Patrick Pritchett
Desiring Logos: The Holy Atheism of Fanny Howe or, Zero Dark Gnostic
What does it mean to be a holy atheist? Is it the same thing as being a post-metaphysical poet? One who writes to a god after the death of God? And can either of these categories answer to the idea of a new gnostic poetry? To explore this question I want to look at the poetry of Fanny Howe.
Despite an extraordinarily prolific output comprised, at last count, of 15 books of poetry, 11 novels, and three essay collections, her work is far less well known than it deserves to be. Though praised by her peers, Howe’s received scant critical attention. One reason for this, I’d venture, is her subject matter: the lives of the spirit, as the title of one of her books has it. Romana Huk’s terrific 2009 essay on The Wedding Dress does a lot to redress this deficiency. According to Huk, the challenge Howe’s work presents to readers of experimental poetry is that of a richly informed poetic theology that draws on “devastatingly secularized theories about language” (SL 658). In what follows here I will offer an all too-brief foray into the ways such theories are mapped onto gnostic modalities in Fanny Howe’s work, modalities that encompass both the a-theistic and the ana-theistic. Howe’s gnostic, or heretical, faith, announces itself as a commitment to an open-ended process of discovery, a refusal of closure, and a willingness to undergo, or suffer, estrangement and difference for the sake of a spiritual thirst for justice that may be unquenchable. Such a knowing is not arrived at through reason, but by experience; an experience of a gnostic logos with the poem as its vehicle of transmission.
To ask how logos became gnostic is to trace how the alien god of the ancient Gnostics has migrated into the alien word of postmodern poetics. Howe’s poetry works to build a home in our un-homed-ness as Adorno might put it. How to dwell in uncanniness. The alien god of the Gnostics is not the evil demiurge who imprisoned the soul in matter, but the thought that, as Derrida writes, “welcomes alterity into logos” (qtd. in Kearney, Anatheism). For Hans Jonas, who put modern gnosis on the map, gnosis is “concerned with the secrets of salvation; knowledge is not just theoretical information about things but is itself … charged with performing a function in the bringing about of salvation” (GR 36). The sage of New Haven Harold Bloom maintains that gnosis is “not rational knowledge but like poetic knowledge … [it] alters both knower and known without blending them into a unity” (A 4-5). Bloom is clear that gnosis is not to be confused with clarity. It is uncanny, enigmatic. “It emphasizes that transition is more real than being” (A 13). But Bloom’s vision of gnosis, rendered with more force than persuasion through his readings of Emerson, Crane, and Stevens is finally little more than an expression of a desire for poetic mastery, a kind of patralogical will to the Oversoul, rather than a surrender to the mystery of being one finds in say Simone Weil, who is an important figure for Howe. Finally, Stef Aupers reminds us that: “Epistemologically, gnostic knowledge does not arise from a reality ‘out there’… it instead relies on an ‘inner source’—on personal experience, imagination, or intuition” (RBC 688-89). What’s central to all three of these views is the privileged role granted to poetic imagination, which can bring about a radical new cognition not predicated on empirical methodologies, but arrived at by epistemological disruption, a forcible intrusion from within – a gnosis of embodied logos. This is one way to understand gnostic poetics today and it is how we need to read it in Howe’s urgent and harrowing work.
Howe’s own comments on ancient Gnosticism are instructive. In her essay “Contemporary Logos,” she revisits the argument between the Gnostic Marcion and the Platonist Philo. Marcion rejected Yahweh as a “false representation of the disappeared God,” writes Howe, looking instead to the serpent of Eden, with its promise of knowledge, as the exiled alien God, forever other and outside (WD 74). Logos may be our source, she says, but in our finitude we are alienated from it, a situation she goes on to link to the predicament shared by many of Samuel Beckett’s characters. Howe’s poem, “The Source,” from her 2003 collection, Gone, speaks to the estrangement of the logos, but rather than resigning to estrangement she finds in it a form of welcome or hospitality.
The source
I thought was Arctic
the good Platonic
Up the pole
was soaked film
an electric elevation
onto a fishy platform
and waves on two sides greenly welcoming
The sunwater poured on holy atheism
It was light that powered out
my ego or my heart
before ending with a letter (G 46).
