Satan and Apocalypse: And Other Essays in Political Theology 1438466749, 9781438466743

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1 Satan and Apocalypse: A Renewal of Milton and Spinoza
Chapter 2 The Transfiguration of Christianity
Chapter 3 The Absolute Heterodoxy of William Blake
Chapter 4 Nietzsche and Apocalypse
Chapter 5 America and the Death of God
Chapter 6 Joyce and the Christian Epic Tradition
Chapter 7 Revolutionary Apocalypse
Chapter 8 Political Theology: An Apology
Epilogue
Index

Citation preview

Satan and Apocalypse

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SUNY series in Theology and Continental Thought Douglas L. Donkel, editor

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Satan and Apocalypse And Other Essays in Political Theology

Thomas J. J. Altizer

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Cover print by William Blake / Jerusalem, Plate 39, “Satans Watch-fiends.....” (1804–1820). Relief etching printed in orange with pen and black ink and watercolor, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2017 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu Production, Diane Ganeles Marketing, Anne M. Valentine Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Altizer, Thomas J. J., author. Title: Satan and Apocalypse : and other essays in political theology / Thomas J. J. Altizer. Description: Albany : State University of New York, 2017. | Series: SUNY series in theology and Continental thought | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016051107 (print) | LCCN 2017039322 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438466743 (e-book) | ISBN 9781438466736 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438466729 (paperback) Subjects: LCSH: Apocalyptic literature–History and criticism. | Philosophical theology. | Postmodernism–Religious aspects–Christianity. | Political theology. | Devil. Classification: LCC BS646 (ebook) | LCC BS646 .A48 2017 (print) | DDC 220/.046–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051107 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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For Bill Eastman Our Greatest Publisher

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Contents

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Chapter 1

Satan and Apocalypse: A Renewal of Milton and Spinoza

1

Chapter 2

The Transfiguration of Christianity

35

Chapter 3

The Absolute Heterodoxy of William Blake

47

Chapter 4

Nietzsche and Apocalypse

57

Chapter 5

America and the Death of God

73

Chapter 6

Joyce and the Christian Epic Tradition

85

Chapter 7

Revolutionary Apocalypse

95

Chapter 8

Political Theology: An Apology

103

Epilogue

113

Index

115

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Preface

A

s a theologian committed to apocalyptic theology, and being virtually alone as such, my quest has been to integrate modern revolutionary apocalyptic enactments with the apocalypse originally enacted by Jesus and primitive Christianity. This is an apocalypse that has been wholly lost apart from our most revolutionary movements, but renewed in such movements, even if wholly transformed in all given or established Christianity. Revolution, or an absolute revolution, can be understood as a renewal of apocalypse, as deeply enacted by Blake and Hegel, and this is the revolution that is reversed in a uniquely modern counter-revolution, one dominating the world today. There have been revolutionary movements throughout our history, and their absence now is an ultimate void for us, one filled by truly pathological movements, although we have little understanding of this pathology. One decisive way into this pathology is through the uniquely Christian epic, as most profoundly given us by Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce, no fully critical understanding of this epic has yet been given us, but this has been the arena of my most fundamental work. It is odd that there is so little investigation of epic in our literary scholarship, and virtually none of the Christian epic, it is as though this is a forbidden topic, and one harboring truly subversive forces, forces discovered by both Blake and Nietzsche. Blake and Nietzsche can be identified as our greatest modern prophets, but only if prophecy itself is given a new meaning, and even a genuinely revolutionary meaning. Nietzsche could know the prophetic revolution as the slave revolt in morality, and perhaps it is our deepest slave revolt, one absolutely reversing everything whatsoever. Yet only such a reversal makes apocalypse possible, an apocalypse that is an absolute reversal, and an absolute reversal of a totally fallen

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PREFACE

world. Hence an absolute Yes and an absolute No are inseparable in genuine apocalypticism, as can be observed not only in the canonical prophets, but in the New Testament itself. Our given establishments were not foolish in once forbidding a reading of the Bible, or a reading of the Bible apart from all established interpretation, a reading that led not only to the Reformation, but to an initiation of modern revolution itself. This can most concretely be observed in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, one that initiated modern revolution, releasing forces that all too decisively transformed the world. Milton is the greatest spokesman of that revolution, giving us in Paradise Lost our greatest revolutionary epic, an epic that is profoundly enlarged by Blake and Joyce. Satan and Apocalypse attempts to understand this revolution, and while this can only be an all too partial attempt, it is nonetheless a genuine venture. It is sustained not only by a lifetime of work in this arena, but by numerous friends and associates, too numerous to name here. There is a vast literature in this arena, far more than I could possibly master, but there is an enormous potentiality here, which hopefully will continue to be explored.

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Acknowledgments

G

rateful acknowledgment is made to the original publishers for their permission to reprint the following material: An earlier version of Chapter Three was published as “The Revolutionary Vision of William Blake” in The Journal of Religious Ethics, 37, 1 (March 2009): 33–38. Chapter 4 appeared in New Nietzsche Studies, 4, 3/4 (2000/2001): 1–14. Chapter 5 appeared in This Silence Must Now Speak: Letters of Thomas J. J. Altizer, 1995–2015 (London, UK: Palgrave Macmillian, 2016), 233–241. The author would also like to offer his deep gratitude to Andrew Kenyon, Christopher Ahn, and Diane Ganeles of State University of New York Press for their excellent and professional editorial assistance in bringing this book to its final form. I would also like to thank Jean Middleton for compiling such a comprehensive index.

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Chapter 1 Satan and Apocalypse A Renewal of Milton and Spinoza

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erhaps the most famous judgment of the political theorist, Leo Strauss, published in the Preface to the second edition of his book on Spinoza’s Tractatus, is that Spinoza’s refutation of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch dissolved the deepest foundation of order and authority in the West. Spinoza was the most hated philosopher in history because he was commonly apprehended as our deepest and purest atheist, and even today we know him as the first powerful assailant of what Heidegger knew as ontotheology. Spinoza is the only great philosopher to whom Heidegger never refers, just as Spinoza is only engaged by our most radical thinkers. So, too, and despite his sacred and canonical status, Milton is perhaps our most radical theologian, and the one who most fully conjoins Biblical and systematic theology, and who without any question is our greatest Biblical or sacred poet and visionary. Although it may appear to be impossible to conjoin or unite Milton and Spinoza, their very pairing evokes a revolutionary power that is overwhelming, and above all calls forth the possibility of a total revolutionary enactment. This is a possibility that has again and again been called forth by apocalyptic traditions, and if at this point they are widely understood to be wholly illusory, this is nonetheless an enlivening illusion, and one embodied in much of our greatest art. Spinoza is seemingly the most anti-imaginative of all thinkers, but his radical thinking ungrounds everything that is not absolutely necessary, and thus opens the way for an imaginative totality, or the very totality realized in our greatest art. 1

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“Totality” is an alien and oppressive word to a great many, as witness the very word “totalitarian,” but Spinoza can be understood as the most ultimate opponent of such totality, and as that philosopher whose thinking is purest in this perspective. Milton, on the other hand, would appear to be that poet who is most polluted by totality, or who most embodies an alien totality, as so decisively manifest in a uniquely Miltonic Satan. Yet the conquering of that Satan is an ultimate victory otherwise impossible, just as the horror of Milton’s Hell is inseparable from the ecstasy of his Heaven, thus Milton along with Blake is a genuinely dialectical visionary. This is very rare, indeed, and is apparently limited to our very greatest art. Here, Milton can be conjoined with Shakespeare, and if that is not possible for Blake, it is the Miltonic Blake who is our greatest visionary of Satan. Perhaps Blake is that artist who is most distant from Spinoza, which itself is illuminating of Spinoza, who can be known as our most iconoclastic thinker, and precisely thereby a Biblical thinker. If Milton appears to be the very opposite of an iconoclast, he is nonetheless the most Biblical of poets, and so Biblical indeed as to be beyond our Biblical theologians. It is fascinating that Milton has been accepted as such by so many devout Christians, thus giving Milton a sacred status shared by no other poet or visionary, and if this has occurred far more in America than in England, this is evidence of a Christian America that is otherwise invisible. Nothing is more elusive or more baffling or more mysterious than the death of God, just as nothing so challenges biblical hermeneutics as does the Crucifixion, here ensues that absolute paradox that so fascinated Kierkegaard, and that he could know as the deepest center of Christianity. Paul is the primal theologian of the Crucifixion, and the original Paul is the apocalyptic Paul, who could celebrate the Crucifixion as the inauguration of apocalypse, a celebration fully paralleled in the Fourth Gospel. Theology was not even open to these celebrations until the twentieth century, an openness made possible by the historical realization of the death of God in the nineteenth century, one bringing Christendom to an end, an ending that was the most ultimate crisis that Christianity has ever faced. Yet how is it possible to celebrate the death of God? Is this not the most awesome event that has ever occurred, one releasing an absolute abyss, ushering in a uniquely modern nihilism, and shattering all foundations, hence making possible the advent of the horrors of totalitarianism? Yet our primal modern prophets, Blake and Nietzsche,

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do celebrate the death of God, and celebrate it as an absolute liberation, a genuine renewal of that crucifixion that realized resurrection, and Blake and Nietzsche are our primal modern enactors of resurrection, and not a resurrection of the “soul,” but a resurrection of the body that is the resurrection of the Body. Here, there occurs once again a uniquely Biblical coincidentia oppositorum, a dialectical identity of an absolute Yes and an absolute No, as the abyss and chaos of the death of God releases apocalypse itself, an apocalypse that Nietzsche named as Eternal Recurrence and Blake named as the New Jerusalem. Now it is important to understand a uniquely Biblical prophecy, one created by the prophetic revolution of the eighth century B.C.E., a revolution that as Nietzsche affirms in the Genealogy of Morals turned the world upside down, high becomes low and low becomes high, up becomes down and down becomes up, as not only is an established world absolutely uprooted, but a void is thereby created demanding an absolutely new world, as apocalypse is enacted for the first time. Second and Third Isaiah are the purest ancient prophets of apocalypse, and theirs are the prophecies that had the deepest impact on the New Testament, even as the New Testament is the most apocalyptic of all Scriptures. Yet there then occurred one of the most ultimate of all historical transformations, as a primitive and apocalyptic Christianity was transformed into a Hellenistic and imperial Christianity, that apocalyptic Kingdom of God that Jesus had enacted and proclaimed becomes an absolutely primordial God or Godhead, one who is not breaking into the present from the future but who can be reached not by an opening to a revolutionary future but only by an absolute eternal return, an eternal return both to a primordial God and a primordial Christ. Kierkegaard was not alone in so deeply thinking that an original Christianity absolutely reversed itself, even the young Heidegger in his quest for a primal Christianity deeply believed this, as have innumerable artists and visionaries. This is the context in which there occurs a wholly new quest for Jesus, one occurring outside the Church and the Christian tradition, although it occurs in Catholic circles, too, for a radical Catholicism had been born in the Middle Ages, and most fully so in Dante. Dante created the Christian epic, one embodied most powerfully in Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce, and one ever more fully apocalyptic as it evolved, just as it is ever more decisively and comprehensively

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an enactment of the death of God. Here, we can most clearly see the full conjunction of apocalypse and the death of God, most cryptically and most comprehensively in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but most gloriously and profoundly in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem, most purely and fully in Paradise Lost, and most prophetically and ecstatically in the Commedia. If only through the Christian epic can we understand the death of God not only as an ultimate ground but as the ultimate destiny of Christianity, and one continually and ever more comprehensively enacted throughout the history of Christianity. Hegel is the philosophical discoverer of the death of God, a discovery that revolutionizes philosophy in the Phenomenology of Spirit, but it is possible to give Spinoza that accolade, a Spinoza who was an even more systematic thinker than Hegel, and no less a comprehensive thinker. Perhaps it is just these qualities that make possible a discovery of the death of God, not to mention an ultimate courage with which Spinoza was profoundly blessed, a courage that might well have been the driving power of the purely abstract thinking of Spinoza. Indeed, it is truly remarkable that such an abstract thinker could have become widely known as our most blessed or holy thinker, an accolade that is unique among modern philosophers. Nonetheless, Spinoza has been widely ignored both philosophically and theologically, perhaps because he shares with Hegel a total enactment of God or the Godhead, and yet like Hegel Spinoza is a profoundly atheistic thinker, and it is Spinoza who first unthinks God, or first unthinks what Heidegger knows as ontotheology. Commonly the medieval terms Natura naturata and Natura naturans are employed in interpreting Spinoza, but this is confusing because in their medieval context this is a distinction between the Creator and the creation, whereas for Spinoza it is a distinction between Substance and its modes, or between the Substance of God and the worldly mode of God’s attributes (Ethics I, Proposition XXIX), and while Spinoza knows God as Substance, that substance is totality itself, a totality that is actual for us in its modes. It was not for nothing that Spinoza became the most hated philosopher in history, and Spinozism identified as a truly demonic atheism, and yet many of the wisest among us know his thinking as a fundamental source of a genuine blessedness or grace. There is a deep continuity between Spinoza and Nietzsche, and Nietzsche is one of those who revered Spinoza, and despite the appearance of their profound opposition as ethical thinkers, there is

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continuity here, too, for Spinoza knows virtue as power and evil as weakness. The seventeenth century can be known as the century of genius, a genius that in Galileo and Newton created modern science, in Descartes and Spinoza created modern philosophy, and in Shakespeare and Milton created modern poetry. Perhaps the most paradoxical of these primal figures is John Milton, a Milton who is challenged only by Shakespeare as our greatest poet, and yet a Milton who most treasured his own Doctrina Christiana, a great and profoundly original theological work that is almost totally ignored, and actually read only by a small body of professional Milton scholars. There could be no clearer sign of our common ignorance of a deeper Milton, but there is now substantial scholarly agreement that the Doctrina is essential to a critical interpretation of Paradise Lost, both were written at the same time, and while the Doctrina is written in Latin and consists almost wholly of quotations from Scripture, it nevertheless deeply illuminates Paradise Lost, and perhaps most so in its understanding of creation and the Creator. For Milton is profoundly heretical in believing that the creation is not out of nothing but rather out of God Himself, God Himself is the sole source of the creation, and there is an “original matter” in God which is the source of all subsequent matter (I, 7). Moreover, the Son and the Holy Spirit are wholly subordinate to the Father in the creation, and Milton’s anti-Trinitarianism is an expression of his faith in the absolute sovereignty of the Creator, which is perhaps the first expression of such an absolute sovereignty, and it sets Milton apart from the Christian tradition. This truly new sovereignty is decisively enacted in Paradise Lost, and nothing is newer in this epic than its enactment of the Creator, even Calvin’s Creator pales before this Creator, as for the first time absolute power is decisively enacted. But nothing is more revealing of Paradise Lost than Satan Himself, the first truly glorious Satan to be created, and one here truly paralleling that Christ who is the sole Redeemer. Here Christ and Satan become a genuine polarity, and each is essential to the other, and even essential to the ultimate acts of the other. Never before had such a vision of Satan existed, and yet Milton’s epic had such an ultimate impact that an enormous number know Satan and Heaven and Hell far more through Paradise Lost than through the Bible. Such an impact is a decisive sign of a genuine epic, an impact to be found nowhere outside of epic, which is one reason why we have

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so little understanding of epic, the least understood of all of our cultural expressions. Frequently we understand epic as being Biblical, as when we speak of Homer as the Bible of the Greeks, and this gives epic a revelatory character, which it is difficult to deny, and surely Paradise Lost has exercised a Biblical role in its impact on us. But there are no assaults on Milton as there are on Spinoza, not even assaults on him as a heretic, which he certainly is, could this be because he has given us a uniquely modern vision of God, which all of us in some sense accept or cannot wholly refuse? Let it be said at once that this is a deeply heretical vision of God, and heretical if only because it is anti-Trinitarian, but far more deeply because this is a God who cannot be separated or dissociated from Satan, a God whose absolute sovereignty cannot be dissociated from absolute evil. Thus, this is a God revealing absolute sovereignty or absolute power itself, a power that is sheer power and power alone, and if only for that reason a power that cannot be dissociated from Satan, and is itself deeply revealing of Satan. After Paradise Lost there can be no responsible disbelief in Satan, but there can be responsible disbelief in God, or disbelief in that God who is inseparable from Satan. Now we can see why Milton is a genuine counterpart to Spinoza, one who illuminates Spinoza in his very vision of absolute evil, one necessitating the radical thinking and the radical affirmation of Spinoza. Nothing is more original in Spinoza than the pure integration that he effects between mind and body or body and soul, we see the true opposite of this in Paradise Lost, which is just why Paradise Lost illuminates the Ethics, and allows us to see the absolute necessity of this revolutionary work. But Paradise Lost is likewise and equally revolutionary, and even if the overwhelming passion of this work is the very opposite of the purely abstract thinking of the Ethics, there may well be a coincidentia oppositorum occurring here, and one deeply illuminating modernity itself. Both Milton and Spinoza are profoundly Biblical, Milton is our most Biblical poet, and the only major poet who mastered the languages of the Bible, a mastery that he commonly employed, and was never unengaged with Biblical exegesis. So, too, Spinoza is our most Biblical philosopher, whose Tractatus is our first modern critical interpretation of the Bible, containing the only Biblical theology given us by a major philosopher, and while expelled by his own community as a heretic, he mastered both Torah and Talmud as has no

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other philosopher. Nor is such mastery alien to Spinoza the philosopher, for it underlies his radical understanding of God, perhaps the most radical of all philosophical understandings of God, as here reason and revelation are purely united as they are nowhere else. Spinoza was perhaps the first to decisively demonstrate that Moses could not possibly have written the Pentateuch, a demonstration subverting all established authority in its dissolution of the absolute authority of the Bible, and for this alone made himself the object of a passionate and virtually universal hatred. Yet Spinoza is also deeply venerated, and venerated as is no other modern philosopher, a Spinoza who had a deep impact on modernity, and above all on German Idealism. Spinoza is also the creator of modern idealism, an idealism to be fully distinguished from ancient idealism, as manifest in the gulf between Plato and Spinoza. However, Spinoza is most innovative in his pure integration of mind and body or body and soul, an integration ending every chasm or gap between them, and thereby creating an absolutely new understanding of both mind and body. So, too, this makes possible an absolutely new understanding of God, a God who is an integral totality, truly being all in all, and all in all in both body and mind. If this is a truly new understanding of God, mind, and body, it is potentially if not actually revolutionary, and one affecting the world as a whole. Milton’s enactment of God in Paradise Lost is seldom recognized for its genuine uniqueness. Here is a Creator whose absolute acts fully equal His own absolute majesty and glory, no visionary had previously approached this, and if here mysterium tremendum eclipses mysterium fascinans, this would appear to evoke an absolute distance from Spinoza’s God. Indeed, can the God of Milton and the God of Spinoza have anything at all in common? Yes, each is a revolutionary enactment, and while this is all too clear in Spinoza, it is virtually unknown in Milton because his overwhelming impact has eclipsed previous enactments of God. This is inevitable in a genuine or fully epic enactment, and it is paralleled in Dante’s previous epic enactment, just as it will be paralleled in the epic enactments of Blake (considered in more detail in chapter 3) and Joyce (in chapter 6). The truth is that the uniquely Christian God has undergone an enormous transformation in its own enactment, nowhere is this clearer than in the development or evolution of the uniquely Christian epic, and there is no better exemplification of this than in the relation

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between Milton and Blake. Blake profoundly renews Milton, even if this is a renewal that absolutely reverses Milton, as the Creator of Paradise Lost passes into the Satan of Milton and Jerusalem. True, very few are aware of this, but few are aware of the Christian epic as a whole, or open to its revolutionary transformations, transformations that are simultaneously theological transformations. Yet to be open to these transformations is to be open to the ultimate transformations of Christianity itself, transformations that have certainly occurred, even if they have become largely hidden from us. Today it is difficult to understand how John Henry Newman became such an enormously controversial figure, and even was so during the Second Vatican Council, for his original understanding of the development of Christian doctrine is an ultimate challenge to Christian orthodoxy, and above all to Catholic orthodoxy’s understanding of dogma itself, an absolutely eternal and unchanging dogma. Newman’s own odyssey was initiated by his growing awareness of the vast distance between early Catholicism and modern Catholicism, although this recognition is simply a consequence of the modern historical consciousness, which itself has been an overwhelming challenge to Christianity. It is perfectly understandable how this radically new understanding of Christianity could have generated fundamentalism, even if it is not commonly known that this is a truly new fundamentalism, which had never existed as such before. Fundamentalists, too, imagine that theirs is an eternal doctrine, and is simply a consequence of a literal understanding of the Bible, even if such a literal understanding did not exist before the advent of fundamentalism. It is possible to understand fundamentalism itself as a consequence of the modern realization of the death of God, one darkening all of our horizons, and calling forth an ultimate leap out of a world of darkness, a leap occurring in the advent of fundamentalism. Of course, it occurs elsewhere as well, and if all of the expressions of modernity are organically linked, there is an organic link between our atheism and our fundamentalism, and a link demonstrating that each is inseparable from the other. For our atheism is no more pure than is our fundamentalism, nor is it simply “other” than all religious enactments, for it exists in an organic relationship to all expressions of modernity. It is Hegel who has given us our deepest understanding of the death of God, and as this is first enacted in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Spirit actually becomes its own opposite or “other,” but does so

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fully only in full modernity, when in the French Revolution it becomes Abstract Spirit or the “Bad Infinite,” and this is the form or expression of Spirit, which actually dies, and does so in an absolute selfemptying or self-negation. It could be said that a radical historical understanding is born in Hegel’s initial enactment of the death of God, for this death is only possible by way of the historical metamorphosis or transformation of Absolute Spirit, a transformation in which Spirit becomes the very opposite of itself. And it actually becomes the opposite of itself, becoming what Blake names and knows as Satan, but a Satan only born in full modernity, and born as the opposite of Christ. This, too, is the time at which the birth of America occurs, so that in his first prophetic poem, America, 1793, Blake first enacts the death of God, a God here named as Urizen, a pagan name for that Creator who only realizes his consummation in his own death. Blake is the epic poet of the death of God, and all of his extraordinarily complex epic poetry can be understood as a comprehensive enactment of the death God, but here this is a universal enactment occurring everywhere whatsoever, and occurring in each and every one of us. Blake’s American counterpart is Herman Melville, whose Moby Dick is an American enactment of Satan, and of Blake’s Satan, a Satan who is a universal Abyss and Darkness. It is not insignificant that abyss first purely realizes itself in the American imagination, in an America that is the first nation to be born with an apocalyptic destiny, unless this already occurs in the birth of that Russia that Hegel, in the conclusion of his lectures on the philosophy of history, could know as the twin of America. Indeed, America and Russia are both apocalyptic nations, and if in the Cold War they could engage in an ultimate war with each other, the apparent nonviolence of this war disguised a new and universal violence, and one subsequently all pervasive. So much is this the case that now violence and nonviolence have passed into each other, and above all so in that new America that seemingly so peacefully dominates the world, and dominates it by Americanizing it, an Americanization that is a new and all comprehensive passivity. Could Milton and Spinoza be prophets of America, and not prophets in the sense of unveiling its destiny, but rather in the sense of unveiling the ultimate conditions making possible its destiny, conditions in which a pure violence and a pure passivity pass into each other? A great many Americans believe in America as the most

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Christian nation in the world, but this could only be a truly new world, an apocalyptic world, and even a dark apocalyptic world. In many respects America has been a nation of prophets, and often of once-born or healthy-minded prophets, but far more deeply of dark prophets, as in most of its greater literature and art, dark prophets enacting a demonic or Satanic America. Is there a truly major American artist or writer of whom this could not be said, and is this uniquely American, one calling forth a uniquely American destiny? One of the fundamental origins of America is commonly disguised. That is, that when the English Revolution failed or dissolved in England, this revolution was transported to America, but only transported in a new epiphany or new body, a seemingly nonrevolutionary body, yet nonetheless a truly transfiguring body, and originally an apocalyptic body. Milton was perhaps the primary prophet of the English Revolution, and as such he was transported to America with the failure of revolution in England, yet his American incarnation was largely an anonymous one, even if Paradise Lost is truly a sacred text in America, and one revered far more in America than in England. But if Milton has had a major impact on America, what can be said of Spinoza—that his is a largely invisible but nonetheless powerful impact, as in the advent of a deeply secular but nonetheless deeply religious nation? Spinoza is our only purely secular and purely religious thinker, unless he is therein paralleled by Nietzsche, but thereby he has had a profound even if wholly indirect impact on America. Although an indirect impact is very difficult to demonstrate, at the very least we can sense genuine parallels between Spinoza and America, foremost among these being the full conjunction of the purely religious and the purely secular. If this occurs nowhere else in the world, it can be understood as a unique destiny of America, one fully embodied in a distinctively American literature and art, just as it is in a distinctively American religion. American religion has seemingly defied all critical understanding, in part because it is so incredibly diverse, but also because it may well be genuinely new, and thus truly other than all that we have understood as religion. A truly secular world was first born in America, and only here did religion itself arise or develop in a truly secular world, thus profoundly affecting American religion. There are scholars who find it difficult to distinguish the religious and the secular in America, just as there are orthodox theologians who find virtually all American

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religion to be heretical, or all religion in America that is distinctively American. But these distinctively American expressions of religion are in one way or another apocalyptic, as not only secularism but apocalypticism abounds in America, an apocalypticism born with the very birth of America. Is there a distinctively if not uniquely American apocalypse, one found nowhere else in the world? The very fact that an American apocalypse is born with the advent of the first truly secular world is unquestionably significant, as is the fact that an American apocalypse cannot be dissociated from the advent of an ultimate atheism, the first such atheism in the world. Inevitably an American apocalypse occurs within the horizon of its opposite or “other,” and hence cannot be dissociated from that other, an other essential to its own occurrence. If only at this crucial point, an American apocalypse is unique, and perhaps unique above all in being finally indistinguishable from its own opposite. Hence light and darkness are here truly conjoined, and even if that is true of every genuine apocalypse, here light and darkness are not only conjoined but indistinguishable, and indistinguishable here as they are perhaps nowhere else. An American apocalypse is universal as no previous apocalypse had been, thus it is not in any way to be confined to the United States, as is clear in every American apocalyptic enactor. Indeed, a genuinely American apocalypse is so universal as to be wholly unclear as apocalypse itself, every line between apocalypse and nonapocalypse or anti-apocalypse is here seemingly erased, and even more so than it is in Hegel and Marx, although it does parallel Nietzsche. Nietzsche is perhaps the best guide to America, or to a unique America, and a uniquely American apocalypse, an apocalypse breaking all bounds, and all bounds that have historically been marked apocalypse. “Nietzsche and Apocalpyse,” is the focus of chapter 4. Thus a distinctively American atheism is a strange atheism indeed, while there is certainly a pervasive atheism in America, and one even largely common as it seldom is elsewhere, yet publicly the vast majority of Americans refuse atheism, and even regard it as sacrilege. Is America immune to the death of God even if comprehensively embodying it? Has America been able to absorb the death of God in a wholly disguised form as so many truly critical Americans insist? Of course, this judgment could be made of virtually all of the industrialized world, but religion is practiced far more commonly in America than almost anywhere else, and although that could mean that

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hypocrisy is more pervasive here than elsewhere, it could also mean that there is a unique polarity or dichotomy in America. These ideas are considered further in chapter 5, “America and the Death of God.” The death of God, or the modern realization of the death of God, can be understood as the most absolute realization of dichotomy itself, an absolute dichotomy between life and death, or between eternal life and eternal death. Only in the death of God does eternal death itself become absolute, or is eternal death absolutely enacted, then eternal life or resurrection is dissolved, or dissolved as a resurrection that is not itself crucifixion. All too ironically, it is the modern realization of the death of God that either ends or disables a Christian tradition that itself had wholly transformed an original Christianity, as so deeply understood by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard himself, as a profound Hegelian, could deeply know an ending of Christianity and of existence itself that alone could make possible a renewal or resurrection of faith, a profoundly solitary faith which Kierkegaard discovered. But that discovery is only possible in a Godless world, a Godless world that is a consequence of the death of God, and only that death now makes possible a genuine faith or a genuine Christianity. Could there be a more offensive coincidentia oppositorum than the actualization of the death of God as the renewal or re-creation of a wholly lost and actually genuine faith? Yet this apparently occurs, and profoundly occurs in both Blake and Hegel, just as it can be understood to occur in innumerable expressions of the late modern imagination. Indeed, it is precisely the occurrence of the deepest language of the death of God, as in Dostoyevsky, that accompanies and even is an expression of the deepest faith, and here Nietzsche poses the supreme challenge. How odd that The Antichrist, enacting Nietzsche’s greatest assault on God, identifies Christianity as an absolute reversal of Jesus, and then recovers that wholly lost original Jesus who is the only pure enactor of genuine compassion. Nietzsche can know Christianity as the greatest of all historical catastrophes, one in which the Gospel of Jesus is reversed into Dysangel, and the world itself is turned upside down. Thereby Nietzsche is certainly not alone, for the modern realization of the death of God releases ultimate assaults on all established religion, and on all established values, as Nietzsche himself most deeply knew. Yet this assault is inseparable from an absolute rebirth or renewal, a

