If you’re interested in reading the book for yourself, it’s available on AAAARG [which all TVA readers should be involved in, of course].

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Summary: Bataille begins his theory of religion, surprisingly enough, with the question of how we humans can conceive of the “immanence” of the animal. These are the distinctions Bataille makes between this immanence and the perceiving of a human: the animal does not subordinate its objects to itself, the animal does not experience the duration of its object, and the animal cannot regard itself as an object. All of these restrictions have to do with the animal’s inability to transcend its object — hence, immanence. Bataille equates transcendence with self-consciousness; so another way to describe the immanence of animals is to say that they perceive without consciousness.

The consequence of this immanence, he imagines, is something half-way between our human consciousness and a world without consciousness. The latter can be glimpsed in the “meaningless” layers of nature uncovered by the hard sciences, in the bounding of atoms and gurgling of chemical processes; but animal immanence dazzles and eludes the eye of the mind. The mystery of it prompts what Bataille calls The Poetic Fallacy of Animality — because we simply cannot imagine perception without consciousness, so “the correct way to speak of it can overtly only be poetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable.” But because such poetry does not penetrate what it addresses but simply puts a vague “fulguration” of words, a halo around the emptiness of incomprehension, Bataille finally insists that the only clear (ie., non-poetic) description he can offer of animal immanence is that animals are like “water in water.” This is an important and recurring phrase.

(Incidentally, he does offer us, by way of disavowing its use, the following poetic description of animal perception: “There was no vision, there was nothing — nothing but an empty intoxication limited by terror, suffering, and death, which gave it a kind of thickness…”)

Commentary: There isn’t much here, yet, that seems to point toward religion or a theory of religion, except the poetic intensity of Bataille’s language. On that note, I admire his characterization of poetry as that which slips “toward the unknowable.” It is this aspect of his style — that it slipped toward the unknowable — that repelled his contemporaries like Sartre, who avoided him because of his “mysticism,” and it is also (I’ll bet) what attracted posterity, like Lacan, Foucault, Derrida.

Regarding his description of animal immanence, an obvious question is this: why does he distinguish the animal from the human? Aren’t humans in fact animals?

I think this question — though it is in some ways a wrong one — gets at the path that will eventually lead Bataille from animal immanence to religion: humans are animals, yet the definition of animality must be a definition in contrast to human consciousness. In some ways, the performance of this definition is a kind objectifying and sacrificing of the animality in humans — though for the purpose, as will become clear in later posts, of regaining intimacy — which ceremonially displays the anguish of the tension in us which he will argue leads us to religion. He concludes the introduction to the book with these words: “The basic paradox of this ‘theory of religion,’ [...] brings a powerlessness to light, no doubt, but the cry of this powerlessness is a prelude to deepest silence.”

At any rate, I think it is important to the argument of the rest of the book for the reader to perform his thought experiment with him, to attempt to conceive of perception without consciousness, to fail but feel the “sticky” temptation of poetry.

Everyone knows the type of theological criticism that consists in finding “Christ figures.” A high-school aged friend of mine uses this kind of theological criticism to convince his parents to let him go to R-rated movies. All he’s got to do is find an appropriate Christ figure in the story somewhere. If someone dies for someone else (or even just suffers a bit for ‘em), or really if anyone vaguely protagonistic dies at all, or better yet appears to die and then shows up later — we have a Christ figure! I for one am just a bit sick of Christ figures. Not because I deny the human need for saviors and examples but because I feel there is more to be said about films than whether this or that character is a Christ figure — though part of what I will propose involves a method extending the methodology behind this kind of thematic comparison.

Another common kind of theological criticism involves noting all Christian paraphanelia and “symbolism.” Did you notice the pigeons (which are kind of like doves) around the church in Mary Poppins? Doesn’t Tatooine remind you of Galilee (from a review in Christianity Today, which combined both this stunning insight and the revolutionary idea that maybe Luke Skywalker is a Christ-figure). When Ricky Bobby runs around in his underwear slapping imaginary flames, were you reminded of Christ’s nakedness and agony on the cross? OK, strike the last example. You know what I’m talking about.

