Goicoechea (Key passages)

The key is to be altruistic toward widow, orphan, stranger, and enemy as more important than yourself.

But serving and suffering for each other is fraught with a symmetry that excludes the other: Judas, the Pharisees, and the Romans are not loved until they repent and enter the kingdom of love. But Lévinas shows us a Good Samaritan host who responds especially to widows, orphans, and aliens because theirs is the call of the excluded.13 His hostage suffers for the persecutor. Precisely Judas, the priests, and the Pharisees are the concern of Lévinas’s hostage… Mark interpreted the Messiah in terms of 2 Isaiah’s suffering servant, whose innocent grace on the cross brought the Roman soldier into the kingdom… Mark’s message about suffering was that just as Jesus had gone up and graciously accepted death, and Peter and Paul had gone up and graciously accepted death, so you might be called to go up and graciously accept death. Your suffering, like that of Jesus and the first disciples, can allow the Roman soldier to say, “Truly this man is the son of God” (Mark 15:39). This model of the suffering of the cross, which Lévinas has made so clear, reveals the heterology that lets ethics be first philosophy and first religion. This primacy of the suffering other and of an asymmetrical kingdom clarifies all of postmodernity. The cross does not have primarily to do with a father who asks the good son to die for the prodigal. It does not have to do primarily with the good son being put to death by prodigals. Rather the Father is revealed in his goodness by the good son who as the Son of Man is the good Samaritan host and the suffering servant hostage who responds to other prodigals with the “me voici.” The symmetry of the I-Thou is carefully substituted for by the asymmetry of the submissive me-for-you. Derrida and Matthew’s Secret Kingdom Lévinas made clear the Markan cross, but without the Markan kingdom. Totality and Infinity philosophically clarifies the asymmetrical structures of the good Samaritan curtailing his freedom for the sake of the freedom of widows, orphans, and aliens. Otherwise than Being clarifies how the Good Samaritan host becomes the suffering servant hostage, who in dying for the persecutor can let the glory of goodness touch the persecutor. The non-manifest goodness, even in its non-manifestation, can be made manifest by the hostage, suffering out of innocent goodness for the good of the persecutor.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (pp. 65-66). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

It is not clear at all as Goicoechea thinks that Mark’s Jesus on the cross died with grace, since Psalm 22 that the cry is borrowed from implies terror but trusting and accepting God’s will: a soldier’s death, and he is recognized by the soldier as such.  It is with Luke-Acts and the forgiving deaths of Jesus/Stephen do we see dying for our enemy. But let’s continue.

As we are being persecuted we feel impotent to do anything about our enemies who are always threatening and besieging us. In our brooding about the cross of suffering we must bear we tell ourselves that the strengths of our enemies are vices: power, pride ,wealth, health, egoism. We tell ourselves that our own weaknesses are virtues: meekness, humility, poverty, chastity, obedience. Then we invent a rewarder-punisher God to enforce this value reversal. This king will reward us in his kingdom throughout eternity and our enemies will be punished in eternal hellfire. Nietzsche shows how modernity began with science to shake off this impotence and to take fate into its own hands…Q’s Jesus in Matthew and Luke practiced a complaisant love for all of existence. He loved crazies, criminals, the sick, the poor, and the outcasts just as the father loved the prodigal son. Prodigal children are as lovely in their own way as are the birds of the air and the flowers of the field. And if you love them with such complaisance you will be as free of concern as the birds of the air and the flowers of the field.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 72). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Caputo responds how the story of the prodigal son teaches about a God who does not demand a fine payment but forgives and welcomes back home. It is the prodigal’s brother who looks at the situation as balancing the books.  (Key Passages)

