Claudia Welz’s brilliantly innovative engagement with the history and future of theological anthropology moves almost seamlessly between its Christian and Jewish sources. It would be difficult for anyone to fully appreciate, especially aesthetically, what it means to say that a human being is made in the image of God without having read her book.

There is every good theological reason for Welz’s study to assume the normativity of the first chapter of Genesis where the divine image is conferred on humanity with astonishing indifference to prevailing social and ethnic hierarchies. In this text, women enjoy the egality of the same genus and moment with men: the two come into being face to face; beating heart to beating heart. I write this short essay, though, wanting to know how Welz’s account of how the invisible God appears in and through the visible might challenge the second (if probably older) account of the creation of the man and the woman in Genesis 2:18–24.

This seems important: the popular reception of this text, far more than Genesis 1:27, has shaped the perception and experience of every single Jewish, Christian, and Muslim woman on the planet. I want to suggest to Welz that while Genesis 1:27 promises iconicity to every human being who will ever live, Genesis 2:18–24 does not. Indeed, it can be interpreted as having attributed the creation of the world’s first idol, in the form of a woman, to God.

In Genesis 2, Ishah, woman, could hardly be more ontologically other to Ish, the man, who, from the outset, enjoys the form of a “living being/soul” (v. 7). Granted, Genesis 2 says nothing about Adam having been made in the image of God. Nonetheless, he comes into existence as an incarnation of the very spirit of God blowing through the earth (Gen 2:7). He, not she, makes visible the unconditioned, invisible God as one whose materiality is breathed by God into the four directions of unbounded, undetermined possibility, as dust drifting through warm air and glancing light.

By contrast, the woman is a walled thing. After a keyhole surgical procedure in which God removes a spare rib from the man’s anaesthetized body, woman is built (va’yiven, Genesis 2:22), a term variously interpreted by the rabbis as a fashioning or construction into a pyramid-like form that narrows towards a point at the top but which stands four-square on the ground (Ber 61a; Eruv 18a). God has to work quickly. She must be finished (in more ways than one) before the man wakes up. There can be no risk of his being repulsed by her still formless bloodied appearance (Sanhedrin 39a).

As the prototypical appearance of a woman fashioned from a piece of rigid, cracking, rattling bone, Ishah is a fixed, opaque likeness not an open, incomplete image that points beyond herself in the ways that Welz’s book so beautifully evokes. She is, in short, an idol not, as is the translucent man, an icon. Nothing is either revealed or hidden: she is bounded and exhausted by her figuration, which both precludes and occludes her possibility. In her, there can be no infinitely recursive recreative seeing of the face of God as it exists within and between people, as described by Welz (and also, recently, by myself and Stephen Pattison).1

Welz is right that the processes by which the invisible God is made visible in the human include “the specifically human ability to listen and respond” (264). But a woman born of man is the first untruth: a primary “disavowal of the maternal debt.”2 Thenceforth, a woman cannot be the truthful subject of her own experience. And as a work of art that resembles a woman, she cannot “step forth” (existere) from herself.

She cannot self-interpret as an image of God, as described by Welz in the second chapter of her book. Blind and silent, she cannot “enter into linguistic communion,” as Welz puts it (38), with the divine and human other. The dialogical “I” is impossible without a “Thou,” and she is neither an I nor a Thou because in some senses she is him: bone of his bones and flesh of his flesh (v. 23).

Welz knows that there is a dynamic “connection between Bild and Bildung, between being an image and becoming oneself in a process of formation” (38). But if the female “I” is not only the masculine “me,” but also his first tool or domestic appliance, hers is a state from which there can be no ontological promotion.

Leaving aside God’s apparent violation of halakhot that would proscribe the sculpting of three-dimensional full-body images of human beings, in this second version of the creation of humanity, the woman is in the world not because she is in the image of God (how else could anyone exist?), but because she is a base solution to the existential situation of the man: he is alone (and will remain alone if he does not propagate).3 Like any other doll fashioned from an objet trouvé—perhaps a peg or a stick—whose face may have been painted on as a nod to realism and a finishing touch, she is a make-believe generic woman for the man to hold at night to keep the lonely dark at bay. The woman is an antidote to loneliness after the cattle, wild beasts and birds (vv. 18–20) have proved unsatisfactory conversationalists. Her animation is a historical contingency: she would have been surplus to requirement if the dog, as it were, had in fact proved to be “man’s best friend.”

Far from being some kind of culmination of creation, as a number of commentators (including the second-wave feminist biblical interpreter Phyllis Trible) have suggested, her humanity is reduced even before she is created to an a priori idea of what will facilitate his.4 She is the occasion of his humanity. It is through her that he attains a new rank: he is now ish—the man (Gen 2:7). As R. Joseph Soloveitchik points out (uncritically) man must lose something of himself—his rib—to gain himself. For man in his solitude has no kavod (dignity/glory/gravitas). Human glory is only reflected glory and it is conferred socially in the assumption of covenantal responsibilities.5 Here, Judaism and Christianity are of similar mind: Karl Barth defines woman as one who completes the man. He sacrificed a part of his body to create her. She must return his sacrifice with the gift of her being. To be a woman “marks the completion of his creation, it is not problematic but self-evident for her to be ordained for man in her whole existence.”6

As a custom-made, mechanically reproducible “pure appearance” the woman is, like an inanimate idol, a rigid, silent, unhearing, unseeing caricature of a living agent. There can be no refraction to the divine image in this serenely invulnerable carved stand-in for a face.7 Whereas a man’s creation from dust and ashes signals both the freedom of his becoming and the pathos of his finitude, the woman sculpted from bone is already dead and if she cannot die, she also cannot live. She is nonexistent.