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renewal that Nietzsche continually enacts, and which is even distantly paralleled in what William James would come to understand as conversion, and mass conversions occurred at the very time of the realization of the death of God. Nietzsche believed that nothing is accidental, just as everything is related to everything else, and this is above all true of the death of God, the most universal and the most powerful of all events. Nietzsche knew this profoundly, just as Hegel did before him, and if now Hegel is being recognized theologically as he never was before, he is known as a profoundly atheistic thinker who is precisely thereby an ultimately religious or metaphysical thinker, and if Hegel and Nietzsche are the consummation of metaphysics, this could only be a theological as well as a metaphysical consummation. The truth is that both Hegel and Nietzsche are ultimate theological thinkers, and most so in their very thinking of the death of God, a death of God that is apocalypse itself, and not only apocalypse but an absolute apocalypse. The New Testament itself is renewed or reborn in this thinking of absolute apocalypse, and reborn as it had never been before, or never before in thinking itself, for it had certainly been reborn again and again in the Western imagination. German Idealism is the first philosophy to deeply incorporate the imagination into thinking itself. Here lies a deep distance of Spinoza from this idealism, a Spinoza who could only know the imagination as a faculty truly weakening the mind. Thereby Spinoza was in continuity with philosophical tradition, a tradition that had never until German Idealism been open to the imagination, but it was only in the Romantic age that the world awakened to the imagination, or awakened to its ultimate power. So, too, it was not until German Idealism that genuine historical thinking was incorporated into philosophy, this, too, transformed philosophy, and it marks another distance between Spinoza and German Idealism. But it also marks a distance between Spinoza and Milton, a Milton who is the most historical of all poets other than Shakespeare, and whose Paradise Lost created the greatest of all cosmic histories. Perhaps only a cosmic history is open to the death of God, or open to the depth of the death of God, a death of God transforming everything whatsoever, but only thereby making possible an absolute apocalypse. Never must we forget that in the cosmic history of Paradise Lost, the fall although an ultimate fall is also a felix culpa or fortunate fall, a fall making possible an ultimate redemption, which is

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wholly impossible apart from absolute fall. Blake also renews Milton in his Songs of Innocence and Experience, wherein Innocence spontaneously transforms itself into Experience, an Experience that is wholly a fallen experience, and even thereby a realization of innocence, an innocence truly destined for experience. Here we can understand that the death of God is a consequence of the creation itself, a creation that is not simply creation, but a creation destined for fall, and not at all in the Gnostic sense, but rather in the Biblical sense of the actuality of the world itself, an actuality inevitably enacting fall. Actuality or Wirklichkeit is primal in the thinking of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger. Perhaps nothing else so unites their thinking, and this is a thinking above all other thinking that is a primal enactment of an ultimate fall, and a fall apart from which no reconciliation or redemption is possible. Yet in no other thinking is redemption itself so actual as it is here, as though it is in German philosophy alone that redemption is philosophically actual, a German philosophy that can be understood as culminating in Nazism. That, too, is possible if this is ultimately a dialectical thinking, and one only able to realize itself through its own absolute opposite, which is perhaps only philosophically actual here. Many understand German Idealism as a German expression of the French Revolution, and this was truly a revolutionary period, one epically inaugurated by Paradise Lost, and if nothing is more revolutionary in this epic than a radically new Satan, that Satan is a Lord in a truly polar relationship with Christ. Not only is this Satan absolutely new, but new with a majesty and glory paralleling the Christ of Glory, and even undergoing a kenotic movement when he journeys to earth, there to seduce Eve by summoning her to his own glory. Here, Milton wholly transforms the Book of Genesis and the Bible itself, and does so by his very glorification of Satan, but one absolutely necessary in the creation of a fortunate fall making possible the actual occurrence of an absolute redemption. Milton is a great Biblical theologian, perhaps our greatest Biblical theologian, and he draws forth for the first time the full actuality of the Satan of the New Testament, a Satan absolutely unique in the history of religions, one going infinitely beyond every other figuration of evil, and only here in the history of religions is there an absolute evil. Yet this fundamental truth is not actually envisioned until Milton, and envisioned in the most glorious of all epics, and the only epic fully and comprehensively expressing absolute glory, and yet a

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glory now expressed most decisively and even most purely in Satan. This is the point at which Milton is most distant from Spinoza, even infinitely distant, and yet that infinite distance illuminates both Milton and Spinoza, making possible the appearance of each in their most singular expression. Now we can understand Spinoza as an absolutely abstract thinker, and understand Milton as an absolutely embodying poet, and it is just in the perspective of Spinoza that Milton undergoes such an epiphany, and in the perspective of Milton that Spinoza can be known as our most abstract thinker. Only in Spinoza does evil as evil wholly disappear, and only in Milton does evil as evil become absolute, or in Milton’s Satan, but Milton’s Satan is his most unique creation, and the one most decisively revealing himself. Spinoza himself is wholly invisible in his Ethics, but no poet is more fully revealed in his work than Milton, and above all so in Paradise Lost, which is thereby not only the very opposite of the Ethics, but the redemption that it calls forth would appear in this perspective to be wholly missing in the Ethics. Or is this true? We might say on the contrary that the Ethics enacts redemption more than any other philosophical work, or does so more purely or more decisively, and it is just this that made possible its deepest impact. Could there then be a genuine coincidentia oppositorum between the Ethics and Paradise Lost? Each can be said to be purely religious and purely secular simultaneously, just as each can be known as inaugurating a pure religion that is purely secular or worldly, one only made possible in Paradise Lost by Satan, thereby making manifest how absolutely necessary Satan is in Paradise Lost. Is this a genuine theological breakthrough for Milton, one going beyond the Bible, but thereby making manifest an inevitable consequence of the Bible, even if it is not realized until almost two millennia after the Bible? The paradox of the felix culpa opens this possibility, and if the fall is absolutely necessary for an absolute redemption, then the source of the fall is both necessary and blessed, and blessed even when it is named as Satan. Never must it be forgotten that in the mature Blake there is a coincidentia oppositorum between Christ and Satan, and perhaps nowhere else is Blake so profoundly a renewal of Milton, revealing a Milton wholly closed to Milton himself, but nonetheless a genuine consequence of Milton’s vision, and one revealing just how radical that vision is. The truth is that every epic is genuinely

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revolutionary, nothing else so distinguishes the genre of epic, a genre all too significantly closed to literary criticism and scholarship, a vacuum of which the world of scholarship is simply unaware. It is remarkable that there is so little discussion of Satan, or serious discussion, a Satan who is seemingly wholly absent from philosophy, even if profoundly enacted but wholly disguised by Hegel. Can even Hegel here be known as being deeply repressed? Is this perhaps the great secret of Hegel, and not only of Hegel but of all of our major philosophers, philosophers who are nowhere else so distant from poets? Hegel is most unique as a thinker in his creation of an absolute negativity, a negativity that is the ultimate energy of actuality, and is the consequence of that absolute self-emptying or self-negation that itself is Absolute Spirit. This is the absolute self-negation that evolves or realizes an absolute negativity, but absolute negativity is actuality itself, and a negativity that is all in all. Many believe, even if they dare not say it, that Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is indeed Satan, and surely the Catholic Church did for many centuries judge modern philosophy itself to be demonic or Satanic, and if it has withdrawn this judgment, it has done so while dissolving or suspending all language of Satan. Why is it so difficult for us now to pronounce the name of Satan? Are we thereby not only most distant from Milton, but most distant from the Bible, or at least from the New Testament? While seldom noted, Christianity is most unique in its ultimate emphasis on Satan, and if this is only true of premodern Christianity, at no other point is modern Christianity so distant from its origin. Once again the Christian epic is deeply revealing of Christianity, an epic in which Satan is ever enlarged as this epic develops or evolves, and if Satan is here finally all in all, that is a totality that is the consequence of a genuine evolution, and a genuine evolution of Satan. How revealing that this is an evolution that is virtually never noted, as though silence is the only proper response to Satan, and this is a silence that is genuinely if not wholly observed. Although Satan is seldom if ever associated with silence, silence is nonetheless our primary response to Satan, but a silence that speaks whenever an ultimate crisis occurs, or an ultimate breakdown and disintegration. Hence Satan has innumerable names, and innumerable sources, so numerous that a singular naming of Satan becomes virtually impossible, even if this naming occurs in our greatest epics. Here, Milton and Blake are our primary epic creators, or our primary

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namers of Satan, a naming for which Milton is most renowned, although Blake’s naming of Satan is most revealing, for it is the most universal of all naming of Satan, and Blake unveils Satan as our Lord and Creator. But this is certainly not a Gnostic naming of God as Satan, for in realizing the universality of Satan it realizes a wholly fallen universality, a universality that is the very body of Satan, and is so as the universality of a totally fallen world. Once again an ultimate paradox confronts us, for here a total naming of darkness is an ultimately liberating act, as our most ultimate apocalyptic seer, William Blake, creates an absolute apocalypse in which total darkness is total light. Therefore, the body of Satan is finally the body of Christ, or the body of Satan is inseparable from the body of Jerusalem, and is so as totality itself, but now an absolutely liberating totality, and liberating by the absolute self- negation of Satan, a self-negation that is finally the self-emptying or self-negation of totality itself. Satan is a primal name of the ultimate ground of that fallen totality, but the absolute fall of totality is truly necessary for its absolute liberation, an absolute liberation only possible as the consequence of a total fall, a total fall more fully envisioned by Blake than by any other seer. Spinoza can be understood as the pure opposite of Blake, a Spinoza in whom namelessness is all in all, and everything is either silent or invisible, or invisible and silent as actuality. But only thereby is pure thinking possible, a thinking without any possible object, or any possible ground, and if only thereby it is a totally pure thinking, or that Ratio that Blake named as Satan. Yet this Satan is absolutely necessary for liberation, a thinking stripping everything of its inessential ground, and doing so precisely in its own pure groundlessness, a groundlessness negating or dissolving the totality of fall. Only a pure Ratio can effect that negation, hence the absolute necessity of Ratio, and the absolute necessity of Ratio for an ultimate liberation. Yet that is the absolute necessity of Satan for an ultimate liberation, and if Blake is the only seer who ultimately enacts this, Blake is our only seer other than Dante who realizes a truly comprehensive vision, and our only vision of the totality of Satan. Yes, Blake thereby profoundly renews Milton, but precisely thereby wholly transforms him, a transformation that is truly consistent with the ultimate movement of Paradise Lost, a movement that is the movement of absolute fall, a fall only reversed in the closing sections of this epic. But these are frequently judged to be the weakest poetic sections of Paradise

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Lost, even as Paradise Regained is everything but paradise regained, a paradise that can never be regained as the consequence of an absolute fall, yet the final loss of that paradise is absolutely necessary for apocalypse itself, an apocalypse absolutely impossible apart from an absolute fall. Now just as Christianity begins with apocalypse, that very apocalypse is almost immediately lost, and the Kingdom of God that Jesus enacted and proclaimed becomes virtually the opposite of itself in the uniquely Christian God, an absolute transformation deeply understood by both Blake and Nietzsche, and if only at that point Blake and Nietzsche are truly united. So it is that an originally apocalyptic Christianity becomes a wholly nonapocalyptic Christianity, and apocalypse itself is now only recovered or renewed in truly radical or revolutionary expressions, and revolution or ultimate revolution and apocalypse or absolute apocalypse become inseparable. Is this an apocalypse that once again has become wholly lost? Or is its ultimate renewal once again possible, and even possible for us? This is the focus of chapter 7 in this volume. Now despite the fact that apocalypse is continually renewed and reenacted in the uniquely Christian epic, apocalypse remains an ultimate mystery, and perhaps our deepest mystery, unless it is unveiled in absolute idealism, and in our deepest or purest poetry and art. While it is critically established that there is a genuine correlation between Hegel and Mallarme and Rilke, and perhaps between Hegel and Milton and Shakespeare, such correlations illuminate an absolute apocalypse, and demonstrate its actual occurrence. In fantasy, apocalypse is a supernatural event, an absolutely literal total transformation, but such fantasy must be demythologized, as it actually is in the very occurrence of apocalypse. So it is that the deepest demythologizing occurs in pure thinking and in the imagination itself, a demythologizing establishing the full actuality of apocalypse. Many scholars believe that the delay of the parousia wholly transformed primitive Christianity, but for Bultmann and the demythologizing movement there is no such delay, for the resurrection itself is the parousia, and is so as the apocalyptic or final epiphany of the Word. Of course, this demythologizes the resurrection, but here resurrection itself is the renewal of the Word, and not of a supernatural or otherworldly Word, but rather of that Word that is actuality itself. It could be said that Hegel is the creator of demythologizing, and that such demythologizing has dominated a truly modern world, a world

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in which the supernatural as such is wholly alien. Yet here it becomes truly alien by way of faith itself, a faith ending the other worldly, and doing so in its witness to the resurrection, a resurrection that is not a resurrection from the world, but far rather a resurrection or awakening to the world itself. Here, we can apprehend the primal role of Spinoza in our world, a Spinoza who himself engaged in demythologizing, and did so far more purely than Hegel did. But we should not understand demythologizing in a literal sense, even Milton, perhaps the most mythical of all poets, profoundly engaged in demythologizing, or in demythologizing a given or established Christianity, and becoming himself an ultimate if not absolute Christian rebel. Despite all the chatter about political theology, we actually have virtually no political theology today, or none going beyond our established orthodoxies. Certainly Milton is our greatest political theologian, and how revealing that he is unknown in the theological world, but surely his work is the most challenging of all political theologies, and it is our only known theology that is a consequence of the English Revolution, that revolution that inaugurated modern revolution. Its most decisive act was the trial and execution of Charles I, one that is repeated and renewed in the French Revolution in the trial and execution of the French monarch, ultimate events that finally destroyed Monarchy itself, perhaps the most ultimate of all revolutionary acts. How fascinating that our theologies ignore the English Revolution, just as do our philosophies and even our political science, it is as though it is a forbidden subject, although it has been treasured by British Marxists. So, too, did Marx himself treasure it, and it was essential to Marx to correlate the English and the French revolutions, so as to accept and affirm a genuinely revolutionary historical tradition. Milton surely belongs within this tradition, and Spinoza, too, for here there is a genuine correlation between Milton and Spinoza, which is indeed a correlation of all of our true revolutionaries. Yet our revolutionaries are either enactors of or witnesses to apocalypse, and to genuine apocalypse, for genuine apocalypse is inevitably revolutionary. Once again we can see why the Christian churches moved so decisively against apocalypse, a point at which they are perhaps most ecumenical, and if this made possible the survival of Christianity, we can here see what such survival actually entails. Pascal’s wager is even more ultimate than he recognized, for if one bets on God, or on the

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manifest or established God, then one stands to lose apocalypse, or to lose redemption itself. Now Pascal deeply believed that to lose redemption is to be damned, and eternally damned, a damnation that cannot be reversed, and that all of us can actually taste if we allow ourselves to become open to it. Only the threat of damnation can here drive us to faith, and this is just the situation in which an ultimate wager occurs, but in the perspective of apocalypse, any such wager is inevitably a wager on eternal death. Nietzsche is our greatest master of irony, an irony that he most deeply knew as occurring in Christianity itself, and in the depths of Christianity, a Christianity whose quest for redemption Nietzsche unveils as actually being a quest for damnation. Spinoza must have known this even if he didn’t dare say it, and Milton both knew it and refused it at once, knowing it in knowing all established Christianity as a reverse or inverted Christianity, hence his refusal of all ecclesiastical Christianity, but refusing it in his own quest for redemption. Was a refusal of that quest possible before the Enlightenment? Let us remember that there was no real atheism before the Enlightenment, and while there was a refusal of damnation, it was seldom openly embodied. A genuine irony for us is that a damnation that was gradually but decisively withering away became resurrected in the twentieth century, literally resurrected in the Holocaust, and actually resurrected throughout a late modern sensibility, as reflected in our deeper literature and art. No one could be further from knowing damnation than Spinoza, although in knowing a deep passivity he knows a full parallel to damnation, a damnation that is central in Paradise Lost, and yet an absolutely damned Satan is the very center of an ultimate energy in this epic. Is that a paradigm for a uniquely Western world? Certainly innumerable non-Westerners believe this, as well as numerous ultimate dissenters in the West, a world that has been a center of dissent. Is dissent, or an ultimate dissent, essential for revolution, and is there a necessary and integral relation between dissent and revolution in the West? The West would here appear to be far distant from both the ancient and the Oriental worlds, except for Israel, and the prophetic revolution of Israel, a revolution that might well be the inaugurator of revolution itself. Although we can speak of an urban revolution and an agricultural revolution, revolutions that were integrally related to each other, these apparently occurred spontaneously and without

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individual enactors. But the prophetic revolution is inseparable from individual prophets, and here for the first time we have written accounts of individuality, and of the individuality of these prophets, an individuality that has not even been surpassed in the modern world. Is there a necessary relation between individuality and a genuine revolution? Can a revolution occur spontaneously or must it be led by deeply individual leaders? Individuality is minimal in the ancient world, and does that foreclose the possibility of a genuine revolution occurring there, a revolution to be distinguished from slave rebellions, or any rebellion not effecting an actual transformation? Biography is a significant genre in the ancient world, but autobiography was created by Augustine, and is not reborn for many centuries after that. Western culture or modern Western culture is perhaps most unique in its self-consciousness, a self-consciousness that becomes absolute in Hegel. Could there be any integral relation between revolution and self- consciousness? Here, Rousseau could be a significant figure, a Rousseau who conjoined revolution and selfconsciousness, and who was even revered by Marx, who along with many others believed that Rousseau was the father of the French Revolution. And Spinoza? Is he not the least self-conscious of all major thinkers? And Milton? Is he not the most self-conscious of all poets or all major poets? This is the very point at which there is the most overwhelming gulf between Milton and Shakespeare, and even though Shakespeare may have created the greatest of all sonnets, his biographers profoundly disagree on just what these sonnets prove biographically. Indeed, the published biographies of Shakespeare apparently demonstrate that a genuine biography of Shakespeare is impossible, and this despite the incredible body of his writing, a writing actually creating what we have known as interiority. As opposed to Milton, we can know virtually nothing about either Shakespeare’s politics or his religion. This does not mean that they were not important, but it does mean that they may have no integral relation to his work. Now even if Milton is the most self-conscious of all major poets, he is also the most revolutionary of all poets, and our only poet who was actually a revolutionary leader, being in effect the Secretary of State of the new revolutionary country, and thus a primal leader of the first genuine or full revolution in the world. Milton sacrificed his poetry for that revolution, an ultimate sacrifice, and so, too, did he genuinely risk his life, for nothing was as important to him as this

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revolution. In our time the English Revolution has seemingly been forgotten, or is simply thought of as the English civil wars, but ours is also a time in which revolutionary politics has ended, to say nothing of revolutionary religion. Can a renewal of Milton be a way to a renewal of those revolutions? And could this also occur with a renewal of Spinoza? Indeed, is a primal way to a renewal of revolution a renewal of Milton and Spinoza? Milton simply cannot be dissociated from the English Revolution, and all too indirectly we could say this of Spinoza, too, and there are those who know Spinoza as an even more radical political thinker than Marx, and above all because his revolutionary thinking is the most integrated of all revolutionary thinking. And even if Spinoza is a purely abstract thinker, his political thinking is the least abstract of all major thinkers, and rivals Milton’s in terms of its integral relation to revolution. So it is that a chasm closes between Milton and Spinoza in the perspective of the English Revolution. Here Spinoza and Milton can be known as revolutionary twins, and twins who are ultimate sources of revolution itself. Although this is only indirectly true of Spinoza, an indirect relation can be more powerful than a direct relation, and more powerful because it can be a far more comprehensive relation. Historians continue to debate the causes of the English Revolution, causes that were certainly multiple, and inseparable from profound divisions that had arisen in British society in early modernity. These divisions also arose in Scotland, and were not absent from Ireland and Wales. Perhaps the English language itself most profoundly reflects these divisions, a language that at this very time was undergoing its most ultimate transformation, a transformation making possible our greatest English literature. So the English Revolution should not be dissociated from a literary revolution, and all too significantly the texts arising from the English Revolution are the most powerful of all revolutionary texts, and only here can we enter the interior reality of revolution. Radical sects were a genuine expression of the English Revolution, a time when Quakers were radical, although they were less radical than Levelers and Ranters, even atheism had seemingly been born, or so it appeared to ecclesiastical authority. Such revolutionary power was above all present in Cromwell and his revolutionary army, perhaps the only time until Lenin when the leader of a major nation was a genuine revolutionary, and after this war England became the most

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powerful nation in the world. True, counterrevolution occurred soon after the civil wars ended, and all the revolutionary transformations were reversed, but nonetheless a momentum had been established that gradually transformed the world at large, so that in this perspective the English revolution is the most successful of all revolutions. Could it also be the most radical of all revolutions? This could only be true in its comprehensive range, one ranging throughout all fields, including science and the arts, and far more so here than in the French and Russian revolutions. Marx was not misled in conjoining the English and the French revolutions, and if Hegel could know the French Revolution as the first world transforming historical event, an absolute event marking the dividing line of world history, the same might well be said of the English Revolution, even if it has seemingly disappeared from history. Or has it actually disappeared? If it is truly actual in Milton and Spinoza is that not a decisive sign of its deep embodiment? A deep embodiment that even becomes a universal embodiment? Revolution and counterrevolution were so conjoined in England that each loses its own specific identity, and England appears as a nonrevolutionary nation and world. Yet a genuine representative democracy was born in England, and England was the primal site of the scientific revolution, just as it was of modern capitalism, so that it is not irresponsible to think of England as the primary site of modern revolution. Since Shakespeare himself is so disguised to us, or so hidden from us, it is Milton who is the primary personification of the English Revolution, and he personifies it with an overwhelming power, and above all so in Paradise Lost. Surely this great epic can be understood at least in part as the epic of the English Revolution, one enacting the overwhelming transformation effected by that revolution, which perhaps can only actually be recorded or enacted in a truly cosmic epic. Are all Christian epics cosmic epics, and is this essential to a total epic enactment, or to an epic expression of a transformation of the world? Each of our great epics enacts such a transformation, and this is true of ancient as well as modern epics, even if such transformations are commonly invisible. Apparently the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante were almost immediately accepted in their worlds, even if this meant the acceptance of an ultimate transformation, which certainly occurs in all of these epics. Nowhere else do such transformations occur, although both Spinoza and Hegel can be understood as

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epic thinkers, as thinkers effecting ultimate transformations of their worlds. Only gradually have we come to understand how profoundly Homer and Virgil transformed their worlds, but it is immediately obvious in the absolute uniqueness of Dante, just as it is in the Satan of Milton and Blake, an absolute Satan who is perhaps the decisive signature of modernity itself. It has often been remarked that our very ignorance of Satan is a primal way by which we are bound to Satan, and if no world is more ignorant of Satan than our own, no world is more unawakened than ours, or more ultimately unawakened. No doubt the Enlightenment is the historical world most parallel to ours, and there are primal thinkers and visionaries in each of these worlds, but while the world of the Enlightenment is seemingly without apocalypse, ours is certainly not, where apocalypse is apparently more manifest than elsewhere, but publicly only a very shallow apocalypse. Does this disguise the deeper apocalypse now occurring, one truly grasped by our great modern visionaries, but now openly manifest only in its most vulgar modes? Perhaps film is our most revealing art, or most self-revealing art, and while a vulgar apocalypse is commonly enacted in our popular films, our truly serious films often if not always enact a deep apocalypse, and one clearly beyond our critical understanding. Is it impossible for criticism to understand such films, an arena that is clearly unknown to us, or has not yet been entered by our critical understanding. Once film criticism was dismissed as popular journalism, now it is taken far more seriously, but not so seriously as art criticism, as though there is something in film that is inescapably common. This does reveal that our deeper apocalypse is not only beyond us, but one that we deeply resist even when it occurs among us, as it does in our more serious films. It cannot critically be doubted that apocalypse occurs in our art and literature, but we can doubt our understanding of it, and that is a serious and responsible doubt, and not simply because there is so little scholarship on apocalypse, but because apocalypse has not yet become a genuine category for us. Or, insofar as it is a category, it has innumerable expressions, with little if any continuity between them. Is this true of none of our other categories, and is this revealing of apocalypse itself, or of our enactment of apocalypse? There is a small body of Biblical specialists in apocalypse, perhaps fewer than in any other major Biblical field of study, and this despite the modern

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historical discovery of the apocalyptic identity of both Jesus and primitive Christianity. And apocalyptic theology? Such a tiny field if a field at all, and this despite the fact that Hegel and Nietzsche, perhaps our most influential modern philosophers, are profoundly apocalyptic thinkers, each of whom thought an apocalyptic ending that is an absolute beginning. Apparently Milton and Spinoza are distant from apocalypse, although each take the Bible with ultimate seriousness, a Bible that in their time had not yet been unveiled in its apocalyptic dimension, although at other points both Spinoza and Milton went far beyond their own time in their understanding of the Bible. Or could it be that Milton and Spinoza are deeply into apocalypse, although in ways that we cannot understand, and cannot understand because we are distant from their deeper work, or distant from the conjunction that occurs between them in that deeper work? If the Principia is our greatest scientific work, it is not devoid of genuine and radical theological thinking, and it is Newton above all major modern thinkers who most gave himself to an apocalyptic quest. Newton’s revolutionary work can be understood as a consequence of the English Revolution, a revolution making possible an absolutely new infinity, and an infinity realized for the first time as the universe itself. Paradise Lost celebrates this universe, thereby profoundly differing from ancient epic, a celebration only possible with the ending of a finite world, or the ending of finitude itself. Certainly that ending can be associated with Satan, but only with Milton’s Satan, our only truly cosmic Satan, or only Satan who is an inverse or reverse Creator. Nothing else is more explosive in Paradise Lost, our most explosive epic, and is most explosive in its enactment of Satan and the Creator. Spinoza is the first philosopher fully to incorporate the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, although this had in part been effected by Descartes, and if here Spinoza went beyond Descartes, this is most manifest in the radicality of Spinoza’s God as opposed to the orthodox God of Descartes. Spinoza’s God is not pantheistic in a common sense but only in a very radical sense, a pantheism that is uniquely Spinoza’s, for it is a pantheism that is an absolute affirmation of the world. God or Nature truly is God or Nature, this affirmation being unique to Spinoza, and can even be understood as an affirmation of the uniquely Biblical God. But that is only possible when the Biblical God is genuinely understood as an absolutely unique God, an understanding that does not occur until the seventeenth century.

