The abyss of Calvino's deconstructive writing: an apology for non-foundational theology

This thesis argues that the later works of Italo Calvino function as an apologetic for a non-foundational theology. Calvino’s two late novels Invisible Cities and If on a winter’s night a traveller are viewed as embodiments of self-deconstructing rhetoric. Calvino’s essays offer a literary theory which is practised in these novels to lead to an expression of aporetic epistemology. This technique of ironic reflexivity is described as a rhetoric of the abyss. This becomes an apologetic for a theology of postmodernism when If on a winter’s night a traveller is viewed in terms of its treatment of the death of the author, because its application to theology is shown in a parallel to the historical process of secularisation. Similarly, Invisible Cities is offered as an apologetic for non-foundational theology because by embodying an exercise in rhetorical self criticism it becomes, for the reader, an experience of epistemological de-stabilisation. Reader-response criticism is the framework which makes this possible. An allegorical model of reading Invisible Cities is offered in viewing Marco Polo as a Heideggerean counsellor who supports his interlocutor, Kublai Khan, to explore the inadequacy of a metaphysical mastery in terms of western concepts of imperialism and philosophical absolutism. The counsel offered is compared to the concept of gift as being without Being, and grace as icon, in Jean-Luc Marion’s God Without Being. The equation of the rhetoric of abyss with Tillich’s God as ground and abyss is viewed as inadequate. The argument is made that instead, a careful reading of Calvino’s rhetoric creates an appreciation of the reasons for accepting the radical a-theology of faith put forward by the work of Thomas J.J. Altizer and John Caputo. Its ethical consequences are aligned to the argument made in Mark C. Taylor’s After God, for religion as a complex adaptive system with ethical and social responsibilities. Finally, following on from the pastoral concern of the Polo-Khan dialogue and briefly discussing Calvino’s novel Mr Palomar, links are made to the issue of autism as a spectrum of universal human problem and opportunity, and to the model of the 12 step recovery program of Alcoholics Anonymous as a secular spiritual praxis. The idea of nomadic theology is suggested as a possible response.

Mindfulness of separation: an autistic a-theological hermeneutic

This thesis argues that a literary hermeneutic based on a mythology of autism offers a significantly validating reading of apophatic and a-theological texts. Instead of a disability, this mythologised autism is read as a valid and valuable poetic theological thinking. The thesis argues that a mythological autism could be envisioned as a trinity, analogous to the three-in-one Godhead of Christianity. This means that each facet of the mythological autistic trinity is indissoluble from the others, are all are equally autism. The first element is termed Mindfulness of Separation, and this entails absence and unknowing as has been conceptualised in Baron Cohen’s theory of Mindblindness. Thought theologically, Mindfulness of Separation is a privileged entry into the (non)spaces indicated by apophatic and a-theological discourse. The second element is termed autistic fascination, and is drawn from the clinical conceptualisation of Restricted and Repetitive Behaviours and Interests (RRBI’s) as described in the American DSM-5. The thesis argues that Uta Frith’s explanation of repetitive, stereotyped behaviours as those of a ‘sensory connoisseur’ can be thought theologically as a capacity for reverence and wonder. Coupled with Frith’s thinking of the sensory, the thesis argues that autistic special interests are equally part of autistic fascination in their sense of revelling in praise of their special objects. Theologically, this autistic fascination can be seen as a haecceic and poetic presence-in-absence made possible only within autism’s particular separation, and this is a paradoxical coincidentia oppositorum which sheds a new light on the similar absent/present paradox of apophatic theology. The third element is termed literal metaphor, and it can ultimately only exist when it is thought theologically, as what is termed incarnational metaphor. This draws on the autistic phenomenon of taking figurative language ‘literally.’ Theologically, this is a strength inasmuch as its stance towards language is not to decode it pragmatically, but to stay within the paradoxes of a poetic language expressing theological thinking. The thesis develops the term ‘apophatic fiction’ to express the way in which incarnational metaphor reads poetic, mystical texts by honouring them as simultaneously both poetic and theological thinking. The ‘literal’ meaning is the incarnational meaning of poetic sacrament, both absent (from pragmatic appropriation) and present (in the power of the word). At the heart of this trinity, making it possible, is kenotic autistic affective empathy. This is drawn from Baron Cohen’s thinking of autism as a ‘zero degree positive’ of unimpaired affective empathy within impaired cognitive empathy. It is kenotic because it pours itself out in affection which has no cognitive safeguards or conditions. It is the wisdom of the holy fool. These are theological, not clinical concepts, although they are a mythologization of clinical constructs. They can be thought theologically in terms of what the thesis terms universal, conscious and absolute autism. Universal autism draws on Baron Cohen’s model of the autistic spectrum as a continuum across human variations, and it is an autistic streak permeating existence. Conscious autism is the knowing adoption of autism as a theological strategy. Absolute autism is the theological thinking which imagines what a total autism would be, in absolute Mindfulness of Separation, absolute autistic fascination, absolute incarnational metaphor and absolute affective empathy. As such, the autistic trinity is the autism of God, offering a powerful way to understand apophatic and a-theological texts. In conclusion, readings of Hopkins’ poetry and Pirandello’s novels are ‘case studies’ for an autistic a-theological hermeneutic

"Christianity in Scottish Literature" edited by John Patrick Pazdziora

Review ofJohn Patrick Pazdziora, ed., Christianity in Scottish Literature, Association of Scottish Literary Studies Occasional Papers no. 25 (Glasgow: Scottish Literature International, 2023), pp. xxxiv + 306, ISBN 978-1908980373. £19.9