To God belongs the East and the West.
Wherever you turn, there is the face of God.
God is All-Encompassing, All-Knowing.
Qur’an 2:115
*
I YHWH am your God who has set you apart from other peoples.
Leviticus 20:24
AMONG the most central of my religious and philosophical convictions is a considerable scepticism toward borders. This arises first and foremost from a recognition that God is unity, and—as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Daoism (among other traditions) have noted especially well—this necessitates not just a unity that transcends difference in identity, but difference in opinion too, no matter how righteous we may take those opinions to be. I intend to write a piece on religious perspectivism in due course, but I begin with mention of this guiding principle in order to address what is a frightfully overabused element of religious discourse. Overabused because, like practically all other claims to distinctiveness or unique purchase on the truth, it is often manipulated to distinguish oneself from the ‘other’ and thereby establish an at least implicit but usually proudly explicit hierarchy of power.
I am speaking of revelation. By nature of the topic, I am generally referring to Abrahamic religions, which speaks most primordially of Jewish revelation, and most specifically of the prophetic heritage and which Jews, Samaritans, Christians, and Mandaeans share under the mantel of ‘the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob’ (Gen. 50:24, Ex. 3:15, Acts 7:32) (plus, of course, the Islamic ummah, though it views itself as descendant of Ishmael rather than Jacob). In any case all begin from that provenance of the Abrahamic ‘covenant of the pieces’ in Genesis 15, and understand their revelation to be founded on a sacred and unique relationship with YHWH, the God of Israel, with respective variations.
The problem that I hope to prod is the following: if the ultimate telos of creation is absolute union with its Creator, then that teleology must bear an ultimately unifiying horizon; one that does not draw final and everlasting distinctions between an ‘in’ and ‘out’ group, but subsumes all in the infinite Being of God. These ‘in’ and ‘out’ groups are human, all too human, as we well know. In Abrahamic religion, we are most often but not always speaking of a border demarcated by the means of creedal confession. Generally, those circumcised and in observance of Torah are ‘Jews’, those baptised and professing faith in Jesus Christ as God are ‘Christians’, and those who invoke the shahadah and take the Qur’an to be authoritative and final are ‘Muslims’. Undertaking such conditions establishes oneself as one with ‘Yisra’el’, the ‘ekklesia’, or the ‘ummah’ respectively. These possess the particular content of revelation—likely an aggregation of textual and oral tradition, with varying emphases—and those on the outside are, to lesser or greater degrees, bereft.
The first port of call whenever one encounters hard distinctions, as a healthy postmodern sensibility always prescribes, is to begin to problematise them, usually best achieved with something like a Socratic method. The overwhelmingly loaded question of ‘Who is a Jew?’ has an ostensibly inexhaustible variability to its potential answers. Orthodox factions insist on maternal ethnic Jewishness and halahkic conversion. Most insist on male circumcision and immersion (tevliah) in a mikveh, and a promise to observe the mitzvah of the Torah. The official Reform position, at least in the U.S., is almost entirely bereft of any ritual. We see from the bat that those who guard the gates are themselves under and in dispute. And—as is usually the irony with strong right-leaning attitudes—the more rigid one becomes in marshalling the borders, the more life scuppers the reality of this rigidity. Are we really to suggest any sort of ethnic exclusivism in our modern age, when all people contain the genes of all people? Not to speak of biological idiosyncrasies which problematise otherwise corporeal significations of identity, such as queries regarding circumcision for someone with aposthia.1 By any account, the distinctiveness of Jewishness is precisely its most elusive aspect, and yet also that by which Jewishness finds its definition.
This is important for our discussion because Jewish distinctiveness is what ensures its self-understanding as a people bearing the substance of the Creator’s revelation. And, to reiterate, if it is a Jewish question then it is a question for all those traditions that derive their revelation from an aboriginally Jewish heritage. So, for all Abrahamic religions, how we are to understand any kind of creaturely specificity in the revelation delivered by a universal Creator?
Let me get at this from the other side. We should appreciate first and foremost that the division between the transcendent and the immanent is categorical. The terms of transcendence—ineffability, immutability, unconditionedness, eternality, necessity—are not merely the pinnacle of a gradational spectrum, but are the direct antitheses of those of immanence—intelligibility, mutability, conditionedness, finitude, contingency. As such, any ‘appearance’ of the transcendent within the immanent must absolutely assume the conditions of immanence, and so abandon those of transcendence. We should first note that this division of transcendence and immanence is not the same as the supernatural and the natural in modern terms. The only ‘thing’ that is really transcendent is God, infinite and unconditioned Being, whilst all (at least potentially) existent entities—from atoms to angels—are immanent. This misunderstanding might lead us to suppose that revelation ‘from the transcendent’ somehow preserves its transcendence upon manifestation simply due to its supernaturality: we might think that because the natural order does not usually allow for a blinding light and voice from the heavens, if/when it does happen we are dealing with something qualitatively different from the rest of existence. This would be a category error. Think of how Kant makes clear in his epistemology that the ‘noumenal’ Ding an sich never manifests in the ‘phenomenal’ realm of appearances, because manifestation itself belongs to the latter. It is simply an impossibility to talk about manifestation of any kind—even of the most dazzlingly ‘apocalyptic’ sort, with the white steeds and beastly marks and angelic trumpets of the Book of Revelation—as anything other than an immanent occurrence. It is immanent precisely because it is manifest.