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Already Luther rebelled against that Catholic God that he could know as a pagan God, and Luther’s deep Augustinianism is inescapably grounded in Neoplatonism, a Neoplatonism that is not fully challenged until the very eve of the Reformation. But it is only decisively ended in the seventeenth century, and most decisively ended by Spinoza, who is perhaps the most anti-Neoplatonic of all thinkers. All too ironically, this made possible a new and ultimate opening to the uniquely Biblical God, a God truly alien to Neoplatonism if only because of the profound otherworldliness of Neoplatonism, an otherworldliness that is itself unique in its very depth. Spinoza can be understood as the most worldly of philosophers, or the most ultimately worldly, and this made possible a truly unique understanding of God, a God who is now known as the world itself, or as the depth or “substance” of the world. Substance is an extraordinarily elusive category, or elusive to us, for it is truly alien to the modern mind, a mind created by the revolutions of the seventeenth century. So it is that Spinoza’s substance is vastly distant from the substance that was commonly known in his world, for Spinoza’s substance is finite and infinite at once, and infinite only insofar as it is actually finite. This is that absolutely new finitude born with modern science, a finitude which is infinite, but only as the consequence of an apocalyptic ending of the Infinite, an ending that is already a realization of the death of God. There is a deep fear of science in the modern world, and one far more responsible than it is commonly thought to be, for the birth of modern science is a realization of the death of God, and is so in the very birth or advent of an infinite universe, an infinite universe absorbing all given or manifest infinity. Spinoza was the first philosopher to know this, or actually to know it, and to make it the very center of his absolutely new thinking, a thinking ending all distinction between God and nature. If this is a uniquely modern atheism, it is wholly other than all common atheism, and perhaps one making possible a recovery of the long lost Biblical God. Spinoza knows that loss profoundly, and knows it in knowing the falsity of the God affirmed in his world, a God that is a truly pagan or Aristotelian final cause, hence wholly other than the Biblical God. This is a crucial point at which there is a genuine coincidence between Milton and Spinoza, a Milton who is the most revolutionary poet in the world, and a Spinoza who may well be the most revolutionary thinker in the world, and if Spinoza and Milton truly

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coincide as revolutionaries, here revolution itself gains a wholly new identity, and does so in the very birth of an absolutely new God. And this is a revolutionary God as Godhead has never previously been, or never historically, and therefore never actually revolutionary, and if this is indeed a profound renewal of the Biblical God, it is an absolute transformation of everything that has been given or manifest as the Biblical God. Not only is this a theological revolution, it is revolution itself, a revolution promised by Biblical prophecy, and actually envisioned and understood by Milton and Spinoza, and so understood and envisioned for the first time. The title of Spinoza’s primary book is commonly ignored, and it could even be thought of as an ironical title, many have judged that the Ethics makes an actual ethics impossible, and even absolutely impossible. Apparently all freedom is dissolved here, and even all possibility of freedom, indeed, as Hegel deeply objected, subject itself and all subjectivity are simply dissolved by Spinoza. This is the point at which Spinoza is in deepest continuity with Nietzsche, and just as Nietzsche is commonly thought of as our most pagan thinker, is it Spinoza who more deserves that judgment? No! And this because of Spinoza’s profound relation to the Bible, only Milton rivals Spinoza as a modern enactor of the Bible, and even if this appears to be a wholly skeptical enactment, it is our fullest philosophical renewal of the Hebrew Bible, or at least the fullest modern one. If Spinoza is more skeptical than Descartes, he is also more Biblical than Descartes, or any other modern philosopher, and while this appears to be an impossible combination, it is paralleled in that Pascal who is profoundly Biblical and profoundly skeptical at once, and far more skeptical than his opponents, for there is a depth of skepticism in Spinoza and Pascal that truly parallels if it is not an actual expression of a profound faith. We can observe this in late modernity in the early Barth, which is perhaps just why Barth had such an enormous impact, and even an impact upon the Catholic and Judaic worlds, worlds that were perhaps initiated into modernity by this very impact. Despite Nietzsche, there is commonly only a very shallow understanding of skepticism, but we have only to think of the Buddha to realize that a profound skepticism and an ultimate enlightenment can be conjoined, and an enlightenment embodying compassion. The Buddha or Sidhartha might be thought of as the first truly radical thinker, the first who by pure thinking dissolved all selfhood, and

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thereby realized Nirvana. Not accidentally did Nietzsche become so deeply drawn to Buddhism, even if he was opposed to that “second Buddhism” that was then dawning in the West, a new Buddhism that was a source of that nihilism that so engaged and enraged Nietzsche, a new nihilism that could even draw forth Spinoza as a nihilist. One could think of Spinoza as a nihilist if only because his skepticism is so deep, but his is a positive or constructive skepticism, one issuing in the deepest affirmation, and the deepest affirmation of the world itself. Is this the first such affirmation, or the first affirmation of the world wholly free of all teleology, and therefore free of every horizon of the Beyond? Once again an affirmation of the death of God? And one necessary to make possible an absolute affirmation of the world? Yet is an absolute affirmation of the world possible? True, it is claimed by many even if only enacted by a few, and a very few, surely far fewer than those who claim an absolute affirmation of God. How seriously are we to take our affirmations of God, could Milton look on them as a genuine affirmation, or do they come far too easily and far too cheaply? Milton profoundly knows the ultimate seriousness of faith, and could condemn most of those professing it in his own time, could he possibly have any more confidence in our time, a time and world clearly embodying the death or absence of everything that he could know as God. Milton may well be our most God-obsessed poet, and he is a genuine poet of God, recreating the language of faith in his poetry, and above all so in Paradise Lost, an epic that is not only a renewal but a re-creation of faith, and if this actually occurs in each of our great Christian epics, that is an anamnesis truly paralleling the anamnesis of the Eucharist. While Milton, the fiery Protestant, would not accept a “real presence” in the Eucharist, he knew a “real presence” in his deeper poetry, a presence wholly given him by grace, and actually given in and to the world itself. There is not a trace of otherworldliness in Milton, just as there is none in Spinoza, and if this is a consequence of a truly new modernity, here Milton is just as modern as Spinoza. Paradise Lost is the epic inaugurator of modernity, a modernity that is the consequence of fall, but here a fortunate fall, a fortunate fall culminating in redemption, and an absolute redemption that is an absolute transfiguration, a transfiguration that could not occur apart from original sin or an original fall.

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Milton knows that transfiguration profoundly, a transfiguration systematically and comprehensively enacted in Paradise Lost, just as its consequences are purely enacted in the Ethics, and if here there is yet another correlation between Spinoza and Milton, that is a correlation only possible in modernity. And only possible in a fallen modernity, and a totally fallen modernity? Is this yet another consequence of the paradox of the fortunate fall, a fall that is a total fall but whose totality is a truly dynamic one, and so dynamic that it actually reverses itself in fall? Few are aware that it is just a total enactment of fall that can make possible a total reversal of fall, indeed, this actually occurs in Paradise Lost, and there is a true parallel to this in the Ethics, where a full awareness of a comprehensive passivity becomes the arena wherein that very passivity is purely annulled and reversed. It is Spinoza who philosophically discovers a deep passivity, a passivity that he could know as the ground of every teleology, and thus the ground of all previous understanding of God. But what Spinoza knows as the necessity of God, an absolute necessity, is the very opposite of passivity, a necessity that is total action or activity. Is it possible that there is a full parallel between the epic enactment of fall and redemption in Paradise Lost and the pure thinking of passivity and liberation in the Ethics? Perhaps nothing makes more manifest the ultimate enactment of the Ethics than its enactment of freedom, a freedom that initially is wholly illusory, and certainly illusory in the great mass of humanity, yet pure thinking actualizes a genuine freedom or liberation, a liberation realized in a full and total amor fati, an acceptance or willing of everything that is actual and at hand. So it is that Nietzsche is a reborn Spinoza, just as his enactment of Eternal Recurrence is a repetition or renewal of the enactment of liberation in the Ethics. Spinoza is our purest thinker of necessity, and an absolute necessity, but when that necessity is fully willed or accepted it reverses all given or natural necessity, and necessity passes into freedom itself. Perhaps it is only Shakespeare who can truly illuminate Spinoza at this crucial point, a Shakespeare whose tragedies give us a comprehensive enactment of our interior impotence or bondage, and whose comedies and tragedies enact an ultimate liberation, and an ultimate liberation from our most interior chains. For it is precisely when we know or realize these chains most deeply, that they become loosened as chains, so that their very enactment is a liberation, a liberation

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effected by an awakening to our chains, and this certainly occurs in the Ethics, just as it is epically enacted in Paradise Lost. Paradise Lost is a cosmic epic, and simultaneously it is an interior epic only made possible by an absolutely new interiority, an interiority most deeply realized by Shakespeare, but epically realized by Milton, and here Milton and Shakespeare are closest to each other, and closest as world transforming artists. Hegel and Nietzsche have given us a philosophical understanding of world transforming art, a transformation that they enacted in their own philosophies, thereby effecting an absolute transformation of philosophy itself. We could understand a comparable transformation as occurring in Plato and Aristotle, just as such a theological transformation occurs in Augustine and Aquinas, but these occur only insofar as they end a previous thinking, and fully and finally end it, an ending that even could be known as an apocalyptic ending, and apocalyptic in its finality. A decisive sign of this is the impossibility of returning to or renewing a form of thinking that has truly ended, and just as Neoplatonism does not return to Plato, neither does it actually renew him, but rather creates a philosophy and a world vastly distant from Plato. Thereby Neoplatonism is a witness to the ending of the Classical world, just as Neo-Thomism is a witness to the ending of the medieval world, and Neo-Marxism a witness to the ending of Communism. Yet ending itself can be a breakthrough, as in the modern historical realization of the death of God, one giving birth to a truly new world only made possible by the death of God. Indeed, this is the death of God that is an absolute reversal, and a reversal of Godhead itself, as an absolute transcendence passes into or realizes itself as an absolute immanence. Reversal itself may well be a decisive key to an understanding of Milton and Spinoza. This is clearest in Spinoza, who reverses everything that we commonly apprehend, such as freedom and necessity, reversing what we commonly know as freedom into necessity and what we commonly know as necessity into a willed or liberating necessity. Is there a parallel to this reversal in Paradise Lost? Is the lordship of the traditional Christ transformed into servanthood and the lowliness of the traditional Satan transformed into lordship itself? There are many reasons for Milton’s Arianism, an Arianism that is truly new, for Christ could not possibly be that absolutely majestic God whom Milton enacts, a God who is absolute power and absolute transcendence alone, and thus wholly incapable of that kenosis or self-emptying that Christ embodies and enacts, as is made clear in the Doctrina.

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Many believe that Milton denigrates Christ by refusing him that absolute Lordship that he so deeply knows, but that would make crucifixion and therefore redemption impossible, so that in Christ Milton does know that absolutely immanent God whom Spinoza so purely knows. Our theological interpretations of Milton are almost invariably orthodox or traditional interpretations, despite the fact that as the Doctrina reveals Milton is a radical theologian, and most radical in his understanding of Christ. Or is he even more radical in his understanding of the creation, and if here the creation is not out of nothing but out of Godhead itself, does that parallel an Incarnation that is into the depths of matter and the world, and hence impossible for the Creator? Milton participated profoundly in the English Revolution, and therefore deeply participated in the most revolutionary movement of his or any previous day, one commonly then looked on as a renewal of an original and long-lost Christianity. If only thereby Milton is far removed from any contemporary religious world, but so, too, is Spinoza. Yet our very distance from Milton and Spinoza can make them far easier for us to become open to, an opening impossible for the great majority in their worlds. There is simply no one in our world who in any way approximates the challenge of a Spinoza or a Milton, thus we have little means of assessing it, even if we can know that it was enormous. Christians commonly think of Jesus as such a challenge, but few Christians are open to ultimate challenge, and thus could not be open to such a Jesus. Milton surely would be so open, but what can we say of Spinoza at this point, is his profound radicality a decisive sign of such opening, and one shared with very few others? Perhaps less is known of him individually than is known of any other modern philosopher, and that does affect our interpretation of his thinking, giving it an anonymity that is virtually Spinoza’s alone, at least in the context of modern philosophy. Accordingly, we understand Spinoza differently than we do other modern philosophers, and although this makes it far easier to understand Spinoza as a holy thinker, it is his thinking itself that can evoke such an identification. Holy? Is this another quality that Spinoza and Milton share, but if they do, we surely must transform our understanding of holiness, and is that genuinely possible? We can understand a deep difference between Catholicism and Protestantism in their understanding of holiness, perhaps their deepest difference, thereby we can realize that there are very different

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realizations of holiness, just as there are different realizations of sanctity and sainthood. This problem becomes all the graver in dealing with revolutionary figures such as Milton and Spinoza, and while each of them has widely been known as being holy, is there any notion of holiness that could be applied here? Of course, neither Spinoza nor Milton has canonically been judged to be holy or saintly, but nonetheless they have widely been known as such, a holiness that many can apprehend in their deepest work. Now it is not odd to think of a major Platonic dialogue as being holy, just as our major music is commonly apprehended as a holy or sacred music, such music gives us a taste of redemption itself, a taste that we can also realize in a deeper encounter with Milton and Spinoza. Once again the Bible is very important, being deeply enacted by both Milton and Spinoza, but is it here enacted in wholly different and even absolutely opposing ways? There is no question that Milton is a profound heretic, but is it possible to know Spinoza as a heretic as opposed to being an unbeliever? Simply to ask this question is to realize that Spinoza is a profound believer, and even a profound believer in God, even if this God is uniquely Spinoza’s own. But is Milton’s God uniquely his own? Surely Milton’s heterodoxy is uniquely his own, and it is extraordinarily powerful if only because it is inseparable from his greatest work, a work that is truly canonical, thus giving heterodoxy itself a canonical status. From a theological perspective, heterodoxy is truly comprehensive throughout modernity, and far more realized in the cultural expressions of modernity than is orthodoxy, an orthodoxy that is silent or disguised virtually throughout the higher or deeper expressions of modernity. Once again the seventeenth century can be known as an absolute dividing line, and if it marks the advent of an assault on or a dissolution of orthodoxy, it is simultaneously the birth of the most powerful of all heterodoxies, as manifest in the advent of the greatest of all heterodoxies. Blake and Hegel can be known as the creators of the most ultimate heterodoxy, a Blake who has an integral relationship to Milton just as Hegel does with Spinoza, so that Spinoza and Milton are reborn or renewed in Hegel and Blake. We must remember that Blake is alone in being fully both poet and painter, and in his greatest work poet and painter at once, just as he is the most heterodox of all of our visionaries, having created what we can only know as an absolute heterodoxy. Thus the late Blake knows God as Satan, even as the early Blake knows Satan as liberator, and a

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liberator from our deepest repression, a repression of which Blake is the artistic master. No doubt Milton would have been horrified by Blake, even if Blake is his deepest descendent, a descent that is revealing of Milton himself, and revealing not only of Milton’s heterodoxy, but of his own absolute rebellion. Inevitably Milton’s creation of Satan is revealing of himself, and if Milton’s Satan is the most absolute of all rebels, this is a rebellion that can be apprehended as occurring in a revolutionary seventeenth century, the most revolutionary of all centuries, and only here is there a truly comprehensive revolution, occurring not only in the birth of modern science and modern poetry, but in the birth or the advent of revolution itself. Chapter 2, “The Transfiguration of Christianity,” considers the relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy further. It is just when Milton and Spinoza are known apart from revolution that their own uniqueness is most dissolved, a dissolution inevitably in the service of counterrevolution, and an ultimate counterrevolution of which we have little understanding. Counterrevolution can only be understood in relation to revolution itself, and the more limited our understanding of revolution, the more minimal our understanding of counterrevolution, which is commonly no understanding at all. We are aware of rebellions against science, and against democracy, too, but have little awareness of the relation between them. Now we can know Fascism as rebellion, and Communism, too, just as we can know an integral relation between Fascism and Communism, and know that in some sense each was born in opposition to the other. Yet can we understand our dominant culture and society as an expression of counter-revolution? If we have truly entered a postmodern world, a world in a fundamental sense beyond modernity, then we may well have left the world of revolution behind, and be closed to all revolutionary enactments. Moreover, a new passivity may well possess us, one totally comprehensive as passivity has never been before, and one already foreseen by our prophets. Blake and Nietzsche could each foresee an absolutely new world simultaneously embodying an absolute light and an absolute darkness, for each this could only be the consequence of the death or self-annihilation of God, and in Jerusalem Blake enacts a “Self-Annihilation” of God that is apocalypse itself, just as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra enacts an Eternal Recurrence that is an eternal recurrence of the death of God that is nothing less than Resurrection itself.

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Each of these are ecstatic prophesies, indeed, our most ecstatic prophesies, and even ecstatic in their embodiment of the death of God. Now resurrection can only be crucifixion itself, and not a Pauline resurrection, not a resurrection in which eternal death is eternal life, but far rather a resurrection wherein eternal death is eternal death. In our new world all positive images are illusory in a wholly new sense, for they are illusions that crumble with a single genuine touch, no one could imagine that anything here is finally real, or is real beyond its own imagery, or beyond imagery itself. Certainly this is a world of counterrevolution if we have in mind those revolutions that occurred in the seventeenth century, revolutions ushering in an absolutely new world, whereas our new world harbors nothing actually new beyond a truly new illusion. Thereby it is actually a counterrevolution, and far more universal than any previous counter-revolution, one threatening to sweep over the whole world, and perhaps the only insulation against it is a backward or backward moving economy. Has ever a world so sanctioned itself as we have sanctioned ourselves in our mass media? Is every prophetic No hidden from us and invisible upon our horizon? But would that not entail the total absence of any possible Yes? And if we are being overwhelmed by an illusory Yes, are there any “disillusioners” among us, or counter-magicians if this be possible, and possible even among us? There was a time when genuine theologians were countermagicians, and odd as it may sound, we can speak of Milton and Spinoza as countermagicians, a truly apt name for Spinoza, and for Milton, too, if we think of countering a false or inverted politics and religion. But is it possible to counter the new nihilism of postmodernity, one in which the people of modernity pass into a new mass or masses, masses fully understandable objectively or electronically, but otherwise invisible? And are they silent, too, and most silent in their new language, a language that is an inversion of Miltonic language, and even an inversion of every historical language? Perhaps interpreters are now more needed than ever before, for something like an anonymous language is now occurring among us, which is virtually meaningless from any historical perspective, but all pervasive now. Is our new world not only an anonymous and empty world but even a magical world instilling us with a virtually total illusion? Yes, we are profoundly in need of countermagicians and perhaps never before has a Milton or a Spinoza been so necessary.

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Chapter 2 The Transfiguration of Christianity

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ne motif, and perhaps only one motif, is deeply shared by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and that is the absolute or total transfiguration of Christianity, a transformation of an original Christianity so comprehensive that there is little genuine continuity between an original or primitive Christianity and all subsequent historical expressions of Christianity. This not only makes possible that ultimate attack on Christianity that occurs in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, but even calls forth a genuine parallel between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the one the greatest of all modern religious thinkers and the other the greatest of all antireligious thinkers If that is a coincidentia oppositorum, it truly enlightens Christianity, for it makes manifest a truly ultimate historical transformation of Christianity, one that Newman in large measure already discovered. But Newman apprehended it as a truly Catholic transformation that realized a genuine continuity with its original ground, thereby creating modern Catholic theology, whereas Kierkegaard and Nietzsche knew it as a total transformation ending every genuine continuity between primitive Christianity and every subsequent Christian world. Indeed, radical Christianity has known such a discontinuity throughout its history, a discontinuity continually evolving radical Christianities, and Blake, perhaps the most radical of all Christians, knows this discontinuity even more deeply than do Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. So it is that the mature Blake who could know an apocalyptic Jesus who is all in all, could know the uniquely Christian God as Satan, and Blake’s is the most comprehensive of all visions of Satan.

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In this perspective we can see that Christianity has evolved more radical or total heterodoxies than any other tradition, and here there is an essential relationship between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, each only coming into existence and evolving by way of its conflict with the other, so that each is impossible and unreal apart from the other. Persecution and censorship have been overwhelming in Christian history. Virtually all ancient heretical Christian documents were not only destroyed but obliterated, and the discovery of the Nag Hamadi Gnostic library in 1947 gave birth to a whole new understanding of Christian heterodoxy, whose depth and comprehensiveness had never previously been known. All too significantly the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in the same year, thereby for the first time revealing the depth and power of an ancient Judaic heterodoxy, so that if only because of these discoveries heterodoxy itself gained a whole new meaning and identity, and one whose power is just as great as is its orthodox opponent. These discoveries could not have been anticipated by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, but Heidegger was deeply affected by comparable heterodoxies in Meister Eckhart and Kierkegaard himself, inducing in him a profound commitment to an original Christianity that he knew as primordial Christianity, and one releasing his assault on Catholic authority and dogma as recorded in Parmenides 3. Now that it has become manifest that Heidegger is a deeply theological thinker, the question arises as to just what kind of theological thinking this is, and it cannot be denied that Heidegger is a deeply heterodox thinker, a heterodoxy that led to the belief that he is an areligious or non-Christian thinker, and this is largely because heterodox Christianity is so little known. Yet Hegel and Schelling are heterodox thinkers, and just as such that they deeply affected Heidegger, and if we could understand Nietzsche as a profoundly heterodox Christian, we could apprehend a deeply modern philosophical heterodoxy that culminates in Heidegger. Is it possible that there is an unknown philosophical heterodoxy deeply paralleling those imaginative or poetic heterodoxies that have become well known, and just as a deeper Western poetry has been heterodox throughout its history, could this be true of all Western philosophy subsequent to the advent of Christianity? The major problem here is the elusive identity of heterodoxy, and if the heterodoxies of Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce have been genuinely explored, why should such an exploration be alien to philosophy? Could this be because a

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deeper heterodoxy has become truly forbidden, and perhaps most forbidden in philosophy itself? True, the heterodoxy of Hegel has been critically explored, but thereby Hegel is unique, for no such exploration of other philosophers has occurred, despite the fact that such an exploration has deeply illuminated Hegel’s philosophy. Here, a conjunction of Hegel and Blake is truly enlightening, each being profoundly heterodox but profoundly differing in their heterodoxies. This is not only because of the difference between philosophical and visionary worlds, but even more deeply because of the actual heterodoxies of Blake and Hegel. While each are apocalyptic in their deeper ground, just as each gave us truly new apocalypses, the Blakean apocalypse actually integrates Christ and Satan and Good and Evil and Infinity and Finitude, whereas the Hegelian apocalypse realizes a coincidentia oppositorum in which the opposites while wholly united with each other nonetheless genuinely and integrally remain in continuity with themselves. Hence, Blake appears to be far more revolutionary than Hegel, but it is Hegel who gave us the deeper ground for our most revolutionary movements, as witness Kierkegaard and Marx. Although Blake is hailed as our most revolutionary visionary, an actual renewal of Blake rarely and never deeply occurs, whereas an actual and deep renewal of Hegel has occurred again and again. Although this is a renewal that is commonly disguised, Hegel is the primal dialectical thinker of the West, and the dialectical thinking and vision of late modernity cannot be dissociated from Hegel, and not even dissociated from Hegel in its most cryptic and subterranean expressions. Thus, Hegel challenges us to understand the possibility of an integral conjunction of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, one that manifestly occurs in Dante and Milton, and perhaps occurs in Blake and Joyce, or this could be true if we could reach a genuine understanding of a truly radical orthodoxy, as opposed to those pseudo-radical orthodoxies that abound in a postmodern world. As our New Testament scholars have demonstrated, there is no division between orthodoxy and heterodoxy throughout the great body of the New Testament, and yet deep conflict does here occur, one between a primitive apocalyptic Christianity and a primitive Gnostic Christianity, as most fully recorded in Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. At this point orthodoxy and heterodoxy are in the process of being born, and if this is a deep conflict between apocalypticism and Gnosticism, it is one that occurs throughout Christian history, ever more decisively realizing

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an orthodoxy that is neither Gnostic nor apocalyptic, and not one but innumerable heterodoxies without any apparent order at all. And as both Newman and Hegel discovered, Christian orthodoxy has been an evolving orthodoxy, thus raising the question as to whether Christian heterodoxy is an evolving heterodoxy, even if evolving through innumerable expressions. Now despite the fact that Christian orthodoxy itself has realized widely differing expressions, the orthodox theologian can apprehend a fundamental unity in those expressions, but is it possible for the heterodox theologian to apprehend any kind of real or actual unity in the vast world of Christian heterodoxy? Now every genuine or pure heterodoxy is surely deeply anti-orthodox, and often in perplexing ways, for it is difficult to understand how anti-Trinitarianism could have been so powerful and so pervasive in the Radical Reformation, as though the Trinity itself is the very seal of Satan. However, it is the Trinity that is the deepest dogma of God in Christianity, so that Christian rebellions against God are whether directly or indirectly rebellions against the Trinity, and nowhere is Christian orthodoxy more offensive to the heterodox Christian than in its dogma or doctrine of God. One overwhelming difference between Christianity and Judaism and Islam is that Christian rebellions against God have been far deeper and far more ultimate, for Islamic and Judaic heterodoxies are far less grave and less powerful than Christian heterodoxy has been. If contemporary Christian heterodoxy is less powerful than its predecessors, this is no less true of contemporary Christian orthodoxy. Both Christian orthodoxy and Christian heterodoxy have been most powerful in those periods when Christianity itself was most powerful, and just as heterodoxy and orthodoxy were weak during the Enlightenment, they were truly powerful during the High Middle Ages, suggesting that movements such as Thomism and Joachism are truly inseparable from each other. Certainly Christian orthodoxy originally arose as a profound struggle against heterodoxy, a Christian heterodoxy that arose simultaneously with Christian orthodoxy, and apart from which no genesis of orthodoxy would have been possible. Although it is possible in large measure to understand how the genesis of Christian orthodoxy occurred, it is impossible to understand the original genesis of Christian heterodoxy, unless it is possible that Gnosticism itself was born in the birth of Christianity, and there is virtually no real evidence for a pre-Christian Gnosticism. Nothing

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could be more offensive to the orthodox Christian than a claim that Christian Gnosticism is as old or as primal as Christian orthodoxy, yet we know that Christian Gnostics deeply contended with Paul and were a source of violent controversy in the Johannine community, and that Christian orthodoxy arose out of such conflicts. Is it possible to understand that orthodoxy and heterodoxy have a fully parallel origin in Christianity, and that there is no Christianity that is prior to orthodoxy or heterodoxy, no primordial Christianity in Heidegger’s sense of the term, or no purely or truly original Christianity at all? Indeed, if there is an original Christianity, historically, that could only be an apocalyptic Christianity, and one that was negated in the birth of both orthodox Christianity and Christian Gnosticism, but this could not be a final negation, for an apocalyptic Christianity has been renewed again and again in Christianity, and most powerfully so in our uniquely modern ultimate heterodoxies. How fascinating that there are major scholars who have discovered the origin of these ultimate heterodoxies in medieval Joachism, a Joachism that was born by way of the rebirth of Biblical apocalypticism. Of course, the world of Biblical apocalypticism is a truly heterodox world, orthodoxy itself, and not only in Christianity, but also in Judaism and Islam, originally arose as a negation and reversal of apocalypticism, and a great body if not the greater body of heterodoxy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is an apocalyptic heterodoxy, an apocalyptic heterodoxy that is reborn in modernity itself. Blake and Nietzsche are perhaps the purest expressions of this rebirth, but so, too, are Hegel, Schelling, and Marx expressions of that rebirth, so that the deepest modern heterodox thinking and vision is in integral continuity with Christian heterodoxy, and can be understood as a genuine expression of it. Thus, to become open to Christian heterodoxy, and above all to a deeper Christian heterodoxy, is to become open to if not to engage in a genuinely radical theological thinking, one never tolerated in orthodox worlds, but simply inevitable whenever there is a full and genuine opening to the world or worlds of heterodoxy. Yet heterodoxy has been so deeply censored and dissolved that it is impossible to discover a responsible scholarly definition or exposition of a religious or ultimate heterodoxy, is it possible that nothing is more forbidden in our world than is an ultimate heterodoxy? Ultimate heterodoxies can be identified by the very hatred that they engender, perhaps the deepest and most pervasive of all hatreds, for an ultimate heterodoxy is ultimately outside or “other,” and other

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than every established or manifest center or ground. Now Christianity did not simply begin as a Judaic heterodoxy, or as an apocalyptic heterodoxy, but as an ultimate heterodoxy that soon aroused the persecution of the Roman Empire itself, the most powerful empire that the world had ever known. Christianity was a genuine threat to that empire, for it soon conquered it, and although this was a conquest from within, it profoundly transformed not only the Roman Empire but Christianity itself, unquestionably the most total transformation that ever occurred in Christian history. Christendom was born with this transformation, a Christendom that lasted for a millennium, and a Christendom that itself engendered ultimate heterodoxies, heterodoxies that eventually ended Christendom itself. Hence, heterodoxies are far more powerful than we commonly imagine, and contrary to Newman’s conviction that heterodoxy unlike orthodoxy does not evolve, there has been an enormous evolution of heterodoxy, as richly demonstrated by Cyril O’Regan’s series of stunning volumes enacting the evolution of Gnosticism from the ancient world to our own. While one must resist O’Regan’s judgment that Blake and Hegel are Gnostics, they are profoundly heterodox, and now there can be no question of the deep and comprehensive evolution of heterodoxy. Now it is not without reason that heterodoxy has been so profoundly resisted throughout its history, it certainly has often had a destructive impact, just as it has had creative impacts, but in full modernity an ultimate heterodoxy raises the specter of nihilism, and does so because it occurs in a world or horizon that is emptied of every primordial ground. This is a world that is a consequence of what Nietzsche proclaimed as the death of God, a world ending every possible given direction, as we are straying through an infinite nothing, an infinite nothing that is all pervasive, for we have entered the first ultimately nihilistic era. Can we understand our nihilism as the consequence of Christian heterodoxy, and of a uniquely Christian heterodoxy, a heterodoxy inverting or reversing the uniquely Christian God? Christianity knows God as an absolutely transcendent and absolutely sovereign God. Would a reversal or inversion of that sovereignty issue in an absolutely actual Nothing? And would the advent of an absolutely actual Nothing be absolutely new, one with no real historical precedent at all, since the absolute nothingness of a Buddhist Sunyata is a wholly inactual nothingness, one that truly can be known as a void or a Void? Certainly there is no real historical precedent for our late modern nihilism, but can that nihilism be

