Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart

Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart

Studies in Systematic Theology Series Editors

Stephen Bevans S.V.D., Catholic Theological Union, Chicago Miikka Ruokanen, University of Helsinki and Nanjing Union Theological Seminary Advisory Board

Wanda Deifelt, Luther College, Decorah, (IA) Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena (CA) Jesse Mugambi, University of Nairobi Rachel Zhu Xiaohong, Fudan University, Shanghai

VOLUME 6

Encountering Cruelty: The Fracture of the Human Heart By

Michael Reid Trice With a Foreword by

Robert J. Schreiter

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2011

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Trice, Michael Reid. Encountering cruelty : the fracture of the human heart / by Michael Reid Trice ; with a foreword by Tobert J. Schreiter. p. cm. -- (Studies in systematic theology ; v. 6) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-90-04-20166-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Cruelty. 2. Reconciliation--Religious aspects--Catholic Church. I. Title. BX1795.V56T75 2011 241'.3--dc22 2010053918

ISSN 1876-1518 ISBN 978 90 04 20166 8 Copyright 2011 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change.

For David

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This is what I say to all who will listen to me – Love your enemies, and be good to everyone who hates you. 28Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel [πονηρούς] to you. 31 Treat others just as you want to be treated. 32If you love only someone who loves you, will God praise you for that? Even sinners love people who love them. 33If you are kind only to someone who is kind to you, will God be pleased with you for that? Even sinners are kind to people who are kind to them. 35But love your enemies and be good to them. … He is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel [έπηρεαζόντων]. – Jesus, Luke 6:27–35

CONTENTS Foreword – by Robert J. Schreiter .............................................................xv Acknowledgments ..................................................................................... xix Introduction ..................................................................................................1 Chapter One Encountering Cruelty: Trajectory of an Inquiry ....... 19 A) Introduction – An Intersection of Four Queries on a Topos ....................................................................................27 i) The Historical Query of Approximation – The Topos of Cruelty .................................................................... 27 ii) The Classic Hermeneutic Query – Nietzsche’s Challenge ............................................................................... 35 iii) The Query from Experience – The Execution of David Jr. Ward .................................................................. 40 iv) The Query from a Locus of Belief – The Execution of Jesus ................................................................ 45 v) Transition from Four Queries and a Beginning ............... 47 B) The Lodestar – To ‘Know Oneself ’ and Nietzsche’s Way of Cruelty .............................................................................. 48 i) The Oracle at Delphi – Construction, Fracture, Concealment ........................................................................ 50 ii) Mythos and Myths – Angst, Wonder and Awe ................ 54 iii) Mythos and Myths – Telos-Orientation and Teleology ............................................................................... 57 iv) Trespass Concealed in Teleological Narrative-Myth ...... 60 v) Scientific Socratism – Skeptic and Tragic Philosopher after the ‘Fact’ ................................................ 64 vi) ‘The Rub’ – Abstraction, Limits of Language, Negative Creation, Reason’s Mask ..................................... 73 vii) Correlation: Positive Creation, Illusion/Allusion, Archeological Diving-Down .............................................. 78 C) Cruelty: Etymology, Normativity, Tragic Existence ................ 84 i) Etymology of Cruelty – Excess and Encounter................. 85 ii) Normative Inroads to a Criterion ...................................... 91 iii) Cruelty and a Sense of Tragic Existence ............................ 94

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contents D) Correlative Cartography – The Topography of Cruelty in Fracture-Artery-Contour ...................................... 111 E) Remarks for Transition .............................................................. 115

Chapter Two Intra-Personal Cruelty: The Artery of Self-Objectification............................................................................ 119 A) Introduction – Seeking a Point of Departure – Topography, Rising-In-Thought, Diving-Down .................... 121 B) An Argument for a Distinct Anthropological Trajectory ..................................................................................... 122 i) Cruelty as Distinct from ‘Sin’ and ‘Evil’ ............................ 123 ii) The External Traditional Teleology of Redemption – Cruelty, Sin and Evil .................................. 126 iii) The Internal Modern Teleology of the Cosmic Self ........ 131 iv) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 134 C) Introduction – An Anthropological Assessment: Oneself ......................................................................................... 135 i) Post-Modern Delphi – Oneself between Existential Limit and Existentiell Horizon ........................ 136 ii) Self-Knowledge – Oneself as An Other ............................ 138 iii) Self-Love – An Other as Oneself ....................................... 142 iv) An Intra-Personal Telos and Moniker............................... 148 v) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 150 D) The Narrative of Job – The Cry Against Cruelty .................... 151 i) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 156 E) The Artery of Intra-Personal Objectification .......................... 157 i) Augustine – Evil, Sin and Perversion ................................ 158 ii) Luther – Evil, Sin, and Pretension ..................................... 161 iii) Assessment – Objectification ............................................. 163 iv) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 166 F) Five Contours in the Artery of Self-Objectification ............... 166 i) Struggle ................................................................................. 166 ii) Trauma .................................................................................. 172 iii) To Become an Enigma ........................................................ 178 iv) Excision................................................................................. 181 v) Ressentiment ........................................................................ 186 G) The Supra-Narratives of Adam and Cain ................................ 187 i) Introduction – What Happened to Adam and Cain?.............................................................................. 187 ii) The Narrative of Cain – Section I ..................................... 189

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iii) The Narrative of Adam ...................................................... 192 iv) The Narrative of Cain – Section II ................................... 196 v) Ressentiment – The Lineage of Cain and the Civilization of Nod ............................................................. 202 H) Remarks for Transition.............................................................. 208 Chapter Three Interpersonal Cruelty: The Artery of the Desire for Recognition ...................................................................... 211 A) Introduction – Charting an Interpersonal Topography in Western Thought ............................................. 212 i) Two Assertions and a Problem in our Post-Modern Epoch ........................................................... 212 ii) The Search for an Interpersonal Moniker ....................... 216 iii) The Greek Interpersonal Moniker – Philia ..................... 218 iv) The Judeo-Christian Interpersonal Moniker – Hospitality ........................................................ 222 v) Assessment – Reciprocity ................................................... 231 vi) Symbiosis – Two Imperative Similes ................................ 233 vii) An Interpersonal Moniker – Remembering Fellows Forgotten ............................................................... 241 B) The Role of Desire in the Interpersonal Struggle for Recognition.................................................................................. 245 C) Girard’s Delphi – Mimetic Rivalry and the Concealment of Cruelty............................................................. 249 i) Daily Tragic Existence and Performable Tragedy ................................................................................ 251 ii) Performable Tragedy – Hamartia and Catharsis ............ 254 iii) The Mimetic Victim and the Abstracted Subject ............ 256 iv) Unfalsifiability..................................................................... 259 v) Conclusion .......................................................................... 260 D) The Artery of Recognition ........................................................ 263 i) Introduction ........................................................................ 267 E) Deuteronomy: 7.1–2 and 20:1–20 – The Narrative of the Canaanites ........................................................................ 271 i) Socio-Historical Context ................................................... 272 ii) The Persona of the Sanctifying-National Deity ............... 274 iii) The Persona of the Enemy ................................................. 279 iv) The Persona of the Righteous Warrior ............................. 281 v) The Interplay of Three Personas in Holy War ................. 289 vi) Conclusion ........................................................................... 295

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contents F) The Artery of Recognition Continued – Cruelty in the Name of Love .................................................................... 296 i) Introduction – The Query of Cruel Trespass in the name of Love .............................................................. 296 ii) The Trace of Pity in the Name of Love .............................. 300 G) Remarks for Transition .............................................................. 312

Chapter Four Institutional Cruelty: The Artery of Injustice ......... 315 A) Introduction – Toward a Moniker of the Institutional Sphere........................................................................................... 316 i) The Cry of Injustice and the Issue of Justice .................... 317 ii) The Irrevocable Correlation of Love and Justice ............. 323 iii) Toward a Moniker of the Institutional Sphere ................. 325 iv) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 328 B) The Trespass of Cruelty in the Institutional Sphere: Rising-In-Thought, Diving-Down ............................................ 329 i) Death Zones ......................................................................... 329 ii) Cruelty as Encounter ........................................................... 332 iii) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 334 C) The Public Execution of David Jr. Ward .................................. 335 i) Introduction ......................................................................... 335 ii) The Beginning of an Execution.......................................... 340 iii) A Change of Course – From ‘burden of proof ’ to ‘Common Sense’ .............................................................. 347 iv) Negative Transcendence and Death .................................. 355 v) Epilogue ................................................................................ 358 vi) Remarks for Transition ....................................................... 359 D) Cruelty at the Cross.................................................................... 359 i) Introduction ......................................................................... 359 E) The Life and Public Execution of Jesus of Nazareth ............... 365 i) Introduction ......................................................................... 365 ii) John the Baptist and the Beginning of a Prophet in his own Town ................................................................... 366 iii) The Crescendo of Interpersonal Relation in the Good Samaritan and Cruelty ............................................. 370 iv) Fundamentals of Message, Rhetoric, and the Symbol of the Temple ................................................... 373 v) Judas’ Conspiring and the Symbolic Cluster of Coins ................................................................................ 376

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vi) A Tragic Last Meal and a Prediction of Brokenness .......................................................................... 378 vii) A Kiss, A Seizure and Growing Distance ........................ 380 viii) Interrogation – Chief Priests, Pilate, Herod.................... 381 ix) The Sentence of Death and the Public Execution of Jesus ............................................................... 384 F) Remarks for Transition: On This Side of a Narrative Lacuna.......................................................................... 386 Epilogue – A Dispatch: Consideration of Some Tenets for Reconciliation ............................................................................... 391 A) Introduction – Reviewing the Project ...................................... 391 B) A Dispatch – Consideration of some Tenets for Reconciliation............................................................................... 393 C) Concluding Remarks .................................................................. 406 Bibliography ............................................................................................. 407 Index ......................................................................................................... 423

FOREWORD The interest in recent years in reconciliation, in transforming conflict and in dealing with trauma has sparked an interest in delving more deeply into all the facets of the healing process. A great deal of attention has been given to dealing with the past—with traumatic memory, with the search for truth and justice—as well as building a different kind of future through forgiveness and preventative measures to impede egregious wrongdoing from happening again. One area that has remained unexplored up to this time has been cruelty. Cruelty has always been apparent in massive acts of wrongdoing. But it has not been subjected to much analysis, perhaps because of the profound repugnance it awakens in us: we instinctively turn away and hide our faces from its monstrous incursion into our lives. Yet cruelty must be investigated if we are to hope for a different kind of future. In recent studies of how ordinary people are turned into suicide bombers or young recruits in armed conflict come to commit atrocities, the creation of a culture of cruelty has been found to play a major role. The objectification and demonization of others, the repression of feelings of compassion and empathy within oneself, and the sanctioning of what would otherwise be considered unacceptable or even inhuman behavior make such acts of wrongdoing possible. Cruelty to others can appear to perpetrators as oddly redemptive of their pasts: gratuitous violence can be seen as bringing about a perverse purification from humiliation and shame, and a vindication of their deepest grievances. To explore the contours of cruelty, and to trace the actions and emotions that hold it together are essential if we are to understand the dynamics by which healing and reconciliation take place. A key part of healing is about loosening the grip that the past has over us. It means revisiting wounds and retelling the story of what happened to us and how we have been inexorably changed by those events. To fail to understand how cruelty has contributed to the trauma of wrongdoing makes overcoming that past difficult. Likewise, to fail to understand cruelty blocks us from understanding why revenge and retaliation can have such a grip on our imagination and can be seen as legitimate human acts.

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foreword

Michael Trice has done a great service to the worldwide community of those who are seeking new pathways into reconciliation and healing by presenting this pioneering study on cruelty. There has never been a study in theology examining cruelty of this length and depth. And I am aware of only one such study in philosophy that comes even near to the thorough analysis that is found in this work. By presenting a phenomenology of cruelty—as excess, disfigurement, ugliness, and fracture—he provides insights into the working of cruelty in human life and society. Using especially the work of Nietzsche, he uncovers distinctive dimensions of cruelty that we have recognized singly, but have never brought together in concert that shows its insidious dimensions. Following Aquinas, he speaks of the “rawness” of cruelty—an apt metaphor for cruelty’s disregard for all that has been humanizing in our actions. Cruelty is more than a transgression of the rules. It sets out rather to undermine care, trust, respect, and justice—all those elements of human reciprocity that mark our lives as interdependent beings. Trice’s vivid language throughout this study reminds us that, although the ugliness of cruelty repels us, we cannot be deluded into thinking we will understand cruelty by keeping it at a safe distance to allow cool and neutral analysis. One cannot hope to understand how cruelty disfigures human relationships by maintaining this kind of pseudo-objectivity. Precisely because cruelty sets out to objectify deeply subjective sensibilities, the examination of cruelty must engage our own subjectivity as well. As he unfolds his phenomenology of cruelty, Trice then follows its unfolding in the full range of human action and existence, from the intra-personal through the interpersonal to the institutional. In so doing, he maps the effects cruelty can have on human society, thereby giving us deeper insight into how it insinuates itself into the most carefully wrought of human and social relationships, only to undermine and destroy them. Cruelty acts not just as a disruption of relationships; it works to undermine the very dimensions of our humanity manifest in our capacity to care, trust, and respect one another. Beyond the striking insights that Trice provides us, his interweaving of this analysis with biblical and theological narratives uncovers what have been at least implicit responses to the problems of suffering, evil and human perversity in Judaism and Christianity. His insights into the plight of Job and the cruel death of Jesus offer an impetus to rethinking our understanding of evil, and the soteriological significance of Jesus’ death. At a time when grappling with evil continues to

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dog theology, and when the role of violence in the redemptive suffering of Christ has come under ever more critical scrutiny, what Trice has to say here will help move both of those explorations along. In a tightly written Epilogue, Trice sketches out under five headings what the implications of this study of cruelty will have for understanding the theological meaning of reconciliation. To have gone beyond this sketch would take another volume at least as lengthy as this one. Yet he gives important pointers into where the next stage of a theology of reconciliation needs to go. In brief, his five headings are a call to face cruelty much more deliberately and squarely than we have in the past. Only by such unblinking scrutiny can we hope to come further into understanding how reconciliation comes about in human life. Indeed, the implications of his findings reach beyond Christian theology to the larger discussion now going on about how to imagine reconciliation across lines of culture, religion, and no religion. To my knowledge, no one has yet given these points the kind of in-depth examination they deserve. It is to be hoped that Trice will find the opportunity to return to them himself. All in all, this is an extremely important study that deserves to be studied and debated. Not all will agree with some of his proposals. Does cruelty actually precede what we call sin and evil? Are its origins perhaps in our animal nature? However one construes the anthropology that precedes or flows from this analysis of cruelty, the questions that Trice proposes need the scrutiny of all of those who are trying to plumb the mysteries of how healing and reconciliation take place in individual human lives and in larger societies. As he notes in the Epilogue, to side-step the phenomenon of cruelty will eventually shortcircuit the reconciliation process itself, or at least hinder its fuller realization. Michael Trice has given us a study that will, in the course of future years, stand as an important turning point in our understanding of the processes of reconciliation. Robert J. Schreiter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Any substantial effort at new discovery is a strain on our resources: mind, body, heart and the closest souls to us – friends, family and advisors all. Too many words to those luminaries in our lives can cast a false light on all that they have become for us. I am so deeply grateful for all of you, named and unnamed, who are nevertheless written clearly along the contours of my own heart. This work on cruelty dawned for me in the diffuse early morning light after a public execution the night previous. In the months and years since, I have more to be grateful for in the ballast of relationships than I would have known when all of this began. To Prof. Dr. Robert Schreiter, Prof. Dr. John McCarthy, Prof. Dr. Guenther Wenz, Prof. Dr. Jon Nilson, Prof. Dr. Bill French, the faculties and staff at Loyola University and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Muenchen, Duke University Divinity School and Bethany Lutheran College – I owe you my sincerest gratitude. Many of you were my conversation partners and friends through this aesthetics of ugliness, in places where others would not have endeavored to enter. To colleagues and friends at the Collegium Oecumenicum, to Lutheran World Federation friends and associates in Geneva, to colleagues in the Administration and who support global peacebuilding efforts around the world, and to my global ecumenical and inter-religious compatriots, which include Bishop Donald McCoid, Dr. Ishmael Noko, Dr. Kathryn Johnson, Dr. Karen Bloomquist, – Thank you. To faculty and staff throughout the United States and around the world, including Prof. Dr. Robin Steinke, Prof. Dr. Maria Erling, Dr. Michael Kinnamon, Dr. John McCullough, Prof. Dr. Giorgio Baruchello, Dr. Deenabandhu Manchala, Prof. Dr. Vitor Westhelle, Prof. Dr. Mark Swanson and Prof. Dr. Diana Eck, Prof. Dr. Nelly Van Doorn-Harder and Prof. Dr. Esther Menn. To the longest arch of friendships and your unstraying love: Elizabeth and Michael Ramey, Thomas W. Trice, Melissa J. Trice, Rev. Daryn Holdsworth, Dr. James Sheppard, Kate Sputta Elliott, Kathy Magnus, Yvette Rénee, Dawn Battiste Esq., Chief Justice Robinson O. Everett, The Albuquerque Trice clan, Chris W. and Jennifer Collins, Catherine Wolf, Joseph, Anne and Leslie. Thank you all.

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acknowledgments

To the lives of so many whose narratives of cruelty line these pages, I pray I have been careful with your memories. That was my intention. To David Jr. Ward, in whose incarceration and death this entire effort originated. Thank you from the heart for the card. Chicago, Illinois March 1, 2011

Michael Reid Trice

INTRODUCTION This work is a phenomenological assessment of the deep structure of cruelty, its affects upon human existence, and the response of reconciliation in light of cruelty. It will be argued that cruelty is an excess in human life that harms and even annihilates well-being. Cruelty is likewise internal and endemic to human life, rendering us complicit in cruel actions even where we fail to notice how such actions harm ourselves and other human beings. Unlike perceptions of how external sin and evil are the result of an original fall upon the human subject, cruelty is an internal feature of being human in the world. Although desiring to view ourselves in a more gratifying light, cruelty is difficult to look upon because therein we confront not only a disfiguring excess, but an ugliness in who and how we are within ourselves and in relation to others. The disfiguring ugliness of cruelty in our intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres of existence is a radical exclusion of human dignity and integrity in the heart of everyday life that we conceal from ourselves. It will be further argued that we can work toward the possibility of reconciliation only after we are aware of how cruelty is present in human life. Indeed, throughout Encountering Cruelty, significant reference will be made to the practical possibility of reconciliation in, through and after the encounter of cruelty in the world. From the beginning, I want to emphasize that any reference to reconciliation in this study includes a recognition of the following: Reconciliation is in and of itself a term freighted with cultural complexity, so it is essential for any substantial trajectory of reconciliation to be both aware of cross-cultural constants and deeply inclusive of unique cultural features in relation to the entire enterprise of reconciling activity in the world. The implications of reconciliation in relation to cruelty reach beyond Christian theology to a broader discussion today about the nature of reconciliation across culture and religion. An analysis of cruelty will commence in the pages to follow, but a thick approximation of the structures of reconciliation in relation to cruelty will require efforts that expand beyond the last page of this text. That further work awaits talented drafters, challengers and defenders all.

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Cruelty is distillable and will be approximated in our daily existence. We will identify cruelty, clarify how it affects human life and relation, and offer a new possibility for reconciliation through and after cruelty. In the history of western thought, scant attention has been paid to interpreting the topic or topos of cruelty, even though the effect of cruelty on human life and relation is attested to in philosophy, theology, psychology, poetry and prose. Although we talk about “cruelty,” we seldom identify that about which we are talking. This lack of identification is a serious problem if we aim to understand who and how we are, and what happens to us, in our experience of cruelty. The problem is compounded in our historical context, where global agitations produce all kinds of cruel behavior that harms and even annihilates our fellow human beings. Due to the fact that no sustained effort at understanding cruelty in current literature has been undertaken, no study of reconciliation through and after cruelty has been ventured. In order to locate reconciliation, we must first understand what ails us underneath. Throughout, the method of this work is a constructive or hermeneutic theology that will begin the analysis for an adequate approximation of cruelty. This method will also assist in locating reconciliation in relation to cruelty. Encountering Cruelty is principally an archeological and genealogical exploration of cruelty, inasmuch as this kind of spadework has not been previously undertaken theologically, and only recently in philosophy. As with any archeological dig, focus is relative to a specific site, where the layers of life and culture are imprinted and textured on the earthen walls of a specific context. The site chosen for Encountering Cruelty has been within the parameters of Western thought, specifically in its nineteenth and twentieth-century layers. And beyond that, the encounter within the temporal layer of Western philosophy and Christian theology. Consequently, there is a somewhat monocultural or mono-civilizational tone to the work. And yet, without taking this topos seriously at the site of its first philosophically cognizant appearing in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, there cannot be any materially recognizable intercultural encounter with other sites. Such spadework is the condition of possibility for intercultural encounter. Nonetheless, acts of cruelty are not, nor ever have been, restricted to a given cultural or civilizational area. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, however one judges its merit as an overview of the current time, indicates how violence crosses cultural and civilizational boundaries.

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Although the site-specific archeology of cruelty is a necessary condition for coming to understand better what remedies cruelty, such an approach is not a sufficient one, given especially the globalized reality of life today. Thus, this study cannot ignore wider cultural and civilizational implications nor assessment. Absent the possibility of describing at this time specific intercultural encounters, what will be most useful is to indicate cross-cultural horizons in the study of cruelty. By “cross-cultural” I mean to signify those commonalities that range across different cultural configurations, which provide points of comparison and suggest to the reader a trajectory for deeper insights into the phenomena under study. “Intercultural” refers to the dynamics of encounter between two cultures. This study will concentrate on cross-cultural horizons as a stimulus both to understanding instances of cruelty and to reflecting upon what can be discerned as common dynamics of cruelty across cultural boundaries. The archeology and genealogy of cruelty requires an interdisciplinary approach. This study will explore some of those interdisciplinary dimensions, but not all of them. Work in cognitive and evolutionary psychology currently being undertaken is exploring the neurochemistry of trauma and empathy, for instance. What the preliminary results of such research suggest is that the impact of the perception and experience of cruelty upon the human subject may be something of a crosscultural constant. How such cruelty is responded to, however, displays cultural differences. For example, the neurochemistry of trauma in the mid-brain appears to be the same across cultural boundaries, but different cultures display a range of responses to it – psychoanalytic approaches in the West, ritual and drama in Southeast Asia – may differ. Similarly, how human beings respond to the need for social bonding (and in the study of cruelty, the denial or exclusion of such bonding) bears distinctive cultural stamps. This will be reflected in the crosscultural remarks made throughout this study. Encountering Cruelty is separated into four chapters. Chapter one situates the enterprise as a whole and identifies the issue of cruelty in human life. Chapters two through four will clarify how cruelty affects human beings in three spheres respective to each chapter. These spheres are: intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional life. An epilogue will conclude the study with threads of theological possibility for a beginning discourse toward reconciliation through and after cruelty’s advance in human life and relation. The four chapters are outlined as follows:

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introduction Chapter One – Encountering Cruelty: Trajectory of an Inquiry

Chapter one has four aims. The first aim is to situate the enterprise as a whole. This study on cruelty is the result of thinking through four basic vectors, the intersection of which results in a constructive theory of evaluation. These vectors are: a) the lack of clarity within historical scholarship; b) Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenge that cruelty is concealed in western thought; c) the author’s experience of cruelty in the public execution of a friend; and d), cruelty in the public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Scholarship, experience, and our classic Judeo-Christian understanding, combine to offer a legitimate starting point for assessing cruelty and reconciliation. The second aim is to find an adequate starting point for the investigation of cruelty. I begin with what Nietzsche identified as “the way of cruelty” in western thought. Nietzsche believed that western thought has constructed Ideals for how human beings should and do live. Systems of governance enshrine these Ideals, where for instance revenge utilizes the Ideal of Justice in the legitimation of the death penalty. But underneath the system with its enshrined Ideal lies unconcealed cruelty that enables reconciliation for neither victim nor perpetrator. Nietzsche employs the metaphor of Delphi (i.e., the Ideal with its system) and the fractures underneath Delphi (i.e., human suffering and cruelty) in order to illustrate how every enshrined Ideal can provisionalize human suffering and conceal cruelty underneath. Cruelty is like a fracture insofar as it is concealed from us, and has the potential for rupturing who and how we are in the world. The metaphor of cruelty as a fracture in human life, with its implication for harming human beings, is adopted in the study as both a starting point and source for heuristic concepts. The problem of systemically enshrined Ideals is complicit with how we construct closed teleological narrative myths with their calculable and pre-determined beginning-middle-end constructions. Such enclosure renders life sublime, like a Greek tragedy where we have a cathartic response and everything is resolved in the end. Nietzsche’s point is that such appeals to the sublime Ideal impede our experiencing and understanding of the world as it is – full of wonder, awe, anxiety, suffering, and cruelty. While this study rejects the narrative structure of tragedy and its aesthetic resolution in catharsis, it does recognize the tragic elements

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of human life. Life is tragic in the trespasses we endure where there is no simple resolution to suffering and cruelty. The painful experience of cruelty is that there is no sublime Ideal for its reconciliation; there is no assurance that we will endure with a world reordered and made calculable once more. The cost for such knowledge is a more complete understanding of what the world is for us. The benefit is how we take Delphi at its word, and get to “know ourselves” much better. The study identifies Nietzsche as our lodestar for understanding cruelty. His insights into how cruelty operates will assist us as we uncover examples of cruelty in human experience and within our classic narratives in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. What we discover is that cruelty is more than tragic: its effect upon human life is what makes us ugly. Cruelty makes us ugly for three general reasons. First, unlike some forms of violence, we usually do not recognize the effect of cruelty upon our lives. Cruelty can be concealed in resentment underneath odes to love, or hidden in expressions of inclusion that exclude other human beings. Second, what makes us ugly is not only our lack of recognition, but how we are complicit in cruelty’s advance. For instance, the enshrined sublime Ideal, once more of Justice, can conceal a thirst for revenge. Although cruelty is concealed, it remains active. Third, in our lack of recognition and complicity, cruelty contradicts (i.e., transvalues) our values without our awareness of such contradiction (i.e., transvaluation). Revenge is sought in the name of Justice, exclusion is pursued through a rhetoric of Inclusion, or resentment is concealed and active in expressions of Love. In this way, our values of justice, inclusion, and love become changed and reduced deep within us, and human life is harmed. A lack of recognition, our complicity, and the contradiction of our values, produce an ugliness in us. Nietzsche views such ugliness as a systemic sickness within the western human heart. The third aim is to locate Nietzsche’s “way of cruelty” in a larger but limited set of reflections on cruelty. The method used is an etymological one. Thomas Aquinas was the first to say that cruelty is “raw, like uncooked meat.” Cruelty is raw insofar as it harms and even breaks the bonds of human hospitality and reciprocity by exceeding any daily understanding of human well-being. Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, German, and English etymological resource material disclose cruelty precisely as a rawness, or excess, in human existence. Insofar as it harms reciprocity and hospitality, cruelty is an excess that is also irrational, inexplicable, and contradicts and transvalues who and how we are in

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the world. For instance, the excess of being a “cruel friend” reveals how quickly friendship is transvalued. Cruelty contradicts the meaning of friendship, where the second term is changed and reduced into an oxymoron when it follows the first. The fourth aim of the chapter is to explain how Nietzsche’s image of a geological “fracture” will be developed through a set of heuristic concepts which include the notions of arteries and contours. Cruelty is like a fracture in human life. The fracture of cruelty has at least three arteries correlated to the three spheres of human life (intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional). Each artery contains five identifiable contours, like the textured walls of a gorge that assist us in identifying not only each artery, but the nature of the larger fracture of cruelty itself. The image of “fracture” provides the structure for this analysis. Cruelty is as a fracture, and it affects all three spheres of human existence like three distinct but inseparable arteries of the same larger fracture. For instance, chapter two identifies how the artery of selfobjectification fractures across the intra-personal sphere. The contours of each artery overlap one another, revealing how we experience cruelty within each artery. These contours are identified here and assessed in chapter two. The contours are: Excessive struggle, trauma that we internalize as a contagion, turning ourselves and others into enigmatic strangers and enemies, excising human life and relation, and pursuing a course of deception in resentment. Struggle, trauma, the enigmatic, excision, and resentment are five contours within each of the three arteries in the larger fracture of cruelty. Chapter one concludes with Remarks for Transition and the trajectory of chapter two is identified.

Chapter Two – Intra-Personal Cruelty: Self-Objectification Chapter two investigates the artery of self-objectification within the intra-personal sphere. The chapter has six aims. The first aim is to explain why the topos of cruelty must be viewed as distinct from the traditional teleological structure of sin and evil within the Judeo-Christian tradition. Nietzsche asserted that cruelty operates underneath the Judeo-Christian understanding of sin, evil, love, and forgiveness. Due to its transvaluative character, resentment can be concealed underneath odes to love, or fear of human trespass and struggle may reside under forgiveness. Furthermore, sin and evil are

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operative and assumed in the traditional teleology of human fallenness and redemption. In order to interpret the effect of cruelty on the human subject, we suspend this traditional teleology. Although not all of Nietzsche’s conclusions are accepted, his argument establishes the need for a unique anthropological assessment that accounts for cruelty in human existence distinct but not necessarily separable from a nonteleological reading of the topoi of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ Insofar as cruelty is distinct from teleological sin and evil, the human subject (who is affected by cruelty) must also be considered apart from the wiles of an enclosed or teleological interpretation of sin and evil. The second aim is to construct a distinct interpretation of the human subject who is affected by cruelty. Drawing from our classic philosophical and theological texts, we discover how human beings exist between existential limit and existentiell horizon. Between limit and horizon, Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian Scriptures call human beings to both know and love themselves. The Delphic “know thyself ” implies an increase in intra-personal well-being, where one learns to dwell-in, go out into the world to see (oida), and return-to and bring-back-together (sunienai), once more. The Christian imperative to “love your neighbor as yourself,” means that knowing and loving oneself is primary to knowing and loving one’s neighbor. “To love … as yourself” suggests certain irreplaceable features of human life. For instance, the art of self-care is an intra-personal responsibility; through self-care, we learn to love ourselves as nonsubstitutable; we respect, seek justice, and gain integrity with regard to who and how we are in the world. The anthropological assessment locates an intra-personal moniker. A moniker is a single word or phrase that identifies the complexity of who and how humans are as intra-personal subjects. In selfknowing and self-loving, the intra-personal moniker is identified as a journey of self-intensification. The intra-personal journey of self-intensification is made intimate and intense insofar as human beings attest to their identity (who) and action (how) in the world. To know and love oneself is a journey in how one dwells-in and returns-to oneself between limit and horizon. The intra-personal journey intensifies insofar as it reaches new depths of self-awareness and self-becoming. Likewise, an intra-personal telos is clarified. This telos is clear in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, explicit in Adam and Abraham’s respective responses to God – “I am here.” To “be here” and journey in a world of suffering and cruelty is the first rudimentary intra-personal telos for human life. The intra-personal moniker and telos are also evident in

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how Job struggles with cruelty. Job’s journey and endurance through suffering and cruelty reveal this truth. The third aim is to locate a site in the Judeo-Christian scriptures that reveals the artery of cruelty upon the human subject, as intra-personal cruelty. Job is the first protagonist in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures to identify the effect of cruelty upon his life. He tells God: “You have become cruel to me.” Interpretations of the Job narrative usually employ an external teleology of Redemption (as an enshrined Ideal within an enclosed soteriological systematic that includes the ontologies of sin and evil). These interpretations portray Job as the Ideal of the Faithful Servant. But they likewise conceal cruelty within this narrative. Job as the sublime Faithful Servant is contra-poised with another Job of faithfulness, who is aware of cruelty, values justice, hopes for understanding, and who never relents. The qualitative difference between these two interpretations is a narrative attestation that neither provisionalizes suffering nor conceals cruelty. In the verse prior to his complaint, Job observes God “standing back” from him. In being neglected, abstracted, or objectified, Job yearns for a divine response to his world so torn asunder. The site we locate for the intra-personal artery of Job is identified as “objectification.” In a closer analysis of the Job narrative, we note five infringements upon Job’s life that reveal how objectification transvalues his life. These infringements are an internal struggle grown to excess, his identity become hateful and enigmatic, excision or being “cut-off ” from himself and the world, public resentment, and the trauma he endures in body and spirit. Through the remainder of the book, these infringements operate as the five contours within each artery of cruelty. The task is left to explain the nature of intra-personal objectification, and thereafter to clarify the above infringements as five contours within cruelty. The fourth aim, and indeed the aim from this moment to the conclusion of chapter four, is to answer a simple question: How does cruelty affect human beings? In this chapter, our response must clarify the nature of objectification (i.e., to be treated like an object). Job’s complaint of being treated as an object, both by oneself and by others, is further assessed. In order to ground an understanding of objectification, we follow two prominent theologians – Augustine and Martin Luther. We follow their respective thought to the conceptual ground of sin and evil. We recall that the topos of cruelty is distinct from a teleological accounting of sin and evil, albeit not necessarily separate from

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a non-teleological reading of sin and evil. Our hope is to locate the connection between cruelty and to be treated as an object. For both Augustine and Luther, to treat oneself as an object is located in perversion and pretension. For Luther, human pretension produces the degeneration of self-love, whereas for Augustine the degeneration of self-love produces perversion. Whether pretension first or perversion last, both theologians are concerned with the conceptual ground of why and how it is that human beings treat not only themselves, but God and neighbor, as objects. In order to account for this human penchant, both Augustine and Luther turn to the fall of humankind, and the infusion of sin and evil into the world. This infusion of sin and evil is the very ground upon which the western tradition has constructed a teleological and enclosed interpretation, not merely of the fallen human subject, but of redemption in light of the fall. We have resisted this teleological advance. We can also now glimpse how the hermeneutics of reconciliation must account for excess that is not readily accessible in the traditional teleological topoi of sin, evil, and redemption. Reconciliation that does not address the ugliness of human cruelty, may offer a possibility for redemption to the enclosed theoretics of sin and evil, but it will miss the nature of daily human excess that desperately requires reconciliation. We resist the teleological advance of sin and evil enough to investigate once more the conceptual ground to which Augustine and Luther were drawn. Our preliminary question is this – What is so ugly and even treacherous about treating oneself, God, and others as objects? The ugliness of treating oneself, God, and others as objects rests in how objectification is an excess that blows apart the interior existential machinations of the subject, one’s relation to the existentiell horizon (i.e., the Imago Dei), and a sense of mutuality, care, justice, respect, integrity, and reciprocity between human beings who share in the Imago Dei. Objectification is treacherous to the intra-personal sphere in the infringements identified in the Job narrative. The next task is to align these infringements as five contours of cruelty that will be informative to the remainder of this study. The fifth aim is to identify once more the infringements Job endures, and clarify these as five contours within each artery of cruelty. The analysis returns again briefly to Job. Job struggles, is traumatized, becomes estranged, is excised from his former life, and endures resentment. Through our reading of Job we are finally in a position to offer

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an assessment of these five contours that affect human life. The assessment identifies how these contours transvalue human life and make us ugly in ourselves. The analysis of the five contours reveals the following: i) excessive struggle harms or even annihilates well-being in human life, and can lead to despising oneself. The German term, Kampf, suggests struggle that verges on an internal war, with respect to our analysis, and is used interchangeably with “excessive struggle” throughout this work; ii) trauma is a contagion when it is internalized and one becomes anchored in cycles of cruelty; iii) Augustine recalls his own trauma of losing a childhood friend, where he becomes “an enigma to myself.” The double-entendre of the enigmatic is when one becomes a stranger and enemy within oneself. One is complicit in self-alienation, ostracized from one’s own dwelling; iv) Job is excised from himself and his family, and becomes homeless in himself. Excision transpires in a situation of crisis, and is typified through specific symbols (to cut, pierce, penetrate, or tear open) that are prevalent and repetitious throughout western classic literature; finally, v) ressentiment is shown to contradict the basic human well-being of care, respect, justice, and integrity. The symbol of the “unsound eye” in classic literature is employed by Nietzsche and is an aid in understanding the nature of ressentiment. The “unsound eye” that transforms light into dark, is an image for how ressentiment always turns on a fulcrum of self-deception. Jesus’ metaphor of wine illustrates ressentiment. The accidents of wine are a gift of replenishment from viewing what Jesus calls “the outside of the cup.” At the same time, what is “inside of you” can be “full of robbery and wickedness.” The accidents attract, but the substance underneath conceals a deception. By association, the appearance of love can be cloaked in ressentiment. The analysis concludes with a specific identification of the five contours: Kampf, trauma, to become an enigma, excision, and ressentiment. Finally, the sixth aim is to test the validity of the analysis to this point through an assessment of two classic narratives from the JudeoChristian scriptures. The supra-narratives of Adam and Cain are chosen to this end. We locate the artery of self-objectification in these narratives, as well as how the five contours harm and even annihilate human life. Adam becomes an enigma to himself. The bitten apple is the symbol for an objectified world. Adam’s choice excises him into the enigmatic in the form he cannot endure, the symbol of his own death, his own skin. Thereafter, humanity has learned that cruelty to oneself,

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even as a fracture, arises from within the internal operations of the subject, in the daily choices and machinations of human life and relation. As for Cain, ressentiment annihilates his brother, destroys his intra-personal dwelling when he becomes an enigmatic fugitive, and alienates him from God. How all of this transpires takes us through a new reading of the narrative of Cain, where the reader becomes implicated by Cain in the reading itself. Both narratives confirm and sharpen the present analysis insofar as they reveal cruelty as an ugliness and disfiguring excess that is internal to, and mired in, human life and relation; cruelty is a serious threat to human well-being, as illustrative in the supra-narratives of Adam and Cain. Chapter two concludes with Remarks for Transition and the trajectory of chapter three is identified.

Chapter Three – Interpersonal Cruelty: The Artery of the Struggle for Recognition Chapter three investigates the artery of the struggle for recognition within the interpersonal sphere. The chapter begins with two assertions: The first assertion is that the Delphic “know thyself,” which informed our intra-personal anthropological assessment in chapter two, likewise has interpersonal implications in chapter three. To know oneself as an other, and an other as oneself, will serve as the hermeneutic bridge between the intra- and interpersonal spheres. Next, the second assertion is that our contemporary context is one of a serious crisis of authority, is flush with interpersonal cruelty, and thereby demands our full attention toward reconciliation now. Crises being what they are, this one – of a lack of normative authority in a globalizing context flush with displays of cruelty – belongs tooth and claw to our own epoch. In light of this crisis, our first contemporary challenge is to take Delphi at its word and get to know ourselves and others much better. The chapter takes up this challenge through three aims. The first aim is to construct a distinct interpretation of interpersonal relation between human subjects. The former anthropological assessment was in view of the singular human subject, but the current assessment is of interpersonal relation. A search for the linguistic ground of interpersonal relation draws the reader to an investigation of the Greek concept of philia (i.e., “friendship”), and the Hebrew understanding of hospitality. Through an assessment of classic philosophers

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and theologians, interpersonal reciprocity is located at the heart of exchange between human subjects. Daily reciprocity includes an interpersonal exchange of care, trust, respect, and justice. Next, the analysis turns to an account of reciprocity in the JudeoChristian scriptures. In chapter two the imperative simile was to “love… as yourself’; in chapter three the interpersonal scriptural imperative is located in “doing unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Both verses are mutual imperative similes – love and do “as” to oneself and another. These imperative similes drive the analysis beyond daily interpersonal reciprocity and to an underlying ontological symbiosis between human beings. Daily interpersonal reciprocity reveals a deeper assumed ontological symbiosis clear in the Judeo-Christian scriptures and by association in our classic literature. Interpersonal ontological symbiosis is attested to in classic narratives, such as within God’s question to Cain after the murder of Abel. God asks: “Where is your brother?” God assumes an ontological relation that is not erased in death, where daily interpersonal reciprocity is sundered. This ontological relation allows a fresh reading of philia and hospitality, where both require, not merely daily kindness toward friends and strangers, but a necessary assumed fellowship between human beings. Ultimately, the repetition on derivations of “fellowship” in classic literature opens for the reader an interpersonal moniker. A journey of self-intensification was disclosed as the intra-personal moniker; the interpersonal moniker is fellowship. As a moniker, fellowship captures the breadth of an ontological symbiosis and daily reciprocity between human beings. The second aim is to show how an interpersonal desire for mutual recognition can lead to an excess that harms or annihilates interpersonal reciprocity. Ontological symbiosis is never erased in death. God asks Cain where his dead brother is. Even when human beings murder one another, they are still meant to live otherwise, as is evident in God’s question to Cain that makes the living brother responsible for the dead one. On the other hand, God’s question and Cain’s silence do reveal that daily human reciprocity can be harmed or even annihilated. The living brother is responsible for the dead brother, even after daily reciprocity is sundered. Daily human reciprocity, as in the Cain narrative, can be sundered when an interpersonal desire for recognition rises in a struggle that contradicts human well-being. Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence is the prevailing, contemporary systematic theory that attempts

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to explain how such a desire for recognition destroys human life. The Girardian theory is assessed, but is revealed to be a systematic Ideal of Mimesis enshrined within a teleological beginning-middle-end of mimetic rivalry. In the Girardian theory, a sense of tragic existence is marginalized, and in its place is constructed an elaboration akin to a Greek performable tragedy. The cathartic response happens in the sacrifice of a scapegoat, and interpersonal life returns to a state where human desire is temporarily released from human excess. Our contemporary vulnerabilities produce analyses, such as the Girardian mimetic theory of violence, that return us again to a teleologically fixed Ideal, or a “generative mechanism” somehow hidden since the foundation of the world. The difference between an approximation of the fracture of cruelty and Girard’s presentation of mimetic violence is that the former lands in the middle of a hostile hermeneutic environment where interpersonal well-being is contradicted, grows inexplicable, and transvalues interpersonal fellowship. An approximation of cruelty resists – not mimetic desire in daily existence – but the Girardian systematic theory of mimetic rivalry that provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty within a teleologically fixed Ideal of Mimesis. Girard’s analysis is insufficient for an account of the excess of cruelty in interpersonal relation. The analysis searches for an account of excessive struggle in an interpersonal desire for recognition that is also reflected in our current historical context, and turns first to the JudeoChristian scriptures for such an account. The Deuteronomic account of a “holy war mentality” provides an example of excessive interpersonal struggle, the principles of which are shown to be active in our current historical context. The artery of interpersonal cruelty is located in the desire for recognition that exceeds and abstracts humans being. The Ideal of national Right and the systematic logic of the herem (i.e., the divine command to annihilate the other) are investigated. In the struggle for the Ideal of national Right, a triadic transvaluation ensues: The creator deity is reduced to the national deity, oneself is reduced to the righteous warrior, and one’s fellow is reduced to the stranger-infidel underneath the autograph of the enemy. Kampf rises and threatens interpersonal well-being. The contagion of trauma, the enigmatic symbol of the “ban,” and excision in the piercing symbol of a sword, are all tragic and render us ugly in a holy war mentality. Life is transvalued. The righteous warrior is obedient and indeed wins the Ideal of national Right, but this Ideal is vacuous when it is given from a reduced creator deity. Obedience can be cruel. The war produces animosities

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that are arduous to future prospects for reconciliation. In the interpersonal artery of the struggle for recognition, a holy war mentality transvalues interpersonal well-being, and ultimately concludes in fear. The assessment reveals how ugly cruelty can make human life and relation. The third aim is similar to the second, which is to locate a specific accounting of cruelty in interpersonal life. This time, however, the analysis turns to cruelty concealed as pity. Pity has been a topic of concern from Zeno to contemporary scholarship. For his part, Spinoza wrote that we are cruel to those we love. The assessment locates cruelty when it is “what we do to those we love,” but in the name of love. This trace of cruelty-to-those-we-love-in-the-name-of-love is distinct from the assessment of the Cain narrative, where his murder of Abel precludes mention of affection. This trace is likewise distinct from the previous Deuteronomic account of excessive struggle; cruelty in the name of love (i.e., pity) is an excessive struggle that is almost entirely subterranean, clarifying earlier points about the deceptive nature of cruelty. Pity masquerades as a quasi-love that desires a performance from our fellows. Pity sensationalizes the attestations of the other through an insatiable joy attained in the performance. In the sensationalized performance, one gawks, yearns for satisfaction, celebrates that one is not the performer, and yet desires to hear more of the other’s attestations from the performable narrative. Public pity is pursued in contemporary media through “jolt points” that aim to keep the viewer sensationalized. Where a reaction to offer help is void, akin to Hegel’s “ethical desire” to offer immediate and substantial assistance, then pity feeds on the struggle and trauma of others. Pity in the name of love transvalues daily reciprocity with their fellows insofar as pity excises others from us, and reduces these others to the enigmatic. Pity is often a subtle interpersonal cruelty. The response to our earlier query of how cruelty affects the human being, reveals how cruelty transpires in interpersonal life, even in the name of love itself. Cruelty of this ilk transpires in an interpersonal desire for recognition, but not in a Hegelian sense of dyadic pawns checkmating one another. This form of desire is often unexpressed, subterranean, and certainly no less ugly and trespassive of human well-being. Chapter three concludes with Remarks for Transition in our trajectory to this point. The trajectory of chapter four is identified, and we prepare the groundwork for an understanding of cruelty in the institutional sphere.

