ola sigurdsonimmanence — if these at all are appropriate concepts in this con-
text — should not be seen as each other’s rivals. According to Christian
tradition God can be immanent, to put in a simple way, just because
God is transcendent. The transcendence of God should not be under-
stood as a distance that must be overcome but rather as the freedom
of God as the condition of possibility for created human freedom. The
difference between God and human beings that some times is signified
as transcendence could be described as a fundamental asymmetry
where human beings are dependent on God for their existence, but
where God does not need the existence of the world to exist as God.
In this context, the transcendence of God could perhaps best be
described as a truth-event that does not annihilate human subjectivity
but rather breaks with its persistent tendency to circle around itself
and destroys its infantile narcissism.^23 The subjectivity of human
beings becomes like the moon, in a beautiful image suggested by Jean-
Louis Chrétien, as it receives its light from elsewhere.^24 This is also the
reason why Christian tradition has been eager to distinguish prayer
from magic, prediction, and manipulations, as these often could be
understood as ways of taking control. Prayer is about learning to
inhabit human existence as a gift, not a part of an utilitaristic calculus
or the game of human manipulation.
To some readers the very notion and phenomenon of prayer might
not be immediately familiar. Let me therefore try to explain what I
mean through some analogies; there are other human phenomena that
remind us of prayer as far as the kind of subjectivity they imply. One
such phenomenon is humor. Humor, like prayer, is of course a very
ambiguous phenomenon, but if we follow the British philosopher
Simon Critchley in regarding humor as building upon “a disjunction
between the way things are and the way they are represented in the
- The association to Thomas of Aquinos’ notion that “grace does not destroy
nature, but perfects it” (Summa theologiae, I. q.1 a.9) is intentional. But cf. also
Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso
Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, 171: “His alterity is mani-
fested in a mastery that does not conquer, but teaches. Teaching is not a species
of a genus called domination, a hegemony at work within a totality, but is the
presence of infinity breaking the closed circle of totality.” - Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word,” 162. Jean-Louis Chrétien, “The Wounded Word,” 162.