In this enigmatic yet inviting poem, Howe seems to be rethinking her relationship to Logos as Source. Once thought of as Arctic, Platonic – half-rhymed words that provide a sense of a higher reality’s remoteness, sealed off by hierarchical tiers – the divine now becomes electric, fishy, lit by sunwater – in a word, earthy. “The Source” traces the signature move in Howe’s work: a turn from the transcendent to the immanent. A disavowal of the heavenly and an embracing of the body. A turn away from the thought of a source that powers the heart from outside to the recognition that the poem, after all, ends with a letter, a material sign. “The Source” marks Howe as a gnostic Catholic, abandoned by The Word yet unapologetically devoted to an idea of logos, with a small “l,” not as a stabilizing force, but as a alienated posture from which to re-think and unwork orthodox systems of belief. Her poetry re-articulates the grounds of faith as a radical doubt, an uncertainty about the estranged status of the word, which is no longer to be found radiating from on high, but right here, among the ordinary things of the everyday, abject, impoverished, in crisis. Howe’s willingness to inhabit the house of alienated spirit is a poetic testing of faith not unlike George Oppen’s dedicated testing of the basis of the real. “Doubt,” she writes, “allows God to live” (WD 120). Gnostic poetics is the faith of doubt, the commitment to uncertainty and its confusions.
Howe’s work asks us to consider not only the theological value of heresy – the way it disrupts prevailing orthodoxies and calcified doctrines – but heresy as a force for progressive social change. Her gnosis is a feminist one: rooted in the experience of being a woman it challenges the gender politics that sets the agenda for both things of the spirit and things of the body. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has recently noted: “there are no genderless subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture” (PP 3). Nor are there any in religious culture, either, I might add. So we need to think of Howe’s work as a specifically gendered form of gnosis, along the lines mapped out by both feminist and liberation theologies, which speak to the poor and the disenfranchised, whose work is to reclaim a space for the marginal and the oppressed. Time doesn’t permit me to do anything more than gesture at this, but it’s crucial for understanding how Howe’s poetics of gnostic theology is also a poetics of social justice. For Howe, life’s urgency calls from every moment: “Every experience,” she writes, “that is personal is simultaneously an experience that is supernatural” (WD 19). But this urgency is countered by the realization which she recalls in her memoir, The Winter Sun, that “the prevailing writers (Kerouac, Rexroth, Corso) were all male, leaving the women to shuffle barefoot around masculine territory” (WS 64).
Despite these struggles to find a voice, or because of them, Howe’s poetry attains the simplicity and clarity of fable or fairy tale – charged with a luminous directness whose straightforward diction retains a beguiling air of mystery, a sense that words themselves are potential sites for the miraculous, events in which grace might take form as speech. Laid out in short, clipped, yet lilting lines, and full of slanted end rhymes, they create a contrapuntal music between the declarative and the aphoristic. This is from her serial poem, “Servitude” (1988):
Torn from the language of my childhood
When I was cut to size
And it was done, I leaned down
To where the clay turns soft
Like this I splurged on liturgy
It gave me a migraine to read the word GOD
In water lights, in everything good
Instead I saw stones
Happy Ohs, the vowels and holes
Of planetary silence (V 79).
The splurge on liturgy (typical of Howe’s delicious assonance) results in piercing pain. Such a triumphalist economy of divine expenditure won’t answer to her needs. Only stones and voids and silence can provide the “oh” that is the sign and call of both spiritual distress and the surprise of astonishment and pleasure. “Oh” may be the secret core of gnosis.
This desire to be both distressed and astonished is perhaps most forcefully articulated in Howe’s manifesto, “Bewilderment” (from the 2003 collection of essays The Wedding Dress). Huk has discussed this collection with considerable insight, but I want to touch briefly on it here in order to outline just how radical Howe’s theological investments in atheism really are. As she puts it: “The atheist is no less an inquirer than a believer” (WD 10). What the atheist desires most is a language – a logos – capable of dealing with the vast confusion of experience. She names this confusion bewilderment. “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability … [it] circumnavigates … the empty but ultimate referent” (WD 15, 20). Bewilderment is a radical de-centering, a self-emptying out that exposes the self to the other. It invites in difference, rather than seeking after the identical. Huk comments that bewilderment is about “losing one’s way,” abandoning “familiar models of progress and self-expression” and “decentering the self.” As Howe herself states: “[bewilderment] breaks open the lock of dualism … and peers out into space” (WD 15). To become bewildered is to undergo dethronement, or kenosis, forsaking the transcendent logos for a gnostic logos residing in the body. Kenosis is the doctrine, first declared by Paul (in Phillippians 2:5), that Christ put off his divinity to become mortal, the logos made flesh, and so accomplished a second fall into history and suffering.
