Godhead And The Nothing

An eminent theologian argues that nothingness is necessary in order to fully actualize the Godhead.

Eminent theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer breaks new ground by exploring the ultimate transfiguration of the Godhead as a question of the Nihil or nothingness and God. The Nihil is essential to the full actualization of the Godhead in that it fully occurs in both a primordial and an apocalyptic sacrifice of the Godhead. Virtually unexplored by philosophical and theological thinking, the Nihil is luminously enacted in the deepest expressions of the imagination, and most clearly and decisively so in the Christian epic tradition. Altizer looks at the works of philosophers and theologians such as Spinoza, Barth, Hegel, Nietzsche, and epic writers such as Dante, Milton, and Blake to ultimately posit a God that is necessarily a dichotomous God.

Though trinitarian theology has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in the last few years, there is a lamentable lacuna in much of this study, a gap between intellectual rigor and concrete experience. While the contributions of Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas are important to any foundational study of the Trinity, a strictly philosophical and scholastic approach has proved to be both contentious and problematic. As a result, many are left wanting for more meaningful expressions of this profound mystery. Anne Hunt fills this lacuna and offers a fresh avenue of reflection. She explores the distinctly trinitarian insights of a number of Christian mystics 'Hildegard of Bingen and Meister Eckhart, Bonaventure and Elizabeth of the Trinity, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, William of St. Thierry and Julian of Norwich. Readers will find that the mystery of the divine life and love that was so tangibly given and so palpably experienced by these mystics is now offered to us through them. Anne Hunt is faculty dean of theology and philosophy at Australian Catholic University. She is currently vice president of the Australian Catholic Theological Association. She is author of Trinity: Nexus of the Mysteries of Christian Faith, What Are They Saying About the Trinity? and The Trinity and the Paschal Mystery.

This book probes the complex interweaving, across time and cultures, of violence and non-violence from the perspective of the present. One of the first of its kind, it offers a comprehensive examination of the interpenetration of violence and non-violence as much in human nature as in human institutions with reference to different continents, cultures and religions over centuries. It points to the present paradox that even as violence of unprecedented lethality threatens the very survival of humankind, non-violence increasingly appears as an unlikely feasible alternative. The essays presented here cover a wide cultural–temporal spectrum — from Vedic sacrifice, early Jewish–Christian polemics, the Crusades, and medieval Japan to contemporary times. They explore aspects of the violence–non-violence dialectic in a coherent frame of analysis across themes such as war, jihad, death, salvation, religious and philosophical traditions including Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam, mysticism, monism, and Neoplatonism, texts such as Ramayana, Mahabharata and Quran, as well as issues faced by Dalits and ethical imperatives for clinical trials, among others. Offering thematic width and analytical depth to the treatment of the subject, the contributors bring their disciplinary expertise and cultural insights, ranging from the historical to sociological, theological, philosophical and metaphysical, as well as their sensitive erudition to deepening an understanding of a grave issue. The book will be useful to scholars and researchers of history, peace and conflict studies, political science, political thought and cultural studies, as well as those working on issues of violence and non-violence.

A select book list appears quarterly.

Most Christian readers today have been taught by Church theologians of many different creeds that one must have faith in Christ above everything else. Meister Eckhart and C.G. Jung taught us to have trust in ourselves, in our own inner images of God, or the Self first. Eckhart was a man of the earth who came after Christ. By birth of the Holy Spirit in humanity, Herrmann means in this book the birth of the Self in Eckhart and Jung and also in you, the reader. We are all after Christs and are therefore incarnating the Holy Spirit through our callings to individuate from the Imprinter, which is beyond God, not the traditional God of theology. One of the good things that comes with being a postmodern Jungian analyst, and not a member of the Catholic Church as an institution, is the freedom and liberty granted to spiritually democratic people who can speak their own truths from conscience. Herrmann’s book adds something new and significant to the gendered language in theology: God is beyond gender. The book remains true to what Eckhart said about God and Sophia, or Wisdom; for as everyone knows today who has made a deep reading of the Master’s works, he was in essence talking about men and women, about all people. God could be a she or an it in postmodernity. In fact, for Eckhart and Jung, the origin of God is the feminine Godhead, or primal Ground of all metaphysical and empirical being. Both theologically and psychologically speaking, the Self, or Holy Spirit is essentially trans-dual, above all duality of male or female. For Eckhart and Jung, the vocation of the Self includes the archetypal feminine, the soul or anima and animus, above all categories of thought, transcendent of time and above gender.