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Chapter Four – Institutional Cruelty: The Issue of Justice Chapter four investigates the artery of injustice within the institutional sphere. This chapter has five aims. The first aim is to locate the rudimentary and prevailing injustice to which justice always responds. Theologians have asked what justice is, and how it responds at a fundamental level to human injustice. The respective answers of four theologians are assessed. These theologians assert that human beings have a preliminary idea of justice as a “sketch, sense, spirit of, or first principle.” Daily reciprocity between human beings, and the nature of well-being from care to justice, affirms our former analysis regarding a fundamental requirement of justice in human life. Justice is a serious concern in human life in the face of injustice, or when we hear the cry – “Unjust!” – from fellow human beings. The analysis continues in an assessment of both the cry of injustice and the response of justice. Both cry and response rise in human life from the same deep-structure content. This deep-structure content is often expressed negatively in the rudimentary human need not to be “abandoned” by one’s fellows in the world. A moniker of justice is located that captures this same deep-structure content between cry and response. The moniker of justice is negatively expressed as the human need against abandonment. Abandonment is the rudimentary and prevailing injustice to which justice always responds. When later developments of justice forfeit the deep-structure content of “abandonment” of fellow human beings, then justice is transvalued into something other than it claims to be (i.e., such as revenge), and is lost to injustice in the name of justice. The second aim is to display the masks of cruelty in this moniker for justice as “abandonment.” Rather than turn to the response of institutional justice, the analysis remains at the level of the attestations of the singular and collective cry against abandonment. Furthermore, the analysis reflects upon where human beings are abandoned by the institution, but in the name of justice. When the institution abandons human beings, then both intra- and interpersonal life and relation is likewise seriously harmed or even annihilated. Insofar as institutional abandonment of human beings affects all three spheres of human life, we refer to this effect as a “death zone” in human life. Institutional abandonment of fellow human beings, but in the name of justice, produces a death zone driven by an “irrationality” that will have concrete, spatial, political, and economic impacts on human life. The irrationality

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of pursuing injustice through the name of justice indicates that those caught in the wake of irrationality have no further quarter for safe passage. Such death zones are an excess, transvaluing justice into gradations of injustice, and reveal an ugliness in human life. Institutional cruelty is a death zone. The assessment returns to the etymological study of chapter one. Trucido is an excessive trespass that changes and reduces human well-being. Death zones are ugly and cruel because they are irrational, tragic, and inexplicable to well-being. Cruelty at the institutional sphere is a fracture that can simultaneously harm and even annihilate well-being in every sphere. Insofar as cruelty is a “death zone,” its effect is as an encounter that overwhelms human life. The third aim is to reveal how cruelty encounters and affects the human subject within the contemporary institutional sphere, and indeed all three spheres. The author worked with a team of attorneys for the sake of appealing death-penalty cases in North Carolina. One trial is analyzed for the exhibition of cruelty that violated all three spheres. This case was in fact a prevailing inspiration for the study. David Jr. Ward was executed on October 13, 2001. One need not impugn the entire judicial system to see how institutional abandonment ultimately ended David’s life. Thirteen volumes of trial transcripts are assessed. The five contours of cruelty, in particular the enigmatic, excision and ressentiment, were operative in David’s trial. The institution abandoned David, an injustice that went unresolved through nine years of the post-conviction appellate process. The fourth aim is to locate how the encounter of cruelty is likewise apparent in the public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The assessment of David’s trial, appeal, and execution were based on attestations from experience and trial transcripts. The life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth is based on the gospels, particularly the gospel of Luke. Both executions reveal how institutional cruelty affects all spheres of human life. Institutional cruelty has similar facets, whether yesterday or two millennia prior. No other correlations between David’s life and that of Jesus are implied. To pursue such a course would provisionalize individual suffering and produce confusing and unmerited analogies. In chapter one, we stated that cruelty comes from within human existence, and has a potential of transvaluing everyone it encounters. These are the realities to be looked for in two distinct accounts of public execution. The life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth is assessed. Parables of Jesus that call for resistance against cruelty are clarified.

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At the gospel crescendo of interpersonal reciprocal relation, Jesus makes clear that one should “pray for everyone who is cruel [έphreazÓntwn] to you.” Why pray for the cruel? Praying provides a model exhibited foremost by “God in heaven … [who] is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel [ponhroύV].” Second, in Matthew, through praying for those who persecute you, “you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the cruel [ponhroύV] and on the good.” Finally, the epilogue does not move us immediately to the resurrection account. What is suggested is a resistance of too easy a coherence of theories of atonement on the far side of death that may provisionalize human suffering and conceal cruelty in the world. The epilogue concludes the study with threads of theological possibility for a beginning discourse toward reconciliation through and after cruelty’s advance in human life and relation. Epilogue – Dispatch: Consideration of Some Tenets for Reconciliation In the context of the first four chapters, our telos from the start is an archeological and genealogical consideration and construction of a relatively adequate phenomenology of the encounter of cruelty in human existence. Our method is a hermeneutic charting that creates a dialogue between four spheres of interest: the attestations of human experience, the history of the concept in our classic literature, the plurivocity of perspectives from complementary fields of interest, and praxis.1 From the start, both our telos and our method will become an exercise in public theology, a theology which uses all of the resources at its disposal to think upon, correlate, and construct a relatively adequate approximation of cruelty in human life and relation. The constructive project for identifying cruelty in human life and relation is concluded with chapter four. Although it appears a natural progression in theological endeavors to consider an argument for reconciliation in light of the array of anthropological and social hardships 1 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London: Verso, 1993), 21; see also, David Tracy, Analogical Imagination, and Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974); see also, Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 201–207.

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or constraints, such an endeavor escapes the bounds of this study and the stated project. However, a thorough undertaking on the nature of reconciliation in light of cruelty is necessary. In light of this necessity, the epilogue does identify several items or tenets for consideration that can be taken into account by any adequate public theology of reconciliation through and after cruelty. Although these tenets are partial in scope, their inclusion in the epilogue is meant to offer a dispatch of possibility into the public square for the advancement of public theology and the semantics of reconciliation through and after cruelty. Five tenets are chosen for consideration by the public theologian, and each of these are grounded in consideration of the project itself. The tenets range from the necessity of understanding cruelty for any adequate undertaking of reconciliation, to the Christian claim to meaning and truth that reconciliation will exude Christological conviction. With respect to this last tenet, the epilogue identifies areas throughout chapters one through four where the life, public teaching, and public execution of Jesus reveal inroads toward understanding reconciliation in light of cruelty. The epilogue closes with concluding remarks, and the project reaches its finish.

CHAPTER ONE

ENCOUNTERING CRUELTY Trajectory of an Inquiry Philosophers have so little to say about cruelty, especially, that one must suppose that everything that can be thought about it is too obvious to mention. That is not, however, a plausible guess, for historians, dramatists, and poets in verse and prose have not ignored these vices, least of all cruelty. – Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices Father forgive them for they know not what they do. – Luke 23:34a For they know not what they do—we alone know what they do! – Nietzsche1

If David Tracy is correct, and theology is public discourse, then how should theology approximate what is encountered and what is left of hope when over three thousand people from throughout the globe die on that single bright morning in downtown New York?2 Shortly after they arrived for work hundreds, alone or hand-in-hand, jumped out of 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morals, I:14. David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology and the Culture of Pluralism (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 3–46. “… the ‘world’ is also understood as a properly theological reality.” If theology is ‘public’ it must be in the sense akin to Ogden’s “fully reflective theology” that is engaged in the correlation of the rough practicalities in the economy of human affairs with the “basic existential faith that is constitutive of human existence” and which addresses this question – ‘What should the Christian witness of faith now become as decisive for human existence?’ See Shubert M. Ogden, On Theology, (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 2, 13, 24, 73. The position I hold is that public theology can never succumb to Barth’s assertion that the Word proclaimed by the church in no sense can be critiqued by culture, or other sciences that stand within culture. Contrariwise, culture and the sciences cannot reduce the role of theology in human affairs, just as theology must be both certain and flexible enough not to reduce other disciplines. Where theology does reduce what is revealed is not a weakness in Christian claims to meaning and truth, but a weakness of the theological position to make these claims meaningful. 2

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windows as high as a hundred floors up.3 Pause here and consider what that means. What do people encounter that opens a doorway for this kind of collective response that was repeated in both north and south towers and on an uncertain number of floors? Consider also the longstanding United States and European political and economic policies that contributed to such an ‘encounter.’ These policies are re-buttressed by the U.S. rhetoric of a “shock and awe” military might, a rhetoric that continues to recycle the response of international anxiety and hatred today. Finally, an international response of anxiety and hatred also makes its own decisive contribution toward what is encountered.4 On that morning in New York it may have been the ferocious heat and mob-confusion combined with a flight mentality that caused the leaping to take shape.5 And yet, if this conclusion is meaningful, then is it adequate? And do we undergo a reduction of the common threads of our humanity when human action is placed in a category of the ‘same’ kind of action given a set of ‘similar’ circumstances? That is, does this response correlate to our need to understand the following – What was done there? Who are they that did this? And what do we 3 Dennis Cauchon and Martha Moore, “Desperation Forced a Horrific Decision,” USA Today, Sept. 11, 2002. “The jumping started shortly after the first jet hit at 8:46 a.m. People jumped continuously during the 102 minutes that the north tower stood. Two people jumped as the north tower began to fall at 10:28 a.m., witnesses said.”; Dennis Cauchon, Rick Hampson et al., “Just-Released Transcripts Give Voice to the Horror,” USA Today, Friday, August 29, 2003. The New York Port Authority released transcripts of 260 hours of radio transmissions and telephone calls on 9/11, revealing disbelief and raw shock. Male caller: “Yo, I’ve got dozens of bodies, people jumping from the top of the building … in front of 1 World Trade.” Female voice: “Sir, you have what jumping from buildings?” Male caller: “People … bodies are just coming from out of the sky.” 4 Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002). Simon and Benjamin were respectively Senior Director and Director of the Transnational Threats division of the National Security Council for U.S. President Clinton. This is an exemplary first resource toward an awareness of U.S. policy in the Middle East; see also Ahmed Rashid, “They’re Only Sleeping: Why Militant Islamicists in Central Asia Aren’t Going to Go Away,” The New Yorker, Internet edition, posted 7 Jan. 2002. Increased levels of international anxiety and hatred only multiply the potential for future terrorist attacks. This being true, the approach to still discrete and enigmatic terrorist cells through broad military rhetoric and action deserves considerable reassessment. Pertaining to the second war between the United States and Iraq, and for an excellent and thorough historical review of the political situation between the United Nations and the Iraqi Baathe Party, see Henner Fürtig, “Iraq: How Severe is the Threat?” Iraq: Threat and Response, eds. Gerhard Beestermöller, David Little, (Hamburg: Lit Verlag, 2003), 97–126. 5 James Glanz and Eric Lipton, “Towers Withstood Impact, but Fell to Fire,” New York Times, March 29, 2002. A conceptual sense of the heat: “The incredible energy generated by this blaze was estimated to be three to five gigawatts at its peak. A typical nuclear power plant generates about one gigawatt.”

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do now? An initial response to the first question is that each of these people encountered some wholly different and tightly wound series of radical or excessive objectifications that annihilated their special integrity of being human, which carried the entire living scene into the distance that ended peoples’ lives.6 It was this encounter that shocked and horrified much of the world and formed temporary communities of catharsis within internet chat-rooms and around television screens, and the numbing CNN reenactment of the spectacle for days afterward.7 As public theologians we must approximate this encounter within our world, because if we do not adequately understand what we encountered, and continue to encounter, then on what hope will reconciliation be established?8 What could public theology hope for then?9 Our internal hope is that the Owl of Minerva never arrives too late for public theology. This study is an investigation of cruelty and how cruelty shapes and affects our intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional lives.10 But what about the phenomenon of cruelty is essential for our understanding that likewise provides a contribution to public theology today? 6 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Paul Negri (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1998) VI, 87, 98. Aristotle contrasts “excess and defect.” Excess is an overabundance of what is normally ‘good’ action, and defect is a depravity of virtue in an action that is “hurtful.” The fusion of both suggests in skeletal form that cruelty is a kind of excess related to virtue and vice in daily normal activities that produce pain. 7 Aristotle, “Poetics,” A New Aristotle Reader, ed. J.L. Ackrill (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 542. The nature of a spectacle – “This man in the picture is so-and-so. If you happen not to have seen the original, the picture [will produce pleasure in the spectator] because of its technical finish or color.” All spectacles are constructions that take on a life of their own. In our media-driven world, Aristotle’s “technical finish or color” receives new overtones. 8 The World Council of Churches and organizations such as the Lutheran World Federation have named ours the Decade to Overcome Violence (2000–2010). The noteworthy efforts at these organizations toward reconciliation and transformation include analyses of continuing religious and political divisions in countries such as Ireland. See the compilation of essays edited by Alan Falconer and Joseph Liechty, Reconciling Memories, (Dublin: Columba Press, 1998), and the extensive study by Joseph Liechty and Cecelia Clegg, Moving Beyond Sectarianism: Religion, Conflict, and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland, (Dublin: Columba Press, 2001). 9 Any emphasis of being ‘of the world’ but ‘separate’ with all of its Manichean implications that was so well articulated once again to modernity in the Anabaptist Schleitheim Confession of the sixteenth century is here rejected. See the Schleitheim Confession, article four. 10 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), Seventh Study, 169–202. Ricoeur’s linkages between personal, interpersonal, and institutional normatively aspired to as “seeking the good life with and for others in just institutions,” is herein adapted.

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Describing why cruelty should be investigated and approximated today is analogous to describing why Madagascar should save its once lush rainforests. One could describe the rationale for such an effort until the last tree is razed, but the fact is, if we wish to live in, and contribute to, a peaceable environment, then it is first essential to hear the buzzing of the saw in the distance. We have to interpret and approximate how cruelty sounds and how it appears in our world that is currently revealing the extreme aspects of globalization and its concurrent pluralisms, aspects that materialize when the global reach of the exchange of ideas brings different cultural standards, biases and technologies within the hailing distance and speed of a nanobyte.11 The velocity of this process outstrips the cultural and ethnic coping-mechanisms necessary for intercultural, social, and political absorption, rejection, and above all understanding. Such velocity increases the prospects of intercultural strife and encounters of cruelty. It also places the entire Christian ethical foundation of loving one’s neighbor – as beginning with understanding who and how the neighbor is – to prodigious testing of an urgency not seen since early Christian syncretism, the events leading to the Thirty Years War, and the normative veracity of our western ethical moorings through and after the first and second World Wars of the past century.12 Despite the advances that we can imagine toward reconciliation in the current century of previously unfathomable velocity, we must not fool ourselves. The new legalistic emanations of fascist and totalitarian leadership and rhetoric in both political and religious circles and parties, the exacerbated destructive power which a single individual can yield against numerous anonymous others, and the complex phenomena of cultural 11 Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 195. Kristeva’s notion of the ‘stranger within’ resonates in my introduction here of ‘extremity’ within our plurivous post-modern world. When values collapse in a combination with economic and geopolitical forces that draw us closer, the threat is a lack of a common moral code to which we may appeal. 12 The heritage of the conquests of the Americas remains unresolved, with problems of poverty and political corruption that are directly traceable to the influence of the conquistadors from the Iberian Peninsula. See Richard M. Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) for sound arguments illustrating the historical complexities that develop when the neighbor is both objectified and killed with impunity. For a more thorough understanding of the plights of Native Americans in the North, see David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Francis Jennings, The Founders of America, (New York: Norton, 1993).

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numbness to the other in our global midst, are signs that a world is not keeping up with itself. These signs represent the dangers of our own historical epoch as real, unfolding, and worthy of keen observation from every theologian concerned about the shaping of the future of Christian ethics, Christian veracity, and the Christian response to action in our time.13 Not just for theologians, this work is likewise a clarion call to specialists in cross-cultural studies, those engaging in interdisciplinary work, psychologists, sociologists, as well as religious and political leaders, and those engaged in the resolution of ethno-religious conflict, among others. I am convinced, as you may well be, that an era of global stability in which we may be afforded a modicum of time in order to reform systemic structures of cruelty, has already come to a close. We missed our opportunity starting in 1948. In 1948 the General Assembly of the United Nations proclaimed the Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and nations; this was an ambitious cross-cultural, international and global appeal to our better angels, expressed in terms of a “universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Preambulatory to the heart of the Declaration is the pledge from member states of the UN that “human rights should be protected by the rule of law” in the diffuse light after two world wars and the concomitant “barbarous acts which outrage the conscience of (hu)mankind.” The thirty articles of the Declaration exclusively arbitrate for the rights to recognition and property, and to a host of freedoms, including freedom of thought, conscience, religion, movement, education, rest and leisure, opinion and expression, and free participation in the cultural life of the community. It is articles four and five where the thrust of the Declaration is delivered, but in the negative: “No one shall be held in slavery,” and “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” The international public debate in 2007 that took up the question of ‘whether torture was cruel’ (relative to waterboarding and activities at the U.S. prison in Guantánamo) revealed a seminal weakness in both 13 Vatican II: Gaudium et Spes: The Church in the Modern World – 4. “At no time have men had such a keen sense of freedom, only to be faced by new forms of slavery in living and thinking … If there is a growing exchange of ideas, there is still widespread disagreement about the meaning of the words expressing our key concepts.”

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the debate and an understanding of the structure of the Declaration. Torture was relatively easy to quantify, but whether torture was indeed cruel, escaped definition. As a result of this, lines were drawn in the debate but the nature of cruelty in relation to torture escaped clarity, and thus the public debate failed. This was more than a hiccup in international discourse; it represented a serious and unresolved explanatory catastrophe relative to the core of the Declaration. The catastrophe took place because the fulcrum of all of the freedoms and rights articulated in the Declaration, turns on this term ‘cruel’; likewise, later terms in Article 5 (‘inhuman’ and ‘degrading’) orbit ‘cruel’ as the first qualifier. In the Declaration the term ‘cruel’ serves as a tripwire that, once crossed, places in jeopardy all of the articles, with their attendant rights and freedoms, of the Declaration itself. The United Nations must interpret what indeed this term means. Later in this text, we will suggest that at the least cruelty is an excessiveness of action that is violative and raw, shocking and dehumanizing, and that can commence through degrees of excess, which will harm and even annihilate humans in their intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional environments. But this is only the beginning of a conversation, not its end. We must endeavor together to never again miss the opportunity to make ourselves aware of the markers of cruelty in the world. For myriad reasons – and if past is prologue, then for the many historical examples that have yet to materialize – this study will investigate cruelty as a new topos within the western theological tradition. By topos we mean the Greek ‘place,’ as a ‘clearing-of-ground’ for new thought and interpretation. Locating a point of departure for this uninvestigated topos of cruelty in western theology will be an especially important aspect of the following investigation. Words and metaphors regarding how cruelty sounds in the buzzing of a saw, its velocity, urgency, and our historical epoch, are not a simple quickening of late Heideggerian poetics; in fact, these are chosen to disclose an awareness of the topography of cruelty. That is to say, if cruelty is our topos, then the first assertion is that it enters our existence and we encounter it sometimes in relation to, and other times separate from, our traditional articulation of either ‘sin’ or ‘evil.’ The practice of naming our experience with terms such as ‘evil’ and ‘sin’ can be useful, but this practice must be undertaken with great care, since the kernels of these terms often harbor uncritical ontologies that

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are merely secularized and assumed. Cruelty is not the agency of some mysterious and transcendent winged thing, but is a possibility entrenched within the dailiness of human existence. This suggests that, like other topoi of sin and evil, the topos of cruelty has a particular and distinct topography. Cruelty is phenomenologically distillable; that is, cruelty may be approximated in our daily existence and its features may become recognizable or chartable through a correlated trajectory of queries and inquiries. A trajectory through the topography of cruelty also reveals how reflection upon cruelty is never reducible to an academic abstraction; rather, “cruelty” is, as Etinne Balibar rightly notes, “concrete, spatial, geographical [and also] geopolitical.”14 The illustration of a topography of cruelty is unlike an elaborate phenomenological mural that mesmerizes yet leaves us ultimately empty-handed. Quite to the contrary, cruelty in our intra-personal, interpersonal, institutional, socio-political, ecological and geopolitical environs means that the radical and ordinary exclusion of human dignity and integrity “in the heart of everyday life” is often the very thing we have a difficult time seeing.15 Following Balibar, a topography of cruelty involves human trespasses that are never one-dimensional. Between the above intrapersonal to geopolitical environs, we engage in the language of friend/ suspicious stranger, north/south, first/third world, ‘this and that side of the border,’ hard and soft military targets, the blessed and the infidel, black and white. This topography is likewise never intrinsically uncomplicated – the quest for peace transpires with soldiers parachuting into deserts and jungles, ignorance is bliss until it is revealed as repressed

14 Etinne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” Constellations Volume 8, No. 1, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001) 15–29. “Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind political preference for ‘consensus’ and ‘peace,’ not to speak of the implementation of law and order policies on a global scale. This, among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of ‘topography, by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective – for instance taking into account such shifting distinctions as ‘North and South,’ ‘center and periphery,’ ‘this side of the border or across the border,’ ‘global and local,’ etc. – and an abstract, speculative perspective, meaning that the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on different ‘scenes’ or ‘stages,’ which can be pictured as ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ or ‘imaginary’ – but the imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no less determining than the real.” 15 Etinne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” Constellations, 18.

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trauma, interpersonal love without self-awareness of limit may contradict our initial intent, thereafter we become either enslaved in obsession or exiled in fear. The thesis of this study begins with the assertion that the human experience of cruelty is phenomenologically distillable into an approximated topography. By topography we mean that cruelty is chartable as a specific and graphic landscape, replete with features, like the contours and depressions of a fracture in the earth, that are related to one another. In light of the topography of cruelty, this study will construct a course or trajectory through the landscape of cruelty that enables us to consider cruelty in human life and relation. By trajectory we mean that we will chart a course through the topography of cruelty that will correlate classic images (i.e., fracture, contour, cave), core concepts (rawness, blood, horror), and symbols germane to image and concept (i.e., knife, the ban, whirlwind), that raise the specter of the topography of cruelty before us. The first aim of the book in chapter one is to introduce the historical problem of cruelty, clarify its theological importance as a new topos, proffer an etymological assessment, review Nietzsche’s ‘way of cruelty’ as it affects human existence, and finally set our hermeneutic cartography of the topos of cruelty in an investigative light that will best approximate how cruelty appears in human life and relation.16 Next, in chapters two through four, human life and relation is represented within three spheres of our daily human affairs – these spheres are intra-personal, interpersonal and institutional. Cruelty will be approximated within each of these three spheres as intra-personal selfobjectification, the interpersonal fight for recognition when it reaches an excessive trespass of other human beings, and institutional injustice. The final aim at the epilogue is to offer threads of theological possibility for a beginning discourse toward reconciliation through and after cruelty’s advance in human life and relation. What will be remembered in the semantics of reconciliation – exhibited in Jesus’ shocking petition for understanding and forgiveness during the final moments of his public execution – is how reconciliation can be as difficult to achieve as cruelty is severe. 16 Morgenröhte I: 18: What is the “way of cruelty” that preceded “world history” but “the actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind.”

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A) Introduction – An Intersection of Four Queries on a Topos It is quite in keeping with man’s curious intellectual history that the simplest and most important questions are those he asks least often. – Norman Angell Whitehead once suggested that a religious sensibility begins with a sense that ‘something is awry.’ In ways that Whitehead could not have foreseen, we now sense that something may be very awry indeed in all our classics and traditions, including the religious ones. No great religion should hesitate to apply to itself its own suspicion of either sin or ignorance. – David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity

Below are four separate queries that approach the frontier of a topography of cruelty. These queries are meant to reveal how a historical, hermeneutic, experiential, and a classic faith-seeking-understanding of this topography, are essential to the contemporary efforts of public theology. The intersection and correlation of the fundamental elements of these following queries result in a guiding inquiry that, first, builds a case for the project of an examination of cruelty, and second, provides a point of entry and a central methodological ‘lodestar’ for beginning an investigation of the topos of cruelty. i) The Historical Query of Approximation – The Topos of Cruelty Properly speaking, a man does not pity himself, but suffers in himself, as when we suffer cruel treatment in ourselves. – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II.ii.30.1 The daughter of my people is become cruel, like the ostriches in the wilderness. – Lamentations 4:3

Since September 11, 2001, popular and professional literature in both the United States and Europe has focused on the crucial matter of adequately interpreting ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism.’17 Psychologists, political

17 Jon L. Berquist, ed., Strike Terror No More: Theology, Ethics and the New War, (St. Louis, Chalice Press, 2002). Gilford J. Ikenberry, “American Grand Strategy in the Age of Terror,” Survival: The IISS Quarterly, 43 no. 4 (2001/02): 19–34, and Karl-Heinz Kamp, “Der Erfolg im Kampf gegen den Terror: Sechs Thesen,” Die Weltweite Gefahr: Terrorismus als Internationale Herausforderung, ed. Hans Frank and Kai Hirschmann (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002), 417–431.

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and social theoreticians, theologians, and sociologists among others have made critical inroads. ‘Terror’ and ‘terrorism’ are what they are because they deliver the possibility of an intrusion at every level of human existence (even if this intrusion can be characterized as an enduring sense of psycho-social dread), as an in-breaking and omnivoyant violation that is forced upon the daily activities of human life.18 Unlike the frenetic machinations of the current rhetoric of ‘terror,’ cruelty is a concept with which we avoid confrontation, allowing its discomforting visage to slip by us almost imperceptibly. In culture we have learned the trick of talking around cruelty long enough to conceptually disarm it and render it mundane and even perceptively invisible. But when cruelty is rendered mundane it can become a source of significant danger within culture. Rather than identify the exaction of cruelty upon human well-being and particular individuals within society, cultures exhibit a tendency to react against the victim by blaming her for the original cruelty exacted against her. The early work of psychologist William Ryan introduces ‘victim-blame’ as a commonplace feature in what we may identify as the denial of cruelty across cultures. Consider the instance of rape, where the imprint of cruelty is evident in cross-cultural patterns that display the denial and disassociation of cruelty in a specific trespass, and the re-association via punishment of the originary trespass upon the victim herself. This cross-cultural pattern of cruelty in relation to rape is not contiguous with our assumption that only cultures with strong taboos around sexuality will therefore shun women, although the exaction of punishment will be more severe in specific cultural contexts. Cultural severity of re-associated cruelty relative to rape will include ostracization, shunning, banning, divorce, and even murder. In 2008 a thirteen-year-old Somali girl who had been raped was buried to her neck and stoned to death by over fifty men, despite her desperate pleas for life. In 2010, 56% of Britons polled believed that women should be held partly accountable in for their own rape. 18% of those polled thought that most rape claims were false.

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Like all concepts, ‘terror’ shifts conceptually according to historical climate. What terror is after ‘9–11’ is still unclear, but it is certainly defined more radically than, say, as it was in the student revolts of intellectual radicals during the “kritischen Jugend” student demonstrations in Germany. See Hermann Lübbe, Endstation Terror, (Stutgart: Seewald Verlag, 1978).

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A cross-cultural pattern of cruelty and the victim, as in this example of rape, is not synonymous with the Girardian hypothesis of the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ that is universally and perhaps even agentially imposed upon society. Rather, episodic cruelties, and the trespass of human well-being in culture, reveal similar patterns of this trespass within the context of each archeological site. In Somalia and Briton, the visage of cruelty slips by us in a re-associated form of blame that may well lead to social and even physical death. Cultures repeatedly allow the visage of cruelty to slip imperceptibly by. We talk around cruelty but it remains embedded within culture nonetheless. Over the millennia this unaddressed reality in human life and relation never disappeared, creating what Charles Mathewes calls, with respect to sin, a “growing incomprehension … [of] this ugly, croaking toad.” In the passage of the eons, cruelty is reduced to one term among others that describes, however vaguely, violative behavior; but cruelty is not nearly so predictable and does not fit neatly on hermeneutic shelves. And, after three-thousand years the fact that cruelty has not been plundered of its contents, yet is always somehow conceptually present, leads one to risk the assertion that its concealed status signifies serious grades of intellectual avoidance and social denial.19 And yet, cruelty is incontrovertibly a concept of such universal swagger and is so entangled in the economy of daily existence that without it the aforementioned conceptual elements of ‘terror’ would lose their semantic moorings. Of course, the above are bold assertions about the enigmatic nature of cruelty; we might know whether these assertions are valid if we could only clearly articulate this concept that keeps appearing in our literature, on our televisions and radios, in internet chat rooms and blog sites, and in our conversations with family, friends, and colleagues: “That man was cruel” – what does this mean? What is cruelty in that particular context? We are at the start of the hermeneutic Gordian knot that is our current investigation. In the preponderance of the aforementioned literature on ‘terror’ and ‘terrorism,’ in the caches of 19 Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 3. [Italics mine]. From Mathewes’ perspective, the croaking toad is the presence of evil in a post-modern context that is ignored “through some form of ironic alienation,” for example. See also 4, 24. Mathewes asserts that the chief problem in our inability to perceive evil is the development of subjectivism in modernity, with its belief that one’s identity is formed primarily independent of the external world.

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our western literature, through conversation with family, friends, and colleagues, the question of what cruelty indeed is, is typically servedout in a cold slice of intuitive analogy … cruelty is like ‘x’. We have developed no clear sustainable articulation of cruelty although cruelty appears regularly in our literature as a fundamental concept, given a tertiary nod of mutual recognition before it is once more set down lacking further elucidation.20 Literary repetition reveals that the vague nature of cruelty remains important. Annette Baier’s essay, Moralism and Cruelty, serves as an example. Baier writes how she will leave aside “the tricky question of just what should count as cruelty” even in the middle of an investigation on the nature of cruelty!21 Through human generations, Job does not leave aside the “tricky question,” but experiences and then names his experience in the clearest and simplest articulation of the human cry for a divine accounting. This articulation is the thrust of the Job narrative. He directs the force of his complaint to God – “You have become cruel to me.”22 As we shall later see, Job means something quite specific in his complaint. Nevertheless, when enough scholars wittingly or unwittingly make similar hermeneutic dodges, like the above in the very object of their study, then they are not merely being ironic; rather, something in particular is being concealed. Current scholarly efforts such as Baier’s, and other sensitive, repetitive nods to the vague nature of cruelty, are not a recent phenomenon. Further examples – Tzvetan Todorov recalls the conquest of Tenochtitlan by Spanish conquistadors where 70 million Native Americans lost their lives between 1500 and 1600 as a constellation of events that can be considered “cruel.” In a separate work, he reflects upon those marked for death in Auschwitz who refrained from telling the new arrivals about the gas chambers: “The inmates agree not to reveal the truth … it would only have made their deaths more cruel.” Cruelty’s discomforting visage slips imperceptibly by. What makes these

20 Cruelty has not only made a grand appearance in contemporary literature. As we shall see, Seneca, Augustine, Aquinas, Montaigne and Spinoza are but a few who have briefly written on cruelty. The pairing of cruelty with human excess has been with us all along in our classic literature. 21 Annette C. Baier, “Moralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant,” Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, v. 103, Gerald Dworkin, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 437. 22 Job, 20.31.

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diverse accounts of death, and potential death, “cruel?”23 Christopher Browning recounts the confession of a pseudonymous soldier of the Nazi Reserve Battalion 101 out of Hamburg, who describes the events surrounding him and his participation in the extermination of over 1,500 Jews in Józefów, Poland on a single bright afternoon, as upsetting due to “the cruel treatment of the Jews.”24 The pseudonymous soldier delivers this objective observation about cruelty at the same moment he recalls the subjective experience of how he aimed too high and shot out the cranium of “his Jew” before him. How does objective observation protect the perpetrator by dislodging cruelty from a subjective act of the will and re-associating it into a seemingly less culpable Zeitgeist that ensnares its participants (i.e., consider the oft cited account of Nazi soldiers simply following orders)? Hannah Arendt reflects upon the nature of totalitarianism and how, without mutual respect between individuals, “the conflicts between groups … take on such terribly cruel forms.”25 What makes these forms “cruel” and who and how do these cruelties affect most? Or Pierre de Senarclen writes, “Toward the mid-1990s, we count more than fifty new armed conflicts, essentially civil wars. Certain of these conflicts – in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, or Algeria – astonish by their violence and cruelty, by the extent of the destruction. …”26 What about their astonishing nature makes these events so cruel? Because cruelty is explanatorily vague does not at all suggest that cruelty is a vagary in human experience. Instead, explanatory vagueness suggests we have not yet grappled with cruelty enough to unearth and re-construct its conceptually hidden, but never experientially forgotten, status in human affairs.27

23 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of the Americas, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 133, 143, 171, and Facing the Extreme, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 214. 24 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 66. 25 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 13. 26 Swiss expert, Pierre de Senarclens of the University of Lausanne, L’humanitaire en catastrophe (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1999), in Etinne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty, 20. 27 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr., Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1997), ii. It is as though cruelty is “wrapped in a dense fog,” a phrase Augustine uses to describe the perspicuity of Scripture. The labor of this book owes a great debt to both early and late Heidegger, his discussion of Being and Dasein, and the nature of language that both conceals and discloses meaning.

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Literature sometimes has a tendency of employing words – like cruelty – that make an impact upon our intuition, on our sense of the experience that the word signifies. But the danger of such ill-constituted or non-elucidated words is how they produce a hermeneutic ricochet through the interpretive process where the diffuse nature of the ‘signifier’ (concept) inaccurately approximates the nature of the ‘signified’ (experience), an inaccuracy which likewise produces further cognitive dissonance for the future efforts of the labor of the concept (signifier) to approximate lived experience (the signified). We may intuit that the singular and devastating experience of cruelty is like a fissure through both private and public spheres of existence, where the experience of this singularity gives itself with such force conceptually that no descriptive approximation of cruelty is sufficient to human existence.28 And yet, the very danger to us as theologians, and to those we represent, is precisely when intuition and inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the eidetic structures of cruelty are taken as somehow sufficient to human life and relation; these eidetic structures must be unearthed from our experience, language, and understanding in order to be rethought, approximated, and named.29 This said, to date I have not encountered scholarly efforts that address the contemporary reality of cruelty in human intra-personal, interpersonal, or institutional affairs.30 This absence of understanding in theology creates a vacuum of collective misapprehension where ‘Springen und swimmen’ is the best one can do with Heidegger. His early work is best represented in Sein und Zeit, and his later work include important compilations of essays representative in Poetry, Language, Thought and The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays. 28 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of the Americas, 143. “Murders are like the ascent of volcanoes: in each case, one reaches the top and climbs back down; yet one does not report the same thing.” 29 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, III.I 6:93–94. Inaccurate or an incomplete understanding of cruelty must not be allowed to suffice, contrary to Kant’s perspective that “it suffices that they [envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations] are there, and that … they [human beings] will mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and make one another evil.” 30 Daniel Baraz has recently (2003) written a book on Medieval cruelty that approximates cruelty in his study of Seneca, Augustine, and Aquinas. Bazar’s work is helpful in its introduction of the slight yet essential comments of Seneca on crudelitas, comments revisited in chapter two. I owe a debt to Baraz’s careful treatment of medieval cruelty. See Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003). Philip P. Hallie has written an earlier text on cruelty, which is helpful in terms of understanding the scant history of the literature. See Hallie, Grausamkeit: Der Peiniger und sein Opfer: Eine Analyse, (Freiburg: Verlag der Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 13–21.

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all agree in principle that an event is ‘cruel’ but no one has yet asserted exactly why and how cruelty as a phenomenon appears and what it explicitly does to human life and relation in its appearance. If this fact does not seem exceedingly problematic, then what are we to make of the public employment of variations on the term cruelty in our theologically professional work? This query is pressing in that ours is a charged historical climate where we as theologians are facing new challenges toward what we mean in what we utter that can make serious contributions to those in our churches, seminaries, colleges, universities, and those represented by the arena of our socio-political involvement.31 There is a further difficulty: Through a plurivocity of professional and public involvement, and in light of the human experience of cruelty, theologians will encounter problems articulating reconciliation beyond well-intentioned platitudes without comprehending how and what kind of particular experience must be both privately and publicly reconciled.32 If the theological articulation of reconciliation were alone sufficient for naming excessive trespass, then perhaps our theological answers about what happened on September 11, and indeed 31 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 241. What is rejected is the notion that postmodernism implies in itself an abandonment of the quest after “truth” in the loss of “meta-narratives.” The quest for truth is seen as the quest for power. Of course, asserting there is no truth is likewise the cornerstone to a ‘meta-narrative’ where power is grabbed yet again. Truth is power; in order to register such an assertion we would need a more thorough understanding of the nature of power in our post-modern epoch. Farley shows how even Derrida rejected an interpretation of his work as the rejection ‘of truth.’ See Richard J. Bernstein, ed., Habermas and Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) and Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World, (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 32 The issue here is understanding, hoping, and resisting toward reconciliation, which is a hallmark of praxis oriented theology illustrated in the following – Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, trans. and ed., Sister Caridad Inda and John Eagleson, (New York: Orbis Books, 1973), 15, 25–37. Theologians must not “reflect from an armchair” but engage themselves by “sinking roots where the pulse of history is beating at this moment.”; James Cone, God of the Oppressed, (New York: Crossroad, 1975), chapter II, Speaking the Truth: “Any view of the gospel that fails to understand the Church as that community whose work and consciousness are defined by the community of the oppressed is not Christian and is thus heretical.” Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, (New York: Crossroad, 1992), 112: “The experience of women today provides a powerful catalyst … in the scope of the height and depth, the length and breadth of the incomprehensible God, language can be set free.” Vatican II Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution of the Church – 7: “The Church encompasses with her love all those who are afflicted by human misery and she recognizes in those who are poor and who suffer, the image of her poor and suffering founder. She does all in her power to relieve their need and in them she strives to serve Christ.”

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in what is always within our potentiality as human beings, would be more believably correlated to the cruel nature of the event itself.33 A methodological point of departure for investigating cruelty will exude a forceful hermeneutic effort that aims to correlate signifier and the signified, concept and experience, contemporary language and articulations of cruelty ferreted from the classic texts of our traditions. Through the correlation of these items – concept, experience, contemporary language, and our classic texts – cruelty is never allowed the harbor of the intellectually vague, nor left an inlet for waves of sensationalist factoids that dull our senses. Furthermore, the theological response to cruelty is neither vague nor lackluster, but employs the theological hermeneutic engines necessary to span theory and praxis, thought and action, knowledge and participation, and makes a public accounting by remaining pastoral in the face of the urgently current. Such correlative spanning in fact constructs the metal that interweaves and girds public theology. We have exemplars of public theological methodologies that correlated in the above manner, most recently including the interdisciplinary efforts of theologians with a view toward intellectual theology and personal action (David Tracy), and philosophers who engage the questions of religion (Paul Ricoeur) where such interdisciplinary approaches enhance public theology by laboring to understand the plurivocity of perspectives from complementary fields of interest.34 The correlative methodologies and efforts of both Ricoeur and Tracy contribute greatly in our effort to understand cruelty.35 33 Jürgen Habermas, “Psychic Thermidor and the Rebirth of Rebellious Subjectivity,” Marcuse: Critical Theory and the Promise of Utopia, ed. Robert Pippin, Andrew Feenberg, Charles P. Webel, (London: MacMillan Education Ltd., 1988), 11. Resistance is not a utopian panacea to the encounter of ‘cruelty;’ rather, resistance is akin to Marcuse’s “right of resistance,” where one is enabled to engage in the difficult labor and transformation of the self and society. 34 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London: Verso, 1993), 21. “Pluralistic methodology” – “Some of the most important formal properties of a theory are found by contrast, and not by analysis.” Critical inroads on inter-disciplinary efforts in theology are to be found in David Tracy, Analogical Imagination, and Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974). 35 Awareness toward dialogue and action is also critical to Levinas. See Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 201–207. See also David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order: The New Pluralism in Theology, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 249. Tracy warns that action must be scrutinized for what is possible and realistic, and thereby resist yet a novel brand of eschatological fervor that misjudges the machinations of social structures to emit change. “There still can be

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But these thinkers have never been alone. Analogous correlative methods are visible in Bernard of Clairvaux’s (On Loving God, treatise II) effort to correlate perfected love within the Trinity and the imperfect expression of love in human community, or Martin Luther’s (Freedom of a Christian) and Ignatius of Loyola’s (Autobiography) challenges to faithful obedience through public service, or Moltmann’s (Theology of Hope) and McFague’s (Models of God) clear theological call for personal transformation that manifests in renewed ecclesial understanding and language, or Gutiérrez’s (A Theology of Liberation) and Pope John Paul II’s (Love and Responsibility) dedication to a loving God that liberates oneself fully to the neighbor, even if both theologians fall on respective sides of Marxist ideology. Here are a few important examples where theology is public and correlates – because it can do no other – theological concepts and human experience. Following their attentiveness, the methodological task of public theology in our work is to think upon, correlate, and construct a relatively adequate approximation of cruelty in human life and relation. Thereafter, we can move toward an articulation of reconciliation in the wreckage left by cruelties in human life and relation. We proceed now to our second query regarding the experience of, and conceptual possibilities for, understanding cruelty. ii) The Classic Hermeneutic Query – Nietzsche’s Challenge The merciful man does himself good, but the cruel man does himself harm. – Proverbs, 11:17

A consistent unspoken conviction within the above remarks is that despite its relegation to the mundane, cruelty is not an unapproachable mysterium; its encounter is manifold in this world. Still, although cruelty is not an unapproachable mysterium, the reality of cruelty in human life and relation resists precise rational description. If we could have done this, we would have by now. Cruelty resists such precision insofar as human beings undergo such excess within the intimate, subjective experience and singularity of life itself. Broad descriptions of

heard those dark and foreboding proclamations of our need to be ‘realistic’ about the use of power in our fallen and sinful situation which tarnished the record on theoria and praxis alike of some neo-orthodox theologies and existentialist philosophies of the very recent past.”

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cruelty fall short of pinpointing how cruelty appears in specific cultures and what it does to personal human existence in its appearance. Thus, an abstract definition of cruelty will always miss the mark of the personal and singular experience of cruelty itself. Abstractions birth abstractions. If cruelty cannot be precisely and fully described, then it must be thoroughly approximated in human life and relation.36 We begin this approximative effort by assessing Friedrich Nietzsche’s interpretation of cruelty. Nietzsche was the modern philosopher in the western tradition to undertake a sustained approximation of cruelty in human affairs, prompting Merold Westphal to write that Nietzsche was one of the “great modern theologians of original sin.”37 But Westphal misses the force of Nietzsche’s approximation of cruelty. Far from the topos of sin, Nietzsche’s investigation identifies cruelty as an originary phenomenon of human consciousness, and he commits himself to the labor of this investigation at length by constructing what he identifies as the “way of cruelty.”38 Nietzsche’s ‘way of cruelty’ carries a challenge to both western philosophy and theology – that is, suffering and cruelty underlie all claims to systematic truth, and whereas claims to truth do not admit as much, then society provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty under false pretense. If the second aspect of

36 Nietzsche’s legacy of a hermeneutic of suspicion, including the other great masters of suspicion (Weber, Marx, Freud), have been influential to theologians such as Bultmann and his demythologizing efforts against the mystification of Christian spirituality that threatens to reduce the narrative of the cross. See Rudolf Bultmann, The Theology of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1952); likewise Sallie McFague suspends the monarchial model of the Trinity and experiments with ‘God’ as Mother, Lover, and Friend in her Models of God: Theology for an Ecological, Nuclear Age, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987). See chapter one (3–28) which is an attempt to employ the Nietzschean ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ without reducing language and its attendant meaning to inconsequential Derridian morphemes. Both Bultmann and McFague employ the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ in an analogous fashion as Marcuse’s “immanent critique” that subverts and builds upon the original theory in order to glean new insights that do not rupture the tie between informed imagination and tradition, creation and life. This is in fact Nietzsche’s sense of “overcoming” in the relation of art to life, theory to praxis, analogous to Ricoeur’s sense of attestation beyond verification. 37 Mathewes 4; see also Merald Welstphal, Suspicion and Faith: The Religious Uses of Modern Atheism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993). 38 Like many of his concepts, ‘cruelty’ also has at least two meanings. On the one hand, the “moralists” are cruel in how they stifle what is noble and natural in humanity. On the other hand, a natural disposition toward ‘cruelty’ is an essential possibility of being human that is masked by reason, custom and myth. See Nietzsche’s Daybreak V: 521.