To give just one brief example of how kenosis and embodiment are gnostically intertwined in Howe’s work I will look briefly at a poem from “The Quietist” (1992):
Zero built a nest
In my navel. Incurable
Longing. Blood too –
From violent actions
It’s a nest belonging to one
But zero uses it
And its pleasure is its own (SP 141).
Zero performs an exemplary function here as heretical/gnostic agent, acting as the figure for both fullness and emptiness (registered moreover by the explicitly female body, its omphalos the site of parturition and evacuation). Zero is the postmodern gnostic trope par excellence. It’s promiscuous with heresy, with the “the happy Oh of vowels and ohs.” But it’s also, as Howe notes, what the Zohar calls “point Zero,” or God (WD 47).
Signifying both fullness and emptiness then, zero is the “bewilderment” of opening to a profound vulnerability, a desire for redemption achieved through a commitment to uncertainty. Bewilderment in Howe performs a liturgy of emptying out in order to keep faith with the anxiety of not knowing, which finally produces a deep empathy. As the sign which evacuates itself, zero is the radiant performance of its own kenosis, the exemplary sign of weak theological power, the Pauline trope of logos tou starous – “the logos on the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18) which marks one strand of Christian theology (the other being the militant theology of glory, which focuses on the ascent of humanity into heaven). Cross theology tends to Christ’s descent from divinity into the suffering of human history and accordingly emphasizes humility and service to the poor. It has been re-framed by postmodern theologian John Caputo as “weak theology,” which he characterizes as a stripping away of God’s omnipotence, his sovereign power, which is replaced, not by the God of negative theology but by a suffering God, a God in pain, as Zizek calls him (though it’s worth noting that Caputo will have no truck with Zizek). The idea of a vulnerable, suffering, abject God allows weak theology to intervene in the suffering of history, much as Benjamin conceived of a weak messianic force that was powerless to effect the future but just sufficient to redeem the past.
Howe’s notion of zero asks us to think of it cinematically, as a superimposition shot, in which “a nest belonging to one” is also used by zero. It’s a position resonant with what Richard Kearney calls anatheism: the return to God after God. Anatheism imagines a post-metaphysical turn toward the idea of a God who neither is nor is-not, is located in a third category, that of the May-Be or the messianic. This God Who May Be (as the title of Kearny’s 1993 book has it) is a God who, as he reveals himself to Moses through the Burning Bush, “flares up and withdraws, promising always to return, to become again ... who resists quietism as much as zealotry… an Exodic God whose exile marks him as both outside and on the way … who obviates the extremes of atheistic and theistic dogmatism in the name of a still small voice that whispers and cries in the wilderness” (QG 170). It is God’s abjection that redeems him and us because, unlike triumphalist theology and its insistence on transcendence, abjection does not blindly refuse the horrors of history or the challenges of how to meet the suffering other. “The anatheist moment,’ Kearney writes, “is one available to anyone who experiences instants of deep disorientation, doubt, or dread.” In short, to anyone who has felt the weirdness of a logos in exile.
Ernest Bloch remarks that “the best thing about religion is that it creates heretics … what is decisive is to transcend without transcendence” (AC n.p.). Such a heretical form of transcendence is what Howe’s gnostic poetics strives for. “God cannot be reduced to the word God,” she states, and yet, at the same time, she claims “we may not know if there is a God or not, but we do know that there is a word” (WD 81). Gnostic poetry’s desire is for the strange materiality of that word.
Works Cited
Aupers, Stef, et al. “Cybergnosis: Technology, Religion, and the Sacred.” Religion: Beyond a Concept. NY: Fordham UP, 2008.
Bloch, Ernest. Atheism without Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Trans. J.T. Swann. London: Verso,
2009.
Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.
Caputo, John. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukfosky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry. Iowa City:
Iowa UP, 2012.
Howe, Fanny. The Wedding Dress. Berkeley: California UP, 2003.
_____. Gone. Berkeley: California UP, 2003.
_____. Selected Poems. Berkeley: California UP, 2000.
_____The Vineyard. Providence RI: Lost Roads, 1988.
_____. The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009.
Huk, Romana. “A single liturgy”: Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress. Christianity and Literature. v. 58, n. 4 (Summer 2009): 657-
693.
Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
Kearney, Richard. Anatheism; The Return to God after God. NY: Columbia UP, 2010.