Finally, a particularly objectionable kind of theological criticism attempts to discover the “underlying worldview” of a film — which would be a good insight, if such critiquers could only recognize that narrative is prior to the theoretical system they take “worldview” to mean. That’s one of the reasons Ross Douthat’s recent critique of Avatar was so lame. For him, the real meaning of Avatar was that it was an exposition of Cameron’s “Hollywood pantheism.” It seemed like a review based on previews rather than on an actual watching of the film. (Query: did Douthat in fact see the film? Or did he just watch previews and read a wikipedia summary? Show us the ticket! This is at least as important as Obama’s birth certificate.) Everything is oh-so-cleverly squared away according to a pre-existing typology of religious perspectives, and the pigeon-holed objects can then be deployed polemically as ammunition in the “culture war.” Surely theologians have better things to do.

If I were to speculate on which kind of common theological criticism is most valuable, I would probably go with Christ-figure-hunting. This kind of comparison at least implies the belief that theology can speak to popular narratives, because it originally has to do with a narrative itself. It seems to me that what is “theological” about stories is the way they function in faith and then, accordingly, their content; consequently, these two aspects of stories are what theologians as theologians can most directly talk about. Let me flesh this out with some help from Hauerwas and Bruegemann.

Hauerwas’s essay, “A Story Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down,” involves one of his most entertaining arguments for the centrality of narrative to moral and political life. (By the way, he’s talking about the book Watership Down rather than the movie; but I think his example is still applicable because theological criticism of films is usually theological criticism of stories.) He argues that the differing rabbit societies involved in the story — Sandleford, an unnamed warren, Efrafa, and Watership Down — are distinguished and formed by their approach to the stories they tell of El-ahrairah, the first rabbit. Watership Down emerges as the best, and most successful, community because it successfully appropriates the traditional stories of El-ahrairah, using them in a way open to innovation yet definitive for its experience of the world. Ultimately, Hauerwas’s reflections use Watership Down as an excuse to discuss his theories about the formative nature of stories. The theological criticism employed tests the narrative of Watership Down within the story-framework he has learned to see from his acquaintance with Christian theology.

I think this essay is a good example of the first aspect of good theological criticism — criticism which takes the life-defining dynamics that the practice of theology has brought to their attention in order to see similar dynamics at work in the stories it examines.

Bruegemann’s unique approach to Old Testament theology is relevant in a different way. Certainly it doesn’t function as an example of theological criticism of films, but what it does do is offer a largely expanded view of what theological criticism could deal with in its second aspect.

If we take it to be true that besides examining the dynamics of story-shaped worlds, theologians are also uniquely fitted to compare stories because their original subject is itself a story, then suddenly Christ-figure-hunting comes into perspective. Essentially this overly employed comparison seeks to take one (albeit central) aspect of the Christian mythology and argue that this aspect is borrowed, stolen, or unwittingly employed in a popular story. The ensuing critique — insofar as it manages to be a critique rather than a teenage excuse to see an otherwise forbidden movie, or a disgusting attempt to allegorize a film such that one can experience it “sanctifyingly” or some such rot — is essentially a comparison of stories. This practice could be hugely expanded in two important ways.

First, why does theological criticism have to seek only to “find Christian themes,” essentially to baptize whatever elements of popular life the critiquer in question wants to consume? The motivation behind such baptisms are dubious at best. Are Christians afraid that unless they wrench a story out of its own context to make it a lesson that could have come from their own tradition they will be corrupting themselves? Perhaps they are not confident or committed enough to the Christian story to face the possibility of competing stories. At any rate, I would argue for more legitimate, careful, and detailed comparison, and not just the identification of Christ figures for general baptismal purposes.

Second — and here Bruegemann comes in — is the Christ event the only aspect of the Christian story worth comparing? One of Bruegemann’s central (and most valuable) purposes in his Old Testament Theology, is to search out what kind of rhetorical assertions Israel makes at various times about Yahweh. In the excellent historical preface to this work, he examines the arguments of those who would rescue the Old Testament as the Jewish Bible, those who would deconstruct the text with regard to its dealing with women, those who would understand the text against the conservative and power-maintaining tradition as descriptive of a liberating God, etc. He doesn’t reject the insight of any of these perspectives, thereby creating an extraordinarily multi-faceted and deep account of Israel’s witness regarding Yahweh. According to Bruegemann, the “grammar” of this witness is characterized by “strong verbs dominated by the subject of the verbs who is an active agent [Yahweh], effecting changes in various direct object” — in other words, Israel witnesses in stories about what she claims that God has done. What Bruegemann — and serious theology in general — can contribute to theological criticism of films is the fact that the stories which define the Christian tradition have many more potential points of comparison than Christ figures.