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Nietzsche’s challenge (socially provisionalized suffering and concealed cruelty) has veracity, then numerous explicit theological topoi – such as love, forgiveness, theodicy, and atonement – will require serious reevaluation. And yet, the reevaluation of theological topoi is not an uncomplicated endeavor. It is difficult for society to reevaluate what is still first concealed. For Nietzsche, Christianity both concealed and forgot within its confessions of faith the manner in which cruelty encounters human life, and furthermore the Christian tradition would be unable to identify cruelty without running the risk of indicting the history of its own internal forgetfulness.39 Nietzsche recounts how the Constantinian advent of Christendom was the threshing floor where Christianity triumphed and thereafter hid cruelty and the fear of cruelty behind a binary rationale of Christian love toward one’s neighbor in the present, and the eschatological hope for justice in the post mortem of the uncertain future.40 Cruelty and its concealed or forgotten status in human myth and custom enabled the further construction of confessions of faith that reinforced the collective loss of memory of the very origin of cruelty and its influence on human affairs.41 Accordingly, 39 Friedrich Nietzsche,“Zur Genealogie der Moral,” Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, (Berlin: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH & Co., 1988), GM III: 19[19] [all German references are from the Kritische Studienausgabe. Standard abbreviations for Nietzsche’s corpus will be followed]. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Walter Kaufmann, (New York: The Modern Library, 1992). The history of the western tradition is one of a “disgraceful moralizing way of talking. …” Elizabeth Clark is a pioneer in the sociohistorical reconstruction of the debates in early Christianity. Her reconstructive efforts around these debates address the complex literary and socio-historical realities of religions competing for viability. Clark employs a hermeneutic of suspicion to go underneath the monomorphic interpretation of Christian history. See Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 40 Nietzsche, GM I: 14[22–29]. “Nein! Noch einen Augenblick! Sei sagten noch nichts von dem Meisterstücke dieser Schwarzkünstler, welche Weiss, Milch und Unschuld aus jedem Schwarz herstellen: – haben Sie nicht bemerkt, was ihre Vollendung im Raffinement ist, ihr kühnster, feinster, geistreichster, lügenreichster Artisten-Griff ? Würden Sie ahnen, wenn Sie nur ihren Worten trauten, dass Sie unter lauter Menschen des Ressentiment sind?” Nietzsche was not unique in the assertion that fear precedes love, or even that fear activated in vengeance is a form of ressentiment. See Max Stirner, “Art and Religion,” The Young Hegelians, (Humanities Press: New Jersey, 1997), 330. See also Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 30. On the nature of defilement, Ricoeur writes: “Man enters into the ethical world through fear and not through love.” 41 Nietzsche, Morgenröthe, I: 18[27]. See Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 17.

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the Christian confessional language of communal love and its further secular manifestation of obedient citizenship from social contract to jurisprudence illustrate a veiled language underneath which reside the competing principles of power, and the constructions of systems of power, which are a matter for the self-asserting will.42 Not altruistic intent or governing ideas, but the fear of encountering cruelty is what we have hidden within our confessions of faith.43 By way of example, Nietzsche asserts that two Christian pillars of love of neighbor and the triumph of the cross are suspect because, i) fear of violation by and envy of the neighbor and not altruism are what inform the articulation of love-rhetoric, and, ii) the triumph of the cross reveals how members of sacrificial religions assemble around spectacles of cruelty and then rename and celebrate these spectacles in terms of ‘victory’ or ‘triumph’ in order to hide the originary reality of the encounter of cruelty, as well as to unconsciously skirt that infamous speculative sinkhole of the theologically irreconcilable question of theodicy.44 For Nietzsche,

Cruelty has been hidden behind morality as a “sense of custom;” See also, GM II: 3: “The worse man’s memory has been, the more fearful has been the appearance of his customs;” See also, GM II: 16: Nietzsche later defines the effect of custom: “lacerating, persecuting, gnawing at, assaulted and maltreated – this is what man did to himself with custom.” Furthermore, “die Feindschaft, die Grausamkeit, die Lust an der Verfolgung, am Überfall, am Wechsel, an der Zerstörung – Alles das gegen die Inhaber solcher Instinkte sich wendend: das ist der Ursprung des “schlechten Gewissens.” Nietzsche was not the first to criticize custom. Pascal was a severe critic of custom and its social diversion of niceties as a complex system of existential avoidance. See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, intro. T. S. Eliot, (London: J.M. Dent, 1931), 90, 97. Likewise, the Peitist, Jakob Spener, was a critique of custom and its effect upon core Christian values – “Wretched custom has obscured the precepts of Christianity to such an extent that we think it absurd when in a given instance somebody practices what is acknowledged by all, namely, that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, although the force of these words is little pondered.” See Jakob Spener, Pia Desideria, trans. Theodore G. Tappert, (New York: Fortress Press, 1964), 60. 42 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche,” Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II: 366. “Wolle ein Selbst … das Schicksal scheint ihnen immer noch die Wahl gelassen zu haben.” This assertion would become the intellectual loadstone for existentialist philosophy in the twentieth century. See also GM II: 7[30–4]: There is a “joy in cruelty” where pain is “adorned with such innocent names that even the tenderest … is not suspicious of them – i.e. ‘tragic pity’ and ‘les nostalgias de la croix’ [the nostalgia of the cross] is another.” 43 Nietzsche, Morgenröthe, IV: 357. 44 Nietzsche’s claim that Christian theology employs an illusory use of language is well-known. Theologian Sallie McFague states it is a truism that “must be squarely faced.” See McFague, Models of God, 22. See also Bouchard, 1–10. “Theology that reads well the art of tragedy must discover itself inevitably blinded by thoughts of theodicy.” See also Mark I. Wallace, Fragments of the Spirit: Nature, Violence, and the Renewal of Creation, (New York: The Continuum Publishing Company, 1996), 190. Away from

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cruelty at the crucifixion is concealed in sacrificial atonement and a corollary triumph at the cross that is enacted and reenacted in a festival of enjoyment that is codified in confession and liturgy.45 Even at first blush, Nietzsche’s way of cruelty requires time for thought, evaluation, and a theological response. A popular knee-jerk response to both Nietzsche and the influence of his work in post-structuralist philosophy is to dismiss him outright as polemical, unsystematic, and sensationalist. Nietzsche is often all of these things, as was Tertullian, and yet we are still drawn to the pages of Praescriptions Against Heretics. Like Praescriptions, polemics and sensationalism have rhetorical advantages in a given historical epoch. The power of observation throughout sustained critiques developed by first-rate thinkers, means we are wise never to dismiss as a first response. What is particularly troubling since Nietzsche’s challenge in his way of cruelty is how the last one hundred years have seen this challenge go wholly unanswered by western theologians. When we consider the twentieth century alone, the recent outbreaks of religious and political extremism, the global Angst over ‘old’ (cold war) and ‘new’ (war on terrorism) aggression, and the shifting tides of unease in globalization – all of which cut across religious, ethnic, national, and complex economic horizon lines – this response as a non-response regarding the topography of cruelty from theologians desiring to be public carries a certain alarm.46 Inside Nietzsche’s way of cruelty is ample evidence of cruelty’s imprint upon human existence that springs up for theological reflection. But the kernel of Nietzsche’s challenge waits for theology and theologians. Where theologians desire to be public, then it bodes well to assess this challenge. Nietzsche’s challenge in his way of cruelty remains, and theology can contribute to an understanding of the topos of cruelty. A first directive traditional concepts of theodicy, Wallace writes of Ricoeur that “the task before the theologian is to relocate the problem of evil on the grounds of practical rather than theoretical knowledge.” See also David Tracy, “Saving From Evil: Salvation and Evil Today,” The Fascination of Evil, ed. David Tracy and Hermann Häring, (London: Orbis, 1998), 114. “Most modern theodicies have ended in failure.” 45 Ibid., I: 53, IV: 21. See also GM III: 19 and Nietzsche’s extensive discussion of the persona of the ascetic priest who induces excess through guilt which enables the maintenance of power. “Sacrificial religions,” as “moralities of sacrifice” are “half-savage” where reason has never gained complete control. Nietzsche’s polemics are meant to shock one toward suspicion and even awareness. 46 Nietzsche, GM II: 6[18]. The twentieth century rang true of Nietzsche’s assertion that the history of justice or ‘Recht’ has been “soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.”

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in our theological and methodological orientation will be in consideration of Nietzsche’s way of cruelty. Once Nietzsche’s understanding of cruelty is assessed, the trajectory of our correlative effort will be set upon its topographical course. Along our course, Nietzsche will be a lodestar for further elucidation in chapters two through four. One clear advantage of Nietzsche as our lodestar is how this investigation will halt short of theological platitudes and thin or contentless constructions of love, resistance, forgiveness, or triumph. Such constructions would continue to provisionalize human suffering, conceal the reality of cruelty in human affairs, and weaken future efforts at reconciliation. It is through attention to our lodestar that a hermeneutic of suspicion effectively disarms reconciliation of its idealism while leaving intact the practical possibility of its true idea.47 We proceed further toward our third query for understanding the experience of cruelty in human life and relation. iii) The Query from Experience – The Execution of David Jr. Ward Before beginning my doctorate at Loyola University in Chicago, I worked and conducted research for a federal Judge in an office in Durham, North Carolina.48 While there, a team of attorneys took on the labor of defending American citizens who had received the death penalty and were now exercising their right to appeal their sentences. I became part of this team and my contribution included scouring case-records of capital litigations in Raleigh, making trips to North Carolina Central Prison to visit a defendant, and stepping into that almost endless bureaucratic array of details, legal paperwork, and conversations between attorneys, with the inmate, and always with a view toward a credible defense as the appellate process serpentined its way to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, and further on toward the desk of the Governor of North Carolina for a stay of execution. 47 Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation, (London: Penguin, 1969), 32. Marcuse vies for the fusion of art-life, but by ‘art’ he implies what is creative as an “aesthetic ethos” and not mimetic and sensationalist. 48 Judge Everett was Chief Justice for the Military Court of Appeals to the Armed Forces from 1980 to 1990, is professor at Duke University Law School, and continues his practice in Durham, North Carolina, including efforts for voting district equanimity that began with his Shaw v. Reno case before the United States Supreme Court. See Christopher M. Burke, The Appearance of Equality: Racial Gerrymandering, Redistricting, and the Supreme Court, (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), 59–124 for an account of this case and its effects upon jurisprudence and the construction of voting districts in the United States.

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My inclination for years had been that the death penalty was a tragic yet appropriate measure for dealing with the hardest criminal violations. And yet, the disturbing patterns that surfaced from these searches and experiences were a testimony to how the judicial system in the United States measures the issuance of punitive justice, and the worth of human life, while overlooking critical forces such as socio-economic factors that bear a direct correlation to a rise in social unrest and violence. Even more disturbing is the astounding number of minorities (and in North Carolina that translates chiefly into African-American males), who are executed.49 There is something to the truth that, like an Escher print, if one stares long enough at the lithograph then new patterns begin to emerge and etch their ways into one’s consciousness. If one gazes long enough at the spectacle of cruelty (wherein essential but ultimately reductive phenomena such as formal descriptive statistics fade) one is able to catch a glimpse of the wholly different ‘other’ whose singular experience of cruelty is never reducible to either a statistic or a single book. One of these African-American defendants was David Jr. Ward, a resident of North Carolina, a youth who had picked cucumbers in the summers for forty-two cents an hour, a son who stayed by his brother’s side at the hospital after his brother had been in a critical accident, a father to a daughter who took dance lessons, a grandson who bathed his grandmother’s ailing body, a friend who recounted how he had planned to grow strawberries in a house he would never afford, and a man who fired his weapon at a woman during the night hours in the spring of 1991. David and his accomplice were tried separately and both were convicted of the capital crime of first-degree murder in the spring of 1992. David’s accomplice was tried first and received the sentence of life-inprison without parole. Unlike his accomplice, the mitigating circumstances in David’s favor included, but were not limited to, the facts that hours after the murder he voluntarily assisted the local police, revealed the identity of his accomplice, disclosed the location of weapons, drove the police to where stolen money had been hidden, and voluntarily 49

Isaac Unah and Jack Boger, “Race and the Death Penalty in North Carolina: An Empirical Analysis: 1993–1997,” presented by The Common Sense Foundation, North Carolina Council of Churches, (April 16, 2001). Dr. Unah (professor of political science at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) and Dr. Boger (professor at UNC law school). Non-white perpetrators were more likely to receive the death-penalty when they assaulted white victims.

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offered details of the night before without a lawyer present to represent him in his testimony. Furthermore, David’s defense team was comprised of an attorney who had graduated from law school three months prior, and a second attorney who had not tried a capital litigation in almost thirty years, both of whom unsuccessfully implored the judge not to slate them to the case for reasons of lacking sufficient and recent professional experience in capital litigations. However, despite these reasons, and further mitigating circumstances, including complications that surrounded two outbursts in the course of David’s trial – at the start of his trial and during the sentencing phase which could have proven ‘reasonable prejudice’ to the jury – nevertheless David received the punishment of death and spent the next nine years of his life seeking an appeal that ended with his execution on Friday, October 13, 2001 after the exhaustion of his appellate process and a non-stay of execution from the desk of the Governor of North Carolina.50

50 The manner in which the death penalty is exacted in North Carolina underlies a sterile and bureaucratic sense of preparation and procedure that is only possible in the reigning technocratic age. “Execution Method – Lethal Injection,” North Carolina Department of Correction, (July, 2003). “Lethal Injection – The inmate is secured with lined ankle and wrist restraints to a gurney in the preparation room outside the chamber. Cardiac monitor leads and a stethoscope are attached. Two saline intravenous lines are started, one in each arm, and the inmate is covered with a sheet. The inmate is given the opportunity to speak and pray with the chaplain. The warden then gives the condemned an opportunity to record a final statement that will be made public. After the witnesses are in place, the inmate’s gurney is taken into the chamber by correctional officers who draw the curtain and exit. Appropriately trained personnel then enter behind the curtain and connect the cardiac monitor leads, the injection devices and the stethoscope to the appropriate leads. The warden informs the witnesses that the execution is about to begin. He returns to the chamber and gives the order to proceed. The saline intravenous lines are turned off and the thiopental sodium is injected which puts the inmate into a deep sleep. Potassium chloride is then injected, leading to cardiac arrest. An injection of pancuronium bromide follows. This agent is a total muscle relaxer. The inmate stops breathing and dies soon afterward. The warden pronounces the inmate dead and a physician certifies death has occurred. The witnesses are escorted to the elevators and the body is released to the medical examiner.” Cost of execution supplies for lethal injection – 60 cc syringes at .40 each × 12, 10 cc syringes at .12 each × 6, 1000 ml saline at .71 each × 3, IV tubing set at .63 each × 3, IV set (needle) at 6.87 each × 3, IV stopcock at 1.23 each × 12, thiopental sodium 5 gm. 100 ml at 20.28 each × 2, potassium chloride 2 mg/ml 10 ml at .31 each × 12, pancuronium bromide 5 ml at 1.37 each × 12 = TOTAL $105.63. “Costs varies somewhat depending on supplier, current costs and amount of drug used.” See also Brian Lane, The Encyclopedia of Cruel and Unusual Punishment, (London: Virgin Publishing Ltd., 1993), for a historical survey of procedures for execution. For a better understanding of the experience of awaiting one’s death, see William A. Schabas, “The Death Row Phenomenon,” The Death Penalty as Cruel Treatment and Torture: Capital Punishment Challenged in the World’s Courts, (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 96–156.

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David and his executioner were on one side of a large sound-proof slate of hard plastic, and a viewing audience of attorneys and family members and friends of both the victim and David were on the other side. David spent the last week of his life expressing his love for family and friends, and in fact these were his last words to his attorney as he died. In David’s case, one witnessed an escalating and excessive series of limited exchanges and events, judicial decisions and numerous other objectifications that cruelly trespassed his life, from his arrest to his trial and death years later. Claims of this stature must by no means be supported by an unexamined mode of judgment that transposes the victim into the icon of the martyr, and the observer into that selfflattering icon of the rescuer of memory and moral righteousness. The experience of David’s life, his imprisonment, the arbitrariness of the North Carolina judicial system, and the morose miles and years to David’s execution, wrested from me any former convictions on the utility of capital punishment. I reconsidered – from my initial research through the case and conversation with attorneys and David – why his case struck my skull like a hammer, and how the spiraling events involved a moral distance that was impossible to rationally describe, and from which all involved seemed caught by its gravitas. Nothing could have stopped David’s execution; no appeal to justice would have been sufficient for justice’s advance. If the justice of due retribution is assumed to function sufficiently at legal and even normative levels, then why does the very language of retribution sometimes make a travesty of the reconciliatory features of justice toward human well-being?51 This is a quagmire analogous to Orwell’s observation when reconciliation is lost in the desire for retribution. Orwell writes, “our century is the period in which human equality became technically possible” but also a century in which “practices that had long been abandoned – imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages, and the deportation of whole populations – not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened 51 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3–16. Well-being or ‘welfare’ in the personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres is here meant as a ‘caring-after’ in the Aristotelian sense as that which relatively satisfies human desire and in this way brings “happiness.” The excess of human desire in personal, interpersonal, and institutional cruelty can ravage well-being. If desire brings happiness, then its contrary is an excess as a violative encounter that induces degrees of misery.

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and progressive.”52 The defense of cruelty can appear almost worse than its perpetration. The defense or justification of cruelty has cross-cultural applicability. In fact, such consideration of cruelty prompted a consultation in December 2006 through the auspices of the World Council of Churches titled Cruelty: The Uglier Face of Violence, which convened in Puidoux, Switzerland.53 Professors, practitioners, and leaders in their own right from around the globe met in order to assess cultural examples and implications of cruelty in the world. Cross-cultural resonance around the impact of cruelty indeed echoed Orwell’s observation above. Whether it be systemic racism in Europe, or the caste subjugation of Dalit women living in India, or the rationales that maintained power imbalance against blacks in Apartheid South Africa, or child prostitution and the abuse of the female body in the Philippines, or the Israeli government’s justification for the occupation of the Palestinian people, or the institutionalized practice of torture in the detention centres of Guantánamo and Iraq, or the role of the churches in both commission and omission during the genocide in Rwanda, all bear the imprint of a common pattern: Across cultures, as exhibited in the case of David’s execution, systemic cruelty transpires under the crust of deep-structure rationalizations from within the moorings of a specific culture. A central and pervasive challenge to the cross-cultural analysis of cruelty will always be in the delineation between what is considered culturally specific and appropriate, on the one hand, and what rationales are heinous contributors of systemic cruelty against our shared humanity, on the other. Even here, the analyst’s persistent appeal to objectivity in the appreciation of cultural specificity may itself rationalize the furtherance of cruel trespass of the weakest in each particular culture. Can it be that the human cry of injustice is thickly concealed even in appeals to the objective assessment of a given culture? Yes. As Orwell noted, even the most enlightened and seemingly progressive amongst us will justify the exportation of peoples, the imposition of the death penalty, or the usefulness of torture in the world. As in 52 George Orwell, The Penguin Complete Novels of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 861, in Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 169. 53 A compendium of papers under the title Cruelty: The Uglier Face of Violence is available through the World Council of Churches, and is an excellent preparatory resource to a cross-cultural assessment of cruelty in the world.

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David’s case in North Carolina, appeals to justice are often nothing short of state sanctioned revenge. In this last case, at the heart of state sanctioned revenge is a desire to receive one’s pound of flesh for retribution. For David, justice was sanctioned revenge where reconciliation of human well-being was betrayed and the human cry of injustice obliterated by abandonment. What was justice then? The horizon and trajectory of the cross-cultural analysis of cruelty requires careful sledding. That effort awaits reflective and nimble minds. Our contribution in Encountering Cruelty requires from us a careful assessment of David’s case in chapter four, including an assessment of the arduous task of interpersonal reconciliation where violation produces severe animosity and possibilities for endless concentric circles of retribution. We proceed to our fourth and final query for conceiving of the experience of cruelty in human life and relation. iv) The Query from a Locus of Belief – The Execution of Jesus Arching back to our lodestar and Nietzsche’s critique of triumphalist atonement, how might an understanding of cruelty conceptually invigorate an interpretation of the public execution of Jesus? Understanding cruelty during this execution, distinct from the triumph of the cross, reveals the ground of human resistance against the encounter of cruelty in human life and relation. One need not strike novel speculative flint in order to consider this distinction between an ideology of Triumph and human resistance, as it is already implied in the Lukan account of Jesus’ public execution. Three were executed in the early afternoon, but only in Luke is a curious recognition of what is unfolding within the crucifixion accounted for in the petition – “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”54 What did the Lukan narrative community see in the execution that gave credence to this sole addition in the gospel text? The purpose of this section is to begin laying groundwork for the prospect of reconciliation in, through, and after the encounter of cruelty. A constellation of terms merit investigation from numerous cultural contexts, insofar as within any given context forgiveness requires

54 Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger, ed., “The New Oxford Annotated Bible,” The Holy Bible, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), Luke: 23:34a [Italics mine]. Unless otherwise stated, all biblical citations are drawn from the ‘Oxford Bible.’

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a deep awareness of memory, cultural narrative, and expertise in how communities interpret the nature of truth.55 Furthermore, cultural qualifiers abound in any consideration of the difference between political pardon or amnesty, and interpersonal or communitarian efforts to identify and heal the fractures of cruelty that are culturally specific. As a case in point, following years of dialogue, in August 2010 the Lutheran World Federation, representing nearly 70 million Lutherans worldwide, sought forgiveness from Mennonites around the globe, for the atrocities Lutherans had visited upon Anabaptists (forebears of the historic peace churches, which includes Mennonites) in the sixteenth century. This act, although meaningful, also introduces attendant difficulties. For instance, in what manner is a cross-cultural and global effort simultaneously specific to local cultures and environs of Mennonites and Lutherans who, in the 21st century, do not identify with the ethnic or geographical placement of their forebears in the 16th century? Furthermore, cross-cultural inquiries are compounded by temporal considerations: How do the current voices and ears of Lutherans and Mennonites in the world speak and hear forgiveness on behalf of the 16th century maimed, murdered, murderers, and universally dead today? Sensitive appeals to forgiveness on the cross must also clear existential ground for those acts which are potentially ‘unforgivable.’ Current explorations on the unforgivable include the assessment of genocidal activity in Armenia, Germany or Rwanda, where the entire possibility of forgiveness may be impossible at the least, and a final affront to the memory of the dead, at the most. And yet, what is to be made of figures such as former Nazi Paul-Damascus who sent hundreds of Jews to their death. Often mistaken for being Jewish when he lived in South America, Damascus professed that he experienced a transformation of heart that materialized in the 1950s when he gave his entire fortune to Jewish charities, and ultimately turned himself in to the Israeli government in 1998.56 Is Damascus beyond forgiveness? Who has the authority to arbitrate this matter? And finally, what is purchased from our

55 An excellent and timely first resource for this discussion is provided in Charles Griswold’s text Forgiveness: A Philosophical Exploration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 56 See Laurence Thomas’ article ‘Forgiving the Unforgivable’ in Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust, eds. Eva Gerrard & Geoffrey Scarre (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2003).

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common humanity in terms of our diminishment wherever hard boundaries on the nature of forgiveness are exacted in the world? An understanding of narrative, memory, truth, and the unforgivable all have culturally specific qualifiers that serve to deepen any interpretation of forgiveness relative to cruelty. Attention must be paid as well to the specificity of the ‘act’ one is forgiving. A horizon to begin our inquiry is precisely internal to Jesus’ own petition during his public execution, which is analogous to our initial inquiry on that morning in New York. Who are they? What is it that they do? Internal to the Lukan community’s interpretation of forgiveness (“Father forgive them”) is an implied reference to the act(s) and entities to be forgiven. Whatever the Lukan narrative community meant by this petition’s inclusion in the last throws of a public execution, their intent is radical in nature in terms of the practical possibility of forgiveness in the world. What might the unexpected and arresting language of reconciliation from the dying at the end of a public execution entail? Where are the specific and shared cultural horizons for forgiveness that can embody such a radical appeal? And what, indeed, would this kind of reconciliation require from the world today? v) Transition from Four Queries and a Beginning What they do, what we all have within us to do, is to participate in the trespass of cruelty within all spheres of human existence. Our trajectory continues in light of the four above queries of cruelty. Nietzsche’s understanding of cruelty is our methodological lodestar that orientates an investigation of cruelty.57 This means that his understanding of cruelty must be investigated and clarified before further elucidation regarding the topography of cruelty in chapters two through four. Next, additional central considerations regarding cruelty – such as an etymological assessment of cruelty, the normative problem of cruelty, and cruelty’s relation to tragedy – must likewise be assessed in our current chapter. We continue this chapter in consideration of our lodestar.

57 Nietzsche has been chosen as a portal toward understanding cruelty not simply because he is the only philosopher to attempt a thorough uncovering of its manifestation in human affairs, but also because of the way in which his method uncovers how reason conceals and thereby confounds our efforts to interpret ‘cruelty.’ The reasons why we have not as public theologians attempted a discussion of cruelty have an analog with how reason conceals and confounds that which we urgently need to understand.

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The breadth of Nietzsche’s understanding of a way of cruelty is a first attempt to understand the topography of cruelty within human life and relation. B) The Lodestar – To ‘Know Oneself’ and Nietzsche’s Way of Cruelty But what lies behind the Homeric world, as the womb of everything Hellenic? For in that world the extraordinary artistic precision, calm, and purity of the lines raise us above the mere contents: through an artistic deception the colors seem lighter, milder, warmer; and in this colorful warm light the men appear better and more sympathetic. But what do we behold when, no longer led and protected by the hand of Homer, we stride back into the pre-Homeric world? … [We behold] the uninterrupted spectacle of a world of struggle and cruelty. – Nietzsche, Homer’s Weltkampf 58

“Gnothi se auton” – The sun god Apollo’s shrine on the side of Mount Parnassus rests, like those other hewn monuments to Greek understanding along the Gulf of Corinth, upon the uneven fractures, contours and grooves that were sacred to the ancient Greek gods.59 Plutarch wrote that the maxim “Know Thyself ” was first inscribed on the Oracle at Delphi, and it was here that the Pythia (the Oracle prophetess) sat on a tri-pod stool over one of the fractures and breathed in the intoxicating vapors that rose from the mysterious depths that effected a trancelike state and opened the Oracle to expressions of truth from the fractures underneath.60 Classic inscriptions such as the Delphic maxim do not necessitate claims to either noetic origin or originality. Rather, 58 Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf,” Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebene Büchern, Werke Historische-Kritische Ausgabe III:2 (Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1994). What lies behind the Homeric world? “Nur in Nacht und Grauen, in die Erzeugnisse einer an das Gräßliche gewöhnten Phantasie… Folgerungen der unausgesetzte Anblick einer Welt des Kampfes und der Grausamkeit drängte.” See also Daniel Breazeale, trans. & ed., Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1979). 59 Porphyry, “On the Cave of the Nymphs,” Porphyry: Selected Works, (Kansas City: Selene Books, 1988), 185. “Caves, therefore, in the most remote periods of antiquity, were consecrated to the gods, before temples were erected to them.” 60 Jacques Brunschwig et al. ed., “Epistemology,” Greek Thought, A Guide to Classical Knowledge, trans. Catherine Porter and Dominique Jouhaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 72–93. The rise of the Greek sense of ‘knowing oneself ’ is not reduced to the moral veneer of self-worth or esteem. Instead, to ‘know oneself ’ is in

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they are classic because they signify a prior symbolic constellation of meaning which rise from fractures, contours and grooves, from that cognitively uncircumscribeable and often vague mystery of being human. Through Delphi, the life-long journey to understand this mystery and its attendant complexities is what Thales means when he reflects that it is an enduring difficulty “to know thyself,” a difficulty reflected as well in Heraclites’ assertion that “You would not find out the limits of the psyche, even though you should travel every road: so deep a logos does it have.”61 From this beginning, the enduringly difficult journey to self-understanding is at the heart of western philosophy, art, architecture, literature, as well as in the history of theological discourse. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus states that the scribes have “taken away the key of knowledge;” the key of knowledge is reflection, but “you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”62 Equally intriguing is the Nag Hammadi gospel of Thomas, where Jesus exclaims – “Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished;” and again, “Blessed are they who have been persecuted within themselves. It is they who have truly come to know the Father.”63 To seek self-knowledge and knowledge of the divine is a pain-staking labor. In early Christianity both Athanasius (Life of Antony, vii) and Cyril of Jerusalem (Catechetical Lectures, iv) resound the assertion of ‘selfknowing’ as essential to a commensurate understanding of God. Augustine’s admission that “I am certain that I am, that I know that I am, and that I love to be and to know”64 is followed in later Catholic and Reform traditions in the respective personas of Theresa of Avila (Interior Castle, Book I) and John Calvin (Institutes, Book I), who begin their individual and complex projects with the proposition that the sense of ‘bringing back together [sunienai], and of being someone ‘who has seen,’ [oida] and of finding what is plausible about oneself and the world, as Xenophanes says, after “seeking for a long time.” 61 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 130–141. The journey of self-intensification is what Taylor refers to as a “radically reflexive” turn inward, the trace of which he investigates from Plato through Kant. See also, Joseph Grange, “Lacan’s Other and the Factions of Plato’s Soul,” The Question of the Other, 170. 62 Luke 11:52. 63 Gospel of Thomas, 69; see also Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, (New York: Random House, 2003), 57. 64 Augustine, City of God, (London: Penguin Books, 1984), XI.26.

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a relationship to the deity of necessity correlates to ‘knowing oneself.’65 In his Fides et Ratio, Pope John Paul II arcs back to adapt Anselm’s own search in the latter’s Proslogion – ‘knowing thyself ’ involves a faithfulness through the life-long journey as a locus of belief in a continuous and complex dialogue between believing and understanding.66 i) The Oracle at Delphi – Construction, Fracture, Concealment Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. – Pascal, Pensées What did you go out into the wilderness to behold? A reed shaken in the wind? What then did you go out to see? – Jesus, Gospel of Luke

The Delphic maxim “Know thyself ” is reenacted in multiple distinct genres within classic western literature. Although the expressions like those above are analogous and correlative to one another, they are never collapsible into the same kind of expression of the ‘self ’ knowing – just as the Delphic Oracle rests on the uneven surface of Parnassus with its multiple fractures that are routed differently toward a surface in common. So, when Ophelia tells Hamlet, “we know not what we may be,” or when Maya Angelou writes that the tragedy of being a clipped, tied, and caged bird is synonymous with the torture of opening one’s “throat to sing” but never to sing from what it means to be free, these may be shown as analogous to both Whitehead and Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza’s separate theologically oriented hermeneutics of suspicion that something is “awry” or discordant in the correlation between the fixed Ideal of the self and the reality of who we potentially or truly are in our intra-personal, interpersonal and

65 For Calvin’s sense of self-knowledge as Sui Notitiam see his Institutes, 1.1–2. Drawing from the Delphic Apollo, Luther likewise states that the Psalms call on one to “know thyself ” and one’s disposition in the world, akin to his sense of “the knowledge of the heart” from The Bondage of the Will. See Martin Luther, “Preface to the Psalms,” Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger, (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 41. 66 Anselm’s so-called ‘proof ’ for the existence of God, is indeed an Enlightenment mischaracterization of his pursuit. Anselm begins his Proslogion as a rigorous exercise of ‘faith seeking understanding.’ The prevalence of his faith or belief, as a central locus, is what drives his search. In chapter seventeen he admits to not reaching his goal, but the reader will note that this does not mean God does not exist. In contraposition, Kant’s critique of the ontotheological argument begins with rational necessity and ends with the reasonable deduction of God as a regulative principle of morality.

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institutional spheres of existence.67 In short, the human ‘Ideal’ does not fully represent the raw reality of human existence, just as the shining Ideal of Delphi does not fully represent the unsystematic, unpredictable and mysterious qualities and characteristics (i.e., fractures underneath) of human experience and logos, comprehension and reflection, in the practice of ‘self-knowing’ that is the key to understanding much of what Nietzsche identifies in “suffering and cruelty.” Nietzsche viewed the Oracle at Delphi suspiciously as that construction of marble and shadow where an “artistic deception [of] precision, calm, and purity of the lines raise us above the mere contents” of what lies underneath.68 And what lies beneath in the experience of the preHomeric world is “a life ruled only by the children of the Night” who display “terror and an imagination accustomed to the horrible” where the openly celebrated “cruelty of victory” of humans competing against and even destroying one another is “the pinnacle of life’s jubilation.”69 Nietzsche’s semantics are nearest to the Psalmist’s plea – “… the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.”70 The Oracle at Delphi in relation to “the dark places” of fracture underneath is as the Ideal of Self over the experience of self, where consciousness sniffs its own scent in the intoxicating vapors, and what it discovers in that scent is an originary and ontological Angst that is concealed in the Ideal; that is to say, underneath the Ideal humans 67 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Bloom, (New York: Chelsea House, 1990). 4.5.42 [Italics mine]; Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, (New York: Bantam Books, 1971); Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), Introduction; “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 107.1 (1988), 3–17; Psalm 115:7, “and they do not make a sound in their throat.” 68 Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf,” Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebene Büchern, Werke Historische-Kritische Ausgabe III:2 “Thus the Greeks have a trait of cruelty, a tigerish lust to annihilate.” 69 Nietzsche, GM III: 19[: Nietzsche calls his investigation a “true [human] biography.” “Wer von ihnen hielte noch eine Wahrheit ‘über den Menschen’ aus! … Oder, greiflicher gefragt: wer von ihnen ertrüge eine wahre Biographie!” Nietzsche’s project is not an analogous echo of Hume’s Philo in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, where Philo wins the day for philosophical skepticism. Nietzsche is instead Ion, who converses with Creusa and Xuthus and later storms the gates of Delphi – “I will ask Apollo himself whose son I am.” Apollo vanishes, and the child must transcend through creation “not because he must, but because he has no wish to stay.” Euripides, “Ion,” The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott, (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 14, 86. 70 The Holy Bible : King James Version. 1995 (Ps 74:20). Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.

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exude what Moltmann terms “an infinite anguish concerning themselves” – an Ur-Angst.71 But what is this infinite anguish as an Ur-Angst? According to Heidegger, Angst is not merely a fundamental ontological feature of existence.72 Rather, Angst is the deep-structure ontological foreboding that later manifests as existential fear and anxiety of violation, and overburdenment with the objectless nature of death and self-concern.73 The importance Heidegger places on the “objectless nature” of Angst must be emphasized, as Noëlle McAfee does when she reminds the reader that “by this [Angst] Heidegger does not mean fear, because we fear this or that entity. While fear is a fear of something, anxiety [Angst] has no object.”74 As an “Ur”, or an originary, objectless, and fundamental ontological feature of existence, Angst is present in our lives where there is no immediate or protracted sense of overcoming it, no seeming origination or teleological plan that ultimately tempers it, no Roman Fortuna or ontology of Judeo-Christian providence that reorients it into clean systematic and calculable circles.75 Thinking upon Hegel, here the Angst of the human spirit really is phantasmal, even haunting, and not reducible to a series of calculable, conceptual or historical sublations. And yet, all of the above is not to suggest that an originary and objectless Angst (i.e., Ur-Angst) annihilates the human ability to cope and come to terms with reality. Referring to Jung, Moltmann writes that Ur-Angst is what we hold in common as human beings, and is fundamental to our “Kollektives Unbewusstes” (collective unconscious). Ur-Angst is present in who we are as human beings, giving cause for Moltmann to write that Ur-Angst is not merely 71

Jürgen Moltmann, Gott Kommt, (München, Kaiser Verlag, 1975), 60. Heidegger, What is Metaphysics, 105–6. 73 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” Martin Heidegger: Pathmarks, ed., William McNeill, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 88–93. “In anxiety there occurs a shrinking back before … that is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of entranced calm.” See also Ernest Becker, “Chapter Two – The Terror of Death,” The Denial of Death, (New York: Free Press, 1975). Built-in to Calvin’s notion of selfknowledge as cognitio + notia, or cognoissance, is not merely knowledge but severe ‘existential apprehension.’ Only faith combined with “earnest fear” can produce a wellordered and pious mind that trusts in God. See Institutes, 1.1–2. 74 Noëlle McAfee, “Abject Strangers: Toward an Ethics of Respect,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, Kelly Oliver, ed., (London: Routledge, 1993), 120. 75 In the choir of Rochester Cathedral, a thirteenth century painting portrays the Wheel of Fortuna tossing her gifts indiscriminately to the anxious humans below. See also Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 56, 61, for an impression of the indiscriminate nature of Fortuna – “she heeds no tears, no cries of mercy.” 72

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necessary but “essential in allowing us to sense life’s most intimate struggle against threats and hindrances.”76 Nietzsche’s challenge regarding cruelty is not that we exhibit an Ur-Angst, but that western consciousness exhibits a penchant for constructing around Angst as a form of denial. Consciousness transvalues Angst into a sickness where objectless Angst becomes the object of fear, and we conceal both this fear and Angst underneath shimmering utopian Ideals and dogmatic teleological structures. Consciousness constructs For Moltmann as for Nietzsche, it is in the purview of Angst that consciousness searches for meaning, for self-understanding that reveals purpose, rhyme, reason, and in the search constructs itself anew in elaborate marble with its straight uniform columns that are at first intended to herald the query or search itself. Yet fractures can be overwhelming; our own thoughts can repel us, and ultimately the need for calculability and certainty triumphs over shadowy glimpses of Angst and the uncertain outcomes of the quest for self-understanding.77 Thereafter, marble does not herald but conceals, transformed from an icon to an idol.78 “Know Thyself ” as a maxim is therein calcified as a general truth of an imperative end and not as a rule or means of procedure in the journey of the self; the maxim “Know Thyself ” becomes absolutized as the state of being human rather than the dynamism of humans being. Nietzsche’s language is infused with challenging western consciousness in its penchant for concealing Angst in this way. The kernel of his argument is that consciousness appeals to moderation and security, and not to self-overcoming and the inherent risks of maturation. Consciousness conceals When it embarks upon the search for self-understanding consciousness intuits and even recognizes the fractures, the complexities of 76

Jürgen Moltmann, Gott Kommt, (München, Kaiser Verlag, 1975), 60. Calvin, Institutes, 1.1–11. Self-knowledge is telos-oriented insofar as one desires to consider for what purpose one was made and how this purpose will be realized. 78 Psalms 115:3–8. Idols “have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see. They have ears, but do not hear,” analogous to Shakespeare’s “sound and fury signifying nothing” (MacBeth 5.5.23–28), or Ricoeur’s recollection of Parmenides’ Poem of mortality as a “breath of air,” as “vanity in the pursuit of the wind.” (Symbolism of Evil, 75); Augustine recalls his awareness of the loss of the idol and of friendship as a painful awakening: “I had poured out my soul into the sand…” (Augustine, Confessions, V). 77

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human existence, its attendant unpredictabilities and contradictions, its sense of self-objectification, self-loathing, self-ravishment, and Angst.79 According to Nietzsche, consciousness thereafter queries with a sincerity that is rarely duplicated – “am I ugly?” Am ‘I’ somehow other than I imagined, where self-deception compounds and disfigures me? In the western tradition, the definitive reply is as quick and resounding as the glint of Delphi which consciousness constructs – “No! You are beautiful, you exude purpose in your beauty, you are tragic, but not ugly.”80 Consciousness conceals as it constructs. ii) Mythos and Myths – Angst, Wonder and Awe Philosophical, artistic, historical, religious and theological, but always narrative constructions thereafter shape and reshape the physique of consciousness through the gathering of what Hegel calls “artistic consciousness,” and what we identify as the art of Mythos. Mythos is that broad constellation of increasingly elaborate and sophisticated narrative myths often established in the repetition of “pure lines” (i.e., specific narrative forms), akin to the myth of marble Delphi erected above all fractures.81 Myths reveal to us what Pascal also noted: Humanity is 79 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V: 97. “There is thought to be a possibility of injustice towards one’s self, because herein it is possible for men to suffer somewhat in contradiction of impulses really their own.” Self-objectification is the beginning of injustice of one to self. 80 Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 9. “Cruelty … repels instantly and easily because it is ‘ugly.’ It is a vice that disfigures human character, not a transgression of a divine or human rule.” 81 GM II: 9, 18[24–30]. “This hint will at least make less enigmatic the enigma of how contradictory concepts such as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice can suggest an ideal, a kind of beauty; and one thing we know henceforth—I have no doubt of it—and that is the nature of the delight that the selfless man, the self-denier, the self-sacrificer feels from the first … diese Lust gehört zur Grausamkeit.” See also Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 39. “Greek philosophy was worked out in contact with myths which are themselves interpretations, descriptive and explanatory exegesis of beliefs and rites …” Nietzsche’s contention is that the “fixed ideals” of myth, and not the process of interpreting existence (mythos-oriented) cloud the mystery of existence. Synonymous to mythos is ‘narrative,’ as in MacIntyre’s “the narrative unity of a life” in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). See also, Richard Kearney, “Myth and the Critique of Tradition,” Reconciling Memories, 40. “Narrative – understood as the universal human desire to make sense of history by making a story – relates to tradition in two ways. By creatively reinterpreting … and by critically scrutinizing.” I am reserving the term ‘narrative’ for what is plurivously displayed as specific ‘myth.’ Mythos, as the human predisposition toward creation, is a search of humans being in experiencing-explaining-understanding. How this human predisposition often transvalues the search into a second dogmatic form of mythos, as the totality of experiencing-concealing-controlling, will be a concern in the following pages.

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“only a reed, the weakest in nature, but it is a thinking reed.”82 We think through myths and therein desire to know ourselves knowing, analogous to Aristotle’s thought-thinking-itself, or exuded in John the Baptist’s wandering reflections in the wilderness,83 Myths are necessary in order to think, reflect, interpret, construct, conceal, articulate, and share through narrative, where narrative is that truth-seeking and most meaningful indicator of what it means to be a reed, to spring up and advance the simplest and clearest idea as a response to wonder. Why wonder? To what are Mythos and its corollary myths responding? “Artistic consciousness,” noted Hegel, “originated in wonder.”84 Myths respond to one of the ironies of our western heritage – the experience of “wonder and awe” in the face of Angst at the core of our sense of the cosmos. Myths respond in order to both construct and conceal those very things which inspire Angst, wonder and awe in us.85 Mythos and the construction of specific narrative-myths attempt to provide responses to Angst and wonder-awe. Insofar as we are creatures of myth, mythos has been at the narrative ground of all mystery. We might add that myth is likewise reflective of our need to understand our relation to the mystery of divine transcendence. Exemplars of the human need to understand the mystery of divine transcendence begin in our classic literature with Thales of Miletus, who in the seventh century b.c.e., responded with the naturalist dictum that “all things are water,” a groundbreaking idea in a world thick with Greek mythology. If Aristotle credited the concept of ‘God’ as the unmitigated logical ground of existence,86 then Zeno of Citium was the 82

Pascal, Pensées. Luke 7:24–5. “What did you go out into the wilderness to behold? A reed shaken in the wind? What then did you go out to see?” 84 Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F.P.B. Osmaston, (London, 1920), II.23 in Anne and Henry Paolucci, ed., Hegel on Tragedy: Selections, (Smyrna, Delaware: Griffon House, 2001), xviii. Artistic consciousness, “no less than the religious … have originated in wonder.” 85 The connection between wonder and Angst in human existence is visited in Freud’s concept of das Unheimliche (the uncanny) and Heidegger’s complex understanding of the Nothing. For Heidegger, Dasein is “held out into the Nothing,” which creates objectless fear or Angst. But in the encounter with the Nothing Dasein understands its own beingness and experiences the wonder of being radically free. Without “the original revelation of the Nothing [there can be] no sense of self and no freedom.” See Heidegger, What is Metaphysics, 105–6; see also Noëlle McAfee, “Abject Strangers: Toward an Ethics of Respect,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, Kelly Oliver, ed., (London: Routledge, 1993), 120; and Sigmund Freud, Complete Works, volume 17, 236. 86 Aristotle, A New Aristotle Reader, ed. J.L. Ackrill (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1987), 233. 83

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first to present an ontological argument in that “It would be reasonable to honor the gods – It would not be reasonable to honor what does not exist – Therefore, gods exist.”87 Boethius was the first Christian thinker to construct an epistemological argument for the existence of God, “since nothing better than God can be thought.”88 Augustine’s dualpointed methodological compass of crede, ut intelligas (believing in order to understand) and Fruitio Dei (the enjoyment of God in contemplation), meant that faith became the necessary port of entry for metaphysical inquiry into understanding the mystery of divine transcendence.89 Anselm rooted himself firmly within the Augustinian tradition with his query – “How shall I approach light inaccessible?”90 Anselm’s quest to comprehend the Omnitudo Realitatus was at heart a response to the ‘wonder and awe’ that resonates in human existence.91 Unlike Augustine, Anselm’s response was framed in a proof, and it was this proof that Kant misread as a quasi-empirical attempt to “prove” the mystery of divine transcendence.92 A popular conceptualization is that the Rationalist quarter of ‘wonder-awe’ to the dogmatic admitted of a transcendence increasingly reduced to the propositional. Thereafter, Nietzsche was effectively able to exclaim (analogous to Moses Mendelssohn’s bemoaning of Kant’s “world-crushing” critique of the ontological argument) that “we have unchained the earth from its sun.”93 That is, we have removed not merely the traditional and metaphysical underpinnings of human existence, but we have drastically

87 Jacques Brunschwig and Geoffrey E.R. Lloyd et al., ed., “Theology and Divination,” Greek Thought: A Guide to Classical Knowledge, 507. 88 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), III.10. 89 Augustine, City of God, XI.26. 90 Anselm, “Proslogion,” The Library of Christian Classics: Ichthus Edition: A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham, ed. Eugene R. Fairweather, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1956), 73. 91 Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych, (New York: Continuum, 1994), 32. Rahner provides a review of Anselm’s notion of ‘God’ as Omnitudo Realitatus. 92 PJ McGrath, Believing in God, (Millington: Wolfhound Press, 1995), 39; see also Charles Hartshorne, Anselm’s Discovery: A Re-Examination of the Ontological Proof for the Existence of God, (La Salle: Open Court, 1991), 87, 208; see also Collin Grant, “Anselm’s Argument Today,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57.04 (2001), 798. What Anselm proved was in fact the premise that “God is conceivable is not conceivably surpassed.” 93 Martin Heidegger, “The Word of Nietzsche,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 106; see also Allen W. Wood, “Rational Theology, Moral Faith, and Religion,” The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. Paul Guyer, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 397.

