Dante’s theology and contemporary thought: Recovering transcendence?

The dialectic of transcendence and immanence

Particularly the relation between transcendence and immanence—between religious experience of an unspeakable, unknowable order of being and the anthropological and social understanding of human actions and worldly phenomena—has again become radically open to question in a postmodern and, more to the point, post-secular age. These two dimensions (worldly and ultra-worldly) interrogate one another in a way that they generally did not throughout the modern era, which was characterized by the secular realization of the human subject. The modern subject as demiurge was conceived as dominating a material, empirical world molded to its own will and purposes. For Dante, on the cusp of this modernity, the transcendent, eschatological destiny of the human being is in a new and momentous manner grounded in the immanence of rational self-reflection. And yet, for Dante, the nobility and dignity of the human subject is still vested in humanity’s standing in relation to God—in humanity’s being made in the divine image and even being in dialogical communication with a Divinity whom it recognizes as infinitely higher and more noble than itself. The human perfection achieved through speculative intellect is not severed from Christian revelation. Even human self-reflection is still a revelation of theological transcendence. There is in Dante a constitutive tension between the assertion of human autonomy and the total dependence on a higher, transcendent, theological ground that requires acknowledgment and devotion.

This tension is inscribed into the nature of language as Dante theorizes it in De vulgari eloquentia. Man’s own first word is the Name of his Creator: El. Adam turns, in thanks and praise and joy (gaudium), to God rather than becoming absorbed in admiration of himself. This first human word, as an autonomous speech act and the paradigmatic act of human freedom, thus orients the human agent to its transcendent source and origin. The contrary turning is depicted by Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram (book IV, chapter 22) as the sin of the bad angels, engendering their own fallen consciousness, cognitio vespertina.

Dante imagines language, notwithstanding its being the element of the realization of human freedom, as starting from the divine Name, as sacred and as given intact and already formed by God. At the origin of human language stands a “certain form of speech created by God together with the first soul” (“certam formam locutionis a Deo cum anima prima concreatam”), according to De vulgari eloquentia I.vi.4. In the Commedia, however, specifically in Paradiso XXVI, in his dialogue with Adam, Dante comes to a secular understanding of language as generated freely by human will and desire: “nature lets you then invent according to your own fancy” (“natura lascia / poi fare a voi secondo che v’abbella,” 126–131). Nevertheless, this is a secular truth about language that still embodies and expresses a transcendent order of being in relation to God. The transcendent order is not replaced or effaced, nor even made impossibly remote through receding into a scarcely tangible nothingness. On the contrary, divine transcendence becomes palpably present in the sensuous epiphany of the universe: it is concretely expressed by Dante in the poetry of historical existence. Everything human and worldly is still understood by Dante as theological revelation, indeed as theophany. The otherness of the transcendent is absolute in a sense that makes it not inaccessible and remote from us. Instead, the transcendent is placed in a continuum that stretches from the proximate and everyday out and away from us toward what is less familiar and projects, finally, toward the completely unknown. This transcendent otherness cannot be known, and yet it can—and cannot help but—be lived in the absolute immanence of our bodily existence and social relatedness with one another and with everything else in the universe.

The reconfiguring of relations between transcendence and immanence that is currently underway in our own time generally refuses to think in terms of two worlds or two successive lives—this one and the next. Contemporary thinking prefers to imagine different dimensions: a deep dimension and its manifestations in the directly observable empirical world. The strong position of hard-core secularists that there is only this world has proved to be unsatisfying to many thinkers today because of its failure to acknowledge the ineradicable otherness inhering in this world. We often hear today that we are in a postmodern age because the postulate of a single self-enclosed worldly order that was bequeathed by a certain triumphalistic interpretation of modern science and its causal explanation of all by the laws of physics has burst asunder. The universe has now again been opened up to indeterminacy—with quantum physics or, again, with chaos and complexity theory—to what no specifiable order seems able definitively to encompass. The order of things is inhabited by an otherness that corresponds in crucial ways with what had been interpreted in former ages as a mysteriously—and to us incomprehensibly—other world and transcendent Divinity. Dante’s giving incomparable poetic expression to this world as other resonates as uncannily contemporary with our new and emerging episteme. His pre-modern vision prefigures essential aspects of our “postmodern condition,” to put it in terms made famous by Lyotard (1979).