In fact, Jewish tradition shares some of my unease. It did not escape rabbinical notice that the biblical account of the creation of a woman lacks any reference to the infusion of a soul.8 Rashi and Maimonides had, among others, a theology of marriage that compelled them to translate tzela not as rib but “side.” For Eve to have been formed from Adam’s rib would have been an offence against the dignity of a man’s wife (and thereby a dishonor to himself). A bone-woman would have been something too much akin to what we in the twenty-first century might regard as a prototype for the robotic silicone sex dolls now being made in the pornographic likeness of a fantasy woman for the sexual satisfaction of men as shy and lonely as the biblical Ish. Were Eve, however, to have been taken from Adam’s side then she would have accrued enough ontological affinity with him to qualify as one-half of the one-flesh complementary union that is a marriage. As her husband’s “other half,” her interests would be protected; he would naturally care for her as he would for himself (BT Yevamot 62b).

It is a fundamental principle of Western ontology that when one thing exists for the sake of another (compare the words of Saul/Paul, the first-century diasporic, sectarian Jewish theologian, in his First Letter to the Corinthians 11:10) then it is inferior or subordinate to it. Certainly, a number of the rabbis, including Ralbag, interpret Genesis 2 as a warrant for female subordination. However, this is not to say that the fabrication of woman in Genesis 2 licenses a husband (in Hebrew, ba’al, master) to enslave his ezer. Abravanel (who has read Aquinas) denies in his commentary on Genesis that man has the right to use woman as a slave. That she is of his flesh entitles her to the respect due to him; that she is of neither his head nor his foot signals that she is neither his ruler nor his slave.

Clearly, Jewish interpretations of Genesis 2 are diverse and most commentators, ancient and modern, are far from insensible to the predicament of women. It is also the case that as ezer k’negdo the woman can be valorized by translating the phrase as a marital “pillar of strength in times of trouble” or “opposite number.” Yet I remain unpersuaded that the construction of woman in this canonical text is anything other than the first crime (of many) against the humanity of women. It is a crime against her image/ination by God.

Martin Buber drew Genesis 1 and 2 together with the phrase “In the beginning was the relation.”9 On the grounds I have outlined above, I think he is wrong on two counts. First, Buber’s own distinction between “being” (Sein) and “seeming” (Schein), knows that when the appearance of a person becomes the figuration of an ideology (as Genesis 2 narrates of women) their presence or face is reduced to mere propaganda, which is a symptom and cause of alienation.10 Second, Genesis 2 surely marks the beginning of the instrumental I/It binary: a male “I” being given a female “it” or a thing among things that renders her an existential vacuity.

In sum, I have suggested that neither Welz, nor the feminist theologians she cites who have noted that a woman bears the image of God only secondarily by virtue of her complementary marital relationship with a man, have paid sufficient attention to the theological anthropology of Genesis 2. Here, I suggest, woman is not made in the image of God at all. After the construction of her prototype in Genesis 2, a woman can be poured out into a mould that reproduces, rather than creates, her to the specification of the masculine project.

But the woman to come will not be a standard figment of the patriarchal imagination. The not-yet woman remembers the woman of Genesis 1 who was made in the primary image of the God whose name is “I AM”; I will be who I will be (Exod 3:14): the God for whom there is no likeness. This not-yet woman is a figure and voice of the messianic for when she exists, that is, when she appears at her own gate and steps forth from the four walls of her construction, incommensurable and irreducible to any other woman who has ever walked this earth, the other Others will come out in joy to meet her.

The believing Christian lives between the two great acts of God—between the creation by which we move and have our being, and the revelation by which we may understand what these things mean. As we learn from the Greeks, we do not require revelation in order to come to an understanding of ourselves in the natural world and might even ground that understanding in the idea of a divine creator. But then we are able to say only very little about the creator. In the Timaeus, a myth of the cosmos depicts the creator as a sort of craftsman who brings together preexisting form and what is otherwise formless matter (Timaeus 31b–48b), and the decidedly non-mythical progression of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (XII 7) arrives finally at the thought that God is always in the good state that we ourselves achieve only rarely, though we do strive after it according to the very dynamism of our being. But if faith in revelation enables the Christian to say considerably more about God, it also leaves her with all of the difficulties one easily anticipates when it is a matter of a finite being brought before words and images that express the will of one who is infinite. To be sure, the question that arises is not of their origin, but rather of their meaning.

The theology that accepts divine revelation suspends from consideration Feuerbach’s idea that our conception of God is born in anxiety and fashioned of our own experience. This does not mean that such a theology claims to fully understand the revelation, and does not rule out every suspicion that certain propositions about the revealed God may prove all too human. Theological reflection applies itself to the work of achieving a better understanding of what is revealed, and in its course addresses anthropomorphism as a circumscribed problem. Still, we ought not forget that a deformed understanding of revelation may nonetheless be a response to it, and ought not pass over the thought that revelation is thus received by consciences with uneven capacities for understanding it. We tend to think we know the difference between a weak and a vital understanding, but in truth the thought is unfounded until we have first worked out the more elusive fact that a God who transcends our very being can enter consciousness at all. As long as we hold fast to the idea that God is infinite and human beings are finite, the only possible answer is that God has already prepared a place in us for this to occur. And so, Christianity is a faith in which creation is interpreted in light of the possibility of revelation. God will have created us such that we live in readiness to hear or see divine revelation, and reflection on that readiness is a fundamental key to knowing what we truly are.

