evhartogh writes:

Reviewed by Evelyn Hartogh

The translators of this book take pains to explain the title Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity. As with much contemporary French-or Continental as it is became more recently referred to-Philosophy, the creation of new words and word play itself is at the central core of Jean-Luc Nancy's thesis that dis-enclosure is a matter of opening an enclosed space. The enclosed space in this case is the conceptual framework that constructs Christian thought around a monotheistic God. Nancy's project, he asserts, is not the destruction of Christianity, or a switch to atheism, and he is neither attacking nor defending its principles. Instead Nancy simply unravels and reveals how Christian thought is no longer making sense to the modern world. Each chapter of this book examines the influence of the Bible in creating and sustaining our modern culture and society, while, at the same time, demonstrating how humanism has moved beyond and surpassed these founding ideals. The very principles that underpin Christianity, in particular their concept of God, and the myth of creation and destruction, have led to Christianity creating its own obsolescence.

The initial enclosure that Nancy discusses is the way in which the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic God is hypothesised as the unknown and the unknowable.  By defining God as the undefinable, and making finite in God the idea of the infinite unknown, Christianity creates an unsustainable paradox.  Simply because this idea of God cannot be understood, or known by humans, then it is impossible to enclose the unknown in a category called God.  Neither it is possible to enclose the world itself into the categories of our known world and the unknown world of God.  Our understanding of the universe has expanded since the writing of the Bible and therefore the boundaries of the known and unknown have shifted so dramatically that the unknown is now regarded as the not ‘yet’ known.

 In Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity Nancy sees the essential problem with defining God—as the great unknown and unknowable—is that just naming something does not define and completely enclose it.  There will always be something outside any closed category, and there will always be an opening to an enclosure because the state of being a closed term is temporary and implies the states of being prior to the enclosure and after the enclosure.  If the known shifts, so must the unknown.  To define and limit and enclose the unknown is in principle an impossible endeavour.

 The ongoing wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, to name but a few, are cited as evidence of the futility of a monotheistic religion that has fractured from within and is fighting amongst itself.  The absurdity of Jews, Christians and Muslims killing each other in the name of the same God is artfully examined by Nancy.  The very existence of these wars, this violence and this hatred between religions suggests all the participants have a complete lack of any of the principles of these religions.  Any war that is based on both parties having a belief of ‘God on one’s side’ is a war that, by its very foundation, destabilises the very ‘one’ God worshipped by the warring parties.  War today is as based in economic principles as it ever was, and the acquisition of wealth and power remains the guiding light, while the concept of God acts as a shorthand smokescreen.

 The paradoxes at the centre of belief, prayer and the creation and destruction myths are brilliantly dissected by Nancy.  Belief being a principle of accepting an idea without any evidence is integrally fantastical.  Nancy suggests that belief itself is simply accepting anything that cannot be proven, shown, demonstrated or tested.  Belief again relates to the concept of the unknowable, because to believe in anything requires believing also in nothing.  The unknown is at once something that exists and something that lacks existence and knowledge.  Things that are found are not lost but exist outside of our experience and knowledge.  If belief and faith can be lost, this implies they have an existence outside of us.  Lack of faith, Nancy suggests, is not as simple as an adoption of nihilism, since even a belief in nothing implies that something unknown still exists.

Communication with the unknown occurs through prayer.  Prayers are wishes and requests to the concept of God.  However, the principle of prayer itself is that it will be heard but may not be answered.  Phrases like “God willing”, “if it please God”, “Let go and trust God”, and others are common to all three strands of monotheism.  Jews, Christians and Muslims all pray to God that hears but does not necessarily obey.   The problem and pointlessness of prayer is that it is also an advocating of lack of responsibility for one’s life.  Instead of taking steps to create the life one wishes to have, prayer offers the chance of putting one’s desires outside oneself, into the will of the God one believes in.  Prayer sends out the inner desires and puts outside the self the decisions of one’s life’s direction.  In many ways, prayer itself demonstrates a giving up, a despair, a nihilism, a powerlessness, yet not a humility.  Prayer can be seen as an arrogance and a laziness, and a handing over to the outside of the self the responsibility for the manifestation of one’s desires.  The idea of God acts as the ultimate excuse because any circumstance can be explained by God’s will, God’s desire, and God’s intervention.  Using the concept of God as an excuse for disavowing participation or responsibility in ones’ life means that humans are able to deny any thought in regard to the operation of the world.  Rather than looking at the reality of the world, God offers the fantasy of humans being guided by an unseen and unknowable force, and this encourages ignorance and passivity.  Leaving matters up to God is only a way of saying that one will do nothing.

The scope of human knowledge has expanded immensely in the last few centuries.  Even the very concept we have today of the future shows a conceptual shift that Christianity cannot possibly accommodate in its limited mythology of the creation and destruction of the world.  The very absurdity of the Christian creation myth and its imposition on a moment in human history is regarded as almost laughable by Nancy.  Looking at the thousands of years of human history and religious myth as a whole, the Christian myth is shown to have been influential but not all conquering.  It is a myth that holds the apocalypse as the inevitable end that exists simply as another way of confining and limiting history.  Creation and destruction myths offer a beginning and end that did not exist before these (unprovable, untestable, unexaminable) myths were promoted as an explanation to calm the terror of the unknown.

While reading Nancy’s book I could not help thinking about the concepts in modern physics of dark energy and dark matter.  A recent concept in astrophysics, and among cosmologists, dark energy and dark matter are the terms used to explain all the things that they cannot see or find.  The idea behind the existence of dark matter and dark energy is that these are things that we humans do not currently have the tools to see.  What makes dark energy and dark matter an unknown that differs from the unknown God is that these dark ideas of physics are that which cannot be ‘yet’ examined.  God is defined by something that never can be examined, proved, or tested.  The concept of God is limited by this refusal to accept any possibility of a shift in human abilities.  Science acknowledges that the universe not only holds things we cannot yet know but also the existence of tools we do not yet know.  Christian thought denies the possibility of acquiring any new knowledge or tools by which to understand their concept of God.  If we can never know God, then the end of Christianity, Nancy argues, has been encoded in its conceptual basis.

Nancy’s argument that Christianity no longer limits our view of the world is based in an examination of the reality of human endeavour.  Humans are not led by God but by their own desires, and even the interpretation of Biblical verses, and verses from the Koran are in a constant state of flux.  The shifts within the Churches do not signify a belief in God adapting to modern times but instead show the Churches’ inability to make sense of the world anymore.  The myths of Christianity itself—such as the virgin birth, the resurrection, creation, destruction, the tree of knowledge, the snake and many more—were already well established in many other religious faiths prior to the emergence of Christianity.  Christianity did not offer anything new and it still doesn’t.

A Jehovah’s Witness at my door one day said Christianity allowed her to stop asking questions anymore, it offered her a ‘full stop’ as it were, she did not have to keep thinking or worrying about the world around her and was told the answers to everything.  I find her statement echoed in Nancy’s arguments that Christianity encloses and limits the universe, takes away personal responsibility, and denies us the ability to imagine a new existing world and invent new ways of looking at it.

Dis-Enclosure: the Deconstruction of Christianity
(2007)

by Jean-Luc Nancy, (translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith)
Fordham Press
ISBN: 9780823228362
200pp US$20.00

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