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changed our ability to come to terms with Angst, wonder, and awe through traditional mythos. Nietzsche recognized our crisis – we had not lost our ability to tell a good story, but we had lost the resources to believe it.94 iii) Mythos and Myths – Telos-Orientation and Teleology Mythos interprets existence in constellations of specific narrativemyths that coincide, or blend, into a ‘narrative unity.’ Insofar as mythos seeks to approximate existence, then it is always engaged in specific narrative-myths. Narrative-myths include genre, plot, direction, mystery, but especially a beginning, middle, and an end. Mythos is constructed and advanced in two general trajectories of narrativemyth, and we will identify these trajectories here as ‘telos-oriented narrative-myth’ and ‘teleological narrative-myth’ and then attempt to explain both. First, telos-oriented narrative-myth advances insofar as it is able to maintain an existential distance of ‘wonder-awe’ and its attendant Angst of existential inexplicability that does not conceal this inexplicability.95 The beginning-middle-end of telos-oriented narrative-myth is open and free to the diverse and even radical world of polymorphous interpretations. In this sense, we mean that narrative-myths have an oriented telos, or an oriented course that is meaningful and true for human beings in their particular narrative context.96 When myths are meaningful and true but do not collapse Angst, wonder and awe, then these myths are telos-oriented. 94 Jeffrey Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, 25. See Simone Weil, “Word and War,” Politics, March 1946), 70. Weil’s comments reflect a dissatisfaction with his historical mileau, and the inability to believe former stories. “We people our political world with monsters and myths; we recognize nothing but entities, absolutes, finalities.” 95 Jürgen Moltmann, Gottes Erfahrungen: Hoffnung, Angst, Mystik, (München, Kaiser Verlag, 1979), 27–39. “Der Angst und der Hoffnung gemeinsam ist doch eine Sensibilität für das Mögliche.” Wonder and Angst, analogous to Moltmann’s sense of Angst and Hoffnung, as with Sören Kierkegaard (Begriff der Angst) and Ernst Bloch (Prinzip Hoffnung) are irrepressibly borne together. Angst gives rise to wonder, and vice-versa, but wonder always maintains an attendant ‘gratitude.’ Kant’s glimpse at the ‘starry heavens’ and resounding question – in what may I ‘hope’? – is also herein represented. 96 C.G. Jung, Answer to Job, trans. R.F.C. Hull, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 108. Jung also captures this sense of telos-orientation at the end of his study: “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”

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Second, teleological narrative-myth was a conceptual fixture in philosophy and theology long before Christian Wolff popularized the term “teleology” in the eighteenth century.97 Teleological narrativemyth depends upon pre-established and causative final ends. These causative ends are invoked as principles of explanation from the existence of God to the exclusivist reading of a Scriptural text. Causative ends, fixed as foundational truth-claims in human narratives, are the enshrined metanarratives railed against in the twentieth century. The “incredulity toward metanarratives,” as Jean Francois Lyotard put it, is a distinct criticism by post-modern existence upon the problem of teleological narrative-myth.98 One reason why teleological narrativemyths are problematic is because their causative ends boast an exclusivist authority by transforming principles of explanation into predetermined proofs. The teleological or exclusive causative ends accrue historical authority and ultimately crystallize into enclosed totalities or absolutes that crush further creative inspiration. Because enshrined causative ends crush inspiration, teleological narrativemyths are shut to new discovery. Fortified causative ends, absolutivist exclusivity, and totalism without inspiration are never transparent as such. Rather, these features of teleological narrative-myth are typically

97 Christian Wolff, Rational Philosophy or Logic (1728); General Cosmology, (1731). The Ionian Greek philosopher, Anaxagoras, was the first to assert that world-systems evolve through natural causes in his On Nature fragments. Plato’s exploration of universal forms views causation, changelessness and motion in nature and God in the Laws. Aristotle, in his concept of the Final Cause, traces the end stage of a process from potentiality to actuality. All of these thinkers have made important contributions to philosophy and theology in how we conceive of telos in human understanding. The point I am making is that the heart of Christian ‘faith seeking understanding’ is harmed when we, through dogmatic over-dependence, reduce telos to a descriptive argument for belief that is dependent upon a hard kernelized teleological hermeneutic. As an alternative in our tradition, the hermeneutic of ‘faith seeking understanding,’ as we witness in Anselm’s Proslogion (xvii), is not a reduction of this telos, but instead an exploration of faith in his well formulated locus of belief. Even when one is unable to grasp cause (and not teleological causation), this does not suggest that we are somehow chasing after illusions, which is the over-rehearsed response following the Enlightenment. As soon as we make this mistake as a confusion between cause and causation, we sacrifice the locus of belief which Anselm, but also Kierkegaard, went to lengths to clarify. 98 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv–xxv; see also, Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” The Leslie Stephen Lecture, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 2; see also, Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 20, 44, 186. The confusion between what is telos-oriented and teleological in Christian truth is a perpetual source of confusion for Rorty.

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concealed within the symbol of the sublimely beautiful Ideal. The sublime Ideal, of whatever ilk, is the hallmark of teleological narrativemyths. We will shortly say more about the nature of the sublime Ideal in western consciousness. For now, a correlation can be made between telos-oriented and teleological narrative myths When mythos advances narrative-myths that are inflexible in genre and plot, where ideology hems in the life of the idea, and where an open telos degrades into hardened and canonic teleology (as an inflexible totalism that bars language from understanding experience anew), then authority sublates authenticity and teleology sublates an oriented telos.99 A more explicit way of making this distinction in mythos is to state that mythos may either aim at human well-being where concept and experience dialectically engage for the enhancement of mutual dwelling-well and belonging-to under something like Kant’s endless constellations of the wonder-full “starry heavens above.” Or, through concealment, mythos can establish the repetition of narratives that press Ideals and craft new teleological structures – such as the ‘self ’ or the divine – into calculable absolute forms exemplified in a popular misreading of the Cartesian Ipseitous ‘Self ’ or William Paley’s deist ‘watchmaker God,’ which above all produce effects of self-denial regarding wonder-awe and Angst within the sheen of a new surface for consciousness.100 When the economy of a telos is bound too tightly, then the risk is the construction of a teleology and the loss of central aspects of our humanness in Angst, wonder and awe.101 The ‘knowing self ’ and the divine mysterium receive a new gloss of the Ipseitous Self 99 Lessing, “On the Reality of Things Outside God,” Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 103. The difference between an oriented telos and canonic teleology is here analogous in Lessing’s argument between contingency and necessity: “But people will cry out in horror: Contingencies in the immutable being of God! Why? Am I the only one who does this? You yourselves must ascribe to God ideas of contingent things. Has it never occurred to you that ideas of contingent things are contingent ideas?” 100 Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 178. The notion of a “narrative unity of life” means that one is normatively engaged in the interpretation and action that creates and endorses a ‘life plan’ in a ‘narrative sense’ and as an aspiration toward the ‘good life,’ all three of which gather to comprise a sense of one’s “narrative unity.” Next, Levinas offers an exhaustive critique of the ipseitous nature of the subject that resists the totalistic constraints of a Cartesian cogito – see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 118–19. 101 Edmund Hill, The Mystery of the Trinity, (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), 22–25, 50.

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and a Pantheist Deity, but their originary attributes of wonder and awe in the face of Angst are concealed.102 ‘Wonder-awe’ is attended by Angst, where existential anxiety increases in the all too human fear of violation. What is the correlation between anxiety and violation? According to Nietzsche, our fear of violation reveals to us a self-awareness of vulnerability, of the omnipresent possibility of human trespass. The possibility of being trespassed, as the etymological tracking-through or crossing-over other human beings, is one reason why teleological narrative-myths provide a sublime comfort. The sublime comfort of teleological narrativemyths is as Delphi above fracture. Teleological myths conceal the experience of fracture underneath. iv) Trespass Concealed in Teleological Narrative-Myth Nietzsche reflects upon the concealing teleological trajectory of mythos. He reiterates that prior to and underneath the purification of this dominant mythos “steaming over Hellas from Delphi” remain the fractures underneath. The fractures are the history of human wonder, awe, Angst. But the fractures are also what Nietzsche identifies as a fundamental “struggle and cruelty” within human existence. Wonder, awe, Angst, and ‘struggle and cruelty’ – these are what Nietzsche believes were concealed by the marble “purity of lines” in teleological narrativemyths that enshrined existence in calculability and purpose, in inflexible teleologies representative in the marbled columns of Delphi.103 Throughout this depression at Delphi, the true origins and nature of the human fracture of “cruelty” were concealed by teleological narrative-myths. And yet, repressed fracture always resurfaces, albeit oddly changed. That is, where cruelty has been concealed and forgotten its transvaluation will resurface within the acceptable social morality of the concealing teleological narrative-myths themselves. Thus, when human trespass resurfaces in teleological narrative-myths, it is 102 Ricoeur’s essay “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977), 1–38, is brilliant in creating a distance between teleology and revelation while assessing the symbol of revelation in terms of incalculable wonder which apprehends revelation as inspiring and dangerous in its ability to reorient human thought and action. Also of note is Ogden’s sense of revelation where he rethinks revelation away from canonic form and toward an ‘originary event’ “being constitutive of human existence” that is intimate to being human, “always occurring insofar as we exist at all.” See Ogden, On Theology, 43. 103 Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts,” 2.

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transvalued within the prevailing teleological narrative-myth to reflect the sublime Ideal itself. For instance, the intra-personal trespass of self-loathing will resurface as the pietistic Ideal of Selflessness, the interpersonal trespass of mass murder will resurface as the justification for Holy War, and the institutional trespass of execution will resurface as legitimate legal retribution.104 The Ideals for each of these will be argued from the ground of principled teleological narrative-myths, but the trespass remains all the same as a fracture of cruelty. According to Nietzsche, what transpired in the trajectory of Greek teleological narrative-myth is that “a trough cut deep into Hellenic history” where calculability was constructed upon the fissures and fracture of struggle and “cruelty,” like a “purity of lines … above content” of what lies underneath.105 Consequently, the dominant nature of human narrative as telos-oriented – of stories told at firelight to ponder until the dawn – became teleological in nature and ushered in the birth of civilization. According to Nietzsche, too much Angst, wonder-awe, and cruelty will harm civilization, so these had to become concealed in unyielding calculability. Why Nietzsche finds the concealment of cruelty problematic delivers us to our next task. Nietzsche’s assertion is that the maxim at Delphi has been misappropriated in western thought as an imperative end enforced through teleological narrative-myths.106 On the other hand, if the Delphi were to be correctly appropriated, then to ‘know oneself ’ would involve a

104 Plato, who was also aware of this penchant of myth being canonized, states that the Republic is truly an allegory of the soul – “Perhaps it is a pattern laid up in heaven where he who wishes can see it and become its citizen. But it doesn’t matter whether it exists or ever will exist; it is the only city in whose politics [the good man] can take part.” Republic, 592. See also Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts,” 23–4. 105 Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf,” Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebene Büchern. See also Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II: 43; GM II: 16, Nietzsche writes that ‘cruel’ people are “backward,” and by backward he means “all those instincts of wild, free, and prowling man” underneath in the “content” are turned backward against man himself insofar as cruelty is hidden in our confessions of faith and now finds expression under a mask of reason. But this is a typical Nietzschean move, where ‘backward’ is not pejorative, although one would assume so at face value. 106 Consider the myth of the ‘discovery of the Americas.’ The narrative of discovery conceals invasion. See David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World. See also the contemporary resistance against the legacy of the myth of discovery and its attendant entitlements in Jon Sobrino, Archbishop Romero: Memories and Reflections, trans. Robert R. Barr, (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990). Romero, Archbishop of El Salvador, was assassinated while celebrating Mass on March, 24, 1980, at the Divine Providence Cancer Hospital.

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binary awareness of a) the ‘wonder-full’ mysterious, incalculable, struggles and cruelties (i.e., “contents”) of consciousness which pervade in existence, and b) the nature of teleological narrative-myths that conceal the content underneath.107 Through this binary awareness of life and its concealment, consciousness can attempt to avert the danger of present forgetfulness and a corresponding chaotic future when, in fact, teleological narrative-myths fail.108 The Oracle at Delphi and the maxim to “Know Thyself ” should thus challenge consciousness both beyond and before teleology and toward an awareness of language and understanding which reclaims Angst, wonder-awe, and an awareness of human “cruelty.”109 Still, denial in western thought beginning with Greek teleological narrative-myth was a means of constructing and concealing, rationalizing and mollifying, the realities of human cruelty. Narrative-myths of this ilk do not desire to be uncloaked so easily. Why? As a first response – because what these ideals conceal is simply too ugly; very few desire to know that their display of pietistic selflessness might be steeped in self-trespass. Second, because every teleological narrativemyth contains an inflexible absolute Ideal or “fixed idea,” as in the Ideals – Father-Deity, Loyalty-of-Job, Liberty-as-an-AmericanBirthright, and Righteous-Abraham’s-Obedience. The inflexibility of a given Ideal shuts further creative inspiration in the crust of the teleological, and authority gathers around the Ideal, universalizing it – Patriarchy, The-Loyal-must-Suffer, Liberty-Always-Prevails, theRighteous-Always-Obey.110 And yet, underneath the inflexible Ideal is 107 Job undergoes a transition from awareness of his powerlessness to an investigation of a myth of divine retribution endorsed by both his friends and wife. He cannot simply “curse God and die” (Job 2:9). 108 Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations 2: 6, 10. “When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it. John Hewitt, in his poem “Postscript 1984” attests to the failure of myth and the violence this effects – “The years deceived: our unforgiving hearts/ By myths and old antipathies betrayed.” 109 Ibid., 2:10. “The god of Delphi cries to you his oracle: ‘Know thyself.’ What does he indicate to you? – both present danger and a way out of the chaos by understanding the past.” Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), xix–xxv. The ‘Preface to the English Edition’ recalls the risks of ontology, which is attributable to teleology. 110 These Ideals reflect Freud’s discussion of the “auxiliary constructions” and “powerful delusions” which cloud existence. See Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and It’s Discontents,” in Donald Capps, ed., Freud and Freudians on Religion: A Reader, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 63.

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found contradiction to human well-being – Oppression-of-Women, Suffering-of-the-Innocent, Murder-in-the-Name-of-Liberty, TheObedient-may-Kill-and-be-Righteous.111 Unveiling what is concealed inside the sublime Ideal is an ugly business.112 Teleological narrative-myths can, for instance, transvalue the quasimeaningful struggle for domination into the noble aspirations of victory or the liberation of a people, or transvalue a husband’s displays of violence into a rationale that he did it out of love, or cloak revenge and ambition behind notions of divine right or retributive justice, or a rhetoric of both.113 The reign of teleological narrative-myth in western social consciousness has been constructed through elaborate theories of the polis, through Machiavelli’s justification of state coercion and Stalinism, and up to the modern equivalent of the nation state and the historical plethora of small dictatorships throughout developing countries.114 The Ideal is always left standing. Teleological narrative-myths 111 GM II: 3[31–35]: “In a certain sense, the whole of asceticism belongs here: a few ideas are to be rendered inextinguishable, ever-present, unforgettable, “fixed,” with the aim of hypnotizing the entire nervous and intellectual system with these “fixed ideas”— and ascetic procedures and modes of life are means of freeing these ideas from the competition of all other ideas, so as to make them ‘unforgettable.’ ” 112 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 18. “… as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena, also brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation, and perhaps beauty itself. After all, what would be ‘beautiful’ if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ugly had not first said to itself – Am I ugly?” 113 The myth of ‘divine right’ that conceals an encounter with cruelty is illustrated a) in anti-Semitic sermons preached during the Thirty Years war between 1630 and 1631 that are today resting on a shelf and awaiting investigation at the University of Leipzig, and b) the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist out of New York who believed that Rabin’s peace proposals and potential capitulation of the over 5,000 Jewish settlements in Palestine threatened the ‘divine right’ of land for Israel. The disclosing of myth in the second example requires uncovering the call for ‘divine right’ and renaming it as, for instance, license to ‘slaughter.’ See Allen C. Brownfeld, “Religious Extremism and Holy War: Jews as well as Muslims must put House in Order,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 21, no. 2 (March, 2002): 85–87. In Israel-Palestine, “religious extremists have been brutally slaughtering their opponents ‘in the name of God’ from the beginning of recorded history.” [Italics mine]. 114 The same legacy applies from Plato to Machiavelli. Meno believed that the surest way to achieve his political aspirations was through perjury, lies, and deceit, whereas Machiavelli wrote that without state “coercion” then “every sort of distress, every kind of ruin, every other ill comes quickly.” See G.M.A. Grube, trans., Plato: Five Dialogues, (Indiana: Hacket Publishing Co., 1981) 59; and, Gilbert Allan, trans., “Tercets On Ambition,” Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others 3 vols. (Durham, Duke University Press, 1965), 106, 118, 737. See also, Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, (Illinois: The Free Press, 1958), 96. For the modern emanation of the ‘market state,’ see Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the Course of History, (New York: Alfred

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sacrifice the integrity of individuals and communities to an inflexible absolute Ideal. Persons become abstractions. Enclosed teleological narrative-myths read the Delphic maxim as an imploration of an imperative and causative end ‘to know.’ But then, what is known? v) Scientific Socratism – Skeptic Philosopher and Tragic Philosopher after the ‘Fact’ Utopias only work because they are carefully organized to prevent evils. This means that the people running them be continually governed by certain well-directed fears. – Mary Midgley, Wickedness A foreign traveler came back from the Third Reich and was asked, “Who actually reigns there?” He answered – “Fear.” – Bertolt Brecht, Die Gedichte in einem Band115

But then, what is known? Teleological narrative-myths in the west that enshrine the prudence and reasonability of Delphic calculability constructed atop fracture as a “purity of lines … [above] content,” gathers in Nietzsche’s term, “scientific Socratism.” ‘Scientific Socratism’ is the systematic quest for knowledge that seeks the absolute and calculable Ideal, or “fixed ideas” above the fractures of ‘suffering and cruelty’ as a further sophistication where prudence and reasonability evolve and ultimately shed their originary relation to mythos altogether. The “fixed ideas” are thereafter posited as “scientific” fact (i.e., as a new objective domain of facticity).116 A. Knopf, 2002), 667–797. Bobbitt, a former Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford, follows the evolution of the modern nation state into what may now be conceived of as the ‘global market state.’ How theologians understand the global market state will bear directly on how we understand the bureaucracy that has a direct effect upon the plight of those we represent and who do not benefit from this new emanation. For an influential sociological perspective of factors that lead to a market state see Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities, (London: Yale University, 1982). 115 Bertolt Brecht, Die Gedichte in einem Band, (Frankfurt: Insel, 2003), 703: “Ein fremder Reisender, aus dem Dritten Reich zurückgekehrt und befragt, wer dort in Wahrheit herrsche, antwortete: Die Furcht.” 116 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) B 350. Myth is often falsely correlated with fiction when juxtaposed to what is considered hard ‘fact.’ Kant was aware of the hermeneutically thin line between [myth as …] ‘fiction’ and [myth as …] ‘fact,’ and the accompanying underlying nature of illusion in all human judgment. “For truth and illusion are not in the object, insofar as it is intuited, but in the judgment about it insofar as it is thought.” ‘Scientific’ is meant here in the German ‘wissenschaftlich.’

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Teleology conceals its origination in mythos by concealing myth in the appeal to the narrative-myth of fact.117 The hallmark of scientific Socratism is its optimism for advancement “beyond” mythos, of consciousness’ advancement to a higher clime where the Ideal becomes synonymous with sound, prudent, or progressive reason. What Nietzsche terms “theoretical optimism” substantiates scientific Socratism in its quest to align human experience with the theoretical conceptuality of the Ideal.118 “Theoretical optimism” becomes the methodological engine of scientific Socratism and the reign of the Ideal. Scientific Socratism labors under theoretical optimism where the Ideal or “fixed ideas” are locatable, describable, meaningful, measurable, predictable, purposeful and teleological. Thus, scientific Socratism optimistically trollops out the presupposition that present conceptual knowledge and the future telos can be described, fixed, and rendered calculable as fact for human experience.119 Finally, the enduring human experience of suffering and cruelty in daily human existence, which would normally confront the prevailing Ideal and its attendant teleology, are perceived as anomalies, peripheries, illogical, inaccurate, unpietistic, unfaithful, unpatriotic, and otherwise dangerous to the normalcy of human existence so conceived.120

117 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 27. “Facts and theories are much more intimately connected than is admitted by the autonomy principle [insofar as the ‘autonomy principle’ asserts that facts are independent of theory].” See also Alasdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality, (Indiana: Notre Dame Press, 1988), 7, and the myth of progressive reason in the Enlightenment, where “the legacy of the Enlightenment has been the provision of an ideal of rational justification which it has proved impossible to attain.” 118 Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” National Interest, no. 16 (Summer, 1989), 3–18, from Jeffrey C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion. “The liberating notion of progress by reason, the faith in science as an unmixed good, the demand for popular education and the faith in its political meaning for democracy – all these ideas of the enlightenment have rested upon the happy assumption of the inherent relation of reason to freedom.” 119 GM III: 9: Nietzsche’s appraisal of the ‘prudent philosopher’ is that he is meek and useless by nature. 120 Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, XVIII: The ‘theoretical man’ “would rather believe something is illogical than that something is true and horrifying.” See Augustine, De Ord. I.v.14. Nothing happens in this world without a cause and without order, and nothing thereby may reside outside the causal nexus of an ordered nature. Thomas Kuhn’s groundbreaking analysis of “anomalies” on the periphery of assumed knowledge continues to be influential and informative. The point is that when ‘fact’ meets a new ‘anomaly,’ it perceives the anomaly as a threat to pre-determined factual ‘reality.’ Galileo and Copernicus are but two examples of what happens to those who

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When opposing teleological systems of fact clash with one another, the struggle can be enormous For instance, the popularized conceptual struggle for a claim to legitimate human experience between “faith” and “reason” in the Age of Rationalism was fundamentally about how best to approach causative ends or facts particular to each teleological system. Divisions were exacted under the unfurled banners of “faith” and “reason” (as characterized in the Oxford Sermons X–XII of John Henry Newman and Vatican I’s Dei Filius, Chapter IV), or “the necessary truths of reason” vs. “the contingent or accidental truths of experience,” (Leibniz’s theory of knowledge or Spinoza’s concept of ‘natural divine law’), or “the unalterable laws of nature” vs. “superstition” as asserted in Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1758). The rivalry between “faith and “reason” as competing systems of facticity chafed and cracked until finally an anomaly formed that neither teleological system could dismiss, accounted for by Lessing’s famous allusion to an “ugly broad ditch” forming in consciousness.121 The metaphor of a ditch is still but an allusion, albeit a powerful one, yet ultimately it is the mode by which competing teleological systems of fact reached a stalemate in a conceptual war for legitimating human experience, a way of enclosing existence in fact and then of mourning its deconstruction.122 But what indeed transpired in this struggle is that despite the efforts to enclose existence in teleological narrative-myth, the opaque character of the “content” underneath mythos rises, as when a traumatic personal, interpersonal, or cultural event reveals something of the cracks in the “pure lines” of the marble.123 When specific teleological narrative-myths discover and introduce the new anomaly. See “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 43–51. Luke T. Johnson adapts Kuhn’s analysis in order to rethink the concept of ‘worldviews’ that cast light on the social complexities on first century Christianity. See The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 12–18. 121 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, “On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power,” Lessing’s Theological Writings, 31, 51–56. 122 Regarding the ‘metaphor,’ this was also Murdoch’s point at the 1967 Leslie Stephen Lecture: “Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models, they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition.” 123 Augustine was well-aware of the so-called ‘ditch’ growing in consciousness in his remarks about the contradictory pursuit of the effable to describe the ineffable – “And a contradiction in terms is created, since if that is ineffable which cannot be spoken, then that is not ineffable which can be called ineffable. This contradiction is to be passed over in silence rather than resolved verbally.” In the modern period, the anomaly between effable/ineffable, between faith-seeking-understanding and the pursuit of propositional-reason, became a chasm that could no longer be “passed over in silence.”

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shimmer in their opacity, a crisis will form in what Nietzsche identifies as a “psychical” dissonance within consciousness where what had been true before has now become enigmatic.124 The facts of unqualified faith or reason, of human progress toward a final pre-determined religious or secular eschaton, of human contradiction that thwarts the realistic implementation of the Ideal, crash in as anomalies that can transform life into an enigmatic quagmire. Once ‘psychical’ dissonance reaches a crisis, consciousness typically takes on two types. The first type of consciousness, as a passive or receptive type, is what Nietzsche calls the ‘skeptic-philosopher.’125 Consciousness as the skeptic-philosopher, first, is unexpectedly shocked by “the ditch,” by the illusory nature of the quest for the Ideal in self-understanding when teleological narrative-myths fail, and second, is confronted by fracture that is not teleologically centered, such as human ‘suffering and cruelty’ which, although lacking a teleological center, nonetheless pour into the lacuna left after the vanishing of the Ideal.126 Adherents of so-called “reason” will be alarmed that progress did not eliminate an entire plethora of human cruelties, even in the rancor of the debates themselves, and adherents of the “faith” camp will have difficulty making theodical assertions in the face of overwhelming human trespass and cruelty. It is here at the intersection between the loss of the Ideal and the confrontation with the fracture of suffering and cruelty that consciousness is struck by a psychical dissonance where life is characterized as Ecclesiastical vanity,

Underneath this “contradiction” is the reality of human existence aflood with contradiction, with a sense of the irreducible that the tragic senses. Earnest Christian thinkers such as Augustine were aware of our limits at knowledge-identification, but when later teleological systems transform these limits into fortified frontiers, their collapse takes on the characteristic of an external onslaught rather than a necessary, critical aspect of our own humanness. See Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, vi. 124 GM II: 18, 22. On ‘psychical cruelty:’ “All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses – Here is sickness.” The notion of ‘psychical’ dissonance is the beginning of intra-personal ‘cruelty.’ 125 GM II: 18; BT XVIII: The “theoretical man … feels that a culture based on the principles of science must be destroyed when it begins to grow illogical, that is, to retreat before its own consequences.” 126 We see this same collusion of dueling Ideals in Antigone. Antigone’s brother is killed in battle, deemed a traitor, and thereafter the ruler of the city Creon orders that no one bury his body. Antigone disobeys for the Ideal of the family duty. Creon pursues with the Ideal of the state against disobedience. The absolute claim of both Ideals chafe and cruelty and death is the result. See A.C. Bradley, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” in Anne and Henry Paolucci, ed., Hegel on Tragedy: Selections, 371.

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human beings are but enigmatic cosmological drops, and truth takes on the character of being irrelevant, or worse, relative.127 Once the crises of the illusion of the Ideal create a psychical dissonance, consciousness as a skeptic-philosopher will be transformed into a skeptic of all truth.128 As a skeptic of all truth, what looms ever larger is the wonderawe of reality, the corollary Angst of existence, and the experience of human suffering and cruelty that will not be concealed within a conceptualism of either scientific progressivism or theodicy. It is here, at the frontier of being a skeptic of all truth, that we witness a splitting in the consciousness of the skeptic philosopher. He will either set his course on a utopian star – as in Lessing’s beautifully articulated notion of “truth” as “brotherly love, sincerity, and tolerance” – or, he will hunker down as a last bastion in defeatist bunkers that pretend at stoic contemplative moderation. The splitting into utopianism or defeatism are both efforts to escape two poles – crumbling totality, as the first pole, and the overwhelming reality of wonderAngst-suffering-cruelty that is dredged up in the skepticism of all truth, as the second pole. For its part, utopianism ultimately fails because, as Mary Midgley points out: “Utopias only work because they are carefully organized to prevent evils. This means that the people running them be continually governed by certain well-directed fears.”129 Fear cannot be concealed and the utopian Ideal is defeated. The fear of trespass resurfaces in Lessing’s utopian star, where ‘brotherly love’ lurks fearful of its opposite; the joy of utopia is either corrupted or extinguished. The second escapist split of the skeptic-philosopher into modern defeatist bunkers is inextricably represented through the post-modern concealment of human cruelty in what may be termed sublime irony.

127 The serious assertion that truth is irrelevant is a strongly uttered claim to truth, even if I have just disproved my case in its utterance. Yet, the popular assertion that truth is relative slouches in seriousness, where it should be patently obvious to the most casual observer that to assert that truth is relative is to utter an absolute truth that does not offer itself to serious engagement or a starting point for authentic dialogue. Like Ricoeur’s famous assertion, one must reach the starting point. One must win it. 128 Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other, 20. “Illusion suppresses reality at every level. It suppresses or misinterprets any facts that could serve to challenge the illusion. But it also suppresses reality in a metaphysical sense; that is, it suppresses knowledge of the plurality, concreteness, and unique loveliness of the beings that inhabit our world.” 129 Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 81.

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Sublime irony is the view that one is sufficiently privileged and intellectually sophisticated enough to view conflict and contradiction in existence from a tree-top perspective, allowing one a sense of academic objectivity, like post-modern heirs of Plato who pity those remaining in the cave. Richard Rorty’s ‘liberal ironism’ is the gemstone of postmodern sublime irony. As a clear aspiration for irony in his Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Rorty calls for “a religion of literature” that denies Scripture in order to avoid the “deep matter” of philosophical or religious quandaries. Indeed, this avoidance is an effort at escaping the poles of crumbling totality and Angst, wonder, awe, and cruelty. Regarding truth, Rorty suggests that “our purposes would be served best by ceasing to see truth as a deep matter, as a topic of philosophical interest, or ‘true’ as a term which repays ‘analysis’ … is just the recommendation that we in fact say little about these topics, and see how we get on.”130 But how “we get on” is to bowdlerize truth to the most common public denominator where conversation, indeed thought itself, is hedged as irrelevant because it is inexplicable, and where the smirk of liberal irony conceals the incalculability of wonder, Angst, suffering and cruelty through a policy of intellectual non-confrontation.131 A recommendation of this kind not only polices the frontiers of language and understanding against a surplus of Angst-wonder-cruelty, but it quarantines the great classic texts, particularly Scripture as a classic, insofar as their contribution to the experience of public life may take on a hue of religious significance.132 According to Nietzsche the skeptic-philosopher will understandably grow fearful. When yearning after life before ‘the ditch’ is exhausted, and former trajectories close so that no way back is possible, the 130

Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8, 14–17. MacIntyre’s widely known “catastrophe thesis” at the end of After Virtue (p. 26–63) is handled by H. Jefferson Powell in his work The Moral Tradition of American Constitutionalism: A Theological Interpretation, (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993); see also Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory in correlation with his response seven years later which transcended ‘catastrophe’ in his Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, chapters 18–20. 132 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 136. “… the hope for a religion of literature, in which the works of the secular imagination replace Scripture is the principal source of inspiration and hope for each new generation.” If the standard for a classic piece of literature is that it “has inspired many readers,” then I do not see how Rorty is able to dismiss the various texts of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, whose value is incontestable, even from the perspective of a literary atheist. 131

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skeptic-philosopher will fall into a kind of reductive stoicism, believing itself a privileged spectator in philosophical shelters that only allow for temporary relief. Analogous to Kierkegaard’s understanding, if the skeptic-philosopher wishes to survive the slow descent into something as intellectually useless as irony for its own sake, then consciousness must actively transcend its skepticism and learn how to see through opacity, value the ‘wonder-full’ and Angst-inducing illusions of mythos, and also approximate ‘suffering and cruelty’ as the enormous existentially concealed theological and philosophical question in post-modern consciousness.133 It is noteworthy that Rorty enthusiastically invokes Judith Shklar’s criterion of a liberal as “somebody who believes that cruelty is the worst thing we can do;” indeed, Rorty makes it his project, and does so in his admirably clean fashion, to articulate how both Orwell and Nabokov write toward understanding cruelty.134 And yet, somewhat bewildering in his Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty never once approximates or defines what cruelty in fact is, as that most heinous ‘phenomena’ or ‘action’ that is to be avoided at every expense as the highest negative principle of liberalism. In fact, if Rorty addressed how cruelty encounters human life and relation then his allegiance to irony would dissolve. Allegiance to irony would dissolve because cruelty in daily human existence is not ironic, but tragic in the classic biblical supposition that human beings are both existentially lost and found in human life and relation. Life as sublimely ironic in the face of this classic supposition is peculiar to an age where cynicism saturates our sensitivities. Even in this age, the reign of sublime irony over an awareness of cruelty renders this reign an absurditus, since, if not Scriptural supposition, then the experience of life itself demands more from us than irony. Underneath the teleology of sublime irony, consciousness still grapples with wonder-awe, Angst, suffering, and with ugliness or cruelty. If consciousness somehow ceased to grapple with these things, then a cynical age would be lost not to the way-station of a thin, chortling, and dogmatic liberal ironism, but rather farther down at serious sociocultural disparagement and finally in the gravitas of what René Girard

133

Ronald L. Hall, “The Irony of Irony,” International Kierkegaard Commentary, (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2001), 317–320. 134 Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 146, 156–86; see also Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984),

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refers to as a broad “cognitive nihilism.”135 Where the teleology of sublime irony would die in nihilism, cruelty remains. The second type of consciousness is discoverable in Nietzsche’s second type of philosopher which he developed between 1873 and 1875 in his epistemological writings within his Nachlass Fragments. This second, and active, type of consciousness is able to transcend skepticconsciousness by observing skepticism for what it is – a psychical and intellectual depression that develops in the “trough” between the “purity of lines” and the “content” underneath, between epistemological certainty and incalculable mystery, between the illusion(s) of the Ideal as fact and the harsh realities of ‘struggle and cruelty.’136 Furthermore, this second philosopher or consciousness is aware that skepticism, as a psychical depression, is only a final but unhealthy dependency on the illusion of the teleological Ideal, where the Ideal supported the concurrent dissonance and dependency of skepticism in the first place. The second consciousness grows suspicious of the Ideal fact and skeptical of skepticism.137 Consciousness rises in thought, learns anew how to think, and takes on a new mode of interpretation first as a hermeneutic of suspicion.138 When the illusions of the Absolute or “fixed ideas” and skepticism are rejected in favor of the absolute nature of illusion, then both the teleological Ideal and skepticism in their hitherto known forms are overcome.139 By absolute nature of illusion is meant that the labor of 135

René Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 213. See also, Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). Blumenberg traces the use of the shipwreck metaphor, of loss in deep seas, and even of sinking before leaving port. The confrontation with meaninglessness, not imploring the notion of nihilism, but a sense of the self as both surrounded by and run-through after the deluge of meaning’s absence – this is the catastrophe of a personal shipwreck. 136 Friedrich Nietzsche, BT XVIII[25–30]: The “trough” is a “malady of modern culture” where the ‘theoretical man’ desires “optimism” over truth with “all of nature’s cruelty attaching to it.” 137 Nietzsche, “The Philosopher” in Philosophy and Truth, 41. 138 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, (new York: Harper & Row, 1977), 112. “Thinking begins only when we have come to know that reason, glorified for centuries, is the most stiff-necked adversary of thought.” Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 349. “Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again.” 139 Sallie McFague, Models of God, 22. McFague nicely states the nature of the predicament – truth becomes “fixed, canonic and binding so that we forget that they [metaphors] are illusions.”

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mythos is inescapable where, for instance, even Nietzsche’s deconstruction of western myths in favor of the “Übermensch” was the trading upon myth.140 This brings us to the essentiality of mythos for existence. Consciousness requires mythos and its attendant narrative-myths, but this is not equivalent with stating that consciousness requires artifacts of falsity or self-delusion to construct what Kierkegaard and later Sartre assessed as ‘bad faith,’ (which was the dwelling of the first consciousness) as we shall see when the nature of ‘illusion’ is addressed below. Sufficed here to say that the second type of consciousness recognizes how illusion produced in mythos is necessary to human existence.141 This recognition is the first fragment of hard-fought knowledge the second philosopher brings with it out of the depression or “trough cut deep into Hellenic history.”142 It is a “tragic knowledge” to know that one must, within the conflict of interpretations about the meaning of existence, will “illusion” in order to exist.143 The recognition of this knowledge gleaned through a hermeneutic of suspicion is what earns the second philosopher-type the moniker, “tragic philosopher,” as a consciousness that faces ‘wonder’ and Angst, ‘suffering and cruelty,’ tragedy and ugliness, a sense of being simultaneously both lost and found.144 If the skeptic-philosopher is enslaved in the dependency of skepticism still hoping on the rescue of teleology formed through ‘scientific Socratic’ “knowing,” then the tragic-philosopher is liberated through 140

Bernard, Lonergan, “Transition from a Classicist-Worldview to HistoricalMindedness,” A Second Collection, ed. William Ryan and Bernard Tyrrell, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), 3. “… not to change the old universal, but to place another new universal beside the old one.” 141 C.G. Jung, Answer to Job, 47. “Myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity.” 142 Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf,” Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebene Büchern; see also HH II: 43; GM II: 16. 143 Friedrich Nietzsche, BT, 10. “The mysterious doctrine of tragedy; a recognition that whatever exists is of a piece.” See also, BT 7, 15 The labor of the ‘tragic philosopher’: “When carried to its limits the knowledge drive turns against itself in order to proceed to the critique of knowing knowledge in the service of the best life. One must even will illusion – that is what is tragic.” 144 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 211–3. See also Aristotle, Poetics, 544. Tragedy is “a mimesis not of people but of their actions and life … of doing something.” Nietzsche associates tragedy with being over doing where consciousness wants to know not if it does ugly things, but if it is ugly. Aristotelian tragedy is swallowed up in Nietzsche’s being.

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a hermeneutic of suspicion into an “artistic Socrates” anticipated in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, who is transformed beyond suspicion and into a creator of value.145 Hegel’s thought also correlates to this point – “Knowledge brought about the Fall, but it also contains the principle of Redemption. Thus what to others was only ruin, to Socrates, because it was the principle of knowledge, was also a pinnacle of healing.”146 For Nietzsche, from teleology to telos-oriented art, “our salvation lies not in knowing the Ideal but in creating!”147 The “tragic philosopher” as ‘artistic’ (and for Nietzsche ‘artistic’ is synonymous with ‘creative’), returns to ‘art’ the legitimacy of illusion, whereby what distinguishes him from skeptic-consciousness is his “lack of naiveté: he will understand both that his illusions are illusions and why they are justified.”148 vi) ‘The Rub’ – Abstraction, Limits of Language, Negative Creation, Reason’s Mask For Nietzsche the true nature of the Delphic oracle is not an imploration toward ‘knowing’ as the contemplation of moderation and prudence that can legitimize all kinds of human suffering and cruelty;149 rather to ‘know oneself ’ is, first, to be suspicious of both the Ideal and 145 The trace of the death and rise of Socrates is also found in Hegel. “Knowledge brought about the Fall, but it also contains the principle of Redemption. Thus what to others was only ruin, to Socrates, because it was the principle of knowledge, was also a principle of healing.” For Nietzsche, healing transpires from ‘scientific Socratism’ to ‘artistic Socratism,’ and the redemption of humankind through creative imagination. See, Hegel, “Substance of Tragedy,” in Anne and Henry Paolucci, ed., Hegel on Tragedy: Selections, 365. 146 Hegel, “Substance of Tragedy,” in Anne and Henry Paolucci, ed., Hegel on Tragedy: Selections, 365. 147 Friedrich Nietzsche, BT, 14–15. The “dying Socrates” gives way under the “artistic Socrates,” a hermeneutic transition with which Nietzsche experiments between ‘knowing’ and ‘creating’ in these two dense sections, and a concern that never ceased to influence his thought even through Twilight of the Idols. See also, “Aphorism 149,” Nachlassene Fragmente Herbst 1869 bis Herbst 1872 to observe the conception of these ideas. “Der Kampf zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft in Griechenland ist darzustellen. Der Stand der theoretikoi in seiner Entwicklung. Titel etwa Socrates und die Tragödie.” 148 Breazeale, Philosophy and Truth, xlii, xliv. For Nietzsche, “art” and “creation” are synonymous. 149 Die Geburt derTragödie, IV[6–14]: “Moderation in the Hellenic sense. As a moral deity Apollo demands self-control from his people and, in order to observe such selfcontrol, knowledge of self ‘Know thyself,’ and ‘Nothing too much!’ Excess and hubris [”Selbstüberhebung”] come to be regarded as the hostile spirits of the non-Apollinian sphere.”

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of skepticism as sui generic facts bound to teleology, and second, to reorient oneself in a trajectory toward ‘wonder’ and Angst at the fractures of human existence and thereafter to authentically ‘create’ both through and beyond a hermeneutic of suspicion (i.e., a skepticism of skepticism), that is, beyond knowing and toward creative action.150 And yet, reason has been unveiled as both constructing and concealing, and thus creation must not repeat the concealments of the past. One of the limits in creative action is not to induce ever newer manifestations of teleological systems of fact that conceal the seeming epistemic inexplicability of ‘struggle and cruelty’ in human existence. Nietzsche does not impel the reader toward a new teleology as an Ideal of the subject because he wants to ‘create’ beyond the Ideal and toward a methodology that does not just acquiesce but rather hermeneutically grapples with ‘suffering and cruelty.’ Nietzsche desires to create beyond the Ideal and in light of his awareness of the fracture of cruelty. How does ‘tragic consciousness’ create? It creates first by understanding how language is employed, so that our trajectory now shifts to orbit Nietzsche’s understanding of the limits of language, and furthermore what language may articulate about ‘suffering and cruelty.’ Nietzsche’s early lectures at the University of Basil on “The History of Greek Eloquence” (winter semester, 1872) reveal a methodological beginning to his creative labor throughout his work where his knowledge of rhetoric and the uses and abuses of language informs his philosophical thought.151 Rhetoric-informing-philosophy is the methodological consistency that continues through Nietzsche’s late masterpiece, The Twilight of the Idols (1889), and its subtitle – “How to 150 Friedrich Nietzsche, BGE V:195, GM I: 14. “Bad air! Bad air!” Nietzsche is searching for a way out from the first mythos and toward another methodological way. The later Heidegger will ultimately turn toward ‘poetry’ as this way, and Ricoeur will utilize his considerable mental acumen to pursue an investigation of the symbol in his hermeneutic phenomenology. Echoing this need to ascend beyond totalities in their manifold forms, Rousseau, who is disenchanted with overly romanticized conceptions of society, seeks an analogous third way from a “state of nature” and beyond the corruption of a “state of society” where we then “imagine a new condition where our ills will be remedies. This new condition is a third ‘way,’ neither in the past nor in the present – an ideal that lies in the future.” Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, trans. John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky, (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), xxi. 151 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Struggle Between Science and Wisdom,” in Philosophy and Truth, 199. “Words are the seducers of philosophers; they struggle in the nets of language.”

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Philosophize with a Hammer.” Through his intellectual advancement Nietzsche remains the perpetually suspicious Hermeneus as a piano tuner who pings on philosophical concepts and philologically “fixed ideas” to reveal the true tenor of a teleological Ideal and the discordances of its abuse.152 This is the first albeit negative grappling aspect of creation. Creation begins with locating the Ideals of teleological narrative-myths and clearing conceptual space by a hermeneutic of suspicion that further deconstructs teleological language. In review, the psychical dissonance and loss of the teleological narrative-myth is not the commensurate loss of mythos, but of its overextension where teleology has “insisted too much” through “the establishment of a tension between a beginning and an end.”153 Dissonance in the face of the absolute determinable authority of teleology delivers the conclusion that language is always limited in nature and is thereby deficient in its capacity to fully describe Ideals. At first ‘hearing,’ this claim sounds rather obvious to our contemporary sensibilities, especially when we may already believe that the jury is no longer out on this issue of teleology. But beyond cynicism and toward creation, the limited nature of language means that the linguistic approximation of human existence is partial at best, and every partiality is indeed a second-order interpretation upon what it is that language wants to approximate about experience.154 If knowledge can never be more descriptive than the language that describes such knowledge, then it is summarily true by way of a hermeneutic circle that speculative attempts to describe an Ideal, such as a noumenal outside the constraints and limits of language, are fundamentally abuses of the capacity of both language and thought, where “absolute and unconditional

152 Scholarship places Nietzsche’s intellectual advancement in three distinct phases from 1861 to December, 1888. See also, Morgenröthe V: 536, where Nietzsche petitions the reader to apply a “thumbscrew” to those “self-opinionated believers” who abuse language. 153 Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 239. The distance between authentic mythos and the myth of teleology is one between approximation and concrete description in how we understand narratives that testify to the truth of human existence. 154 Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent ed. Trans., Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989): xiv. See also Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 108: “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena. …” Nietzsche is not original on this point. Shaftesbury and Hutcheson both understood a commensurate conceptual loss of ‘providence’ in a loss of teleology. See the still relevant work of Thomas Fowler, Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882).

