jazz 46–7 movement of 32 Nancy, Jean-Luc 10, 59, 65, 109 narrative 104, 175, 180, 187 biblical 88 creation 83, 174–5, 179 salvation 88, 125 theology 204–5, 207, 210 nature 177, 206 and culture 18, 183, 189, 192, 195, 197–9, 212, 218 and the feminine 101 as physis 76, 79 human 165–7

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Index in Augustine 130, 135, 142 in Nietzsche 69–70 rhythms of 9 Neoplatonism 88, 126, 129–30, 132, 138 network 56, 188–91, 221–4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 12, 78–81, 87, 108, 145 and Deleuze 59–75, 77 and Heidegger 77–8 on Heraclitus 67–8 on rhythm 69–75 on the Apollonian 69–75, 78 on the Dionysian 68–75 on the eternal return 66–8, 72 nihilism 86, 144 nothingness 109–10, 114, 132 of creation 147, 157, 159, 169, 202–3 number 5–8, 59, 92, 118, 145, 147, 152, 223 creation of 176, 181 in Augustine 127–33, 135, 141–2, 189, 193 rhythm as 5–6, 59, 92 numerus 127–30 see also: number Oliver, Simon 136, 140–2, 144, 147, 149–50 ontology 93, 128, 156, 189, 195, 197, 214 Agamben and 95–7, 100, 111–14 and politics 95–7, 140, 213–14 Deleuzian 61, 66, 111 Heideggerian 77, 111 Musical 135, 136–7, 139–40, 145, 148–9, 163 Nietzschian 73, 75 opposition 9, 46, 174, 213, 223 between God and creature 110, 154, 208 between immanent and transcendent 123, 150 between meter and rhythm 31 between Platonic, and pre-Socratic 10, 15, 37, 69 between time and eternity 203–4, 207 Dionysian affirmation of 68, 73 God as beyond 158 harmony in 59, 64, 67–9, 85, 135 improvising through 54 in Agamben 95–7, 112 in Deleuze 64–6 in Heidegger 76–7, 80 in Nietzsche 68–73 in Radical Orthodoxy 137–8, 141–2, 146–7 ontology of 95–7, 101 principle of 81, 88 system of 154 transcendence of 110

253

order 61, 110, 112, 166, 177, 182, 191, 194 Apollonian 71 created 134–6 divine law of 67, 71 fear of 194 imposition of 137 in Augustine 128–35 in Plato 5 in Radical Orthodoxy 136–8, 141–3, 146–7, 149 natural 133, 142, 147 of antithises 86 of movement 50 of society 53 of the body 30, 128 rational 132 symbolic 102–3 temporal 132, 134–5, 149 ordinary, the 97, 202–9, 214–16, 221–6 Orthodoxy, Radical 85, 123, 132, 136–49, 150 oscillation 51, 54, 94 between actuality and potentiality 120 between and essence and existenc 117, 154 between number and flow 118 between one and many 143, 147 between stop and flow 40, 49 between synchronic and diachronic 44, 151, 162, 164–5 diachronic 105, 158 ecclesial 214–17, 222, 225–6 experience of 34, 161, 164 God as 82 in analogy 118, 151, 154–5, 160 in Augustine 128 in creation 174, 176–7, 180–2 in Deleuze 64, 82 in poetry 34 in Przywara 151, 154–6, 158, 160–5, 167 of attention 164 of beat 1, 2–27 of body 51, 163 of physis 76 see also: alterity of the creature 156, 160–1, 164, 167, 213 otherness 88, 110, 120 between creature and God 18, 144, 154–5, 161, 164–6 interruptive 87, 110 of rupture 114 within immanence 109 see also: alterity Pabst, Adrian 136, 142–4, 147, 149–50 panentheism 82–3 pantheism 125–6, 144–5