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known as the very opposite of all of our ultimate orthodoxies? If only nihilism itself can be known as an ultimate heterodoxy, and one perhaps in genuine continuity with our deeper Christian heterodoxies, heterodoxies reversing all established law, and even dissolving law itself, as occurs in the profoundly Christian Milton, and the radically Christian Blake. For almost a century Blake’s prophetic poetry and art was understood as an expression of pure madness, whereas today it is universally venerated. Yet critically it is not possible to know Blake without knowing an ultimate heterodoxy, perhaps the most ultimate of all heterodoxies, as witness his late vision of God as Satan. This first decisively occurs in his great epic, Milton, an epic recording Milton’s rebirth as Blake, and a rebirth in which Milton’s vision of God is absolutely reversed, thus making possible an epiphany of God as Satan. Yet this occurs apocalyptically so as to make possible the “SelfAnnihilation of God,” a self-annihilation realizing an absolute redemption, and one fully paralleling an Hegelian absolute self-negation. Both are absolute transfigurations of totality itself, and just as Blake has given us our most total or most comprehensive vision, Hegel has given us our most total or most comprehensive philosophy. So, too, both Blake and Hegel are profoundly heterodox, as is clearest in their absolutely negative enactments of God, enactments that are our earliest enactments of the death of God, and in both the God who dies is the absolutely alien God, one whom Blake names as Satan, and Hegel names as abstract Spirit or the “Bad Infinite.” And in both Hegel and Blake there occurs the advent of a truly new and absolute history, a history of absolute fall, and even the fall of Godhead itself, and only this fall makes possible that absolute apocalypse that both enact. Of course, it was Gnosticism that first named the Creator as Satan, thus leading many to name both Blake and Hegel as Gnostics, but the Gnostic Satan or Ialdabaoth is and only is Satan, whereas Hegelian Spirit and Blakean Energy are absolutely self-negating or self- transfiguring, thus embodying and enacting absolutely self-transfiguring totalities. Each of these totalities evolve by way of fall or self-negation, for here the way up is the way down, and just as Hegel philosophically created an absolute negativity, Blake imaginatively created a fully parallel negativity, and in both Blake and Hegel an absolute negativity is all in all. Yet in each an absolute negativity is an absolutely selftransfiguring negativity, and not one occurring by way of an eternal return, but rather occurring by way of what Nietzsche would name as

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eternal recurrence, an absolutely forward movement to eternity, and one continually and eternally transfiguring eternity itself. Now Satan or Abstract Spirit is the name of an absolute stasis, an absolute stasis that is the very opposite of Energy or Life or Body, and the very opposite of actualization or embodiment itself. Yet such stasis can only be known by way of its very opposite, and thus only known through Body or Energy itself, and if Blake enacts this most clearly, he himself knew this to be possible only through the final advent of apocalypse itself. If Blake is our most fully apocalyptic visionary, Hegel is our most fully apocalyptic philosopher. Can we even thereby think of them as being our most profoundly heterodox Christians? Certainly Blake and Hegel are vastly distant from orthodox Christianity, yet it is very difficult to deny the deeply Christian ground of each, more than any other philosophers or visionaries they enact the fullness of Christian dogma, and a uniquely Christian dogma, one even centered on Incarnation and Crucifixion. Here, the enactment of the death of God is a deeply Christian enactment, and if it is nonetheless a deeply heterodox enactment, it realizes a depth and ultimacy of Incarnation and Crucifixion that is impossible in orthodox Christianity, and it is just thereby that an assault on orthodox Christianity here occurs. In both a Blakean and an Hegelian perspective, orthodox Christianity is a petrified or alien Christianity, one alienated from Christianity itself, and above all alienated from Incarnation or Crucifixion, an alienation that is an alienation from the Crucified God, and thus an alienation from that Body which is the Body of God. But this has occurred only by way of an absolute transfiguration of Christianity, a transfiguration that has actually occurred historically, and is openly manifest in that petrified Christianity that is so pervasive in late modernity. This is the petrified Christianity that can be known as the consequence of an absolute transfiguration of Christianity, one in which Christianity has seemingly become the very opposite of itself. If this is the greatest transformation that has ever occurred in a religious or ultimate world, it is one profoundly revealing of Christianity itself, a Christianity thereby revealing itself as a self-negating or self-annihilating Christianity. Kierkegaard’s final assault on Christianity can be understood as an expression of Christianity itself, a Christianity recognizing an inversion of itself in modern Christianity, and thereby knowing an absolute transformation of itself. Nietzsche’s final attack on Christianity

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fully parallels Kierkegaard’s. Each can know modern Christianity as the very opposite of original Christianity, just as each can know contemporary Christianity as not only being truly empty but pathological as well. Despite their apparent total opposition to each other, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can be understood as dialectical twins. Together they are our most truly solitary thinkers, and profoundly original thinkers as well, moreover each can know an absolute Yes that can only be realized by way of an absolute No. So, too, they are truly great psychologists, even eclipsing Freud himself. And they truly parallel each other in that Kierkegaard is clearly our greatest modern religious thinker and Nietzsche is the greatest of all antireligious thinkers. Indeed, Kierkegaard’s pure orthodoxy, perhaps the purest of all orthodoxies, is an absolutely impossible orthodoxy, one impossible for any kind of subjectivity, or any Existenz. If Kierkegaard is the creator of Existentialism, this is an Existentialism in which what he knows as faith is simply impossible. Now even if Kierkegaard knows that the impossibility of faith is its deepest attraction or its deepest power, this is an absolutely new understanding of faith itself, and even if it has a deeply Lutheran ground, this is a ground never found in Lutheranism itself. One can imagine that if Nietzsche had encountered Kierkegaard he would have discovered his own genuine faith, but in a Kierkegaardian context faith is absolutely invisible, even if it releases in Kierkegaard a truly new language and speech. Now just as Kierkegaard is the supreme thinker of paradox, what he knows as faith is the ultimate paradox, and not only because it is grounded in the absolute paradox of the Incarnation, a paradox that Hegel had already fully understood and resolved, but rather because faith in itself is absolutely paradoxical, and absolutely paradoxical as an ultimate interiority transcending all possible subjectivity. While Kierkegaard is best known for his paradoxical judgment that truth is subjectivity, a Kierkegaardian subjectivity is absolutely and only his own, and even if that is true of every genuine subjectivity, all subjectivity is infinitely less than a genuine interiority, an interiority that can be discovered in the knight of faith alone. True, Kierkegaard spent little time with the knight of faith, just as Nietzsche spent little time with the Superman or the Overman. Neither is ultimately important for either thinker, it is far rather the ultimate goal that is infinitely important, and it is just for this reason that Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can be known as our ultimately

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eschatological thinkers. But as eschatological thinkers they are thereby absolutely offensive thinkers, assaulting everything that is visible or manifest, thus creating the deepest possible offense, and just thereby each has been understood as a truly Pauline thinker. Of course, Paul has been wholly tamed by our churches, but he roars once again in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and roars as he has not roared since Luther. We must never forget that Paul is our first great heretic, and Kierkegaard perhaps our last great heretic, unless that title belongs to Nietzsche. But because of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche heresy or heterodoxy has become virtually impossible, and attracts little interest of any kind, except on the part of historians investigating a seemingly vanished past. Even our forbidden books have long since ceased to be forbidden, although Nietzsche’s The Antichrist might be an exception to this, and there are Nietzsche scholars who identify it as his greatest work. It is certainly his most offensive book, and quite possibly his most intelligible work as well, an intelligibility inseparable from its profound offense. This is surely the most offensive of all books, and it leads us to recognize that Nietzsche’s power is largely an offensive power, and that the shock that it effects is essential to a genuinely Nietzschean thinking. Yet Kierkegaard presents us with a comparable shock, or does so when we most understand him, and such a shock can be associated with a genuinely eschatological thinking, one perhaps beginning with Paul himself. It is odd that eschatological thinking is not one of our acceptable categories, perhaps because it is so rare, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche certainly do stand alone, and stand alone in the world itself. If we cannot look on each as a Superman, can we look upon them as knights of faith, and not faith in any given or established sense, but rather in what we might here call an eschatological sense? In late modernity Christianity was discovered as an eschatological faith, and hence as one vastly distant from the established forms of Christianity, this became known as the eschatological scandal, and perhaps it is an appropriate symbol to associate with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. While it is common to speak of Nietzsche as being apocalyptic or eschatological, it is not common in speaking of Kierkegaard. Perhaps we can do so if we associate the eschatological with an absolute Either/Or, and one absolutely immediate here and now. Commonly we think of Nietzsche as the most anti-Christian of all thinkers, and think of Kierkegaard as the most purely Christian of all great thinkers, but thereby we lose their integral relation to each other

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as manifest in virtually every unraveling of them as twin or parallel thinkers. Dialectically, anti-Christian and deeply Christian are integrally related to each other, and it is precisely insofar that each is the pure opposite of the other that each is integrally related to the other. Biographically, there is an obvious truth in this, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are biographically fascinating as are no other thinkers. This in itself is enough to turn many philosophers away from them, but if there is such a philosophy as Existentialism, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are the supreme Existentialists. We could also identify them as the supreme philosophers of religion, or are so with Hegel, and Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are probably inseparable from Hegel, and therefore inseparable from the world of philosophy itself. Yet despite the vast scholarship that each has attracted, is there any study that fully and critically relates them, or does this more fundamentally occur in subsequent philosophy and theology? Each has been enormously influential, and each has stood forth as great writers in their own right, among our very greatest writers, and perhaps beyond all established literary criticism. However, simply to relate Kierkegaard and Nietzsche is to encounter the vast complexity of Christianity itself, one far more complex than we can imagine, and one that has undergone ultimate transfigurations that themselves become manifest simply in conjoining Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Now a pure conjunction of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche does make manifest a way or faith that is far beyond our scholarly understandings of Christianity, perhaps this would most decisively be manifest in any evocation of God or the Godhead that could be realized through a conjunction of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. First, it should be clear that any such conjunction would realize an absolute negation of all of our established understandings of God, even our purest understanding of God such as that of Aquinas would dissolve in the perspective of a genuine union or coinherence of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. But does this demonstrate that no such union is possible? Yet it is clear that there is some such union in the absolute negations that each effect, each are absolutely negative thinkers, perhaps our most purely and profoundly negative thinkers, and if each has an ultimate ground in an Hegelian negativity, and this despite Nietzsche’s indifference to Hegel, this is a ground by which they certainly can be conjoined as purely dialectical thinkers. Dialectical thinking may well be deeply ignored in our world, perhaps because of its association with Marxism, but Kierkegaard is clearly and decisively a dialectical

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thinker, and Nietzsche certainly can be understood as one, which inevitably occurs in any theological interpretation of Nietzsche. It cannot be denied that Nietzsche has been enormously influential in late modern theology, and even if this is often a purely negative influence, it is also true that much of our theology has been deeply affected by Nietzsche’s profound understanding of a uniquely Christian pathology, and it is just here that Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have often been conjoined. Indeed, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are our greatest pathologists, or our greatest interior pathologists, whose depths as pathologists even transcend psychoanalysis itself, and each has won a virtually universal acceptance in our deeper intellectual worlds. So, too, here they have manifestly been conjoined, and it is just a conjunction of their thinking, a conjunction that has been overwhelmingly powerful in late modernity, that has made possible our deepest interior voyages, and this on the part of artists such as Joyce who have not actually read either Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. Little else could so demonstrate the overwhelming power of a conjunction of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in our world, and even if this is a purely negative power, it is nonetheless here manifest as pure power itself.

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Chapter 3 The Absolute Heterodoxy of William Blake

W

illiam Blake is commonly and critically known as our most revolutionary visionary, but precisely thereby he is deeply unknown to us all, and unknown because we have so little sense of what a genuinely revolutionary vision is. Perhaps this is truer today than previously, and true if only because of the advent of the most conservative world since the birth of modernity, a world in which even our most radical thinkers become conservative when they speak theologically, and in which a radical theology is more silent than ever before. Blake was almost universally judged to be a madman until a century after his death, and although his stature today is extraordinarily high, he has virtually no influence on either our politics or our religion, despite the fact that he is hailed as our greatest modern prophet. Both our common politics and our common religion today can be known as true inversions and reversals of Blake’s vision, but that itself gives us a way into this vision, and a vision that is most revolutionary by being so profoundly centered on Jesus. Blake discovered an apocalyptic Jesus who was not historically discovered until the late nineteenth century, so, too, Blake is unique in so deeply centering his vision on Jesus, if only here he differs decisively from his poetic predecessors, Dante and Milton, just as he also here differs from his poetic successors in the twentieth century. Yet what is most uniquely Blake’s own is his progressive enactment of an apocalyptic and imaginative coincidentia oppositorum, one dialectically uniting Christ and Satan, and doing so only through a radical

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disruption of our language itself, a disruption issuing in the advent of a purely apocalyptic epic, and one only possible by way of the deepest transfiguration of epic itself. That transfiguration is inseparable from a transfiguration of Blake’s primal opponent and predecessor, Milton, and above all a transfiguration of Milton’s Satan. Milton’s Satan is Milton’s most original creation. There is simply nothing at all like this Satan prior to Milton, and certainly nothing like it in the Bible, apart from its partial predecessor in the Book of Revelation, and Milton was not only a great Biblical scholar and theologian, but he gave us in his Doctrina Christiana perhaps our only critical and systematic Biblical theology, and not even this theology is open to the Satan of Paradise Lost. There is, however, a deep opening to this Satan in a late work of Blake’s, his illustrations to the Book of Job. Here on the eleventh plate the Creator and Lord who appears at the conclusion of the Book of Job is unveiled with a cloven foot, a decisive sign of Satan, and of that Satan who is absolute sovereignty and absolute sovereignty alone. This revolutionary vision of Blake is in genuine continuity with Milton, but only by way of inverting Milton’s Creator, and inverting him so as to call him forth as his own ultimate opposite. Now the time of Blake’s most revolutionary vision is also the time of the advent of a purely dialectical Western philosophy, for the first time in the West a philosophical coincidentia oppositorum is purely and comprehensively enacted in Hegel’s philosophy, an enactment truly paralleling Blake’s vision. Thereby Blake’s vision, and, indeed, his truly revolutionary vision, has a profound philosophical ground paralleled by no other imaginative vision. Even if Blake could not possibly have understood Hegel, nor could Hegel have understood Blake, their ultimate enactments nonetheless coincide, and most manifestly coincide as purely dialectical enactments. Hegel, of course, was the first philosopher to enact the death of God, just as Blake was the first visionary to enact that death (in America, 1793), but Hegel is also the first philosopher to know the absolute self-alienation of God, for as he declares in his most revolutionary work, the Phenomenology of Spirit: Absolute Being becomes its own “other,” thereby it withdraws into itself and becomes self-centered or “evil,” yet this is that self-alienation culminating in death, a death that is the death of the alienation or evil of the divine Being (778–780). Blake names an absolute self-alienation as Satan, but this does not occur until his own transformation as a visionary, one wholly

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transforming his earlier vision of Satan, and only now is Satan called forth as the uniquely Christian Creator. This is just the point at which Blake is most deeply known as a Gnostic visionary, but it would be difficult if not impossible to imagine a more anti-Gnostic visionary than Blake, that Blake who is not only a purely erotic poet and visionary, but who has given us a total vision of Body itself, and of that Body, which as body is the New Jerusalem. This is the body whose own opposite is the body of Satan, a body that only becomes fully incarnate with the birth of the modern world, but then it is truly and actually everywhere, and everywhere as an absolutely repressive body. Blake discovered repression before its discovery by Nietzsche and Freud, and discovered it by way of his discovery of the totality of Satan, a Satan who is not only the opposite of Christ, but whose very totality is the totality of old aeon or old creation, an old creation not manifest until the advent of the new creation, and a new creation whose name is Jerusalem or the apocalyptic Christ. In Blake’s mature vision, the enactment of Jerusalem or the new creation is the enactment of “The Self-Annihilation of God,” an annihilation calling forth the dead body of God, a body that is the body of Satan, and one only becoming incarnate through the Self-Annihilation of God. Here, we are at the center of Blake’s most revolutionary vision, one calling forth God Himself as Satan, or calling forth the uniquely Christian God as Satan, that very God whom Nietzsche in The Antichrist (18) can know as the deification of nothingness or the will to nothingness pronounced holy. For this Satan is the very embodiment of the Nothing, a Nothing not fully envisioned until Blake, and one only enacted philosophically in Schelling and Hegel, but not until Schelling and Hegel is the imagination itself philosophically enacted, an enactment inseparable from an enactment of the depths of abyss. Certainly those depths are called forth by Blake, but they are most decisively called forth as the very body of Satan, and the self-annihilation of that body is the ultimate sacrifice, and hence a sacrifice inseparable from the sacrifice of Christ. Blake has given us our fullest imaginative and poetic enactment of the Passion of Christ, a passion even called forth in the Songs of Innocence and Experience, but one that is the very center of Milton and Jerusalem, and hence the center of Blake’s apocalyptic epic. Now that passion is envisioned as the “Self-Annihilation of God,” one long known as such in the depths of Christian experience, but one always refused by Christian theology, a

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theology refusing to know the death of Christ as the death of God, and precisely thereby closed to the ultimacy of that passion. And only now is that passion fully enacted imaginatively, but now this ultimate death is only finally or apocalyptically realized by the death of Satan, and by that Self-annihilation of God, which is the Self-annihilation of Satan. On the penultimate plate of Jerusalem, there is an illustration of the apocalyptic union of Satan and Jerusalem, one that is perhaps the most erotic in all of Blake’s art, as the body of Jehovah or Satan is about to ecstatically penetrate the body of Jerusalem, a penetration realizing an absolute apocalypse, and an absolute apocalypse occurring here and now. If we have ever been given a Christian Tantric art, this is surely its purest expression, and one truly reversing the Augustinian foundation of Western Christianity. Let us remember that in the City of God the most decisive sign of our ultimately pathological condition is the advent of sexual orgasm (XIV, 16), an orgasm that did not exist before the fall, for it is a consequence of a new dichotomy between the body and the soul, a violently discordant state in which passion and mind are wholly unlike but wholly commingled, thus making possible a climax wherein the mind is overwhelmed. This is the very moment and condition that makes possible the transmission of original sin, and also the moment in which the will is least free. Each of us has our origin in that moment of pure lust or pure sin, wherein original sin becomes the sin of all, and our actual origin becomes the very opposite of our origin in the creation. Now that pathological origin is totally reversed in Blake’s apocalyptic vision, and reversed by calling forth an apocalyptic orgasm, and an apocalyptic orgasm that is apocalypse itself. If nothing else, this vision brings a penetrating light to theology’s continual refusal of apocalypse, perhaps nothing else so unites the innumerable expressions of Christian theology, and this despite the fact that Christianity was originally an apocalyptic faith or way. Yet no religion or way has so comprehensively reversed itself as has Christianity in its historical evolution, one already beginning in the later expressions of the Pauline tradition, and reaching a kind of consummation in the rebirths of theology in the twentieth century, all of which are truly nonapocalyptic theologies. Now even if Blake’s language and imagery is more comprehensively Christian than is that of any other fully modern artist or poet, no poet or artist has been more refused or evaded by theology than has Blake, and refused if only

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because his is a revolutionary Christian language. It is fascinating that many forms of Marxism have been open to Blake, just as have been other forms of modern radicalism, but the name of Blake is virtually unknown in the world of theology, and even unknown to all but our most radical churches. We may see in Blake, more fully than in any other visionary apart from Dante, a totality of revolutionary vision, a totality comprehending all realms whatsoever, one wherein deity, nature, politics, religion, art, body, and interiority become conjoined, but only conjoined in their ultimate reversal, as each becomes the very opposite of its given or manifest expression, thus making possible a truly comprehensive apocalyptic vision. Nowhere is this reversal more decisively manifest than in this revolutionary vision of Godhead itself, as for the first time Godhead is envisioned as becoming the very opposite of itself, one wherein a “Self-Annihilation of God” becomes an absolute transfiguration of the Godhead, a transfiguration that is an absolute apocalypse. That is the apocalypse transfiguring Satan into Jerusalem, or the God of Judgment into the God of Grace, and only an absolute reversal of the depths of judgment makes possible a realization of the depths of forgiveness or grace, so that Satan as Satan is absolutely essential to this redemption. Thereby, we can apprehend the ultimate necessity of Satan, one not known or enacted until Paradise Lost, and just as Blake knew himself as an epiphany of Milton, as recorded in his great epic Milton, Blake’s most revolutionary vision revolves about an absolute reversal of Milton’s Satan, a reversal in which Satan is envisioned as the absolute Lord and Creator, an absolutely solitary Lord not known until Milton, and that is the solitude and the absolutely sovereign solitude whose ultimate reversal realizes an absolute apocalypse. That reversal occurs through an absolute death, but that crucifixion is apocalypse itself, one first openly enacted by Blake, and only in the wake of that enactment did New Testament scholarship unveil the Pauline and Johannine enactments of crucifixion as enactments of apocalypse itself. Yes, Blake is a visionary of eternal death, but an eternal death that is an apocalyptic death, and precisely so as the eternal death of Satan. Only that eternal death realizes an absolute compassion, or the compassion of Christ, a compassion truly reversing all Satanic judgment and repression, but a compassion inactual apart from that reversal, hence the absolute necessity of Satan, and the absolute

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necessity of Satan for apocalypse itself. Hence, the primacy of Satan in all apocalyptic vision, and the fuller the apocalyptic vision the fuller the vision of Satan, inevitably Satan is absolutely primary in Blake’s vision, a primacy apart from which there is no possibility of that “Self-Annihilation of God,” which is absolute atonement, and hence no possibility of an ultimate redemption or regeneration. A purely or finally apocalyptic redemption is not envisioned until Blake, and then it is envisioned as an absolute transfiguration of everything whatsoever, a transfiguration released by the “SelfAnnihilation of God,” but that annihilation is an absolute sacrifice, and the absolute sacrifice of Satan, a Satan who thereby realizes a coincidentia oppositorum with Christ. Could there possibly be a greater or more absolute heterodoxy than that enacted in Blake’s mature vision? Yet this is a vision that deeply affected Yeats and Joyce, and a host of other artists and poets, and even if philosophy has not entered Blake’s vision, there is a full correlation between Blake’s “System” and Hegel’s. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the pure heterodoxy of Hegel’s philosophy, and if we can know that philosophy as the primary philosophical ground of a revolutionary modernity, this is a modernity in which Blake is truly embodied, and embodied as what he knew as Energy. Perhaps only Blake knows this Energy as Eros itself, and an ecstatic Eros, an Eros embodied in a uniquely Blakean apocalypse, but that is an absolute apocalypse, or that very apocalypse enacted by Blake. Blake is our fullest enactor of absolute Body, or a bodily totality, one that he can name as Albion, but an Albion that is finally regenerated as Jerusalem, a Jerusalem who herself finally becomes an absolutely transfigured Satan. Here, the concluding plates of Jerusalem are of decisive importance, plates giving us our most revolutionary vision of Satan, a Satan initially appearing as the absolutely sovereign and transcendent Creator, a Creator who undergoes an eternal death in the “Self-Annihilation of God.” The absolute scandal of the Crucifixion now becomes decisively clear, a scandal that Christianity itself has deeply resisted. Only after a millennium does the Crucifixion appear in Christian art, but then it overwhelms Christian art and iconography, and becomes the primary symbol of Christian art. Not even Dante could or would enact the Crucifixion, but his contemporary, Giotto, did, a Giotto who revolutionized painting, and even revolutionized painting in his absolutely new vision of Christ. Almost immediately the Crucifixion becomes all in all in Christian art, but

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only all too gradually did this transfiguration occur in Christian poetry, a transfiguration most profoundly occurring in Milton and Blake. Blake is our only major poet who is poet and artist at once, and if Jerusalem is his greatest work, here his illustrations and designs are overwhelmingly important, and if the greatest of these is the 96th plate, here the Creator/Satan is just about to sexually penetrate the beautiful body of Jerusalem, a penetration whose consequence is an absolute apocalypse. One only has to carefully examine this plate to realize this, yet it is an absolutely forbidden topic, perhaps the most absolute of all blasphemies and heterodoxies occurs here, and all too significantly this is the conclusion or resolution of Blake’s greatest work. Another forbidden topic is Christianity’s absolute reversal of its original ground. This is primal for both Blake and Nietzsche, just as it is primal in a large body of our New Testament scholarship, but it is alien to Christian theology, or to the great body of Christian theology. While the apocalyptic identity of Jesus and his proclamation and enactment are commonly accepted by New Testament scholarship, this is a ground that is ever more decisively transformed in Hellenistic Christianity, and soon it disappears altogether, as the dawning Kingdom of God of Jesus and primitive Christianity is transformed into the absolutely sovereign and absolutely transcendent Creator. Ever since the most revolutionary movements in Christianity have been apocalyptic movements, as exemplified by the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, a truly apocalyptic explosion that gave us Milton and a host of other revolutionary visionaries who absolutely assaulted the Church and an established Christendom. We shall never know how many radicals there have been in Christian history, but there can be no question of the existence of a Radical Christianity, and one that is most clearly manifest in a uniquely Christian heterodoxy. Milton and Blake are Radical Christians, but so, too, are Schelling and Hegel, and although each is a deeply individual enactor, all of them share a profound Christian heterodoxy, one going far beyond the Christian orthodoxies of their worlds. The truth is that heterodoxy, or a deep heterodoxy, demands a far greater energy and power than does orthodoxy. This is precisely its attraction for many. Troeltsch showed us how monasticism could draw dissenters into its life who otherwise would have become sectarian, and it is not insignificant that the most powerful Catholic

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theology has been created by monks, monks far more disciplined than the great majority, a discipline necessary to preserve orthodoxy, but a discipline that could nonetheless sow the seeds of heterodoxy. Great historical crises generate heterodoxy, just as does war and plague, powerful ruling bodies enforce orthodoxy as a primary means of control, just as it is heterodoxy that generates the deepest dissent and revolt. Nothing is more controversial than the historical effects of the Reformation, but there is no doubt that it brought to an end a holy and universal order, an ending that finally results in the ending of monarchy itself, which may well be the greatest of all historical revolutions. Need we wonder that vast numbers of heretics were burned at the stake? What could be a greater sign of their power? Perhaps nothing is stranger about our new world than the apparent absence of heterodoxy. This is certainly not a sign of the goodness and justice of our world, but is it a sign of the absence of a deeper energy or a deeper engagement? Ultimate controversies such as the war between Catholicism and Protestantism have simply disappeared, and it is difficult to believe that controversies over gay marriage and contraception are signs of an ultimate conflict, just as it is certainly significant that profound problems such as the vast disparities in our incomes fail to generate an ultimate discord, and it appears that nothing could disrupt our tranquillity. Is this a world at peace or a world asleep? Is heterodoxy impossible in our world? Would revolutionary prophets be impossible for us? Can Blake not be renewed for us? Or can Blake any longer even be encountered at all? Once there were radical religious bodies generating dissent, a dissent that is not even imaginable today, indeed, a profound dissent is now unthinkable. Has heterodoxy been so deeply conquered that it is no longer possible? Blake may have been blessed by having no formal education, and if he was almost wholly self-taught, is that essential for a genuine prophet? Blake is unique in having created both innocent and simple poetry and designs and the most complex and esoteric literature in our canon. Unfortunately the most radical and heterodox Blake is only present in his prophetic poetry, a poetry that few can read, but his “Everlasting Gospel,” which he left only in manuscript, is both easy to read and genuinely explosive, just as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell can be read by all. Above all, Blake is a poet and prophet for Jesus, and his is a Jesus who is a truly universal Jesus, more universal

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than any other Jesus, but nonetheless a revolutionary Jesus, indeed, our most revolutionary Jesus. Our scholarship has so fully established Jesus as an eschatological or apocalyptic Jesus that it is difficult to realize how revolutionary Blake was in discovering the apocalyptic Jesus. The apocalyptic Jesus ushers in the end of everything that we know as world, a world that even now has come to end, and that ending realizes apocalypse here and now. Yes, this is an absolute judgment, but it is simultaneously an absolute liberation, and above all a liberation of the weak and the oppressed. Only heterodoxy and an ultimate heterodoxy is open to apocalypse, and Blake is our most heterodox seer, but precisely thereby he is our most apocalyptic seer, and seer who finally knows Yes and only Yes.

