Altizer's Theology as the Thinking of Passion Itself

2023

Thomas J.J. Altizer's (1924-2018) death-of-God theology incorporates concepts from Nicholas of Cusa's (1401-64) theological-mystical thinking, despite their different religious and cultural contexts separating them by over 450 years. Due to the use of a certain logic, they arrive at a world-affirming and immanent theological framework. Inspired by Cusa, Altizer radicalises these to fit the contemporary radical immanent worldview in which religions and religious individuals struggle to find their place. This paper examines whether Altizer's use of Cusanian thought is correct and reflects the coincidence of opposites by analyzing Antonino Drago's (1938-) work and mathematical logic (§2). It concludes that Altizerian logic, which employs non-classical logic and double-negation without affirmation like Cusanian logic, is more closely associated with Hegelian dialectics (§3). This difference is due to Cusa's inconsistent use of non-classical logic and occasional use of paraconsistent logic. Altizer uses the non-classical logic and dialectics consistently, and by radicalising them, creates a 'religious naturalism' that helps declining religions and searching religious individuals find God in the depths and wonderous workings of the natural world.

Ultimate Reality and Meaning, 1978

Comment on Eric C. Meyer's article on Thomas J. J. Altizer No writer of our time has been more passionately or creatively obsessed with the question of ultimate reality and meaning than has Thomas Altizer. No scholar has dealt more carefully with the total corpus of his work than has Eric Meyer. Meyer has traced the development of Altizer's vision of ultimate reality with precision and sympathetic insight. His essay is a valuable and important one. Meyer's criticisms are legitimate. It is true that Altizer satisfies neither most Christians nor most atheists. He does not in a scholarly way resolve the issues between Hegel and Nietzsche. He is not on the whole a reliable source for historical information on the authors he treats. His position embodies numerous traditional and original heresies when judged by any sort of static norms of orthodoxy. In spite of these failures in Altizer's work Meyer appreciates his originality and is impressed by his program. The attention Meyer has lavished on Altizer's work indicates that this appreciation is genuine, but the exposition and critique he offers do not fully explain the fascination that Altizer has exercised on either Meyer or me. If Altizer is to be more deeply understood, and if his contribution to reflection on ultimate reality is to be grasped, another level of evaluation is also needed. In addition to judging his work by external and conventional norms, one should consider Altizer's own norms. One can then both question the validity of those norms and ask how well Altizer's work measures up to his own standards. Altizer's norms are integrally related to his vision of ultimate reality. That reality is best understood as Geist in the Hegelian sense. The locus of sacred and profane, God, man, and nature, subject and object, the primordial and the eschatological are all within Geist. Geist is a dialectically self-unfolding reality. This movement is not to be traced, as a sociologist might suppose, by statistical samples ofa cross-section of people. On the contrary, its movement is to be found at the cutting edge of thought, imagination, and creativity. Opinions, images, and actions that do not belong to that cutting edge are unimportant or irrelevant. Since most Christian theology has separated itself from that edge in favor of articulating the views of communities that no longer contribute the decisive thought, images, or creations to our world, church theology is no longer worthy of attention. Ultimate reality is revealed elsewhere. The modern Christian theologian's task is to discern this reality, share in it, and claim it for Christ in spite of its otherness to all that is known as Christ in contemporary churches. Given this understanding of reality and of the theologian's task, Altizer's

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 9, no. 3 (fall 2008): 97–109, 2008

xviii + 416 pp. ISBN 0226791696 hese recent titles by a few seasoned cultural critics analyzing what the death of God continues to mean for theology, religion, faith, culture, and life in general, are significant for the common ground they share and for the criticisms that crisscross between them, sometimes identifying each other by name. In his latest book, After God, Mark C. Taylor alludes to a "looming disaster" and "peril" before which "it is difficult not to despair," as he postulates that the most pressing dangers we currently face result from the conflict of competing absolutisms that divide the world between oppositions that can never be mediated. i Nothing is more dangerous, in his view, than the growing devotion to dualistic either/or ideologies in a neither/nor world (AG, 349). Thomas J. J. Altizer's most recent book, a theological memoir titled Living the Death of God, understands the deepest challenge of our time as a fathoming of the depths of darkness enveloping us in the form of nihilism, a nihilism brought on by the death of God and the end of our historical world. ii As compared with Taylor, Altizer pursues a more intimate and interior struggle-his effort is to generate a light of active understanding in the darkness, a movement of life that would transfigure the satanic subjection that is the apocalypse of our world into an actively sustainable Ereignis, to borrow Heidegger's term. iii

2023

In the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture, a radical immanent worldview took hold of (post)modern consciousness, making it difficult for religions to find their place. Between the 1970s and 1990s, Thomas J.J. Altizer’s (1927-2018) death-of-God theology and David J. Bohm’s (1917-92) New-Age science developed radical immanent visions of God or ultimate reality. These visions can still benefit religious individuals today. This master thesis analyses them through Schellenberg’s definition and Wildman’s models of ultimacy, presenting Altizer’s ‘dialectical movement’ (original ultimacy → apocalypse → ultimate actuality) and Bohm’s ‘holomovement’ (explicate ← implicate ← superimplicate order) as ultimate reality. The concluding comparison places both movements in the ‘religious naturalism’ model of ultimacy M∨A U2-C2, highlighting their mutual elements.