Realized eschatology

Contemporary philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in “La chiesa e il regno” and more extensively in Il tempo che resta (2000), envisages the Gospel as a way of living the immanence of historical time in relation to the transcendent time of the end—apocalypse. Everything in this life here and now takes on a different sense in relation not to the continuous time of historical chronology but rather to the time of revelation, of truth and totality, of apocalypse. St. Paul’s ur-Christian outlook indicates how to live transcendent truth in the immanence of one’s daily life here and now, and in just this respect the Commedia’s message is surprisingly similar. Dante shows the eschatological existence of souls in the afterlife as the final meaning and ultimate truth of their existence in history. This revelation invites all readers to consider their present historical existence in light of the eternal reality of which history shows up as the anticipation and figure (Auerbach, 1959 [1944]).

To live the time of the end (“il tempo della fine”) in the present means also to live the present as ending and ourselves as finite and mortal. It is to live our death, the death of our finite selves such as they are known to us. This consciousness of our end is a way of first realizing what we are and all that we are. Agamben is influenced here by Heidegger’s ontology of finitude and by his notion of “being-for-death” (Sein-zum-Tod). However, for Dante and Christianity such a realization includes also an anticipation of what comes after this life on earth. Dante lives in this tension between the affirmation of immanence for its own sake and the eschatological hope for the promised life to come.

Is the sense of the other life only the heightened, transformed, revolutionized sense of this life? Dante imagines another life in other worlds—namely, hell, purgatory, and heaven. These imaginings are life transforming in addition to being deliberately didactic. Do they, furthermore, represent objective realities? The question implodes, for it is the very objectivity of representation itself that is undermined by this relation of oneself to ultimate reality. ⁴ Living this relation in the penultimate reality of the eschatological “last time” turns the world that we can grasp and objectively experience into a vanishing unreality—at least for the likes of Boethius and Dante, given their Platonic heritage. On the other side of Dante, in history following him, such a reversal in which mystical vision relativizes all worldly knowing achieves articulate theorization in Nicholas Cusanus (1453) and particularly in his De visione Dei. In this perspective, only the ultimate but inconceivable reality is true and real, while the so-called “realities” of the empirical world can only be inadequate images of it. Worldly, finite things’ truth is poetic and ethical, not objective: it lies in some species of value for us. And yet this truth is experienced concretely in our enactment of the ideals we envisage; for example, through the ethical action of charity, or through aesthetic beauty realized not least importantly in the arts and rituals of a liturgy. Christian liturgy, so conceived, is not a representation, in the sense of an imitation of reality: instead, it is itself an unmediated enactment or performance of life and even—at least in intention and projection—of transcendent, eternal life.

Dante ardently embraces the vision of transcendence—of the One or of the divine—that is conveyed in the traditions of both Neoplatonic philosophy and biblical revelation. However, he does so not to the exclusion of radical immanence but rather with a newfound sense of the unconditional worth of the human being and of the nobility of the vernacular tongue. By synthesizing both traditions, Neoplatonic and Scriptural, Dante makes them share in a common hybrid impurity as complex and multiform. He suggests that human embodiment can itself be a source of greater fecundity than the pure form of angelic being that mirrors the divine ray perfectly. Incarnate soul mixed with material, bodily being can reveal aspects and potentials of divinity that would otherwise remain unsuspected. The dignity of man is exalted thereby beyond perhaps even that of the angels, whose nature is purely intellectual alone. At his highest potential, man is “almost another incarnate God” (“quasi sarebbe un altro Iddio incarnato”), according to Dante’s heady declaration in Convivio IV.xxi.10. In the grip of his arguably overweening enthusiasm, at this stage Dante elevates philosophy to a level where it can promise the state of beatitude in this life (in hac vitam). Dante’s outlook thus asserts the continuity of creation with its source in a divine emanation that can best be understood through the metaphysics of light (Ottaviani, 2004).