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knowledge is the desire to know without knowledge.”155 This is precisely where teleological narrative-myths feels themselves crushed, exactly where reason “coils up” and strikes at the teleological Ideals in narrative-myths that reason itself purports. As Nietzsche asserts: But science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly toward its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points; and while there is no telling how this circle could ever be surveyed completely, noble and gifted men nevertheless reach, e’er half their time and inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail.156

Here is the rub – what is one to make of corners of the western philosophical and theological tradition that rely so heavily on speculation in metaphysical analysis of the Ideal? By way of example, consider Kant’s noumenal ding an sich or “faultless Ideal” of ‘God’ described reductively as an authoritative albeit regulative principle of morality. This consideration is directly related to our query regarding cruelty. That is, how is one to approximate cruelty and its effect on the economy of human affairs that does not collapse or reduce an explanation of cruelty into another teleological narrative-myth with its concurrent Ideal? Nietzsche offers caveats – utilizing once more the Kantian ding an sich, Nietzsche asserts that Kant is unwittingly involved in the project of the western speculative tradition (i.e., western metaphysics) to conceal through language the originary realities – and therefore traces of the ‘true nature’ – of human existence.157 Kant’s description of morality as a universal normative prudence is thus expertly framed within a mask of reason that conceals the fundamental aspects of being human behind the highest religious and categorical Ideal equal to the “conversion to a new life conformable to its duty.”158 As an imperative, 155

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 522. Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, 15[20–29]. Xenophanes stands analogous to Nietzsche’s point: “The clear and certain truth no man has seen nor will … For even if, in the best case, one happened to speak aptly of what has been brought to pass, still he himself would not know it.” See Xenophanes, Fragments/ Xenophanes of Colophon, trans. J.H. Lesher, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992) frg. 34. 157 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 6[20–24]. What Nietzsche calls the “sphere of moral obligation” was born in the “moral conceptual world of guilt, conscience [and] duty,” which is why he states that “even Kant’s categorical imperative smells of cruelty.” See also Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 41. 158 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans., Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson, (New York: Harper, 1960), III.I 6:116. 156

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the teleological Ideal of ‘duty’ masks the activity of what Nietzsche refers to in The Birth of Tragedy as the “terror and horror” (or what we have earlier called the ‘struggle and cruelty’) of existence.159 Reason masks itself in three ways. We already know the first way; that is, reason masks the ‘suffering and cruelty’ of existence by overextending itself semantically through descriptive or quasi-descriptive (i.e., mystical) speculation as an over-reliance upon a teleological Ideal. Second, reason masks cruelty by constructing through and beyond the originary Ideals of teleological narrative-myths; these narrative-myths cluster into narrative unities, systems of calculable ‘fact,’ attendant moral norms and customs, and finally in intricate confessions of faith that reveal a concrete teleological alternative to the [abys(s)-mal] qualities of human partiality and fracture.160 Third, the depth of reason’s masking of suffering and cruelty within existence is revealed in a striking reversal within reason itself that is so commonplace it is largely automatic. The uneven, originary and often bloody episodes of ‘suffering and cruelty’ within human history are abstracted and concealed under the teleological Ideal – i.e., ‘liberation,’ ‘salvation,’ or ‘triumph.’ These episodes of suffering and cruelty, which furthermore provided the cultural and moral material for the raising of communal confessions of faith, are concealed. Thereafter, teleological narrative-myth and narrative unities are applied as having always contained the governing universal Ideals of reason’s often lock-step advancement to the confessions of faith. The conceptual residue of the origins of ‘struggle and cruelty’ or ‘terror and horror’ in existence are further concealed and forgotten behind a vortex of complex, overlapping, and increasingly calculable confessions of faith until the exponential addition of the masks of reason, the ruses themselves, reinforce a new memory of the origins beneath the teleological narrative-myth. The Ideal becomes a closed loop where its own originations, and cruelty, are buried.161 159 Friedrich Nietzsche, BT 3; Morgenröhte IV: 339. See also Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 603–620, particularly 614 onward through his discussion of the ‘terror and horror’ of existence. 160 Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Philosopher,” in Philosophy and Truth, 52: “Every culture begins by veiling a great number of things”; BT 3: The morality of good and evil is the illusion of reason’s mask imposed upon the “terror and horror of existence.” See also GM II: 22 for the sense of the abyss here at play in this section. 161 Aristotle, “On Memory,” A New Aristotle Reader, 206–207. “There is no memory of the present at the present.” There is only perception in the present, and memory is only of “the past.” Regarding mythos, the memory of the past constructs a perception of the present, but the perception of the present also constructs the memory of the past.” This second aspect of memory is what is meant by – “to reinforce a new memory.”

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Teleological narrative-myths thereafter shine forth as the bearers of governing Ideals – such as ‘way of life,’ ‘freedom,’ ‘divine jihad,’ ‘fatherland’ – akin to the strength of hewn marble at Delphi. This is all the labor of teleologically advancing mythos. All the while, partiality or the fracture of cruelty in human existence (that is, the authentic linguistic, conceptual, or symbolic past of human existence), remain largely forgotten.162 How do we know cruelty becomes hidden and forgotten? During the Thirty Years war between Protestants and Catholics, half of Germany was killed in the fight for religious Right. The politics of trench warfare in WWI, the atrocities of WWII, and the Hungarian Gulags are sadly but a thin quarter of human death when we consider the multiples of millions of human beings slaughtered in genocides against Native Americans beginning in the sixteenth century, and within Stalin’s Russia in the twentieth century. Seeing the topography of cruelty does not mean we will necessarily change our action, but perhaps we will better recognize the Ideals that are employed to justify these actions, and leave cruelty unburied in our histories. vii) Correlation: Positive Creation, Illusion/Allusion, Archeological Diving-Down We are now in a position to address the positive form of creation after the first albeit negative aspect of creation that clears space through a hermeneutic of suspicion and discloses the use and abuse of reason. First, what is a creative act if not the engagement of consciousness with ‘wonder’ and its attendant Angst, even an engagement with the reality of suffering and cruelty in human existence? Creation is always openended, ready to be inspired, telos-oriented without succumbing to the teleological Ideal. Nietzsche’s tragic consciousness, as an artist beyond suspicion, will create through an awareness of wonder, Angst and cruelty. Here the air is crisp, and one feels the self alive.163 Consider the ground that consciousness has covered – to ‘know oneself ’ as a static imperative or dynamic process, the construction of Socratic Delphi or Artistic Delphi, the concealment of fracture in teleological

162

Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröhte V: 536. There is something of the concept of new creation and crisp air in Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” penned the year of his death, 1862. “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” 163

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narrative-myth, or the awareness and articulation of fracture in telosoriented narrative-myth. Positive creation is dynamic in how it reveals, critiques, includes, interprets, correlates and desires to see things in their truer presencing. To create positively is to face ‘wonder’ and Angst and the fractures underneath, to correlate the manifold of human language, experience, and understanding that ‘attest to’ these fractures with the classic expressions of truth in western literature. The language of ‘attesting to’ or attestation is developed by Ricoeur, but his usage is here correlative to Nietzsche’s sense of positive creation, and insofar as the concept of ‘attestation’ will remain crucial throughout this study, we must pause for its consideration. Angst, wonder, awe, suffering, and cruelty are all articulated through attestation. What we commit ourselves to when we ‘attest’ to something is speech about who we are, how we are in the world, and to what we are creating beyond skepticism.164 In attestation we have already escaped the bounds of a teleological narrative-myth grammar in ‘I believe that,’ and instead our need to create beyond skepticism becomes a telos-oriented narrative-myth grammar of ‘I believe in.’ Each telos-oriented attestation is also a testimony and a prediction: We ‘attest to’ memory, especially the memory of suffering and cruelty; we also attest to who we are becoming between our daily existential questions and our sense of the existentiell horizon – akin to Hegel’s notion of the Absolute revealing itself to the subject – that draws us out.165 Attestation in the telos-oriented grammar of ‘I believe in’ never reduces Angst, wonder, awe, suffering, or cruelty to a provincial status in human existence. Quite to the contrary, these features in human life are attested to in testimony that is already implicitly

164 The language of attestation is akin to Stanley Hauerwas’ sense of autobiography. “The art of autobiography” requires ‘perspective and image’ of one’s ‘present time,’ an understanding of one’s social context and narrative or story in relation to this context; what is finally required is “skill … to ferret out the truth” in a narrative or “story that allows us to recognize the evil we do and enables us to accept responsibility for it in a nondestructive way.” Stanley Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich” (with David B. Burrell), in The Hauerwas Reader, ed. John Berkman and Michael Cartwright, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 200–20. 165 G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction,” Phenomenology of Mind. The Absolute is “from the outset in and for itself beside us and [who] wants to be beside us.” Hegel’s project considers the relation of the Absolute to the subject, but Hegel’s Idealism is thoroughly indebted to and draws from Christian metaphysics and the encounter of the divine with humanity.

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hoping toward a transformed future.166 In this way, attestation is what enables us to live fully between past and future, between testimony and anticipation. Attestation is likewise what balks at our efforts to enclose life within a rigid teleological narrative-myth that risks the demolition of past, present, and future under the burden of a shining new Ideal. To create through attestation is to gather past, present, and future together as telos-oriented – to think upon the essential rudiments of suffering, cruelty, history, tragedy, architecture, literature, philosophy, theology, et al. This means we attest to the wonder, awe, Angst, and cruelty of what it means to exist together on this particle of earth; to attest to our extraordinary fragility and the possibility of a raison d’être. Through attestation, human language, understanding, experiences, and the classic expressions of meaning and truth all coincide – insofar as we recollect, interpret, recall, and share – under the canopy of mythos, and specifically within our narrative interpretations. The language of attestation will sound anticlimactic when we yearn for the calculability of the teleological Ideal, and for a concrete unwavering end. Furthermore, Angst arises insofar as experience is so closely aligned with the notion of narrative-myth. The result is a sense of betrayal of the legitimacy of experience through an adherence to fiction. Nothing could be further from the truth. What is herein asserted is that even in the simple self-interpretive act, we engage in constructions of meaning; we conform our raw experiences to language and understanding that take on the quality of personal narratives, where personal narratives are enforced as authentic when we are aware of our inability to totally circumscribe experience with language and descriptive analysis. Thus far we have asserted that there are two trajectories of mythos – teleological and telos-oriented. But insofar as this is true we more precisely mean that mythos illudes truth differently. It is a clearer approximation at this point to say that mythos illudes in two different trajectories through specific narrative or myth. The illusive qualities of specific myths are what can now be assessed below. It is essential to assert and reassert in a hail of exclamation marks that within the expanse of mythos, not all myths are the same with regard to claims to meaning and truth, where the differences between how a myth conceals (Delphi as scientific Socratism) and how a myth reveals

166

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 20.

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(Delphi as the Artistic Socratism) depend upon how each illudes; that is, how illusions are used within the content of myth to either conceal or reveal reality. First, let us consider via negation what we already know about how illusion in myth conceals. Teleological illusion that conceals in myth is illusion that attempts to describe the totality of experience and encapsulate this totality within a respective Ideal. Descriptive totality disallows access of supposed dangerous anomaly, hides behind authorities that limit philological analyses, and thus also limits the free exchange of ideas, which diminishes or halts dialogue. Finally, illusion that conceals may do so by semantically masking with the logic of prudence, reasonability, and a rhetoric of the best of all concerned. This form of illusion in myth imperils singular human identity with abstraction, threatens the character of our common existential questions with dubious implorations to the Ideal, and concurrently damages faithful expression as a locus of belief toward our existentiell horizon of ultimate concern.167 Here is reason enough to be skeptical and wary of illusion that conceals truth within myth, and is also the reason why this form of illusion within myth must always be carefully handled and scrutinized through a hermeneutic of suspicion. Nevertheless, teleological illusion that conceals truth is valuable insofar as it reveals meaningfully what truth is not. Second, telos-oriented Illusion that reveals in myth is dynamic, vital, and organic by its nature, continually overcoming itself due to the 167 Edward Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1990), 146–153. “Being founded” means having the courage to risk one’s being in daily existence, and in this sense what it means to dwell or “belong to. …” Ultimate concern is, on the one hand, not the Tillichian sense of a “teleological dependence,” which is the manipulation of an ultimate concern into fixed form. Ultimate concern is understood here in the sense of both Rahner and Ricoeur – as what engages us, activates us, as Rahner’s pre-apprehension of Being that delivers us fully into the world, and Ricoeur’s sense of revelation that is at best approximated by poetic language and is never reducible to a single form. See Tillich, Systematic Theology, 41–42; see also, Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 47, 53, 56. “Max Scheler … Langdon Gilkey have demonstrated the effectiveness of phenomenological reflection in explicating that final or ultimate horizon precisely as a religious one.” See also Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” The Postmodern God, ed. Graham Ward, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 45–73. In fact, the ‘I’ is the formal object of God, if indeed one must utilize this language; that is, the ‘I’ does not initially ‘think’ God, but God ‘thinks’ it.167 Thus, Levinas is able to claim that “the difference between the Infinite and the finite is behind intentionality.”167 And that which is behind the intentionality of the Cogito is the infinite – that is, ‘God’ who is utterly ‘in’ [immanent to] the finite ‘I’ and yet wholly different [transcendent from] the ‘I’ and its conceptualized world.

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nature of creativity, and thereby requires or needs to be informed by classic expressions of truth in what is traditional and novel, to be engaged in dialogue from the distant past and the ever present, to be freed to the correlative effort of inter-disciplinary exchange of ideas between all voices from every walk of life and religious, philosophical and professional persuasion.168 Illusion that is creative attests to existence as open-ended and approachable for assessment, further creative interpretation, and modification where necessary. Illusion that is creative is telos-oriented insofar as it gives, references, intuits toward, hints at, which is to say, it alludes toward meaning and truth. It is in this sense of approximating but not being capable of full description that illusion that reveals in myth is best transliterated into the term ‘allusion,’ in two senses: a) Illusion that reveals in myth alludes toward (i.e., gives-toward) an approximation of truth where classic expression, dialogue, and the free exchange of ideas correlate and assist the subject toward faithful understanding of and belief in what Tracy calls our great existential limit questions, on the one hand, and likewise to faithful expression regarding what Rahner writes is our existentiell horizon of ultimate reality or concern, on the other.169 Next, b) Illusion that 168 The notion of myth that is dynamic, vital, and organic is adapted from Maurice Blondel’s articulation of the development of the church in his History and Dogma, 255–64, and Bernard Lonergan’s sense of a “living organism” in his essay, The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical-Mindedness, 1. Never fictional, mythos that is authentic in this way represents the most insightful of how we have historically and theologically understood revelation, an understanding that is witnessed to in the institution of the church, which at its best is a shining emblem of revelation itself. 169 See Stephen J. Duffy, The Dynamics of Grace: Perspectives in Theological Anthropology, (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 266, 280. Rahner adapts the existential from Heidegger, Kant, and Aquinas, to refer to the “transcendentalanthropological method” (i.e., transcendental Thomism) which investigates the underlying variables of human experience, these being a sense of shared historicity where history is an unfolding and dynamic endowment in which one comes to sense one’s own finitude and the extraordinary horizon of the infinite. Existential limit questions, as those questions that are never fully and descriptively answerable in a given lifetime reflect the complexity of our lives: ‘Who am I as this one?’ ‘What is my responsibility and to what does it mean for me to belong?’ ‘What do I love and should I love?’ ‘What does it mean to live and expect death?’ See Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych, (New York: Continuum, 1994), 62–63, 75, 182–83. The existentiell, echoing Aquinas, is that ultimate horizon of divinity, of the holy, of ‘God,’ that brings “man in the presence of being in its totality insofar as he finds himself in the world.” By analogy to the existential and existentiell, Pascal wagers that humans live in the immediacy between the partiality of our existential questions that press at the limits of our human capacity to provide descriptive answers, on the one hand, and again in the immediacy of that great disclosure of “nothingness” or the non-disclosure of Being, or

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reveals in myth and beyond the totality of description is itself alluded to (i.e., given-up) from the opaque characteristics of what lies within the aforementioned “content” underneath mythos. The “content” underneath is a given that alludes inexhaustibly to the classic expression, dialogue, and free exchange of ideas pertaining to myth that is openended in ‘wonder.’ What Nietzsche calls the “content” underneath, or what I referred to earlier as ‘fractures,’ are metaphors for that domain regarding what Ricoeur calls ‘symbols.’ Symbols are those opaque sources ‘given’ in human language, understanding, and experience, and approximated in truth-claims that are never exhausted by myth and that in fact outlast every hewn myth constructed upon symbol’s native soil. We would be mistaken and perhaps even arrogant to view the above account of illusion and allusion as hermeneutically modern. The best of our philosophers, theologians, poets, scientists and generalists have opened themselves to wonder, Angst, and the world in this way. From the genesis of western consciousness, this is why the pre-Socratic Thales is still a classic figure for us. For Thales’ triumph is not that he said all was water, but that he allowed himself say it at all. From the start of philosophy, with Thales on the shoreline pondering the fabric of the world, the best of creative thought is done without a safety-net. In summation of the above, illusions within myth that indicate toward experience both conceal and reveal. Here the difference between two forms of illusion is discussed in terms of illusion (what conceals) and allusion, where allusions are informed by the givenness of the fractures underneath and likewise give toward language and understanding in a further approximation with regard to these fractures. In relation to how mythos alludes in the second sense, Nietzsche’s hermeneutic of suspicion upon language focuses the attention of his thought beneath the shining Delphic Oracle of Socratic moderation, so to speak, and toward an ‘arche-ology of fracture’ insofar as by arche we mean the originary symbols (i.e., within the fractures underneath) that give-toward, or allude, what we approximate as ‘suffering and

what may be called the ultimate horizon, or horizon of the mysterium, on the other. Nicholas of Cusa’s description of the “Wall of Paradise” also serves as an analog, where we reside in the perplexities of our daily existence on this side of finitude, and the wall of our immediacy shrouds the infinite nature beyond. The existential limits and existentiell horizon are essential to this investigation.

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cruelty’ in human language, experience, and understanding.170 For Nietzsche, arche-ology is thereby the labor of “diving down.” We do this through a binary exegesis of common human language and experience, on the one hand, and through interpretations and understanding of the classic texts in western consciousness, on the other. Through diving down, Consciousness comes to ‘know itself ’ through an awareness of the ‘wonder’ and Angst, ‘terror and horror,’ ‘suffering and cruelty,’ or what Nietzsche identifies as the “way of cruelty” within human existence.171 The circling of the arche-ological topography of the ‘way of cruelty’ continues through further considerations upon cruelty, beginning with an etymological investigation of cruelty and concluding with an assessment of the relation between cruelty and tragedy. Thereafter, we will transition from Nietzsche’s way of cruelty and prepare ourselves for an investigation of the theological topos of cruelty. The difference between Nietzsche’s way and a theological topos is the mediating term – challenge. As confirmed from the start, Nietzsche’s way is the challenging question to the heart of Christianity; theology thereafter gathers its resources in a new topos of investigation, where the topography of cruelty offers, among other things, a response to Nietzsche. C) Cruelty: Etymology, Normativity, Tragic Existence Cruelty … repels instantly and easily because it is ugly. – Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices

Nietzsche’s choice of terminology is precise, and so the choice of terms, ‘grausam’ or ‘Grausamkeit’ within his work is intentional and specific. This is not merely true because he is a concise thinker, but also because he was a student of rhetoric, and the influence of rhetorical precision

170 Goethe’s Mephistopheles who advises a student: “Who would study and describe the living, starts/ By driving the spirit out of the parts:/ In the palm of his hand he holds all the sections,/ Lacks nothing, except the spirit’s connections.” What Nietzsche unearths in western language and thought is only much later arranged into a genealogy of originary symbols and concepts, like so many clay pots assorted in a line on the desert floor, and even so the assessment of many of these artifacts had to wait for another generation of archeologists, for instance, polar Post-Structuralists as Derrida and Ricoeur. 171 Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe I: 18: What is the “way of cruelty” that preceded “world history” but “the actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind.”

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was one of the principle and provoking characteristics of Nietzsche’s poetic style. Nietzsche employs the word ‘grausam’ in Human All too Human, but the later English translation of ‘horrible’ in place of ‘grausam’ reveals how simple mistakes in translation are committed, and how the kernel of meaning in a word is likewise so easily confounded.172 The best English equivalent of ‘grausam’ is ‘cruel’ for both etymological and philological reasons, and especially in the overarching context in which Nietzsche employs it in Human All too Human. Why this is the case is illustrated in an etymological analysis of the relation between ‘grausam’ and cruelty below. Thomas Aquinas is one of the few theologians to treat cruelty, however briefly. He is also unique because his treatment is insightful in its single etymological reference. He reflects in his short question entitled De Crudelitate upon cruelty as more than “the hardness of heart in exacting punishment,” which was the position of Seneca.173 Rather, “cruelty apparently takes its name from ‘cruditas’ [rawness]. Now just as things when cooked and prepared are wont to have an agreeable and sweet savor, so when raw they have a disagreeable and bitter taste.” This is all we receive from Aquinas, but the notion of rawness which he locates places us upon our etymological trajectory. i) Etymology of Cruelty – Excess and Encounter The German term ‘grausam’ first gained popular usage in the sixteenth century as the middle term representative of the semantic relation between erregen – [and] – Grauen, or ‘to excite [arouse] … horror’ in others.174 As the middle and semantically binding term between Grauen and erregen, what grausam suggests are the shocking and aweinspiring aspects that excite horror. Shock and awe identify the rawness of an act or event that excites horror, but as a hyper-extension or

172 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All too Human, Preface: 3; II: 37, 88, 104; III: 140; IV: 154. Nietzsche writes, when Greek reason speaks “wie herbe und grausam erscheint dann das Leben!” ‘Grausam’ is something more awe-inspiring and shocking than ‘horrible,’ even though what is ‘grausam’ elicits ‘horror’ as the following etymological analysis reveals. 173 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2.159; Seneca, De Clementia ii, 4. See Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, ed. Ford Lewis Battles and André Malan Hugo, (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1969). See also Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 174 Cassell’s Deutsch-Englisches Wörterbuch, ed. Harold T. Betteridge (London: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1982), 277, 952.

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excess that is not only raw but also ‘heart-less,’ or Herzlos.175 Likewise, that which is grausam is socially reprehensible, but the shock and awe of this excited-horror reflect hyper-extensively a reaction to some act or event being brutish or filled with brutality, or Brutalität.176 The hyper-extended nature of excited-horror, and its accompanying shock and awe reveals a general Inhumanus, a Latin term equivalent to the Greek, άπάνθρωπος or German, unmenschlich, or English inhumanity, exhibited toward the ‘other.’177 This notion of the hyper-extensive shock and awe of what is excessive that conceptually emboldens what is grausam, and which furthermore degenerates toward inhumanity, is grounded in an older conception of excessiveness that is directly correlative to the German word, roh, and in its nominative, Rohheit.178 In English, Rohheit is roughly equivalent to a combination between ‘rawness,’ ‘roughness of skin,’ and ‘bloodiness’ such as in raw meat, but the older Germanic suffix roh also introduces forms of degenerative behavior that violate the ‘other’ who can both witness and/or be party to the violation, such as ‘his behavior was so raw [roh]’ that best semantically approximates an older conception of the more recent German middle-term, grausam, as noted in German language etymological resource material.179 We have come full circle back to Aquinas. Roh captures the hyperextensive or excessive nature of excited-horror in the analog of ‘rawness’ that may not be as precise in the term grausam. Still, the correlation of roh and grausam suggests that to excite or arouse in a manner that is grausam is to force a violation upon the other as a rawness or roughness (Rohheit) that is specific and excessive, and is particularly grauenhaft or ‘horrifying’ as registered in the reactions of shock and awe. Although the correlation between grausam and [R]roh[heit] is semantically newer, the conceptual linkage of this form of excessive human action and behavior is much older as confirmed in both 175 Orbis Verlag Wörterbuch Englisch-Deutsch, ed., Wolf Friederich (München: Orbis Verlag, 1987), 73, 424. 176 Joachim Bahr, Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm: Stationen seiner inneren Geschichte. (1984), 387–455; Langenscheidts Grosswörterbuch, Griechisch-Deutsch: Unter Berücksichtigung der Etymologie, ed., Hermann Menge (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1991), 759. 177 Langenscheidts, 759; Deutsch-Griechisches Schul-Wörterbuch, ed., Karl Schenkl (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1883, 1991), 376. 178 Langenscheidts., 377. 179 Duden: Das Herkunftswörterbuch – Eine Etymologie der deutschen Sprache, ed., Prof. Dr. Günther Drosdowski (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1963), 233.

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Greek and Latin. Rohheit is the German equivalent of the Greek ώμός akin to roh, or ώμότης as the adjectival ‘rawness’ of uncooked or raw, cold unreif/‘unprepared’ meat;180 Curiously, ώμός is also semantically analogous to both grausam and what is unmenschlich or inhuman.181 The Greek ώμότύραννος, or όμως τύραννος means not only ‘tyrant’ or ‘ruler’ but the emphasis is upon the adjectival grausamtyrant or raw-ruler who exhibits inhumane treatment.182 Like Rohheit, ωμός is oriented both as a sharpening or adjectival specificity, as ‘rawto-meat’, and is also oriented toward excess as ‘cruel-to-tyrant’. It is also interesting to note that the Greek ώμός is linguistically close to ώμος, the latter of which is the Greek equivalent to the English ‘shoulder,’ or German Shulter; the Rohheit of Grausamkeit is here creatively expressed as giving someone the raw shoulder.’183 But the Greek έπηρεαζόντων also touches on cruelty as an excess, where hospitality and humanity is threatened, endangered, mal- or ill-treated, and abused. Likewise, πονηρούς is a state of sickness or wickedness, viciousness, maliciousness, or of intentionally causing pain. Thus far we have shown semantic and conceptual inroads from grausam that excites ‘horror’ through the excess of Rohheit, as registered in the reaction of shock, awe, and dismay. Still, the necessary etymological triadic linkage between Rohheit and grausam with ‘cruel’ has not been shown. This is our next task. The specific and excessive nature of the German Rohheit, and the older German Roheit, in fact, has a direct semantic correlation to the Latin crudus. Crudus signifies what is grue-some insofar as it is ‘rough, bloody, and raw,’ a meaning that is in fact more akin to excessiveness of the German roh than either the German grausam or the English ‘raw.’184 A further Latin term, crudelem, as a derivative of crudus [raw], means ‘unfeeling’ as a kind of deadness, rawness beyond heartlessness or “devoid of human feelings.”185 The old French lexically similar term 180

A Patristic Greek Lexicon, ed., G.W.H. Lampe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991),

1556. 181

Langenscheidts, 759. Langenscheidts, 1557. 183 The first known literary reference to ‘the cold shoulder’ comes from Sir Walter Scott’s use [“The cauld shouther”] in his The Antiquary (1816); no historical correlation exists between the ‘raw shoulder’ and ‘cold shoulder,’ although in excess both colloquialisms are appropriate hermeneutic images to express ‘cruelty.’ 184 Deutsch-Griechisches Schul-Wörterbuch, 376. 185 The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 10th Edition (Springfield: Merriam-Webster, 1997), 420. 182

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of crudel was a transposition of crudelem into French; the English use of the term ‘cruel’ first came into noticeable light in Middle English around 1225 as an adaptation of the French crudel.186 If we understand the term grausam by its Rohheit up to and through the excess of what is unmenschlich, then there is an analogue here with the English word, ‘cruel.’ To be ‘cruel’ is to exhibit or encounter excessive (rough, bloody, and raw) actions or behaviors that violate human life and relation. But this approximation at a definition is incomplete. Assuming that ‘cruel’ and grausam are semantically analogous and correlative, then the additional Latin terms that bind them together (and where grausam and ‘cruel’ are here referred to interchangeably), are listed as follows: Atrocitas (harsh, horror, cruel), atrox (terrible, horrible, harsh, cruel), and atrocity (appalling or atrocious condition, quality, or behavior in the form of violation against other human beings), as well as barbarus and crudelis (rawness, extreme action against an other). These terms, including the breadth of excess between Inhumanus (cruelty as inhuman and uncivilized, as an objectification of the civility of the ‘other’) and Trucido (cruelty as the relinquishment of justice followed by the spectacle of butchery, massacre and slaughter) reveals something about the nature of ‘excess’ – of the near limitless ways and means in which one can shock, awe, and dismay – with regard to cruelty. The ‘excess’ or Rohheit of what is grausam is an open window of imagination toward further displays of violative actions that can be pursued with impunity. This is so because ‘excess’ is difficult to hermeneutically approximate since the very word itself exceeds its own approximated limits. Because ‘excess’ is difficult to approximate, the singular violations of cruelty wash clean any effort at a full or complete description of how cruelty has the potential to reshape our relationships to both the existential limits and existentiell horizons of existence. But insofar as limits and horizon are violated, one can suggest that cruelty has an effect upon all three personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres of existence. Furthermore, if we consider that the excess of cruelty comes in certain degrees or limits that correlate to each sphere, then perhaps these limits could be approximated (i.e., as ‘objectification’ derived from Inhumanus, for instance). Thereafter, the linkages between each limit could be shown to reveal the trajectory of ‘excess’ as it exceeds in cruelty. 186 The American Heritage Dictionary, 2nd college ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), 330.

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An approximative effort of both limit and the linkages between limits brings us to a second attempt at an initial understanding of cruelty – cruelty is an excessiveness of action and behavior that is violative and raw, shocking and dehumanizing, that can commence through degrees of excess (rawness), which have the ultimate capacity for destroying and even annihilating humans being in their intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional environments.187 Pursuing this line of thought and correlating it to Aquinas’ insight, it is the Rohheit of ‘cruelty,’ where excess is located. The excess of rawness can precipitate the abandonment of the well-being and existence of an ‘other,’ hasten death and ultimately even lead toward the forgetfulness of the memory of this ‘other’ outright as a psychical and social equivalent to the grave. One can assume that if the excess of cruelty involves interpersonal dismemberment or death of the identity of the ‘other’ at a microcosm, then the excess of violation can be exacerbated at the macrocosm where death and its further annihilation or abandonment of memory washes every trace clean of the integrity of being human. In this sense, cruelty can disintegrate human integrity. If our first pass at approximating cruelty is clear, then what can further be suggested about the manner in which cruelty is ‘encountered’ in existence?188 We know a) that cruelty is marked by excess, which means an excess of the ordinary features of existence (i.e., callousness shocked toward brutality in the exciting of horror), akin to what Lonergan identifies as a “flight from understanding” that “blocks insight” and degenerates into decadent routine where “initiative becomes the privilege of violence;”189 b) we also know that we can suspend any effort at a veiled teleology since our ability to explain through language the precise ‘knowledge’ of cruelty’s limits forgets that the

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Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 3. Schillebeeckx understands ‘encounter’ as “a fundamental mode of existence of human existent, a structural possibility inherent in it.” In terms of the theologalencounter what is implied by Schillebeeckx is an “existential God-centeredness as distinct from the abstract-analytic nuance of theological.” The use of the term ‘encounter’ is adapted here in the first sense, as a structural possibility inherent within humans being. Encountering ‘distance,’ as asserted earlier, is to encounter that structural possibility inherent but nonetheless denied, overlooked, or misaligned within being human. To encounter cruelty as distance, where a trauma is immediately repellant, is to project distance upon the immediacy of an act of cruelty, and in this way to attempt to deflect the impact of its encounter. See Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God, xv, 16, 27, 183, 203. 189 Lonergan, “Transition from a Classicist World-View,” 8. 188

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excess of cruelty means it is exceeds singular human experience and can never be fully described; c) finally we assert that the fractures underneath myth and informative of myth allude toward an approximation where cruelty is also more than singular in its Inhumanitus, where there is a sense, even if only an intuitive sense, of universality that also makes cruelty a common experience for human beings, beyond the individual. Taking these points into consideration, a first attempt is to suggest that cruelty transpires when a slippage or excess of the ordinary and daily aspects of the personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres of existence are threatened, where cruelty may threaten to eclipse the entire field of our existential limit-questions and concurrently our existentiell relation to the ultimate horizon.190 In terms of a slippage or excess of the ordinary in this sense of literally eclipsing the existential (limit) and existentiell (horizon) in the multiple spheres of human existence, cruelty can be understood, and spoken of, as being something we encounter in being human. But this point must be underlined – the encounter of cruelty in human affairs is an encounter of an excess within the ordinary and necessary daily intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres of existence. Cruelty as an excess of the ordinary, means that the potential for cruelty is already always there within us, within our interpersonal relations, and within our institutions.191 Hemingway writes – “Why did they make birds so delicate and fine as those sea swallows when the ocean can be so cruel? But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.”192 Is the ‘ocean’ cruel, or rather is the nature of the ‘birds’ a thrown projection upon the externality of the ‘ocean’ itself? Dipping and “hunting” ‘birds’ produce images more akin to acts of violation than the placid (albeit insensible) and rolling nature of the deep. Hemingway projects the excess of cruelty upon the incalculable enormity of that 190 Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 186. “The ordinary vices are to a certain extent an inversion of the ordinary virtues. Dignity is, above all, internal consistency; fragmentation its absence. Caring leads us to see others as the end of our actions; depersonalization transforms all subjects, both self and other, into a means. The enjoyment of power over others is thus a particular (but crucial) instance of depersonalization as well as a most rigorous inversion of caring.” 191 Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröhte I: 30. Cruelty is already within us and does not come from with-out. 192 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, (New York: Simon & Schuster) 1995, 29.

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dark abyss, an enormity that can swallow excess in the projection without overturning the logic of the metaphor. Aristophanes had been more successful in his portrait of the tranquility of birds, but then the trespass of creation was firmly placed, not on the birds, but on “weak mortals, chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods.”193 Hemingway’s metaphor of the cruelty of the ocean rests here alongside the notion of the thrown projection of cruelty from within the ‘birds’; the correlation of both reveals how reason presents us with two opposing interpretations on the nature of cruelty. What gets masked behind the visage of delicacy of “small sad voices” from the birds is the other word that should at least momentarily hold our attention – “hunting.” Through the Marquis de Sade we transpose the ‘bird’ upon the seat of cruelty in human consciousness: “Does not the child himself offer an example of the ferocity that surrounds us?. … We see him cruelly strangle his bird and take pleasure in the poor animal’s convulsions.” What is masked by Hemingway is the potential for violation behind the Ideal of Delicacy. Cruelty is not a rising of the dense extra-ordinary oceanic upon humans being, but instead cruelty is an excess of the ordinary and daily that already resides within being human itself. Hunting takes place on the ocean, but the ocean itself does not hunt. ii) Normative Inroads to a Criterion A few comments are in order with respect to a trajectory that takes up the normative approximation of cruelty. First, the response of the singular ‘other’ to the encounter with cruelty must not actually be one of horror, since that which is ‘grausam’/‘roh’ may overwhelm the ‘other’ before it is aware of the violation upon its humanity that may rapidly degenerate into the inability to form an awareness and then to adequately defend oneself with a response, if such a defense is even possible in a given context.194 In the absence of the singular ‘other,’ who determines when a specific encounter is cruel? The encounter of cruelty produces a double offence at the micro- and macrocosms, both upon the singular ‘other’ and likewise upon the collective ‘other’ or

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Aristophanes, The Birds, (Dover: Mineola, New York, 1999), 19. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1977), Xi. “We are not usually philosophical in moments of crisis; most often, there is no time.” 194

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humanity as humans-being-together.195 When the singular ‘other’ is unable to express a response to the violation in the encounter with cruelty, then that respons-ibility finds expression in the sociality of the collective ‘other,’ where the collective ‘other’ names the encounter for what it is.196 This suggests that because cruelty is a violation of humansbeing-together (i.e., of humanity), the normative criterion will center on what ‘humanity’ is in a given cultural, ethnic, regional context and then pinpoint in what manner and to what degree it is violated. The normative search for criteria at this level is a far removal from a concept of the banality of cruelty that Nietzsche sometimes vies for, a banality similar to Hannah Arendt’s conception of the banality of evil.197 In Human All too Human, Nietzsche matches evenly the normative approximation of what is ‘grausam’ between both the “perpetrator’s knowledge of how painful the action is” and how the “mistreated” subjectively misappropriates the “malicious” nature of the violation. Nietzsche’s aim is to intentionally shatter the normative lines between 195 Lonergan, “Transition from a Classicist World-View,” 4. Lonergan’s precise sense of community is here informative of the macrocosm. 196 Bernard Dauenhauer reminds us that Ricoeur sees the necessity for ideological and utopian elements in politics insofar as they reveal “social and cultural imagination that is constructive for any durable society.” Practical wisdom as a dialectic between criticism and conviction means the difference between ideological and utopian benignity or malignancy. Still, a Nazi publication in 1940 entitled Dokumente Polnischer Grausamkeit (Documented Polish Cruelty) reveals how fascist ideology at the macrocosm identifies “cruelty” to justify invasion and brutality under the ruse of national preservation and even humanitarianism. This resource redefines the phrase ‘grossly explicit.’ In the middle of the work are one-hundred full black-and-white photos of bodies horribly mutated and at times beyond recognition, not of specific identity, but of humanness altogether. Immediately following these photos is a full-page map of Poland and the call to rise in self-defense against the broken promises from a distant Versailles to protect the Germans against the cruelty of the Polish. At this macrocosm, the responsibility of the collective other is at the frontier of its most shameful and dangerous manipulation. See Dokumente Polnischer Grausamkeit (Berlin: Im Auftrag des Auswärtigen Amtes auf Grund Urkundlichen Beweismaterials Zusammengestellt, Bearbeitet und Herausgegen von der Deutschen Informationsstelle, 1940). 307–407; see also, Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur: The Promise & Risk of Politics, (Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 213. 197 For Arendt, evil is banal because it manifests in the actualized possibility of blindly following orders. Evil happens when we are not conscious of our actions, after which evil overcomes our lives and experiences. It is too little to say that cruelty is banal for Nietzsche, since he sees its origination as vitalistic to human life; but he does conceptualize cruelty as never definable in relation to factors of intension by either perpetrator or victim. This means cruelty is something within human consciousness which is encountered when the right conditions and confessions of faith are exacted. It is in this sense that cruelty is banal for Nietzsche. See Bernard J. Bergen, The Banality of Evil, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 40, 72.

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the act and intention of the perpetrator, on the one hand, and the untrustworthy nature of the subjectivity of the victim, on the other.198 But Nietzsche’s argument is fallacious in that it is a clear unwarranted devaluation of the phenomenology of subjectivity, and of the credibility of the victim to identify its own singular experience of violation through and after an encounter with cruelty. The victim’s genuine account of violation is of fundamental importance – particularly after the atrocities of the twentieth century – to how moral and legal assessment is now understood and undertaken.199 Furthermore, even in light of the subject’s account of cruelty, the intentionality of the perpetrator is not of first relevance. Philip Hallie’s comments that “any understanding of cruelty should leave out the phrase ‘intention to hurt’ is meant to shine a light on cruelty as the infliction of ruin, whatever the motives.”200 Cruelty remains a human trespass, whatever the intentions. For all of that, and unlike ‘evil,’ cruelty is not normatively banal for Hannah Arendt, who was clear in her conviction that Eichmann must die, and he must die for the kind of violation against humanity in which he was such an instrumental figure.201 It is not his violence that

198 Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, II: 43, 81, 99, 104. Nietzsche writes that “cruel people” “sind so wenig verantwortlich, wie ein Stück Granit dafüur, dass es Granit ist;” and again, “Ja, jeder Grausame ist nicht in dem Maße grausam, als es der Misshandelte glaubt; die Vorstellung des Schmerzes ist nicht das Selbe wie das Leiden desselben.” 199 This point of contention with Nietzsche can be identified in John Kekes’ rejection of the premise of innocence through ignorance. See John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 837. “But to be a cruel person is not necessarily to know that the relevant action will cause pain to the victim for the agent’s indifference to the victim’s pain may be so extensive as to preclude awareness of the misery the action inflicts. Of course, if the agent takes delight in the pain of the victim, then the effect of the action must be known, otherwise it could not delight. Cruelty thus may be ascribed to human agents both when they know what they are doing and when they do not.” 200 Philip P. Hallie, The Paradox of Cruelty (Middleton, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 14; see also, John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 839–40. In relation to this passage, Kekes writes “In the first place, it is an exaggeration to suppose that cruelty must maim or ruin its victims. It certainly damages them in serious ways, but the damage need not be as serious as Hallie claims in order to be cruel.” And yet, the multiple degrees of psychological, social, economic, political et al. “ruin” are of degree. Cruelty is always a ruination of some aspect of daily human life and relation. 201 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 279. “And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations … we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. That is the reason, and the only reason, that you must hang.” It is a “cruel policy” which is only partially articulated by Arendt where ‘cruel’ actions are so raw they make one “not want to share the earth.”

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defines the violation against humanity, but the cruelty he exhibited and how its encounter violated humans being. iii) Cruelty and a Sense of Tragic Existence Of course, tragedy as a cultural expression is dangerous. To find pleasure in depictions of suffering may make us all bad citizens … we may become hardened and indifferent and cruel … – Richard Kuhns, Tragedy Pangloss most cruelly deceived me when he said that everything in the world is for the best. – Cunegonde in Voltaire’s Candide202

Nietzsche’s tragic-philosopher is tragic because he maintains a “tragic knowledge;” that is, he has a sense of willing illusion, of being both lost and found, of human contradiction, of unintentional suffering beyond the normative hallmarks of good and evil, and – as we have seen – the tragic-philosopher has a knowledge of human ugliness.203 Nietzsche means something specific with ugliness, which Judith Shklar also identifies as cruelty – to be ugly is to be cruel.204 This linkage between that which is tragic in existence (i.e., the tragic) and cruelty is also made by Richard Kuhns above, and is likewise a linkage essential to our lodestar.205 Indeed, for Nietzsche, only the tragicphilosopher can attest to human cruelty and ugliness, and create within and through it. Our purpose in this section is to follow the trace between a sense of the tragic in human existence and human cruelty. In order to understand this linkage between the tragic and cruelty, we have to first understand what we mean by “the tragic.” A route out toward understanding the tragic is to consider how the tragic is both revealed and concealed in performable or theatrical tragedy.206

202 Voltaire’s Candide, investigates the possibility of human happiness that is a parody of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Théodicée (1710). Leibniz had concluded that the world is basically good – in fact, the best possible, since it was a creation of God – and that its apparent evils were secondary irritations caused by man’s inadequacies. 203 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 211–3. 204 Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 9. “Cruelty … repels instantly and easily because it is ugly.” 205 Richard Kuhns, Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). For Kuhns, pleasure in tragedy has the potential of making us cruel. Tragedy testifies and attests to human cruelty. 206 F. Forrester Church ed., The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 165–67. Tillich writes: “The state

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We begin with the idea of performable tragedy. Unfortunately, even from the start a singular understanding of the art of performable tragedy per se escapes identification, for in the West we have no single and prevailing definition of what tragedy is.207 Tragedy was as unique for the ancient Greeks of Aeschylus and Sophocles as it remained for Elizabethan theatre and Shakespeare. Different elements within tragedy are emphasized or omitted according to the context of the spectator – how the spectator understands time, community, family, subjectivity, history, art et al. Due to the context of the spectator, members of the Greek polis heard tragedy through different ears as would an Elizabethan courtier; likewise, how we hear tragedy today is unique in our own post-modern epoch.208 Even with its common features, theatrical tragedy has a way of meeting and confronting a community’s native philosophical and religious beliefs and standards – as Bertolt Brecht’s tragic play, The Good Woman of Setzuan, confronted tenants of Communism.209 Furthermore, these beliefs and standards change between cultures and through temporal inertia, which likewise impact the spectator. Fortunate to our lodestar, we know that the weight of Nietzsche’s early critique of tragedy lands upon classic Aristotelian Greek tragedy in a similar manner as his earlier critique of fracture lands at Delphi.210 The clean lines of Apollo’s Delphi sit atop and of existence is the state of estrangement. Man is estranged from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself. The transition from essence to existence results in personal guilt and universal tragedy. …” 207 Aristotle, Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Schopenhauer are but a few who interpreted tragedy unique from one another. An expansive study is not here permissible, but is meant to reveal the plurivous ways in which we can understand the phenomena of performable tragedy. 208 Kuhns, 7, 31: “We may think of ourselves in a ‘modern,’ or more likely ‘postmodern,’ posture, protected from ancient faults and remembered indignities; but the truth tragedy tells is that we cannot protect ourselves, neither through the wisdom of self-control nor through the magic of wish. There is no defense against the self in its fate.” 209 For social confrontation and reconciliation in the Theatre of Cruelty, see Will H. Rockett, Devouring Whirlwind: Terror and Transcendence in the Cinema of Cruelty, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), xv; Janice Brody, Cruelty to Myself First of All,” 162. See also, Janice Brody, Cruelty to Myself First of All: The Experience of Antonin Artaud, (Michigan: Xerox University Microfilms, 1976), 149. For Artaud, the Theatre of Cruelty was a place of “self-transformation and radical social change.” Artaud indicates that the “forces or impulses that must be released in order to rediscover the total self are the very elements that society has designated as dangerous and harmful.” “The cruel side of existence, which Artaud designates as the realm of dark forces and possibilities, is seen as innate, but normally repressed.” [Italics mine]. 210 Richard Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” 3. “Nietzsche was quite right: Aristotle wanted to transform, if not actually to eliminate, any remnants of the Dionysian origins of tragedy.”

