This is the seventh in a series of extracts from my forthcoming book on Deleuze (to be published in the same P&R ‘Great Thinkers’ series as the Derrida and Foucault volumes). It argues that the Bible has a radical view of history, the material world and the human person that set it apart from almost all ancient and modern philosophies. In this extract I also argue that the Bible does not present a metanarrative but what we might call a mesonarrative. To see all the excerpts released so far, please click here.
Plato and Deleuze also share the view that we accede to the condition of our experience by a particular form of reflection from within our experience. In both cases the direction of movement is from inside to outside experience, either through the intellect (Plato) or through transcendental reflection (Deleuze).
Once again, the Bible cuts across this shared assumption with the claim that, at a particular moment in history, the condition of possibility of our existence became apprehensible within the world of experience: the incarnation of Jesus the Christ. It does so, in fact, in terms of a threefold scandal, at least to the abstract universalising spirit of the enlightenment which Plato helped shape and which Deleuze substantially (though not wholly) shares: the scandal of the particular, the scandal of the historical, and the scandal of the material.[1] On the biblical account, the direction of epistemological travel is not from the inside of experience to the outside, but outside in (figure B.9).
Figure B.9: The word became flesh.
The Scandal of the Particular
The first scandal of the incarnation is the scandal of the particular.[2] In Christianity, the condition of possibility of our existence is revealed not as an abstract, universal principle, but as a particular person: Jesus Christ. Note that Christ is not merely the one in or through whom revelation takes place, as if he were the mouthpiece or conduit for an abstract reality beyond his own person. This would be characteristic of the Christ of the Enlightenment, not of the Christ of the Bible. In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, for example, Immanuel Kant holds that “[e]ven the Holy One of the Gospel must first be compared with our idea of moral perfection before he is recognized as [a model]”.[3] Christ, for Kant, is the embodiment of an abstract idea more fundamental than the particular person of Christ himself. The language of the Bible, by contrast, will not allow us to frame Christ as an intermediary or vessel for a deeper, impersonal reality. Christ is the truth: “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” (John 14:6). This identification of Christ with, rather than as a mere ambassador for, the condition of our existence is further stressed by Paul in Colossians 1:
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. (Colossians 1:15-17)
Christ does not only tell us of the one by whom all things were created; he is that one. He does not only explain how all things hold together; he is the one in whom all things hold together. In other words, nothing in Christ’s particularity invalidates his universality; to think so is to continue to labor under the Enlightenment prejudice that assumes that the ultimate and the universal must necessarily be abstract and impersonal. “In Christian thought”, by contrast, “the ‘transcendent’ vantage that takes in all things is that provided by a particular first-century Jew”.[4] Note also that, in John 14, the one about whom Christ bears witness is no more abstract than he is himself. Jesus does not say “whoever has seen me has seen the ground of being”, or “whoever has seen me has seen the ultimate reality of the universe”, but “whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
This particularity does not mean that the Father or Christ cease to be universal; to assume so would once again to fall under the Enlightenment prejudice. The particular Christ, Jesus of Nazareth, is universal; the particular Father, the “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ”, is universal.[5] This concrete particularity of Christ sits in contrast to the Deleuzian virtual, the transcendental condition of being which remains inaccessible by direct experience. Christianity transgresses the distinction between particulars and their transcendental or transcendent condition which both Plato and Deleuze maintain and upon which they both rely.
The scandal of the Historical
The second scandal of the incarnation is the scandal of the historical. The Bible does not claim that the incarnation instantiates an eternal relationship between God and his creation, or that it illustrates an unchanging reality, but that it is a one-time event that took place at a particular moment in calendar history—an event, indeed, that cleaves calendar history into two. The incarnation is irreducibly historical: Christ is not an abstract eternal reality but has a particular human genealogy, being “descended from David according to the flesh” (Romans 1:3).
In the prologue to his gospel, John presents the incarnation in three moments of increasing intensity:
5 The light shines in the darkness […] 9 The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. […] 14 And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.