What we find here is a series of propositions that raise claims for immanence to such a height that they veer toward forms of heresy, specifically of pantheism. The transcendence of God is thereby endangered. Dante seems to be attracted to—and sometimes even to propound—versions of such immanentist doctrines, but he also wishes to remain in line with orthodox Christian belief and is, after all, a passionate knight and indefectible champion of theological transcendence. To follow Dante through the minefield of his own intellectual milieu, we have to rethink the relation of transcendence and immanence along lines that philosophical thought and cultural theory today are intensively engaged in redrawing. Conversely, this relation is already revolutionized by Dante in a manner that can help us to face also our own dilemmas and impasses with greater subtlety and suppleness. Logically, transcendence and immanence are opposites and exclude each other, but apophatically they are inseparable and are only distinguished in the nondualistic way that the concepts of God and the world, Creator and creation, are distinguished even in remaining inseparable as indissolubly correlative. ⁵ Analytic reason is no more capable of conceiving this than it is of conceiving the Incarnation, God become man, or the Trinity—three persons and yet only one being. A different kind of rationality is necessary, a poetic and visionary type of rationality that Dante and his culture understood in crucial ways rather better than we are prone to do today.

Primiloquium and archeology of knowledge

The approach to such an inconceivable reality requires special methods. Dante’s method in the passage on the primiloquium in De vulgari eloquentia (I.iv.4) is one of imaginative reconstruction of what “rationally” (“rationaliter”) must have happened. This method deals especially with what is not given by the text but remains, instead, necessarily silent because not representable. The first event of speech, as Dante imagines it, transcends the chronological order of history that can be subjected to empirical investigation and breaks reason open to what it cannot objectively know but is, nevertheless, compelled to imagine.

In this way, Dante invents his account of the first human word, the “primiloquium,” as an ideal narrative of what must have happened in Eden during Adam’s first moments of conscious and linguistic life. Dante’s highly original hermeneutic method might today plausibly be qualified as “archeological” in something like the Foucauldian sense of an “archeology of knowledge” (Foucault, 1969). Michel Foucault employed his method in order to write what he called “the history of the present,” in which the hermeneutic presuppositions of our present knowing come to light as conditioning fundamentally whatever field of historical objects can be constructed. Foucault highlighted how each age of culture invented the historical categories that suited its own aims and purposes. In this light, “history” shows up as essentially “genealogy,” a willful construction of an origin. Constructing genealogies is how any culture establishes the image and interpretation of the past that it wishes to bequeath to itself.

Agamben takes up Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and works also under the influence of Walter Benjamin, particularly of the latter’s Arcades project intent on reconstructing the cultural history of 19th-century Paris as expressed eminently in the poetry of Baudelaire. This “archeological” method entails not digging for an object that can be found ready-made in the earth so much as digging into oneself and into the sediments and collective unconscious of one’s own civilization. The goal is to unearth buried consciousness of one’s own participation in the cultural production of the enabling structures of knowledge. ⁶ The method presupposes that the objects of our science are not detached from us—that we ourselves stand always already in their midst and are deeply, inextricably implicated in them. We discover by self-reflection turned upon our own thinking fundamental links and modalities that frame, and so essentially structure, whatever field of objects we are examining. The means of this self-reflection are basically linguistic. Language reflects on how we have formed concepts through creating images of things—and reciprocally of ourselves—in all our transactions with the world.

This contemporary critical (or, more exactly, post-critical) method is not lacking in more remote historical precedents. The traditional genre of the hexameron, the inventive exegesis of the six days of the Creation as recounted (or mostly not explicitly recounted) in Genesis 1, stands immediately behind Dante’s speculative interpretation of what happened when language originated in Eden. Dante is evidently speculating contrary to—or at least independently of—the letter of Scripture, yet he is nevertheless following exegetical procedures that had been practiced by no less an authority than Saint Augustine, along with others like Saint Bonaventure (Collationes in Hexaemeron). Especially in his hexameral De Genesi ad litteram, Augustine had employed and justified theoretically an exegetical method that resembles Dante’s reconstruction of Adam’s primiloquium in the margins of the narrative of Genesis and without any literal support in the biblical text. ⁷ In breaking with canons of linear inference from manifest evidence, Dante and Augustine anticipate forms of interpretation that will have peculiar appeal in our own postmodern times of shattered or decentered rationality and deconstructed subjectivity.

Hermeneutics or deconstruction?