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Chapter 4 Nietzsche and Apocalypse

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pocalypse is perhaps the deepest mystery in our history and world, seemingly defying all philosophical and theological explication, and this despite the fact that ours is so clearly an apocalyptic world, and the most comprehensively apocalyptic world in history. No thinker has so deeply enacted our apocalypse as did Nietzsche, an enactment not only bringing our history to an end, but unveiling its origin as did no other thinking, an origin which itself is an apocalyptic origin, one that Nietzsche knew as occurring in the ancient Persian Zarathustra. If that origin is a pure reversal of the archaic world, it is renewed in the prophetic revolution of Israel, and while Nietzsche could know this revolution as the “slave revolt” of morality, a revolt that is an absolute reversal of high and low and master and slave, this reversal is wholly inseparable from an absolutely new epiphany of God, a God who is finally that uniquely Christian God who is the deification of nothingness, the will to nothingness pronounced holy (The Antichrist, 18). Yet this is a truly apocalyptic understanding of God, one only possible when God Himself is dead, for it is the dead Body of God that is nothingness incarnate, a new and absolute nothingness that is the consequence of the death of God, one ushering in that very nihilism that is so deeply our own. Nietzsche is our purest apocalyptic thinker, giving us our only thinking that is a pure and total apocalyptic thinking, hence it is a thinking of absolute reversal, and a reversal that is finally an absolute reversal of God. So it is that an absolute No-saying is finally an absolute Yes-saying, or is so when it undergoes an apocalyptic reversal of itself, and if this is a dialectical and apocalyptic coincidentia 57

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oppositorum, it is precisely thereby a resurrection and renewal of apocalypse itself. Yet this could be nothing less than an apocalypse of God, and an apocalypse of the uniquely Christian God, as now for the first time in thinking, Godhead itself is unveiled as absolute apocalypse. Now, even if Jesus himself was an apocalyptic prophet, and original or primitive Christianity was a truly apocalyptic Christianity, this is the original ground that was almost immediately reversed in Christian history, and reversed most decisively in that Christian God who is absolute transcendence and absolute sovereignty at once. Nietzsche could finally understand that the God of Christianity is the very opposite of the God of Jesus, and its gospel the inversion of the gospel of Jesus, hence it is “ill tidings” or dysangel, releasing for the first time in history an absolute guilt and impotence, and one that is ended only by the death of God. Thus, that death can be understood as the renewal or resurrection of Jesus, a resurrection that is a truly apocalyptic resurrection, as for the first time resurrection is purely embodied in thinking itself. If we have not yet understood Nietzsche as a truly theological thinker, this is in large measure because all manifest theological thinking is so clearly a nonapocalyptic thinking, only the most radical expressions of Christianity have been genuinely apocalyptic, and these have never truly or fully been embodied in theological thinking. But if this actually occurs in Nietzsche’s thinking, then that thinking will inevitably appear to be nontheological or anti theological to us, and antitheological precisely to the extent that it is genuinely apocalyptic. Nietzsche is clearly the most antiphilosophical of our great philosophical thinkers, and so, too, is he the most antitheological of our great theological thinkers, and if Nietzsche has finally been accepted as a genuine philosophical thinker, the time is surely at hand to understand him as a theological thinker as well. Let us never forget that Nietzsche could know all of the great philosophical thinkers as being at the bottom theological thinkers, and if following Spinoza he could know Western metaphysics as ontotheology, he no less than Spinoza subverted that ontotheology, and like Spinoza subverted it by reversing it, yet unlike Spinoza’s his reversal is an apocalyptic reversal. Nietzsche and Spinoza are also alike in being true discoverers of the Bible, for just as Spinoza was the first to realize a genuine historical understanding of the Bible, Nietzsche was the first thinker to realize the Bible’s reversal of itself, one occurring in the prophetic revolution when Israel’s original noble morality was reversed into a

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slave morality, as a total Yes-saying passes into an absolute No-saying, which is nothing less than the historical advent of a pure ressentiment. Nietzsche was the first thinker to discover ressentiment, and this occurred only after his proclamation of the death of God, only the modern realization of the death of God unveils that absolute nothingness into which we have been hurled, a nothingness unveiling a pure ressentiment, even if that ressentiment was born with the prophetic revolution. While Nietzsche came to know our nihilism as being deeply grounded in the birth of Christianity, Christianity itself is a consequence of the prophetic revolution, and most so is that Christian God whom Nietzsche could know as No-saying and No-saying alone, but that is the absolute No-saying that can pass into its very opposite in the death of God. Hence, Nietzsche could know the death of God as the source and ground of the most joyous and ecstatic Yes. Of course, Christianity is unique among the world religions in knowing the death of God, and Christianity knows the crucifixion as the sole source of redemption, but the Crucified God never actually enters thinking or the imagination until the full advent of modernity, and if this occurs most comprehensively in Blake and Hegel, it occurs most ecstatically in Blake and Nietzsche, each of whom could know the death of God as absolute apocalypse, and as that absolute apocalypse that even now is becoming all in all. Blake can be understood as being even more radical than Nietzsche, and most clearly so in his revolutionary naming of the Christian God as Satan, but that naming illuminates Nietzsche’s naming of the Christian God, for the God who is the will to nothingness certainly can be understood as Satan, and if it is Satan alone who calls forth an absolute revulsion and hatred, we can understand why Nietzsche was so negatively obsessed by God, and obsessed by God as has been no other thinker. Moreover, Satan is only historically born with the advent of apocalypticism, and it is only apocalyptic prophets who are actual prophets of Satan If Jesus is the fullest prophet of Satan in the Bible, or the fullest apart from the seer of the Book of Revelation, it is Blake and Nietzsche who are the fullest prophets of Satan in our world, and are so most decisively in their prophetic enactments of God. Certainly both were prophets in their enactments of the death of God, and each finally knew that death as absolute apocalypse, but only insofar as they knew the uniquely Christian God as an absolutely alien nothingness, and an alien nothingness that is absolute darkness.

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Conservative theologians identify both as Gnostic visionaries at this point, but both Blake and Nietzsche ecstatically celebrate both body and the world, thereby absolutely inverting and reversing Gnosticism, and if this is a reversal and inversion inseparable from an inversion and reversal of God, it is only made possible by the death of God. Hence, the death of God is gospel for Nietzsche and Blake alike, but only insofar as it is the death of Satan, or the death or transfiguration of an absolutely alien nothingness. At no point do our philosophers and poets more deeply differ than they do in their vision of evil, and if poets can name an absolute evil as philosophers cannot, here, too, Nietzsche is a genuinely poetic philosopher, and one in deep continuity with the Christian epic tradition, so that Nietzsche can be understood as an epic philosopher, and an epic philosopher carrying forward the epic tradition of Dante, Milton, and Blake. So, too, Nietzsche can enact an ecstatic joy as can no other philosopher, a joy inseparable from the totality of body and the world, so that here joy is a totally incarnate joy, and one inseparable from the dissolution of heaven and the beyond. But such a vision already begins with Dante, our first truly realistic poet, and Dante was the first visionary who could know a God inseparable from the very actuality of the world, so that Dante’s apocalypse is an apocalypse of the world itself, and an apocalypse only made possible by Dante’s vision of Hell. Absolute evil first enters poetic language in the Inferno, but so, too, persons and self-consciousness are first poetically real in the Inferno, and that is the very realism absolutely essential to the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, a realism inseparable from the horizon of Dante’s Hell. Hence Hell is absolutely essential in the uniquely Christian epic, but so, too, is it essential in Nietzsche’s thinking, and if Nietzsche is our only philosopher of Hell, or our only philosopher of an absolutely negative nothingness, this is a Hell that is essential to Nietzsche’s apocalypse. Here, Nietzsche clearly and decisively differs from every thinker who preceded him, or every philosophical thinker, but he does not thereby differ from his theological predecessors, for every premodern theological thinker knew the centrality of damnation and Hell, and knew it as only Nietzsche does in the modern world. Ever since the Enlightenment theologians have been mute on the subject of damnation, a silence or dissolution most comprehensive in twentiethcentury theology, so that theologians are appalled at the centrality of guilt and nothingness in Nietzsche’s thinking, and can even imagine

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that this is a consequence of his atheism. But thereby Nietzsche is more truly Augustinian than any modern theologian, and if it was Paul and Augustine who discovered self-consciousness itself, it was Nietzsche who discovered an absolute reversal of self-consciousness, and an absolute reversal embodying the truly alien nothingness of consciousness itself, so that now consciousness itself is inevitably a consciousness of damnation. Need we wonder at the flight from consciousness in our world, or the flight from a fully active and embodied consciousness? It was Nietzsche who first fully understood this flight philosophically, a philosophical understanding that is inevitably a theological understanding, and most so in its understanding of an absolutely actual nothingness, which Nietzsche himself understood as the absolute No-saying of God. Now if transgression is a decisive key to Nietzsche’s thinking, this is finally an ultimate and absolute transgression of God, one effected by no other thinker, and one that can be understood to have finally broken Nietzsche himself. Again and again theologians point to Nietzsche as a paradigm of the consequence of defying God, and just as he is our most blasphemous and offensive thinker, he is our only real thinker whose very thinking issued in madness, and even if this madness defies our understanding, it surely cannot be understood as a Dionysian joy, or as anything that the Christian can recognize as grace. Perhaps the Christian symbol that most illuminates Nietzsche’s madness is the Descent into Hell, a symbol always peripheral in historical Christianity, and one that simply disappears in modern Christian thinking. But it does not disappear in the Christian imagination, it far rather becomes ever more comprehensive in the evolution of that imagination, and if Nietzsche is truly a forerunner of the twentieth-century imagination, this is nowhere so manifestly true as it is at this point. Already Blake could envision the marriage of Heaven and Hell, and finally Blake realized that marriage as a coincidentia oppositorum between Christ and Satan, one that could only be a final apocalyptic coincidentia oppositorum, but that is just thereby absolute apocalypse itself. Did Nietzsche envision that apocalypse in his vision of Eternal Recurrence? The apocalyptic visions of Blake and Nietzsche are visions and enactments of an absolute and total Yes-Saying, and one possible only by way of the ending of both history and self- consciousness, but it is even more deeply the ending of “God,” and here an overwhelming question arises as to the very identity of God. Of course, the identity

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and meaning of God is the supreme theological question, but nowhere in theology is that question more challenging or more elusive than it is in Nietzsche’s thinking; indeed, Nietzsche’s thinking can be understood as the most contradictory and most paradoxical of all theological thinking. Is it just thereby a truly dialectical thinking, and perhaps the purest dialectical theological thinking that we have been given? Did Nietzsche go beyond even Hegel in the purity of his dialectical thinking, and is that most manifest in his understanding of God, and above all in his apocalyptic understanding of God? While Hegel is our first apocalyptic thinker, and certainly our most comprehensive one, did Hegel realize a genuine apocalyptic understanding of God, and one effecting the final ending of God? Hegel’s understanding of the resurrection of God would seem to belie this, and if Hegel was the first philosopher to understand and enact the death of God, an enactment realizing a revolutionary transformation of philosophy, an Hegelian death of God is nevertheless a resurrection of God, and this is just the point at which a chasm arises between Hegel and Nietzsche. There is no more difficult question in philosophical exegesis than the relation between Hegel and Nietzsche, but it is clear that there is both a deep continuity and an ultimate discontinuity between them, and nowhere is this more decisive than it is in the question of God. Here, the problem of atheism is inescapable, and if Hegel like Spinoza was a philosophical atheist and a philosophical pantheist at once, can this be said of Nietzsche? Or is Nietzsche the first thinker to truly and finally effect a transcendence of God, and one so total that God finally thereby disappears, a disappearance and dissolution that is the first final dissolution of God in thinking itself? Certainly this could be understood as an apocalyptic event, but is it a genuine apocalyptic understanding of God, and a pure apocalyptic understanding of God, and one so pure that now Godhead and apocalypse are indistinguishable, and indistinguishable in an absolute ending that is an absolute beginning? Certainly Nietzsche knew such a beginning, and knew it in his proclamation of Eternal Recurrence, a proclamation that is finally indistinguishable from his proclamation of the death of God, for it is precisely the death of God that realizes Eternal Recurrence. Nowhere is Nietzsche in deeper continuity with Hegel than in his reversal of the archaic movement of eternal return, for Eternal Recurrence is an absolute reversal of eternal return, and is only possible when there can be no return to an absolute beginning, or no return to Godhead itself.

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That is why the absolute beginning of Eternal Recurrence is an absolutely new beginning. Now an absolute novum, which is impossible in eternal return, is actuality itself, but is actuality itself only insofar as eternal return is finally ended. While Nietzsche again and again fell back upon the archaic language of eternal return in his own exegesis of Eternal Recurrence, this is clear testimony to the ultimate difficulty of understanding Eternal Recurrence, and perhaps only in his most ecstatic moments did Nietzsche himself truly understand Eternal Recurrence. Did he most purely understand this apocalyptic transfiguration in his final moments of sanity, and is that why he could then sign himself as Dionysus and the Crucified? Certainly the Dionysus of the late Nietzsche is a universe removed from the Greek Dionysus of The Birth of Tragedy, for this is a Dionysus who is a consequence of the death of God, and if only thereby is inseparable from the Crucified. No such death of God is possible upon a pre-Christian horizon, and if true Dionysian thinking is the thinking of Eternal Recurrence, it is the thinking of that absolute novum, which is ushered in by the death of God. Hence, it is possible only when every beyond has disappeared, a disappearance simply impossible in the pre-Christian world, but all too possible as a consequence of the crucifixion, a crucifixion that is finally the crucifixion of God. Hegel was the first thinker to understand the crucifixion as the crucifixion of God, and at this crucial point Nietzsche is unquestionably an Hegelian thinker, but Nietzsche understands the crucifixion apocalyptically as Hegel does not, for now the crucifixion is understood as the final ending of God, and only that final ending is absolute novum itself. Absolute novum is absolute apocalypse, but is this possible apart from the final ending of God, and hence is a pure apocalyptic thinking a thinking finally ending God? Is this a truth mutely recognized by twentieth-century theology, a theology that is comprehensively nonapocalyptic or anti- apocalyptic, and this despite the fact that it occurs only after the historical discovery of the apocalyptic Jesus? How ironic that one of Nietzsche’s deepest friends, Franz Overbeck, was the theologian who discovered Christianity’s reversal of its own original apocalypticism. Is Nietzsche most deeply a theologian in recovering that very apocalypticism? Is this why Nietzsche devoted so much of his final energy to recovering Jesus, and is this absolutely crucial to his revaluation of all values, for if Jesus is the one historical figure whom Nietzsche knew who is free of all ressentiment, is the way of Jesus the way for us to Eternal Recurrence,

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and is that why the life and death of Jesus is God (The Antichrist, 33)? What could this cryptic statement possibly mean? This statement occurs in the chapter of The Antichrist in which Nietzsche declares that the abolition of any distance between God and humanity is precisely the “glad tidings” of Jesus, now blessedness is the only reality, and its consequence is a new praxis, a praxis called forth in the way of Jesus, and the life and death of the Redeemer is nothing else than this praxis, and this is the very praxis that is God. Notice that Nietzsche can actually identify the life and death of Jesus, only thereby is Jesus the Redeemer, so that one must inevitably ask if the new name of Zarathustra is at bottom the name of Jesus? The new Zarathustra apocalyptically reverses the apocalyptic reversal of the original Zarathustra, and if this is the Zarathustra who is the Zarathustra of Eternal Recurrence, the one giving us an absolute Yes and Amen, could this possibly be Nietzsche’s new name of Jesus, a Jesus who had been totally reversed by Christianity, and who can be resurrected only by the death of the uniquely Christian God? Nietzsche can know Christianity as the stone upon the grave of Jesus, is it the new Zarathustra who shatters that stone, and shatters it by renewing the original way of Jesus, a renewal only possible by way of the death of the Christian God, so that the proclamation of the death of God is finally indistinguishable from the renewal or resurrection of Jesus? Could it be that Nietzsche is our only pure thinker of resurrection, a resurrection that is truly apocalyptic, and truly apocalyptic in calling forth an absolutely new world? Is that new world finally inseparable or even indistinguishable from a new God, a God so absolutely new that it cannot be named as God, and can only appear or be real in that new absolute nothingness that is released by the death of God? A pure or absolute nothingness is perhaps our most forbidden category, very few philosophers have dared even to attempt to think it, foremost among these are Hegel and Nietzsche, and perhaps it is only at this point that it is extraordinarily difficult to distinguish Nietzsche from Hegel. Hegel, of course, was deeply affected by Meister Eckhart, and by Eckhart’s vision of Godhead itself as an absolute nothingness, and while Eckhart’s is a Neoplatonic mystical vision, Hegel inverts a mystical nothingness into an actual nothingness, and for the first time nothingness becomes an actual category of pure thinking itself. This alone could account for Hegel’s deep negation of Christian scholasticism, and its understanding of evil as a privation of the good, for Hegel was the first philosopher to

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understand an absolute evil, one inseparable from his revolutionary understanding of God. Indeed, Hegel’s God is a God who from the beginning becomes alienated from itself, thereby withdrawing into itself and becoming “self-centered”; and this “evil existence” is not in itself alien to God, but rather essential to the very identity of God as God (Phenomenology of Spirit, 780). This is that purely negative movement of God, which realizes that God who is “being-in-itself,” a negative movement that is absolutely necessary to make possible the death of God. And that is the death that reconciles absolute essence with itself, a reconciliation which is the death of the purely alienated or the purely abstract God (Phenomenology of Spirit, 779). Thus Hegel can know the death of God as the reconciliation of Godhead with itself, could this be said of Nietzsche as well, and does Nietzsche finally know Godhead itself in knowing Eternal Recurrence? Eternal Recurrence can be understood as a final apocalyptic transfiguration of absolute transcendence into absolute immanence, but is it not thereby inevitably the apocalyptic transfiguration of Godhead itself, and one that Nietzsche could finally understand as being inaugurated by Jesus himself? Then the Kingdom of God, which Jesus proclaimed and enacted, could be understood as an apocalyptic reversal of the absolute transcendence of God, a kenotic or self-emptying kingdom rather than an absolutely sovereign kingdom, and a sacrificial kingdom embodying the absolute sacrifice of God. Both Nietzsche and Hegel were fascinated by sacrifice, perhaps being our only genuine philosophers of sacrifice, and just as Nietzsche came to know that we must finally sacrifice God to the Nothing, is that the sacrifice that is the sacrifice of the crucifixion, and one that is already embodied in Jesus’ enactment of the Kingdom of God? Let us remember that the Kingdom of God in the synoptic gospels is an apocalyptic title, one found neither in the Old Testament nor in all of that Jewish literature prior to Jesus, including the apocalyptic scriptures of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so that if only here Jesus’ language is truly unique, even if this is the very language that is most subverted and inverted by Christian theology. Did Nietzsche recover that language, and most purely recover it in his proclamation and enactment of Eternal Recurrence, an Eternal Recurrence enacting an absolute joy that is never discovered in our theological language, and an absolute Yes that is an absolute reversal of every possible No? Is it possible to understand that this Yes is truly the name of apocalyptic Godhead and of apocalypse itself? Mystical theology has long

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known a genuine distinction between God and the Godhead, a distinction that becomes a gulf in Meister Eckhart. If this gulf is a deep ground of Hegel’s thinking, is it a ground of Nietzsche’s thinking, too, but now a far more overwhelming gulf, and so overwhelming that there is no continuity whatsoever between Godhead and God? Nietzsche could know a deep midnight of the death of God that is alien to Hegel, a midnight effecting an absolute break in history and consciousness at once, nothing is more integral to Nietzsche’s thinking than is this midnight, and it is only this midnight that makes possible Eternal Recurrence. This alone could account for the deep discontinuity between God and Godhead in Nietzsche’s thinking, just as it could account for the extraordinary rarity of his positive references to God, which perhaps only genuinely occur in The Antichrist, unless they also occur in those passages in Ecce Homo when Nietzsche seemingly speaks of himself as God. The truth is that Nietzsche’s obsession with God deepens as his thought matures, and if he is our only philosopher who has engaged in an ultimate conflict with God, or the only one who has done so openly, this is a conflict that unquestionably bore rich fruits, and perhaps most so in Nietzsche’s ever deeper understanding of God. Only Hegel and Spinoza rival Nietzsche in his understanding of the totality of God, and only Augustine does so among our theologians, and if these are the very thinkers who are Nietzsche’s deepest predecessors, in this perspective, Nietzsche is without any successors at all, for an actual thinking of God has virtually disappeared in the genuine expressions of twentieth century philosophy. Commonly we think of Nietzsche as the very inaugurator of twentieth-century thinking, but surely not at this point. Is this because Nietzsche’s thinking finally made impossible the thinking of God? Is Nietzsche’s thinking of God his deepest sacrifice, one which finally destroyed him, so that he could truly know himself as the crucified? Nietzsche and Spinoza are the only modern philosophers whom their followers can know as saints, and there is a genuine sanctity in Nietzsche, one inevitably giving him a sacred aura, as even his deepest blasphemy can be heard as a sacred blasphemy. Surely no other philosopher has so hypnotized our world, and while all too many can know this as a curse, innumerable others have known it as a blessing, and perhaps most so our artists and poets. Is Nietzsche’s thinking that thinking which most fully realizes for us the ultimate truth that “blessedness” is the only reality, that the rest is only a sign with which

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to speak of it, and that it is this blessedness alone that makes possible a genuine praxis? That is the praxis that Nietzsche could know as being called forth in the Sermon on the Mount, and while this is the purest of all slave moralities, it is simultaneously a noble morality, and the only noble morality that the mature Nietzsche could affirm. Yet this is a noble morality that is an apocalyptic morality, one inseparable from the immediate advent of the Kingdom of God, and if that kingdom is a truly self-emptying kingdom, embodying a Godhead that is the crucifixion or the sacrifice of God, it is that sacrifice that is “blessedness” itself, and a blessedness that is finally the only reality. Yes, Nietzsche could name this reality as Eternal Recurrence, or even name it as the Will to Power, but that is a power that is the very opposite of what we commonly know as the will to power, and is so as a sacrificial or self-emptying power, and precisely thereby absolute power itself. Nietzsche’s mature thinking and vision revolves about an apocalyptic coincidentia oppositorum, a final union of an absolute No and an absolute Yes, but can we understand that union as a reflection or an embodiment of apocalyptic Godhead itself? First, we must be aware that unless this occurs in Hegel, a thinking of apocalyptic Godhead never occurs before Nietzsche, hence inevitably such thinking will be distant and even vastly distant from everything that we have known as the Godhead, and perhaps most distant from that purely mystical Godhead, which is named as absolute nothingness. The way to mystical Godhead is the way of absolute return, an eternal return to a primordial or original eternity, one absolutely beyond the world and time. But the way to apocalyptic Godhead is the very reversal of an absolute or eternal return, for it is a forward rather than a backward movement to eternity, and it is one embodying rather than disembodying time and the world. Both a forward and a backward movement to eternity are present in Hegel’s thinking, but in Nietzsche’s thinking, or Nietzsche’s mature or final thinking, there is only a forward movement to eternity, and this is a forward movement ever more finally reversing every backward movement to eternity. Hence eternal recurrence is an absolute reversal of eternal return, one shattering or dissolving every possible primordial totality and ushering in an absolutely new totality which is the total embodiment of time and the world. Now, if it is possible to understand that Christianity has truly and absolutely reversed Jesus’ enactment of the Kingdom of God, and

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that the uniquely Christian God is the absolute reversal of that Kingdom, then it is possible to understand that Nietzsche’s enactment of Eternal Recurrence is a genuine renewal of the Kingdom of God. Thereby a backward movement to eternity is purely and totally reversed into a forward movement to eternity, a primordial totality or Godhead is reversed into an apocalyptic Godhead or totality, and it is time and the world that are now eternity itself. Now the world itself is an absolutely new world, an absolutely new eternity, one never thought before, or never purely thought before Nietzsche, and whose very thinking demands a pure reversal of thinking itself, or a reversal of every thinking on our horizon. There can be little doubt that Nietzsche embraced this goal, but did he achieve it? Is this even an actual possibility of thinking itself? No one ever assaulted philosophy more fiercely or more purely than did Nietzsche, and his assault is a genuinely philosophical assault, one intending an absolute reversal of philosophy, but perhaps this very reversal is most clearly unveiled by understanding it as a theological reversal, and a theological reversal of everything that we have known as God. There are astute scholars who know Nietzsche as our purest pagan thinker, the one most distant or most liberated from every possible Biblical horizon, or most liberated from God, and perhaps the only truly modern thinker who is a genuinely or fully pagan thinker. This interpretation demands an understanding of Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence as a renewal of an archaic or pre-Biblical eternal return, so that here Nietzsche becomes our only truly archaic or primordial thinker, or the only one in a post-Biblical or post-Christian world. But is Nietzsche truly liberated from God, is his thinking, or his mature thinking, an absolutely God-less thinking, and the only thinking that we have known as an absolutely atheistic thinking? It would be difficult to doubt that Nietzsche is our purest atheist, or our purest atheistic thinker, but if Nietzsche is a genuinely or truly dialectical thinker, then an absolute No to God is finally an absolute Yes, and above all Yes if Nietzsche is a genuinely apocalyptic thinker. Apocalypticism is the very horizon that is most alien to our philosophical world, but also truly alien to our theological world. Theologians have ever known apocalypticism as a pure enemy, and the orthodoxies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all arose as reversals of apocalypticism, just as a uniquely modern apocalypticism has been the gravest of all threats not only to orthodoxy but to theology itself, an apocalypticism embodied in both Hegel and

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Nietzsche, but it is Nietzsche’s apocalypticism that is the most ultimate theological threat. In this perspective, Nietzsche is most threatening not as a pagan thinker but as a heterodox thinker, and an absolutely heterodox thinker, perhaps the only one whom we have known, or the only one who is a purely heterodox thinker; here, once again clearly differing from Hegel, and not only from Hegel but from every other philosopher apart from Spinoza. Heterodoxy is an elusive category, or is so in the modern world, but it has always been a deeper threat to Christianity than has any form of paganism, and above all that heterodoxy that is a pure apocalypticism. Already Paul could be known as such a heretic, to say nothing of Jesus, and all of the great Christian epic visionaries have been apocalyptic heretics, a heterodoxy most purely embodied in Blake, a Blake who is surely the poetic twin of Nietzsche. Certainly Blake’s poetic apocalypticism illuminates Nietzsche’s philosophical apocalypticism, and perhaps most so Blake’s apocalyptic vision of the Godhead, a Godhead realizing an apocalyptic coincidentia oppositorum between Christ and Satan, even as Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence is an apocalyptic coincidentia oppositorum between an absolute Yes and an absolute No. Here, both Blake and Nietzsche are more vastly distant from a truly pagan ground than is any manifest theology, but are they thereby distant from a truly Biblical ground, or a Biblical apocalyptic ground? Now just as Blake truly discovered the apocalyptic Jesus, Nietzsche truly discovered Christianity’s absolute reversal of Jesus, and while well known to Blake and to a host of radical heretics, never before Nietzsche was it known in thinking itself. Not until the full advent of modernity is a genuine apocalyptic thinking born, unless this occurred in medieval Joachism, and apocalyptic thinking throughout our history has been a radically heretical thinking, giving us perhaps our only pure heterodoxy, a heterodoxy reaching a consummation in Nietzsche. But if we understand Nietzsche as a heterodox thinker rather than as a pagan thinker, and as our purest heterodox thinker, then we can understand that Nietzsche does envision the Godhead, but a purely apocalyptic Godhead, and therefore a Godhead infinitely distant from our given understanding of God. Here, too, there is a gulf between Hegel and Nietzsche, but Nietzsche knows a total or absolute apocalypse as Hegel does not, one not only finally ending our history, but ending all self-consciousness as well, endings inseparable from the ending of everything that we have known as God. That

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ending could only be an apocalyptic ending, and hence a final ending, so not only does it renew or resurrect an absolute nothingness, but that is the very nothingness that is now the only possible horizon of Godhead itself, a Godhead that is now all in all only as an absolute nothingness. Nietzsche is far closer to a purely mystical vision than is Hegel, but he is simultaneously far more distant as well, now absolute transcendence has been totally dissolved, and an absolute immanence born wholly liberated from every shadow or echo of transcendence, and if this absolutely new immanence is Godhead itself, it is an immanence embodied in the very nothingness of that transcendence. That is why this nothingness is a truly and even absolutely new nothingness, and if it does parallel a purely mystical nothingness, it does so only by reversing that nothingness, thereby nothingness ceases to be a primordial nothingness, and wholly becomes an embodied nothingness, embodied in the actuality of world and time, thereby becoming actuality itself. But a total Yes-saying, or the total Yes-saying of Eternal Recurrence, demands and enacts an absolute Yes-saying to that actuality, thereby a sheer horror passes into a pure joy, deep midnight passes into dawn, and now there is only “blessedness” itself. Nothing could be less pagan than this affirmation and enactment, and nothing could be more Biblical, or more apocalyptically Biblical, for this is nothing other than apocalypse itself. Yet it is apocalypse only by being absolute apocalypse; now apocalypse is totally embodied, and totally embodied here and now. Need we wonder that theology has been so horrified by apocalypticism, or that apocalypticism has ever been the gravest threat upon our horizon, one inciting the deepest theological assaults, and the deepest political assaults as well? Yes, Nietzsche is our enemy, perhaps the most dangerous thinker who ever lived, but he is our most open enemy as a theological thinker, the most radical and revolutionary of all theological thinkers, and most so in his very thinking of apocalyptic Godhead. If it is that Godhead and that Godhead alone that induces an absolute joy, it no less calls forth an absolute horror, a horror known to Nietzsche alone among our philosophers, but a horror inseparable from that absolute joy which Nietzsche alone could know. Or, rather, Nietzsche alone among our thinkers, for just as a fully comparable joy is certainly known by a Dante or a Blake, and enacted throughout our deeper imaginative history, which is a history in which that joy becomes ever more elusive, but just thereby ever more comprehensive and total.