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254

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paratext 186–9, 194 patience 162, 202–6, 221 pattern 7 African American approaches to 54–6 church as 215–16 creation as 97–8, 174–6, 180–4, 194–5, 207–9 cultural 51, 216, 222 diachronic experience of 162, 164 disruption to 41–3, 102, 105, 162, 164 for movement 18 in Autism Spectrum Disorders 48–9 in poetry 26–30, 34–5, 37–9, 162–6 of shapes 25, 41 repetitive 48, 63 rhythmic 34, 35, 41, 46–7, 55, 164 salvation as 201, 207, 209 social 51 synchronic 43, 45, 162, 176, 182, 194 visual 34, 39, 129 wave 4, 24, 84 Paul, the Apostle 95, 107–9, 112 pause, see: caesura; break peace 136–7, 139, 144–5, 150, 217 performance 3, 17, 35–6, 43, 46, 54, 74, 196–7, 218 diachronic 43, 164 liturgical 183, 215, 220–2 musical 46, 49–50, 130, 219–22 of a poem 30, 35–6, 46, 49 temporal 42, 50, 131 periodicity 8–9, 40, 43, 65 and Plato’s rhythm 59, 74, 82, 90 cycles 7, 184 in poetry 25–6, 30–7, 128 phenomenology 12, 23–4, 52, 168 phonautograph 6–7, 9 physis 66, 73, 76–8, 81 Pickstock, Catherine 3, 107, 132–6, 139, 225 pilgrimage 189–91 Plath, Sylvia 29 Plato 16, 66, 119, 138, 147 and periodicity 31, 37, 59, 69, 74, 82 influence on Augustine 6, 123, 126–7, 129–31, 149 metaphysics since 108 on dance 53 on rhythm 4–6 on the chora 71, 141 opposition to pre–Socratic 4–6, 10, 12, 59, 69, 90 world-soul 140–1 poetics, cognitive 28, 34–6, 105 poetry 24 as metaphor 16, 55, 183, 195–8, 218

end of 210, 213 free verse 8–9, 26, 29, 33–5 in Agamben 93–4, 97, 99, 111–12 in Augustine 128, 131 in Kristeva 105 in Nietzsche 75 modern 6–9 performance of 35–6, 46, 49–50 rhythm of 25–37, 43–5, 49, 56, 205, 210 polarity 26, 225 in analogy 64, 115–19, 160–1 in Deleuze 61–8 in synchronic prosody 26 of night and day 181 of the fourfold 79, 92 polemos 76–7, 79, 81 potentiality 83, 85, 119, 120, 182 in Agamben 97, 106, 108, 111–12, 120 in analogy 124, 151–67 power 14, 51–2, 76, 78, 149, 156, 187, 206, 217 in weakness 95 of God 76–9, 149 of rhythms 56, 70, 101 of the state 96, 98 ontology of 66 pre-Socratics 4–6, 60, 74 process cognitive 28–9, 34, 49 God as 61, 67, 81–2, 87, 150 in Heraclitus 68 in Nietzsche 74 interruption to 94, 99 of becoming 101–2 of church 213, 221 of civilizing 53, 192–4 of conversation 46, 94, 100 of creation 82–4, 179, 208 of harmony from strife 67, 78 of history 111 of improvisation 46, 198 of negation 144 of the body 2, 49, 51 ontological 106 reality as 66, 68 rhythm as 33, 36, 46 salvation as 192, 200–1, 221 semiotic 103–4 theology 82–4, 87–8, 186, 228 prolongation 26–8 prosody 13, 35, 103–4, 189 Protestant 165, 215, 219 providence 133–5, 141, 147, 189, 195 Przywara, Erich 82, 115, 133, 136, 179, 227 and Barth 16 on analogy 17–18, 151–2, 154–64, 165–70

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Index on Augustine 125–7, 146–9 on Heraclitus 84–7 on intra-creaturely analogy 117–20, 151, 177, 182 on non-contradiction 86–7 on salvation 201–3, 208–14 on theological analogy 123–5, 151, 177 on theopanism 124, 144 on tradition 217 on transcending immanent 118, 120 use of rhythm 16, 117–20, 151–2, 154–64, 165–70 psychoanalysis 10, 104 pulse 2, 7, 40, 46, 70 see also: beat Rahner, Karl 16, 217, 220–2 redemption 88, 104, 120, 175, 178, 192, 200–3, 206, 211 regularity 5, 26, 33, 37, 42, 70, 82 see also: continuity remnant 95–7, 105 repetition 8–9, 26, 30, 51, 72, 81, 136, 210 imitative 48 in Deleuze 62–7, 78–9, 102 liturgical 174 pure 10, 44 ritual 174 temporal 30 visual 1 resonance 24, 39, 52, 110, 174–5, 189 between art and subject 39 between, layers 135 in phenomenology 24, 52 of divinity 110 return, eternal 65–8, 72–5, 81, 145 rhuthmos 5–6, 8–10, 15, 64, 70, 75, 94, 128 rhyme 1, 29, 32, 35, 37 rhythm, Apollonian 69–74, 78, 81 rhythm, Dionysian 68–74, 77, 81, 101 rhythm, semiotic 46, 71, 101–5 rhythmanalysis 51 rhythmicization 92, 127, 158, 162 ritual 3, 11–12, 174, 214–15 Rose, Gillian 35, 144–5 rupture 39, 83, 101, 144 as distinct from interruption 39, 113–14 as false transcendence 109–10 in Congdon 207–10 in Kristeva 103–4, 162 salvation 89 and remnant 97 as ascent 126 as goal of life 120, 129 as interruptive 209–10