These few thoughts conclude just short of the point where Claudia Welz’s Humanity in God’s Image begins: in an exploration of the possible meanings of three passages in which Genesis states that we are created in, according to, or as the image of God (27–28). The implication is unmistakable: our human being is itself not only, as one might adduce from the metaphysics of creation, an expression of the divine will, but already a revelation of who or what God is. This opens a distinctive path toward understanding our place before God, but it also introduces a new complication. It is, after all, scripture, the revealed text, that enjoins us to approach our existence also as revelation. Or, if one wishes to avoid equivocal use of “revelation,” it is by what is revealed in scripture that we are to address ourselves as imagines Dei. Or again, from Genesis—and, to be sure, from other biblical texts—we learn that self-knowledge will go hand-in-hand with knowledge of God. Welz does not pursue this primarily as a matter of biblical exegesis. Taking up some of its conceptual possibilities, she instead appeals to a remarkable range of disciplines and discourses in order to draw them out. Thus, it follows from the most straightforward sense of being created imago Dei that we are dependent on God in our very being. The special difficulty of Welz’s theme probably arises already here, for it follows from this that it is not clear whether, even at our most vital and virtuous, we bring forth the presence of God and not in fact cover it.

The early chapters of her book marshal an entire series of concepts in response: human being is depicted as fundamentally deictic (chapter 1), the sense in which mimesis presupposes and requires a degree of resemblance is submitted to its differentiating function (chapter 2), and similarity and dissimilarity are carded from one another without complete separation (chapter 3). Now it deserves attention that all of this is organized around an association of the divine with invisibility and the human with visibility, not because this can be surprising when it is a matter of interpreting an imago but with a view to recognizing some consequences. Chapter 4 soon enough, though again unsurprisingly, begins to parse different senses of light and visibility according to the manner in which we inhabit them. It would seem necessary to admit a certain form of light and vision in order to conceptualize the bare possibility of ever recovering the imago Dei thought by some to have been present in the soul but lost from view due to sin (Irenaeus) or to even distinguish the powers of the soul which would operate in darkness were it not for God’s grace from that grace itself (Luther, Kierkegaard; see 123–24). And in turn, such thoughts easily rejoin the traditional association of increasing degrees of light and visibility with increasing degrees of elevation from sin, though bearing in mind that in the special case of God’s invisibility is not mere lack of light (God, it has often been observed, transcends the difference between light and darkness).

Everything thus suggests that the believer comes to know what it means that she is imago Dei not as the result of prolonged mental exercise or sudden insight but in the course of a life of discipleship, of commitment to what is offered and commanded by God. If it is not actually one and the same thing to live coram Deo and know who one truly is as God’s creature, then at least the same principles and practices lead toward both. But of course, for Christians discipleship is formed as a response specifically to Jesus Christ, and so as discipleship becomes prominent, Welz turns to Christology.

What are the prospects for developing a Christology within the topos of visibility and light? Let us not forget Welz’s expanded definitions of these terms: “visibility” is comprehension from a perspective, and “light” is availability for comprehension. Incarnate, here among us in this world yet also one with the Father, Jesus is both visible and invisible; he is available to be seen from a finite human perspective, yet more than any such perspective could ever grasp. For high Christologies of the sort recently promoted by Jean-Luc Marion, Jesus thus is gift, superabundance, excess of light pouring more into the field of vision than any perspective could receive, and in that way awakening us to the outline of the field itself (163–65). This would be a metaphysical (or donatological) approach to what the dialectical and relational theologies favored by Welz underline again and again: the possibility of faith arises at the initiative of Jesus, who is both human and divine. Jesus proposes a way of life that promises salvation, and that life consists in saying yes to this. But then the way of life, as a struggle against the darkness of sin, depends on the visibility of Jesus. Here, visibility carries significant weight: since, as everyone knows, Jesus’s proposal comes in the form of a teaching that models certain practices (humility, love . . .), the believer must be able to see Jesus as someone who can be imitated. It is in imitating Jesus that one will come to know him, and thus be brought before the Father as fully in his image.

All of this prepares one to expect from Welz a discourse on the living body of Jesus, as the necessary condition for an identification that makes imitation possible. In some pages entitled “Imitation through Identification” (153–54), she follows Bonhoeffer all the way “back,” as it were to the locus classicus for this topic, Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, which Bonhoeffer read during his imprisonment. But Bonhoeffer understood imitatio as Nachfolge of Jesus’s efforts (156), and one must wonder whether this quite gets at the essential. The “efforts” that we are to imitate include prominent place for suffering, by which the claims of the world are defeated in favor of a higher good, but Jesus’s suffering, we should not forget, is physical no less than spiritual. And regardless of quite how far one is willing or able to go with this, the fact itself brings us to a point of some phenomenological importance: only a love that is given with the entirety of one’s being is able to call upon the entire being of the beloved. Declarations of love, fine preaching and entreaties are no doubt necessary, but they come closer to us, and feel more certain, if they are accompanied by physical evidence. I take this to be what Feuerbach has in mind when, in his book on Luther, he refers to Jesus as “the sensuous [sinnliches] essence of God.”1 The revelation that is God Incarnate can reach us, as it were, body to body, striking our senses no less than our imagination or intellect. It would be in and as Jesus that God calls to the whole of our being, making possible the only response adequate in faith, love for love. Moreover, just as the body of Jesus is an integral part of God’s call to faith, so is it the steadying focus for the believer’s response. In Christian faith, the body of Jesus—his physical body, as a historical reality—grounds the work of imagination and intellect, which to be sure are also engaged in discipleship.

