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More David Hart:

“…if divine agape is generous in another sense, if it is actually charitable by giving way to otherness, by desiring the other dearly enough to give in a way that liberates the other even as it ‘binds’ the other – by desiring the other, that is, as the very impulse of charity, and thereby relieving the other of any debt of pure and disinterested return – then the idea of the gift may yet prove resistant to too astringent an ethical purism…”

“…Love is capable of an epektasis toward the truly desirable, a stretching out that is not a backward speculative return to metaphysical identity or moral withdrawal into subjective probity, but a ‘return’ always to the outwardness of the gift, and ecstasy able to claim the other as beloved and desired in a trinitarian way: possession by way of dispassion, gratification of desire through the discover of another.”

“Honestly, it is difficult to be convinced by a discourse of difference and distance that attempts at the same time to be a discourse of Heracleitean flux, because there is no distance in the flux: all dimensions are consumed before they arise. This is the ‘totality’ in the aleatory: every moment of repetition is a singularity that entirely…contains the shape of the whole, a Leibnizian monad that is no longer in any meaningful sense a ‘perspective’ on the whole, because the whole is a sublime, unmediated, absolute presence. For Christian thought, on the other hand, true distance is given in an event, a motion, that is transcendent: a pure prolation in which all patterns are ‘anticipated’, in an infinitely fulfilled way that allows for every possibility…It is transcendence, the divine distance, with its analogical scope, that prevents presence from being totality, and this distance is the original ‘thematism’ – the transcendent act of music – that makes real difference possible…”

“One might best characterize the properly Christian understanding of being as polyphony or counterpoint: having received its theme of divine love from God, the true measure of being is expressed in the restoration of that theme, in the response that submits that theme to variation and offers it back in an indefinitely prolonged and varies response…forever complete and forever calling forth new intonations, new styles of accomplishment and response. The circular, ‘synthetic’, and pleromatic grandeur of the Hegelian [and the Dwaynian] infinite are equally dreary; but the Christian infinite, free of the mechanical hypotaxis of the one and the boring boisterousness of the other, yields a profuse and irreducible parataxis, a boundless flood of beauties, beyond synthesis, but utterly open to analogy, complexity, variations, and refrains.”

“…when I use the word ‘theme’ here, I mean it in its strictly musical sense, to indicate a phrase or motif, a point of departure, which is neither more true nor less complex than the series of variations to which it gives rise. The ‘theme’ of creation is the gift of the whole, committed to limitless possibilities, open to immeasurable ranges of divergence and convergence, consonance and dissonance (which always allows for the possibility of discord), and unpredictable modulations that at once restore and restate that theme. The theme is present in all its modifications, for once it is given it is recuperated throughout, not as a return of the Same but as gratitude, as a new giving of the gift, as what is remembered and as what, consequently, is invented.”

“Distance is the gift of trinitarian charity, address and response, regard and donation…”

“When I speak of creation as [divine] expression, however, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the question of the one and the many as such; the coincidence in Christian thought of the doctrines of the Trinity and of creation ex nihilo renders that question a matter of indifference…While it is certainly desirable to say that in creation no hard division can be drawn between essence and exposition, and even that within the trinitarian perichoresis God is never an indeterminate ground of pure divinity, prior to or apart from the utterance of his Word and breathing forth of his Spirit; still God and world do not constitute between them a single order of content and explication, and so one can properly speak only of ‘analogical expression’ [for Dwayne].”

“Precisely because God does not come to or discover or achieve himself in and through creation but simply declares his glory therein, we find God in and through creation as the generous source and end whose goodness shines upon the surface of every sign. It is this (to Deleuze) contradictory notion of a transcendent origination of being’s expressivity that allows for real difference, a real ‘digressionism’…”

“An ‘expression’ bound entirely to its own immanent force expresses nothing but its own expression [Dwayne] – expresses, that is, precisely nothing, repeats nothing. True expression, though…is possible only if there is that movement that allows it to differ, to be at once a new word and an act of disclosure. There must be an original difference that precedes each finite utterance, that frees each word from every ‘ground’…

[Tom’s Note: I see NO way to ground the “difference” in creative expression, the “address and response” between creator and creature, the “unpredictability” and “display of inventive creativity” that shall define fully realized creaturely existence of which Hart speaks except in the creature’s free determination in “elaborating” upon the divine “themes” that God provides. They’re one and the same.]

And my favorite:

“It may be so, as Michel de Certeau asserts, that Christ offers ‘a style of existence that ‘allows’ for a certain kind of creativity and that opens a new series of experiences’….”

[Certeau’s article is in French so I can’t read it. But given the context, my guess is that he views our true ‘self’, our ‘logos’, as the gift of creative capacities to interpret the divine themes of love, not specific determinations minutely prescribed. The divine themes are GIVEN as gift by God and then received back from us as gratitude precisely IN THE DIFFERENCE which our freely determined elaborations and renditions upon those themes constitute. Thus it is in the difference which we determine that we are in fact different from God in the only really important sense at all, personally distinct from God. So our gifts to God throughout eternity are not the blank slate of our volition void of self-expression and offered to God as the mere instrumentation for divine will (the sort Hart criticizes). Our gift to God is our renditions of the gift of his themes. That’s the music he wants to hear.]

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Yeah, I like Hart.

I remember POW dittoed that final comment (“Our gift to God is our renditions of the gift of his themes”). D objected to all of it with “Jesus is my benchmark.” But now that I expressed (and D almost shed tears of joy over it?) a sense in which God “let’s us go” sufficient to account for the DIFFERENCE between Jesus and us, nothing about Jesus’ example as “benchmark” negates the unique freedom and personal distinction from God which God intends for us but which does NOT characterize Jesus.

T

Post Edited (Tom) : 6/23/2008 6:54:27 AM (GMT-5)