Now over and above its allegorical intent, the parable—the core of which on everyone’s accounting has a strong tradition and good credentials going back to Jesus—provides us with Jesus’s own account of how God the Father, his father, our father, keeps account in the kingdom, and in my view it forces us to consider an alternate view of the cross. In the parable, the father is the figure of God and the two sons are each figures of wayward humankind who are invited into the kingdom. The prodigal son is a sinner, but a sinner who has turned around. The elder son is dutiful, but he is a spiritual cost accountant who is scandalized by the excess of forgiveness and therefore a bit resentful and given to pouting. Seen thus, the story offers us an instruction about divine forgiveness in a way that forces us to recast our notions of atonement and sacrificial death. How would the God of Jesus, Abba, a loving father/parent, regard the waywardness of a son/child? By exacting punishment in order to balance the scales of divine justice, for otherwise the injury done to the divine dignity would go unredressed, the divine accounts forever out of balance? Only if God is the father/parent not of all good gifts, but of all balanced accounts or economies. The one who has a sense of strict economic justice in the story is not the father but the dutiful son who stayed at home. David Goicoechea calls him the good son but I am inclined to think he was simply the more faithful and law-abiding son who, to his credit, saw his duty to be to stay at home with his father, but whose vision was entirely limited by the horizon of duty and punishment, who was therefore offended at the father’s beneficence towards his younger prodigal brother. He could no more comprehend the prodigal love of his father than he could dismiss the prodigal sinfulness of his brother. He was a man of strict accounts, of economy not the gift. So, in the parable we have three crucial figures: (1) the father, who is the figure of the gift and forgiveness, the love- and gift-giving that is emblematic of the kingdom of God, who embodies the way things are done not in the “world,” which is a system of exchange, but in the kingdom, the space where things are done the way God does them; (2) the younger, prodigal son who is wayward, the figure of sin or transgression, but who swallows his pride and comes back to the father repentant, asking for forgiveness and contenting himself with a lower place in his father’s house than his filial status would have entitled him, having forfeited his rights—in any strict accounting of his merits—to anything more; and (3) the elder, law-abiding son, who represents the narrow confines of economics, the strict accounting of law and transgression—as a man of the law he did not forsake his father to begin with, but as a man of the law he is also offended at the father’s mercy, love, and forgiveness. Forgiveness seems to him to leave the father’s accounts unsettled and out of balance, for the father greeted transgression not with its just deserts but with a party. The elder son’s nose is out of joint and we are left to wonder as the parables ends whether he will be able to come to grips with his father’s prodigal generosity. The message of such a story is plain enough. The paradigmatic gesture of the father of Jesus, the central message of the preaching of Jesus, is forgiveness, the madness of forgiveness, in which transgression is wiped away, not cost-accounted. The prodigal has suffered enough from his own foolishness and has had a change of heart (metanoia), and so he does not need to be punished further, or punished at all, but welcomed home, while the law-abiding son should take a lesson from the loving wisdom and wisdom of love of his father. Punishment is not the coin of the realm in the kingdom. If all that is so, then there is no version of the “sacrificial death” of Jesus that does not fall afoul of this parable; no way to tell the story of Jesus’s death as a paying off or atoning for, or in one way or another, making up for, the transgressions of humankind that does not rob God of his love and turn God into a balancer of books. Imagine the frame of mind of parents who have been injured by a child, for whom the horrible suffering of the child somehow makes the child more pleasing or acceptable to them and who therefore receive it in exchange for the offense they have suffered. What sort of human father or mother would require such a bloody and gruesome balancing of the books as the sacrificial death of their child? So I read the parable as a parable about the end or delimitation of economy and the beginning of the gift, as the end of blood sacrifices, sacrificial economies, and the beginning of forgiveness. That reading is aligned with Derrida’s aporetics of the gift and the economy, for which each is I think rather a nice fit. Well then, what are we to make of the horrible and unjust execution of Jesus? That is, suppose we apply this parable told by Jesus to Jesus’s own death. What did the cross purchase? Nothing. Jesus died against his will, against the will of God, against the will of any good person. He was not trying to buy anything. Why then did he suffer such a fate? He suffered first and most conspicuously a prophetic death, an (alas!) all too typical death of anyone who challenges the powers that be, having made the Romans and the high priests nervous with a prophetic teaching about the kingdom of God. His death is another instance of an ancient and all too modern tradition that stretches from the ancient prophets to modern ones like Ghandi, Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King: we kill our prophets. But it was beyond that. It was, let us say, a “basaleic” death, if one could say such a thing, exemplifying the way injustice and persecution are met in the kingdom (basileia), not with retribution or getting even, but with forgiveness. We have no way to know what Jesus actually said on the cross, but of all the venerable last words that are handed down to us by the tradition, none rings more true than the words of forgiveness, which echo the Lord’s Prayer, which may well be their source, as well as reflecting Jesus’s most characteristic message. Jesus is not claimed to have said, “Father, this is difficult, but it will be worth it in the long run,” but “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do…”  forgiveness. In the kingdom, power is not the power to overwhelm or subdue, but the power of appeal, of call, of solicitation, the power that appeals to our heart, to be of a new heart, metanoia. It is the power that Jesus showed the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov. After a long discourse in which, among other things, the Lord Cardinal explained to Jesus that he had the power to have him arrested and executed, the Cardinal was subdued by a kiss. Jesus simply listened to him silently and then kissed him, which completely disarmed His Eminence, the Lord Cardinal Grand Inquisitor.  No one made more of the death and resurrection of Jesus than Paul, and while the sacrificial economy can be found in Paul, that was not his central or best view of the death of Jesus. What truly moved Paul was the notion that with the death and resurrection of Jesus we are raised up into a new life, a life of grace beyond the economy of law and transgression, made members of the life and body of Christ, granted a new being, made into a new creation.  Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 75-8). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