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conceal the fracture of suffering and cruelty underneath. In an analogous manner, Apollonian tragedy also conceals the tragic elements that Nietzsche attributes to the rawness of the Dionysian god representative of such fracture underneath.211 In short, there is something in Apollonian tragedy steaming over from Delphi that both reveals and conceals the tragic nature of fracture underneath. If we consider main elements of Aristotle’s sense of performable tragedy and correlate these to what we mean by ‘the tragic,’ then the linkage in our trajectory between the tragic and cruelty will become clearer. In his Poetics, Aristotle asserts that tragedy is one of the many poetic arts, and “is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude.”212 As an art at imitation, the crafting of tragic drama reveals our own humanity within the mûthos (the story, plot, or formulated speeches in a tragedy).213 True to the form of art which tragedy is, Aristotle writes that the mûthos is always “self-contained, complete, and unified” with a beginning-middle-end, or what we identify as a built-in teleology. The enclosed mûthos requires a stage-time, where time is delivered within specific narrative constraints and holds the attention of the spectator within these constraints.214 The mûthos furthermore involves a protagonist who errs from his original path. Two aspects of the protagonist’s error are important to note here: First, the protagonist errs not due to a particular vice, but because of his hamartia – or those fundamental virtues that are essential to the character of the protagonist and yet are employed in a specific context that destroys some part or all of his existence.215 Hamartia thus implies that the protagonist is both virtuous and innocent. For instance, Sophocles’ Oedipus is the steadfast king of Thebes and loving husband, 211 Larry D. Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought, (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1989), 23. 212 Aristotle, Poetics, vi, vii. [Italics mine]. Aristotle was opposed to representing “gory and horrible deeds on stage.” 213 Jean-Pierre Vernant, “Myth and Tragedy,” Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 33. John Kekes, Facing Evil, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 32. “Aristotle was more moderate. He acknowledged there was truth in this tragic view. The flaws in human character and the role of luck in human life are responsible for the failure of many human projects. Tragedies show that this is so, and by leading us to the clarification of our emotional responses to this state of affairs, we shall be better able to conduct our lives.” 214 Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “The Psychology of Aristotelian Tragedy,” Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, 2, 12. 215 Aristotle, Poetics.

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and orders all men to “banish” the killer and blasphemer who “contaminates” their native Thebes. But Oedipus does not know that it is he who ‘contaminates’ Thebes, and that his steadfastness to search out the malcontent, along with his love of his wife-mother, rushes forth his own condemnation. The second aspect of the protagonist’s error is already appearing; that is, the protagonist will remain ignorant of his error until the events reach a narrative crescendo and restoration to a former life is revealed as a forgone possibility. Thus, Oedipus has no idea that his wife is also his mother and that his daughters are his quasi-sisters. It is a knowledge that causes Oedipus the king to condemn Oedipus the subject, the rejection symbolized in the excision of his own eyes. When error is due to the protagonist’s relative innocence and ignorance, then disaster comes cloaked as an “undeserved misfortune” that is nevertheless sealed in the time constraints of the mûthos. The protagonist still remains blameless yet caught in a whirlwind, as the reappearing symbol for a life delivered beyond the threshold of redemption. How does the spectator of performable tragedy react to these events? Aristotle writes that three responses from the spectator are essential: The first response of the spectator is pity – the spectator sees that the protagonist’s own virtues have become, in combination with fateful twists in daily existence, his own undoing in ignorance. The protagonist is blameless, virtuous, yet sorrowful, thick-footed, and blind, an object to be pitied. The spectator’s second response is fear – if this can happen to the innocent and virtuous Oedipus, then the right conditions can also topple my own existence! The spectator identifies with the protagonist’s plight and fears that, under the right circumstances, his life could also be unmade. Remembering that for Aristotle tragedy is a “unified” whole, this suggests that the resolution or ‘end’ of the tragedy brings a return to balance. Through the irrational and extraneous nature of the unfolding events, a recurrence of order is built in. This last point brings us to the third spectator response of catharsis. Catharsis – or the psychological and ultimately pleasurable turning of the spectator from extraneous irrationality and once again to order – places the tragic events within a resolved context where what was lost is resolved and the community is found again. The tragic aspects are worked through; the banishment of the blinded Oedipus means the return of order and a deeper wisdom for the community. What the spectator regains through catharsis is a “well-balanced soul,” indeed this is the end-effect to which Aristotle is aspiring.

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In summation of these abbreviated elements in Aristotle’s performable tragedy, a successful tragedy is an effort at imitation cast into a “unified whole.” Tragedy will include the following: the spectator witnesses a teleological beginning-middle-end of a mûthos, innocence and ignorance in the protagonist befalls fateful destruction, and the spectator’s pity-fear-catharsis are essential psychological reactions to both mûthos and the protagonist’s destruction. Earlier we discussed how teleology – with an inflexible beginning-middle-end – has a way of concealing aspects of our existence. In our case, performable tragedy seeks to identify the tragic in human existence, and is successful insofar as we empathize with the plight of the protagonist through pity and fear. So what does it mean when Kuhns and other thinkers upon tragedy assert that the construction of performable tragedy “is itself a denial of the tragic content of the art work.”216 How can performable tragedy that reveals the tragic in human life simultaneously mean the very denial of the “content” of the tragic in human existence? This question brings us to the relation between performable tragedy and the tragic, and drives our inquiry further along to the ‘content’ of the tragic, a content being both revealed and concealed in performable tragedy. In reaching an understanding of tragic content, we are likewise drawing closer to our main purpose – understanding the linkage between the tragic and cruelty. We ask with Kuhns – what tragic “content” is being denied or concealed by performable tragedy? The answer begins with the recognition that in his Poetics Aristotle is a Greek public philosopher giving technical and structural advice to Greek playwrights, and not vice-versa. At the end of the day the play has to be an engaging performance-piece for the polis, and requires particular structural limitations and technical flourish. But just as the play must be engaging, as a philosopher Aristotle was not unaffected by a tendency in western philosophy – that began with the Greeks – to evade further rumination on the content of the tragic in human existence through an appeal to beauty through the sublime.217 As a case in point, the aim of a performable 216 Kuhns, 72. “One unconscious purpose in devising plots is that we believe we transcend, in the very act of making a plot, the hiddenness of destiny. Thus the making of tragic art is itself a denial of the tragic content of the art work, in this case the performed tragedy. [Italics mine]. 217 Aristotle writes in his Poetics, vii, with respect to the structure of performable tragedy: “A beautiful object, whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude; for beauty depends upon magnitude and order.” Magnitude and order simultaneously i) conceal the disorder and incalculability of excess as the sense of the

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tragedy for Aristotle is to produce an imitative ‘picture’ of human reality, where the role of tragedy is to manufacture a narrative of human experience that is a resolvable “whole,” or has a beginning-middle-end. The irresolvable inexplicabilities, contradictions, and excesses of human existence are ultimately provisionalized in the resolvable ‘whole’ nature of performable tragedy. This ‘whole’ of tragedy exudes a resolvable completeness that brings peace to human existence. A ‘resolvable completeness that brings peace to human existence’ is a phrase synonymous with sublimity. Insofar as a ‘whole’ tragedy exudes sublimity, then it is aesthetically pleasing, or beautiful.218 But as we see, the tragic content gets provisionalized and concealed in a sublime appeal to beauty, as does the nature of cruelty in human life and relation.219 This tendency in philosophy is not only exemplified in Aristotle’s Poetics, nor did it cease its activity through modernity in the genre of moral philosophy. The simple genius and sublimity of Kant’s categorical imperative that orders forth the stealthy beauty of the normative Kingdom of Ends is a denial of the enduring inexplicabilities, contradictions and excesses within daily existence just outside the normative magnitude and regulative order of that shining fortress. For this reason, Nietzsche writes that “even Kant’s categorical imperative smells of cruelty.”220 In our own historical epoch, memorials erected atop earthen floors of past brutalities in war and death are first aesthetically pleasing or beautiful because they create a resting place, or a trace of memory to tragic, and ii) reveal a relational linkage between beauty and the sublime Indeed, the linkage between beauty and the sublime is the visage of order as a well-balanced soul after catharsis, a sense of resolve in teleology and destiny, and determinacy in a world made beautiful and manageable. Beauty and sublimity are nothing without the correct magnitude and order. As mentioned above, western philosophy could not endure and indeed denied this tragic sense of excess. The denial took the ingenious form of hiding excess underneath a linkage between beauty and the sublime. Under the visage of order, the excess that the tragic senses about our humanness evaporates, or rather is repressed. What this visage of order between beauty and sublimity conceals, is exactly what the tragic senses in human existence. 218 Aristotle, Poetics, vii. 219 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 18. “… as the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena, also brought to light an abundance of strange new beauty and affirmation, and perhaps beauty itself. After all, what would be ‘beautiful’ if the contradiction had not first become conscious of itself, if the ‘ugly’ had not first said to itself – ‘Am I ugly?’ The teleological response conceals as it constructs. 220 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 6[20–24]. Kuhns 85, “Underlying Kant’s analyses of experience is a deep pessimism, however, much his expressed doctrines insist upon a discovery that will save religious beliefs and values, for no Pietist could consciously accept the tragic as part of the human condition.” “Thus tragedy is consciously avoided, and the dominant spokesman for Enlightenment.

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hem in irresolvable and inexplicable contradictions that exceed and rend existence asunder.221 Beauty follows the sublime.222 When we allow the tragic content of existence to stand alongside sublime beauty, then a conceptual cracking begins to appear deeper down at the sublime foundation of beauty. That is, beauty and the tragic content correlate when we see that life is both provisionally resolvable and irresolvable at the same moment. But this correlation creates a conceptual vibration or dissonance in sublimity where a teleological completeness is readjusted by an oriented telos that neither provisionalizes human suffering, nor conceals cruelty. The inflexible foundation of sublimity or completeness ultimately crumbles through the dissonance. Performable tragedy is suddenly viewable not merely as an imitation; when it pretends to represent reality, then performable tragedy is in fact no longer an imitation, but has become a dangerous parody of daily human existence. Furthermore, with the crumbling of sublimity, the tragic content of human existence is thereafter pressed to endure the load for beauty – sublime beauty becomes tragic beauty. But what happens then is astounding. In tragic beauty, life is beautiful because existence is a pendulum between being lost and found. Life is unique and bitter-sweet, fragile and fleeting for reasons we cannot fully grasp, yet so much more precious in its poignancy when we recognize it as provisional, than it ever was under the auspices of sublimity.223 This transformation of sublime beauty into tragic beauty is what makes monuments like the Vietnam memorial and the Normandy American Cemetery powerful symbols to which many communally gravitate to express gratitude, sorrow, and pain: To find again what has been lost. Western philosophy defers to sublime beauty because the tragic content of human existence reveals a number of ontological qualities about being human that cannot be simply shaken off or provisionalized through nifty categorical and

221 Kuhns, 90. “Drama and sculpture coalesce in the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C.” 222 Beauty is a central element to our lives. We know that with the advent of simple tools, charcoal brushes now long gone crafted images and animal icons on cave walls; both practical and nostalgic objects likewise adorned the burial places in what we today qualify as deposits of grave goods. A recent argument that both animal icons and grave goods were constructed solely for purposes of utility is farcical. Only the modern mind could make this unwavering split between utility and beauty, revealing more about our current inability to understand the tragic than the past we believe we correctly interpret. 223 Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other: Retaining Truth in a Pluralistic World, 68–85. Farley’s interpretation of the world as unique, fragile, and poignant is herein employed.

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normative schemas. What does the tragic content reveal about the provisional status of our existence? Inexplicability The tragic content reveals at least three general themes about our existence: First, life has the capacity of taking on a hue of gross inexplicability or irrationality, and can engage us as even meaningless and irreconcilable.224 We need not invoke the Brothers Karamozov to know inexplicability in the death of a child; the assault of a drunk driver at the wheel, a war for liberation that obliterates families, the suicide of a friend, or the painful loss of our intimate relations. Humanity appears often entrapped in crisis events between partially understandable existential questions and diffusive existentiell answers, an entrapment that can render our lives – particularly during crises – into gray existential zones of contingency and ambiguity, as a general sense of feeling lost or betrayed amidst the ruins of former securities.225 Contradiction The second general theme about our existence is that our good intentions often co-exist with stark intra- and interpersonal opposition and contradiction. As a negative instance, we often desire our own wellbeing but infuse life with debilitating guilt, shame and pain; as a positive instance, we often exhibit overwhelming hope even in the face of despair. We are deeply ironic beings. And yet, to rest on this point delivers us to the earlier assessment of post-modern sublime irony. Sublime irony is a defeatist attempt of Nietzsche’s ‘skeptic philosopher’ to escape the tragic reality of two poles – the crumbling of totality and the potential wonder-awe-Angst-cruelty of daily existence. Sublime irony fabricates a spectator persona within us that abstracts us from our own existence. The sublime smirk of hermeneutic height that illumines the world with irony is an existential cul-de-sac and must be resisted.226 Like ironists, we may also employ distance to observe 224 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 36: “Tragic situations essentially involve a conflict between the essential conditions of life and the human aspiration to live good lives. In tragic situations, the attempt to live good lives founders on contingency, indifference, and destructiveness we find in the world.” 225 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, 60: “Why behave like a stranger newly arrived on the stage of life? You know there is no constancy in human affairs, when a single swift hour can often bring a man to nothing.” 226 Andre Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,1995), 221. The legitimation of the project of ‘liberal ironism’ in the United States follows in the footsteps of Richard Rorty. The fact

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ourselves as tragic, but without resting in irony. In this way, we observe humanity as tragic in a way that irony is unable to grasp. What we observe is that although human beings are indeed deeply ironic, they are also simultaneously lost and found, and tragic through-andthrough; and we are tragic because, despite our best ambitions and efforts we are incapable of simply overcoming contradiction and excess within ourselves and every aspect of our lives. Contradiction is a way of changing and reducing (i.e., transvaluing) even our most fundamental values. We induce pain when we seek joy, or obsession when we desire to love. Contrariwise, we display outward graciousness that is self-serving, and practice inner logic that rationalizes another’s neglect or outright pain – and we may very well do all of this without wanting or intending the consequences of any of it. Contradiction of value takes two distinct forms of change and reduction (i.e., transvaluation). The first form of transvaluation is when a value such as love reaches an excess of obsession and the imprint of the original (i.e., love) is thereby trespassed, contradicted, changed, and reduced. As a further instance, justice can lose its originating imprint as a value and be transvalued into revenge. In both examples the inertia of contradicted value reaches an epistemic and experiential excess. When this excess is finally actively externalized from within the intrapersonal sphere of existence, then human life and relation unquestionably will be harmed. Contradiction of value in existence is active in yet another form, and this form takes a particularly dangerous course through the concealment of its internal machinations. The imprint of the originating value in this second form always begins in the negative. Revenge can be hidden behind a mask of love and justice; jealousy will be concealed that irony seeks to legitimize itself is itself ironic, and this is the problem with the movement; for reasons expressed in the ‘skeptic philosopher’ of Nietzsche, irony is a cultural dead-zone if it does not allow transition to another clime. Hope, friendship, the study of the classics, all become ironic, until the fact that life is ironic becomes itself consumed in irony – this is a house of mirrors. It is also a homegrown American elitism that would readily quicken itself as the spirit of Post-Modernism. And yet, we are learning in the age of terrorism that irony as a place of intellectual dwelling is not a luxury of most of the planet, and that religious conviction, even when dangerous, takes itself much more seriously than the ironists. For all of this, Delbanco’s book is fascinating in its depth, rigor and honesty about the destructive ways in which active and privative ‘evil’ is characterized in American culture. The last chapter entitled ‘Prospects’ crowns Rorty for putting away the “childish things” or “fairy tails” of religious conviction. This option is – for better or worse – as out of character in the world today as was Teilhard de Chardin’s enthusiastic panentheism during the twentieth century.

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behind affection; maliciousness can be secreted within odes to friendship. Both forms of contradiction involve complex trans-valuation. But whereas the first form represents a rather linear excess (from lovejustice to revenge), the latter is especially excessive and destructive (from revenge to pseudo-justice) because the contradiction turns on a fulcrum of deception. The deception may be both well under the psychological waterline of intentionality and thereby must not necessarily be normative at its core. Cunegonde complains that the philosopher “Pangloss most cruelly deceived me when he said that everything in the world is for the best.”227 Pangloss’ deception of Cunegonde originates in his own self-deception that is based on a former transvaluation. He (in fact, Leibniz) may earnestly believe that the tragic sense of existence, with all of its cruelties, represents reality “like shadows on a beautiful picture.”228 And yet, Cunegonde recognizes that Pangloss’ universalized philosophical epistemology does not accurately reflect, and even provisionalizes, her personal attestation of human experience. The purpose of Voltaire’s Candide, from one excruciating narrative trial of pain and heartache to the next, is to reveal that the world is otherwise than Pangloss esteems it. The world as otherwise – a reason Candide is not formally a philosophical treatise but rather a narrative history of human existence – enables Voltaire to attest to human suffering and cruelty through the narrative engine of a fictive presentation of the world as sublimely beautiful. His narrative of ‘the world as otherwise’ contra Leibnizian philosophy is the existential proof in a narrative pudding. In both transvaluative forms of contradiction, human life and relation is harmed in two ways. First, through transvaluation the singular intra-personal capacity to conceive of a distinction between values (as the difference between ‘justice’ and ‘revenge’) is abridged. The result of this abridgment is that one’s capacity to conceive and interpret ‘justice’ is compromised in present and future valuations.229 We view this 227 In Leibniz’s Théodicée is the representation of sublime beauty, par excellance. Voltaire’s criticism of sublime beauty is the narrative thrust in which he frames Candide. 228 Voltaire, Candide, 60. “These are but the shadows on a beautiful picture.’ ‘Your hanged man [Pangloss] mocked the world,’ said Martin. ‘The shadows are horrible blots.’ ‘They are men who make the blots,’ said Candide,’ and they cannot be dispensed with.’ ‘It is not their fault then,’ said Martin.” 229 Tillich, The Protestant Era, 177–78. Tillich asserts that justice is a form of love. I am suggesting that integrity, as nurturing love of self, is broken and thereby becomes an injustice.

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outcome in Pangloss, who undergoes physical and psychological distress from being violated, hanged, and enslaved; nevertheless, Pangloss’ life never transforms his transvaluation.230 The world is always beautiful. On the other hand, Candide does sense tragic existence and its accompanying cruelties – “Alas!” said Candide, “it is the madness of maintaining that everything is right when it is wrong.”231 Akin to when originary values are contradicted, Mathew Lamb writes: “Individuals may have the best will in the world, may be good and upright, and yet by their actions contribute to social and historical processes that oppress and dehumanize. There is a pathological distortion of human existence – a tendency to distort life into death. …”232 When the original value of justice is compromised along with the capacity for valuation, then both revenge and victimization can become externalized and further rationalized, taking terribly vindictive and helpless forms in the name of justice. Human life and relation is harmed through the incapacity of value-differentiation and active rationalized externalization upon other human beings. The second way in which human life and relation is harmed is epistemologically and phenomenologically intra-personal, and continues through the first harm at the level of value and valuation above. I seek my revenge through rationalizations that justify my actions. These rationalizations, which I trollop out in the defense of “justice,” are transforming my idea of revenge into an Ideal of Justice. Consequently, the Ideal of Justice will become a supreme indicator of truth. The rise of ‘revenge’ as a truth, even rationalized as Justice, means the consequential depletion of my capacity to regard the singular reality of the other person before me, the same person who is the receiver of my vengeance. What I do not regard in the singular reality of the other is a sense of personhood that is comparatively equivalent to my own. If the Ideal does not include the reality of personhood, then the singular reality of the other will come under threat. There is a hermeneutic catch. The personhood of the singular other is both micro-and macrocosmic in scope. That is, singular others are comparatively equivalent by virtue 230 Voltaire, Candide, 85. Pangloss is never able to fully transform the convictions of his values: “The discourse gave rise to new reflections, and Martin especially concluded that man was born to live either in a state of distracting inquietude or of lethargic disgust. Candide did not quite agree to that, but he affirmed nothing. Pangloss owned that he had always suffered horribly, but as he had once asserted that everything went wonderfully well, he asserted it still, though he no longer believed it.” 231 Voltaire, Candide, 49. 232 Mathew Lamb, Solidarity with Victims, 3.

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of their personhood. The depletion of my capacity to regard the singular other reveals a depletion in my own intra-personal identity. The depletion emerges in that what I do not recognize in the ‘other’ is how singularity is also macrocosmic insofar as singular others share in comparatively equivalent personhood. Both an abridgement in the capacity for value differentiation, and depletion in the recognition of the singular reality of personhood are harmed through cruelty. I cannot differentiate my values, I seek harm through false rationalizations, and I have a weakened capacity for understanding my comparative equality to the other person before me. The contradictory nature of cruelty as a trespass will implicate me every time at the level of valuation and my shared humanity, or personhood. Self-implication means that the one who trespasses is also trespassed. The tragic sense of existence is that we elude contradiction, and excessive contradictions usher in trespasses at the level of personhood and valuation to others in the immediate vicinity. In contradiction, what is lost is the ability to perceive truth and conceive of a common humanity. Cruelty, as an excessive contradiction, may be immediate, rationalized, unexpected, and inexplicable. It can unexpectedly encounter existence and harm or kill relation for everyone in the vicinity, even as an explosion in a café. Excess The third theme the tragic content reveals to us is exhibited and intimately connected to both inexplicability and contradiction. This third theme is also gleaned from our previous etymological study. That is, insofar as we act in the world, we exhibit an overwhelming capacity for excess that is locatable in the heart of our daily human existence. The tragic content of our capacity for excess is not simply whisked away in a catharsis orchestrated within performable tragedy, nor is it mollified in Leibniz’s sublime assertion of this world as ‘the best of all possible worlds.’ We are beyond both sublime beauty and catharsis. This sense of whole sublime completeness or ordering an enclosed life as an anthropos ex machina is resisted.233 As with Candide and Cunegonde, daily existence will eventually catch up with us, superimposing the reality of our excesses and those around us that destroy 233 Goethe rejected the notion of Aristotle’s catharsis as a psychological tactic that too easily allows the tragic in human existence to be resolved for the spectator through performable tragedy. Reconciliation was up to the characters themselves within the drama, a lesson in problem-solving for the spectator.

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life and relation through how we exist in ourselves, with others, and in our institutions. It is a life of excess in human life and relation that leaves an old man languishing in regret. If we gaze at excess long enough, we recognize it as an irreconcilable truth of human existence that even Socrates evades with his upbeat and simple call for moderation in all things. What Socrates does not reveal is that even a life of moderation can be excessively pursued. Excess is so inexorably bound to the “tragic content” that we require a revision in our choice of terminology – for it is misleading to identify excess with the term content, as Kuhn’s had done. Kuhn’s sense of content infers something fixed and calculable, like the voyage of a sea chest that holds a solid object; and yet, this concrete image confounds the fundamental nature of excess. We do not observe face-to-face the full magnitude of human excess that makes us ugly; this magnitude is somehow always enshrouded. Nevertheless, we do somehow sense this magnitude fully saturating human existence.234 Rather than employ the term content, let us say that we have a sense of tragic existence regarding human existence, and this sense of the tragic affirms that humanity exudes excess that has the potential of harming and destroying human well-being and relation, regardless of our intentionality.235 In light of a sense of tragic existence, consider the virtue of justice – when excess penetrates the rind of this virtue a figure such as Shylock is willing to destroy “his family, his religious privacy, and himself ” through obsessive dedication to justice that exceeds into revenge.236 Excess reveals how our values for well-being and our daily actions can never be assumed to 234 This ‘sense’ of the tragic is not a mystical sense, but the practical, daily intuitions we have of our own existence that is articulated by August Wilhelm Schlegel’s sense of a “tragic mood.” What is here resisted within Schlegel’s ‘sense’ is his reliance on our vocation in an afterlife that resolves the tragic in our lives here and now. Schlegel’s later provisionalization of who we are as tragic beings weakens our inquiries into what we ‘sense’ about tragic reality. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vorlesungen über dramatische Kunst und Literatur: Kritische Ausgabe engeleitet und mit Anmerkungen versehen von Giovanni Vittorio Amoretti, (Bonn: K. Schroeder, 1923). 50–71. 235 Bouchard, 47–50: “Together, the externality and internality of evil point to the third disclosure of tragic theology, the irreducibility of evil. Why do we commit hubris in violence and in thought? Tragic method gives no answers to the limit questions of tragic theology. Irreducibility has emerged as an ontological and conceptual limit in both tragic experience and in various interpretations of tragedy.” Bouchard believes he has located a “tragic a priori.” “Tragedy is a method of inquiry that tests the limits of our abilities to think about evil, and in so doing may awaken critical appreciation of the variety of experiences that attend those limits.” 236 Kuhns, 100.

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simply coincide.237 It is at the level of non-coincidence that excess glows through contradiction. Tragic beauty is akin to hamartia without the final resolution of catharsis; particularly in our own globalized historical epoch, we may hold conflicting values that we believe lead to well being – like railing against oppression while drinking a cup of Columbian coffee, or attending a peace rally in Nike sneakers made by impoverished teenage girls in Indonesia. Even here it is not so simple – not to purchase the coffee and shoes might mean hunger for someone else. It is certainly true in our contemporary and globalized context that values and action collide and can lead to all manner of confusion through intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional conflict. The three themes of the sense of tragic existence are: Inexplicability, contradiction that trans-values existence, and excess: Love or care for oneself can exceed into self-objectification, desire for mutual solidarity can exceed into malevolent domination of the other, justice can exceed into sanctioned revenge. What do we think of when we say that the tragic senses an excess in human beings that is somehow connected to inexplicability and contradiction? Ricoeur offers us a caveat before we think too deeply, too early on excess. He flatly asserts – the tragic resists thought and thought resists the tragic.238 By “thought” Ricoeur means the topographical charting of excess with the aim of conceptually enclosing it and rendering it calculable, an effort at facticity native to Nietzsche’s decry of Socratic scientism. Excess does not resist charting, but the nature of its irreducibility (i.e., if we recall, excess is always exceeding itself) means it cannot be enclosed.239 At first pass, excess that the tragic senses seems relatively unapproachable. And yet it is not. We already know that Nietzsche’s tragic-philosopher reaches through the tragic in order to confront human suffering and cruelty, and thereby create himself anew. Ricoeur readjusts this issue of ‘creation,’ and employs the aforementioned terms – testimony and

237 Paul Ricoeur, Fallible Man, trans. Charles Kelby (Chicago: Regnery, 1965), 204. “This possibility is not simply the fact that we are limited, finite creatures. Rather, it is our capacity for inward contradiction: ‘the idea of limitation as such cannot bring us to the threshold of moral evil. Not just any limitation constitutes the possibility of failing, but that specific limitation which consists, for human reality, in not coinciding with itself.” 238 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 214–230. 239 Bouchard, 42.

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attestation – in order to understand excess.240 Through testimony and attestation, a sense of the tragic (i.e., inexplicability, contradiction, excess) is not forfeited to the Ideal of Catharsis; rather, one testifies and attests to provisionality, past and present contradiction, regret and loss, sorrow and suffering, pain and human indifference, of being lost and found, of inexplicability and meaninglessness, of humiliation, ambiguity, contingency, and destruction.241 The ciphers between performable tragedy and a sense of tragic existence are able to keep performable tragedy in the realm of the imitative, where we do not see performable tragedy as a true representation of reality. In this way, performable tragedy is saved from becoming a dangerous parody. The ciphers are the testimonies and attestations to inexplicability, contradiction, and excess located not only in the actor who is attesting to these things, but precisely in the ruminations and warnings of the Greek chorus.242 On the frontier between spectators and the unfolding events on stage, the Greek chorus hears the past and speaks the present and future, testifies and attests to vice and virtue, hospitality and friendship, but also to struggle, deception, envy, exclusion, injustice, and excessive desire. Because the tragic senses inexplicability, contradiction, and excess in human affairs, the Greek chorus not only testifies and attests to the above, but to the seemingly irreconcilable aspect of each of these that has the possibility of unmaking human existence. In our own context, the stiff allegiance to a highest virtue of loyalty becomes a community’s undoing, attempts at forgiveness while remaining a victim of domestic abuse ushers in cycles of trauma, inhospitality slides into rabid injustice, desire for an object becomes objectless-obsession. Struggle chafes and thereafter obsessive deception-envy-exclusion confuse human relationality through grades of resentment and spite. But the Greek chorus is the embodiment of the cipher of attestation, reminding spectators with ears to hear that the performable tragedy is only imitative at best. In this sense, the Greek Chorus functions as the prophetess at the oracle in Delphi, breathing in and expunging the meanings of the fractures underneath that are never meant to be provisionalized or concealed by the performance itself. 240 Bouchard, 42. “Learning heals ignorance and illusion, even when what is learned is negativity, evil, and desperate suffering.” 241 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 43. The notion of tragic existence as contingent, indifferent, and destructive, is employed by Kekes. 242 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 229–231.

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These three themes of inexplicability, contradiction, and excess that the tragic senses regarding human existence, are phenomenological before they are normative.243 That is, a sense of the tragic recognizes how we rather easily become entrapped in the phenomena of a whirlwind that is often more complex than our own normative intentions. As Bouchard notes, “the Dionysian abyss not only erupts immanently but also transcends the horizon of human volition.”244 But this suggests that what the tragic senses about human existence is not merely inexplicability, contradiction, and excess, but how all three trespass human existence. Trespass [Latin trans + passer] means one tracks-across, passes-by, or goes-beyond the limits of oneself. A trespass always has an object that is tracked across or passed by, be it oneself or other human beings. To track across someone or to pass by may imply intentionality or negligence contra oneself or others. If cruelty is a trespass of ourselves and others, than it is a kind of trespass that is raw or excessive, inexplicable, and in contradiction of the original values and principles that we first purported. The value of love becomes transvalued and contradicted not into its opposite, but into an active excess such as self-obsession. The inexplicability of this transvaluation means that we do not always understand how or why love was changed and reduced into a value we would not normally aspire toward. In like mind, desire for an object may exceed itself into objectless obsession without a clear indication of how intention brought us to this place. Of course, cruelty also involves intention, but the focus here is to think of cruelty as a phenomenon and how it affects all those it encounters. As an encounter that trespasses human existence, cruelty is not extraordinary but bears the mark of coming from us and being encountered from within our daily existence. We, and every generation after us, retain the potential of trespassing ourselves and others. Excess that produces an inexplicable contradiction is a trespass in that it harms our ability toward well-being, toward a sense of our own narrative lives, and solidarity with other human beings. The encounter of cruelty 243 Edward Farley, Good & Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, 131. Tragic vulnerability that leads to “negation,” is in part what is meant by ‘homelessness.’ Farley also remarks that the ‘tragic’ springs up as “sin’s offspring.” My contention is that sin is a second-order interpretation, a concept as he employs it that is much newer to western thought than terms such as Ricoeur’s ‘pollution,’ or ‘fault.’ A ‘sense of the tragic’ does not forthwith reference sin; at an execution the killing of another human being and the accompanying sense of the tragic recognizes the rawness of cruelty first, and attests to this encounter expeditiously. 244 Bouchard, 40.

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has a way of grabbing onto us and affecting us in every aspect of our lives. We conceal the dynamics of cruelty for numerous reasons, but a fundamental reason we conceal cruelty is simply because it is so ugly. We may even desire to discard it from our lives as being peripheral. “Two of the 20th century’s most costly tragedies in terms of human life,” writes Geneviève Jacques, “have occurred in its concluding decade – the Rwandan genocide and the succession of wars in the former Yugoslavia.”245 What the tragic senses about human existence reveals how ontology does not merely disappear through simple wishing, and this would, of course, include the ontological status of cruelty within our lives. Where cruelty is hidden, what the tragic senses about our existence will always give us a clue of where to start looking when life is transvalued and complicated by its encounter.246 This said, a sense of the tragic will not always reveal cruelty, but the ugliness that is cruelty will always reveal an accompanying sense of the tragic in intra-personal, interpersonal and institutional life and relation. Finally, we have continuously spoken of the ugliness of cruelty. Over the course of our study, we are now in a position to ask: “But what is ugly about cruelty? Or rather, how does cruelty make us ugly?” What we will observe is that, although cruelty is tragic, how this excess encounters and disfigures us renders us ugly. Cruelty renders us ugly for three general reasons. First, unlike some forms of violence, we usually do not recognize the effect of cruelty upon our lives. Cruelty can be concealed in resentment underneath odes to love, or hidden in expressions of inclusion that exclude other human beings. We may intend goodness but still trespass other human beings. Not recognizing how we harm ourselves and others is an ugliness for us. Even at my best I may harm others? This is an ugly feature of human life, so that an awareness of our own inability to recognize what we do has a souring effect even when we think about it. Second, what makes us ugly is not only our lack of recognition, but how we are complicit in cruelty’s advance. For instance, the enshrined sublime Ideal, once more of

245 Geneviève Jacques, Beyond Impunity: An Ecumenical Approach to Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, (Geneva: WCC Publications, 2000), 5. 246 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 5–6. “In contemporary moral thought there is considerable reluctance to accept the tragic view. The opposition is not just a defensive maneuver, aiming to protect us from disillusioning truths; there is a reasoned case behind it, even if many who share the reluctance are unaware of the case… Intimate understanding of human conduct tends to reveal complexities disguised from superficial acquaintances.”

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Justice, can conceal a thirst for revenge. Although cruelty is concealed, it remains active, but active in a way that we may intend or not intend. Either way, our complicity in harming ourselves and others is an ugly quality of human existence, and we are ugly when we are complicit. Third, and of direct influence to points one and two above, concerns how cruelty contradicts, changes, and reduces (i.e., transvalues) our values with or without our awareness of such transvaluation. Through transvaluation we become disfigured, or made ugly in the world. What’s more, such transvaluation may raise up Ideals by which we justify our action, revealing how easily reason masks itself. We may seek revenge in the name of Justice, exclusion can be pursued through a rhetoric of Inclusion, or resentment may be concealed and active in expressions of Love. In this way, our values of justice, inclusion, and love become contradicted, changed, and reduced deep within us, we are disfigured, and human life is harmed. When the excess of cruelty encounters human life, a lack of recognition, our complicity, and the complex nature of transvaluation, produce an ugliness in us. Through transvaluation, we quite literally become what we were not – a dis-figuration. Nietzsche views this ugliness as a systemic distortion or sickness within the western human heart. Cruelty is nothing if it is not ugly for us, a point that underlines every step along our way in the following chapters. When ugliness is not spoken aloud in the following pages, we must assume its’ disfiguration is a possibility in us. D) Correlative Cartography – The Topography of Cruelty in Fracture-Artery-Contour Nietzsche’s “way of cruelty” that preceded “world history” is a metaphor for the “actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind.”247 That is, cruelty is a saturated aspect of human trespass, the evidence of which is emblazoned in the manifoldness of human history, literature, the politics of relation, and daily existence. Cruelty precedes its hidden and forgotten status under the factual constructed calculability of “world history,” where the Ideal of the day (i.e., Freedom, Loyalty, Obedience, Patriotism, Self) has enabled the perpetration of untold cruelties. The Ideal, absolutized and totalized in teleological narrative-myth, is that “precision, calm, and purity of the 247

Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröthe I: 18.

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lines [which] raises us above the mere contents” of human existence. Cruelty, as the mere contents lying “behind the Homeric world” is concealed and hidden in human life and relation. Nietzsche’s way of cruelty is the challenge to the heart of Christian veracity, so that our task now begins to shift from Nietzsche’s way to the definitive trajectory of an investigation of the topos of cruelty. The result of the topography of cruelty is, among other things, a response to Nietzsche. Like a fracture underneath Delphi, cruelty is what Nietzsche observed in the protruding veins of that polished marble.248 Chapters two through four will investigate cruelty as fracture and further chart, through a hermeneutic phenomenology, what we begin to understand about the topos of cruelty in human life and relation. Nietzsche is our lodestar, but philosopher Paul Ricoeur and theologian David Tracy are also essential to the methodological pace of these next chapters. As we noted earlier, Ricoeur’s contribution is his distinctive hermeneutics of symbols and language; Tracy’s contribution is his method of a mutual critical correlation in theology. Chapters two through four proceed in assessing symbols and correlations that reveal to us the nature of cruelty as fracture. Correlation is thus a means of charting symbols in the topography of cruelty that are onerously unsystematic in our tradition. Thus, our efforts include correlation between thinkers, distinct philosophies-theologies, concepts, beliefs, and particular narratives. Symbol and correlation, as compass to traveler, reveals which hermeneutic paths are best resisted, and which are best trod in the topography of cruelty. In this sense, the method employed herein is a correlative cartography, where the language of hermeneutic trajectory and phenomenological diving is an adaptation of Nietzsche’s rhetoric for this same topos. The metaphor of fracture is chosen to emphasize without question the ontological status of cruelty and its reality in daily human existence. Cruelty in human life and relation is a fracture that is sharp and cuts, protrudes unexpectedly in daily existence and then diverges again; fracture also implies rawness, excess, contradiction from a clean systematic course, and inexplicable depth. Depth of fracture illustrates the irreducible nature of cruelty. If the Socratic scientific method is 248 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Homer’s Wettkampf,” Fünf Vorreden zu fünf ungeschriebene Büchern, Werke Historische-Kritische Ausgabe III:2 (Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1994). See also Daniel Breazeale, trans. & ed., Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s.

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equivalent to scanning full oceans and continents and reducing these to within the meter from satellite, then our effort is more akin to methodical traversing. We earlier discussed cruelty in the politics of human environs such as cultural, social, economic, and geopolitical. These and other environs can be identified in three distinct spheres of daily human existence. These are – intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional. We can imagine at least one additional sphere, such as ‘regional or global environment.’ Still, we resist over-enclosure and remain with our three pre-designated spheres. Each sphere – intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional – reveals a parallel artery of the greater fracture of cruelty. The image of artery is utilized to reveal how cruelty in one area of our lives typically has an adverse and harmful effect in other areas, like arteries that connect to a larger ontological fracture that is evident in daily human existence. For instance, the complicated transformation of oneself through objectification (i.e., self-objectification) is the first artery of the larger fracture of cruelty within the intra-personal sphere of daily human existence. We already know from Nietzsche’s articulation of the way of cruelty how easily cruelty is concealed. This suggests that our metaphors of ontological fracture and artery must shine a hermeneutic light on the reality of cruelty in human life and relation. In consideration of intra-personal existence alone, how we exist as post-Cartesian subjects is an intricate and complex reality, a reality which – through the auspices of twentieth century psychology, psychiatry and literary analysis – we relate to with a particular historical attunement. This said, just as human intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional daily existence is intricate and complex, so also the arteries of cruelty are, like walls of a cave, contoured in specific ways. That is, intra-personal cruelty to oneself reveals particular textures within the artery of cruelty that are similar to, but not the same as, the other two arteries of interpersonal and institutional cruelty. Intra-personal cruelty is likewise contoured differently within the singularity of each person.249 249 Elaine Scarry and Kate Millett’s independent accounts of torture, as instances, reminds us of a rawness in singular experience and identity, and also of how excess as torture is difficult to wrap our minds around in order to render an adequate account at this depth of fracture. Nevertheless, the reality of torture has much more to contribute to the limit of objectification in an encounter of cruelty, and the attendant wrenching aspects of a life terrified. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Kate Millett,

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Still, particular contours within the arteries of this fracture are chartable, even if we must grope a bit to discover the texture of these contours. As an illustration of contour, consider how intra-personal struggle can devolve into an irresolvable internal dialectic within an artery of cruelty in daily human life and relation. This form of struggle is a part of the singular and social experience of cruelty, and can be charted or approximated in order to reveal how cruelty as excessive struggle affects human existence. Why not do away with this language of fracture-artery-contour and simply draw a contiguous line of ascendancy that is linear, cyclic, or symbiotic in nature and be done with the project in an expeditious fashion? Because to do so is no longer to talk about cruelty, or its encounter.250 The metaphor of the ontology of cruelty as fracture is an effort to resist the very tendency of over-enclosure as an over-exposure to what one believes one can utter in constructive thought. There are limits. If we suppose that the fracture of cruelty is not wholly circumscribable, and if we further suppose that the simultaneity of the three spheres is how cruelty encounters our lives and that, due to human singularity, we always arrive at approximation de facto, then we have to content ourselves with these suppositions by not fully enclosing ontological fracture in a noetic veil of absolutivity. This hermeneutic move has other benefits, such as assuring that we do not commit ourselves to an interpretive and totalizing course of teleological narrative-myth. A specific deduction means that a pseudo-theodical response to cruelty – with a beginning-middle-end to how and why cruelty is what it is in its encounter – is resisted. Hermeneutic traversing through phenomenological fracture may feel intellectually like a process of spelunking through caverns from beginning to end, but it is more akin to investigating contours where one stands as a human being, and within the rubric of public theology. Analogously, in the effort at finding shards, archeology places these in correlation to one another, where the main effort is not necessarily

“The Death of a Guatemalan Village. El Salvador,” The Politics of Cruelty: An Essay on the Literature of Political Imprisonment, (New York: Norton, 1994), 253–279. 250 Sue Grand asserts her methodology in an analogous fashion: “And we do not risk committing … the ‘obscenity of understanding’: the tendency to eviscerate evil by theorizing its interior. Rather, we know that as we draw close to malevolence, its secrets will elude us. We can investigate evil and retain evil’s raw edge. …” See also, Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective, (New Jersey: Analytic Press, 2000), 9, 12, 23.

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reconstructing phenomena as one would reconstruct a vase. The effort here is to approximate how cruelty is encountered, and in this sense contours and arteries are placed in relation that exudes a kind of traversing, of locating texture and groove. We will never fully recover the singularity of cruelty’s encounter, just as Elaine Scarry reminds us that we cannot feel the pain of the body next to us.251 Cruelty is raw not due to a general unpredictability, but rather because its unpredictability encounters us in who we are, as a raw shock to our daily singularity. When we approximate cruelty it is after the fact and singularity is diminished no matter how much we may desire to reconstruct it. Our efforts always risk grazing artificiality, but not unduly so. For if we can approximate the ugliness that cruelty is, then it is reachable, and since cruelty is not explicitly predictable then at least its future encounter is generally foreseeable, if our efforts are to assist us in recognizing fracture that take us beyond traversing for its own sake. Edmund Hill’s comments about Augustine’s labors in De Trinitate are noteworthy to this end. He writes that Augustine “is not so much talking about the Trinity as talking about how to talk about it.”252 A correlative cartography is an attempt to chart and learn how to talk about cruelty. Abiding by Gutierrez’s conviction, theological thought is not for the armchair. Its trajectory wants to risk a contribution, to hope for a conversation, to discover what was missed in an account of the topos of cruelty within ontological fracture. Ultimately, it comes down to hope. E) Remarks for Transition Chapter one had four aims: First, we asserted through four vectors why a study on cruelty is a necessary and legitimate undertaking. The lack of clarity within historical scholarship, Friedrich Nietzsche’s challenge that cruelty is concealed in western thought, the author’s experience of cruelty in the public execution of a friend, and cruelty in the public execution of Jesus of Nazareth, established the necessity of this investigation. Scholarship, experience, and our classic Judeo-Christian understanding, combined to offer a legitimate starting point for assessing cruelty. 251 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. That I cannot feel the pain of the other is an essential tenet to Scarry’s text. 252 Edmund Hill, The Mystery of the Trinity, (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), 22–25, 50.

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Second, this starting point began with what Nietzsche identified as “the way of cruelty” in western thought. Nietzsche believed that western thought has constructed Ideals for how human beings should and do live. Systems of governance enshrine these Ideals, where for instance retribution utilizes the Ideal of Justice in the legitimation of the death penalty. But underneath the system with its enshrined Ideal lies unconcealed cruelty that enables reconciliation for neither victim nor perpetrator. Nietzsche employed the metaphor of Delphi (i.e., the Ideal with its system) and the fractures underneath Delphi (i.e., cruelty) in order to illustrate how every enshrined Ideal provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty underneath. The metaphor of cruelty as a fracture in human life, with its implication for harming human beings, was adopted in the study as a heuristic device. Cruelty is like a fracture insofar as it is concealed from us, and has the potential for rupturing who and how we are in the world. The problem of systemically enshrined Ideals resides in how we construct closed teleological narrative myths with their calculable and pre-determined beginning-middle-end. Such enclosure renders life sublime, like a Greek tragedy, where we have a cathartic response and everything works out in the end. Nietzsche’s point was that such appeals to the sublime Ideal disallow us from experiencing and understanding the world as it is – full of wonder, awe, anxiety, suffering, and cruelty. Life is not a Greek tragedy, but it is tragic. And life is tragic in the trespasses we endure where there are no easy answers for suffering and cruelty. We could stop recreating Delphi, and instead seek to interpret the world through telos-oriented narrative myths that are open to wonder, awe, anxiety, suffering, and the reality of cruelty in human life. If we were open in this way, then we would begin to understand not only wonder and awe, even the mystery of existence, but we would likewise finally see who we are as tragic creatures, and how cruelty fractures us. The painful experience of cruelty is that there is no sublime Ideal for its reconciliation; there is no assurance that we will endure through it, where the world is reordered and made calculable once more. The cost for such knowledge is a more complete understanding of what the world is for us. The benefit is how we take Delphi at its word, and get to “know ourselves” much better. Nietzsche was our lodestar for understanding cruelty. His insights into how cruelty operates will also assist us in the coming chapters as we uncover examples of cruelty in human experience and within our classic narratives in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. We discovered in chapter one that although cruelty is tragic, its effect upon human life is

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what makes us ugly. Cruelty makes us ugly for three general reasons – we do not recognize the effect of cruelty upon our lives, we can become complicit in cruelty’s advance, and cruelty contradicts (i.e., transvalues) our values without our awareness of such contradiction (i.e., transvaluation). In these ways, our values of justice, inclusion, and love become changed and reduced deep within us, and human life is harmed. A lack of recognition, our complicity, and the contradiction of our values, produce an ugliness in us. Nietzsche viewed such ugliness as a systemic sickness within the western human heart. Our third aim was to produce an etymological study that grounded the concept of cruelty in order for us to recognize and unconceal or disclose it. Thomas Aquinas was the first to say that cruelty is “raw, like uncooked meet.” What we discovered following Aquinas is how Greek, Hebrew, Latin, French, German, and English etymological resource material disclose cruelty precisely as a rawness, or excess, in human existence. Cruelty is an excess insofar as it is irrational, inexplicable, contradicts and transvalues who and how we are in the world. For instance, the excess of being a “cruel friend” reveals how quickly friendship is transvalued. That is, ‘cruelty’ contradicts the very meaning of friendship, where the second term is changed and reduced into an oxymoron when it follows the first. Finally, our fourth aim was to adopt the metaphor of “fracture” as a heuristic device. We developed a new hermeneutic or way of interpreting the topos of cruelty that is operative throughout this study. Cruelty is a fracture, and it affects all three spheres of human existence, these being intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional life. Cruelty affects each of these spheres, like three distinct but inseparable arteries of the same larger fracture. For instance, in chapter two we will identify how the artery of self-objectification fractures across the intra-personal sphere. Each artery likewise has contours, as the walls of a cave, which overlap one another. These contours reveal how we experience cruelty within each artery. In chapter two we will identify five such contours. These contours are: Excessive struggle, trauma that we internalize as a contagion, turning ourselves and others into strangers and enemies, excising human life and relation, and pursuing a course of deception in resentment. Struggle, trauma, the enigmatic, excision, and resentment are five contours within each of the three arteries in the larger fracture of cruelty. Our task in chapter two will be to disclose cruelty in the intrapersonal sphere of human life and relation. We turn our attention now to this task.