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019

Some say Thomas J. J. Altizer is dead, others say his theology is a dead end. I am not so sure of either. I heard his heart stopped beating but I still hear the repetitions of his inverted gospel all around. I hear it calling from below, from the earth, the melting ice, the overheated lands, the stones crying out an inverted gospel in a repetitious mania. God is dead, God is grounded, wounded, dying with us, incarnated, marinated in the consequences of human incapability, even evil. A marinated, incarnated Christ/Satan-the two have become inseparable in an actual coincidentia oppositorum. The only resurrection possible, though barely plausible, is one of a total presence, of absolute truth, revealing the abysmal facts of the current situation. A resurrection inseparable from life itself, from the possibility of life in actual accordance with the realities of creation. Not a life lived on a loan from a make-believe world of ideas where theoretical calculations legitimate use of that which is not ours. Not a life lived on resources we did not create ourselves, resources that our make-believe world pretends are endless and ever at the whim of human disposal. Still, Altizer, the academic bad guy, the metaphysical modernist, the nutty, repetitive preacher who, in our first encounter, told me all about his actual meeting with Satan-is he an apt thinker for the current planetary crisis? This article argues he could be. By relating Altizer to Gilles Deleuze I am not arguing that Altizer is inspired by and in that sense belongs to a vitalist or hermetic thought tradition but I am arguing that when read through a Deleuzian lens, material aspects of his metaphysics stand forth, as does the contemporary relevance of the peculiar style through which his metaphysics materializes.

Albany: SUNY Press, 2012

In The Call to Radical Theology, Thomas J. J. Altizer meditates on the nature of radical theology and calls readers to undertake the vocation of radical theology as a way of living a fully examined life. In fourteen essays, he explores how the death of God in modernity and the dissolution of divine authority have freed theology to become a mode of ultimate reflection and creative inquiry no longer bound by church sanction or doctrinal strictures.

“Let God Die.” Rev. of Godhead and the Nothing, by Thomas J.J. Altizer. Stirrings Still: The International Journal of Existential Literature1.1 (2004): 74-82.

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019

Essay #8 of “Thomas J. J. Altizer & Radical Theology,” special issue of Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 19, no. 1 (Winter 2019), guest edited by Lissa McCullough.

2011

In these discussions between Mircea Eliade and Thomas Altizer we can recognise two important things: there are some points of contact between these two thinkers and some differences. The problem lies in determining whether or not these points of contact are simply two different ways of understanding the same concepts. On the one hand,“Death of God” theology was in vogue in the United States in the 1960s, but today has few adherents. However, a new evaluation of this theological movement is necessary because we need to understand its possible impact on the renewal of Christianity. On the other hand, Eliade was considered an important scholar in the field of history of religions. In our time, many critics contest his influence in this field and criticize him for the fact that he relativizes Christianity. This new interpretation of both scholars was an opportunity to link the research in the theology with that in the history of religions, an important motive for our time. In ecumenical discussions, the link between research in both these fields is so important. The concept of coincidentia oppositorum, the understanding of the sacrality of our time, in different religions, and the new language for discussing with people of different faiths are the main preoccupations of the ecumenical movement.

Thinking through the Death of God: A Critical Companion to Thomas J. J. Altizer, ed. Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004, vii-xi.

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019

As part of a special issue on the radical theology of Thomas J. J. Altizer, edited by Lissa McCullough (https://jcrt.org/archives/19.1/), this essay explores the poetics of thinking in reading Altizer's _The Self-Embodiment of God_ (1977) as a key to his most meditative theology, in particular as an extension of the visionary poiesis of Blake's Illuminated Prophecy "Jerusalem." Poetics here implies a phenomenology of revelatory reading.

Religious Studies Review, 2008

The Incarnate Word Journal, 2011

In this book, Gondreau deals with Thomas’ theology of the human passions of Christ. It surely marks a major contribution in the field of dogmatic theology, as well as in psychology, since Jesus attains the essence of what it means to be a true human being in a way unlike any other human individual. One has to also note that this is the first time that Thomas’ treatise on the passions of Christ is examined, a truly new work.

Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2019