Caputo envisions a religion where God is incarnate in the religious, even in the madness of finding Him in stories that probably never happened.

A perfectly good example of such a poetics is the narrative of an angel appearing to a virgin to announce the birth of the redeemer. That’s a good story, a good narrative. I doubt that Paul, John, or Mark, not to mention Miriam of Nazareth actually knew that story, but they would have been moved by it had they heard it. Or that Jesus ascended into heaven up above, like Mohammed from the rock—an arresting if pre-Copernican image. The move one makes in embracing stories like that has everything to do with finding something iconic to embody the invisible God; but it must be made to stand free of any account or revelation that implicates God in giving special privileges to selected friends, which is an idol. If the “friends of God” or “God’s people” does not mean people plain and simple—everybody—then the rest of us are in trouble. Clearly, then, for me the issue is not to replace religion in the concrete with a formal abstract religion without religion, but to displace the self-assurance of the concrete religious traditions just so much and not more, just enough to let them be haunted by a ghost while not scattering them to the four winds... [Caputo thus expresses his religiosity as follows] … I, on the other hand, happily embrace the third transcendental (the pulchrum), the soaring majesty of the mountains and the cedars of Lebanon, all the joys of life from the smallest pleasures to the most massive discharges of jouissance, and also the fourth (aliquid, which means singularity!). What does not kill me makes me happier. In taking religion to mean the love of God, I take it, I want to take it, I promise Hart I will take it, to mean the affirmation of the world, a veritably Dionysian and boisterous expenditure of yea-saying, along with a quiet reverence for the earth, to which I add a meditative, early matins and monastic sense of the mystery of God’s life flowing through the world. What do I love when I love my God? The world is God’s body, according to the theology of the eco-feminists, and religion is the celebration of the love of God in all its forms, without number. My religious imagination does not stop at three but goes on to affirm the innumerable. Zlomislic, Marko; DeRoo, Neal. Cross and Khôra: Deconstruction and Christianity in the Work of John D. Caputo (Postmodern Ethics Book 1) (p. 114- 117). Pickwick Publications, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.

In the Phaedo (especially around 100c–d), Plato (via Socrates) explicitly discusses the presence (Greek: parousia) or communion/sharing (koinōnia) of absolute Beauty (the Form of Beauty) in beautiful things as what makes them beautiful. Socrates presents this as his “safe” and “simple” answer to the question of causation: beautiful things are beautiful by (or through) Beauty itself—nothing else makes a thing beautiful except the presence or participation in absolute Beauty (however that comes about). He contrasts this with rejected material explanations (e.g., color or shape) and applies the same logic to other Forms (e.g., greatness makes great things great).

This is part of the broader discussion of the theory of Forms and causation in the Phaedo, where sensible particulars derive their properties from the eternal, unchanging Forms through participation or presence.In the Gorgias (497e), Plato also has Socrates state that people (or things) are called beautiful because beauty is present in them. In context, Socrates is drawing an analogy during an argument with Callicles about pleasure vs. the good: “Do you not call good people good owing to the presence of good things, as you call beautiful those in whom beauty is present?” Callicles agrees.