CHAPTER TWO

INTRA-PERSONAL CRUELTY The Artery of Self-Objectification With or without the conscious intent to destroy, generation after generation, mankind has turned against itself in cruelty. – Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil

Chapter one assessed how the topos of cruelty is concealed and forgotten behind reason’s mask and underneath teleological narrative-myth. Thereafter, the topography of cruelty has been ignored as a topic of serious investigative interest not only to scholars but to society at large – it has not been on the investigative radar within the Self-Image of the Age, as Alasdair MacIntyre coined it.1 Second, it was also observed that cruelty never fails to leave its imprint in our sense of tragic existence, in the trace of a word or the crumb of a half-elucidated value in our literature from Augustine to Todorov, from Aquinas to Rorty, from Arendt to Hemingway. Third, it was postulated that due to its hiddenness, cruelty is articulated through intuitive analogy (i.e., cruelty is like ‘x’) or denied through aesthetic sublimity (i.e., beauty or irony). Fourth, cruelty was also often perceived as an impingement upon ordinary existence that rises from the extraordinary metaphysical distance or deep, when in fact cruelty is a disfiguring ugliness, rawness, or excess within daily human life and relation that has a way of contradicting or trans-valuing the way we usually desire to conduct life. And finally, we asserted that the topography of cruelty can be approximated within three spheres of human daily existence – intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional – in the hope of an awareness for public theologians and for those whom we represent.2 1 A. James Hammerton, “Cruelty and Divorce,” Cruelty and Companionship, (London: Routledge, 1992), 102–133. Hammerton’s study is an important one surrounding marital cruelty. His work reveals the current enigmatic nature of legal cruelty in relation to domestic verbal and physical assault. 2 Miroslav Volf, Exclusion & Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996), 21. The notion of

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Chapter one offered the reader an examination and elucidation of the implications within Nietzsche’s way of cruelty. The aim of chapter two is to begin the hermeneutic and archeological charting of the phenomenological topography of cruelty as a fracture in intra-personal daily human existence. Charting the topos of cruelty means we must assess the fracture of cruelty in terms of its internal arteries and contours, as a Nietzschean diving-down (i.e., a grappling with and attesting) into the “actual and decisive” qualities of the so-called “true biography,” a biography that reveals the “character of mankind.”3 The chapter commences a) by arguing in favor of a distinct anthropological trajectory from the nature of identity and action, of who the human being is that runs up and through the complexities of how the human being experiences cruelty. Next, b) an anthropological assessment will be undertaken and identified as a journey of intra-personal self-intensification. Then, c) the narrative of Job, and his cry against cruelty, will be investigated as the paramount personal cry contra cruelty within the Hebrew Scriptures. What happens to Job within this narrative will enable us to locate the artery of self-objectification. Thereafter, five contours of cruelty that transvalue Job’s life will be identified. These five contours are Kampf, Trauma, Excision, ressentiment, and to become an Enigma. Finally, d) we will put our overall assessment to the test in our classic narratives. The supra-narratives of Adam and Cain are chosen to this end. The five contours within the artery of self-objectification are discoverable in these narratives. The chapter will conclude after this correlation with a trajectory toward the topography of the interpersonal artery of the struggle for recognition as the next artery of the ontological fracture of cruelty.

representation is not rhetorical. Public theologians should concentrate “on fostering the kind of social agents capable of envisioning and creating just, truthful, and peaceful societies, and on shaping a cultural climate in which such agents will thrive.” Fully in conversation with Tracy’s notion of ‘revisionist theology,’ public theology is here advanced. See Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 43: “The revisionist model holds that contemporary fundamental Christian theology can best be described as philosophical reflection upon the meanings present in common human experience and language, and upon the meanings present in the Christian fact.” 3 Morgenröhte I: 18. Gordon Graham, Evil and Christian Ethics, 17. “There is no fiercer critic of Christian morality than Nietzsche.” Part of Nietzsche’s biography involves the Christian ‘morality of the herd’ that has stripped humanity of former Aristotelian values. As discussed at the end of the last chapter, Nietzsche’s anti-homiletic style can weaken his argument. And yet, his critique of cruelty in the west is engaging in its exactitude.

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A) Introduction – Seeking a Point of Departure – Topography, Rising-In-Thought, Diving-Down I hate cruelty … as the extreme of all vices. – Michel de Montaigne

We are at an artery of intra-personal cruelty in search of a point of departure.4 We begin by reiterating that the labor of identifying intrapersonal cruelty has not been undertaken, so the trajectory must reveal its route out and through our topos, which means hermeneutic excursions and detours are intended along the way.5 Arche-ology works this way; the best routes are traversed when we know not only what routes are to be resisted, but also what we learn about topography through resistance.6 Ricoeur’s invocation to hear the exegete and listen to the forces that benefit and inhibit the interpretive process is fundamental to topography, resistance, and at last discovery.7 Analogous to those medievalist exegetes who were given the onus of creating glossaries

4

Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 1967, 348. “The beginning is not what one finds first; the point of departure must be reached, it must be won.” At the end of the day we cannot simply return to the conceptual bulwark of the church; public theologians must go out in search of what is lost where concepts are found in our diverse common human language and experience in relation to the classic texts of the Christian faith. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak V: 530. “With many thinkers, the course of their thought as a whole is rigorous and inexorably bold, indeed sometimes cruel toward themselves … they circle around a thing ten times, though in the end they resume their rigorous path. There are rivers with many meanderings and secluded hermitages; there are placed in their course where the river plays hide-and-seek with itself and creates for itself a brief idyll, with islands, trees, grottos and waterfalls: and then it goes on again, past rocky cliffs and breaking its way through the hardest stone.” [Italics mine]. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenröhte I: 18. Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of Selfhood,” Oneself as Another, 117: “… hermeneutics proves to be a philosophy of detours: the detour by way of analytic philosophy quite simply seems to me to be the one richest in promises and in results.” See also, Ephraim Lessing, “The Education of the Human Race,” Lessing’s Theological Writings, trans. Henry Chadwick, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956), 97. “Go thine inscrutable way, Eternal Providence! Only let me not despair of thee because of this inscrutableness. Let me not despair of thee, even if thy steps appear to me to be going backward. It is not true that the shortest line is always straight.” Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Ed., William Kaufman, (Minneola, New York: Dover Thrift Editions, 1997), 8.60: “In one way an arrow moves, in another way the mind. Yet the mind, both when it cautiously examines its ground and when it is engaged in its inquiry, is nonetheless moving straight ahead and toward its goal.” 6 Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other, 13. “… desiring the truth, however infinitely it evades us, is an act of rebellion and resistance.” 7 See Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, Imagination, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). Chapters one and two.

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after twelve-hundred years of massive literary accumulation, resistance helps us understand what to exclude and why, and what standards justify inclusion.8 We may learn from their efforts by thinking about how one reaches a point of departure and also about what we will resist along our way. We begin now by arguing in favor of a distinct anthropological trajectory from the nature of identity and action, of who the human being is that runs up and through the complexities of how the human being experiences cruelty. B) An Argument for a Distinct Anthropological Trajectory Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. It is a trait that is not known to the higher animals. – Mark Twain, The Lowest Animal

Our humanity precedes our trespass. As the example par excellance, the classic theological topoi of sin and evil are framed anthropologically. Humanity falls into evil and sin, certain features of guilt indwell, the human bad conscience is formed, and soteriological relief (i.e., redemption) is established. Again, these features are cast in anthropological molds due to the assertion that our humanity precedes our trespass; otherwise, who indeed would confront evil, sin, feel guilt, and be offered redemption? Anthropology is always a central preliminary issue. And yet, precisely with regard to anthropology, and in light of our first chapter, we must argue for a distinct anthropological trajectory from the nature of who the human being is that runs up and through the complexities of how the human being experiences cruelty. This anthropological trajectory will prove distinct for three reasons, which we will identify here and clarify in the following pages. These three reasons for anthropological distinctness are i) the topos of cruelty will at first prove to be an incongruent topos with regard to the anthropological and traditional topoi of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ Having once established this incongruence, locating a way back from the topos of cruelty to the

8 The risks of such a venture upon these scholars were onerous, but we may not automatically assume that they were less critically aware of their historical locus than we are of ours today, so we are not in a position of hermeneutic privilege. We have our own darkness, only of a different kind.

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topoi of sin and evil is discoverable; ii) the external traditional teleological structure of Redemption, with its congruent ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil,’ will be resisted with respect to our conclusions from chapter one on the nature of the Ideal (i.e., of Redemption) that may provisionalize human suffering and conceal cruelty, and, iii) in a similar manner, the internal modern teleological structure of the human subject will be resisted where the Ideal of the Self as absolute and self-enclosed (i.e., as a ‘cosmic Self ’) provisionalizes human suffering and conceals the subjective human experience of cruelty. In light of the three reasons for anthropological distinctness, we may later discover that the topos of cruelty is at first incongruent but ultimately not contradictory to a non-teleological understanding of the topoi of sin and evil. Furthermore, we may also rediscover an anthropology where the non-enclosed human subject knows and crafts itself in the creative Delphic sense of chapter one, where the subject dwells aware of itself in a non-provisionalized or unconcealed world of wonder, awe, Angst, and suffering and cruelty. Both of these discoveries could in due course enrich theological conversation about classic conceptualizations of both human subjectivity and redemption. We continue our argument in favor of a distinct anthropological trajectory by clarifying the three reasons for distinctness noted above. i) Cruelty as Distinct from ‘Sin’ and ‘Evil’ We are obliged to explain why cruelty should be considered a topos distinct from those other topoi of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’. We begin our assessment with an unanswered challenge Nietzsche leveled at the western Christian tradition. Nietzsche forecast an anthropological quandary, or logical inversion, where he believed that the topos of cruelty implicated the traditional Christian topoi of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ precisely at the anthropological nouveau. In brief, Nietzsche believed cruelty was a hidden subterranean anthropological feature that smolders underneath the teleological Christian understanding of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ For Nietzsche, if cruelty were revealed to have a hidden status underneath Christian morality, then the entire hermeneutic structure of Christian anthropology would be harmed. The inversion transpires in the following manner: A central binary truth-claim to Christian anthropology is the indisputable moral values of ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness’ that overcome ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ But, if the Christian moral values of ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness’ were often in fact value-inversions of human fear and the hidden perpetration

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of cruelty, then the forces of human consciousness deeper than ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ would inform the very values of ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness’ that were meant to overcome ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ In short, ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ would be trumped by cruelty at the anthropological nouveau, where cruelty was an inexplicable and irrational excess that was concealed both underneath and within the normative Ideals of ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness.’ This being true, the centrality of Christian ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness’ would also be harmed from centrally indisputable to centrally problematic and even deceptive in an anthropological and teleological structure. If Christian ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness’ were centrally problematic or even deceptive in this structure, then ‘sin’ would be problematic as an irreconcilable Christian topos with respect to the teleological Ideal of Redemption. The problematic of the topos of ‘sin,’ along with the centrally problematic nature of ‘love’ and ‘forgiveness,’ would end in a cascade effect. Christian claims to normative meaning and truth for human beings would be constructed upon weakened anthropological pylons, and fall one after another until finally left in an indefensible heap that had been lost to a former subterranean conflagration.9 We can be attentive to Nietzsche’s challenge to a teleological structure of Redemption in the Christian tradition and still not accept the full breadth of his anthropological conclusions, and for good reason. For if our investigation of cruelty has taught us anything thus far, it is that the motivations, intentions, and interpretations of human value are complex. Even Nietzsche’s nineteenth-century anthropology of cruelty reveals its intractable bond to German Romanticism. His phantasmal account of the cruel Semitic slaves desiring to crush the masters with an ingeniously devised inter-generational thirst for revenge ends when the stronger masters, including their advanced values enshrining a ‘will to power,’ are overcome and delivered to the sickly morality (i.e., the very teleological structure of evil, sin, love, and forgiveness) of the Judeo-Christian tradition and its adherents. Like other stories, this one is easy to tell but impossible to believe, even if on the grounds of

9 Nietzsche has not been alone in his critique of the ontology of sin. See Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 239. Ricoeur writes: “With even more reason, original sin, being a rationalization of the second degree, is only a false column. The harm that has been done to souls, during the centuries of Christianity … with later speculations, principally Augustinian, about original sin, will never be adequately told.” For an articulation of total depravity in the Protestant tradition, see Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, at Calvin College (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1986), 2.1–2.

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historic merit. Furthermore, the anthropological complexity would be compounded for Nietzsche where – as Spinoza forecast prior to Nietzsche’s labors – both love and cruelty are often mixed without one being foundational to the other.10 This mixing of love and cruelty is indeed what the sense of tragic existence reveals to us regarding contradiction, inexplicability, and excess – representative of the substance of our tragic sense of life itself. And finally, Nietzsche sometimes imports a hyperbolic language of agency in cruelty underneath ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ that misses the mark of cruelty’s dailiness and draws unnecessarily close to a kind of performable tragedy with cruelty as an antagonist in human life. From our findings in chapter one regarding cruelty’s daily human intransigence, as well as its alignment to a sense of tragic existence (as opposed to performable tragedy), such agency is problematic and is to be resisted. Still, in order to respond to Nietzsche’s aforementioned challenge, and respect the formidable mental acuity of this thinker, our best course is not to reject him offhandedly. If we do not fully accept Nietzsche’s anthropological insights noted above, we are still left with the problems of teleology that he identifies, and how these teleologies impact our understanding of the subject and its intra-personal life and relation. This means we cannot proceed to an accounting of an intra-personal anthropological perspective too quickly. For Nietzsche’s challenge or critique of the teleology of Redemption, along with his critique of the teleology of Socratic scientism in chapter one, must be addressed now or plague our thinking later. In fact, these two essential critiques are synonymous with the above second and third reasons why the topos of cruelty places us on a distinct anthropological trajectory. We are now in a position to examine these essential critiques of the aforementioned ii) external traditional teleology of the Ideal of Redemption, and iii) the internal modern teleology of the Ideal of the enclosed ‘I’ or ‘cosmic Self.’ We therefore first continue our argument for anthropological distinctness in an examination of the external traditional teleological structure of Redemption. Our aim will be to show that this teleological structure, with its implied ontologies of ‘sin’ and

10

Annette C. Baier, “Moralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant,” Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, v. 103, Gerald Dworkin, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 436–457. See also, Spinoza, “Ethics,” Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), 3.38; 540. “Cruelty is what we do to those we love.”

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‘evil,’ should be resisted insofar as its enclosed nature provisionalizes human suffering and conceals the human experience of cruelty. ii) The External Traditional Teleology of Redemption – Cruelty, Sin and Evil In a world riddled by conflict, cruelty, and suffering, a world which seems daily more vexed by these questions, renewed study of Augustine, would seem to be a wise move. – Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition

If we inspect more closely Nietzsche’s challenge above, then we note one of his essential critiques of the western Christian tradition. It is likewise a critique that Nietzsche believed was a harbinger for modern, and what we also often refer to as post-modern, consciousness regarding the so-called “death of the gods.” This critique of the western Christian tradition is its penchant to cast the ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ within the enclosed landscape of a teleological soteriology and its accompanying Ideal of Redemption. The beginning-middle-end of any teleological Ideal of Redemption concludes with the unmitigated salvation of humanity from the sin and evil that burdens it. And yet, as we discussed in chapter one, cruelty is a topos that has been concealed by traditional teleological structures replete with their respective ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ So we are obliged to resist traditional teleological structures of Redemption if we hope to understand cruelty. For the sake of clarity, a way of locating and clarifying an example of a traditional teleological structure of Redemption, with its ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil,’ can be seen by a contemporary theologian’s call for the west to return to such a teleological structure. Charles Mathewes, in his compelling study of Augustine, offers just such a call. Mathewes asks why human beings have difficulty understanding ‘evil’ in the “modern” west.11 Such understanding was clear for Augustine: ‘Evil’ is “always already there, before we act, [which] seems to have a quasi-existence as a power in itself;” this being true, Mathewes queries: “why is it that modernity finds thinking about evil so difficult?”12 Mathewes’ argument assumes that the modern difficulty with evil is not due to evil’s complicating ontological status in a larger teleological structure of Redemption; rather, the problem is that we are 11

Charles T. Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 5. “In a world riddled by conflict, cruelty, and suffering, a world which seems daily more vexed by these questions, renewed study of Augustine, would seem to be a wise move.” 12 Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 97.

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modern, or post-modern. In short, the problem with being modern is that we are at a loss for understanding, not merely evil, but redemption from what we fail to understand. “The answer is simple,” Mathewes continues, “Modernity has a hard time thinking about evil because we moderns lack ways to acknowledge its persistence and pervasiveness, its intimacy and intransigence, so we lack the resources by which we might bring the challenge of evil into reflective focus.”13 And yet, the answer of a modern incapacity is not as simple as Mathewes supposes when we consider that his question of ‘evil’ is itself noetically constructed upon a classic Augustinian conceptualization of sin, redemption, the cosmic-order, and the divine, that may be characterized as not only epistemologically but even paradigmatically problematic to ‘modern,’ but certainly post-modern, worldviews.14 Perhaps the problem rests not in what moderns and post-moderns lack. Rather, many of the neo-Platonic and Plotinian ontologies at the marrow of a classic teleology of Redemption can only be partially realigned to a post-modern epistemological context. If this is true, then try as we might, post-modern consciousness cannot be contorted to view our own age as somehow in “error” of the correctness of these former ontologies. There is something problematic in this notion of ‘error’ that conceals or provisionalizes how the modern and post-modern

13 Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 30. Mathewes names Subjectivism as the usual suspect. Not that there is not good reason, but I cannot help but read in Mathewes’ critique a Weberian pessimism regarding the ideal type of the ‘progressive man’ who finds himself without resources in Weber’s infamous “iron cage.” See Max Weber, General Economic History, (London: Transaction, 1995), Intro, xxv, 366; see also Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, (New York: Scribners, 1905). 14 Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 237. Near the conclusion of his work, Mathewes admits as much, stating that “evil, tragedy, and sin are in their essence our interpretive constructs … It should be admitted, however, that this response is not a ‘solution’ to the problem of evil. But what, we may justly ask, would such a solution look like and who would want it?” The question is not whether one “wants” meaning and truth, but whether what we believe correlates to how we understand our daily existence. Karl Jaspers’ comments also attest to conflicting worldviews. See Jaspers, Philosophy and the World: Selected Essays and Lectures, “For more than a hundred years it has been gradually realized that the history of scores of centuries is drawing to a close.” See also, Mathew Lamb, Solidarity with Victims: Toward a Theology of Social Transformation, (new York: Crossroad, 1982), 70; see also, Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 268–271. In the revolutions of the past century, Tillich takes a trip to western Europe and makes four observations about the current situation – people were living in “Angst, uncertainty, loneliness, and meaninglessness.” The revolution in the European spirit that he is witnessing breaks free in French Existentialism, and it is ultimately Existentialism that will craft the character of the post-modern ‘Self.’

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experiences the world. What is this problematic for the modern and post-modern experience of the world? In truth, our contemporary problem is more difficult than the decrial of a modern incapacity to error, and a call to return to a former teleological structure. The contemporary problem is locatable in what Tracy identifies as a post-modern awareness of “systemic distortion” in human consciousness. “The now classical strategies of Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and feminist criticism are, one and all, exercises in spotting not errors but systemic distortions.” The “systemic distortion” that Tracy notes, does not call us to return to an external traditional teleology of Redemption. Rather, we have to account for such distortion by diving underneath it in order to understand the subterranean forces exhibited in distortion. Tracy calls us out of traditional teleology, not in order to denounce it, but in order to understand. Tracy continues: “We need new strategies to account for and sometimes remove or at least alleviate these unconscious but systemically operative distortions that both plague and fascinate us.”15 Following Tracy’s insight, a legitimate way forward in an anthropological assessment is not to quicken past teleological structures, but to exercise new critical hermeneutic thought or what Tracy calls “critical theories as distinct from traditional theories.”16 Such “critical” thought on the topos of cruelty would require a critical hermeneutic investigation of these ontologies correlated to the equally complex post-modern sensibilities of the post-Cartesian self, the post-Newtonian universe, and the post-Kantian approachability to the divine.17 Next, we must be careful to understand how we identify the terms “modern” and “post-modern” in our historical epoch. For instance, what cannot be underestimated about our epoch and the global implications of cruelty is that, first, we dwell in plurivocity18 where Mathewes’ appeal to the autographs ‘modern’ and ‘post-modern’ only begin to approximate the 15 David Tracy, “Saving from Evil: Salvation and Evil Today,” The Fascination of Evil, ed. David Tracy and Hermann Häring, (London: Orbis Books, 1998), 111–2. 16 Tracy, “Saving From Evil,” 112. 17 Emil Brunner makes an elegant and informative effort at situating modernity’s theological locus in a post-Nietzschean and post-Feuerbachian age. See Brunner, Christianity and Civilization, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), 15–29. 18 To ‘dwell in plurivocity’ is akin to Gordon Graham’s statement regarding world religions. Christianity is “amongst other [religions] in a pluralistic moral sea.” See Gordon Graham, Evil and Christian Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18. By plurivocity I mean a) we must be attentive to a flexible yet limited nature of jargon to describe our contemporary status, and b) more than a “moral sea,” we live

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panoramic differences of human experience at the start of the twentyfirst century. And finally, we dwell as newcomers fresh from the other side of the meta-horrors of the twentieth century, even if we are often emotionally numb to the enduring existential languishment or social ennui of this latter reality.19 But consider for a moment when this western languishment was still raw-shock in the poignancy of remarks by Leonard Woolf, Nichola Chiaromante, or Paul Tillich about life after 1945. In the remarks of Woolf, Chiaromante, and Tillich one can hear the split of incommensurability between worldviews, and the crumbling of former teleological securities, that still characterizes us in our own day: Chiaromante writes, “I remember being totally obsessed by a single thought: we had arrived at humanity’s zero hour and history was senseless … even conservative and religious thinkers, who had long expatiated on the dangers of modern secularism and the original sinfulness of human initiative, were not immune to the feeling that all bets were off, that traditional understandings – of class, community, nation, church, God – were somehow inadequate to the task of coping with the world.”20

in a world where cultural, economic, and social standards of approaching existence, even in how we understand simple phenomena and hallowed objects (and their employment in daily life), can be vastly differentiated, finally c) with the question of authority as a question of legitimacy in our historical context, even the notion of public opinion must be qualified with which public we are referring to. Bearing these three points in mind, plurivocity is that great fulcrum upon which our current historical situation turns. Plurivocity is not akin to an obsession with a “politics of difference [that] encourages a radical fragmentation of civic understanding,” as Lewis S. Mudge writes. Plurivocity is simply the recognition of sameness and difference, fragmentation and correlation, of where we stand in history. See Lewis S. Mudge, “Moral Hospitality for Public Reasoners,” Rethinking the Beloved Community: Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, Social Theory, (New York: University Press of America, 2001), 275–296. 19 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 9, 130. Taylor refers to the competition of new “moral ontologies” when former totalizing lenses of reality have been displaced. In this, Taylor locates a buttress that determines our own historical situation as plurivous. 20 Nichola Chiaromante made these statements in “Albert Camus: In Memorium,” Camus: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed., Germaine Brée, (Englewood Cliffs: PrenticeHall, 1962), as quoted in Jeffrey Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 22. See also, Lamb, Solidarity with Victims, 15. “As Lonergan observes, the age of innocent theory is past. Even if theory never was innocent, at least now we should know how biased theory can be.” See also, Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, 167, 268: “We are in the midst of a world revolution affecting every section of human existence, forcing upon us a new interpretation of life and the world.” And again, “Not only the religious symbols of earlier centuries had lost their power of giving a meaning to life, but also the philosophical and political symbols which were supposed to replace them. So everything was missing which could make an absolute

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A return to Augustine’s ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ as a “profound and dreadful ignorance that produces all the errors that enfold the children of Adam”21 gives itself to a traditional teleological structure of Redemption. And yet, on this side of the twentieth century, Miroslav Volf writes that Augustine’s “evil as ignorance presupposes too much false innocence and generates too many vain hopes. It implies that the corruption of the evildoers is, at the bottom, a noetic stance that needs only proper enlightenment to be overcome.”22 For Woolf, Chiaromante, Tillich, and Volf, a traditional teleological perspective such as Augustine’s is not fully sufficient insofar as it conceals and provisionalizes the ugliness of their experiences. If evil need be noetically realigned, then it must be done in a detour through the overwhelming reality of human trespass, of a complex array of cruelties as a “systemic distortion” that no one expected to have taken such fatalistic historic forms in the past century, and that resist provisionalization and concealment in the present. The views of Mathewes or Chiaromante represent a choice between the post-modern without recourse to the past, or past teleological structures unable to be simply realigned in the present. In either case, Volf exhibits the personal resources to comprehend systemic distortion, but only as classic concepts are reframed by and for his post-modern understanding and attestation to history and experience. Nietzsche criticized the external traditional teleology of Redemption, with its attendant ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ If the Ideal of Redemption provisionalizes and conceals the human experience of cruelty, then the attendant ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ must not be assumed to be immediately congruent with the topos of cruelty. This traditional teleology must be resisted, as many thinkers attested to in their experience of life after 1945. If we recall from chapter one, Nietzsche also widely criticized what can be termed the internal modern teleology of Socratic scientism, or the modern Ideal of the enclosed ‘I’ or ‘cosmic Self.’ Not dissimilar to

claim for surrender and devotion.” Tillich’s next point is that fascism found a ready lacuna to fill, referring to Nazi Germany. 21 The City of God, 13.13–15, 22:22. [Italics mine]. See also books 8, 11–14 and the regime of the passions after the Fall. See also Augustine, De peccatorum meritis et remissione et de baptismo parvulorum ad Marcellinum, II.xvii.26–8. Ignorance and concupiscence is what threatens us as a penalty for the Fall. See also G.R. Evans, Augustine on Evil, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 155. 22 Volf, Exclusion & Embrace, 76. [Italics mine].

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his critique of external teleology, the internal modern Ideal of the absolute and self-enclosed ‘I’ also provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty, and should be resisted. We remember that a critique of the internal modern teleology of the ‘cosmic Self ’ is likewise our third reason for anthropological distinctness. Thus, our third and final step toward an intra-personal anthropological assessment is to identify the problem of the internal modern teleology of the Self, so we are aware of what it is we are resisting. Our aim will be to show that this teleological structure of the enclosed, predictable, fixed, and calculable Ideal of the ‘I’ or ‘cosmic Self,’ should be resisted insofar as its enclosed nature conceals the human subjective experience of cruelty. iii) The Internal Modern Teleology of the Cosmic Self What is the problem with the internal modern teleology of the Self? This cosmic Self is a source of serious languishment in Nietzsche’s writing, where wonder, awe, Angst, and suffering and cruelty are provisionalized and concealed by a self-enclosed Socratic scientism. We are obliged to locate, even briefly through a micro-historical approach, the rise of this modern ‘Self ’ in order to understand it’s raison d’être, and what we resist therein. Popular scholarly blame against the modern penchant toward the internal teleology of an enclosed cosmic ‘Self ’ is typically leveled against Descartes, eventually prompting Jacques Lacan to flatly dismisses this thinker as “that idiot Descartes.”23 But Descartes only assumed a radically self-reflective cogito or ‘self ’, who it is often overlooked, returns to think upon his relation to God once more, not unlike the method of Anselm in his Cur Deus Homo. In truth, the rise of the modern teleology of an enclosed cosmic ‘Self ’ is somewhat more convoluted. Levinas’ identification of this rise offers us assistance. According to Levinas, in the triadic philosophical advancement of the Cartesian cogito, the Kantian Ideal self as the ‘unity of apperception,’24 and Hegelian Absolute Self-Consciousness,25 some philosophical

23 Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. S. Tomaselli, ed. J-A. Miller, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 73. 24 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 258; see also, Kant, “On the Common Saying: ‘This May be True in Theory, But it Does not Apply in Practice,’ ” Political Writings, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 289. 25 G.W.F Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 39–41.

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representation of the human being assumed for this being a pure interiority that synthesizes the world in terms of its own ‘sameness’ – or what Adriaan Peperzak identifies as an “egological totalitarianism.”26 As Jeffrey Isaac shows us, synthesizing the world into a universal and enclosed ‘sameness’ (i.e., ipseity) runs not through Descartes, but primarily from Kant’s broad conceptualization of ‘universal history,’ and the manner in which this conceptualization informed Hegel’s “deification of man” as Absolute, as the one who universally names and categorizes all history.27 Isaac is not alone in his critique. He notes how both Camus and Arendt observed in Hegel the treatment of “a unified, sovereign subjectivity as the outcome of a long, progressive historical development.”28 In Hegelian thought, the Cartesian cogito and Kantian self as a ‘unity of apperception’ become not merely self-contained, but progressively absolute, fixed, and calculable. Analogous to our assessment of external traditional teleology, there is an apt illustration for this internal modern teleology of an enclosed cosmic ‘Self.’ The identification of the internal teleological fault is precisely in this correlation of both ‘pure interiority’ (the Ideal of a subjective Absolute) and the totality of ‘sameness’ (a formalized and enclosed synthesizing dialectic).29 The teleology of the absolute ‘Self ’ resides in the narrative-myth that the ‘Self ’ is in reality a self-enclosed unity as an infinite ‘I’ that remains constant while it simultaneously objectifies the entire world into a calcified sameness. But the ‘Self ’ also resides in this world and is likewise calcified into its own highest object or Icon. The implications for this iconic reign of the Self means that other human

26 Adriaan T. Peperzak, “The significance of Levinas’ Work for Christian Thought,” The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, ed., Jeffrey Bloechl, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 185. 27 Richard Shweder offers the field of cultural psychology a critique of the western anthropological concept, ‘psychic unity,’ a notion that Shweder argues is nonsensical at the level of ‘unity’ as absolutive. See Shweder, Thinking through Cultures: Expeditions in Cultural Psychology, (Cambridge: Harvard, 1991), 23–30. 28 Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion, 81–4; see also, Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” On History, ed., Lewis White Beck, (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 1963), 11–26. 29 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 57; see also Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 42–45. Pure interiority and the totality of sameness are clear in Heidegger’s remarks from “What are Poets For?”, 116. The “unconditional character of mere willing in the sense of purposeful self-assertion in everything … the undisturbed continuing relentlessness of the fury of self-assertion which is resolutely self-reliant. …”

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beings risk the projection of this objectification upon them, but not all objectifications are equal. Other human beings can become objectified idols to the reigning Icon.30 Transforming other human beings into objectified idols is a serious threat, and one that will be assessed in chapters three and four. For now, and returning to Peperzak’s notion of “egological totalitarianism,” when the entire world is synthesized to the ‘sameness’ (i.e., ipseity) of a single perspective, then ‘I’ draw the entire world into myself; contrariwise, ‘differences’ (i.e., alterity) in the world and outside of the ‘I’ or ‘Self ’ risk obliteration.31 The ‘I’ comes to ‘know itself ’ as a first mover, because ‘I’ make the world meaningful and intelligible, and ‘I’ make intelligible what the infinite reveals in the absolutization of everything ‘I’ hear. Ultimately ‘I’ become the impassable speaker and hearer, and even the entire diverse heritage of western logos is hermeneutically crushed into a single word of entitlement – ‘mine.’32 Therein, analogies become meaningless when life is never ‘as’ anything outside oneself, but always literally ‘is’ according to how one categorizes and names the world. No amount of external wonder, awe, Angst, suffering and cruelty – no revelatory import from a far country or fractures underneath – easily penetrate the geographic rind of this arduously designed ‘I’, or what we herein illustrate as the cosmic ‘Self.’33 From the above assessment, what we resist in the internal modern teleology of the subject is its teleological structure as an enclosed, predictable, fixed and calculable cosmic ‘Self.’ In such construction, the human experience of cruelty is provisionalized and concealed where the Self reigns. Cruelty notwithstanding, awe, Angst, suffering, and a sense of tragic existence are likewise concealed.

30 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 56; see also, Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 27. 31 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” The Postmodern God, ed. Graham Ward, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 56. 32 Lewis S. Mudge, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Interpretation,” Rethinking the Beloved Community: Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, Social Theory, (New York: University Press of America, 2001), 275–296. “We are deaf to the Word today. The root of the problem, for Ricoeur, lies in a general loss of sensitivity to symbolic language in modern Western civilization. … We conceive ourselves as authors of our own meaning and being, set in the midst of a world there for us to interrogate, manipulate, control.” 33 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 53; see also Jürgen Moltmann, “Überwindung der Angst,” Gott Kommt und der Mensch wird Frei, (München: Kaiser, 1975), 60. Moltmann marginalizes the relevance of Angst here, which moves quickly to christlicher Theologe’ as rehabilitation.

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chapter two iv) Remarks for Transition

From the beginning of our current section, we have argued in favor of a distinct anthropological trajectory for three reasons: i) the topos of cruelty may be incongruent with the anthropological, traditional topoi of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’; ii) necessary resistance of any form of the external traditional teleological structure of Redemption that provisionalizes the human experience of cruelty; and iii) necessary resistance of the internal modern teleological structure of the human subject where the Ideal of the Self as absolute and self-enclosed (i.e., as a ‘cosmic Self ’) provisionalizes the subjective human experience of cruelty. Correlative to these reasons, we are now in a position to draw important conclusions for an anthropological assessment: i) teleological structures, either internal or external, are to be resisted in our anthropological trajectory because they conceal and provisionalize the human experience of suffering and cruelty, and such concealment and provisionalization disallows us from understanding the nature of identity and action, of who the human being is that runs up and through the complexities of how the human being experiences cruelty; ii) the topos of cruelty is never necessarily congruent nor secondary to the topoi of ‘sin’ or ‘evil,’ and assumptions to this end must be resisted; iii) Finally, we must resist accepting the full breadth of the anthropological conclusions Nietzsche draws regarding the agency of cruelty. In chapter one we never suggested cruelty has agency, as a kind of transcendent winged thing. Quite to the contrary, we remain squarely with our findings in chapter one that cruelty is entrenched within the dailiness of human existence. In its dailiness, we remain in agreement with Etienne Balibar’s insight that cruelty is “concrete, spatial, geographical [and even] geopolitical.”34 34

Etienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” Constellations Volume 8, No. 1, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001)15–29. “Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind political preference for ‘consensus’ and ‘peace,’ not to speak of the implementation of law and order policies on a global scale. This, among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of ‘topography, by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective – for instance taking into account such shifting distinctions as ‘North and South,’ ‘center and periphery,’ ‘this side of the border or across the border,’ ‘global and local,’ etc. – and an abstract, speculative perspective, meaning that the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on different ‘scenes’ or ‘stages,’ which can be pictured as ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ or ‘imaginary’ – but the imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no less determining than the real.”

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C) Introduction – An Anthropological Assessment: Oneself We are now in a position to construct an anthropological assessment of who the human being is that runs up and through the complexities of how the human being experiences cruelty. Three criteria based on the findings from chapter one and our previous section will guide this anthropological assessment. These criteria are: i) we will seek a telosoriented clarification of the human subject. The beginning-middleend of our trajectory will be open to our tragic sense, to wonder, awe, Angst, and suffering and cruelty; next, ii) we will return to Delphi’s Apollonian ‘Know Thyself ’ as the art of crafting oneself, free of the imprint of the ontologies of ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ within the teleology of Redemption. This will be the same conceptual ground of ‘self-knowing’ so important for Athanasius, Cyril of Jerusalem, Augustine, Theresa of Avila and others, that we illustrated in chapter one;35 Finally, iii) we will seek this telos-oriented anthropological assessment in a way that is likewise contiguous with the very heart of Judeo-Christian normative teaching and biblical intra-personal relations within and for oneself. In consideration of these above criteria, our anthropological assessment develops in the following manner: i) Delphi will be rethought in terms of self-knowing between existential limit and existentiell horizon, eluded to in chapter one; next, ii) self-knowledge will be correlated with the Judeo-Christian understanding of love of oneself; then, iii) essential qualities of self-love will be assessed. These qualities include responsibility, care, justice, respect, and dignity; finally iv) a common telos of our daily humanness will be identified in how the human “is here,” or present in itself. Our aim at the conclusion of the anthropological assessment is to identify a single moniker that summarizes intra-personal relation. By moniker we mean a single and simple word or phrase that identifies the complexity of who and how we are as intra-personal subjects, as human beings. The following anthropological assessment hopes to construct a relatively adequate albeit not exhaustive approximation of who and how we are in the world.

35 Augustine, City of God, (London: Penguin Books, 1984), XI.26. For Calvin’s sense of self-knowledge as Sui Notitiam see his Institutes, 1.1–2. Drawing from the Delphic Apollo, Luther likewise states that the Psalms call on one to “know thyself ” and one’s disposition in the world, akin to his sense of “the knowledge of the heart” from The Bondage of the Will. See Martin Luther, “Preface to the Psalms,” Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger, (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 41.

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chapter two i) Post-Modern Delphi – Oneself between Existential Limit and Existentiell Horizon Only attend to yourself, and resolve to be a good man in every act that you do: and remember … look within. Within is the foundation of good, and it will ever bubble up, if you will ever dig. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.58–9.

In an intra-personal anthropological assessment, thought rises toward theology, philosophy, psychology, and literature.36 In the breadth of our historical and intellectual achievements, and when we consider literature from Empedocles to Homer and Prometheus Bound – and more recently from Witi Ihimaera’s post-modern book, The Whale Rider to Costa-Gavras’ wrenching film Der Stellvertreter – then we experience living with a sense of wonder, awe, Angst, and tragic existence.37 In the normal everyday sense of wonder, awe, Angst, and tragic existence, we are always already squarely positioned at the query of what it means to “know oneself ” as a human being, akin to Pascal’s poetics of fellow “reeds in the wind.”38 From the classic to the postmodern preoccupation with knowing oneself before and beyond the Cartesian cogito, we are provided the task of grappling and then attesting to what it means for us to exist, to who and how we are.39

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Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 20. The Whale Rider is a story about a young girl who is in conflict with her community’s traditional myths and recreates the orientation of these myths that galvanize her community toward a reclamation of their heritage. The tragic displacement and reorientation of myth sees the end of the story with her community once again courageously facing the ocean. Gavras’ film, Der Stellvertreter is based on the work of Rolf Hochhuth and follows the life of Kurt Gerstein, a hygiene expert and SS officer who seeks to inform the world of the genocide of the Jews. Gavras aptly depicts the political events that impacted Pope Pius XII and shines an indelible light on the moral and ferociously immoral figures of the day. 38 Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 129. “Like Bloom, [Whitehead] agreed with Goethe that the ability to shudder with awe is the best feature of human beings.” 39 The careful use of the term ‘attestation’ is so crucial to this study that it is here briefly recalled: Angst, wonder, awe, suffering and cruelty all gather at the intersection of attestation. What we commit ourselves to, when we ‘attest’ to something, is to speech about who we are and what we are creating beyond skepticism. In attestation we have already escaped the bounds of a doxological grammar in ‘I believe that,’ and instead our need to create beyond skepticism becomes a grammar of ‘I believe in.’ Every attestation is also a testimony and a prediction, insofar as we ‘attest to’ what we remember, to the memory of who we are, as well as how we experience and understand who we are becoming between existential limit and existentiell horizon. Finally, ‘attesting to’ in the grammar of ‘I believe in’ never reduces Angst, wonder, awe, suffering, or cruelty to a provincial status in our lives. The opposite is true. These features in human life must be respected in testimony that attests toward a transformed future. 37

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Philosophy and theology have described the dynamic way in which the self daily attests to its own identity and action, of who and how it is in the world, where in such attestation the self comes to know itself. As an example of this dynamic way, Charles Taylor writes that the western heritage of consciousness from Augustine (fruitio Dei) to Descartes (Cogito ergo sum) and beyond, is one of “radical reflexivity,” of ‘oneself ’ as interior-oriented, contemplative, and rational.40 As interior, contemplative and rational, Taylor directs us to how other thinkers have long described the dynamics of the self. Philosophers, theologians and psychologists have written about the self existing between the poles of what we identified in chapter one as existential limit and existentiell horizon.41 We recall that ‘existential limit’ is a phrase to represent the questions of one’s existence that limit and define oneself – who am I existing? What shall I do in the world? What do I love and should I love? What does it mean to live and expect death? What will I finally become? ‘Existentiell horizon’ is a phrase to represent the self ’s concern over what is external to it as a horizon of ultimate reality and possibility – Do I respond with belief or faith to the Mysterium that drives me to wonder and awe? Does such mystery require something else of me? With a view to existential limit and existentiell horizon, Hegel described 40 Taylor, Sources of the Self, 130, 137, 141; see also, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, 1985), ii. 54. 41 See Stephen J. Duffy, The Dynamics of Grace: Perspectives in Theological Anthropology, (Collegeville: The Liturgical Press, 1993), 266, 280. Rahner adapts the existential from Heidegger, Kant, and Aquinas, to refer to the “transcendental-anthropological method” (i.e., transcendental Thomism) which investigates the underlying variables of human experience, these being a sense of shared historicity where history is an unfolding and dynamic endowment in which one comes to sense one’s own finitude and the extraordinary horizon of the infinite. Existential limit questions, as those questions that are never fully and descriptively answerable in a given lifetime reflect the complexity of our lives: ‘Who am I as this one?’ ‘What is my responsibility and to what does it mean for me to belong?’ ‘What do I love and should I love?’ ‘What does it mean to live and expect death?’ See Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, trans. William Dych, (New York: Continuum, 1994), 62–63, 75, 182–83. The existentiell, echoing Aquinas, is that ultimate horizon of divinity, of the holy, of ‘God,’ that brings “man in the presence of being in its totality insofar as he finds himself in the world.” By analogy to the existential and existentiell, Pascal wagers that humans live in the immediacy between the partiality of our existential questions that press at the limits of our human capacity to provide descriptive answers, on the one hand, and again in the immediacy of that great disclosure of “nothingness” or the nondisclosure of Being, or what may be called the ultimate horizon, or horizon of the mysterium, on the other. Nicholas of Cusa’s description of the “Wall of Paradise” also serves as an analog, where we reside in the perplexities of our daily existence on this side of finitude, and the wall of our immediacy shrouds the infinite nature beyond. The existential limits and existentiell horizon are essential to this investigation.

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the Absolute always “beside us;” Tillich wrote of the human before the horizon of “ultimate concern;” Freud took issue with the self ’s sense of being caught up in the “oceanic;” Rahner depicted the human preapprehension (i.e., Vorgriff) of the divine and of “being born of the sea;”42 Edward Farley discusses the self ’s sense of “being founded.”43 We know human life and relation is complex, but for both its applicability to classic and post-modern interpretation, we will refer to this dynamic way of self-attestation as transpiring between existential limit and existentiell horizon. ii) Self-Knowledge – Oneself as An Other You must live for your neighbor if you would live for yourself. – Seneca, Ep. 48.2 For just as we should not be cruel to other people’s bodies or trouble them with unjust requirement, so we should not do this to our own bodies either.44 – Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians45

What transpires within identity and action, of who and how we are, between existential limit and existentiell horizon, is precisely where the

42 G.W.F. Hegel, “Introduction,” Phenomenology of Mind. The Absolute is “from the outset in and for itself beside us and [who] wants to be beside us.” Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 22–28. “Nothing that is less than we, nothing that encounters less than the center of our personality, can be of ultimate concern for us.” Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, 406. Reflections of Aquinas – “Man is the mid-point suspended between the world and God, between time and eternity, and this boundary line is the point of his definition and his destiny.” Karl Rahner, Foundations of the Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Idea of Christianity, trans., William V. Dych, (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 22. See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed., James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1962), 64–5; see also, Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed., James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1975) for Freud’s dismissal of what Romain Rolland identified as a sense of the ‘oceanic.’ 43 Edward Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, (Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1990), 146–153; see also Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” The Postmodern God, ed. Graham Ward, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997), 45–73. This idea of being founded is not what the self initiates. The ‘I’ is the formal object of God, and not vice-versa. The ‘I’ does not initially ‘think’ God, but God ‘thinks’ it. Thus, Levinas is able to claim that “the difference between the Infinite and the finite is behind intentionality.”43 44 Luther, M. (1999, c1964). Vol. 27: Luther’s works, vol. 27 : Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 5–6; 1519, Chapters 1–6 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 45 Luther, M. (1999, c1964). Vol. 27: Luther’s works, vol. 27 : Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 5–6; 1519, Chapters 1–6 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House.