In addition to the progressive accumulation of detail about the incarnation across these three verses, I would like to alight particularly on their sequence of tenses. Verse 5 contains the present indicative active verb phainei, “is appearing” or “is shining”. The present is continuous, with the sense that “shining in the darkness is what the light does”, rather than pointing to a temporally punctual event (“right here and now, the light is shining in the darkness”). There is as yet no indication of historical specificity: this tense could describe the relationship between Platonic forms and particulars (“the particulars participate in the forms”) or the Deleuzian actual and virtual (“entities in our experience are actualizations of the virtual”). In verse 9, however, we begin to see the contours of historical specificity emerge: the true light “was coming” (erchomenon) into the world, a verb in the aorist tense, middle voice, which could be translated either as “is coming” or “was coming”. In either case, the tense indicates that the relationship between the word and the world is not eternally unchanging: something happens. This emerging specificity is sharpened even further in verse 14: “the word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory”.[6] “Became” translates the second aorist egeneto: something happened in the past, continued for an unspecified length of time and has now finished happening. It is followed by two additional aorist verbs: “dwelt” (eskenosen) and “have seen” (etheasametha, aorist middle voice). Eskenosen derives from the Greek skene, meaning “booth” or “tabernacle”, underlining not only the temporal but the spatial specificity of the incarnation: Christ’s incarnation is not an abstract or general indwelling but, like the Old Testament tabernacle—or indeed like any other tent—is pitched at a particular location for a particular length of time. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek rightly notes, Christianity is unique in that it “offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation”.[7]
The incarnation, in short, is not an eternal reality or a timeless spiritual truth; it was an event. There was a moment when it began, a period of time when Christ was incarnate on earth, and a moment when he ceased to be so. The incarnation is emplotted in biblical history. I use the term “event” here with its full philosophical weight. An event is something that happens, often unexpectedly or unforeseeably, to disrupt the natural development of already-existing realities and the extrapolation of already-existing conditions, something contingent and unpredictable that creates a “before” and an “after” and that, therefore, makes history itself possible. Revelation is an event in this sense because it interrupts the regular and predictable outworking of natural processes,[8] as Oliver O’Donovan explains:
Any philosophy of history which takes some other starting-point than simple revelation is doomed to end up trapped within one or another form of natural determinism. It can give no account of the future except by extrapolating regularities from the past. There are, of course, many possible regularities for it to choose among, so that there are many different types of philosophy of history. Some are cyclical, singling out the repetitive character of the natural processes and extending the principle of repetition explicitly to include larger patterns of events; in which case they are, in the end, quite overtly philosophies of nature. […] To be truly ‘history’, history must be shaped by the unique, by that which cannot be guessed from the scrutiny of natural repetitions.[9]
So while it is not incorrect to say that the incarnation is an event in history, it is also correct to say that history itself, emplotment itself, is made possible by revelatory events like the incarnation. Emplotted revelation is the condition of possibility of history (in O’Donovan’s strong sense of the term “history”), as well as itself partaking in the scandal of the historical.[10]
The Scandal of the Material
The third and final scandal of the incarnation is the scandal of the material: Christ came not as a pure idea but with a normal body with all its normal limitations and functions. For those who labor under the Enlightenment prejudice that ultimate reality must be a pure, abstract and universal, the notion that God could have a body is indeed a scandal.
In the terms of the prologue to John’s gospel, the word did not become idea or language, but “flesh”: blood, bone and sinews, inscribing a scandal of the material at the heart of biblical emplotment. It is this carnality that John emphasises at the beginning of his first letter:
1 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— 2 the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— 3 that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you (1 John 1:1-3)
“That which was from the beginning” and “the eternal life which was with the Father” is the same as that which, in a crescendo of three sensory encounters of increasing proximity, John says “we have heard […] seen […] touched”.
The incarnation is not just a scandal of the material in the sense that Christ had a physical body, however. It vindicates and dignifies the whole material world, as Hart explains: “the incarnation of the Logos, the infinite ratio of all that is, reconciles us not only to God, but to the world, by giving us back a knowledge of creation’s goodness”.[11] That God should become flesh reiterates the “it was good” pronounced on the material world in Genesis 1; that he should further be raised and ascend with a body of flesh after his death seals the importance of the material for eternity: “the resurrection of Christ directs our attention back to the creation which it vindicates”.[12] The Gnosticism which Deleuze rightly rejects preaches a redemption from creation, but biblical Christianity preaches the redemption of creation.