With the primiloquium in mind as a suggestive example of Dante’s radical interpretive method, we can confront the inevitable question: Why conjugate Dante with contemporary thought? The general answer is that Dante can engage current theological thinking because his poem happens in history. Its history of effect (Wirkungsgeschichte) deeply interrogates us and our own access to religious truth today. The truth of the poem happens in and through our interpretations. This even becomes explicit in the Commedia’s famous addresses to the reader. These addresses are the meta-narratological locus setting the poem into motion as an event of truth and even of genuinely theological revelation as a non-dogmatic, personal truth reached rather through poetic interpretation.

My own published work has emphasized two leading and competing tendencies in contemporary theory as mirroring and, in effect, reenacting Dante’s intellectual itinerary. Moving from extended theoretical reflection on the significance of Dante’s address to the reader, and borrowing from the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, Dante’s Interpretive Journey (Franke, 1996) develops a theory of interpretation in an existential and theological mode. It offers close readings of key passages in the poem, where Dante’s transhistorical address to his reader expressly reformulates and reframes the poem’s entire meaning, projecting it into interaction with successive generations of readers and their own different historical contexts in posterity.

This hermeneutic paradigm works especially well in relation to the Inferno and the Purgatorio. Accordingly, the illustrative readings developed at length in Dante’s Interpretive Journey are drawn from the first two canticles of the poem. The third canticle I treat rather in Dante and the Sense of Transgression: “The Trespass of the Sign” (Franke, 2013) and in accordance with another paradigm, namely, the “thinking of difference” or “deconstruction” as represented eminently by the French philosophers Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Strong and often explicit affinities connect this current with negative theology, a tradition that was in crucial ways Dante’s own, especially in his fully mature phase as author of his final poetic testament, the Paradiso. ⁸

Hermeneutics and deconstruction—the former turning on exegesis and the latter turning into negative theology—correspond in their direct relevance to theology respectively to the most characteristic German and French contributions to contemporary theory. Theory is to our age what speculative theology was to Dante’s—viz. an exploration of the underlying intellectual matrix generating the possibilities of thought. In this capacity, both theoretical paradigms become sources of a kind of transcendental revelation of fundamental and inescapable conditions of thought and experience.

Theological turns in phenomenology and political theory

Several further theoretical movements offer remarkable possibilities for comparison and dialogical interaction with Dante’s theology as realized implicitly in his poetry. These include, first, the so-called theological turn in phenomenology. Michel Henry, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, and Jean-Ives Lacoste take phenomenology in a theological direction by exploring the phenomenon of what does not appear. ⁹ These phenomenological philosophers and theologians investigate how our thought can be thoroughly conditioned by what remains beyond the horizon of its perceptions. Non-revelation is itself in many ways the most fundamental of revelations: it reveals the phenomenon of transcendence. Given phenomena are finite, but the giving itself can be infinite and thus arguably a theological phenomenon. Such religious (ultra)phenomena can be at least as real as discrete empirical phenomena. They constitute experience, too, albeit experience of something ungraspable. This ineffable (un)ground was already implicit near the origin of the modern phenomenological movement, as underlined by Heidegger in his 1929 inaugural lecture in Freiburg (“Was ist Metaphysik?”) on the metaphysical experience of the Nothing (das Nichts). This turn toward the non-appearing that lurks in every appearing enables phenomenology even in our skeptical, secular culture to discern something of the theological significance that worldly phenomena certainly carry in Dante and in Patristic and medieval theologies as well.

This orientation has led, furthermore, to examination of the phenomenology of the body as an area of impenetrable mystery. Just such a focus is echoed in groundbreaking studies of Dante by Gary Cestaro (2003), Manuele Gragnolati (Gragnolati et al., 2012), Heather Webb (2016), Fabio Camilletti (2019), Robert Harrison (1988), and numerous others (e.g. in Barnes and Petrie, 2007). In its unaccountable being-there and facticity, the body stands as a locus of divine creation and revelation. Its fathomless mystery is further reflected symbolically in the miracle of the resurrection.