_____. “The God Who May Be.” Questioning God. John Caputo et al, editors. Bloomington. Indiana UP, 2001.
Desiring Logos: The Holy Atheism of Fanny Howe or, Zero Dark Gnostic
What does it mean to be a holy atheist? Is it the same thing as being a post-metaphysical poet? One who writes to a god after the death of God? And can either of these categories answer to the idea of a new gnostic poetry? To explore this question I want to look at the poetry of Fanny Howe.
Despite an extraordinarily prolific output comprised, at last count, of 15 books of poetry, 11 novels, and three essay collections, her work is far less well known than it deserves to be. Though praised by her peers, Howe’s received scant critical attention. One reason for this, I’d venture, is her subject matter: the lives of the spirit, as the title of one of her books has it. Romana Huk’s terrific 2009 essay on The Wedding Dress does a lot to redress this deficiency. According to Huk, the challenge Howe’s work presents to readers of experimental poetry is that of a richly informed poetic theology that draws on “devastatingly secularized theories about language” (SL 658). In what follows here I will offer an all too-brief foray into the ways such theories are mapped onto gnostic modalities in Fanny Howe’s work, modalities that encompass both the a-theistic and the ana-theistic. Howe’s gnostic, or heretical, faith, announces itself as a commitment to an open-ended process of discovery, a refusal of closure, and a willingness to undergo, or suffer, estrangement and difference for the sake of a spiritual thirst for justice that may be unquenchable. Such a knowing is not arrived at through reason, but by experience; an experience of a gnostic logos with the poem as its vehicle of transmission.
To ask how logos became gnostic is to trace how the alien god of the ancient Gnostics has migrated into the alien word of postmodern poetics. Howe’s poetry works to build a home in our un-homed-ness as Adorno might put it. How to dwell in uncanniness. The alien god of the Gnostics is not the evil demiurge who imprisoned the soul in matter, but the thought that, as Derrida writes, “welcomes alterity into logos” (qtd. in Kearney, Anatheism). For Hans Jonas, who put modern gnosis on the map, gnosis is “concerned with the secrets of salvation; knowledge is not just theoretical information about things but is itself … charged with performing a function in the bringing about of salvation” (GR 36). The sage of New Haven Harold Bloom maintains that gnosis is “not rational knowledge but like poetic knowledge … [it] alters both knower and known without blending them into a unity” (A 4-5). Bloom is clear that gnosis is not to be confused with clarity. It is uncanny, enigmatic. “It emphasizes that transition is more real than being” (A 13). But Bloom’s vision of gnosis, rendered with more force than persuasion through his readings of Emerson, Crane, and Stevens is finally little more than an expression of a desire for poetic mastery, a kind of patralogical will to the Oversoul, rather than a surrender to the mystery of being one finds in say Simone Weil, who is an important figure for Howe. Finally, Stef Aupers reminds us that: “Epistemologically, gnostic knowledge does not arise from a reality ‘out there’… it instead relies on an ‘inner source’—on personal experience, imagination, or intuition” (RBC 688-89). What’s central to all three of these views is the privileged role granted to poetic imagination, which can bring about a radical new cognition not predicated on empirical methodologies, but arrived at by epistemological disruption, a forcible intrusion from within – a gnosis of embodied logos. This is one way to understand gnostic poetics today and it is how we need to read it in Howe’s urgent and harrowing work.
Howe’s own comments on ancient Gnosticism are instructive. In her essay “Contemporary Logos,” she revisits the argument between the Gnostic Marcion and the Platonist Philo. Marcion rejected Yahweh as a “false representation of the disappeared God,” writes Howe, looking instead to the serpent of Eden, with its promise of knowledge, as the exiled alien God, forever other and outside (WD 74). Logos may be our source, she says, but in our finitude we are alienated from it, a situation she goes on to link to the predicament shared by many of Samuel Beckett’s characters. Howe’s poem, “The Source,” from her 2003 collection, Gone, speaks to the estrangement of the logos, but rather than resigning to estrangement she finds in it a form of welcome or hospitality.
The source
I thought was Arctic
the good Platonic
Up the pole
was soaked film
an electric elevation
onto a fishy platform
and waves on two sides greenly welcoming
The sunwater poured on holy atheism
It was light that powered out
my ego or my heart
before ending with a letter (G 46).