I am puzzled, therefore, that in the illuminating tour de force that is Humanity in God’s Image there is no concentrated reflection on the human body of Jesus Christ. One might expect to find it in the long chapter on “Likeness to God in Love and Suffering” (chapter 5), but there the central matter is still the difficult relation between image as example (i.e., Jesus as Vorbild) and the limits of our identification and imitation, which for understandable reasons becomes construed as a fruitful way into reflection on nature, sin, and grace. One might turn with all the more expectation to a short section on “Christomorphism” (182–87)—a section which I consider crucial for the entire effort of the book. There the topic is the corporeal dimension of becoming Christ-like, and so the matter of Jesus’s own body is quite close. Indeed, there is close attention to the face of Jesus, of which it is said that it is “not merely a metaphor” and “a body part” (183). Yet these thoughts are parsed rather than integrated, so that there is, on one hand, reference to its unique capacity to admit glory into the world (“mediator,” “ideal image of God,” etc.), and on the other hand, at least a concession that, like any other body part, it may appear as “an opaque, ambiguous phenomenon” (183).

These passages strike me as overdetermined by the abiding concern with visibility and invisibility, and in two senses. First, I do not otherwise know how to understand the tendency to restrict attention to Jesus’s lived body only to his face, though I do agree that there are established reasons to define it by a reflection of divine glory. Second, I also cannot easily admit the apparent dichotomy opened, or almost opened, between the face as revelatory and the face as opaque, whether or not one decides to extend it to the other parts of Jesus’s body. But I do not know whether my phenomenological sketch of the loving encounter that gives rise to faith opens up a theological debate, or only adds to a work that has already said a great deal about many important things.

Claudia Welz’s Humanity in God’s Image offers a rich exploration of multiple understandings of the imago Dei and what it means to say that humans being are created in God’s image. Further it seeks to grapple with that theological idea in the aftermath of the Shoah and other atrocities. What does human dignity mean, Welz asks, in a world in which humans are humiliated, tortured, and murdered? Welz pays sustained attention to both Jewish and Christian theology, making of the book a kind of interreligious effort. The sheer number and variety of interlocutors—of theologians and philosophers and artists and authors—that she draws into her discussion make the book particularly useful for graduate students and others trying to orient themselves within the vast body of contemporary and classical thought related to questions of the human, the image of God, dignity, and the like.

Welz offers insightful and innovative articulations of the dialectic between visibility and invisibility as both an either/or and a both/and, of the role of the imagination in bringing partial visibility to the invisible, and of the necessary indeterminacy of images that offer indirect access to that which cannot be accessed directly. Eschewing “every image that determines once and for all how someone is seen” (2), Welz explores multiple images of God and of the human made in God’s image, including even artistic self-portraits. Particularly powerful is her suggestion that we need a prohibition against making idols not only of God but also of each other, where the word “idols” suggests fixed images that inhibit rather than engage our dialogical engagement with each other.

Readers are made to consider many things anew by the provocative and productive juxtapositions, interrelations, and interpretations offered in her book. For example, in chapter 7, “Imago Dei and Crimes Against Humanity: Biblical and Post-Holocaust Perspectives on an Ethics of In-Visibility”—the first chapter in part 4: “Ethics with an Eschatological Proviso”—Welz takes seriously the idea that Christian theology must grapple with the events and aftermath of the Shoah, and grapple with them at its very core—its very understandings of God and of humans; the Shoah “provoke[s] a radical re-vision of Christian theology” (14). This is a much-needed effort, as all too many theological projects either neglect to engage the Shoah, or simply acknowledge the need to do so but then fail to do so at any level of depth. Welz asks: “Can we do anything for the restitutio ad integrum of the image of an invisible God? How, if at all, can we (if this ‘we’ includes Holocaust survivors and perpetrators) recognize ourselves and each other as having been created in God’s image?” (204). The chapter offers short excurses into the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Melissa Raphael, Walter Benjamin, and Avishai Margalit.

1.

One of the questions the book raised for me was the following: Is there a danger that the very effort to recover the image of God within the human might overlook the person, instrumentalize her as the location of God’s image, serving to buffer us from God’s absence? There are points in the book where the particular sufferers and survivors seem somewhat lost from view, in the background, unseen. While the idea of a normative, counterfactual understanding of human dignity—one that does not rest on the appearance or capacities of the individual person—seems crucial, I wonder if there might be a temptation to overlook the very real someone before me in my very effort to affirm her dignity and her being made in the image of God. Might the very ideas of human dignity and/or of being created in the image of God themselves, at times, function as objectified images of the other?

I think Welz is aware of this danger when she suggests that “the imago Dei is not a stable entity, but rather the result of a dynamic process of solidary inter-human interaction” (211–12) and states that “without imitatio Dei, the imago Dei disappears” (211). She seeks to hold together what she calls the mimetic and anti-mimetic interpretations of what it means for humans to be made in the image of God—the mimetic being based on humans acting like God and the anti-mimetic pointing to the uniqueness and transcendence of each concrete other, as God too is the absolutely other. Nevertheless, there seems to be room for more caution.

2.

My second question has to do with what it means to say that the imago Dei is distorted beyond recognition. Welz refers to the possibility of speaking of “the sad instance of an imago Dei being distorted beyond recognition” (207), “the restitution of the image of the invisible God when it has been distorted, degraded, and debased” (212), and uses terms such as reforge, recovery, and restitution as the modes in which the image of God might be made visible once again. How does Welz distinguish between what happens to the imago Dei of the perpetrator and what happens to the imago Dei of the victim? It seems as if the same vocabulary describes them both, and if this is so, I think we might need to revise that vocabulary to distinguish between what, to my mind, should be not be side-by-side. To elide the difference between perpetrator and victim in any particular injustice is to elide that injustice.

These questions are really ones of clarification for a rich, intellectually provocative study, undertaken with sensitivity and intellectual rigor. I learned a great deal from reading it and look forward to continuing to learn from it.

1.