Here the language is more everyday and non-technical (not yet invoking the full metaphysical theory of Forms as in the Phaedo), but it uses the same core idea of beauty being present in what is beautiful. It serves a dialectical purpose in distinguishing good from pleasure.  The Phaedo passage is more philosophically developed (linking parousia directly to the causal role of the Form), while the Gorgias one is briefer and more conversational, but both affirm that beauty is present in (or makes present its character in) the beautiful thing/person. This reflects Plato’s recurring interest in how properties like beauty relate to their instances. As Heidegger says in his Nietzsche book for Plato beauty allows Being to scintillate at the same time.

For example, Niagara Falls may appear as a wonder of the world to the tourist, but as noise pollution to the local resident.  Similarly, the mansion might appear as houseness incarnate, houseness being merely present in the average house, and deficient in the delapidated shack.  On the other hand, to someone else the mansion may appear gaudy and the shack quaint.  Heidegger gives the examples of Art appearing incarnate in the Van Gogh or the circling eagle personifying Nature. We can see what Caputo means by comparing with Calasso, which makes the same point:

(Calasso key passages)

Yet there was a time when the gods were not just a literary clich?, but an event, a sudden apparition, an encounter with bandits perhaps, or the sighting of a ship. And it didn’t even have to be a vision of the whole. Ajax Oileus recognized Poseidon disguised as Calchas from his gait. He saw him walking from behind and knew it was Poseidon “from his feet, his legs.”

Since for us everything begins with Homer, we can ask ourselves: which words did he use for such events? By the time the Trojan War broke out, the gods were already coming to earth less frequently than in an earlier age. Only a generation before, Zeus had fathered Sarpedon on a mortal woman. All the gods had turned up for the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. But now Zeus no longer showed himself to men; he sent other Olympians along to do his exploring for him: Hermes, Athena, Apollo. And it was getting harder to see them. Odysseus admits as much to Athena: “Arduous it is, oh goddess, to recognize you, even for one who knows much.” The Hymn to Demeter offers the plainest comment: “Difficult are the gods for men to see.” Every primordial age is one in which it is said that the gods have almost disappeared. Only to the select few, chosen by divine will, do they show themselves: “The gods do not appear to everyone in all their fullness [enargeis],” the Odyssey tells us. Enargei?s is the terminus technicus for divine epiphany: an adjective that contains the dazzle of “white,” argos, but which ultimately comes to designate a pure and unquestionable “conspicuousness.” It’s the kind of “conspicuousness” that will later be inherited by poetry, thus becoming perhaps the characteristic that distinguishes poetry from every other form.

But how does a god make himself manifest? In the Greek language the word theos, “god,” has no vocative case, observed the illustrious linguist Jakob Wackernagel. Theos has a predicative function: it designates something that happens. There is a wonderful example of this in Euripides’ Helen: “O theoi. theos gar kai to gigno’ skein philous”–“O gods: recognizing the beloved is god.” Kerenyi thought that the distinguishing quality of the Greek world was this habit of “saying of an event: ‘It is theos.'” And an event referred to as being the?s could easily become Zeus, the most vast and all-inclusive of gods, the god who is the background noise of the divine. So when Aratus set out to describe the phenomena of the cosmos, he began his poem thus: “From Zeus let our beginning be, from he whom men never leave unnamed. Full of Zeus are the paths and the places where men meet, full of Zeus the sea and the seaports. Every one of us and in every way has need of Zeus. Indeed we are his offspring.”

“Iovis omnia plena,” Virgil would later write, and in these words we hear his assurance that this was a presence to be found everywhere in the world, in the multiplicity of its events, in the intertwining of its forms. And we also hear a great familiarity, almost a recklessness, in the way the divine is mentioned, as though to encounter divinity was hardly unusual, but rather something that could be expected, or provoked. The word atheos, on the other hand, was only rarely used to refer to those who didn’t believe in the gods. More often it meant to be abandoned by the gods, meant that they had chosen to withdraw from all commerce with men. Aratus was writing in the third century b.c., but what became of this experience that for him was so obvious and all-pervasive in the centuries that followed? How did time affect it? Did it dissolve it, destroy it, alter and empty it beyond recognition? Or is it something that still reaches out to us, whole and unscathed? And if so, where, how?

The holy is likewise a cute trick of the mind: a favorite gospel song can go from appearing numinously to appearing irritatingly just by playing it 40 monotonous times in a row.