In this enigmatic yet inviting poem, Howe seems to be rethinking her relationship to Logos as Source. Once thought of as Arctic, Platonic – half-rhymed words that provide a sense of a higher reality’s remoteness, sealed off by hierarchical tiers – the divine now becomes electric, fishy, lit by sunwater – in a word, earthy. “The Source” traces the signature move in Howe’s work: a turn from the transcendent to the immanent. A disavowal of the heavenly and an embracing of the body. A turn away from the thought of a source that powers the heart from outside to the recognition that the poem, after all, ends with a letter, a material sign. “The Source” marks Howe as a gnostic Catholic, abandoned by The Word yet unapologetically devoted to an idea of logos, with a small “l,” not as a stabilizing force, but as a alienated posture from which to re-think and unwork orthodox systems of belief. Her poetry re-articulates the grounds of faith as a radical doubt, an uncertainty about the estranged status of the word, which is no longer to be found radiating from on high, but right here, among the ordinary things of the everyday, abject, impoverished, in crisis. Howe’s willingness to inhabit the house of alienated spirit is a poetic testing of faith not unlike George Oppen’s dedicated testing of the basis of the real. “Doubt,” she writes, “allows God to live” (WD 120). Gnostic poetics is the faith of doubt, the commitment to uncertainty and its confusions.
Howe’s work asks us to consider not only the theological value of heresy – the way it disrupts prevailing orthodoxies and calcified doctrines – but heresy as a force for progressive social change. Her gnosis is a feminist one: rooted in the experience of being a woman it challenges the gender politics that sets the agenda for both things of the spirit and things of the body. As Rachel Blau DuPlessis has recently noted: “there are no genderless subjects in any relationship structuring literary culture” (PP 3). Nor are there any in religious culture, either, I might add. So we need to think of Howe’s work as a specifically gendered form of gnosis, along the lines mapped out by both feminist and liberation theologies, which speak to the poor and the disenfranchised, whose work is to reclaim a space for the marginal and the oppressed. Time doesn’t permit me to do anything more than gesture at this, but it’s crucial for understanding how Howe’s poetics of gnostic theology is also a poetics of social justice. For Howe, life’s urgency calls from every moment: “Every experience,” she writes, “that is personal is simultaneously an experience that is supernatural” (WD 19). But this urgency is countered by the realization which she recalls in her memoir, The Winter Sun, that “the prevailing writers (Kerouac, Rexroth, Corso) were all male, leaving the women to shuffle barefoot around masculine territory” (WS 64).
Despite these struggles to find a voice, or because of them, Howe’s poetry attains the simplicity and clarity of fable or fairy tale – charged with a luminous directness whose straightforward diction retains a beguiling air of mystery, a sense that words themselves are potential sites for the miraculous, events in which grace might take form as speech. Laid out in short, clipped, yet lilting lines, and full of slanted end rhymes, they create a contrapuntal music between the declarative and the aphoristic. This is from her serial poem, “Servitude” (1988):
Torn from the language of my childhood
When I was cut to size
And it was done, I leaned down
To where the clay turns soft
Like this I splurged on liturgy
It gave me a migraine to read the word GOD
In water lights, in everything good
Instead I saw stones
Happy Ohs, the vowels and holes
Of planetary silence (V 79).
The splurge on liturgy (typical of Howe’s delicious assonance) results in piercing pain. Such a triumphalist economy of divine expenditure won’t answer to her needs. Only stones and voids and silence can provide the “oh” that is the sign and call of both spiritual distress and the surprise of astonishment and pleasure. “Oh” may be the secret core of gnosis.
This desire to be both distressed and astonished is perhaps most forcefully articulated in Howe’s manifesto, “Bewilderment” (from the 2003 collection of essays The Wedding Dress). Huk has discussed this collection with considerable insight, but I want to touch briefly on it here in order to outline just how radical Howe’s theological investments in atheism really are. As she puts it: “The atheist is no less an inquirer than a believer” (WD 10). What the atheist desires most is a language – a logos – capable of dealing with the vast confusion of experience. She names this confusion bewilderment. “Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability … [it] circumnavigates … the empty but ultimate referent” (WD 15, 20). Bewilderment is a radical de-centering, a self-emptying out that exposes the self to the other. It invites in difference, rather than seeking after the identical. Huk comments that bewilderment is about “losing one’s way,” abandoning “familiar models of progress and self-expression” and “decentering the self.” As Howe herself states: “[bewilderment] breaks open the lock of dualism … and peers out into space” (WD 15). To become bewildered is to undergo dethronement, or kenosis, forsaking the transcendent logos for a gnostic logos residing in the body. Kenosis is the doctrine, first declared by Paul (in Phillippians 2:5), that Christ put off his divinity to become mortal, the logos made flesh, and so accomplished a second fall into history and suffering.
