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CHRISTO-FICTION THE RUINS OF ATHENS AND JERUSALEM
INTRODUCTION A Gnostic Theology in the Quantum Spirit
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hat are we to do with the twofold tradition, that of christologies and philosophies, that of the “Christian literature” of the Gospels and of the “lives of Jesus”? If a dialectical reconciliation (Hegel) or a thinking conciliation (Heidegger) have already been tried under the theological authority of philosophy, if exegesis and history have only succeeded in interring and dispersing the message in the inert sands of positivity, what has not yet been done is to conjugate science and theology in a completely new way—in a gnostic spirit that, this time, will make use of quantum theory. How can these two be crossed, as variables equally necessary to thought, stripped of their sufficiency, neither of them any longer claiming to make sense of the other and to dominate it? They are not mere materials, and only abandon their claims within a special matrix for which quantum theory and theology serve only to modelize the whole of the christic message—not to constitute it (it already exists) nor to decide upon its interpretations (there are already too many) but to reorient its use in terms of the humans to whom it is addressed. Thus nothing is lost of the rational rigor necessary for a thought that must refuse all belief, nor of the essence of the kerygma (that is to say, of the faith that defines the faithful). This essay is not a methodological one, a Critique of Pure Theological Reason, nor an exercise in supposedly infallible dogma or discipline, nor indeed one dealing with
separate theologemes. It is an essay in the vision-of-Christ-in-Christ and not in the vision-of-the-world-in-the-world. The method, more than ever entangled with its object, treats every separated hermeneutic, axiomatic, and dogmatic as properties of the same object become complex through the integration of its dimensions. However it is certainly not a return to our old enemy, the dialectic, arisen from the empty tomb of philosophy. If you must have a governing thesis or a principle then here it is, in all its brutality: the fusion of christology and quantum physics “under” quantum theory in its generic power, and no longer under theology. This is called a matrix, and serves to determine, albeit as indeterminate or underdetermined, the cognizance (our faith) of that X that we call Christ-in-person, on the basis of the material of his images, fables, or sayings, his conceptual christophanies. New tasks are prescribed by this placing of Christ’s message into the gnostic matrix: Q To treat the specular doublet or theo-christo-logical difference as the essence of Christianity. The set of its effects is theoretically, but also practically, concentrated in the Principle of Sufficient Theology that governs Christianity. Q To suspend the supposed validity of the two basic disciplines when left to their positivity and its spontaneous claims. Christ is neither theologian nor philosopher, nor even the founder of a new “human science.” But it was necessary to demonstrate this, to furnish ourselves with a suitable, independently validated method, and to draw all the consequences of it, not just state it confusedly or pay lip service to it. Q To manifest Christ’s message in a nonhermeneutical manner as being neither Greek nor Jewish, as being unintelligible by way of Logos and Torah separately or mixed together, but intelligible if Logos and Torah are canonically conjugated as variables—that is to say, as properties posited for Christ but which are only determinable when considered outside of any melange, with one excluding the other. To theology’s vicious manner of thinking, we oppose the inverse products of these interpretations, and give a concrete translation of them, with both topological and phenomenological aspects, in terms of relations between transcendence and immanence, Law and Freedom, proximity and infinite distance.
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Q To demonstrate how Christ is the founder of a science of humans that is nonphilosophical and nontheological, but generic—that is to say, man-oriented or underdetermined by what we call “being-in-lasthumanity” or generic man as “last instance.” Q To manifest the generic essence of Christ, which is to render humans idempotent, so that each may verify, through Christ, his equality to another. Christ is the internal law of composition that makes it possible for a human to equalize himself to another and to lead him from rebellion or revolution to heresy. We call Christ-in-person the mediate-without-mediation that transforms the believer into a “faithful-in-Christ” and humanity into a “mystical,” that is to say, nonphilosophical, body. Q To reinterpret the scene of the Cross and the Resurrection. The refusal of history and its “vulgar” temporality necessitates the establishment of a new causal order for these events: It is the Resurrection that underdetermines, as prior-to-first, the primary order of the Crucifixion and the Entombment. The Resurrection is essentially a surrection or an ascending that must no longer be understood as a philosophical transcending or an elevation in exteriority, already viciously impregnated with theology and opening the way to every dialectic. Q The erected Cross is the inverted objective image of the Resurrection, which is the real movement that has been falsified by the theology and the belief that uphold it, in an apparent or objective movement. The apparent sacrifice of Christ is really the sacrifice of God, the end of the rivalry between Father and Son, the birth of Equals. Q To reinterpret the distinction between belief and faith. Theo-christological belief is the specular doublet of Christian representation, and moves within Greco-Judaic melanges of transcendence. Immanent faith is the generic—that is to say, human or idempotent in-the-last-instance— phenomenon that distinguishes the faithful from believers. Q To rename this whole set of axioms as being those of a gnostic but nonreligious usage of Christ, of his kerygma and of his faithful. The gnostic spirit is the fusion of science and philosophy, of knowledge and salvation, in equal shares; the operation of the subtraction of the faithful from the world, the sacrifice of the “Evil God,” and the glorification of Christ as mediate-without-mediation for the faithful.
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Renewed, non-Christian gnosis proceeds via the substitution of contemporary knowledge (quantum theory, as model of thought) for the purely conceptual science of theology. In this regard one might call it, strictly speaking, a quantum deconstruction and a generic transformation of theology.
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