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Are we returning to that cycle which initiated this joy, a return that could only be a forward rather than a backward movement, or what Kierkegaard named as a Biblical repetition as opposed to a pagan recollection, and a repetition of that Kingdom of God, which Jesus enacted and proclaimed? If Nietzsche is truly a philosopher of that kingdom, and at no other point is he more unique philosophically, he is so only by being a theologian, and the only totally revolutionary theologian whom we have known. Perhaps this is just the point at which we most resist him, the very point at which he is most profoundly threatening, and most threatening to that very theological ground that none of us have been able to escape.

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Chapter 5 America and the Death of God

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ur most revolutionary prophet, William Blake, in his first prophetic poem, America (1793), enacted the American Revolution as the initial realization of the death of God, the deity here named as Urizon, the preincarnate and alien God, whose death initiates apocalypse. This is the God whom Hegel named as Abstract Spirit and the “Bad Infinite,” a God not realized until the advent of the modern world, and who is the consequence of an absolute selfnegation or self-emptying of the Godhead. Both Blake and Hegel enact the death of God, indeed Hegel and Blake are the first enactors of the death of God, a death that for each is an absolute self-negation or self-emptying, a self-negation that is the absolute source of all and everything. Hence, the death of God is both genesis and apocalypse, or absolute beginning and absolute ending, the absolute beginning of all and everything, and the absolute consummation of everything. That consummation itself proceeds out of an original self-negation or self-emptying, one negating or emptying an original absolutely undifferentiated Godhead, and only this self-negation makes possible either apocalypse or the world itself. Hegel is our most profoundly apocalyptic thinker, while Blake is our most totally apocalyptic visionary, each recover and renew a long lost apocalyptic ground, a ground that is the original ground of Christianity, one that is wholly transformed in the great body of Christianity, and only recovered in revolutionary movements, which are the most revolutionary movements in our history. Both Blake and Hegel are profoundly Christian, but they are radical Christians, even atheistic Christians, who absolutely negate the 73

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given God, or who deeply and comprehensively realize that this God has absolutely negated itself, a self-negation that inaugurates the modern world. Each could know the French Revolution as the historical realization of the death of God, but Blake, at least in America, could know the American Revolution not only as the initial realization of the death of God, but as the inaugurator of absolute revolution. This is the deepest calling of America, one known to every deeply American seer, and actualized in that America, which is the first secular nation, the first not only to separate Church and State, but to create a public realm that is a truly secular realm. This inspired an assault on America by many European Christians, but Europeans have never been able to understand America, and the question can be genuinely asked if America has ever understood itself. America, with the possible exception of Indonesia, is the most pluralistic nation in the world, the one with the largest number of diverse minorities, and whose original aristocracy was the first aristocracy to be wholly transformed, and now only pale traces of it remain. Of course, America is the most capitalistic nation, now serving as a model for a once revolutionary China, but American capitalism is now inseparable from American militarism, and if American military power now transcends world military power, this power is having an immense impact on America, where no political leader dares resist it. Once it was common to look on America as the new Rome, and while the American empire is not as powerful as was the Roman empire, the impact of America on the world is possibly as great as was Rome’s, and not only in the pragmatic arena, but in a new and wholly new mass popular culture. America is the creator of that culture, and here one can see an all too concrete realization of the death of God, as depth itself is ended, or is now indistinguishable from surface, and just as American folk music and folk art are now disappearing, this is occurring throughout the world. Innumerable thinkers have attempted to contend with the advent of a new mass culture and mass society, one that dawns in America and is rapidly extended throughout the world, and if only here America dominates the world. But is that culture inseparable from a vast economic and military power, so that the American empire is a truly new empire, as is fully manifest in the perspective of the Roman Empire, for Roman military power was a purely naked power, whereas American military power is disguised by its conjunction with our mass culture, and inevitably wholly disguised in the mass media. So

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in a fundamental sense American military power is invisible, but all the more powerful just because of that, for thereby it does not provoke ultimate resistance, and this despite the vast sums that are spent on it, as a military totality has been created even in the absence of a military power or powers that could possibly contest it. Now this is very much like ancient Rome, and if that Rome had resisted imperialistic ventures it could possibly have survived, but can a genuine empire resist imperialism, which is certainly a primary question being asked of America today. There is also a parallel between Rome and America in the religious arena, imperial Rome was the site of a large number of dynamic religious bodies including Christianity, just as America is the site of such bodies, and in Rome these bodies underwent enormous transformations, and most of all Christianity itself, undergoing a total transformation unparalleled by any other religion in the world. Now Catholicism truly becomes Roman Catholicism, but is a comparable transformation occurring in our world, and could this be occurring in the context of the death of an old religion, as occurred in ancient Rome? Surely the death of God in the modern world is comparable to the twilight of the gods in the ancient world. Wagner realized this profoundly, but if America is the original site of the death of God, could that be essential to American destiny, even if that is now most hidden in that destiny? America is perhaps the most religious nation in the industrial world, but we know all too little about this, for whereas deep and comprehensive studies occur of the American economy, there is very little study of contemporary religious life, and no in-depth studies of it at all, it is as though an absolute prohibition of inquiry has been enforced here. American literature is perhaps the arena in which such an inquiry could now most decisively occur, and it is vitally important to attend to what is most unique here, what is vitally and most distinctively American. Moby Dick is an apt site for such an investigation, for it is our most American epic, and also the first mythical novel, a truly fundamental breakthrough, and if the White Whale is the most powerful figure in American literature, it is truly a horror religiosus, and one profoundly enacting the death of God. Moby Dick is truly a Urizen in the American world, and a Urizen perhaps here undergoing an ultimate and final death. But is that really possible in the context of this novel, or in the context of America itself? Now if Moby Dick truly is the American epic, is this an epic revolving about the death of

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God, a death of God that Blake could enact as the origin of America, and one dominating American literature as it does no other literature? It is surely paradoxical that such a seemingly conservative nation as America could produce such a radical literature, and this is true of its greatest literature, as is true of no other nation. Eugene O’Neill is commonly accepted as the greatest American dramatist, and his major plays are enactments of the death of God in numerous arenas, plays that can be understood as our most nihilistic dramas, and yet they are deeply and even uniquely American. O’Neill is genuinely a revolutionary dramatist, perhaps the most revolutionary of all dramatists apart from Shakespeare, yet he is a Catholic dramatist, but only as a radical Catholic, and a radical Catholic opening himself to our underworld, creating an American inferno comprehending “Here Comes Everybody,” as most purely occurring in The Iceman Cometh. But this play can finally be understood as a purgatory rather than an inferno, even if a nihilistic purgatory, which is perhaps the only purgatory that could be real in a genuinely American world. Certainly O’Neill is deeply American, and a European intending to study America could do no better than to study O’Neill. But is O’Neill truly representative of American literature as a whole, or of a deeper American literature? Insofar as we accept Moby Dick as the American epic, we can become open to a distinctively American wildness or wilderness, a wilderness that deeply shaped America, giving it a uniquely American identity, an identity that is continually renewed in American literature. So it is that the fiction of Henry James, perhaps the most sophisticated of all fiction, could be understood as a sublimation of an American wilderness, but one only possible by way of that wilderness. James Baldwin, another sophisticated American novelist, once declared that the Gothic cathedrals are not part of his past, and this could be said by virtually any American, for America is truly a desert insofar as it is so isolated from the actualities of history. So it is that American Gothic is a truly ironic American architecture, one wholly artificial and false as a Gothic architecture, but one despite this fully pragmatic, and thus fully functional. Accordingly, Heidegger could reach the judgment, in the conclusion of Introduction to Metaphysics, that America and Soviet Russia are metaphysically identical, for here time as history has vanished from human life. Nothing is more revealing about America than a distinctively American religion, and if America is the most religious of all industrial nations, its religious life is more diverse than that of any other

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nation, for if only because of the immense emigration to America, virtually every religion in the world has found a home in America. Not only did America initiate the separation of Church and State, it inaugurated the first truly secular culture, and only in America has religion existed in an integral relation with secular culture, thus leading not only to deep conflict, but to a deep religious absorption of secular culture, or a distinctly American idolatry. Such an idolatry can be observed in that mass advertising created by America, one in which wholly empty and vacuous images create a totally empty language, but one truly effective in that very emptiness, one creating empty but all-consuming desire. There is something deeply American in mass advertising, a peculiarly American pragmatic power, one either truly demonic or wholly amoral, and one that could only occur in a deeply anonymous world, a nameless world that itself is peculiarly American. Jazz is commonly judged to be the most distinctively American art, and jazz has a deeply religious origin in spirituals and the blues, blues that are truly unique to America, one conjoining the impact of slavery and oppression. Nonetheless there is a deep joy in the blues, one deeply realized in jazz, and openly embodied in the great blues and jazz singers, singers who have had a universal impact, and a universal liberating impact. But this is a very strange liberation, one seemingly suppressing or dissolving all possibility of rebellion and revolt, as though jazz is the source of a true passivity, but one nevertheless inseparable from a genuine joy. While America claims to be an ultimate source of freedom, it has been more deeply scarred by slavery than any other nation, thereby incurring a peculiarly American guilt, and one as deep as anything else in the American soul. Is there a distinctively American atonement or purgation for this guilt, one deeply occurring in American literature, as perhaps most manifestly realized in the major novels of Faulkner, that deep son of the state most embroiled in slavery, and yet a state that produced more major literature than any other state? Jazz itself can be thought of as a primal source of atonement, an atonement realized through the violence of jazz, a violence assuaging itself in its own actualization, as its assault on us induces a deep calm, but a calm inseparable from assault. A pure expression of this is “The West End Blues” of Louis Armstrong, one creating a truly new sound, assaulting all that is simply given as jazz, and transfiguring it into a new ecstasy, a pure ecstasy consuming its hearer, but doing so only by

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effecting an actual purgation, and an actual purgation that can be understood as an atonement, and an actual atonement releasing us into a new life. Jazz is inseparable from festival, a festival that is inevitably a sacred festival, as are all the high moments of jazz, but thereby and therein these are atoning moments, moments impossible apart from an actual purgation. At this crucial point we can only speak of atonement itself, an atonement resisting all real theological understanding, yet an atonement that has given us perhaps our greatest art, and if only here painting and music are in full harmony with each other, a harmony that is echoed in jazz. If we associate jazz with the death of God, and do so because jazz is so deeply American, then the death of God can be understood as realizing an ultimate joy, one that Nietzsche himself profoundly proclaimed, and did so while himself in a wholly broken condition. For the joy released by the death of God is wholly independent of the condition of its recipient, or can only be correlated with a broken condition, that very condition that Nietzsche associated with a slave morality, a morality only possible by way of the reversal of a noble morality. Is jazz only possible through a reversal of a noble morality, does its very advent depend on an ultimate assault on the high and the exalted, one shattering all sanctioned authority and status? Many conservatives associate such an assault with a new America, an America transcending an established law and order, and inaugurating the first anarchistic nation. While such an America cannot be discovered in a common or established America, it is present in a radical America, as manifest in much of the literature of America, and even in its more radical religious bodies. This is the America that called Blake and many other radical Europeans, but an America that can only be recovered through rigorous historical study, or by an imaginative or religious rebirth, for this is an America that has become hidden from view, and truly silent apart from its underground expressions. Now that America is the most powerful nation in the world, it is thereby the most established of all nations, and the one most sanctioning all established authority and power, a sanctioning inevitably occurring through its own power, but an overwhelming power inevitably inducing rebellions against itself. Are such rebellions now occurring in America, and even occurring through a distinctively American realization of the death of God? Few have given attention to the question of a peculiarly American realization of the death of God, and perhaps the deepest

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inquiry into this question is in H.L. Mencken’s great book on the American language, wherein he demonstrates an absence in that language of a virtually universal linguistic and hierarchical distinction between high and low, a hierarchy wholly alien to the American language, and perhaps finally alien to a deeper America. Certainly the death of God, or an actual death of God, dissolves or destroys all such hierarchy, and even if few Americans are aware of this, genuine conservatives know it all too well, and if modern conservatism was founded by Burke’s response to the French Revolution, modern conservatism is a deep reaction against a revolutionary Terror destroying all established law and order, a Terror that is an enactment of the death of God, as proclaimed on the banners of the revolutionary armies. Once the deepest political controversy in America was over the French Revolution, one giving birth to a distinctly American conservatism, and even if this has now been forgotten in America, American conservatism remains deeply bound to all established law and order, and precisely thereby is the most powerful opponent of all revolution. Little is more ironical in world history than the American Revolution, a revolution that many could identify as the very advent of freedom, but a revolution that many can now know as ending all possibility of revolution, and doing so with an apocalyptic finality. Already the young Blake in America gave us an apocalyptic vision of the American Revolution, a Blake who was himself inspired by American revolutionaries, and even if that is inconceivable today, we can thereby understand how an ultimate reversal of America has indeed occurred. The visionary Blake actually envisioned how such an absolute reversal occurred in Christianity, one finally transforming the sovereignty of the Christian God into a Satanic sovereignty, as most decisively occurring in his illustrations to the Book of Job, but as most fully occurring in his penultimate epic, Milton. Thus that radical Milton who first fully envisioned Satan is truly reborn in Blake, and most reborn in Blake’s Milton, an epic giving us our purest vision of Satan, a Satan who is an absolute and universal negativity. Yet that negativity undergoes its own reversal in what Blake envisioned as “The Self-Annihilation of God,” a self-annihilation fully paralleling an Hegelian self-negation or selfemptying of God. And if this is an absolute atonement for both Blake and Hegel, it is an atonement that is a revolutionary atonement, and one absolutely transfiguring everything whatsoever. Has America been given the promise of enacting such a revolutionary atonement, and could this occur through its very

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embodiment of the death of God, an embodiment already negatively or inversely enacted in Moby Dick? Is it really so very odd so to associate America and the death of God, and if we approach this question through a Blakean and Hegelian perspective, does that not give America an ultimate identity that otherwise is inexplicable? Of course, many would oppose all ultimate identity, and think it most ludicrous to give America an ultimate identity, that very America that is now a new Rome. But is not a new Rome an ultimate identity, and even an apocalyptic identity, it would surely be in continuity with the Book of Revelation, a book profoundly naming an old Rome, and a book perhaps harboring an apocalyptic naming of America? When one reflects on the role that America has played in realizing a contemporary world of universal economic exploitation and a universal mass society and culture, it would not be odd to give America such a purely demonic identity. Yet apocalyptically a demonic identity is inseparable from a salvific identity, the kingdom of darkness is inseparable from the kingdom of light, and absolute darkness only fully dawns in the wake of the advent of absolute light. Thus if America has a genuinely demonic apocalyptic identity that identity is inseparable from its very opposite, and if Blake is our most revolutionary apocalyptic visionary, at no point is that vision more fully manifest than in his vision of Satan. For in giving us our fullest vision of Satan, that very vision enacts the absolute necessity of Satan, and the absolute necessity of Satan for an absolute apocalypse. Even if he couldn’t fully face it, Nietzsche knew the absolute necessity of evil, a necessity for realizing an actual Eternal Recurrence, a necessity apart from which Eternal Recurrence could only be eternal return. Eternal Recurrence can be known as our purest vision of apocalypse, and Nietzsche is a purely apocalyptic thinker, at which point he is in genuine continuity with the apocalyptic Hegel. In both Nietzsche and Hegel, those thinkers who most profoundly enact the death of God, there is an ultimate renewal of Joachism, that Joachism that is the deepest and most influential of all medieval heterodoxies, and above all so in its witness to the actual advent of the final Age of the Spirit. Can America truly be dissociated from such an advent? Surely its own visionaries have known it, as concretely manifest in the most American of all new religious movements, Mormonism and Christian Science, both of which enact an Age of the Spirit, even if in all too limited and narrow modes. So, too, Christian apocalyptic sects are

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apparently most powerful in America, and Christian apocalyptic visionaries appear again and again in America, and do so ever attracting new followers, for America more than any other nation is overwhelmed by Christian sects, and this is true even while American Catholic and Orthodox bodies are more vital than they are in any old world. Nothing so baffles the European as does the vitality of American religion, but if this very vitality can be associated with the death of God, then it can become understandable, and perhaps understandable even to the European, and as European theologians have noted, when God is dead, religion is everywhere. Certainly many Europeans are horrified by the demonic power of America, and if only as a demonic power American can be known as embodying the death of God, a death of God that may well be more universal in America than anywhere else, even if thereby most deeply disguised. Let us return to the symbolic figure of Moby Dick, who can be understood as the deepest symbol of America, and here an America who actually kills God, even if that murder is at bottom a suicide, and a suicide that can be understood as either the death or the self-annihilation of God. Moby Dick is a truly prophetic book, and one envisioning not only a future but a present actuality, an actuality occurring in a deeper America, and one inseparable from everything that is genuinely American. Just as an absolute horror is actual here, a horror that is a horror religiosus, this is a horror that cannot be disjoined from a deeper America, nor disjoined from a deeper American destiny, a destiny called forth in the deepest American vision. A comparable horror is enacted in the dramas of O’Neill, whose greatest plays are our most horrible dramas, and just as these are commonly and critically accepted as our most American dramas, they inevitably embody a uniquely American destiny, which is everything but the manifest destiny of the nineteenth century. While there are those who think that tragedy is alien to America, the opposite would appear to be true in American literature itself, a literature astutely ignored by the populizers of America, for whom America is a pure innocence. Let us recall that the American Civil War was the first totally horrible war in history, and a war producing an all pervasive horror of war, one deeply and comprehensively transforming America. The horror of that war can be known as being renewed in World War I, a war initiating America as a truly world power, but a power soon destined to be engaged in futile and self-destructive wars. Subsequent to World War II, American wars have been truly ironic,

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their victories inevitably become defeats, just as while realizing the greatest military power in history, this power itself is inseparable from a deep American impotence, which no one can understand. Why not employ the symbol of the death of God to explicate this condition? Cannot contemporary American power be likened to the dead or dying body of God, which destroys everything in its wake? Yes, the symbol of the death of God is our best symbol for explicating America, an America that is inevitably a tragic nation, and even is so in its very innocence, an innocence that is inevitably an innocence lost. Nowhere can this be observed more decisively than in American literature, perhaps the most confessional literature in the world, and one embodying more horror than any other literature. While American critics may be blind to this, European critics are not, and while we may be astounded that a Baudelaire could take American literature so seriously, Baudelaire knew the death of God more profoundly than any American. Americans do know the death of God, as truly manifest in American literature, but they deeply veiled this from themselves until only recently, when the death of God exploded in America, even if this explosion was soon dissipated. That explosion was a fulfillment of a long American gestation, one occurring in American philosophy as well as in American literature, and even occurring in American historiography and sociology, which are truly radical American ventures. It is remarkable how America has so fully hidden its revolutionary identity from itself, while so commonly proclaiming a Utopian identity for itself, a Utopian identity that is the very opposite of a revolutionary identity, one wholly disguising American from itself. Yet an originally revolutionary America has become the most reactionary of all contemporary nations, and this is the context in which it can be liberating to understand America as an embodiment of the death of God, thereby identifying America as a revolutionary rather than a reactionary power. While the death of God can release profound and deadly reaction, as so deeply understood by Dostoyevsky, it also can be profoundly liberating, a liberation ultimately enacted by Nietzsche, and by Hegel, too. And if it is Hegel and Nietzsche who most profoundly understand a uniquely Western destiny, that destiny cannot be divorced from the death of God, and from the death of God as an ultimate and apocalyptic event. While we commonly think of modernity as fully dawning in the seventeenth century, and doing so through genuine political, social,

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economic, literary, philosophical, and scientific revolutions, it is actually not until the nineteenth century that there is a full awareness and embodiment of the actuality of these revolutions, and only then is there an absolute break between an old world and a new world. Thus, an actual language of the death of God is now released for the first time, and only now is the death of God either poetically or philosophically enacted, as occurs in the revolutionary work of Blake and Hegel. This is just the point at which Blake and Hegel are most openly revolutionary, for they are the first actually to speak or write of the death of God, which each understands as the advent of an absolute transformation, and a transformation transforming everything whatsoever. America can be understood as the primal site of that transformation, or the primal public site, and if only for this reason America must be deeply disguised from itself, and wear the mask of a simple innocence. How appropriate that the ultimately revolutionary Blake should choose America as the point at which to inaugurate his own prophetic poetry and designs, thereby truly reversing the public image of America, and even calling forth the American Revolution as the ending of monarchic empire. Blake never returns to this image of America, and if no American prophet even approaches the revolutionary power of Blake, an ultimate disguise may well be necessary for a uniquely American destiny, and that destiny is clearly a universal destiny, as actually enacted in the uniquely American philosophy of Pragmatism. Here is a thinking that is truly American and truly universal at once, and if this is paralleled in a uniquely American drama, that is a drama centered on the death of God more than any other drama apart from Brecht and Beckett. Can a contemporary America realize a uniquely American destiny? This is even now occurring if we identify that destiny with a truly anonymous and empty body, a body of no return because it has already wholly arrived, and a body that American prophets have enacted as a Great Sleep. While American destiny, as Henry Miller envisioned it, may well be an air- conditioned nightmare, that could be a realization of world destiny, and itself an apocalyptic enactment of the death of God. Is it, then, impossible to dissociate America and the death of God? Is it only America that can be envisioned as totally enacting the death of God, and is that truly America’s destiny, and America’s unique destiny? Dare we say Yes to this? Or is it possible to say No, and to say No with an actual and genuine conviction?

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Chapter 6 Joyce and the Christian Epic Tradition

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he Christian epic continually renews itself, each epic poet is reborn and renewed in his successor, and Blake’s deepest rebirth occurs in James Joyce, and although this is a Catholic rebirth, and thus a rebirth of Dante, here Catholicism is an underground or subterranean Catholicism, and thus a truly radical Catholicism, but even thereby the most universal expression of Catholicism. Joyce is truly Blakean in undergoing such a total and comprehensive transformation of his vision, and so, too, is he Blakean in centering on the Body of Satan, which is ultimately the Body of Christ, yet in Joyce’s vision this is an absolutely prosaic body, just as Joyce’s epics are our first fully and wholly prosaic epics, and thereby consequences of an ultimate linguistic transformation. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake can be known as radically modern rebirths of the Commedia, and thereby the beginning and the ending of the Christian epic tradition coincide, each realize apocalyptic endings that are apocalyptic beginnings, and each are profoundly but radically Catholic visions. Few Catholic lovers of Joyce can doubt his Catholic identity, but this is one that thus far has defied theological analysis, even though a great body of Catholics knows that the Church is far more universal than its Hierarchy can accept. Surely Joyce is our most universal visionary or seer, as explicitly enacted in the Wake in “Here Comes Everybody,” and implicitly enacted in Ulysses in its body of characters who are already everybody, and whose absolutely prosaic language is the actuality of a universal world. Unquestionably the Wake is Joyce’s most challenging work, and strangely enough it is also his most deeply Catholic work, as for the 85

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first time the Eucharist is fully realized imaginatively, and enacted throughout the Wake as its deepest and purest movement. Now the Missa Solemnis becomes the Missa Jubilaea, and as a cosmic and universal mass it is an apocalyptic rebirth and renewal of the absolutely primordial, as primordial Godhead undergoes a death of self-annihilation in this mass: Laying the cloth, to fore of them. And thanking the fish in core of them. To pass the grace for Gard sake! Ahmohn, . . . Help, help, hurray! Four ghouls to nail! Cut it down mates, look slippy! They’ve got a dather with a swimminpull. Dang! Ding! Dong! Dung! Isn’t it great he is swaying above us for his good and ours. Fly your baloons, dannies and dinnies! Her’s doorknobs dead! And Annie Delap is free. Ones more We could ate you, per Buccas, and imbabe through you, reassuranced in the wild lac of godliness. One fledge, one brood, till hulm comes evurdyburdy. Huh the throman! Huh the traidor, Huh the truh. (377.29–378.6) This cosmic mass occurs again and again throughout the Wake, which alone makes the Wake truly unique, and it occurs as a common or ultimately vernacular mass, thereby becoming absolutely universal. That very universality is likewise and even thereby a radical political call, and one not simply calling for a universal humanity, but embodying that humanity in its own language, and even effecting or realizing it in its eucharistic enactments, enactments that actually realize a universal body and world. Blake’s Jerusalem opens with the call to Awake!, a call repeated and renewed by Joyce, and we are to awake to apocalypse itself, and to that apocalypse, which is dawning even now, and dawning in the purest actualities about us. While such dawning radically transcends everything that is manifestly political, it nonetheless radically challenges the political, and above all challenges all given or established political worlds, even while embodying an ultimate political destiny.