The object of these notes is Claudia Welz’s engagement with dignity in her recent book Humanity in God’s Image. The book itself is one of the most sustained, significant, and original works written on the topic of the imago Dei in many years. Welz herself is a prolific and important writer whose work—particularly in chapter 8 of her book—takes place at the intersection of theology, philosophy, and legal theory. She is a thinker whose activities are central to the current preoccupations of the humanities. Rather than comment on her project as a whole, the task here, as already noted, is limited to her discussion of dignity. Dignity is not an arbitrary concern. On the contrary, the broader context is provided by one of the claims made by Hannah Arendt at the beginning of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt’s argument is clear. After the “totalitarian,” almost as the demand bequeathed by its actuality, human dignity needs what she terms “a new guarantee.”1 The continual presence of war, famine, and enforced austerity further underscores the exigency of her position.

Accepting this need as the point of departure necessitates that a number of remarks concerning dignity be made in advance. There is, of course, an important discussion that would involve developing a genealogy of “dignity.”2 At the outset the Latin dignitas which, at its most elementary can be described as involving a contingent quality of human existence, is transformed in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. In the latter dignity is linked to the interplay of autonomy and freedom. Hence the famous formulation:

We have made you neither of heaven nor of earth neither mortal nor immortal, so that you may as the free and extraordinary shaper of yourself, fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer (in quam malueris tute formam effingas).3

What is important here is not just that dignity is connected to freedom and thus to self-fashioning. A sense of freedom is indicated by the self-fashioning (effingas) having been linked to what is wanted or wished for (malueris). In other words, there can be the expression of a preference within the process of self-fashioning. The form is not determined in advance. More significantly, it is a preference that is always to be realized. Hence the important modal point. Capacity and freedom are the inscription of an always already sensed futurity into and as part of the present. What marks the singularity of this particular interplay of freedom and capacity, once it is interarticulated with the identification of an end as the expression of a particular preference or want, is that when these elements are taken together they can be understood as identifying the presence of a potentiality that is intrinsic to human being. There is therefore the inscription of potentiality whose presence is integral to the being of being human. Potentiality entails forms of activity. Being human therefore has to be thought in terms of activity. The activity in question is life. However, this is not just the life of the body. It is rather that human being—human life—is defined in terms of the actualization of what can be called the potentiality to be. The possibility of defining life as having no end other than itself is a possibility that has to be thought in terms of potentiality (the concept of “potentiality”). While it may be possible to attribute a sense of the epigenetic to natural development, the presence of disequilibria of power within human relations—and moreover the necessity to understand human history in terms of the unfolding of those relations—means that the potential to be, is the potential to “fashion yourself in whatever form you prefer” is not actualized of necessity. Its taking place is the actualization of a potentiality whose possibility of that actualization is itself contingent. Consequently, the refusal to allow it to occur and thus for the potential to remain unactualized, means, in the case of the latter, a diminution in what is entailed by (and for) human being. Potentiality to be endures as unactualized. The significant point here is that dignity cannot be separated from either the potential to be and thus, in terms of its negative determination, from the possibility of that potential remaining unactualized.

The claim here is not that Pico argues for such a position. The claim is that once centrality is attributed to a capacity for self-fashioning—and that this capacity identifies a locus of freedom—dignity is allowed a fundamental reformulation. Dignity loses its merely moral status by having acquired an ontological force. (Hence what emerges is a fundamental and original coincidence between the ethical and the ontological.)4 Dignity has to figure therefore within a philosophical anthropology that is orientated by a concern with human being. Dignity cannot be separated from the being of being human to the extent that human being is understood in terms of a potentiality to be. These opening considerations open the path to a more direct encounter with the presence of dignity. Or, to the question of what is the presence of dignity? Can there be a phenomenology of dignity? (The final question is central to Welz’s project.)

2.

While Welz’s engagement with dignity in Humanity in God’s Image is not limited to her argument—one repeating the opening line of the German Grundgesetz—that dignity is “inviolable,” such a claim plays a fundamental role in her engagement with the topic (233). Any argument concerning either the nature or the location of human dignity cannot escape the problem of definition. Hence the question: What is the force of the claim that dignity is inviolable if it is not clear what this quality actually is? What is it that is inviolable? It would seem that without a definition of dignity it becomes impossible to advance any claim concerning its nature. There is a complex problem here. What would “definition” mean in such a context? Dignity, were it to be in fact inviolable, would have to pertain even at those moments in which its absence was the most evident. In other words, in such instances it would be the apparent invisibility of dignity—its absence at any one moment—that allowed it to be present. And yet, what is it that is absent? What is not there is that which is still, in fact, there—there in its violation. Attention may be called to a face that bears the marks of cruelty. Those marks are seen. They are visible. What they manifest is the violation. And yet, while there is an important connection between invisibility and manifestation—and these terms are central to the development of any phenomenological account of dignity—what of the face cannot be seen? What of those whose circumstances are such that they are literally invisible? Those who have had possibility of recognition stripped from them. There is a straightforward answer to these questions. They are not seen because they are not able to appear. They are not seen therefore because they are not able to enter spaces in which recognition occurs. They will be a range of possible reasons for this form of non-presence. However, what is significant is that a certain set of actions have brought it about. A result that will need to be secured and thus policed. Invisibility as non-presence is a state of affairs that isolates. That isolation will often need to be sustained. The important element here is that this general account pertains as much to groups who, because of certain defining elements (race, religion, ethnicity, etc.), have been isolated, as it does to an individual whose treatment, even within a domestic setting, enforces forms of separation. In all such instances isolation closes down the possibility of any form of recognition that is defined in phenomenological terms. Appearance is the very precondition for being an object of experience—let alone of relations defined in terms of intersubjectivity. The possibility of experience will have been excised. The individual—be it the individualized group or the individual person—subject to such processes will have become anonymous. While the actualization of this possibility has to be understood as a sustained activity—one that can be described as rendering anonymous—anonymity closes down the possibility of experience.