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as process 134, 200–1, 221 as rhythmic 214, 222, 226 doctrine of 18–19, 200–1, 209–11, 221–6 economy of 128, 138, 179, 194 experience of 88, 137 in Agamben 107 in Congdon 205–8 in Jenson 204–5 in Przywara 201–3 in Radical Orthodoxy 134, 137, 139, 141 through confrontation 224–5 through identification 104, 224–2 scansion, foot 31–2 science 6–7, 9, 14, 130–1 shape 66 improvised 145 in Nietzsche 75 in Heidegger 76, 78 liturgical 215 mediating 43 of animals 184 of experience 184 of music 46 of poetry 9 of rhythm 226 rhythm as 5, 7, 11, 25, 30, 185 Son as 177 supplied by mind 44 vertical 37, 162 visual 29–30 silence 130, 148, 150, 209, 210 simultaneity 31, 34, 56, 175–8, 182 simultaneous creation. see creation, double sin 88, 126, 134–5, 147, 201–2, 208–9, 213 slavery 53–4, 97–8 society 6, 9, 72, 130, 188, 196, 209, 212 and rhythm 11, 52–3, 56, 196 urban 9 Western 4 soul, the 8, 61, 110, 147, 149, 156, 193 in Augustine 128–33 world- 140–1 space 2, 4, 131–2, 139, 211 ambiguous 91, 105, 107, 110 and time 99, 169 cognitive 34–5 creation of 176, 178, 180–99 disruptive 110 empty 110 experience of 38, 184–5, 187 formed by culture 184 geographical 189 in Agamben 107, 110 in communication 48

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256 space (cont.) in Deleuze 61, 63 in Kristeva 113 in music 40, 47 in Nietzsche 72 in phenomenology 23–4 maternal 101 new 225 of hope 97, 105 of power 96 organization of 23, 28, 52, 127, 188, 191, 193–4, 196 originary 92 public 188 sacred 189–90, 192–3 semiotic 101 -time 203, 211, 214, 218–19, 222–3, 226–8 to open 54–5, 93–5, 97, 99–100, 102–3, 112, 149, 162, 177, 204 two-dimensional 7 unify 192 speech 2, 53 and the subject 101–2 everyday 32, 34, 38 measurement of 6–7 of God 149, 177–80 poetic 8 rhythmic 11, 24, 46–8 Spirit, Holy 66, 82–3, 147, 177–9, 204, 212, 215 stress 31–5, 47, 70, 189 see also: accent strife 66–8, 71–2, 74, 76, 78–81, 85–6, 111, 146 struggle, see: strife subject, the 39, 43, 64, 80–1, 98, 115, 162 and slavery 53–4 becoming 101–3 Christ as paradigm of 104 experience of 9–91, 71, 100, 105–6, 114 expression of 59–60 ground of 109 interruption to 59, 78, 110, 160, 162 speech of the 38, 100 sublime, the 108–14 suffering 88, 104, 203, 209 surprise 39–40, 43, 115, 205, 210 syllable 26, 28, 31–3, 36, 47, 128 synchronic and diachronic 1, 18, 59–60, 151 approach to creation 173–83, 194, 196, 200, 206 approach to church 217, 220, 224 approaches to poetry 25–31, 34–7, 41–4, 56

