Philosophy of God against God: Reflections after Negri on Job
"...to suffer is to resist." Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job, p. 26.
The right believes that unhappiness is sin, a sign of an injustice that applies uniquely not to worlds but persons. It goes with the right's view of "God" as all powerful, and Nature as a world perfectly made at the origin of time, humans set in it to obey. Thus, if you are unhappy, there is a fault, only, in your relationship, as fallible being, to Being as faultless. Thus, too, conservatives value custom, the habitual adjustment of individuals and communities to the way things are; custom expresses the way things are, and since what is and what ought to be are not distinguished, social alienation, physical pain, or any sign of a breach in conformity by habit to what is given, this is the individual's crime, or sin.
Tyrants may use the infliction of pain or suffering to punish or to threaten and warn. That they are tyrants, pursuing injustice, like demonic forces making it possible (in a world where everything that happens is caused, by an original force or 'will'), proves that pain's signal that something is wrong does not mean that it can only be you, or your 'attitude', as one component of the worldly or natural environment you are part of.
You feel the pain, which is individual and world-destroying. But what it means is impossible to know in advance. Suffering like chaos conditions creation. The enemy of creation is government and bureaucracy, priesthoods, prisons, police. They enforce and guard the only thing that can be: things as they are, the way that things are. The Biblical God was an alternative to magical rites and tyrannies. It was a revolution that could not be completed. Traces of tyranny taint every theology, every totality, and most theory.
Rebellion defines itself by the courage to say no to power even when it inflicts pain, or treats pain as sign of the slave's guilt.
The left announces and cultivates the courage of transgression. Specifically, to refuse not just some norm, but the normativity of the normal, of the way things usually are. That is, of naturalizing social institutions (which articulate 'the way things are' in an implied unity of history and nature, Being in both cases a perfect, flawless totality), even when the refusal is painful.
The left is transgressive, the right redemptive. Redemption is atonement, perfection, wholeness; transgression is more open, and allows difference and even conflict to persist. The left is inventive. The left thinks, while the right 'knows'.
Biblical Judaism in the book of Job, and elsewhere, undermines the same comfortable and totalizing theology elsewhere associated with it. Introducing scandals to which God himself has no answer. For all the elegance of its solutions, Christianity did not avoid similar problems.
The dominant view of God is a mirror of a project of mastery. The modern problem in philosophical theology is to think of God or the divine outside mastery. A God who, unlike Augustine's
"Dominus," is not a figure of power. Some sacralizing secular theologians today seem to think the answer lies in the indiscernability of the difference, based on the apophatic tradition of negative theology, between absolute monarchy and anarchy. But anarchy is not a power that is completed veiled, hiding itself perfectly, but one that does not even exist, lacking all power and potentialities. Talmudic Judaism made God safe for parliamentary monarchy; Christianity made him safe for revolution, perhaps. The Trinitarian tradition allows both ultra-authoritarian and ultra-radical postures, like Father and Son. Baroque subversive styles of affirming traditional authority, as in Shakespeare, give this a secular analogue. Ambiguities are easier to reconcile in a contemplative posture, the legacy of Aristotelianism. We might need something else. Maybe it is not to modernize God, but to forget him. Maybe his existence is not a falsity but a rhetorical paradigm we could live with or without, a manner of speaking that works, but is hardly necessary. Religion was also political, at least in the sense of governmental. Maybe politics can do without it, like outgrowing a transitional state of immaturity, which Maimonides rightly saw Biblical religion as largely being. It's not that we cannot speak of God; he may have just become less important.
And if someone wants to prove you wrong, what will they do but make a show of their power, remark your precarious vulnerability, declare a ‘tu quoque’ (see, It, the Truth we represent, applies also to you, you have admitted yourself!), all the while enjoying some Shadenfreude. Claims to be able to dominate show themselves by doing so. Apart from that, they are mute. You don’t have to believe anymore to obey, just do it. The arguments of power seem obvious until you realize you can just say no. And if asked why you aren’t with the program, say like Bartleby, “I prefer not to”; Melville’s legal copy clerk was in the hands of a subtle commentator on power’s uses of theologies.
Being, nature, and world were to be centered on God like our earth orbiting its sun. But it's been true already for half a millennium that politics is not morality (Machiavelli) and the world is infinite and has no center (Nicholas of Cusa). Ask me about God, and I may find pro and contra can both be deduced, but ask me if I need him to know what forms of the good to affirm and of oppression to refuse, and maybe not. Thinking of God may be great as support or inspiration, but it’s less his substance than our relationship that matters; do we not speak the same language? If he’s got a logic, it’s ours to learn and use; if tasks, ours to know and do; if hopes, our to experience and realize. The poetry of the prayer matters more than its not easily invoked referent.
The future is open, not legislated by the past. God is ignorant of the future he alone would be powerless to create. Prayers express hopes, its consolations are contingent and tentative, and they are often read when others should be written. Religion is rebinding, always authorizing a government. But the way we inhabit time is such that every government is inadequate as solution to the problems of the political, which exceed it. There is no more a fortune telling or forecasting of the future than a knowledge from consulting the dead. We may know what we ought or want to do, but not what we make, nor what will be. Divine freedom is God's ignorance and impotence; we can at most hope to find from legends and poetry encouragement.