In the first instance invisibility occurs within a directly phenomenological setting. Even if the question of dignity remains, at this stage, only partially answered, it would nonetheless seem self-evident to argue that those subject to cruelty or forced into starvation, or those who are the victims of violence, have to live lives that have been stripped of dignity. And yet, to the extent that dignity is an intrinsic quality of human being, thus to the extent that dignity is in fact inviolable, then it is present in its absence. Invisibility pertains here therefore to that which while absent can still be experienced (experienced as absent). The other sense of invisibility pertains to those who have been subjected to radical acts of exclusion; e.g., forced exile, internal segregation, forms of profound indifference. It is important to note this divide within invisibility. The experience of the invisible points to the presence of that which while being an object of experience does not demand literal presence in order that it be experienced. As a result, there has to be an account of this form of presence. Dignity in this context can be said to attend the empirical and the pragmatic. It is thus immanent within empirical pragmatic acts without ever being reducible to them. What is created as a result is a space that will always hold between that which attends—immanent presence—and any one determinate instance (and therefore determinant instances in general). That space allows for the presence of that to which a call can continue to be made; a call that in the end takes on the form of a judgment. It can continue to be made—thus judgment attends as an always already present possibility—precisely because that to which the call is made, that which grounds judgment, is held apart from any one determinant instance.

It will be this invisibility that can also be deployed in responding to the position and states of affairs created by processes of rendering anonymous. To be anonymous is to be without a name. To be rendered anonymous is to have either a sense of identity taken away or to be ascribed an identity or name that orients the named in ways they cannot control. Such names or identities cannot be affirmed by the named. More significantly, the ascription of a name is to have been named in such a way that the named need no longer recognize themselves within the name. To claim a name, or to resist and refuse either the processes of rendering anonymous or the ascription of name, is not simply a claim that is self-referring, it is a claim, to deploy the discussion orchestrated above, to actualize the potentiality for “self-fashioning.” It is thus a claim for freedom. This is not however the freedom of a subject. Rather it is to allow for the possibility of becoming a subject who acts freely. It is the demand therefore to appear. Appearing does not occur in isolation. Appearing always occurs in medias res. Appearing occurs with others who also appear. Appearing is therefore always relational. Appearing within relationality—where appearing is equally constitutive of relationality such that singulars are individuated by relations—calls on judgment to the extent that appearing is either allowed or disallowed. Appearing is of course inextricably bound up with the actualization of the potentiality to be and thus where the continuity (though equally this discontinuity) within modes of actualization are indicative of different forms of life.

3.

Welz’s approach to dignity is described as “phenomenological” (230). In other words, what has primacy at the outset is the possibility of the experience of dignity, and the limits of possible experience! As has been noted, integral to her engagement with dignity is its inviolability. What always has to be confronted however is the continual violation of this inviolability; i.e., brute actuality. However, inviolability is not a mere token. Indeed, she goes on to suggest that this “inviolability” is “the root of all human rights” (233). (While it cannot be pursued here the difficulty with this claim is that what is left out of consideration is what Arendt describes as the “right to have rights.”) As the argumentation develops, the position being advanced depends—rightly it should be added—on the claim that “dignity remains invisible to the human eye” (236). Hence the importance of the question of what counts as the “expression” of human dignity? It cannot just be a subjective observation. On the contrary for Welz visibility “is not a visual appearance but a hermeneutical one. Human dignity becomes visible in being understood. To ‘understand’ human dignity means to recognize it, and to act accordingly” (238). While the hermeneutical is sustained insofar as literal seeing is continually called into question, she still concludes the chapter with the claim that “the recognition of human dignity . . . demands of us that we try to see the invisible” (254). The problems posed by how “seeing the invisible” is to be understood will continue.

After arguing for a move from visual appearance to the hermeneutical, dignity is then described as an orientating norm. As though what occasions the move from the purely visible to the hermeneutical is the presence of such a norm. The mode of perceiving that emerges in the move from literal visibility to the hermeneutical is argued for in terms of recognition. In this regard, the working hypothesis is that “the acknowledgement of one’s right to exist and to be respected as a human being and the equal value of all human beings—is fulfilled and denied in and through an exchange of looks with others” (241). Looking connects the hermeneutic and the phenomenological. This position is worked through Kierkegaard on love and Sartre on shame. The argument in regard to Kierkegaard is that while love is important and that seeing with “a loving eye” may secure the other’s dignity, the question is “what happens when someone feels exposed to the loveless gaze of the other?” (243). A limit is reached. This is the point where shame and shame’s link to the gaze emerges. The problem with shame, for Welz, is that if a subject feels shamed as a result of the other’s look then there is “the risk” of a loss of self-worth and thus of dignity. In the end Kierkegaard’s work on love as mode of looking becomes the more productive precisely because it allows—through the loving gaze—for the possibility of a form of unseeing of that which may threaten dignity. Actions can be seen through. And yet there still needs to be more. At the limit of seeing there has to be the recognition, not just of the other’s presence, but that dignity is “owed in all circumstances” to the other (249). Dignity is there as a yet to be fulfilled demand.

This opens up the question of the presence of dignity after death. There is more to this question than is present in the book. The corpse demands dignity. But why? On the one hand the relation to God—were there to be one—would also have to obtain post mortem. Were the human to be there as the image of God in life then this would have to be a state of affairs that would also hold after death. At work, here is a form of transcendence that is there with the body and equally with God. Where this leads Welz is to the argument that “dignity can be regarded as an ‘inherent’ property of the person only if it is a property that is at the same time ‘abroad’ in the sense of being independent of human judgment” (252). While this description is accurate the complexity lies in what “independent of human judgment” actually means. If it is truly independent then dignity cannot be a norm for the precise reason that it is not difficult to identify norms—and even laws—that have been or still are destructive of dignity. Dignity cannot even be an orientating norm. It is rather that a concern with dignity must itself be orientated.

