Z:Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible." Why? Because God's suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God's suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoffer's deep insight that, after shoah, "only a suffering God can help us now" - a proper supplement to Heidegger's<

T:Although Z primarily deals with Judeo-Christianity, the suffering god is not at all monopolized by the Abrahamic traditions, for instance it is also invoked in the mythos of Sri Aurobindo as narrated by masters of the hagiographic genre such as Deshpande, who often portray him as the suffering god/man coming down to take on the burden of the Earth. The suffering of the Master in the physical is the archetypal pattern spun in many narratives of the faithful, apparently unaware of their structural affinities with Near Eastern myths.

In its most unconscious telling those spinning these tales of suffering and woe go as far as to project it on to themselves (imitation). Although in their telling of it their suffering becomes more intense the deeper their devotion, the suffering of the preacher and tale teller is different from the deep love of the Bhakti however, who suffers authentically from separation from their divine beloved. The tale teller's suffering is more ideological than that, more on the order of being a suffering foot soldier in the army of God.

This is nothing unique to IY but is the language of the Tent Revivalist Preacher and pious Wahabi Mullah who suffer so that the congregation may be delivered.

In IY suffering or weariness has become a common theme apparent in AP's prose, in the Heehs affair, where he portrays himself as having to endure the pangs of fighting for the purity of the Master and Mother- against those who would have their way with them in critical biographies. One sees this in the attorney's Tripathy wearied responses to his clients, in the endings to his correspondence, "and miles to go before I sleep"..

As if suffering, its endurance and victimhood grants one authority to engage in martyrdom for spiritual combat.
Victimhood breeding fundamentalism, fundamentalism
breeding righteous violence.

While it would be easy to pass judgment on the whole genre of the suffering god/man tales, and easy to accept or dismiss these mythic underpinnings of Sri Aurobindo's life
depending on our proclivity to be convinced, there seems to be something more interesting happening with him, than are captured in these retelling of corn god stories.

It seems to me that not only Savitri invokes important variations in the story of the suffering god but so to his
actual way of being in the world, as if from within the midst of suffering, the man affirms his own divinity by snatching bliss from the suffering god.

Rich, I may not be very clear on what you're saying here ... while I certainly dislike the fetishization of the suffering of spiritual Masters (see for instance how often the Mother poked fun at what the Christians had done to Christ and insisted that she had no desire to be seen as a martyr herself), and hero-worship carried out as an excuse to avoid having to spiritually transform oneself ("the Master did all the hard work ... all we have to do is sit on our backsides praising his/her sacrifice rather than making any actual sacrifice ourselves and this will lead us to salvation"), there can hardly be any doubt that spiritual transformation indeed involves plenty of suffering, as anyone having yogic experiences on a fairly regular basis will attest to. What is so wrong with appreciating the suffering undergone by great spiritual figures, as long as this appreciation is not turned into an excuse for stupidity or spiritual laziness, but rather is something one derives inspiration and endurance from on one's own journey?

Are you criticizing the mere appreciation of the suffering a great spiritual Master or are you criticizing the way such an appreciation is abused by people of a religious mindset in order to feel pious rather than doing the hard and painful work of actually attaining holiness?

Z:Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /.../ all of history remains incomprehensible." Why? Because God's suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God's suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoffer's deep insight that, after shoah, "only a suffering God can help us now" - a proper supplement to Heidegger's "Only a God can still save us!" from his last interview.

DB: Interestingly, this is increasingly the revision of God in contemporary thought - a revision which, from a Judeo-Christian perspective, sees the suffering of Christ as the involution of the Absolute (the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided) as the wager of its destiny. We find the same theological insight in Latour's article carried here some time back, where the immanence of the divine is seeking as never before for cosmic embodiment.

As Zizek points out, the trend in western thought that presages this revision can be linked to post-Kantian German transcendentalism, as in Schelling, but becomes fully metaphysical in Hegel. This trend view history as the (or at least a) Becoming of the Divine, the involutionary-evolutionary journey in which the material cosmos is in travail and which is given its own expression by Sri Aurobindo. What Hegel does with this process is render it deterministic, blunting the edge from the struggle for consciousness and individuality out of the repeated drag of abysmal sleep and the amorphous sameness of conditioned particularity. This leads to the reaction against teleology inaugurated by Nietzsche and continued in the thinking of the postmoderns. However, Nietzsche does not thereby reject the underlying stress of post-Kantian thought, replacing only the determinism of history with the full immanence of divinity in freedom and choice - the will to supermanhood.

