The Impossible Encounter: Creation, Incarnation, Trinity and Miracle in Nancy and Pontormo

If the predominant view of the last decades the so-called secular word – parts of the global North – is that of a ‘return of religion’ toward a ‘postsecular society’, Jean-Luc Nancy’s deconstructive studies of Western monotheism seem to contradict this view. His leading question is why the monotheistic traditions, in their ethical, imaginative, ritual, narrative and doctrinal forms, are persistent in secular modernity. Could it be that monotheism bears in itself an atheistic source? In this article, I pursue Nancy’s challenging question by focusing on three features of Christianity: creation, incarnation and the Trinitarian God. I will show how in these area’s of Christian narrative and doctrine an entanglement of presence and absence with regard to God and humanity is articulated, leading to a notion of ‘absentheism’. This ambiguous experience of the divine unveils a secular ‘truth’ within Christianity that has had and still has a deep impact on the secular age breaking away from the power of the Church since the Renaissance and early modernity. The article concludes with refining the analysis of this religious absentheism by concentrating on a painting by Pontormo, ‘Visitation’, that brings together most of the features studied earlier. Nancy’s own interpretation of this painting is elaborated with a brief account of its art historic history, that of the emergence of mannerism in the beginning of the sixteenth century, introducing magic and miracle in the new Renaissance world of realism.