To give just one brief example of how kenosis and embodiment are gnostically intertwined in Howe’s work I will look briefly at a poem from “The Quietist” (1992):
Zero built a nest
In my navel. Incurable
Longing. Blood too –
From violent actions
It’s a nest belonging to one
But zero uses it
And its pleasure is its own (SP 141).
Zero performs an exemplary function here as heretical/gnostic agent, acting as the figure for both fullness and emptiness (registered moreover by the explicitly female body, its omphalos the site of parturition and evacuation). Zero is the postmodern gnostic trope par excellence. It’s promiscuous with heresy, with the “the happy Oh of vowels and ohs.” But it’s also, as Howe notes, what the Zohar calls “point Zero,” or God (WD 47).
Signifying both fullness and emptiness then, zero is the “bewilderment” of opening to a profound vulnerability, a desire for redemption achieved through a commitment to uncertainty. Bewilderment in Howe performs a liturgy of emptying out in order to keep faith with the anxiety of not knowing, which finally produces a deep empathy. As the sign which evacuates itself, zero is the radiant performance of its own kenosis, the exemplary sign of weak theological power, the Pauline trope of logos tou starous – “the logos on the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18) which marks one strand of Christian theology (the other being the militant theology of glory, which focuses on the ascent of humanity into heaven). Cross theology tends to Christ’s descent from divinity into the suffering of human history and accordingly emphasizes humility and service to the poor. It has been re-framed by postmodern theologian John Caputo as “weak theology,” which he characterizes as a stripping away of God’s omnipotence, his sovereign power, which is replaced, not by the God of negative theology but by a suffering God, a God in pain, as Zizek calls him (though it’s worth noting that Caputo will have no truck with Zizek). The idea of a vulnerable, suffering, abject God allows weak theology to intervene in the suffering of history, much as Benjamin conceived of a weak messianic force that was powerless to effect the future but just sufficient to redeem the past.
Howe’s notion of zero asks us to think of it cinematically, as a superimposition shot, in which “a nest belonging to one” is also used by zero. It’s a position resonant with what Richard Kearney calls anatheism: the return to God after God. Anatheism imagines a post-metaphysical turn toward the idea of a God who neither is nor is-not, is located in a third category, that of the May-Be or the messianic. This God Who May Be (as the title of Kearny’s 1993 book has it) is a God who, as he reveals himself to Moses through the Burning Bush, “flares up and withdraws, promising always to return, to become again ... who resists quietism as much as zealotry… an Exodic God whose exile marks him as both outside and on the way … who obviates the extremes of atheistic and theistic dogmatism in the name of a still small voice that whispers and cries in the wilderness” (QG 170). It is God’s abjection that redeems him and us because, unlike triumphalist theology and its insistence on transcendence, abjection does not blindly refuse the horrors of history or the challenges of how to meet the suffering other. “The anatheist moment,’ Kearney writes, “is one available to anyone who experiences instants of deep disorientation, doubt, or dread.” In short, to anyone who has felt the weirdness of a logos in exile.
Ernest Bloch remarks that “the best thing about religion is that it creates heretics … what is decisive is to transcend without transcendence” (AC n.p.). Such a heretical form of transcendence is what Howe’s gnostic poetics strives for. “God cannot be reduced to the word God,” she states, and yet, at the same time, she claims “we may not know if there is a God or not, but we do know that there is a word” (WD 81). Gnostic poetry’s desire is for the strange materiality of that word.
Works Cited
Aupers, Stef, et al. “Cybergnosis: Technology, Religion, and the Sacred.” Religion: Beyond a Concept. NY: Fordham UP, 2008.
Bloch, Ernest. Atheism without Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Trans. J.T. Swann. London: Verso,
2009.
Bloom, Harold. Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1982.
Caputo, John. The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2006.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukfosky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry. Iowa City:
Iowa UP, 2012.
Howe, Fanny. The Wedding Dress. Berkeley: California UP, 2003.
_____. Gone. Berkeley: California UP, 2003.
_____. Selected Poems. Berkeley: California UP, 2000.
_____The Vineyard. Providence RI: Lost Roads, 1988.
_____. The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2009.
Huk, Romana. “A single liturgy”: Fanny Howe’s The Wedding Dress. Christianity and Literature. v. 58, n. 4 (Summer 2009): 657-
693.
Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press, 1958.
Kearney, Richard. Anatheism; The Return to God after God. NY: Columbia UP, 2010.
_____. “The God Who May Be.” Questioning God. John Caputo et al, editors. Bloomington. Indiana UP, 2001.