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A Hyperbolic Imagination: Theology and The Rhetoric of Excess
By Stephen H. Webb

"Can we name, between the economy of the gift and the violent magic of sacrifice, another image to do justice to those moments when we discover ourselves through giving to the other? I propose the word 'squander' . . . To squander is to waste, to give against the demands of a metaphysical economics, to act recklessly, disregarding the calm, cool voice of reason.... We squander when we do not care what the systems that be will do with our gifts, when we defy all of the efforts to make our giving reasonable and prudent. But we also squander from an inner strength, a spiritual richness that suggests that we give because we have already been given too much."

From the Christian point of view, everything, indeed everything, ought to serve for upbuilding. The kind of scholarliness and scienticity that ultimately does not build up is precisely thereby unchristian.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

If we pursue the comparison, the objects of knowledge are not only made manifest by the presence of goodness. Goodness makes them real. Still goodness is not in itself being. It transcends being, exceeding all else in dignity and power.

Glaucon had to laugh. My god, hyperbole can go no further than that!
Plato, The Republic

Across the disciplines of the academy, as a middle way between a now surely defunct Enlightenment belief in the powers of a pure reason and its darker flip side, the corrosive effect of a nihilistic relativism, a revival of the ancient art of rhetoric bears the promise that an increased sensitivity to the concrete contexts of all communicative acts can show us how to make sense without claiming too much or too little for ourselves. For theology, a discipline more dependent on persuasion and style than any other-addressing the three diverse publics of church, world, and academy in an effort to illumine abiding mysteries in constantly changing circumstances-the renewed attention to rhetoric is a welcome project. Too often, though, theologians are tempted to disregard Kierkegaard's refashioning of 1 Corinthians

Stephen H. Webb is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He is the author of Refiguring Theology: The Rhetoric of Karl Barth (1991) and Blessed Excess: Religion and the Hyperbolic Imagination (1993).

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14:26 into a rhetorical rule and warning by speaking exclusively to an academic audience. This situation allows theologians to imitate the neutral and steady voice of the sciences in a bid to establish the credentials of objectivity and to evade, in this difficult terrain, the narrowly personal and the disconcertingly emotional.

The dynamic of research accounts for much of the problem of rhetoric and theology. It drives every field toward specialization, so that scholars in the very same department may have trouble articulating their work to each other, let alone to those uninitiated in their technical vocabularies. Before the professionalization of theology in this country, theologians like Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr were grounded in the church, spoke in the pulpits, and were widely read and discussed. As theology has been dispersed into a series of increasingly fragmented subdisciplines, many theologians have tried to justify their labors by developing philosophical methods that appeal to a broad audience-the potentially universal community of rational agents that comprises the academy-with the ironic result that they have nearly lost their audience altogether. This situation can be only discouraging for the study of religion. There seems to be little in common between the strenuous intellectual labor of scholarly books, journals, and conferences and the simpler, but passionate, practices of religion in the wider public. The classroom is supposed to be the place where complex scholarship is translated into accessible prose, but especially here there is an inadequate correspondence between the extravagant longings and the analytical explanations of that troubling reality that sends students and teachers alike scrambling for understanding. Consequently, pedagogy is devalued; school and church become places where (at best) research can be applied and theory practiced rather than theaters where voices (including one's own) can be discovered and styles created.

The problem, to continue the theatrical images, is one of intonation, delivery, posture, and accent. Religion engenders excessive beliefs and passions, but academicians are trained to be cautious and circumspect. When religion is spoken about at all in the academy, it is at best in the mode of understatement or, more likely, with an ironic aside of dismissal. Even (perhaps especially) in religion departments, which must worry about the separation of church and state and the incredible diversity of viewpoints represented by their students, religion is frequently treated either as a dry and distant object or as something too dangerous to be approached closely. Theologians, who are held in suspicion in the academy for their commitments to particular traditions and for their appeals to nonrational modes of experience, are often those who are most cautious and objective about religious belief in their teaching. It is as if we theologians were pretending to be illiterate while we teach others how to read and write. The equivalent situation would be an art department without a gallery or a music department without any recordings. Who would stand for it?