It is perhaps my Deleuzean sensibility which guides me. Although I do not believe his univocity holds at a metaphysically fundamental level—the analogia entis is far preferrable—I do think it is a sophisticated observation to make when dealing exclusively with the ‘plane of immanence’,2 as Deleuze’s philosophy was. To say that the immanent is itself univocal is simply to reiterate my earlier principle: that one must be thoroughly sceptical of all borders within the immanent, anything that purports to make the kind of categorical distinction that is only appropriate for the division between Creator and creation, not creatures themselves. Everything is of one sort in creation; certainly, different modulations, manifestations, expressions, intensities, singularities, but ontologically comprised of the same universal fabric of contingent and conditioned interrelatedness: what Buddhist philosophy calls ‘dependent arising’ (S: pratītyasamutpāda).
Whether we are speaking of Qur’anic dictation to Muhammad, or the impartation of the Decalogue to Moses, or simply the ‘person’ of Jesus Christ himself, in each case, no matter how thoroughly (or appropriately—I am not being critical) we douse the event in reverence, sanctity, and breathless awe, it is still immanent. If we take all accounts quite literally, accepting all supernatural claims: the manifestation of Gabriel at Hira, the miracles and resurrection of Jesus, the astounding interventions of YHWH to protect or punish the nation of Israel and its enemies, we are at no juncture speaking of a transgression of this immanence, an opening in which the unconditioned remains as such. Crucially, all openings are but further revelations of an already latent depth in the immanent. This also pays no heed to modern scientific divisions: again, any irruption of the miraculous within the natural reveals only a supernatural valence to the immanent rather than anything truly transcendent. No such event can give credence to the illogical and impossible claim that the unmanifest has been made manifest in such a way that permits us to speak about both as identical. (Incidentally, this is exactly why Christianity endured centuries of high-strung, vitriolic, and agonisingly niche debates as its Christology developed: the claim that Jesus, a manifest person, was God the Father, the unmanifest Creator, was a frankly outrageous one that needed a truly brilliant innovation (thanks goes to the Cappadocian Fathers) for exculpation. But even in the Trinity, of course, we are still speaking of a hard and unimpeachable distinction between Father and Son, and the divine and human natures of Jesus).
So, how are we to understand revelation in this light? Well, we must commit ourselves to the consequences of our assertion. Our list was: intelligibility, mutability, conditionedness, finitude, and contingency. To predicate such things of revelation is something that most religious people find rather hard to swallow, but which I insisted in my first triptych of posts was necessary to avoid a subtle yet precarious idolatry. All revelation, no matter how central or sacred to the religion, must be chained to all the mutability and syncretism that history entails. I do not think this is necessarily ridiculous, nor indeed at all detrimental to religion.
Evidence for it can be found in recognising that texts like the Qur’an and the Bible are at best fairly impenetrable and at worst simply unhelpful when we try to read them as though they were applicable equally ‘to all times’. Many Western readers tend to abandon the Qur’an on their first reading because they (supposing it to be like the more narrative-driven Bible) begin with the first Surah and work their way onwards: they typically get no further than the sinuous, protracted jurisprudence of Al-Baqarah, a Surah firmly grounded in the concerns of Muhammad and his followers in Medina in the 7th century. And the Bible is in many cases even worse, especially as the West continues to stumble away from anything like a Christian community, given evangelical believers tend to hoist their own distinctly modern concerns onto the text, resulting in strange innovations (since when has ‘taking the Lord’s name in vain’ (Deu. 5:11) referred to vulgarity rather than oath-taking?) and omittances (which Western Christian today refuses to eat bloody meats, apropos Acts 15:29?).