Sri Aurobindo approaches this immanence of history as much (perhaps more) from the vantage of the Vedic sacrifice of the Purusha as/than the modern Romaintic philosophical tradition. He thus brings together the notion of cyclic time (which is not absent in Nietzsche - as the eternal recurrence of the Same) as the paradox of the eternal appearing and disappearing in a becoming; but also the significance of this becoming as a progressive representation of infinite richness in which Purusha reconstitutes itself as conscious will within its particular possibilties in the creation. The paradox implicit in this approach is the same as that implicit in the human contemplation of eternity and time - it gathers to itself an aporia between two voices - that of the prophet who annonces the always already accomplished Life Divine; and that of the aspirant, who struggles against odds whose measure reveals itself to be ever greater as one grows in consciousness, and who cannot rest in the luxury of a determined future.

But this aporia is resolved not dialectically, but only in a consciousness which encompasses a different experience of time than the human. In the case both of Sri Aurobindo and the Mother one finds a switching between these two modalities and these two and perhaps three experiences of time - that of the cosmic play of possibilties in the 'Avidya;' that of the transcendental vision of the future or of the always already accomplished eternity; and that of what they have called the Supramental, with its Time Vision incomprehesible in experience to present human constitution.

This aporia has led in their all too human followers, not to a simultaneity of temporal experiences or even an aspiration for such a simultaneity, but rather to a privileging of the prophetic over the aspirant voice. Such a privileging serves the determined astrologism of millenarian movements, by bypassing personal responsibility onto an Other who has no inherence in the self.

The suffering of Christ when understood and responded to as the embodiment of the sacrifice of Purusha, becomes an occasion for the contemplation of and identification with the mystery of the involved divine within the self and the cosmos, subject to the Law of the Inconscience, but through a choice of will. In Savitri, Sri Aurobindo describes three potencies of the avatar - the divine who suffers the law of the Ignorance, the divine who aspires to overcome the law of the Ignorance, and the divine (here gendered female) who overcomes the law of the Ignorance.

In trying to relate to the enigma of the avatar, it is important to encompass all these three potencies as aspects of the involved divine within the cosmos and within oneself. In doing this, there are several crucial factors to be kept in consciousness (not flattened gthrough rejection or trivialization): (1) all three potencies need to be co-extensive; (2) all three potencies are to be seen as inhering as the Other in the self; (3) all three potentices are to be regarded as containing the mysterious otherness of divinity - that is something not assimilable into common human experience.

Thus Bonhoffer's "only a suffering god can help us" is a necessary supplement to Heidegger's "only a god can save us" only if it is added to "only an aspiring god can save us" and "only a triumphant god can save us" as the sufficient condition for the destiny of an immanent divinity.

"A Power greater than that of Evil can alone win the victory.
It is not a crucified but a glorified body that will save the world." (The Mother, New Year's Message, 1957).

Z: And the link between these two features of the fundamentalist's position is clear: since fantasy is a scenario the subject builds in order to answer the enigma of the Other's desire, i.e., since fantasy provides an answer to "What does the Other want from me?", the immediate identification with the fantasy as it were closes up the gap - the enigma is clarified, we fully know the answer...

DB: This is the familiar literalization of the Enigma through projection of fantasy, instead of identifying the immanence of the Other in the self. There is a pathetic brutality in the self-flagellations and amrtyrdoms of the faithful, laced with the sentiment that they thereby become the favorites of god. The obverse of this (with the same sentiment) are the jihadis or "hero warriors" who enlist in the army of God to avenge his suffering. Interestingly, as befits the "integrality" of Sri Aurobindo, those in the ranks of fetishized suffering, who "fully know the answer" are experts at both self-flagellation and holy war.

DB

(Side note: Debashish, you have an amazing way of putting spiritual ideas into contemporary language. Not to boost your ego too much here, but you've got to knock out a book at some point! ;-) )

It isn't that I try to put "spiritual ideas into contemporary language." I think of myself as an agent within a contemporary discourse. To become an agent and not remain a patient one has to internalize this text and participate in it out of one's consciousness. In keeping "spirituality" somehow as a special domain limited to repetitions of vocabularies and expressions invented by messiahs is to live in what walter Benjamin calls "the empty homogenous time" of the exclusionary cult. The language becomes the fetish and develops its doxa which reject dialog or variant interpretations.

Ok Deb, but if do knock out a book on this theme let me suggest the title: "Self-Flagellation and Holy War"

regards Neds?:

Are you criticizing the mere appreciation of the suffering a great spiritual Master or are you criticizing the way such an appreciation is abused by people of a religious mindset in order to feel pious rather than doing the hard and painful work of actually attaining holiness?

T: My quip is not a critique of the intrinsic and necessary role of suffering in spiritual quests or an attempt to pass judgment on the suffering god/man. Rather its about followers appropriating themes commonly found throughout the history of mythology and religion into their own belief system and treating them as their own unique oblation.

Moreover, it was to make the point that when suffering becomes a fetished object and employed as an ideological device to claim exceptionalism rather than an expression of ones separation from divinity it only provides an occasion for internalizing resentment, and often the identification of oneself or community as the sufferers or victims that is often too easily compensated for through acts of vengeance.