The corpse makes demands because it cannot remain purely anonymous. Even the unnamed corpses that lay on battlefields are commemorated as the Unknown. The now present ubiquity of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier acknowledges these deaths. While the names may have been forgotten such tombs are a stand against pure anonymity. This is a tradition already evident in Pericles’s Funeral Oration in which even “the missing” (τῶν ἀφανῶν) are provided with a form of commemoration and thus presence.5 Dignity is preserved through recognition and thus with the refusal of anonymity. What is named is a quality that cannot be reduced to the body. Moreover, what is named is that which is in excess of any norm. (And as such is able to orientate norms whilst at the same time allowing for the judgment of their content.) In naming the corpse, in refusing anonymity, there is the affirmation of dignity in the precise sense that what has been given to the corpse is the quality of having had a life. Life is of course more than having been alive. Life is appearing with others. While Welz invokes a sense of relationality insofar as she argues at one point that “dignity is about being-subject-for-others” what is left out is that dignity involves living a life with others.6 And yet, what endures is the problem of definition. Hence the question: What is dignity? Welz is right to argue that “the recognition of human dignity . . . demands of us that we try and see the invisible” (254). This is however not enough since there are further questions. What is it that is “invisible”? On one level the answer is straightforward it is an inherent or intrinsic quality. If actuality involves violation then the inviolable cannot be reduced to the domain of brute actuality. And yet what content can be given to the inviolable?

Welz’s recourse to the interplay of the phenomenological and hermeneutic is the right approach. However, such an approach can only work if dignity, rather than having a yet to be named essential quality, could be descriptive of human life. A dignified life would then be one in which there was the continuity of the actualization of the potentiality to be. In other words, dignity is neither a contingent predicate nor a mere intrinsic quality. Dignity, as a term within a philosophical anthropology, is invisible insofar as it is the immanent presence of the potentiality to be. The experience of its affirmation, or its refusal, is the experience of the acting out of human being within the public realm. Dignity continues as an unfulfilled call within the present, and for the future, because the presence of dignity—now thought as the actualization of the potentiality to be—is of necessity unconditional.

Humanity is created in God’s image. But “what sort of image is this?” Claudia Welz asks. Taking it as an open question, she departs from three ways of examining this question in order to forge an interdisciplinary approach “re-visioned through the prism of the Shoah or Holocaust” (7).

In an era in which the value of life and lives are in question, Welz’s invitation to rethink this foundational statement about the status of the human is critical. This appeal to the imago Dei is often cited but rarely expounded upon or examined in depth. Welz returns to this biblical motif to assess its potential to speak after genocide—in what she refers to as “the gray zone-in between” victims and perpetrators (14). And yet the timeliness should not steer us away from Welz’s opening statement that implies that we have come to this conversation too late, that it is overdue, that the unavoidable questions of the Shoah have been avoided. This “we” is Christian theologians. The radical re-visioning of Christian theology post-Shoah has yet to take place.

Carefully reviewing the ways in which the imago has been approached, Welz proposes to develop the notion through a dialectics of visibility and invisibility. Previous models can be reductionistic and can present the image as fixed. Instead, Welz emphasizes that the imago Dei is a “complex sign embodied by the human being” (43). It is best understood in terms of a gesture, a transformed glance, and a synaesthetic experience. She develops, by invoking a variety of Jewish and Christian thinkers, ways of imagining “divine and human in-visibility” (12) that express something of the texture of existence, both as tensed and temporalized. For readers who presume to know what it is to claim this imago Dei as a fundamental claim about existence (biblically rendered), Welz challenges these presumptions by developing a “phenomenology of (in)visibility.” She carefully guides readers into what we might consider familiar territory, by exposing the richness of the soil, the topography, alternative routes, and, thus opening up to new discoveries. Welz often closes a section by presenting another question for consideration.

It takes a while to discern where Welz’s sympathies lie amidst her attention to the full landscape of scholarly contributions (“I have sympathy for this approach,” 41). Phrases like “transformed glance,” “becoming the places,” “searching,” and “shines through” are repeated. Unfixed and incomplete, this image orients humans to the world in a particular way. But she is interested in what happens to this image at the limits of human experience. She takes the perennial question of God’s presence and absence in suffering and, in subtle turns of inquiry, plants the seeds for what Emmanuel Levinas imagines as “a new anthropology.”1

Welz’s post-Shoah prism returns us to the unresolved and unsatisfactory status of Christian theological responses to the Holocaust. I want to focus my comments here, because although she concludes there, the concern has been present throughout. She asks whether “the doctrine of the divinity of Christ” can be rethought through the prism of the Holocaust (272). She turns to the most recognized christological response—the work of Jürgen Moltmann. There have, to date, been few critiques by Christian theologians of Moltmann’s reimagining of the Christian cross in response to the Holocaust. Perhaps this is a gesture of reverence for his personal narrative and the narrative form that precipitated his re-visioning, i.e., a response to Elie Wiesel’s novel Night. But the logic is difficult to swallow. Reworking Christian claims from the site of Auschwitz, Moltmann claims “salvific presence at the place that Wiesel calls hell” (273), Welz notes.heseems to preserve Christian hope from ruins without regard for the experience of Jews. He, according to Welz, overrides Wiesel’s testimony of forsakenness with Christian claims of hope. While Moltmann challenges classical conceptions of the divine nature, he does not change the posture of Christian theology toward Jewish suffering. The taking of Auschwitz into Godself through the event of the dying of the Son enacts a familiar series of erasures in order to secure Christian hope.