Indeed, many of the most controversial debates regarding the cultural role of religion today—one thinks of abortion and homosexuality immediately—are embroiled in deeply unnuanced readings of Scripture, often markedly selective in their adoption or rejection of certain, say, Biblical injunctions. For example, a Christian who softly suggests that Paul’s proscriptions of same-sex intercourse—founded as they were on an antiquated ethic, concerned with sexual hierarchy and dominance in a way that no Christian heterosexual couple would care for nowadays3—might now gently be let slip into history will often be met with the sharp frowns and stern words insisting that they must ‘accept the authority of the Bible wholeheartedly’. And yet, quite curiously, that ubiquitous authority seems to come a little loose when we read of the Bible’s clear condoning of race-based slavery (Lev. 25:44-46).4 Any semi-respectable hermeneutics will be aware that a reading of the text is a negotiation with the text. We emphasise and prioritise certain aspects; we diminish and even ignore others. We cannot read in such a way that avoids this, and it is dangerous to believe we can.
I digress. In any case, this all serves only to problematise borders. Interpretations of Scripture, and so any dogma we might derive from those interpretations, are by nature malleable, conditioned, contingent, historical, etc., etc. You know the list. To wit: there are no true ontological divisions in the immanent, and all is of one ilk. Every sacred text or event and every meaning that might be procured from them must be implicated within the fabric of an immanent causal order, and so really everything we call ‘religion’ must be too.
This is one of the startlingly beautiful corollaries of dependent arising: in divesting reality of one overarching, transcendent entity (what Heidegger would call an ‘ontotheology’,5 though in Buddhism is simply the recognition that nothing possesses innate svabhāva), it clears the way for the interconnected unity of all immanent entities. Deleuze is at his most Buddhist when he points out that all ‘events’ are merely nodes of a cosmic network of difference and intensity, one primary ‘Event’ which is nothing but the activity of its smaller elements.6 As an axiomatic result, anything that exists must exist through and by everything. In the Madhyamaka understanding, all is śūnya, nothing existing in a self-sufficient manner, only through other things, thus creating an infinite regress that spans the fullness of the immanent.
So, to string our premises together: if revelation is immanent, and immanence entails being conditioned and related to all that exists, then for any event of revelation anywhere in history to be, it must be comprised of all other events of history. If anything in the world is revelation, everything is revelation. As such, distinctions between what is and is not revelation can be at most preliminary, the identification of different gradations where the same substance is more or less manifest. But these gradations never qualify as truly ontological distinctions.
What are the implications for the foregoing? It is not to say, to be sure, that (for instance) the tabernacle erected around the Holy of Holies is somehow an arbitrary and ultimately irrelevant line in the sand. Again, Judaism is essentially inconceivable without its distinctions. But it is to say that the distinction between shekhinah and creation—if, indeed, that shekhinah is manifest within creation, as a ‘Presence’ depicted in the midst of the wandering Israelites in Torah—can only ultimately be one of modality, even if modalities of a particularly Levitical and so rigorously ritualistic type. This is something that the Hebrew Bible is already somewhat aware of, to be clear, at least to the extent that we can apply scholarly apparatus to unearth the disputing views that comprise its composition. There is an obvious question to be asked about what it means for God to be contained behind a curtain or within a tent. We know the Torah bears a varied authorship with different views not only on national matters (the Elohist and Deuteronomist clash on the priority of Israel vs. Judah), but even on the matter of something as central as monotheism (the author of Gen. 31:19, 34 is perfectly content with Rachel’s many household idols).
Moreover, Jewish attitudes to the ‘locality’ of God altered according to the conditions of Jewish existence. The disaster of the Jewish Revolt in 70 A.D. signified the end of Second Temple Judaism and a genuinely existential threat to Jewish civilisation, forcing the inscription of the Oral Torah in the Talmud along with a move to a more spiritualised attitude to devotion. (Incidentally, a change that allowed the nascent Jesus Movement to adopt a more legitimate spiritual grounding after the death and reported resurrection and ascension of Jesus: now assuming the tabernacle symbolism unto himself—as would later be developed in theological language of ‘incarnation’—Jesus was alive and reigned over all as Lord in a spiritual dominion, rather than leading Israel physically from within the walls of Jerusalem).
All of this is to say that we can have our cake and eat it too: indeed, we must. Different Jewish voices have reckoned differently with the strangely incommensurate claim that the universal Creator happens to bear a covenant with their particular tribe. And, as Jews became increasingly confronted by the reality of other ways of religious life—an exposure most effervescent and violent during the Hellenic era—the more it had to reckon with what their God would have to mean in relation to those people. This is a model we tend to see in the development of all religions; an original, tribal polytheism comes to blossom into a kind of monolatry, and then at its peak the adoption of monotheism (which is to say merely a recognition of the unity of Being’s Source)—usually under the aspect of prevailing deities, rituals, and texts lingering from the culturally specific heritage whence that understanding emerged. Judaism, just like practically every other faith, is a theological polyphony, and one that has grown in its accommodation of the truly all-encompassing valences its doctrine entails.