How about the liberation? How about commandment, which provides a new way of life in the aftermath of liberation? ( — many contemporary films would fall short in this comparison, tending to focus on a plot of liberation in some form or other without giving sufficient indication of the supplanting new life, new creation, post-liberation order.) How about chaos and order, as witnessed to in the Christian tradition by Creation? I could go on, but you get my point. There are many more figures, aspects, and major plot moves to the Christian story than those which are typically utilized in theological criticism.

And so this is my provisional conclusion regarding the task of theological criticism of films: it needs to understand itself as analysis of the world-forming dynamics of story as the theologian has been educated in these dynamics by the study of theology, and it needs to engage itself comparing a much fuller view of the stories with which Christian theology has to do to a much more attentive view of the stories of the films it critiques.

• Does the (RC) church dogma that revelation closed with the death of the last Apostle necessitate a conception of theology in which all that can be said by theologians is already explained in that closed revelation, requiring only translation for each generation? (The Protestant equivalent of this dogma, I suppose, would be the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture.) Rahner’s answer: “What does this proposition mean? It would be false to interpret it as meaning more or less that when the last Apostle died there was left a fixed summary of strictly drafted propositions like a legal code with its clearly defined paragraphs, a sort of definitive catechism, which, while itself remaining fixed, was going to be forever expounded, explained, and commented upon. An idea like this would do justice neither to the mode of being proper to intellectual knowledge nor to the fullness of life of divine faith and its content.”
• This last quotation summarizes Rahner’s position in this essay on (what I call) the difference between static and dynamic theology. For him, a static theology first denies the scientific nature of theology — “the mode of being proper to intellectual knowledge” — and second does not live up to the “plenitude” — the “fullness of life of divine faith” — of its object. Rahner argues that, instead, revelation has “closed” to the extent that the “continuous Happening of saving history has now reached its never to be surpassed climax in Jesus Christ: God himself has definitively given himself to the world.” For Rahner, the history of revelation is dialogic, involving God’s initiation and man’s response — in Christ God’s revelatory reaction to man’s general response of rejection was permanently defined as one of redeeming grace. This permanent definition of God’s continuing revelation, for Rahner, is the sense in which revelation is “closed.” He proceeds to develop a complex and interesting theory of the Holy Spirit’s role in the development of dogma.

I find much to admire in Rahner’s observations. Three highlights that I’d like to appropriate into my own distinction between static and dynamic theology: (1. the doctrine of revelation’s closure does not preclude a high degree of revelatory significance to the development of dogma; (2. the theologian’s task, consequently, is not merely one of translation and re-presentation, or even of clarification and explication, but of renewing and progressing investigation into the plenitude of the fullness of God’s revelation in Christ. Essentially, I assert that just as God defies predicatory confinement, God’s revelation defies complete conceptual comprehension — not just by remaining “bigger than our best attempt” but by remaining “deeper than our last attempt”; (3. every definition of theology absolutely requires some description of the Holy Spirit’s role in the development of dogma, both to live up to the demands of theology’s object and in order to check the theologian’s natural tendency to consider his thinking the fullest conceptual response to God’s revelation to date.

Second, a theologian must be able to say why he is not a philosopher, a historian, a psychologist, or an anthropologist. If he discovers that he cannot distinguish between these roles, then he should probably stop calling himself a theologian and leave the name for those who believe in a separate discipline of theology.

Finally, each theologian must define his discipline because the process of definition is ongoing. Claims about how theologians should work constantly arise—and they should be considered rather than merely countered. For example, one of the challenges for 20th century theologians was to re-examine the sources of theology when the Bible came to perceived as plural in its perspectives and content. Similarly, the rising awareness of the need for liberation of many oppressed groups in contemporary society—racial groups, sexual groups, economic groups—have searingly indicted theologians who do not attend to the possibilities for oppression in their own discourse.

Can theology proceed as a fully functioning, progressing discipline, fully aware of its historical context and also of its relationship to other disciplines? To know the answer to this jeopardizing question, theologians must answer the more basic question—what is theology?