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I

Theologians are hardly to blame. If we still live (with reference to C. P. Snow) in two cultures, the battle line no longer neatly bifurcates the "objective" sciences from the "subjective" humanities. Few people today accept the methodology of the natural sciences as the exclusive paradigm for rationality, and this is the shift that makes rhetoric-the art of communicating when there are no certain truths or universally accepted methods-so very important. Nevertheless, the sciences still represent and perpetuate a powerful prejudice in our culture: the stylistic presupposition that enquiry and communication, especially in the academy, should be clear, concise and unadorned, if it is to count as reasonable. Even if members of nonscientific disciplines do not try to prove their claims by experimentally testing rigorous hypotheses, many still speak as if they were referring to a closed set of established facts and relying on consistent rules pertaining to the verification of theories and the assessment of particular propositions. Others resist this encroachment of scientific style on the relatively haphazard procedures of the humanities, and so the debate between Snow's two cultures, in a slightly altered form, persists.

In fact, to draw a meandering line across today's cultural map would highlight three, not two, cultures, and they can be analyzed rhetorically according to the three principal tropes, or figures of speech: irony, hyperbole, and metaphor. The most significant division concerns the opponents of rhetorical objectivism. On one side of this divide is an ironic culture, which moves across the rough continuum marked by the names David Letterman and Jacques Derrida, where all values and beliefs are suspended, neither affirmed nor negated, in a self-parody that hovers between the comical and the cynical. This culture is equally popular in the academy and with large segments of the wider public; irony, the trick of saying one thing while meaning another, is an effective figure of speech for those who are not sure what they believe but firmly doubt the beliefs of all others. The obverse is a hyperbolic cultural discourse, spanning a field that stretches from Jerry Falwell to Alasdair MacIntyre, which struggles to revive a much neglected vocabulary of values rooted in belief and tradition. This culture uses the zeal and polemic of exaggeration because it must assert its idealistic claims against the grain of the prevailing skepticisms of irony, and it can only seem, to its sophisticated counterpart, naive and nostalgic.

Framed in this way, the division echoes Kierkegaard's either-or confrontation of the aesthetic with the ethical stage of existence. One must either flirt with life by proliferating the possibilities of the interesting and the beautiful, ever dependent on that peculiarly modern category, the "new, " or one must decide to be rooted in a life plan, parsimoniously restricting the play of possibilities with concrete

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actualities, letting the merely amusing give way to the serious and, sometimes, the tedious.

The tendency in the academy is not to try to transcend this dichotomy with a different kind of language but to mediate a middle ground, which goes by the easy name of pluralism. This third culture exhibits the rhetorical structure of the most optimistic trope, metaphor, which confidently seeks the similar in the different by fusing together disparate elements into one poetic image. The metaphorical ambition to create pluralism out of chaos-to draw together that which stands apart-actually has religious roots in the Jewish and Christian traditions of respect for the integrity of all persons. Indeed, at its religious best, the analogical imagination of pluralism is sponsored, as exemplified in all of David Tracy's work, by faith in an allencompassing and loving God who funds our hope for mutual understanding.

In the hands of less rhetorically agile theologians, however, the motif of pluralism tends to degenerate into a quasi-scientific model that treats the world religions as the data, all more or less alike, upon which universal theories can be constructed. This tendency is indicative of a perplexing ambiguity: Pluralism is a rhetoric that persistently denies its poetic basis and, instead, insistently pretends to constitute a new version of scientific objectivism. Pluralism can be defined, then, as the discourse that tries to deny rhetoric altogether in its earnest quest to do justice to every position from a neutral standpoint. This invidious deception effectively (and silently) substitutes a rule of prudence for rhetorics that draw attention to themselves. In sum, pluralism thinks of itself as comprising an optimal, that is, objective combination of truths, when, in reality, it is nothing more than one among many rhetorics.