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This destiny is wholly alien to all established political languages and worlds, and if this is the destiny of “Here Comes Everybody,” it is also the destiny of Anna Livia Plurabelle, that Eternal Feminine who is the uniquely Catholic Mother of God, but also the rebirth of an ecstatic Molly Bloom, and even a rebirth of Dante’s Beatrice. The profound union of A.L.P. and H.C.E., which is realized in the Wake, is a union of all polar others, and is necessarily a political union, even if an apocalyptic political union. Hence it is a rebirth of Dante’s Empire, and of that Empire that is wholly united with the Church, thereby giving the Church itself an absolutely new identity, but in its Joycean expression an absolutely universal identity, and an absolutely actual universal identity. Simply by participating in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake we are awakened to a new political body, a universal body as political bodies have never previously been, and a fully and wholly integrated body, as an absolutely new body is here enacted. The genius of these epics is that they enact body itself, and the depths of body, depths never enacted before, and depths previously alien to every expression of the imagination. Joyce is perhaps unique among our contemporary visionaries in being simultaneously both deeply distant from and ultimately grounded in our deepest traditions, and yet this condition is characteristic of our great Christian epic poets, and at no other point is there a greater unity between them. Dante, Milton, and Blake are all revolutionary visionaries, and each created truly comprehensive visions, a comprehensiveness found in no other epic poetry throughout the world, and this comprehensiveness is itself a revolutionary achievement. Therein scripture itself is profoundly transformed, now disappearing as a scripture which is only “scripture,” and appearing as a scripture, which is world or totality itself, and a scripture fully and actually speaking in these epics, epics that are scripture and actuality at once. Moreover, scripture here is a truly evolving scripture, and one evolving through deep transformations of itself, transformations wherein scripture evolves its own polar opposite, but does so only to realize a true coincidentia oppositorum between itself and its opposite. So it is that a deep and radical “heresy” here evolves out of a pure “orthodoxy,” and nothing else is more manifest in the evolution of the Christian epic imagination than is its movement from orthodoxy to heresy, yet this heresy is truly the dialectical “other” of orthodoxy, ever more

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fully realizing itself as a totality drawing orthodoxy into itself, so that full realizations of this scripture are totalities embodying “light” and “darkness” simultaneously. We now know that Christian orthodoxy arose as a transformation of an original Christian apocalypticism, a transformation that is the most radical and total transformation in the history of religions, and this is a transformation that the Christian epic ever more decisively and more comprehensively reverses, as a truly new apocalypticism dawns in Dante, burst forth even more deeply and comprehensively in Milton, and then seemingly becomes total in Blake’s revolutionary vision. Therein we can truly see a comprehensive evolution of “heresy,” but this is a heresy renewing an original Christian apocalypticism, and just as the Christ of this vision is an ever more fully apocalyptic Christ, world itself ever more fully dawns as an apocalyptic world or new aeon, even as darkness itself is ever more fully transfigured into an apocalyptic light. But Christianity has never evolved a truly or fully apocalyptic theology, so that the Christian epic has ever been alien or impenetrable to Christian theology, and this despite the fact that it is so clearly a renewal of the Bible, for here the Bible is reborn far more fully than it is in any other expression of our mind or imagination. Nevertheless, our Christian epics remain a theological cipher, and most so those of our last great epic visionary, James Joyce. Of course, Joyce is the most heretical of our epic seers, and here heresy is more total than anywhere else, and not only heresy but blasphemy as well, and it seems impossible that there will ever be created a more offensive work than Finnegans Wake, but the truth is that there is a deep continuity between Dante and Joyce, and between Joyce and Blake as well. One such deep continuity lies in their apocalyptic vision, and even if Ulysses and Finnegans Wake must be interpreted as reverse or inverted apocalypses, they are apocalypses nonetheless, and apocalypses fulfilling a Christian epic tradition, a tradition that had ever more fully inverted or reversed everything that the Christian tradition had known as apocalypse. Yet it is precisely thereby that an original Christian apocalypticism is renewed, and if nothing has been more deeply repressed in Christianity than its original ground, nothing has been more alien to our dominant Christian tradition than apocalypticism, so that the renewal of apocalypticism has ever been a renewal of deep heresy, and this as early as the New Testament itself, as witness the Book of Revelation. All of the great Christian

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epic visionaries were deeply inspired by the Book of Revelation, and this includes Joyce himself, but so likewise were they inspired by a deeply heretical apocalyptic tradition, one bursting forth not only in Dante’s world but even more comprehensively in the Radical Reformation, a reformation ecstatically issuing in Paradise Lost, and thence realizing its purest scriptures in Blake’s Milton and Jerusalem. This is an apocalyptic tradition unknown to our theologians, and inevitably so if only because theology is so alienated from Biblical apocalypticism, an alienation that is also an alienation from the original apocalyptic Jesus, but that is the very Jesus who is reborn in the Christian epic, and even reborn in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Nothing is more startling in Joyce’s vision than the deep and comprehensive presence of the apocalyptic Jesus, perhaps thereby he is most disguised to the Christian reader, but he is also thereby the most anonymous Jesus in our imaginative history, never bearing the name of Jesus, and ever distant from every established image of Jesus. Except insofar as Jesus is known as the Crucified, for crucifixion is more fully and more comprehensively enacted in Finnegans Wake than it is in any other imaginative work, and if only at this point we must acknowledge Joyce’s deep ground in the original Jesus. If Paul could only know Christ through and as the crucified Jesus, Joyce is inescapably a Pauline visionary, and one who unites as theology has never been able to do the apocalyptic and the ecclesiastical Paul. Paul could know the church as the body of Christ, a body that is an embodiment of the crucifixion, and only thereby the escahatological Adam (Romans 12:3–8), but Joyce can know the world itself as the body of “Here Comes Everybody” and Anna Livia Plurabelle. This body, too, is the body of crucifixion, and only thereby is it apocalyptic body, and just as A.L.P. and H.C.E. are polar expressions of one body, that body is an apocalyptic body, and an apocalyptic body that is totality itself. Now this is a truly new expression of that totality, which Blake finally knows as Jerusalem, and just as Blake’s Jerusalem is the apocalyptic Jesus, Joyce’s total body, too, is the apocalyptic Jesus, but now an apocalyptic Jesus who is a wholly anonymous Jesus, yet nevertheless Jesus if only because this is a truly crucified body, and a crucified body that is not only the crucified Jesus but the Crucified God. Nothing is more revealing about Christian theology than its deep inability to know the crucified Jesus as the Crucified God, but all too

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significantly this is an ever enlarging motif in the Christian epic tradition, and just as Milton’s Arianism derived most deeply from his refusal to recognize the possibility of the crucifixion of God, Blake’s Christocentrism ultimately centers on the crucifixion of God, and here Joyce is deeply Blakean, but Joyce finally envisioned the crucifixion as the Eucharist of the universe, as the universe itself is realized as the apocalyptic sacrifice of God. Here Joyce is in deep continuity with Dante, as he himself realized, and there is no fuller literary presence in Finnegans Wake than the Commedia, and Joyce and Dante alone among our great visionaries finally came to know the universe itself as the body or “volume” of God (Paradiso XXXIII:86). Joyce envisions this body as a eucharistic body, as the missa solemnis is ultimately transposed into the missa jubilae, and just as Finnegans Wake is our most comprehensively liturgical work, thereby being in deep continuity with Ulysses, Joyce and Dante are our deepest Catholic visionaries, even if Joyce’s Catholicism is a totally reversed or inverted Catholicism, and thereby if only thereby it is in genuine continuity with Dante’s Catholic vision. The Easter celebration of Book Four of the Wake opens with the Sanctus that is the great prayer of consecration in the canon of the mass—“Sandhyas! Sandhyas! Sandhyas!”—here chanted in Sanskrit because East and West are now one. An elusive motif of the Wake is now decoded, this is the Augustinian phrase, “securus judicat orbis terrarum,” that converted John Henry Newman, and this phrase, in various transpositions, appears again and again in the Wake, offering yet another Catholic ground of Joyce’s vision, and one that is not fully called forth theologically until the creation of this epic. This is a theological ground stating both the nature and the identity of true Catholic authority: the judgment of the world as a whole is the true authority. And now “securus judicat” becomes securest jubilends (593.13), as an external and exterior authority passes into a universal missa jubilae, or the No-saying of the Catholic and Christian God passes into an absolute Yes-saying, an absolute Yes-saying that is absolute joy. This is a joy that Dante alone among our visionaries had known before Joyce, and it is a joy that is a recovery of the long hidden beatitudes of Jesus, beatitudes that pass into the brute actuality of the world in this epic, and do so even in its ultimate blasphemy, a blasphemy that is here an ecstatic celebration, and even an ecstatic celebration of the apocalyptic, the eucharistic, and the crucified body of Jesus (377–380).

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This very section culminates with the first pages of the Wake to be written (380–382), and these center in the crucifixion of God, or the crucifixion of H.C.E., eliciting the anguished cry, “I’ve a terrible errible lot todue todie todue tootorribleday.” These early pages eventually became the conclusion of Book II, chapter iii, which is both the central or axial chapter of the Wake, and also the most difficult and complex section of this dream or night epic. And there is only one full and actual movement throughout this section, the movement of crucifixion, an eternal death, which is not only the center of a historically cosmic Holy Week, but which is reenacted again and again throughout both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. While everything is the same in this eternal recurrence or return, it is the “seim anew” (215.23) and the “mystery repeats itself todate” (294.28), for now the primordial mystery becomes an apocalyptic mystery, and a mystery even now being unveiled, and not only unveiled but cosmically enacted, and enacted in that universal eucharistic body, which is the primordial and the apocalyptic sacrifice of God. The church knows the apocalyptic sacrifice of God only in the eucharist, and just as the primal action of the eucharist is the anamnesis or renewal of the crucifixion, an anamnesis that is a renewal of primordial sacrifice itself, the major action of the Wake is an anamnesis of primordial sacrifice, one here beginning with the fall of God or Satan on its first page, and culminating with that resurrection, which is the resurrection of the Crucified God. Yet this is the resurrection of Anna Livia Plurabelle, who is Dante’s Beatrice reborn, and just as Dante envisions Beatrice as the incarnate body of Christ, Joyce envisions Anna as that Theotokos or Mother of God who is the mother of the universe, but now a mother who is embodied in the brute actuality of matter itself, as matter and Spirit wholly pass into each other, one prefigured in the missa solemnis, and finally joyously embodied in the missa jubilae. Now the deep power of the mass passes into the power of the world or of the body itself, and this is a body that is a cosmic and a historical body simultaneously, a body that is a new universal humanity, and precisely thereby a universal and cosmic body. But it is a universal body only by being a eucharistic body, a body embodying a universal sacrifice, a universal sacrifice that is the sacrifice of the Crucified God, and a universal sacrifice that is the deepest and most comprehensive action of Joyce’s apocalyptic epics, an action that

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dawned in Homer’s epics, and dawned even earlier than this in Israel’s epic sagas, epic sagas which Christians know as prefigurations of the gospels, and sagas that become universal sagas in the Christian epic. Epic above all other genres is inevitably given to a universal horizon, and just as epic is our least understood literary genre, it is theologically our most baffling genre as well, but a deep and comprehensive theology is fully present in all of our great Christian epics, and present here as it is nowhere else. Yes, this is certainly a heretical theology, and is so already in Dante, and if that theology becomes totally heretical in Blake and Joyce, it is no less theology because of that, and in Joyce and Blake, as in no modern theologians, we are given total theologies. The truth is that all of our great Christian epic visionaries are far more deeply theological than are our theologians, perhaps this is the source of the deepest hermeneutical barriers, which their language embodies, and if here cosmos, humanity, and deity are united, this is a unity unknown to all our philosophers and theologians. And this is a unity that surely speaks in the language of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but so likewise does it speak in the language of the Commedia, and in the language of Paradise Lost and Milton and Jerusalem, as well. There is a power in this language that can be discovered nowhere else, a power that is clearly the power of scripture, one embodying an authority that is simply undeniable, but an authority that is a truly cryptic authority, and while such an authority may well be embodied in all genuinely epic language, this is yet another point at which epic is truly opaque for us. Could the authority of epic language derive from its very universality, if a genuinely epic language is truly universal in its own world, did our modern epic arise from a new universal world, and a universal world that is a truly and actually comprehensive world? Genuinely epic language is extraordinarily difficult, posing deep problems for its reader unknown in any other genre, and even as our great epic writers have been creators of language, a genuine sign of the true epic is that its revolutionary transformations are absorbed by the language that follows it, as is clearly true not only of Homer and Dante, but in our own time of Joyce, too, who is surely the greatest creator of language in the twentieth century. All of us are Joyceans now, whether we know it or not, and are Joyceans in our language, or are so when we actually speak. So likewise were the classical Greeks Homereans, and Joyce consciously intended to create an Homeric

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epic for his own world, yet this linguistic genius never learned Greek, just as he never learned Hebrew, and yet he created epics that were Classical and Biblical simultaneously, and that can be said of no other writer since Milton. Milton consciously knew himself to be a prophet, as he declares in the opening of Paradise Lost, and he created a vision of the fall that has become more widely known than that of Genesis itself, indeed, innumerable people read the beginning of Genesis as though it had been written by Milton himself, and this is just the effect that true epic has, as it absorbs and transforms that scripture that is its source. Yet thereby scripture becomes even more fully, even more comprehensively, scripture itself, and just as something like this occurs in every religious tradition in the world, it also occurs in our imaginative traditions, but, in epic, imaginative and religious traditions are united. Only the Christian epic, however, is truly universal, only here are the sacred, the cosmic, the political, the psychological, and the conceptual realms truly united, and even when an absolute void or nothingness is called forth, as it is in all of our Christian epics, this void is integrally related to if not united with its opposite or contrary, and when it does triumph, as in Blake and Joyce, it calls forth not a simple nihilism, or a pure surd, but rather a reverse or inverted language, and one inverting not only logic and grammar and syntax, but the fullness of language itself. While this language clearly negates the language that precedes it, this is a negation that is an affirmation, and a transcending affirmation, one incorporating into itself that language and horizon that it negates. So it is that the Christian epic is an epic of joy and affirmation, here it has no real precedent in the ancient world, yet perhaps it is most joyous when it is most negative, when it most fully negates its own world and tradition, when it is most “antiscriptural,” and this in the fullest sense. All of our great Christian epic poets are revolutionaries, and not only imaginative and religious revolutionaries, but political and social revolutionaries, too, each were not only religious but also political heretics, although at this point we have surely not yet understood Joyce. It is simply impossible genuinely to read Joyce apart from celebration, and the deepest possible celebration, perhaps Joyce’s are our only truly modern texts, which can be read with such celebration today, and if Joyce is our most popular modern canonical author, Joyce beyond all other modern authors has transformed our canon, as truly canonical language can only be a wholly new language today. Here, novum is truly

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an absolute novum, an absolute novum reflecting and embodying a new aeon, a new apocalypse that is apocalypse itself, and if Joyce is our most apocalyptic twentieth-century writer, therein his language can be understood as a rebirth of Biblical apocalyptic language, and therefore a rebirth of the language of Jesus itself. Our forgetting of that language is a forgetting of the revolution of Jesus, but that language has been reborn again and again in our history, and if it has truly been reborn in Joyce’s epic language, that is perhaps the one real hope that is left to us today.

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Chapter 7 Revolutionary Apocalypse

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lthough nothing is a deeper mystery to us than apocalypse, apocalypse is enacted in each of our genuine revolutions, from the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century to the French Revolution itself. Genuine revolution is truly comprehensive, just as is apocalypse itself, one fully enacted originally by Jesus, and by Jesus’ proclamation and enactment of the Kingdom of God. Early Christianity almost immediately profoundly transformed this enactment, transforming an originally apocalyptic kingdom into the absolute transcendence of God, the greatest transformation in the history of religions. Therewith Christianity renewed the primordial way of eternal return, as an absolutely forward movement is transformed into an absolutely backward movement, or apocalypse itself transformed into a primordial totality. Now despite the profound renewal of apocalypse in modernity, one occurring not only politically but imaginatively and philosophically as well, as perhaps most dramatically realized in Nietzsche, and in Nietzsche’s radically modern vision of Eternal Recurrence. So, too, Hegel’s enactment of the Age of the Spirit is an apocalyptic enactment, one ending an old world and realizing the advent of an absolutely new world. This is a truly revolutionary enactment, with not only Marxism following in its wake, but so, too, in the consequent progressive transformation of the world itself. Nothing like this occurred in our ancient worlds, even if prophesies and visions enacting it did occur, but never then are such visions genuinely enacted, unless this occurs in the prophetic revolution of Israel.

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Nietzsche could understand that revolution as the “Slave Revolt of Morality,” a transformation of low into high and high into low, but one only potentially occurring, although Nietzsche understood it as having already occurred. Nietzsche is most deeply a radical thinker by being an apocalyptic thinker, giving us perhaps our purest apocalyptic thinking, which is just thereby an ultimately revolutionary thinking. This is the perspective in which we can understand a genuine continuity between Marx and Nietzsche, nor can the apocalyptic ground of Marxism be ignored, which is just how Marxism has been so deeply diluted in our world. And it is remarkable how deeply apocalypse itself has been diluted in our world, commonly known as only a sectarian religion, with a virtual closure occurring of any opening to a uniquely modern and revolutionary apocalypse, despite the fact that this so deeply occurs in both Hegel and Nietzsche, to say nothing of our most revolutionary visionary, William Blake. While it is fully understandable how conservatives could be repulsed by Blake, how could this occur among liberals and radicals, who seldom respond to our most revolutionary vision? A closure to radical vision is surely a decisive source of contemporary impotence, yet how did such closure occur, unless it is simply embodied in a new postmodernity? As yet we are far from understanding such a postmodernity, but is postmodernity only truly realized after modernity, and after a modernity that is the most revolutionary of all worlds? Apparently such revolution is now disappearing both in our consciousness and in our society, as one is reminded of the deeply conservative movements in Europe following the French Revolution. Then and only then was a genuine counterrevolution born, and it was universally born, so that it is possible to ask if a comparable counterrevolution is now occurring? One arena in which this question has become an open one is religion itself, is there a distinctively contemporary religion, and one truly different from uniquely modern expressions of religion? Contemporary evangelicalism would appear to be such, one that would seem to be at a vast distance from the Reformation itself, which was a genuinely revolutionary movement. It is fascinating that evangelicalism today is so clearly identified with the political Right, as piety itself now appears as a reactionary piety, and where this is not true, piety can only be a radical piety, even if closed to all historical expressions of radicalism. Hence a genuine void appears to be

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manifest in contemporary religious life, one manifest in its distance from historical expressions of religion, and most paradoxically this would appear to be true in Catholicism, too. Even Islam can now be understood as being truly distant from its own traditions, and perhaps this is true of Judaism as well, as a universal erasure of tradition itself is seemingly occurring, as manifest in the progressive dissolution of all historical consciousness. Does this foreclose the possibility of all genuine revolution today? Nothing is more characteristic of our genuine revolutionaries than a true historical sensibility, as they know their own revolutionary aspiration to be not only genuinely but absolutely new, and the deeper the revolutionary the deeper their commitment to the absolutely new. Nothing reveals apocalypse more deeply than the very idea of the absolutely new, one that is not historically born until the prophetic revolution, and then most decisively born in the calling forth of a new aeon and new creation. So, too, when apocalypticism is reborn in the Middle Ages in Joachism, a Joachism revolving about the apocalyptic prophecies of Joachim of Fiore, thereby is realized the deepest and most challenging medieval heterodoxy, and one reborn in Blake, Hegel, and Marx. This is our deepest revolutionary tradition, and hence one wholly disguised and unknown, as nothing is now more deeply hidden from us than is revolution itself. Many can know Heidegger as a revolutionary thinker, but he is politically and even interiorly deeply reactionary, a reaction seemingly arising from his progressive awareness of a uniquely modern nihilism. Indeed, nihilism itself can be realized as the deepest challenge in our world, a nihilism that is the consequence of a uniquely modern apocalypticism, one effecting the most ultimate negation of the world itself. Our nihilism is a consequence of that negation, hence profoundly differing from the skepticism of the ancient world, and so, too, differing from all modern skepticism. In the perspective of nihilism skepticism can appear to be truly healthy, as it certainly is both in Spinoza and in Nietzsche, and just as Nietzsche’s ultimate conflict was with nihilism, this is a nihilism that he himself most deeply discovered, as most purely recorded in The Antichrist. This book should have been entitled as Anti-Christianity rather than Antichrist, and it is our most powerful assault on Christianity, one apprehending Christianity as a pure nihilism as most decisively occurring in Christianity’s truly absolute reversal of Jesus. Although seldom noted, this is one of our greatest studies of Jesus, and it

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surpasses Kierkegaard in understanding that Christianity has absolutely negated Christ, a negation making possible the uniquely Christian God, and the absolute No-Saying of that God. It is remarkable how coincident this is with the purest enactments of our greatest artists such as Blake and Dostoyevsky, in whose company Nietzsche genuinely belongs, and above all so as the prophet of Eternal Recurrence, a recurrence that can even be understood as our purest prophecy. Are we turning away from prophecy itself in our turn against apocalypse? It is noteworthy that what we have known as prophecy itself occurs only in apocalypticism, here we can surely know Nietzsche as an apocalyptic thinker, and perhaps most apocalyptic in his very calling forth of nihilism. The nihilism that he knows is an ultimate or absolute nihilism, and is indeed the most destructive force in the world, but only fully realizing itself in our world. This is a world making fully manifest an absolute crisis or krisis, one becoming decisively manifest during and immediately after World War I, a war ending all war only by absolutizing war itself. Just as Hegel came to understand the French Revolution as the absolute dividing line in world history, we are coming to understand World War I as such a dividing line, and one incarnating nihilism itself. Now it is impossible to understand nihilism without understanding it as an apocalyptic nihilism, one truly effecting the end of the world, an ending that is truly an actual ending. Here, Heidegger is surely an apocalyptic thinker, and even more deeply one in calling forth an apocalyptic Ereignis, one occurring not only in the advent of a darkening of the holy, but in the advent of ending itself, an absolute ending and thus an apocalyptic ending. This is an ending first occurring in primitive Christianity, a lost Christianity first calling forth Heidegger’s ultimate quest, and most clearly enacted by Paul, who called forth Heidegger’s most ultimate and most long-lasting loyalty. For many centuries Paul was misunderstood by way of a deep transformation of his apocalyptic ground, a ground recovered with the advent of modern apocalypticism, certainly recovered imaginatively, and even recovered philosophically by Hegel and Nietzsche. This is a deep foundation of modern revolution, and nothing is more unique in modernity than is revolution itself, a revolution occurring in every arena, and one as such uniquely modern. Nothing like this occurs in the ancient world, unless it occurs in Jesus, and in Paul, too,

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thereby, and perhaps only thereby, both Paul and Jesus can be known as genuine revolutionaries. It is remarkable how comprehensively and universally Christianity has diluted and transformed revolution, one proceeding in integral relation to its transformation of apocalypse, for apocalypse and revolution are not only genuine twins, but finally wholly inseparable from each other. This alone could explain the deep repulsion that is inevitably induced by apocalypse, a repulsion all the deeper in terms of the depth of that apocalypse that is at hand, one that first can be observed in that absolute offense that Jesus created, an offense lying at the very center of Paul’s apocalyptic enactment. The deep union of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche can be observed in that absolute offense that each created, a union that is clearly a renewal or anamnesis of Paul, and despite Nietzsche’s hatred of Paul, he is nonetheless a profound descendent of Paul. So, too, it is Nietzsche and Hegel who are our most profoundly Pauline modern philosophers, and if this is hidden from philosophy itself, so, too, is hidden the profoundly Christian ground of modern philosophy, which is perhaps the ultimate scandal of modern philosophy itself. Has any world more subtly disguised itself than modern philosophy? That disguise is most torn asunder by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who thereby make manifest not only their own deep union, but a deep union of even the most divergent expressions of philosophy, which are finally united if only by way of stilling or dissolving revolution itself. Nietzsche profoundly knew this, hence he is the ultimate enemy of modern philosophy, thereby he is paralleled by Kierkegaard, and just as philosophy initially reacted deeply against Nietzsche, Nietzsche knew himself as the ultimate antiphilosopher, thereby once again echoing Kierkegaard. Now if Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are genuinely radical thinkers, and perhaps our most radical thinkers, is that very radicality inseparable from apocalypse, and from a uniquely modern apocalypse? This alone could illuminate their Christian ground, but if Christianity itself profoundly transformed or demythologized apocalypse, one could be loyal to that apocalypse only by negating Christianity, an assault that most profoundly occurs in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. It is remarkable that so few are aware of the deep union between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, perhaps nothing else is so theologically challenging, or so challenging to philosophy itself. And it is

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remarkable that while contemporary philosophy so relishes offense, it is immune to the most ultimate offense, even if this deeply occurs in both Hegel and Nietzsche. Does contemporary philosophy deeply shield itself from its own most ultimate ground, and this despite the profound enactment of that ground in Nietzsche and Hegel? How is it possible to speak of a Christian ground of modern philosophy? Is this not a philosophy that in its own evolution progressively enacts a genuine atheism, so that the very word “God” has disappeared from contemporary philosophy? Moreover, are not our greatest atheists philosophical atheists, as in Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche, philosophical atheists who transformed the world? Indeed, did not philosophical atheism make Marxism possible, and not only Marxism but all of our most subversive movements? If all of these questions can be answered affirmatively, does this not establish philosophy as our purest iconoclasm, or even our purest assault on pathology itself? Nevertheless, there is a genuine contempt for philosophy in our world, as can be observed in the contraction of philosophy departments, or the diminution of philosophical publishing in our most critical journals, and a virtual disappearance of philosophy from our public world. Of course, the status of theology is now even lower, and when one remembers what the status of philosophy and theology once was, one cannot ignore a genuine transformation. Many see this as a consequence of decline, but there can be no denial that science and medicine remain healthy, and fiction and drama remain alive, just as does journalism even if in a tenuous form. Is our crisis only a deeply interior one with no genuine external expressions? Many understand this to be true throughout modernity, and if modernity has given us our most profound interior expressions, can we not simply accept this as an ultimate gift, or is it inseparable from an ultimate interior crisis? Apparently a deep disquiet is now possessing us, one with innumerable expressions, and truly pervasive despite a general tranquillity. Many see this as being true of Europe just before its ultimate crisis, but as opposed to that era there are now no prophets of an ultimate doom, or none who are having a deep effect. Perhaps at no other point is philosophy more quiet today, but this, too, can be understood in an apocalyptic context, for if we are now undergoing an ultimate ending, then a new silence might then reign. And we are silent today, perhaps more silent than ever before, which

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is truly remarkable given the cacophony of our technology. Heidegger could understand that cacophony as an ultimate enslavement, and at this point if no other he had a virtually universal impact, for this is understandable to everyone. Is apocalypse finally understandable by all of us, and even if we cannot imagine or understand an absolute apocalypse, can we know it as the most ultimate gift, even if thereby it actually terrifies us? Although many can respond to the promise of apocalypse with an ecstatic joy, others and perhaps the wisest among us can only respond to it with a genuine dread, and historically apocalyptic enactments are commonly destructive, even if they have been ultimately creative in our greatest revolutions. And this is the supreme challenge of apocalypse, those ultimate revolutions, which apocalypse alone make possible, revolutions seemingly impossible today, but so, too, did they appear to be impossible when they first occurred.