Some recently revived paradigms of secularization and political theology likewise illuminate Dante’s ambivalence as both a religious poet and as poet of the secular world. Political theology, which has recently become one of the hottest topics in Shakespeare studies, as well as broadly across humanities disciplines, is especially relevant to Dante and has been recognized as such ever since Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1957) treatment in Chapter 8 of The King’s Two Bodies. Reexaminations of Dante’s legacy in this light, which brings out the theological origins of even our basic terms for secular politics, have only begun. ¹⁰

Dante’s testament has been prescient concerning our contemporary revaluations of secularism and its intellectual, social, and spiritual stakes. Many contemporary thinkers such as Marcel Gauchet, Gabriel Vahanian, Thomas Altizer, following Carl Schmitt, see the entire secular world as the consequence of Christianity, and Dante anticipates this form of secular thinking both poetically and ideologically. The interpretation of the history and destiny of Western thought as Christian incarnational and as entailing a deconstruction of—and by—Christianity (for example, by Nancy (2005) and Vattimo (2002)), is prefigured by Dante’s theology of immanence as it emerges from recent critical readings, for instance by Alessandro Raffi (2004), Ruedi Imbach (1996), and Didier Ottaviani (2004).

Taken radically, the extremes of transcendence and immanence coincide in Dante and in contemporary thought alike. Just as radically orthodox and radically secular theology meet up as opposites in apophatic thinking (I argue this at length in Franke, 2014: ch. 4), so secular and theological thinking converge and completely interpenetrate in Dante as an apophatic theological poet. Only recognizing this fusion of opposites enables us to coherently understand Dante’s allegiances both to radical Aristotelianism, which in his day represented the vanguard of secular advance in the sciences, and to institutionalized, medieval Christianity in all its social and moral conservatism dedicated to the cultivation of a cohesive community and to keeping cultural tradition intact.

Extreme secularism’s theological avant-garde

Such a meeting of ideological opposites is wrought, emblematically for postmodernism, by Slavoj Žižek. Žižek takes inspiration from conservative Christianity à la GK Chesterton, even while propounding a radically profane and even blasphemous politics. His intensive debate with John Milbank’s Radical Orthodoxy enables us to ponder how his apparent erasure of transcendence—or rather of its representations—can also open contemporary thought to what transcends every definable order in its quest for universality (Milbank and Žižek, 2009).

Žižek is protesting against the view that “God is up there somewhere, while we are here on Earth” (Žižek, 2010: 169). This traditional picture of transcendent divinity, in his view, fails. He inveighs against traditional interpretations of Christ’s atonement in terms of paying a debt. Such interpretations are for him relapses into paganism and its ethics of cosmic justice. They are like a fascist regime of total order imposed throughout the universe. Against this, the basic idea of political liberalism says that “you, as an individual, independently of who you are—black, white, man, woman—have a right to direct contact with the universal” (Žižek, 2010: 170). This idea is, for Žižek, peculiar to Christianity (and perhaps also Buddhism). It enshrines the greatness (or even immortality) of the individual as irreducible to just a particular existence. The absolute worth of individuality is asserted through gestures of defiance such as Žižek finds in a drawing of Michelangelo’s given by him to (and later demanded back from) Vittoria Colonna. Christ’s uplifted finger, according to classical codes relayed in Quintilian, confirms the aggressive expression on his face by signifying defiant rebellion of a single member become autonomous like the upraised fist in the film Fight Club, or in the Grimm brothers’ “The Egotistical Child,” or again in Antigone and her American counterpart, Rosa Parks, or in Goethe’s “Prometheus.” Goethe (like Nietzsche) asserts that one must be god oneself in order to rebel against God. All are examples of going all the way to the end of egotistical rebellion against a monolithic and, finally, monotheistic rational order.

Christ’s moment of abandonment on the Cross is interpreted by Chesterton radically as a moment in which God himself seemed to be an atheist. If Christ’s cry of despair is taken seriously and not as a bluff, this means that a part of God does not know what God is doing. The implication is that only through doubt and atheism can you reach God. This would be the revolutionary message of Christianity against the transcendent notion of God in other religions. Only in Christianity does God lose faith in God-self. And precisely this is the key to his being or becoming God—beyond containment by anyone or anything else.