In practice, this rhetoric, like the now outdated claims for the supremacy of scientific methodology, can pose insurmountable problems for religious belief. Pluralism's genius is also its limitation. The valorization of compromise too often means that those voices that do not fit into the preconceived harmony of the liberal universe are not permitted to speak. Voices that go too far, that claim too much-voices that we should acknowledge are named "religious," which is synonymous with excessive-violate the precarious but powerful configuration of impartiality, moderation, and toleration. At issue is the philosophical significance of tone. The flat, uninflected speech pattern of pluralism makes any claims to singularity or demands for distinctiveness sound, by contrast, uncivil, grandiloquent, and even scandalous.

Even given these ambiguities, it is possible to argue that pluralism is a necessary mediation to the clash between the extremities of irony and hyperbole. Both have their drawbacks. Irony, fully pursued, turns appearances against an ever receding sense of reality in order to display the divided mind of the modern intellectual: Every truth-or falsehood-is both true and not true, both false and not false. The moral of this cunning maneuver has something to do with the refusal to

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arrive at final judgments, an abdication of responsibility that could liberate others to be really other. The risk involves a trope that does not allow us to decide anything at all, paralyzing us in a pyrotechnics of unpredictable prose, snaring us in webs of our own making.

The danger of hyperbole seems even greater. No matter how seductive and fascinating, excessive claims and extravagant visions appear to be too vulnerable to fanatical interpretations and reckless actions to be taken seriously. Even good hyperboles seem to oscillate between two opposing poles, exhibiting a lower register in righteous indignation and denunciation (which can degenerate into diatribe and vindictive polemic) and ascending the scales to the higher pitch of encomium and idealization (which can slip into sentimentalism and immature platitudes). In more general terms, in the rhetorical tradition hyperbole is often quite simply equated with deception. We exaggerate-that is, break the bonds of a social agreement on what is minimally real-in order to satisfy selfish desires and manipulate the unsuspecting.

Upon closer inspection, it is possible to see that irony and hyperbole are hardly as opposed as their two cultures might suggest. After all, without the hyperbole, what would irony have to subvert and ridicule? And without the irony, hyperbole would lose much of its urgency and edge. Moreover, irony exhibits a curious logic that can only be called excessive. A good ironist must be hyper-reflective, able to suspend subjectivity by continually stepping back from the seemingly solid judgment each irony implies. Irony always begets more irony in a free fall of dizzying proportions, addictively forcing itself upon the user. If it must stop somewhere, then it only comes to rest in an odd confidence in its own self-doubting, in a boasting belief in its own interminable possibilities. In this way, exaggeration is irony's hidden conceit. Once begun, something else must intervene, whether it be a bluffing laugh or a leap elsewhere.

II

In actual speech situations, of course, we usually rely on mixed genres, using different rhetorical strategies for various purposes and contexts. Nevertheless, tropes have a way of becoming fundamental, of becoming root figures that structure all aspects of our lives. Even choosing between tropes is itself a matter for rhetoric; there is no extra-linguistic basis to which we can appeal to guide such situationsaturated decisions. This emphasis on rhetoric, however, does not mean that anything goes, that relativism displaces rationality. Acknowledging the importance of figures of speech and other rhetorical tools simply emphasizes the fact that our words have shape, that our communications are formed by desires, needs, and goals, that language is not a transparent medium for the flow of ideas and information. In sum, we need to become sensitive to the local economy of every communicative exchange by investigating and evaluating the logics and

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methods entailed in the various figures of speech and the styles they engender.

The contextualization of language means, then, that no discourseneither the seemingly natural claims of common sense nor the rigorous achievements of objective theories-is innocent, pure, or abstract. Reason is always located in particular strategies and networks, and that place is language. Furthermore, language itself is not some idealistic category or autonomous system that functions according to a set of impersonal rules and regulations. Indeed, to attend to rhetoric is to bear witness to that fundamental locale, the embodiment of our very own voices, and to hear in the body of language all of the passions and pains that drive words to multiply, spread, stutter, and finally halt in attempts to disclose and conceal. The jargonistic phrase "materiality of the signifier" merely means the incarnation of all meaning. Our words, whether written or spoken, always trace the uneven routes of the contradictions of our suffering.