Index disruption to 162 form 59–60, 125, 151 in Augustine 135, 149 in Deleuze 65 in Jenson 204 in Keller 88–9 in Nietzsche 75 in Przywara 161–8 theological analogy 124 theological assessment 87, 151 syntax 13, 26, 34, 36, 104, 184 technology 184 tension 18, 26, 30, 32, 34–5, 66, 190, 227 between essence and existence 117, 123 ecclesial 218–21 experienced in time 165 harmonization of 195 in Augustine 133–6, 143, 145, 148–9 in doctrine of salvation 203, 210, 211, 215 in Przywara 152, 158, 161, 164, 201 in rhythm 43 oscillating 152, 158 resolution of 35 with culture 216 see also: oscillation, alternation, disruption theopanism 124–7, 137, 144 Thomas Aquinas 141, 156 threshold 99, 108 time 2–3, 12, 201, 210, 215–16 and eschaton 210 and eternity 167, 175, 178–91, 182, 204 and space 52, 169, 176, 178 change across 56, 220 ecclesial 224 encounter in 23–41, 43, 165 experience of 24, 29, 37, 41, 43, 205, 207 flow of 10, 31, 40, 106, 118 in Agamben 91–5, 98–100, 111–13 in Augustine 127–9, 131–4 in Deleuze 62–3, 65, 67 in Heidegger 76, 78 in Jenson 204–5 in Kristeva 101, 104–5 in music 46, 50 in Nietzsche 69, 70, 72, 75 in phenomenology 23–4, 51–2 in poetry 9, 29–30, 33–4, 38, 42–3, 45 in Przywara 148–9, 159, 161, 163–5, 167, 169 in Radical Orthodoxy 138–40, 146 inescapability of 44 liturgical 136 messianic 98, 212–13 organizaion of 11, 190–1

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Index real 36, 50, 164, 221 space- 180–9, 192–200, 218–19, 222–3, 226–8 spatializing 7, 99–100 unfolding of 45, 49, 125 totalitarianism 97, 194 transcendence as an illusion 61 counterfeit 108–9 divine 120, 124, 133, 140, 180, 182, 201 double 163 empty 110 immanent 113–18, 123, 157, 160 in Agamben 98–9, 113–18, 123 in Jenson 205 in poetry 39 in Przywara 155, 161 in Radical Orthodoxy 142–4 indwelling 157, 160, 162 interruptive 114 metaphysics without 82–3, 137 self- 87, 109–10 transformation 145, 193, 216, 222, 224 Trinity, doctrine of 3, 83, 136, 138, 141, 143 Tsur, Reuven 28, 34–9, 41 unity 93, 181 absolute 124 as rhythm 101 disjointed 210 ecclesial 220–1 God as 154 in Aristotle 117–18 in Augustine 132, 134–6 in Deleuze 61, 65–7 in difference 138–9 in Heidegger 77, 81 in Kristeva 103–5 in Nietzsche 72–3 in Przywara 147, 154–6, 163–4 in Radical Orthodoxy 138–9, 142–3 instrument for 216–17 internal 87 of creation 177, 182 of life 50

257 of the transcendent 127 provisional 55 rupture of 103, 105 striving for 84 see also: continuity

vertical 11, 16, 26, 30, 36, 138, 143, 192, 214 vibration 52, 63, 64, 93 violence 93, 98, 111, 113, 136–9, 144–5, 225 wave 4, 5, 6, 12, 13, 24, 61, 68–9, 70, 76, 184 whole, the 50, 109, 125, 192, 220, 222, 227 absolutized as 119 and Agamben 111, 117 and part 138, 157 circumscribe 174 deification of 80–1, 106 immanent 87 in Augustine 133–5 in dance 50 in Deleuze 61, 63, 65–6 in Heidegger 76–7, 79–80, 90–3 in Heraclitus 80, 85–9, 92, 119 in Keller 82, 83 in Nietzsche 71, 72, 75 in Przywara 160, 162–5, 167–70 in Radical Orthodoxy 136, 138, 140, 144–6, 150–1 in Thomas 156 interruption to 37 map of 28 network as 223 of Being 80 of creation poem as 29, 35, 39, 44 reality as 60, 81–2, 86, 164, 196 rhythm as 25, 41–2, 183, 219 salvation of the 97 unified 83, 213 universe as 177 viewed from outside 60 Williams, Rowan 48, 144, 217, 224–5 worship 3, 19, 82, 174, 191