Kenosis is a term of
philosophy with two interesting and conceptually related uses, one in relation to
religion and the other in relation to
literature. In both uses, the use relates to a conceptual "
emptying," and indeed
kenosis derives from the
Ancient Greek word κένωσις (kénōsis, “emptying”) derived from κενόειν (
kenósin, “to empty”) which varies κενός (
kenos) meaning “empty.”
In religion
In
religious jargon,
kenosis means an emptying of the self, in a transformative sense. The most common historical incarnation of this sense is in
Christian theology, where kenosis is used to describe the process by which
Jesus Christ became a
human being, through the
Biblical God temporarily emptying itself of the aspects of
divinity. Various translations of the original Greek describe how Jesus “emptied himself” or “made himself nothing, taking the form of a slave, becoming as human beings are,” in a variant of the term as used in
Philippians 2:7.
Here it is important to note that the
God of most brands of
theism exists outside of time and space. This poses a problem for those who wish to explain how their God interacts with the existence of mankind, which is entirely bound by time and space. For Christians, it raises the particular problem of how God became one particular human, Jesus Christ, said to be simultaneously fully human and fully divine. Christians diminish or discount the divinity of most or all humans other than Jesus, contrary to those who hew to
pantheism and
pandeism, who accord divinity to all humans. Therefore,
kenosis for Christians is a doctrine of
sacrifice, one potentially more compelling than the
human sacrifice embodied in the
crucifixion itself, for it is through this process that the God of the Bible is asserted to have surrendered the attributes of Godhood – including the inability to die, in the way that Jesus dies upon the cross.
Christian theology presents another use for
kenosis, as the reflective ‘self-emptying’ of the believer’s will with the goal of eliminating internal obstacles to receiving the “perfect” will of God. Despite the predominance of its use in Christological theology: “The idea of
kenosis, the self-emptying ecstasy of God
is crucial in both
Kabbalah and
Sufism.” This sentiment is carried forward in the writing of Nineteenth Century mystic poet
William Blake. In
A History of God,
Karen Armstrong says, “Like the
Gnostics,
Kabbalists and early
Trinitarians, Blake envisions a
kenosis, a self-emptying in the Godhead, who falls from his solitary
heaven and becomes incarnate in the world.”
Kenosis was a fundamental element of the
theology proposed by
Georg Wilhelm Hegel, of whom Armstrong wrote “Spirit which was the life force of the world” and was “dependent upon the world and upon human beings for its fulfillment.” Thus “Hegel's view of the
kenosis of the Spirit, which empties itself to become immanent and incarnate in the world, has much in common with the Incarnational theologies” of
Judaism,
Christianity, and
Islam.
In
pandeism,
kenosis is used in a more far-reaching sense, that of the
Deus (the
Creator of the
Universe which is comparable to the theological concept of God), emptying the whole of its existence into the creation of the Universe.
In poetry:
The other use of
kenosis exists in the
world of
literature and the
fine arts. There, kenosis describes the effect, the feeling, that the reader of
lyric or
poetry experiences. It describes an emptying of the
ego-personality of the reader into the immediate
sensory manipulation of poetics, and in this sense kenosis characterizes the infliction upon the reader of an experience of
timelessness. The comparable affect created by
drama is called
catharsis; that created by
literature is
kairosis.