My conclusion: if the Jewish people are original and particular bearers of a revealed truth from the Infinite, then they are bearers of a revelation that must be (and is already, in a very real sense) universal to all peoples. Perhaps this conclusion will not be palatable to all.7 To read of how Israel has been singled out as ‘a holy people to the LORD your God’, and that ‘chosen… to be a people for Himself, a special treasure above all the peoples on the face of the earth’ (Deu. 7:6) might incline us, as many do, to a worldview of ultimate dualism, of ‘us and them’. But we must ask ourselves whether this individualism necessitates exclusivism. Or, to turn it on its head, whether a claim to universal and eternal truth could ever even begin to be contained exhaustively within the narrow confines of a singular tradition. And even if this circus act (one thinks of an elephant on a tricycle) could possibly occur, we are back to the problem of borders again. Where are you drawing your lines, and how ignorant are you of just how permeable those lines are? Have you forgotten what on the ‘outside’ actually permitted you to create an ‘inside’ in the first place? It is frightfully easy to kick the tricycle out from under.
In sum, there is a manner of approaching borders that reveres their sanctity and indispensable importance (to reprise Candrakīrti’s image, we cannot drink water without a cup), but does not—by merit of the very sacred revelation which they do indeed encircle—eternalise, essentialise, or ultimately inscribe them into the substance of the truth they contain. To be Jewish is to be born into a covenant with YHWH, ‘Creator of heaven and earth’ (Gen. 14:19), to be ‘marked out’ as a member of a people devoted to God in all things. There is a very healthy way—and this stands in delightful contrast to any supersessionism—in which some Christians have remembered their original Jewishness by ensuring that evangelism is not an abolition of particularity in order to accommodate the gentile so much as a broadening and emboldening of a covenant that remains very Jewish; that is, remains very tightly bound to a Godly devotion in all aspects of life, understanding its responsibility to the rest of the human race with a pious sincerity, and (as Hillel the Great summarised Torah) loving all as oneself.
It would be a little cliché (and unhelpful) to end with something like ‘we should all seek to become Jewish’ in some nebulous, we-are-the-world blather. Far better, and far more concrete, to suggest that what we see—what is revealed—in Judaism is a pattern of distinctive living that should be adopted and emulated in ubiquity, in the distinctiveness of other particular and unique traditions. The model is that of a culture and nation entirely turned toward and celebrating the ‘goodness’ and ‘mercy’ (Ex. 33:19) of the Almighty, wrestling with this vocation (Gen. 32:24-32) and accommodating the many, many failures to live up to the call (too many verses to cite). The distinctiveness of Judaism is precisely in its purpose to ‘proclaim His name amongst the nations’ (Isa. 12:4), to ‘worship Jehovah in holy splendour’, as ‘all the earth’ ‘tremble[s] before Him’ (1 Ch. 16:29-30), to bear witness to that One God in whom all people find their Provenance and End. So, bear witness. Seek to see ‘Thy glory’ in all things; just ‘as [we] have seen Thee in the sanctuary’ (Ps. 63:2).
See Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 135a for the Hillel/Shammai dispute.
Gilles Deleuze, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 35.
Paul thought it an abomination for a man to lie under his wife in intercourse, for instance: sexual ethics were in the Greco-Roman age primarily concerned with hierarchies often organised via dynamics of penetration and reception. In 1 Cor. 6:9 for instance, the terms ‘malakoi’ and ‘arsenokoitai’ refer to passive and active actors: the condemnation is here explicitly based on forms of penetration rather than mere ‘homosexuality’ as we would term it today, given that was where Paul’s (very culturally particular) concerns lay.
If one were to assert that Christians no longer live by the old law but by the Spirit (something often vaguely used to justify a dismissal of the Old Testament in favour of the New—when convenient), it would not be a get out of jail free card. In spite of usual interpretations of that one beautiful verse (Gal. 3:28) or indeed 1 Tim. 1:10 there is nothing in the New Testament that explicitly condemns or calls for the abolition of slavery. In fact, in 1 Tim. 6:1-2 we see the author of the epistle instructing slaves to honour their masters. And, of course, the problem worsens when we see Jesus (who, again, did not call for the abolition of slavery) insisting that not a ‘jot or tittle’ would fall from the law (Mt. 5:18). It would take about three centuries before Christian voices (like Gregory of Nyssa) really started speaking out in an abolitionist key.
Martin Heidegger, Essays in Metaphysics: Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
See Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Constantin V. Boundas, Mark Lester, and Charles J. Stivale (New York: Bloomsbury, 1990), 56.
To state the obvious. A quick read of The Book of Jubilees, for instance, presents a view thoroughly isolationist in its conception of the relationship between Jews and the rest of humanity. But there are no last words on the matter of course. It really is something of a dialectic: the deeper one dives into the particular, the more the universal is revealed. As above, so below.
Wonderful read.