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Chapter 8 Political Theology: An Apology

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ne of our deeper theological illusions is that we have or have access to a genuine political theology, a theology that can truly engage and challenge our political world or worlds, and this in the face of a new politics of postmodernity that is more comprehensively entrenched and unchallengeable than any previous political world. As a theologian who was once given the promise of a political theology, as partially executed in History as Apocalypse (SUNY, 1985), I owe a deep apology for a failure fully to realize this gift, and while there were innumerable other such failures, only I can take responsibility for this one. It is very difficult to understand a rare and remarkable gift, and even if I can reread History and Apocalypse and know that everything that is real in it is not my own, I can rejoice in the gift that I was given even while being overcome by a guilt deriving from my failure properly to execute it. I also think that no serious theological book has had so little impact as this one, no doubt this is largely due to its primary subject, the Christian epic, which so far as I know had never been previously apprehended as an organic whole, and in that sense was a truly new and strange topic. Of course, the potentialities here are overwhelming, just imagine the potential power of a theological unveiling of Dante, Milton, Blake, and Joyce, one that would necessarily call forth a radically new theological understanding if it were at all to succeed in its intention. Moreover, the project here is to conjoin historical and theological understanding by apprehending each of our epic revolutions as reflecting and embodying a political and social revolution, and while my grave weakness as an historian did serious damage to 103

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this project, the readers are themselves invited to compensate for this deficiency by their own historical and theological thinking. I sense that never before had historical and theological thinking been so conjoined, and while this book has a deep Hegelian ground, and there are many Hegelian studies paralleling it which influenced the book, so far as I am aware nowhere in this body is there an actual theological study. The more I think about it the stranger the book becomes, its first chapter must be unique, a study of the birth of vision in Greek sculpture which centers upon the ecstatic body that this sculpture embodies within us, a truly new body reflecting our first great historical revolution, which I attempt to understand as the inauguration of our Western epic. Never since have I written anything at all like this, and I certainly cannot think of myself as the author of this chapter, but strange as it is I do think that it is genuine theological writing. The second chapter—“Destiny, Deity, and Death”—is on Classical Greece and while it gives only a little attention to Homer, it attempts to draw forth the Greek gods and goddesses in their own integral identities as theologies are all too reluctant to do, thereby attempting to draw forth a uniquely Greek destiny and redemption, which is essential to this project. I think that this chapter is stronger than its successor, “Israel and the Birth of Scripture,” where I attempt too much in speaking of the Hebrew Bible as a whole, even if this is necessary to the project itself. We have very little understanding of Israel as a fundamental ground of the Western epic, but this is nonetheless undeniable, and when I wrote this I had not yet read Norman Gottwald’s The Tribes of Yahweh which calls forth the birth of Israel as the origin of political and social and economic revolution. There follows a chapter on Paul and the origin of self-consciousness which is Hegelian in its understanding of self-consciousness, and understands Paul not only as the creator of theology but as the creator of an apocalyptic theology that becomes the radical underground of the post-Classical Western world. Despite its weaknesses, I think that this stands alone as a study of Paul, and particularly so in understanding Paul as one of our deep revolutionary grounds, despite the taming of Paul in subsequent expressions of Pauline Christianity. The most important of these is Augustine and Augustinianism, which gave us not only post-Patristic Catholicism and Protestantism, but also that Western subject or Subject which became the deepest ground of the West. I attempt to capture that ground in the chapter

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here on Augustine, and most decisively so in the section on Predestination, a uniquely Western dogma that is perhaps most revealing of our Western destiny itself. Thereafter the book fully begins with a chapter on Dante and the Gothic revolution, initially attempting to call forth the Gothic revolution in its full comprehensiveness, apart from which it is simply not possible to understand Dante. The greatest challenge here is to reach a theological understanding of the Commedia, one impossible apart from understanding Dante as a profound heretic, as witnessed not only by the Papal condemnation of Dante, but by the radical heterodoxy of the Commedia itself, as most manifest in its vision of God, who for the first time is envisioned as being fully coordinate with the world, although the world of the Commedia is an absolutely new world. As Eric Auerbach taught us, the Inferno gives us an absolutely new mimesis, an absolutely new actuality of the world, as for the first time the world is envisioned in its full historical actuality. We must understand that thereby is born a truly new Catholicism, or a truly new Christianity, one vastly distant from the Patristic world, and distant because this is in no way an other-worldly Christianity, but on the contrary is an absolutely new Christianity that is wholly immersed in the world, even while absolutely negating the worldliness of the world. Not until Dante are we given an ultimate understanding of evil, or an understanding of an absolute evil, but an absolute evil that is wholly transfigured by an absolute grace, as for the first time the actualization of grace is fully and actually envisioned, and thereby the Purgatorio stands forth as a fully revolutionary work. Everyone recognizes that the Commedia is a revolutionary poetic work, but it is seldom recognized that it is a revolutionary theological work as well, as most manifest in its enactment of the world itself as an ultimate world, and as a fully integrated world, as its religious, its cosmic, its political, its social, and its interior dimensions, are all integrated with each other, giving us for the first time a full and actual vision of the totality of the world. Now the world itself is absolutely dazzling, as for the first time the actual consequence of the Incarnation is fully envisioned, and fully envisioned as an absolutely new world. If Eastern Orthodoxy believes that God became man in order that man might become God, Dante and the Gothic revolution itself give us an Incarnation in which God became man in order that humanity and the world itself could finally and wholly become Life and Energy and Joy.

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Yet there is nonetheless a profound enactment of damnation in the Inferno, this is an absolutely new damnation if only because these damned ones are integrally real, and integrally real in their own individual voices and identity, as for the first time genuine individuals are actually enacted and portrayed, and portrayed as themselves and no other, as truly unique human beings. Never before had such an enactment occurred, and here even damnation can be understood as a consequence of the Incarnation, or the actual damnation of individual human beings. All too significantly the individuals enacted in the Paradiso are far less actually individual than are the damned in the Inferno, as though a redeeming departure from the world entails a loss of individuality, a loss of our uniqueness as individual human beings. This itself might be thought of as being deeply heretical, as though earth or the world is more actual than Heaven, and it cannot be denied that the Inferno is far and away the most popular section of the Commedia, and the only one that has a genuinely universal audience. Let us remember that Dante chose to write the Inferno in the vernacular, itself a poetic innovation, thereby Dante created not only Italian but modern literature itself, and created it as the primal voice of the Western world. Yet Dante was also a truly political thinker and visionary, the Papacy condemned him for his equation of the authority of the Empire and the Church, and his is the greatest vision of a Christian Empire, and an Empire fully coordinated with the Church, an Empire destined for apocalypse itself, and an apocalypse occurring here and now. Indeed, Dante is a deeply apocalyptic visionary, thereby deepening his heterodoxy, for the birth of Catholicism occurred only by way of the negation of an original Christian apocalypticism, one fundamentally occurring in Paul, only to be reversed by the advent of Patristic Christianity. It is highly significant that the greatest of medieval apocalyptic theologians, Joachim of Fiore, appears as a redeemed and shining prophet in the Paradiso (XII, 140), and ironically appears with St. Bonaventura, the Franciscan minister general who successfully opposed the Franciscan Spirituals, who were largely inspired by Joachim. Joachism released the deepest of medieval heresies, once again the Church turned profoundly against apocalypticism, a turn that is only being abated by our own world, but which led to Dante becoming the deepest of Catholic heretics.

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If Dante is the deepest of Catholic heretics, Milton may well be the deepest of Protestant heretics, even if Paradise Lost is the great epic of Protestantism, and the most glorious work to come out of the world of Protestantism. Milton is a consequence of the radical Reformation and not of the magisterial Reformation, a radical Reformation dedicated to turning the world upside down, and doing so by reversing all established order and authority, a radical Reformation dedicated to actually renewing a wholly lost primitive Christianity. Milton himself was a major political actor, serving as the chief apologist of the English Revolution, whereby he passionately called for the end of monarchy throughout the world, or the end of all political order that is an established order, and thus the ending of all given political authority. There is a genuine continuity between Milton and Dante, and not only as epic poets but as political thinkers and enactors, and while Milton is deeply anti-Catholic, Dante could identify the Papacy with the Antichrist (Inferno XIX). Milton, too, is a poetic revolutionary, and a theological revolutionary as well, as most overtly manifest in his De Doctrina Christiana, his most beloved possession, and a treatise that is purely orthodox and purely heterodox simultaneously. Nothing is more distinctive of the Docrina than its understanding of God, and of God the Father and Creator, only becoming Father through the generation of Christ, and necessarily being the Creator because nothing which exists can have any cause or origin other than God Himself. Therefore creation is not out of nothing, it is out of God alone. Creatio ex Deo is an absolutely free and an absolutely sovereign act, and in the Docrina although not in Paradise Lost, creation is the sole act of God the Father. Thus it is not by or with the Son, or by the Word and Spirit, it is by the Father alone, and only through the Word and Spirit. This leads to Milton’s profound anti-Trinitarianism, for Milton knows the Trinity as an assault upon the absolute sovereignty of God, and thus as the voice of Antichrist. Milton is also anti-Trinitarian in knowing the full death of Christ in the Crucifixion, a death which is the death both of his humanity and his divinity, and Christ’s acceptance of death was freely and individually his own, in no sense was it or could it have been an act of the Father, nor could it possibly have been real for an eternal Son of God, hence Milton’s Arianism. Milton can be said to be the first systematic theologian fully to accept and affirm the death of the Crucifixion, the sole source

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of justification, a justification freely and wholly given by Christ. Milton does differ from Dante and the whole world of Catholicism by being a fully Scriptural theologian, the great bulk of the Doctrina consists of quotations from Scripture, and Milton could even be identified as the only theologian who is fully Scriptural and fully systematic at once. While it may appear to be odd to identify a great poet as a great theologian, this is actually true of all of our great Christian epic poets, although Milton is the only one who actually wrote a theology, a theology so radical that it could not be published until three hundred years after his death, and has still not been encountered by virtually the whole world of theology. Yet it is essential in understanding Milton’s poetry, as every Milton scholar knows, and it is also perhaps the greatest theological work of the radical Reformation, which is yet another reason why it has been ignored both by our ecclesiastical and our theological worlds. Nothing is more distinctive of Paradise Lost than its enactment of Satan, and for the first time the absolute glory of Satan is envisioned, a Satan who is integrally and dialectically related to Christ, and each act of Satan is a reversal of an act of Christ’s, just as the darkness and the wrath of Satan are the absolute opposite of the compassion of Christ. But thereby Christ becomes actually real as he has never previously been in Christian vision, and actually real as the Redeemer, and a Redeemer who could not possibly be actually real as the eternal Son of God. Thus Milton’s Arianism actually deepened his Christianity, and deepened his absolute commitment to Christ, who is our sole Redeemer, but could not possibly be our Redeemer as a Person of the Trinity, or as the full Godhead of God, for then we would have no possibility of an actual contact with Christ. Now this theology is integrally related to Milton’s radical politics, a politics assaulting all absolute authority, and every authority which is a transcendent authority, or which stands beyond and apart from us. No one has celebrated a uniquely modern freedom more deeply or more comprehensively than does Milton, one which profoundly occurs throughout Milton’s poetry, and throughout the vast body of his prose as well. Here, this freedom is perhaps most fully manifest in the Redeemer himself, and a Redeemer who is most free in his death for us, a death that he freely chose and freely enacted, thus becoming the paradigm and source of an absolutely new freedom. This is the freedom that Milton calls us politically to enact, a freedom that will

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turn the world upside down, and upside down in that apocalypse which is even now being enacted. Milton cannot be dissociated from the English Revolution, a revolution that despite its pragmatic failure initiated modern revolution, releasing revolutionary energies that eventually transformed the world. Nowhere is revolution more profoundly embodied than in the Christian epic, wherein an evolving movement or tradition may be discovered realizing ever deeper and more comprehensive expressions of revolution, and here the most revolutionary of all visionaries is William Blake. Blake’s greatest epics, Milton and Jerusalem, are the most intrinsically difficult of all epics, and they call for voyages into the depths of both God and Satan, yet it is Blake’s Satan that is the supreme challenge, a renewal of Milton’s Satan, yes, but now a truly universal and all comprehensive Satan. Blake is Miltonic in knowing a polar relation between Christ and Satan, and deep transformations of both Christ and Satan occur in the evolution of Blake’s vision, both finally being realized as apocalyptic expressions of the Self-Annihilation of the Godhead. Blake’s revolutionary vision is inseparable from his apocalyptic vision, and the Blake who was the first visionary to enact the death of God (in America, 1793), was also the Blake who discovered the apocalyptic Jesus, thereby discovering that Kingdom of God that is the SelfAnnihilation of God. At this very time Hegel was discovering that Absolute Spirit that is the Self-Emptying of God, creating for the first time an absolutely kenotic philosophy, and a philosophy fully paralleling the revolutionary vision of Blake. Just as Milton was deeply affected by the English Revolution, Blake was deeply affected by the French Revolution, a revolution that Hegel could know as the first universal historical event, and an historical event actually realizing the death of God. Hegel parallels Blake in being the first philosopher to realize the death of God, a death of God that both Blake and Hegel can know as a renewal of the Crucifixion, and an apocalyptic renewal ushering in an absolutely new world. Hence both Blake and Hegel are apocalyptic enactors, and both realized truly historical apocalypses, apocalypses actually occurring historically, and actually occurring here and now. David Erdman’s Blake: Prophet Against Empire demonstrates that the great body of Blake’s images refer to historical actualities of Blake’s world, and just as this is true of the Biblical prophets, it is true of the Christian epic tradition as a whole.

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Thereby the Christian epic is truly unique, and that has made possible an immense impact of this epic upon the world, and unlike all other artistic expressions, an actual historical impact, and one truly transforming the world. Inevitably these epics are political epics, and far more political than any other expression of our culture, but so, too, these epics are theological epics, and here as nowhere else the political and the theological are wholly conjoined. If only for this reason the Christian epic is now being bracketed from our lives, seldom being taught in our postmodern world, and only being manifest in truly esoteric expressions, and never publicly manifest in its own revolutionary expressions. And how revealing that the Christian epic is wholly missing from our ecclesiastical and theological worlds, and whether or not this is genuine censorship, the vacuous consequences are the same. It is Blake above all other prophets who unveils an absolutely demonic political world, this is just why Satan is the master of this world, a Satan who is the source of every actual political authority, and who is the driving power of all powerful political movements. Thus the political arena is an arena of ultimate conflict, and one in which all innocence is swept away, and while Blake’s deepest political wrath was directed against monarchy, he fundamentally opposed all established political authority and power. Blake, too, is a consequence, although an indirect one, of the radical Reformation, and certainly he was directed to turning the world upside down, which actually occurs in Jerusalem, our supreme apocalyptic epic. Yet, all too significantly, it is Milton that is Blake’s most theologically radical epic, and is so by calling forth God Himself as Satan. A pure enactment of the “Self-Annihilation” of God occurs in this epic, a self-annihilation only fully embodied in the Lamb Divine, and a self-annihilation that is the self-annihilation of Satan, which is first fully recorded in this revolutionary breakthrough of Milton: I in my Selfhood am that Satan: I am that Evil One! He is my Spectre! In my obedience to lose him from my Hells To claim the Hells, my Furnaces, I go to Eternal Death (14:30-33) Now it is finally revealed that the Self-Annihilation of God in Christ is the Self-Annihilation of Satan, the sacrifice of the fallen and empty body of the Godhead, the very Godhead that is the repressive ruler of a wholly fallen world, and this is the final sacrifice that is apocalypse

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itself. So it is that “Milton,” or the atoning Christ, in entering Satan, can declare: . . . , I come to Self-Annihilation Such are the Laws of Eternity that each shall mutually Annihilate himself for other’s good, as I for thee. (38:33-36) This may well be the most revolutionary of all visions, and it is inseparable from the revolutionary vision of an absolutely new apocalypse, one giving us an apocalyptic humanity that is the apocalyptic Jesus: Mutual in one anothers love and wrath all renewing We live as One Man: for contracting our infinite senses We behold multitude; or expanding we behold as one, As One Man all the universal Family; and that One Man We call Jesus the Christ: and he is in us and we in him, Live in perfect harmony in Eden the land of life. Giving, receiving, and forgiving each others trespasses. He is the Good Shepherd, he is the Lord and master; He is the Shepherd of Albion, he is all in all Jerusalem, 38, 16-24) This is our true, our ultimate humanity, a humanity which is the Body of Christ, and that humanity which even now is being born. Here we witness once again that each epic poet is reborn and renewed in his successor, and that Blake’s deepest rebirth occurs in James Joyce. Although no one doubts that the only real parallel to Joyce is Dante, and that Joyce is closer to Blake than to any other modern artist, there is a universality of Joyce that is uniquely his own, even if it is a universality in genuine continuity with the Christian epic tradition. But why has that tradition been so ignored as an epic tradition? Could it be because it is so unique as such, and so much so that the very possibility of an epic tradition has not been considered, and this despite the fact that there is such an integral relation between Dante and Joyce, and between Milton and Blake? Perhaps these epics are truly baffling when considered together, but it cannot be denied that they embody both an ultimate joy and celebration and an ultimate offense, an offense most manifest in their enactments of Satan, but perhaps even more so in their overwhelming calls for an absolutely new humanity and world.

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Epilogue

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pocalypse, and an absolute apocalypse, is first enacted by Jesus, an enactment that is almost immediately wholly transformed by a dawning Christianity. There is no greater transformation in the history of religions, one inevitably generating radical heterodoxy, a heterodoxy that is comprehensively reborn in late modernity. Blake and Hegel are primary enactors of that heterodoxy, and this is an apocalyptic heterodoxy, just as Hegel and Blake and a host of others are renewers of an original apocalypse. This renewal is itself a uniquely modern revolution, and the most universal revolution that has ever occurred, one transforming the world itself. Although few are aware of the integral relationship between apocalypse and revolution, this is fully manifest in both Blake and Hegel, and just as Hegel and Blake are the first to enact the death of God, that enactment is a fundamental ground of modern revolution. So, too, there is a profound renewal of Satan in modernity, one beginning with Milton and Blake, and continuing in the horrors of late modernity. While there is little fundamental thinking about evil in our world, our imaginative enactments of evil are overwhelming, enactments drawing forth our deeper subterranean ground. That is a ground that has only all too partially entered our theology, a theology that now cannot comprehend an absolute evil, and this despite the fact that Christian theology more than any other theology had called forth an absolute evil, just as the naming of Satan is deeper in Christianity than in any other tradition. Satan is most deeply realized in our apocalyptic traditions, traditions that are wholly transformed in their deepest modern enactments, and these comprehend not only imaginative enactments but philosophical enactments, too, as occurring above all in Hegel and Nietzsche. Here, too, there is a rebirth if not a creation of a pure

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dialectical thinking and vision, as most dramatically occurring in the late Blake’s vision of a coincidentia oppositorum between Christ and Satan. This is possible only when Satan is universally enacted, and although this first occurs in Blake, it can be understood as a fulfillment of a uniquely Christian enactment of Satan. One of the deeper ironies of modernity is that here an enactment of Satan and an enactment of Christ go hand in hand, and although this can be understood as a renewal of the New Testament, it can be so understood only through a truly radical theology. Perhaps we are now more than ever before being called to an ultimately radical theology, and although this occurs in both Blake and Hegel, it is absent from our public world and consciousness. Is the time now at hand to initiate the world itself into a truly radical theology?

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Index Age of the Spirit, 80, 95 A.L.P. and H.C.E, 87, 89, 91 America (Blake), 9, 73, 74, 79 America (United States) apocalyptic identity of, 9–10, 79–80 and atheism, 11–12 and Christian sects, 80–81 and death of God, 78–79, 81–82 and destiny, 9–11, 83 and jazz, 77–78 and literature, 75–76, 82 and mask of innocence, 82–83 and Moby Dick, 75, 76, 80, 81 and new mass culture, 74–75 and religion, 75–76 as secular world, 10–11, 74, 77 American Civil War, 81 American Revolution, 73, 79, 83 Anna Livia Plurabelle, 87, 89, 91–92 Antichrist, The (Nietzsche) cryptic statement in, 64 an deification of nothingness, 49, 57 and Jesus, 12–13 and nihilism, 97 obsession with God, 66 offensiveness of, 44 anti-Trinitarianism, 5, 38 apocalypse and apocalypticism and Biblical apocalypticism, 39 as deepest mystery, 57 and Gnosticism, 37–38 and Nietzsche, 68

and prophecy, 98 renewal in modernity, 95 and theology, 24–25 understanding of, 101 See also under Jesus; Nietzsche, Friedrich; nihilism apology from author. See History and Apocalypse Armstrong, Louis, 77–78 atheism and America, 11–12 and modernity, 8, 26 and Nietzsche, 60–61 philosophical, 100 and Spinoza, 4 Auerbach, Eric, 105 Augustine and Augustinianism, 104–5 Baldwin, James, 76 Barth, Karl, impact of, 27 Blake, William and America, 9, 73, 79 and apocalyptic Jesus, 47–48, 54–55, 96 as both poet and artist, 53 as Christian radical, 35, 59, 74 and Christocentrism, 90 and City of God, 50 and death of God, 59–60, 73 education of, 54 and eternal death, 51–52 “Everlasting Gospel,” 54 and French Revolution, 109 and Hegel, 37, 52

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and heterodoxy, 32–33, 40, 41–42, 55 and Jerusalem, 4, 33, 49–50, 52, 86, 92, 109, 110 and Joyce, 85, 88, 111 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 54 and Milton, 7–8, 47–48, 110–11 and Milton, 4, 41, 49, 51, 109 as revolutionary, 83 as revolutionary visionary, 109 and Satan, 17, 47–48, 49, 51–52, 80, 110 and “Self-Annihilation of God,” 41, 49–50, 51, 52, 79 Songs of Innocence and Experience, 14, 49 stature of, 47 as visionary, 2–3, 47, 49 Blake: Prophet Against Empire (Erdman), 109 body, apocalyptic, 89 Body of Christ, 17, 53, 73, 85, 89, 91, 111 See also Body of Satan Body of Satan, as Body of Christ, 17, 49, 85, 111 See also Body of Christ Book of Revelation, 48, 59, 80, 88–89 Catholicism birth of, 106 and Joyce, 85, 90 and Protestantism, 31–32, 54 radical, 3, 85 and Rome, 75 Christian epic tradition, 93, 109–11 Christianity and apocalypse, 18, 95 assault on, 97–98 and dilution of revolution, 99 and English Revolution, 53 and Gnosticism, 39 and heterodoxy, 36–39 and orthodoxy, 38–39 petrified, 42 primal, 3, 58

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as reversal of Kingdom of god, 67–68 and Satan, 16, 59 as threat to Roman Empire, 40 See also Jesus Christian Science, 80–81 City of God (Blake), 50 coincidentia oppositorum and Blake, 48, 52 and Hegel, 37 and Joyce, 87 and Nietzsche, 57–58, 67 Commedia (later Divine Comedy) apocalypse and the death of God, 4 and Christian epic tradition, 85, 92 and Joyce, 90, 111 as revolutionary theological work, 105–6 conservatism, modern, 47, 79 counterrevolution, 34 Creatio ex Deo, 107 Crucifixion and Blake, 109 in Christian art, 52–53 and Hegel, 63, 109 and Milton, 107–8 and Paul, 2 and petrified Christianity, 42 Dante Alighieri apocalyptic visionary, 106–7 and Christian epic, 3 and evil, 105 first realistic poet, 60 and Joyce, 90 and Milton, 107 See also Commedia; Inferno; Paradiso; Purgatorio Dead Sea Scrolls, 36, 65 death of God and American Revolution, 73, 74 and Blake, 73 celebration of, 2–4

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INDEX

and jazz, 78 modern realization of, 11–12 See also under Blake, William; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich; Kierkegaard, Søren Doctrina Christiana (Milton), 5, 30–31, 48, 107, 108 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 66 Eckhart, Meister, 64, 66 English Revolution and Christianity, 53 and Milton, 21–22, 23, 31, 109 and Newton’s work, 25 and radical acts, 22–23 epic language, 92–93 Erdman, David, 109 Eternal Recurrence. See under Nietzsche, Friedrich Ethics (Spinoza), 15, 27, 29 Eucharist, 28, 85–86 evangelicalism, contemporary, 96–97 “Everlasting Gospel” (Blake), 54 films, as self-revealing art, 24 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) and Catholicism, 85–87 and Commedia, 90 and crucifixion of God (H.C.E.), 91 and Easter celebration, 90 as heretical theology, 91–92 and inverted apocalypse, 4, 88 most challenging work, 85 French Revolution, 73, 79, 96, 98, 109 fundamentalism, advent of, 8 Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 3 German Idealism, and imagination, 13–14 Gnosticism and apocalypticism, 37–38 and Christianity, 39 and Nietzsche as reversal of, 60 and O’Regan, 40 and Satan, 41–42 Gottwald, Norman, 104

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich and Christian orthodoxy, 38 and coincidentia oppositorum, 48 and Crucifixion, 63 and death of God, 4, 8–9, 48, 64–65, 73 as first apocalyptic thinker, 62 and heterodoxy, 32, 36, 37, 40, 41–42, 113 and kenotic philosophy, 109 and negativity, 16 and Nietzsche, 62, 63, 64 Phenomenology of Spirit, 4, 8–9, 48 as revolutionary, 83 and sacrifice, 65 and self-negation, 41, 73–74 Heidegger, Martin and Introduction to Metaphysics, 76 and nihilism, 97–98, 101 and ontotheology, 1, 4 and quest for primal Christianity, 3, 36 Here Comes Everybody (Joyce), 76, 85 History as Apocalypse (Altizer), impact of, 103–5 Iceman Cometh, The (O’Neill), 76 Incarnation, 42 Inferno (Dante), 60, 105–6 Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger), 76 James, Henry, 76 James, William, 13 jazz, 77–78 Jerusalem (Blake), 4, 33, 52, 53, 86, 89, 109, 110 Jesus apocalyptic, 25, 35, 47, 55, 58–59, 63–64, 95 and Joyce, 89 and Nietzsche, 64, 69, 71 as prophet of Satan, 59 reversal of, 12, 58, 69 revolutionary, 99

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universality of, 54–55 See also Christianity Joachim of Fiore, 97, 106 Joachism, 38, 39, 69, 80, 97, 106 Joyce, James as Blakean, 85 and Catholicism, 85, 90 and celebration, 93–94 and Dante, 90 epic language of, 92–93, 94 and orthodoxy to heresy, 87–88 and tradition, 87 and Ulysses, 4, 85, 89 and Yes-saying vs. No-saying, 90 See also Finnegans Wake Kierkegaard, Søren assault on Christianity, 42–43 and death of God, 2, 12 and eschatological thinking, 44 as modern religious thinker, 35 and Nietzsche, 35, 42–44, 45–46 Luther, Martin, 26, 43, 44 Marriage of Heaven and Hell, The (Blake), 54 Melville, Herman, 9, 75 Mencken, H.L., 79 Miller, Henry, 83 Milton (Blake), 4, 41, 49, 51, 79, 109, 110–11 Milton, John and anti-Trinitarianism, 107 as Biblical, 6 and Blake, 7–8, 47–48, 110–11 as countermagician, 34 and Dante, 107 and Doctrina Christiana, 5, 30–31, 48 and English Revolution, 21–22, 109 as God-obsessed, 28–29 as paradoxical, 5 as Protestant heretic, 107 and radical politics, 108–9 as radical theologian, 1–2, 19, 93 and Satan, 33, 48, 79 as scriptural theologian, 108

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and Spinoza, 1–2, 19, 31–32 See also Paradise Lost Moby Dick (Melville), 75, 76, 80, 81 Molly Bloom, 87 Mormonism, 80–81 Nag Hamadi Gnostic library, 36 Neoplatonism, 26, 30 Newman, John Henry and Catholic theology, 35 and Christian orthodoxy, 8, 38, 40 conversion of, 90 Newton, Isaac, 5, 25 Nietzsche, Friedrich as antiphilosophica, 58 assault on Christianity, 42–43 and “blessedness” in, 66–67 and coincidentia oppositorum, 57–58 and Eternal Recurrence, 63–64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 80, 95, 98 Genealogy of Morals, 3 and Hegel, 62, 63, 64, 100 and Kierkegaard, 42–44, 45–46, 99–100 and Marx, 96 as master of irony, 20 and No-saying Christian God, 59, 61 and obsession with God, 66 as poetic philosopher, 60, 69 radical thinking of, 35, 60, 61–62, 68–69, 70–71 and ressentiment, 59 and Spinoza, 4–5 and Zarathustra, 33, 57, 64 See also Antichrist, The nihilism and death of God, 2 and modern apocalypticism, 97–98 and modernity, 34 and new Buddhism, 28 radical thinking of, 40–41 nothingness, 48–49, 57, 59–61, 64, 67, 70, 98 O’Neill, Eugene, 76, 81 O’Regan, Cyril, 40 Overbeck, Franz, 63

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INDEX

Paradise Lost (Milton) and damnation, 20 and English Revolution, 23 epic of Protestantism, 107 and the fall, 13–14 and God, 7–8 interior epic, 30 and Satan, 4, 5–6, 14–15, 17–18, 48, 51, 108 Paradiso (Dante), 60, 90, 106 Parmenides 3, 36 Paul and apocalyptic theology, 104 and Corinthian correspondence, 37 and Crucifixion, 2 in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, 44, 98–99 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 4, 8–9, 48 philosophy, contempt for, 100–101 Principia (Newton), 25 Purgatorio (Dante), 60 Radical Reformation, 38, 89 radical theology, 116 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 36, 39, 49, 53 science, fear of, 26 “Self-Annihilation of God,” 41, 49–50, 51, 52, 79, 109, 110–11 Shakespeare, William, 2, 5, 13, 18, 21, 29–30, 76

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119

Songs of Innocence and Experience (Blake), 14, 49 Spinoza, Benedict de as abstract thinker, 13, 15 as Biblical, 6–7, 27–28 as countermagician, 34 and Ethics, 15, 27, 29 and impact on America, 10 and Milton, 26–27, 30 and Nietzsche, 4–5 radical thinking of, 1–2, 4, 26–27, 31–32, 33, 57–58, 100 and scientific revolution, 25 Tractatus, 1, 6–7 Strauss, Leo, 1 Tractatus (Spinoza), 1, 6–7 Tribes of Yahweh, The (Gottwald), 104 Trinity, 38, 107 Troeltsch, Ernst, and monasticism, 53–54 Ulysses (Joyce), 4, 85, 89 Urizen, 9, 75 “West End Blues, The” (Armstrong), 77–78 Yes-saying vs. No-saying, 57, 59, 61, 70, 90, 98 Zarathustra, Nietzsche and, 33, 57, 64

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