As with all the three scandals discussed in this section, the incarnation is but one instance of the biblical scandal of the material among many. This scandal runs from the “it was very good” pronounced upon the material creation in Genesis 1:31 through the bodily resurrection of Christ, to the materiality of the new heavens and the new earth at the end of the book of Revelation. The compound effect of this repeated insistence on the goodness of matter from Genesis to Revelation lends weight Archbishop William Temple’s claim that Christianity “is the most avowedly materialist of the great religions.”[13]
This Christian vindication of materiality stands once more in contrast both to both Plato and Deleuze. It would be anathema to Plato’s system to suggest that we could hear, see or touch the Forms, for “the very being with which true knowledge is concerned” is “the colorless, shapeless, intangible Being that truly is, perceptible only to the soul’s pilot, intelligence, which is the object of the class of true knowledge”.[14] Similarly, the Deleuzian virtual by definition cannot be directly apprehended by the senses. What Plato and Deleuze both put asunder, the Bible joins together (figure B.9).
Figure B.10: The incarnation diagonalizes Plato and Deleuze’s account of the relationship between experience and its condition.
The scandals of particularity, historicity and materiality mean that the Christian need not look beyond this world to apprehend its ground. Christ, unlike Platonic forms, could be heard, seen and touched. He cannot be touched now because, as befits a historical event as opposed to an abstract, eternal reality, Christ came at a particular point in history. Christ, unlike the virtual, is not the transcendental condition of possibility of the actual, a necessary inference from the way things are, but one who “dwelt among us” such that “we have seen his glory” (John 14:14), not heard a report of his glory or seen it re-enacted as in a play.
It is because of the scandals of historicity, materiality and particularity that it is rather misleading to claim that Christianity has, or is, a metanarrative. A metanarrative is an explanation of the world that sits not on the surface of events but beyond (meta) the history it attempts to frame and the interventions it aims to legitimate. Like Deleuze’s virtual, it is an inference from the way things are, not directly visible on the surface of those things themselves. In the light of the three scandals enumerated in this section it would be more appropriate, in the case of the Bible, to prefer the prefix meso– (from mesos, meaning “middle” or “between” or “amidst”) and speak of the Christian meso-narrative of the Christ who “dwelt among us”. Ultimate reality is manifest in the midst of events, in Christ’s sinewy flesh, at a particular moment in history, rather than on a “meta” level of abstract explanation separate from those particular, historical, material events themselves.
[1] Although these three scandals can be traced throughout the whole Biblical emplotment, I have chosen to address them in relation to the incarnation because, first, the incarnation presents an instance of all three scandals together and, secondly, the incarnation is a particularly intense and biblically elaborated moment for all three.
[2] The “scandal of the particular” or the “scandal of particularity” is a term frequently used by contemporary theologians to refer to the claim that one particular man, Jesus Christ, is the saviour for all. It translates the German “Ärgernis der Einmaligkeit”, first used by Gerhard Kittel in “The Jesus of History”, in Mysterium Christi: Christological Studies by British and German Theologians, ed. Gerhard Kittel, G.K.A. Bell and A. Deissman, (London: Longmans, 1930) 31. In what follows I have sought to clarify the overlapping ideas often gathered under the umbrella of the “scandal of particularity” by separating the scandal of the particular (that Christ was a specific man), of the historical (that he was born at a specific time and place), and of the material (that he had a body).
[3] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor and Jens Timmermann, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) 23.
[4] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 321.
[5] It would be too weak to claim that Christ is merely a “concrete universal”. Though Hegel does introduce the notion of the concrete universal to counter the prejudice that the universal must always only be abstract, concrete universals (such as “human”) can be instantiated in any number of different individuals and so do not the incarnation’s scandal of particularity.
[6] The other verb in most English translations, “dwelt” in the ESV, translates the noun eskenosen, “booths” or “tabernacles”
[7] Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For (London: Verso, 2001) 96.
[8] Though these “natural processes” are also themselves, of course, sustained second by second by God.
[9] O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order 82-3.
[10] This also helps us to see why O’Donovan, perhaps surprisingly, associates Christ’s particularity with his divine nature, and his universality with his human nature (see Resurrection and Moral Order 143-4). The divine is the locus of the unique, the irreplaceable, the particular, and the human is the locus of the universal, the representative, the relative: “As the Lord of time [Christ] confers unique significance on each moment, fashioning time into history; as a participant in time he stands in relation to other moments in time as they stand in relation to each other and to his moment” (Resurrection and Moral Order 144). What O’Donovan shows us here is, crucially, why the incarnation of Christ is not merely one instance of the instantiation of the representation of a universal in a particular, but the unique instance of “the coming within universal order of that which belongs outside it, the one divine Word which gave it its origin and which pronounces its judgment” (Resurrection and Moral Order 144).
[11] Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite 133.
[12] O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order 31.
[13] William Temple, Nature Man and God (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1934) 478.
[14] Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) 141.