Žižek argues against the traditional reading of Job as indicating some higher meaning for creation and for its suffering that is beyond our comprehension. This is the view that the three theological Comforters insinuate, but it is blown out of the water by God when he speaks from the Whirlwind (Chapter 38 and following). God is himself astonished at the creations passed in review and avows the inexplicability of everything, the unreasonableness of the cosmos. (Žižek writes that this results from a close reading of the text! At least it plausibly represents Job’s point of view, when he is suffering without any apparent cause or justification). For Žižek, following Chesterton once again, Job prefigures Christ and his crucifixion as signifying the end of all guarantees of global meaning and of transcendent divinity itself. Only the Holy Spirit is left, and it is reduced to only the love between human members of a community.

Meaning, as something established transcendentally by God in heaven and fixed in the universe, is refuted by the Christ story as anticipated in Job. Žižek asserts that “The temptation to be resisted is the temptation of meaning itself” (Žižek, 2010: 178). Somewhat less categorically, he also suggests that the message of the Crucifixion is that we must make meaning ourselves by banding together (“Where two or three are gathered together in my Name, I am there in their midst,” Matthew 18: 20; cf. Joan Baez’s “Joe Hill”) because there is no higher cosmic purpose and no “big Other” (in Jacques Lacan’s terms). There is only the community of outcasts, as in primitive Christianity, to rely on for organizing positive change in the interests of justice in society.

However, Žižek is also against any simplistic translation of theology into secular humanism. Instead, we must be invaded by some other, higher force than ourselves. This is displayed terrifyingly in horror films, as Žižek understands them. The alien organizes itself and becomes unfathomable. “This is the divine element. I think horror films are the negative theology of today” (Žižek, 2010: 180). Hence Žižek’s conviction that Christianity is far too precious a heritage to be left to the conservative fundamentalists (Žižek, 2010: 181). It must be re-appropriated against them by radical leftist philosophers—like Žižek himself and Alain Badiou.

Žižek is proposing, after all, a kind of theology, one that reflects what many contemporary postmodern philosophers think they find in Christianity at its best. He is speaking as a champion or advocate of Christianity, for it harbors a revolutionary political theology protesting against the universal order of things that can justify sacrifice of individuals like Job or Jesus. Christianity embodies the spirit of rebellion against fascist governments because it enacts the death of God as the wholly other, the big Other, and entails God’s birth as the Holy Spirit in the community of believers. This is vintage Hegel, though it is not without echoes likewise of the spiritual revolution envisioned by Joachim of Flores and embraced, also, by Dante. The Calabrian abbot “Giovacchino” is celebrated for his gift of the prophetic spirit (“di spirito profetico dotato”) in Paradiso XII. 141. Žižek expressly credits this view of the Spirit to a Freudian slip on Hegel’s part—in which Hegel attributes to Western Christianity a specious doctrine that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Son. This is a misprisioning of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, in which the Spirit proceeds only from the Father rather than from the Father and the Son (filioque).

The Son, in a moment of doubt and despair, when God is divided even against himself in defiance, is the Son that Žižek embraces as Savior. Such is Žižek’s purely immanent theology: God does not transcend human community. Neither, however, is this simply a humanism because the human is not an order of things that is known and comprehended. Hence the monsters and horror movies evoked by Žižek as contemporary “negative theology.” What cannot be humanly comprehended and what shocks our rational human understanding we are spurred to recognize as the “divine element.” So really Žižek does not want to limit himself to simple immanence either—any more than Deleuze does.

Deleuze makes immanence into an absolute, but as such it tends to transcend all articulable immanent systems and formulas. It becomes the transcendence of the immanent—the immanent as transcendent. ¹¹ Absolutized, immanence cannot be contained within any express, articulated frame but rather transcends them all. Christianity is seen as effecting just this sort of dialectical reversal of immanence into transcendence by many secularist Christian theologians, notably death-of-God theologians—Thomas JJ Altizer, for one, who shares the Hegelian heritage in common with Žižek.

Absolutizing the autonomy of the worldly opens up a transcendent, inconceivable dimension from within it, one that paradoxically exceeds it from within, and theology is the discourse that interprets this dimension. Like Žižek, Giorgio Agamben (2000) and Alain Badiou (1997) have also taken extreme secular thinking over the edge to where it reverses its course and departs in a post-secular direction of thinking. Hence Badiou’s finding in Paul the prophet of modern universalism and freedom, and hence Agamben’s plumbing the archives of religious history and institutions for a messianic moment of a revelatory and revolutionary event of the inconceivable.