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Foreword by

John D. Caputo

HEBEL Ediciones Arte-Santa | Poesía

Theological Poetry

Eroga Tau. The accused poet opens his wings

Haikus to Heaven Pauper God. Theographies

Luis Cruz-Villalobos

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Eroga Tau. The accused poet opens his wings.

Original Title: Eroga Tau. Escampe del poeta maldito.

© Luis Cruz-Villalobos, 1997.

Intellectual Property Registration Nº 198.440.

Santiago de Chile, 2010.

Translated to English: Magdalena Mohr & Nancy Thomas, 2011.

Haikus to Heaven.

Original Title: Haikus al Cielo.

© Luis Cruz-Villalobos, 2012.

Poems pertaining to the work: Poesía Toda 1991-2011.

© Luis Cruz-Villalobos, 2012.

Intellectual Property Registration N° 213.820

Translated to English: Ryan Flanders, 2013.

Pauper God. Theographies.

Original Title: Dios Mendigo. Teografías.

© Luis Cruz-Villalobos, 2012.

Poems pertaining to the work: Poesía Toda 1991-2011.

© Luis Cruz-Villalobos, 2012.

Intellectual Property Registration N° 213.820.

Santiago de Chile.

Translation to English: Efraín Quilen & Ryan Flanders, 2013.

Foreword by: John D. Caputo

Photograph of front and back: Gonzalo F. Faúndez.

© HEBEL Ediciones, 2019.

Colección Arte-Sana | Poesía

Santiago de Chile.

ISBN-10: 1702116190

ISBN-13: 978-1702116190

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To our Trinitarian trill

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INDEX

Foreword: Theology, Poetry—and Theopoetics 9

Eroga Tau. The accused poet opens his wings 21

Haikus to Heaven 73

Pauper God. Theographies 179

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FOREWORD

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Theology, Poetry—and Theopoetics

By John D. Caputo

It is my pleasure to offer a word in advance to Luis Cruz-

Villalobos’ Theological Poetry.

The link between theology and poetry runs deep, both

historically and conceptually. The Jewish and Christian

Scriptures belong to “world literature,” which means that like

all literature these texts give words to the deep structures of

human experience. In the case of the Scriptures this means

the experience of God, of God’s in-breaking, interruptive,

even traumatic intervention in our lives. The “word of God” is

the word of the other-in-us, the words that rise up in us in

response to something that addresses us, something that has

transformed our lives, something that takes place in and

under the name (of) “God.” The word of God means the

words we give to God so that God may speak to us. As such,

the Scriptures are a logos, a saying and speaking of God, and so

they are irreducibly theo-logical.

In saying this, of course, I do not have in mind the

scholarly studies, the abstract arguments, and the technical

discourse of “academic” theology, which is an artifact of the

university. I mean instead a more elementary logos and pre-

conceptual theology, let us say a discourse nourished by a pre-

logical logos. I mean an archi-theological discourse that is

deeply embedded in a complex of narratives and hymns, of

prayers and parables, of songs and poems, of epistles, homilies

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and injunctions, in which different communities give different

expressions to different experiences of “God.” The Scriptures

gives words to what God calls, to what God calls for, and to

what we call in calling upon God. They give word, in short, to

a more primordial logos, to a pre-logical logic, or paralogic, of

the call—of what is calling, what is being called, and what is

being called for—in the name (of) “God.” This is the stuff a

more nascent and inchoate theology, where the name of God

is not the name of a supreme entity but the name of a call, and

the people of God are the people of the call.

The Scriptures, thus, are not theological in the strong

sense of the logos that is part of its etymological root. The

word theology is after all a “pagan” word—nowhere to be

found in the Scriptures—that goes back to Aristotle, where it

represents the highest form of episteme (scientia), meaning a

disciplined, rationalized discourse in which everything is

organized in such a way as to support its claims. That is why I

distinguish between a “strong” theology and a “weak” one. In

this way I mean to distinguish between a discursive form that

takes place in the active modality of claiming, of making

claims, and a discourse that holds itself in reserve, that takes

place in the receptive mode of being-claimed, of being-laid-

claim-to, and hence of speaking in the mode of responding to

a prior address by which it is always already overtaken.

Theology in the strong sense is characterized by a classical

Greco-philosophical discursive mode, by a system of

propositional claims that are implicated in the historical

development of the Greek concept of logos, something that is

singled out in the contemporary discussion of the “onto-

theological.” The logos of strong theology refers to predicative

claims, saying something about God, approaching God as a

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constituted object of discourse, as the subject of a set of

predicates, as the bearer of certain conceptual properties,

which are expressible in propositions purporting to

determine certain divine attributes. These propositions are

folded together into strings of propositions, into proofs or

arguments, which make up a body of knowledge, a complex of

true assertions concerning the existence and nature of God.

Strong theology is about entities, propositions and

proofs. It first emerged in Christian antiquity when the early

Christian movement, in search of self-understanding and in

contact with Greek philosophy, was caught up in a series of

“Christological” controversies that were eventually given

canonical formulations in the early councils and their

“creeds.” To be sure, theology at that point had not acquired

the trappings of late scholastic or modernist discourse, the

technical terminology, the formality of argumentation, the

systems and protocols of the university; it still conceived itself

as sapientia, a wisdom for life, not scientia, and it did not think

itself possible outside of Christian community and practice.

But even then, the essential thing was there from the start—

the war over propositions that is witnessed by the

simultaneous birth of heresiology, the outburst of polemics

against the so-called dissidents, the aggressive combat over

the correct claim, the “right belief” (orthe + doxa)

uncontaminated by those who “choose” (haeresis) their own

way, who willfully separate themselves from the orthodox.

Where there is (strong) theology, there is heresiology. The

birth of theology was the birth of twins. From its earliest

beginnings, theology, strong theology, is preoccupied with the

separation of true and false propositions, true and false

claims. It eventually acquired the form of a university or

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“scholastic” discourse, first, in the quaestio disputata of the high

middle ages and then in the modern university where it is at

least as technical a discourse as the other humanities or social

sciences and, like them, has to struggle for respectability in

the face of the “mathematical” sciences.

By weak theology I do not mean something debilitated,

ineffective, and anemic but a theology that abandons the

mode of claiming and gives itself over to a prior being-

claimed. Weak theology does not pretend to the exact

determination of a well-formed proposition; it is not about

proposing propositions but about being exposed to

something prepropositional. Nonetheless, weak theology has

a rigor of its own, practicing a deeper discipline that is not to

be confused with conceptual or mathematical precision. By

rigor I mean—and here I am following the lead of

Heidegger—adhering strictly to the demands of the matter to

be thought and spoken, adhering not to an “object”

constituted by a proposition, but to the things themselves, die

Sache selbst, the matters of deepest concern, which cannot be

reduced to the precision of propositions or to the exactness of

mathematics. It is a false rigor to demand that everything be

exact, that everything be determined by propositions, that

everything submit to the requirements of objectifying

thinking, or that everything be formulated in mathematical

terms. That would be like demanding that impressionist

painters draw clearer lines. There is nothing rigorous about

treating non-objectifiable matters in objectifying terms. To be

sure, thematicization, mathematicization and objectification

have their place, but there are other matters in which these

methods are too “strong,” too ham-fisted, too heavy-handed.

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