In a recent chapter on comparative Christology, Marianne Moyaert returns, as well, to Wiesel’s interpretation of the “God on the gallows.” Moyaert is probing the Jewish and Christian hermeneutics of the “suffering servant,” a biblical image that Jews read in terms of Israel’s collective suffering and Christians read in terms of Jesus, the suffering servant, in whose suffering holds the promise of redemption. Moyaert writes: “Christians cannot, it seems, understand the suffering servant in any other way than as a Messianic prediction of the coming of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”2 There is no doubt that Moltmann takes the Shoah as a starting point for his reworking of Christology and that many Christians hear a profound affirmation of God’s identification with suffering through this reading. And yet Moyaert is left with an “unpleasant feeling.”3 Christians have already found an answer; they do not need to linger long in the forsakenness. Welz similarly notes that the forsakenness of the moment that Wiesel narrates is negated by Moltmann’s God of the cross. She images Wiesel’s response: What good is this reframed Christology (see 274)—here?

The drive to proclaim new life in the face of the rupture of human experience seems so built into the liturgical life of Christians. Resurrection is assured. Easter Sunday holds the promise. The divinity of Christ seems to depend on such readings. And so, too, the continuation of Western triumphalism, according to Levinas. I have critiqued this smooth transition from death to life in Christian interpretations of cross and resurrection, but Welz shifts my attention to gestures and postures. When standing in the space of the gallows, what would make it possible for Christianity to sit with, even bear with, the horror and forsakenness? What kind of Christology could facilitate that? James Cones, in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, positions white Christian theologians here, as well, asking why they are unable to see black suffering. Why are well-meaning Christian theologians unable to read the ancient cross in relationship to the crosses of history?

Hugh Nicholson, in his response to Moyaert’s essay, points out that christological appeals have always been rooted in polemics, and that this polemical posture is so implanted in the development of Christology that Christianity inevitably repeats these motions, albeit unwittingly.4 Early Christians formed their identity as underdogs, seeing themselves as embattled, fledgling, struggling for legitimacy, and shamed. This early perception took hold, even as its historical development was quite the opposite. Nicholson, quoting Raymond Brown, notes that this “Christology one-upmanship” is rooted in early experiences of shame and attempts to overcome it.5 This untouched shame, as Stephanie Arel points out, is also untouched in doctrinal formulations, eclipsed by guilt in dominant theological anthropologies. So while Moyaert proposes that Christianity must look in the mirror, face its perpetrator status, and take responsibility, I think we are dealing with a perception problem. Looking in the mirror, it sees a distorted image.

This diagnosis of Christianity’s distorted self-image is a project for our times, and it is one named by theologians like Willie James Jennings in The Christian Imagination. It is a Christo-logical problem, but it is a failure on another level. It is a perception, affection, and formation problem. Instead, it requires a different intervention, one that is able to decipher the optics and examine the moves and gestures that underlie doctrinal formulations.

Welz distances her study from dogmatic theology, implying that doing Christology in this mode is guilty of such harmful interpretations. But I wonder if the distance that she proposes for christological investigation will fail to make a necessary intervention into these reenactments of Christian triumphalism. How might that logic be loosened, so that it does not continue to repeat such performances? From my stance as a theologian within the American context, I am attentive to the theological work that is needed to release many from its hold, both within Christian settings but also in its cultural manifestations.

It may not be Welz’s project to loosen this hold, but her methodology is rich for doing so. The dialectics of visibility and invisibility provides clues for how Christology might be configured in such a way as to do necessary interventions in dogmatic theology. Evidenced in visible currents of mobilized Christianities, such christological images have shaped the Christian imaginary over a long period of time. In treatments of trauma, one of the aims is to disrupt neural pathways that have, over time, set various responses in motion. How might these neural pathways be disrupted and redirected? This cannot be done by simply appealing to the frontal lobe, i.e., by targeting logic. Because the body is locked in certain practices of response, a somatic and synaesthetic intervention is needed.

Welz displays throughout that something unique happens “at the intersection of philosophy, theology, and poetry” (84). Not only can paradox and contradictions be expressed, but this dialectic, as she develops it, is also able to bear loss and facilitate capacities to witness loss. What if this “bearing” is taken more literally, more weightily, more somatically. Maybe when one gazes at the cross(es) at this intersection, vision fades, giving way to other senses. The imago is nowhere to be found. Ways of searching open up. In the Christian gospels, women tend the dead body of Jesus. They fragrance it and wrap it. They weep over it. There is no triumph there; there is tending. Attention is swiftly turned, in the transmission of these accounts, to appearance narratives that confirm the identity of Jesus as the Christ. Tending is eclipsed. Those who witness the rupture of his death learn how to witness what is unbearable, without sweeping it into a resolution, without insisting on an answer. Death is not a problem to be solved. It is a reality to be tended. The promise lies in the holding, the tending. In a section on poetics inspired by Egyptian Jewish poet Edmond Jabès, Welz considers: “Maybe God can be represented only if a multiplicity of individuals work together, join the pieces, and thereby compose the imago Dei—contributing themselves to a pluriform unfinished picture, a picture to be seen by God alone at the end of times?” (67).

I believe the yield of Welz’s methodology may be something called “Christaesthetics,” a term inspired by my reading of Welz’s Frida Kahlo section. The attraction and repulsion the viewer experiences when viewing Kahlo’s self-portrait does important work of orienting us to suffering. The artist alters our perceptions. In a slight turn of the face, we, the viewers, are on the Via Dolorosa. How do we come to see what we do not want to see in ourselves? How do we take responsibility for the triumphalistic gestures performed against Jews? To come to terms with these legacies requires levels of intervention that must bypass our operational logics and begin to work on the level of affect. What really moves us may be what we are unable to see, what is invisible to the eye.