Yet, meaning is alive, not dead. Rhetoric as an art betrays the fact that we make sense in spite of ourselves. To give birth to meaning is to suffer in hope and expectation. Rhetoric marks and celebrates the particular, even idiosyncratic sites of the triumph of shared dreams and visions over incommunicable fears and confusions. We inhabit our words with the desire that they not get lost in the deadends and false starts of labyrinthian entanglements and impotent turmoil. To speak again, even after the most despairing silence, is to reenact a resurrection of meaning toward which our words, no matter how lugubrious and clumsy, direct us without the comfort of metaphysical certainty and the aid of conceptual clarification. The rhetorical shape of that resurrection hope-that which keeps us gesturing and stammering no matter how tempting the silence-is surely that most outlandish and gratuitous trope, the figure that points along a way that is always ahead of us, hyperbole.

Indeed, if the inflection is right, hyperbole can be an effective way of stretching the imagination outward, vertically toward the highest ideals and horizontally toward the undisclosed other. Usually, however, rhetoricians personify hyperbole as the illegitimate member of the tropes family, the bad boy of rhetoric, too eager to distort brute facts and extend unwarranted desires. The wider public reflects this prejudice: children learn it first among rhetorical devices by being warned against it. In the realm of figures of speech, hyperbole is just another name for temptation.

Nevertheless, the very tension of our resistance to hyperbole, as opposed to indifference, reveals just how fascinated we are by extremity. We repudiate hyperbole not because of anything we essentially are or because of something hyperbole necessarily is; we resist because hyperbole is exactly that which, by definition, goes a little further in the direction we were hoping only to go just so far. Herein lies the definition of every good hyperbole: It is that which we

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deny because it calls on us to withstand all that goes without saying, all that we would like to take for granted. Whether judged by the canons of reason, natural order, or civility, hyperbole exercises a seductive and yet bothersome attraction because it is too much in the name of that which we desire but fear to follow to the very end.

Moreover, if irony has its excessive moment, hyperbole likewise manifests an ironic substructure. This can be understood from the phenomenon that we are always on the other side of hyperbole, even as we say it. Good hyperboles do not offer a release to otherwise orderly desires but create productive tensions, reshaping desire by stretching it outward. Thus, we are never wholly excessive, even in the midst of an exuberance that renders us silent. Hyperbole is also, then, a divided trope. To speak it is to realize how far we are from where it points; to live it is to know how much farther we have to go. There is plenty of irony in our culture, born of an exhaustion in which we have overdrawn and wasted all that is best in what has been handed down to us. We do not need more irony, but we do need some irony to keep in check those who would take their hyperboles too literally. Perhaps the irony implicit within good hyperboles is enough irony, the knowledge that too much is never enough and, yet, is already more than we can possibly endure.

What we desperately need is to learn how to speak a hyperbole that does justice to the passions of everyday religion, the qualifications and hesitations of irony, and the impulse toward objectivity implicit in pluralism. The difficulty is that in our culture excess too often denotes, at worst, the merely frivolous, the promiscuous and the luxurious, or, at best, the intoxicating and the ecstatic. Indeed, to many people today, religion seems to be excessive in both senses at once. It is no longer useful in an overly technologized culture except as an inebriated interruption of the everyday by the extraordinary, a transitory and compensatory experience of release and relaxation. Hyperbole is, thus, reduced to hype, to mere ornamentation or embellishment; excess is that moment when language normally used as an instrument of labor gets to go on a holiday. Hyperbole is related to language as the weekend is related to the work week. Notice, for example, how the advertising industry increasingly relies on the ploy of magnifying the use value of products by overusing power adjectives like "more," " extra, " and "super," inflating these labels to the point where they become transparent to a reality that is all too often merely more of the same. In a culture that utilizes hyperbole to heighten the unsurprising, religion is in danger of becoming another conspicuous commodity, an emblem of the excessive only in the sense of the superfluous and irrelevant. In this case, religion, which surpasses the boundaries of the quotidian imagination, can be indicted for offering a "something more" that is in actuality only "just enough" to stimulate the boredom of unrestrained rationalism and to supplement the confinement of an oppressive functionalism.

