Godhead and the nothing

180 Pages·2003·0.638 MB·English

by  Altizer, Thomas J. J

Godhead and the Nothing

Godhead
and
the Nothing
Thomas J. J. Altizer
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2003 State University of New York
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Altizer, Thomas J. J.
Godhead and the nothing / Thomas J. J. Altizer
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-5795-8 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-5796-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Death of God theology. 2. Nihilism—Religious aspects—Christianity.
I. Title.
BT83.5 .A427 2003
230—dc21 2002036481
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Lissa McCullough

Contents
Preface ix
Chapter One The Name of God 1
Chapter Two Primordial Sacrifice 15
Chapter Three Primordial Evil 31
Chapter Four Evil and Nothingness 47
Chapter Five Evil and the Godhead 65
Chapter Six The Genesis of Evil 79
Chapter Seven The Transfiguration of Evil 95
Chapter Eight The Self-Saving of God 111
Chapter Nine The Absolute Abyss 127
Chapter Ten The Body of Abyss 143
Index 159
vii

PREFACE
While this book is in genuine continuity with my theological work over the
past forty years, it attempts to open new vistas, and most particularly does so
to make possible a full theological thinking about an actual absolute nothing-
ness, one which our history has known as the Nihil, and one which has never
been fully entered by theological thinking. Our new era, a new postmodern
world, can be known as an era of nihilism, certainly nihilism is more pow-
erful now than ever previously, and yet we have no real theological under-
standing of nihilism, and this despite the fact that the Nihil or the Nothing has
been a fundamental theological category for theologians as diverse as Barth
and Tillich. Absolute nothingness is an ultimate ground of a purely apophatic
mysticism, and it is even more primal in Mahayana Buddhism, just as it has
been resurrected in the deepest expressions of a uniquely modern imagina-
tion. Nietzsche is the only Western thinker who has fully thought an absolute
nothingness, although that nothingness is a deep even if elusive ground of
Hegelian thinking, and of all of the fullest expressions of modern dialectical
thinking and vision. Genuine or full dialectical vision and thinking finally
realizes a coincidentia oppositorum between its opposite poles. This is true
in both ancient and modern dialectical movements. While often attempted in
modern dialectical theology, this goal has not yet been achieved, but it is a
goal which can be understood as our most challenging contemporary theo-
logical project.
My theological thinking has continually been engaged in this project,
but only in this book is that thinking fully focused upon the Nothing, and
above all upon the primal or ultimate relationship between the Nothing and
the Godhead itself. Heidegger’s Being and Time is deeply grounded in the
Nothing, although here the Nothing as such is not unveiled. In his 1929 essay,
“What is Metaphysics?,” he could affirm that the Nothing originally belongs
to Being, but this is a primal motif which he was unable or unwilling fully
or actually to develop. A comparable lacuna occurs in Barth and Tillich, just
as it does in the ancient world in Augustine himself. Indeed, Augustine is that
thinker who discovered an actual nothingness, a nothingness which he could
know as being incarnate in sin. But ontologically Augustine could only know
evil as a privation of Being, therefore he could not know evil as an actual
ix