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III

Against this reduction of religion from sublime hyperbole to mere exaggeration, which is equally bad theology and poor rhetoric, we need to try to articulate a vision of religion as excessive but not wasteful, extravagant but meaningful. This is especially important for Christian theology, which has always given to excess the name of love, or to put it in other words, has always spoken of love in a hyperbolic voice. The question at hand is not the utility of religion in the modern age; religion goes too far to be made to fit into the cracks and crevices of the world of the autonomous, rational individual. The question concerns the need for theology to discuss styles rather than methods and rhetorically to reflect on the method in a given style. To choose a theological style is not to correlate something abstract called "religion" to the present, concrete situation according to a metaphysically predetermined scheme; it is at its best the creative rearrangement of the linguistic components of a multi-vocal situation, which implicitly structures what we think we can do and who we hope we can become, in order to subvert the apparently necessary and bolster the seemingly impossible in the name of a ruling and abiding passion or love. My own rhetorical project is governed by the conviction that today, more than ever before, theology needs to recover a Christian sense of the prodigious-by welcoming again the return of the prodigal.

The return of the prodigal is the recognition-through that classic parable (Luke 15:11-32)-that love is a force that breaks boundaries, supersedes limitations, and thwarts expectations. A hyperbolic imagination would open our myopic visions to God's unbounded love, the impossible priority of the other, and the unreal hope in ultimate redemption. For Christianity, excess is not the occasional spilling of constrained emotions that comes at the end of a hard day. Excess is not an aesthetic amplification or a dangerous vitiation of the moral realm. Indeed, Christian excess is not simply at odds with ethics but implies, or better is itself, an ethics. To go too far in the name of the other is to wager that hyperbole makes sense, that too much, sometimes, is just right.

A hyperbolic rhetorical strategy would do justice to the (il)logic of abundance that operates in the parables of Jesus, in which love is offered over and above the moderate and reasonable concerns of self-interest and self-preservation. The parables, significantly, do not merely illustrate moral principles. They demonstrate the inherently rhetorical features of any language of love as well as the particular characteristics of this fundamental stratum of Christian discourse. In the New Testament parables, a poetics of praise, an encomium celebrating the apparently impossible but the miraculously necessary, unfolds as an ethical discourse in which the other is situated above (in terms of priority) and in front of (in terms of accessibility) the self, demanding and deserving recognition. This ethical discourse, however,

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is not a prosaic reflection on the need for justice, the careful demands of fairness and equivalency. Instead, this hyperethics is disclosed through the poetics-the poetry establishes an appealing imperative-by a compact and tense account of an action that makes sense because it is narratable, but demands existential verification because it is extravagant. The parables themselves, the excessive stories of Jesus, become, then, an avenue of grace: They open a way toward a giving in which, no matter how much we resist, we can find the empowerment that permits us to give in-the end to which is our own beginning.

Grace, hyperbolically construed as an action that receives healing by going too far in the name of that which is too much, gains its most elegant articulation not in the parables or even in the longer narratives that witness to Jesus' sacrificial life, but in the simple Johannine declaration "God is love" (1 John 4:8). This formulaic proclamation actually condenses in the most compact fashion an explosive fusion of two names, both of which are unimaginable. The impact is neither a conceptual clarification in which what we know is replaced by more general and, therefore, useful terms, nor a metaphorical image in which our knowledge is increased by coupling the known with the unknown. The effect is an identification that pushes both terms outward toward the other in an absolute intermingling, the seductive copula signifying a venture in which love is heightened and raised to the more vertically powerful term, God, and God is widened and stretched to include the more horizontally effective term, love. "God is love" is an outrageous call for action that will find in love the desire for God and find in God always and only the desire of love. A hyperbolic imagination of God's love, informed by the (il)logic of the parables and the narrative of Jesus' triumph through suffering, sees the world as it really is, but, in addition, sees it as it most certainly is not-that is, as what it can become and, therefore, was meant to be.

Because the discourse of giving, referring to a variety of activities ranging from simple generosity and neighborliness to heroic and mythic deeds of self sacrifice and martyrdom, has always been central to Christianity and Western culture as well, it might seem more commonplace than extravagant. Yet, today, this is a discourse that is, not for altogether superficial reasons, in danger of becoming undone. It seems obvious, almost trivial, to say that we have become too inclined to allow the vocabulary of our givings and doings to be supplanted by economical metaphors that reflect the encroachment of a calculative mentality on all areas of our existence. We talk about generosity in terms of the utilitarian trinity of investment, profit, and interest, and we resolutely believe that the circulation of all of our acts constitutes a complex, but ultimately circular, network of interconnections aimed only at self enhancement. We have given up the elevated language of love for the easier, but demoting, discourse of economics. According to the frugal economics of the modern soul, the gift always ironically returns-in fact, it is never really meant to be given at

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all-with an accumulation of value. It is today accepted as a cynical truism-it goes without saying, no matter how often we say it-that we give only in order to receive.

In opposition to this anorexic constriction of generosity from excess to irony, theologians traditionally have defended the fundamental import of self-sacrifice, the spiritualization and internalization of the crucifixion. Unfortunately or not, the word sacrifice today has lost all of its innocence. It can no longer be employed without a very troubling recognition of its high costs. Part of the problem is that it entails an intensification of the economy of the gift that involves the double and excessive move of heightening and masking the two dangerous sides of generosity. The image repertoire of sacrifice, which retains vestiges of victimization in the service of a rigid social structure, helps to perpetuate the myth that giving must entail the will to suffer, even to do violence to oneself, and does nothing to expose or resist the reality that generosity is always usurped by those who position themselves to be recipients without being subjected to the same values as the givers. Indeed, the vocabulary of sacrifice is taught most to those who have the least to give but the most to gain from the generosity of others.

It is no accident that, in many Western texts on sacrifice, the figure of the feminine is held to be the ideal instance of self-denial and self-donation: Woman, tradition teaches, is the being for the other, but, we now respond, in such a way that she is denied being for herself. The ideology of sacrifice not only promotes a self-violence that is only incidentally related to the dynamism of generosity, it also magically mystifies the actual exchange of expenditure and recuperation by promoting extravagant behavior that is reinvested in the maintenance of a dominant hierarchy. Sacrifice, in sum, also has its economy, one which turns the other's loss into my gain while rectifying this imbalance with a cunning language that reverses this unilinear flow by compensating the giver with the word of praise that covers the expropriation of the deed. To speak of sacrifice, then, is to draw on the luxury of a tradition that has conceptualized giving at the expense of the marginalized and the oppressed.

IV

Can we name, between the economy of the gift and the violent magic of sacrifice, another image to do justice to those moments when we discover ourselves through giving to the other? I propose the word " squander," which resonates with extravagance and excess but also awkwardly mediates between the two metaphorics of economics and sacrifice. To squander is to waste, to give against the demands of a metaphysical economics, to act recklessly, disregarding the calm, cool voice of reason. It is not connected to an ideology of self-hate or the compulsive desire to maximize one's investments. Squandering, in fact, is an exaggerated word; to hear it pronounced is to think of excess, to be drawn in by the extravagant. It is a term that can both capture and

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invigorate our most graced moments of giving. We squander when we do not care what the systems that be will do to our gifts, when we defy all of the efforts to make our giving reasonable and prudent. But we also squander from an inner strength, a spiritual richness that suggests that we give because we already have been given too much.

The image of squandering connects sacrificial giving to an antieconomy of surplus, not scarcity, replacing strife and competition with sharing and mutuality. To squander is to exercise a sovereign freedom to spend the gift of life. We can experience in giving, squandering wagers, that dimension in which the gift is already there, restlessly circulating, no matter how it is utilized or spent, through the calculative mazes of our careful plans and agendas. By giving into the ultimate priority of giving itself, we discover, by means of the rash and the ardent, the irreducible givenness of the gift that has already been given before. This original fore-gift, that which makes possible all of our giving, is forgiveness, the acceptance that releases, the holding that frees, the embrace that restores. To accept forgiveness and to forgive the other is to put into play the gift we always already are, an abundance that produces a shared debt redeemable only by repeatedly passing it on.

The strange logic of this rhetoric enables us to solicit excess not as an intoxicating experience or as a means to a moderate ethics of neighborliness but as a conjunction of style and praxis that conjures and creates the bold and vigorous desire that finds the self in the other. Squandering is not a fruitless self-denial aimed at some otherworldly reward or a prudent show of sociability seeking admiration and respect. There is no reward for such a fortuitous gesture, but there is an insinuation or revelation of something that is more than real. The hope of squandering is that a renewed self is what remains of the otherwise wasteful acts of anti-economical generosity. Giving is not always impotent, frustrated, incomplete. Sometimes giving gives birth to a rejuvenated subjectivity that finds itself in the transformative space of a healing loss.

Although it is impossible to name this gift-giving dynamic conceptually, its contours can be followed narratively in that most passionate story of squandering-the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The singular unity of God and humanity is an excessive configuration startling us into multiple possibilities that could only otherwise remain remote and indifferent. This Godperson, however, goes further. Indeed, Jesus Christ's splendid squandering on the cross is an expenditure that we can never expect to recuperate and, thus, redeem. This endowment of suffering generosity, which exceeds the boundaries of our understanding, subsidizes all of our attempts to contribute to others without accommodating the relentless pursuit of profit and interest. The squandered Christ is a gift that calls us to spend in kind, a demanding opportunity that we too frequently squander, in its

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pejorative sense, by trying to order, secure, and conserve that which goes further than we dare try to follow.

To squander, to love-to attempt a poetics of the impossible-is to resist the qualifications and moderations that inevitably tend to attenuate the excessive by relocating it within the fastidious talk about the proper and the prudent, the pragmatic limitations of responsibility-a prose of the probable. There are many discourses-ethics and economics chief among them-that traverse the same ground that theology tries to occupy; not all of them are hostile to religion, but they are all overly eager to diminish the good news to a frail whisper or a somber mumble by belaboring-that is, exaggerating-its difficulties, its irrationality, its unreality. Theology has the task of staging a style appropriate to its own peculiar mission. Theological rhetoric must be personal, acknowledging the lack of any neutral standpoint. It also must be practical, recognizing the political, even the sociological matrix of every communicative exchange. More than anything else, though, theological rhetoric must seek to promote the impossible. A desire for the other overfunded by the reckless giving of the Ultimate Other is a point worth trying to make, even as that very point unmakes and confounds all of our attempts to grasp what we can never reach, to speak what we can never know.

The innumerable voices of understatement, of course, will always demur. Reason will try to have the last, diminutive word. Indeed, the entire debate over excess is prefigured in the profound differences between the two founders of Western philosophy, Plato and Aristotle. Aristotle rejects Plato's insight into the good that transcends the real, a good that is too good to be believed. Glaucon's humorous invocation of the divine reveals the source and goal of the only trope that is adequate to the pursuit of the superlative. Aristotle chooses instead to reduce the good beyond being to that which we can analyze and understand. His classic formulation of the golden mean-a cautious navigation between opposite extremes to find the safe and proper course of virtue-still constitutes the commonsensical view of the ethical life today. "If anyone were to assert that he was choosing the impossible," Aristotle confidently states, "he would be considered a fool" (Nicomachean Ethics). By compartmentalizing the ethical province of the plausible from the poetic imagination of what might or could or should be, but is not, Aristotle severs the everyday from the visionary, abandoning decision-making to the cunning of calculation, which in our own day has become increasingly and irrevocably cynical. This strategy of containment necessarily sentimentalizes and trivializes excess. More than ever before, then, today the impossible is all the more necessary, the poetic all the more practical. Only too much is-and anything less is not even almost-enough.