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complexity of our lives is experienced in a dynamic journey of selfbecoming. We are never alone along this journey of self-becoming, for even when we are unaware, our lives and society itself are crafted on the attestations of those generations gone before us, and in the bodies of evidence they left behind, which we call classic texts. Such attestations or texts are classic for us insofar as they are meaningful and true to how we experience life between limit and horizon. The JudeoChristian Scriptures are such a compilation of classic attestations or texts, and it is to them that we turn first in order to understand this dynamic journey of self-becoming. Our aim in turning to these texts is to locate a single prevailing text that informs how we normally desire to live between limit and horizon. The Judeo-Christian Scriptures contain a distinct imperative regarding who and how we are within ourselves. At the intra-personal sphere, this imperative takes varying forms throughout both oral and written tradition.46 It was likewise inscribed in Leviticus 19:18 and again in Matthew 22:39. That is, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This imperative and its variations trace back for millennia and function as a communal adhesive and narrative loadstone toward human well-being. The passage of time and the trans-cultural spread of Judeo-Christian values introduced in variation the values of mutuality, patience, equitability, justice, and hospitality in human life and relation, which are substantial features of love toward your neighbor. Particularly due to its adhesive social value, the imperative to love your neighbor “as yourself ” has been foremost interpreted as a concern for the neighbor, whom you love. And yet, this imperative is a simile, or a figure of speech comparing and balancing two separate and singular existents – you as the neighbor. This imperative-simile in fact begins at the daily existential activity and journey of self-knowledge in you, who first loves yourself, whereafter you turn in reciprocation to love your neighbor as you have loved yourself. But we have spoken of self-knowledge, and this imperative-simile speaks to us of love. We spoke of self-knowledge because the imperative to love yourself assumes a simultaneous self-knowing. We could 46 Leviticus 19:18 – ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself;’ Leviticus 19:34 – ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God;’ Matthew 19:19 – ‘Honor your father and mother; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ See also Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27, and Romans 13:9. Gospel of Thomas, 25 – “Love your brother as your soul.”

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say that the age-old adage that you have to know yourself in order to love yourself, is in fact accurate. How does one come to know oneself first? Interestingly enough, in order to know yourself you have to see yourself as an other first. What does this mean? George Bataille reminds us of this truth when he notes that “we do not know ourselves distinctly and clearly until the day we see ourselves from the outside as another.”47 In reflecting on Aquinas’ agent and possible intellects, Rahner similarly writes that “it is only in this differentiation over against another that he is present to himself in knowing selfpossession.”48 Julia Kristeva’s provocative remarks resemble the above: “I expel myself, I spit myself out. I abject myself with the same motion through which ‘I’ claim to establish myself.”49 To reflect upon oneself from the outside, to differentiate or expel oneself, are all ways of expressing how self-knowledge is gained in the ability to step back and self-objectify.50 Self-knowledge requires the ability to self-objectify, which is implicit in our use of the term – intra-personal. An intrapersonal – and not merely personal – knowledge of oneself implies a dynamic and shifting internal activity of self-becoming within the parallaxes of the intra-self.51 47

George Bataille, Theory of Religion, (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 31. Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, 133–34; see also, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, tarns. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 13, 46; see also Martin Buber, “Interrogation of Martin Buber,” Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sydney Rome and Beatrice Rome, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 114 in Donald L. Berry, The Vision of Martin Buber, 43. Buber’s notion of Urdistanzierung (a basis of distanciation) is also critical to the notion of intra-personal distancing, as a kind of “primal distancing” that enables intra-personal becoming in light of one’s own otherness. 49 Jean Graybeal, “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, Kelly Oliver, ed., (London: Routledge, 1993), 34 50 Charles E. Reagan, Paul Ricoeur: His life and his work, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 96. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self, as “reflection by the indirect route of analysis, the determination of selfhood by its contrast with sameness, and a second determination of selfhood through its dialectic with otherness” is behind this notion of the self learning to objectify or distance; see also, Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 46. “Reflection is the appropriation of our effort to exist and our desire to be.” The human ability toward dwelling-distancing-returning owes a great deal to Ricoeur. Attestation of one’s life happens through a detour of self-distancing. Returning to dwell again is never a return to a former sameness (ipseity); rather, distance enables the self to know itself through difference (alterity). 51 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling, Thinking,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 147–161. Heidegger writes of our need to belong to someone or some thing (“zu etwas und irgendjemand gehören”). 48

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To self-objectify is when one distances oneself for a gain in selfknowledge and well-being. The human penchant to objectify, or what Stanley Hauerwas calls “stepping-back,” is essential to how humans dwell-in and belong-to themselves between limit and horizon.52 The need to self-objectify (or to “step-back”) was first introduced in western society in the Greek aspiration toward self-knowledge (i.e., to Know Thyself). Self-knowledge requires a stepping-back by someone ‘who has seen’ (oida), and then ‘brings back together’ (sunienai) what was seen.53 When we self-objectify (see) and return to where we dwell (bring back), we reflect upon our commitments to family, friends and strangers. We consider our loyalties, how we spend time, how we begin and complete projects, and otherwise learn the art of getting-to-knowourselves54 In self-objectifying as an art – of dwelling-in, going out to see, and returning again – we learn what Kant and Hegel refer to as self-respect (i.e., we honor, regard or esteem ourselves).55 But what is the correlation between self-objectifying and self-respect? Self-respect, or to honor and esteem ourselves, is what happens in the act of self-objectifying and returning. When we self-objectify and return to dwell, we are in truth asking after our own identity in our actions, about who we are in how we spend time or begin a project.

But what happens in intra-personal strife where we sense we no longer belong to where we dwell? How the self belongs and dwells in intra-personal relation can sometimes be arduous, at best. We will later discover where cruelty fractures how we belong and dwell in ourselves. I likewise owe a debt to Miroslav Volf, in his correlative language between “distancing” and “belonging.” See Volf, Exclusion & Embrace, 35–55. 52 Stanley Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich” (with David B. Burrell), in The Hauerwas Reader, 216. The dialectic of dwelling-distancing-returning in the following pages is a hermeneutic and constructive response to Gordon Kaufman’s question within the rubric of his constructive theology. Kaufman asks, “How is human flourishing and fulfillment to be understood?” See Kaufman, In The Face of Mystery: A Constructive Theology, (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1993), 42. 53 Jacques Brunschwig et. al. ed., “Epistemology,” Greek Thought, A Guide to Classical Knowledge, trans. Catherine Porter and Dominique Jouhaud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 72–93. Even so, Xenophanes remarked that seeing and bringing back requires “seeking for a long time.” 54 G.W.F Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 72, 104–5, 142, 158, 182, 257. The “actualization of freedom” takes form first with regard to the intra-personal ‘self,’ and progresses for Hegel through family, civil society, and state. The way we think about freedom and commitment in our own plurivous context, is not surprisingly different but certainly correlative to Hegel’s sense. For Respekt in Kant, see Critique of Practical Reason, 258; see also, Kant, On the Common Saying, 289. 55 see Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 39–41. For Hegel, respect is a response to personhood, or for a person’s well-being,

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The identity of who and how we are in the world, is precisely what both philosophers and theologians describe as unique to human beings. For our lodestar, Nietzsche, the artistic or creative Delphic ‘knowing oneself ’ is where we exhibit the freedom to ask who we are in ‘the meaning of all of this.’ In dwelling-in, self-objectifying, and returning-to ourselves, we learn about the wonder, awe, and Angst, that rises in all of us.56 Furthermore, both Heidegger and Rahner write that every limit question we pose, and every attempt to hear responses from the horizon, transcends the specificity of the question itself.57 That is, in asking between limit and horizon, we seek to understand not only our question, but the identity of who we are within the question we ask.58 In terms of identity in action, or the who in the how, we are our own existential question after which we query. We are the Question itself.59 Whenever we self-objectify or see, and then return or bring back together, we are the Question we seek to know. Self-knowledge is thus a journey and an art of seeing and bringing back, of self-objectifying and returning to where we dwell, that is critical to how we learn to know ourselves in the world. iii) Self-Love – An Other as Oneself And yet, the imperative-simile to “love … as yourself” draws the self beyond self-knowledge alone. But self-knowledge and to “love … as yourself” are both aspects of a journey and an art toward self-becoming. 56

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt derTragödie, IV[6–14]; BGE V:195, GM I: 14; see also, Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, 129. What is a ‘Person?’ “Personality is that being which has the power of self-determination, or which is free; for to be free means to have power over one’s self. …” 57 The Judeo-Christian scriptural emphasis on ‘hearing’ as understanding is operative in my employment of this word above; see Numbers 24:4 – “The oracle of one who hears the word of God,”; Job 13:1, 42:5 – “My eyes have seen all this, my ears have heard and understood it.”; Psalms 130:1–3, 135:17; Matthew 13:16 – “But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.” 58 Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, 67. Rahner’s notion of Sein ist Erkanntseinkönnen, (being-is-being-able-to-be-known to oneself) is the basis for not only asking existential questions, but being the Questions one asks. In this sense, self-knowledge is correlated to being as a self. 59 Karl Rahner, Grundkurs des Glaubens: Einführung in den Begriff des Christentums, (Freiburg: Herder, 1995), 50. “… it can only be the Question (of Being) as he interprets it himself.” [“… es kann nur die Frage sein, wie er sie selber interpretiert.”], “The personal question of Being is in truth a question of salvation.” [“… die personale Daseinsfrage in Wahrheit eine Heilsfrage ist.”]; see also Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics,” Pathmarks, 93. “… every metaphysical question in each case implicates the questioning Dasein in the question.”

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The imperative-simile of love of self in terms of dwelling-in and belonging-to oneself suggests essential qualities to loving oneself. These qualities sustain and enhance well-being, and can be identified as those rudimentary, central qualities of responsibility, care of oneself, justice for oneself, self-respect, and integrity.60 Indeed the imperativesimile to “love … as yourself” recalls each of these essential qualities in a kind of dynamic intra-personal journey of self-becoming in the interiority of the self where one dwells and belongs between existential limit and existentiell horizon. We turn first to the responsibility of caring for oneself (self-care) as an essential quality to loving oneself. Responsibility and the Art of Care In his Technologies of the Self, Michel Foucault appraises the GrecoRoman notion of self-care as a personal “art of life” (techne tou biou). Techne tou biou is a creative art, where “in the Greco-Roman culture knowledge of oneself appeared as a consequence of taking care of yourself.”61 The balance of self-care was an art representative in GrecoRoman literature and sculpture.62 To take care of oneself (epimelēsthai autou) and thereby gain in self-knowledge, first harkens up something akin to the pristine image of brush to canvas as a sublime Ideal. But the Greco-Roman art of self-care transpires in the turbulent struggle and suffering of oneself.63 With a view to struggle and suffering, Marcus Aurelius also identifies self-care as an “art of life.” But this “art of life … is more like the wrestler’s art than the dancer’s.”64 Images of wrestling 60

The basic principles of jurisprudence, and the notions of personal ‘right,’ are informed by the necessity of care for oneself and others. So necessary was care, Hegel implied that without both intra- and interpersonal care one would be placing the idea of “personhood” in jeopardy. See Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 21–3, 37R, 41R. To “be a person” is not to “do anything against one’s own personality” first, and furthermore to “respect other persons” and not to do anything against “the personality of another” either. 61 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed., Joseph Pearson, (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2001), 23, 97. The ‘art of life’ is a ‘techne tou biou,’ or the technologies of understanding the ‘self ’ is a ‘taking care’ as a form of creative art; see also, Foucault, “Philosophy and the Death of God,” Religion and Culture, (New York: Routledge, 1999), 85. 62 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, 22. Taking care of oneself was necessary art for a measured existence in personal and civic life; see also, Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 205 and “On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory,” Practical Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 289. 63 Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 19–28. “Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more interested in … the history of how an individual acts upon himself, in the technology of the self.” See also, Rahner, Spirit in the World, 67. 64 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.61.

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within oneself, of pushing oneself down and then rising again, appear at first somehow contradictory to the idea of an art of self-care. What is suggestive in Aurelius’ observation of life as an art that includes wrestling and struggling? Aristotle provides an answer to how self-care coincides with struggle. In his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies human well-being as a form of self-care that is relatively satisfied in happiness, or in what Aristotle calls ‘a good life.’65 Contrariwise, human happiness can always be obliterated by the intention to hurt oneself. And yet, how do we explain when one intends happiness, and yet also simultaneously and intentionally obliterates one’s happiness toward a good life? This last point of intending good but committing harm, was a serious concern for Aristotle. Why is it that human beings, in their impulses toward happiness, actually choose actions contrary to happiness?66 He writes: “There is thought to be a possibility of injustice towards one’s self, because herein it is possible for men to suffer somewhat in contradiction of impulses really their own.”67 To suffer from contradiction, even when one has impulses toward self-care and happiness, suggests that struggle within oneself can exceed one’s own intention of self-care. It is both ironic and tragic that one would contradict oneself and destroy the very object of one’s affection.68 Aristotle concludes that this form of contradiction between human impulse and action, or who and how we are, reveals a “defect” in human character. All we can conclude thus far is that loving “as yourself” can bring about self-knowledge that includes 65 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3–16. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson, (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), xix–xxv; see also, Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations. Edward Farley’s contemporary coinage of the human “elemental passion of subjectivity” is drawn from Aristotle’s Greek sense of a basic desire for happiness, or epithumia. See Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990), 72–5, 99–103. 66 Plato, Protagoras, 352B–353A; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VII. Socrates is the first to argue that “no man can knowingly not do what is best.” But this is of course untrue, so Aristotle inherits this issue in his famous problem of incontinence in human judgment. To suffer in contradiction of impulses one’s own is a mental defect for Aristotle. 67 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.97; [Italics mine]. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 107.1 (1988): 3–17. 68 G.W.F., Hegel, “The Consummate Religion,” Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 447: Hegel’s observation reflects Aristotle’s. Hegel writes, “Human beings are inwardly conscious that in their innermost being they are a contradiction, and have therefore an infinite anguish concerning themselves.”

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both balance and struggle, happiness and self-demolition. Intrapersonal self-care can coincide with something internal to human beings, which simultaneously exceeds self-care. Aristotle calls such excess an “injustice toward one’s self.” But what is the relationship between intra-personal loving “as yourself” and justice? If we understand the relationship between intra-personal love and justice then we might also understand how injustice exceeds who and how we are in the love of self between limit and horizon. Love and Justice In the face of struggle, to ‘take care of oneself ’ means to maintain a concurrent sense of self-love that establishes the presence of justice in one’s life. Ricoeur assesses love and justice through a return to the intermediary of ‘care’ in his essay by the same title, “Love and Justice.”69 Ricoeur begins his assessment with the concept of self-care – and not self-love – due to his concern that the language of self “love” often leads to “sentimental platitudes” that risk transforming a lack of justice into pure pity for oneself. In chapter three, we will see how self-pity can exceed oneself in the Ideal of the consummate self as Victim. In selfpity and the Ideal of the Victim, one may grow to enjoy one’s victimized status and the spectacle of one’s own plight. We will reveal how oneself as Victim transvalues human existence and makes us ugly. For Ricoeur, self-pity is where justice is detoured by cycles of spectacular self-victimization.70 Ricoeur resists sentimentality in a detour through self-care. In Ricoeur’s assessment, self-care is a concern for justice that orientates love.71 Caring-after oneself is a kind of love that seeks justice for oneself. In self-care that seeks justice, we view ourselves as “nonsubstitutable.” Ricoeur reaches his correlation between self-care and our own nonsubstitutability in the manner below. Ricoeur first coins the term ‘solicitude’ to describe self-care as a love that seeks justice. The term ‘solicitude,’ has both an intra- and 69 Paul Ricoeur, “Love and Justice,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, Richard Kearney, ed., (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 23–39. 70 Consider Gandhi’s call to suffering, which is not a call to the self as the Ideal of Victim. The difference is that self-suffering can be a choice to endure and labor toward justice, whereas pity freezes one in the icon of the perpetual victim and selfmartyrdom. See, Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 39, 228. 71 See Aristotle, E.N. 5.1.1129a6–9 – “We see that all men mean by justice that kind of state of character [hexis] which makes people disposed to do [praktikoi] what is just and makes them act justly and wish for what is just.”

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interpersonal application.72 Ricoeur notes in his Gifford Lecture Series that solicitude is to view other persons as irreplaceable, “whereby each person is irreplaceable in our affection and our esteem.” But interpersonal solicitude delivers human beings once more to the irreplaceability of the intra-personal self. Ricoeur continues, “In this respect, it is in experiencing the irreparable loss of the loved other that we learn, through the transfer of the other onto ourselves, the irreplaceable character of our own life.”73 Ricoeur transitions from the inter- to the intrapersonal sphere for good reason. The irreplaceable character of our own lives, our own “nonsubstitutability” while we aim for a ‘good life,’ is always held in tension with others who also seek justice. In self-care, to “love … as yourself” includes a necessary dialectic with justice that includes others.74 This is simply to say that justice to oneself is intractable from justice for others. We are justified in love of self and other, and we love through just acts toward both. For Ricoeur, self-care is to love oneself in justice (i.e., solicitude). Justice reveals how the self is irreplaceable where we do not substitute ourselves. Rather, in a responsible relation to oneself through solicitude, self-care includes the pursuit of justice that renders us “non-substitutable” to ourselves. Given Ricoeur’s assessment, we can now address Aristotle’s earlier concern over intra-personal injustice that harms self-care. Injustice to oneself harms the art of self-care by substituting ourselves for something else that contradicts a good life. Personal injustice is a kind of excess that replaces self-care and substitutes it with an intra-personal trespass. Stated positively, to “love … as yourself” includes justice for oneself through self-care. In chapter three we will assess how intrapersonal injustice trespasses not only oneself, but also the neighbor who you love “as yourself.” Integrity as a Gift Thus far we have suggested that intra-personal “love … as yourself” includes the essential qualities of an art of self-care, responsibility, 72

Paul Ricoeur, “Eighth Study: The Self and the Moral Norm, Oneself as Another, 203–225. 73 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 193. [Italics mine]. 74 Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word, 76, 92. Nonsubstitutability is analogous to Rahner’s notion of the human subject in relation to the existentiell horizon – “Standing before God, the basic attitude of human existence is always at bottom a standing before the free God in the still unfulfilled and incalculable possibilities of divine freedom.” This Vorgriff – of the human being “open for all being” – in relation to the existentiell horizon renders human life nonsubstitutable and of intrinsic worth.

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nonsubstitutability, and justice to oneself.75 Furthermore, in our need to self-objectify or ‘step back’, human beings exhibit an internal responsibility to who and how we are between existential limit and existentiell horizon. Throughout the tensions between limit and horizon, the self comes to respect itself. However, as we know from experience, self-respect is not always earned at a small price to oneself. Selfrespect can be hard fought. But in and through respecting ourselves, an intra-personal boon matures in us; it is a boon we had not fully conceived of. This boon through self-respect underlies Todorov’s simple and personal remark that “I want my actions to find favor in my own eyes.”76 The boon of the eye of the self that “finds favor” through self-respect, reveals a self-searching followed by a self-giving. One finds or gives oneself integrity. Integrity is a gift one gives oneself through self-respect. How do we understand integrity as this boon or gift? The root, integritas, signifies a return to wholeness, completeness, and even restoration in a centered condition amidst the throws and uncertainties of life.77 Integrity is what we experience in the returningto ourselves, to where we dwell. It is the gift we bring home to ourselves upon our returning. Because intra-personal integrity is subjective to our experience, we might employ other terms to identify it, such as Tillich’s sense of the “courage of confidence.”78 In any event, the art of self-care involves self-respect; through respecting oneself integrity is a gift one gives to oneself in dwelling [with integrity] in, and returning [with integrity] to, who and how one is in the world. To exhibit 75 Rahner, Hearer of the Word, (New York: Herder 7 Herder, 1969). The notion of responsibility of the self in relation to the divine is one of the essential conceptual buttresses to Rahner’s theology. What is resisted is the reduction of human responsibility for happiness to Freud’s articulation of a pleasure-principle and accompanying repression. See Sigmund Freud, “Civilization and its Discontents,” in Donald Capps, ed., Freud and Freudians on Religion: A Reader, 64–67. 76 Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 65. To find favor in one’s own eyes, or of not turning light into darkness, is a theme drawn from the Hebrew Scriptures. See Judges 17:6 – to do right in your own eyes. 77 Cheryl A. Stewart, “Integrity in the Priesthood of all Believers,” Theology and the Black Experience: The Lutheran Heritage Interpreted by African & African-American Theologians, ed., Albert Pero and Ambrose Moyo, (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), 170–193. I owe a debt to Stewart’s study of ‘integrity.’ 78 Tillich, The Courage to Be, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 155–90. Reflection of the courage to be is not Tillich’s alone. Lewis S. Mudge writes that through personal divestment, disorientation, and dispossession, the return-to oneself reveals something of the courage in the human desire to be. See Mudge, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Interpretation,” Rethinking the Beloved Community, 109.

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intra-personal integrity is to love oneself amidst the struggles and uncertainties of life, the tragic sense of existence, the frailty of skin and voice, and the wonder, awe, and Angst of living between existential limit and existentiell horizon.79 The need to self-objectify or ‘step back’ between limit and horizon is indispensable to who and how we know and love ourselves in the world. But knowing and loving oneself requires further essential intrapersonal qualities. The responsibility to one’s own self-care, the necessity of justice, self-respect, and the gift of integrity, represent some of these. And yet, it is in the idea of self-becoming between limit and horizon, and in the Greek ‘art of self-care’ that we discover an intrapersonal telos in who and how we are as human beings in the world. iv) An Intra-Personal Telos and Moniker The cry of ‘illusion’ … in the charges of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard alike … [means that] our primary task is not the development of a finely tuned autonomous and sincere rationalism, but the far more difficult task of becoming ‘individuals,’ of becoming a self who realizes his or her own radical limitations and possibilities and yet struggles to become a human being of self-transcending authenticity. – David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order

This intra-personal telos, as an open narrative thread of self-becoming assessed in chapter one, reveals who and how we are in a universe of wonder, awe, Angst, suffering and cruelty. From wonder to cruelty, the self learns how to know and love. But Levinas, Ricoeur, Rahner, and Heidegger have drawn our attention to a kind of self-attestation of this love.80 That is, the self endures as an “I am” being “here” in the world. “Here I am,” between existential limit and existentiell horizon is an attestation in the caches of our finest classic literature where the

79 Rudolf Bernet, “The Encounter with the Stranger: Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the Skin,” The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 43–62. Jean Graybeal, “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, Kelly Oliver, ed., (London: Routledge, 1993), 34; see also Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 192. “The self is constantly engaged in self-production as well as self-dissolution, in both building up and breaking down its ever-evolving identity and in constructing and eroding its own meaning. It is a “strange land of border and otherness ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed.” 80 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 69. See also, Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 14–21.

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intimate intra-personal ‘art of life’ is one of seeking and understanding, loving and respecting, speaking and hearing, giving and receiving, stretching and risking, projecting and becoming, distancing and belonging, excluding and embracing, struggling and finding safe haven that does not conceal wonder and Angst. To “be here” between self-knowing and self-loving, likewise foils a return to the cosmic Self with its closed epistemology and narcissistic sheen. The self knows and loves through a commensurate sense of its own subjectivity, of fragility and strength, suffering and cruelty, and wonder and awe. The human being, in a telos of “being here” as a subject open to the world, is one where self-knowing and self-loving may indeed trump each other through narcissism, but not without harm perpetrated against intra-personal life. There is a further reason why a return to the cosmic Self is antipathic to the intra-personal telos of “being here” between knowing and loving, albeit this reason is also interpersonal in scope. To “love … as yourself ” suggests a similar identification of the other who likewise shares the status of a self-beingthere, or a commensurate humanness in the recognition that ‘you are’ and ‘I am’ “here” together.81 This recognition assumes a mutual and even reciprocal ‘end’ or telos. The attestation of oneself and an other, as a “here I am” and “there you are” in the world, carries within it a sense of responsibility, care, justice, respect, and integrity amidst wonder, awe, Angst, suffering and cruelty.82 The attestation – “I am here” in the midst of life is the common telos that draws us through the world between existential limit and existentiell horizon. Where enclosed teleologies fail, it is no small thing to know and love oneself and attest to one’s existence – “I am here, I endure.” The secondary but no less significant question – “what am I here for?” – calls us toward the journey of understanding who and how we are

81 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 45–73.. “Upon reflection it is something completely astonishing, a responsibility that even extends to the obligation to answer for another’s freedom, to be responsible for his responsibility.” Levinas’ correlation between the intra- and interpersonal spheres of human existence is operative here. The indwelling of responsibility is given by the transcendent and in-finite God, the God that is revealed behind the ‘I,’ that calls for the ‘I’ to respect the proximity of the ‘other’ and claim responsibility for the freedom of the other. 82 Emmanuel Levinas, “God and Philosophy,” 68. Levinas’ attestation of the self is poetically rich, and relevant to the above sense of a bridge between intra- and interpersonal existence – “I am a testimony, or a trace, or the glory of the Infinite, breaking the bad silence.” See also, David Tracy, “Saving from Evil: Salvation and Evil Today,” The Fascination of Evil, 115.

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in existence. If the intra-personal telos is “to be” at all, then the next albeit no less significant truth of this telos is the journey into oneself as a Question. A telos is always reached when it returns us to both the mystery of our beginning and the openness of our finality. Between our beginning and finality we seek responses to our deepest existential questions; through both question and response, our lives are intensified and enriched, but also complicated. In short, between mystery and finality is the journey of a lifetime. The common telos, of a self that attests to its own being and the journey within, is the first telos for who and how we are as human beings in the world. Our aim at the conclusion of this anthropological assessment has been to identify a single moniker that summarizes intra-personal relation. By moniker we meant a single and simple word or phrase that identifies the multiplicity of who and how we are as intra-personal subjects, as human beings. What we discover is that this moniker signifies the intra-personal telos reached above. Tracy writes that the artist undertakes a journey of intensification as a “journey into particularity in all its finitude and all its striving for the infinite.”83 Akin to Nietzsche’s artistic Socrates, and with regard to the Greek understanding of selfunderstanding as an art of life, we identify this moniker as the intimate intra-personal journey of self-intensification.84 The intra-personal journey of self-intensification is made intimate and intense insofar as human beings attest to their identity (who) and action (how) in the world. To know and love oneself is a journey in how we dwell-in and return-to ourselves between limit and horizon. This journey intensifies insofar as it reaches new depths of selfawareness and self-becoming. We hinted at the moniker of a journey of self-intensification when we spoke earlier of self-becoming. But having understood more of this art, the journey of self-intensification is the intra-personal moniker that underlines our anthropology in the world. v) Remarks for Transition Given our above anthropological assessment, our task for the rest of this chapter is to answer a simple question: How does cruelty affect the 83

David Tracy, Analogical Imagination, 125. David Tracy, Analogical Imagination, 125. The artist may well undergo “the journey of intensification into particularity to the point where an originating sense for the fundamental questions and feelings that impel us all … is experienced – and often experienced as some kind of ‘gift’ come unawares.” 84

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human being? To construct a response we have to identify both cruelty and its effect along our way. Our best course is to consider a classic text that a) provides an encounter of cruelty that is still meaningful for us today, b) is able to be re-interpreted through non-teleological lenses, and c) gives us an interpretive and analogical foothold into the effect of cruelty on both the protagonist and on who and how we are in our contemporary historical locus. We will return to search for this classic attestation of cruelty in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. We will locate a narrative that speaks to cruelty, and outline the contours of cruelty as it fractures human beings at the anthropological nouveau. D) The Narrative of Job – The Cry Against Cruelty The narrative of Job is traditionally interpreted in teleological terms of the personal triumph of Faithfulness and Obedience over the supreme test to both through the presence of sin and evil. In the end, Job endures the test, receives once more all that he has lost, and is resurrected as the gleaming sublime Ideal of Faithfulness. In truth, this narrative reeks of cruelty. In fact, in the entirety of the Hebrew Scriptures Job is the first protagonist to both name and identify cruelty! In so doing, Job allows us an analogical foothold into the effect of cruelty upon the intra-personal self. We begin by moving from teleology to telos-orientation, contra-poising two readings of the narrative of Job representative in Charles T. Mathewes and Paul Ricoeur. Mathewes identifies, in his reading of Ricoeur’s Symbolism of Evil, Ricoeur’s position on evil as a “quasi-natural force.” But, Mathewes asks, when evil is a quasi-natural force, then what in Ricoeur’s argument enables us to trust in evil’s defeat? Mathewes’ question is a popular and important theological retort that Ricoeur’s study of evil does not ultimately deal with the “properly theological question,” as Mathewes calls it, of “Christian claims about Christ’s victory over evil and death. …”85 But Mathewes expects an adherence to the external traditional teleological Ideal of Redemption in Ricoeur’s reading of evil, evident in Mathewes suggestion that proper theological questions will pay homage to this Ideal of victory over evil, sin and death. And yet, Ricoeur’s project is telos-oriented in scope. That is, Ricoeur offers

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Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 99.

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a critical investigation of the deep symbolic structures of evil which intentionally halts at the limit of Christian soteriology and eschatology. Still, simply distinguishing between teleological and telos-oriented interpretations does not provide an adequate response to Mathewes’ question.86 We have to explain this distinction by turning with these thinkers to the narrative of Job. A more helpful beginning is to note that the distinction between teleology and telos-orientation in Mathewes and Ricoeur is evident from the ground of their respective exegesis of Job. Mathewes identifies this distinction when he himself writes that Ricoeur is like Job. And Ricoeur is like Job insofar as both Ricoeur and Job register a complaint that is essential yet nevertheless at the end of the day carries a “provisional status,” as a “non-finality” to the resurrection.87 Mathewes’ teleological position purports not merely “Christ’s victory over evil and death,” but a classic and traditional ontology of sin and evil, and their triumphant defeat. Like all teleological positions, this one is a simultaneous provisionalization of Job’s suffering and a concealment of the cruelty Job encounters. Here is the point of contention between teleology and telos-orientation. The former is accused of provisionalizing and concealing human experience, whereas the latter is said to forget the finality of Christ’s Resurrection for human beings. And yet, the Ideal of Resurrection is empty if Job must purchase it by provisionalizing his suffering and concealing (i.e., repressing) the cruelty he endures.88 What kind of Redemption requires the repression of oneself, and how would such redemption ultimately redeem? We recall that a sense of the tragic pervades existence, a position incommensurate with the second, later redaction or ending of the narrative of Job at 42:7. In the second redaction, we see the sun rise on Job and his re-acquirement of life, property, economic stability, family, physical revitalization, and social integrity once more.89 86 Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 99. To his credit, Mathewes’ investigation begins methodologically with a challenge he perceives in Ricoeur’s thought: “Ricoeur is right: Augustinian thinkers have often not fully plumbed the deep reality of evil, but have rather wavered between an optimistic denial of its reality and a pessimistic naturalization of its power.” 87 Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 99. 88 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 29. “Our sensibility … refuses to alleviate hopelessness by false hope based on a fictional plot that would render tolerable the contingency, indifference, and destructiveness we encounter.” 89 Julian of Norwich, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, ed., Edmund Colledge and James Walsch, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies – 35, 1978).

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And yet, through a tragic sense of existence, we relate to Job’s story in who he is and who we are in our identification with his life. Job implicates God in his suffering – “You have become cruel to me; With the might of Your hand You persecute me.” [30.21].90 If we did not identify with the cruelty Job identifies in his own life, then this narrative would not endure for us as a classic. Do we experience life like the second redaction?91 Does our sense of tragic existence – of inexplicability, contradiction, and excess – so quickly dissolve into a return to a sublime Ideal of Faithful Obedience?92 Do we so quickly forget the narrative’s own poignant and irreconcilable tension between both the innocence of Job and the enormity of the cruel trespass that unmakes his world?93 And, is it impossible to exude a resurrection hope and remain faithful without slipping into classic ontological categories that render a sense of tragic existence provisional by marginalizing the reality of suffering and cruelty in daily existence? Our study together wagers a response in the negative to all four above questions. This said, we continue to trust the art of a telos-oriented exegesis of Job. What we discover is how much we have in common with Job. Ricoeur’s project is more in line with the first, earlier redaction or ending of Job at 42:6. In the first redaction, we see the light fade on Job. We witness him alone in dust and ashes. To be a child of God, even the most beloved, is sometimes to take the so-called complaint to its ground. But what is the ground of Job’s complaint? Job has a righteous 90 Job 30:21 – “You have become cruel to me,” the Greek άνελεημóνως means inhospitable, unmerciful, uncharitable, and is usually interpreted as Grausam [cruel] in the German. The Latin Vulgate for this passage is “mutates es mihi in crudelem.” To be inhospitable, unmerciful, uncharitable is interpreted as grausam and crudelem [cruel]. 91 Richard Kuhns asks this question in a manner that resounds Paul to the Corinthians and creates serious questions for the concept of restorative justice. Kuhns writes: “Can we demand of justice that objects be restored just as they were? If the world allows this, then we can feel a joyous expectancy that we once had as children, but gave up as we grew up. 1 Cor. 13:11 – ‘When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.’ The question is then – which ending of Job most closely fits how we live, the first or the second ending? See, Richard Kuhns, Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 113. 92 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 29. Kekes lists other themes of existence made tragic that are likewise noteworthy – indifference, contingency, and destructiveness. 93 F. Forrester Church ed., The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 165–67. Tillich writes: “The state of existence is the state of estrangement. Man is estranged from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself. The transition from essence to existence results in personal guilt and universal tragedy. …”

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character (1:1–5). But through a test he loses all of his possessions in a single day (1:13–22), is afflicted bodily with a disease (2:7b–10), and although in his final soliloquy (31:1–40) Job claims his innocence, he has been earlier rebuked by the entire world. Where elders, chiefs, and princes once revered and envied Job (29:8–10), now he is severed from their hospitality (30:9–13). But what happens to Job changes him so that he hardly recognizes himself. In the end, even his most beloved determines that it is better if Job simply “curse God and die.” Job does not simply curse God and die. Instead, he storms the gates of heaven and levels a complaint against God (30:21) – “You have become cruel to me!” One of the reasons God is cruel is explained in the verse directly prior to his complaint (30:20) – “I cry to you but you do not answer me; you stand off and look at me.” In God’s “standing off,” Job feels he has been made an object, where God has ‘stepped back’ in a manner that neglects and abstracts Job. But this objectification, if we may call it that for now, is excessive, raw, inexplicable, and contradictory to everything Job has known before. Taken together, what Job endures is ugly, not merely because it has made his life hateful to himself, but because what he endures conflicts with every intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional sense of fairness that he has ever known. But it is also ugly because he is so thoroughly changed. Along the lines of objectification, Job endures a number of other infringements upon his life that signify ugliness. These infringements are not singular in scope, but cross throughout this classic narrative. First, Job endures a trauma and subsequent disillusionment (6:1–7:21) from the beginning. When he reflects upon these, he does so with clarity: “Ah, could my anguish but be measured and my calamity laid with it in the scales, They would now outweigh the sands of the Sea!” Second, Job is cut off from everything he values in life. This theme of being cut, severed, or more to the point – excised – from his life is repeated throughout the entire text, such as at 6:4 and 18:4. In the first instance Job exclaims that the “arrows of the Almighty pierce me,” whereas in the second instance his friend rebukes Job – “You who tear yourself in anger.” Third, Job has become not merely removed from his life, but is ostracized and made an enemy by others. Large portions of the narrative account for Job’s slow descent as he becomes an enigma to himself and to the world (30:9–13) – “Yet now they sing of me in mockery; I am become a byword among them. They abhor me, they stand aloof from me, they do not hesitate to spit in my face! … To subvert my paths they rise up; they build their approaches for my ruin. To destroy me, they attack with none to stay them.” Fourth, the narrative of Job is

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an experience in struggle, but this form of struggle boils within him, and then boils-over into his interpersonal relations and into the world. Finally, fifth, something often spoken of indirectly in this narrative is how the mocking crowds, even his own wife and friends, have grown to resent Job. Whereas he had been envied, now he is resented among men, a pitiable sight to be scorned. Given the above brief expiation on the ugliness in Job’s life, not merely how but why would we wish to interpret Job through the lenses of sublime Redemption? In so doing, we save Job only provisionally, for the truth of Job is where we identify with his world that rises from within the narrative and places us in the trajectory of his life. Job is sharply aware of his tragic vulnerability, of the inexplicable and excessive nature of the surrounding events that are contradicting his sense of an ordered universe, and of his own mind confused in a “darkening counsel” within a world that has come to this. “You have become cruel to me,” is a complaint flush with Job’s awareness of the spiritual, psychical, and physical elements, the reality of trespass and neglect despite his innocence. We know he is aware of these things because Job does not relent, but attests “I am here,” or I endure, even with a sense of wonder, awe, Angst, and tragic existence. His own self-attestation is combined with an awareness of befallen cruelties that animates his nerve to approach the existentiell horizon, the throne of God, and offer his life as a Question. Despite the whirlwind of multiple cruelties that Job endures, his profound personal value of justice and hope for meaning are not destroyed. Indeed, what animates Job is precisely his valuation of justice and a genuine hope, not for a sublime Ideal, but for assurance and understanding. Job hopes to understand why his life has become a train wreck. Job also exhibits a faith that he will receive a divine response. When he receives a divine lesson in geology, the answer is delivered in a detour – the tragic sense of existence and cruel realities that make us ugly are part and parcel of existence, and sometimes reasons are not forthcoming. It is in this light that Job repents in dust and ashes where he is reoriented toward the intimate and singular, thinned but unbreakable, telos that drew him out.94 The beautiful and sublime Faithful Servant is here contra-poised with another Job of faithfulness, who is aware of 94 Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, 285. The notion of the indescribable is essential for Ricoeur. Mathewes conclusion that “evil cannot be thought” because, as Augustinian privation, it is “totally hollow” delivers his entire argument over to the Resurrection, where the tragic is provisionalized; see Mathewes, Evil and the

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cruelty, values justice, who hopes for understanding, and who never relents – “I am here, I remain” as a testimony to all he is and has become. The qualitative difference between these two interpretations is an attestation of human suffering that is not provisionalized, and an attestation to personal cruelty that is not concealed. i) Remarks for Transition The narrative of Job offers us the first account in the Hebrew Scriptures of a protagonist naming and identifying cruelty. Job complains that he has been made an object through neglect and abstraction; it is in being made an object that Job himself locates what is transpiring in his life. We noted earlier that the uninvestigated topos of cruelty is distinct, albeit not necessarily separate from the non-teleological topoi of sin and evil. In the above reading we see how cruelty, attested to by Job himself, is a legitimate optic or lens for interpreting this narrative. Where the teleological agency of sin and evil are problematic, the cruelty Job endures is something with which we can identify and understand. In chapter one, and for the heuristic purposes of comprehending the topos of cruelty, we referred to cruelty as a fracture that harms human beings in three spheres of existence, these being intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional. We likewise noted that each of these spheres correlates to cruelty like arteries within a larger fracture. Taking our lead from Job, the first artery of cruelty correlative to the intrapersonal sphere is the artery of objectification. We note forthwith that “objectification” is qualitatively different from the human need to “selfobjectify,” which we outlined in our anthropological assessment. This qualitative difference is principally one of excess, something we will discuss below. For now, our task is to identify cruelty in the intrapersonal sphere through the artery of objectification. Our task is to understand the artery of objectification, which will include an assessment of those other aforementioned five

Augustinian Tradition, 237; see also, Job: “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know;” see also C.G. Jung, Answer to Job, (New York: Princeton University Press, 1958), 13, 108. See also Ulrich Simon, Pity and Terror: Christianity and Tragedy, (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 41. God calls Job out of human life as “fragmentary,” and reintroduces him to wonder and awe through a view to “the beginnings of the universe, to the vast cosmic order of interweaving forces. … Wonder and awe fill the soul at what we now call nature.”

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infringements in the Job narrative that signify ugliness in how the intra-personal self encounters cruelty. These infringements, like contours within the artery of objectification, are here preliminarily identified as trauma, excision, to become an enigma, internal struggle, and envy/resentment. Our ultimate task is thus not merely to clarify the artery of objectification, but also explain the nature of the five contours within this artery. We continue with our first task, which is to clarify the artery of objectification within the greater fracture of cruelty. E) The Artery of Intra-Personal Objectification The artery of objectification is correlative to the intra-personal sphere. We need to find a way to make this assertion meaningful and true for us. One way of meeting this task is to trust the theological insights in the attestations or texts, and from the classic theologians themselves, gone before us. If we return to such classic texts and classic theologians, and if we are furthermore correct about objectification, then we will be able to identify and clarify objectification through the rigor of their efforts gone before. Along our way, our single criterion will be to follow both texts and classic theologians on their own terms in order to locate the conceptual ground of objectification. Furthermore, our single aim in this effort will be to clarify objectification so we are in a position to next explain the aforementioned five contours within this artery. We will choose the texts of two classic theologians, Augustine and the German Reformer, Martin Luther. We choose these theologians due to their influence on both traditional catholic and evangelical protestant interpretations of the human subject, and how such influence is implicit to western consciousness. Both Augustine and Luther identified how sin and evil affected human beings. It may at first seem ironic that we would choose to locate an artery of cruelty in a correlation with sin and evil, since we have earlier called for a distinction between these three. And yet, all along we never asserted that ‘distinction’ implied a paradigmatic ‘separation,’ only that the topos of cruelty must be first considered alone in its identification from evil and sin. This last point is important to our current endeavor. We will follow the trace of sin and evil to where both Augustine and Luther located these on a common conceptual ground. On this same ground we will both identify and clarify the artery of objectification as something distinct

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from sin and evil. We begin first by following the trace with Augustine through sin and evil. i) Augustine – Evil, Sin, and Perversion According to Augustine, ‘evil’ (malum) falls into two categories: First, evil is an ontological privation of both being and goodness, as an ontological shortcoming or absence of being in human existence through the heritage of the Fall.95 This form of evil is “totally hollow,” as Mathewes states the case, like an ontological black hole that threatens being human with non-being.96 Augustine’s second category of evil is complex in how it affects the dailiness of human self-trespass, and is rooted in a) the human act of the ‘will,’ b) how the ‘will’ turned inward is a self-destructive love, and c) how this self-destructive love perverts the human relation to the Imago Dei by transforming both subject and God into objects of utility. Augustine often writes of the Imago Dei as that most intimate illuminative thread of being ‘light in a world,’ of divine and human relation that is analogous to what has been already stated about the existentiell as the ultimate horizon, or representative in Tillich’s notion of ‘ultimate concern.’97 Augustine writes: I sought for the origin of evil … I ranged before the eyes of my mind the whole creation. And I made one great mass of God’s Creation … I made it huge … And I saw You, Lord, in every part containing and penetrating it, Yourself altogether infinite: As if Your Being were a sea, infinite and immeasurable everywhere, though still only a sea: and within it there were

95 Augustine, City of God, 13.1–16; see also Gerard O’Daly, Augustine’s City of God: A Reader’s Guide, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 150. 96 Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition, 6–7; Augustine, City of God, 13.5.7. 97 Paul Tillich, Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 22–28. “Nothing that is less than we, nothing that encounters less than the center of our personality, can be of ultimate concern for us.” See also, Madach Imre, The Tragedy of Man, trans. Thomas R. Mark, (New York: Columbia, 1989). Capturing the essence of Augustine’s thought on both the Imago Dei and sin, Madach writes that Adam and Eve are “late beams of light out of Eden.” See also, Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, 406. Reflections of Aquinas – “Man is the midpoint suspended between the world and God, between time and eternity, and this boundary line is the point of his definition and his destiny.” See also Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, ed., James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1962), 64–5; see also, Freud, The Future of an Illusion, ed., James Strachey, (New York: Norton, 1975) for Freud’s assessment of what Romain Rolland identified as a sense of the ‘oceanic.’

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some mighty but not infinite sponge, and that sponge filled in every part with the immeasurable sea.98

The human relation to the Imago Dei becomes distorted in the parallaxes of the ‘will,’ and Augustine enlists an entire cadre of terms to clearly render the active and paradigmatic quality of this loss of relation – perversus, perversitas, aversio, defectio, lapsus, deformitas, deviare, infirmare.99 Of his strongest critiques, Augustine assesses how perversus, as a turning-in (In curvatum se) of the human being, is when the human will exhibits a disordered motion of self-love.100 Through self-destructive love, one’s relation to the Imago Dei is perverted in the “enjoyment” of an object of utility in sky, earth, and sea, as an end in itself that skews this essential relation to the divine.101 The expression of disordered love for an object is in fact an expression of evil. Such expression is “to do evil” since it is to “go away from discipline” or to exceed the measure of a life formerly aligned by the Imago Dei prior to the Fall.102 Perversus, as an excess of measure in selflove that contradicts the human relation to the Imago Dei, is not static but cumulative.103 That is, self-destructive love devolves the daily 98 Augustine, Confessions, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1.1, 7.5, 23. [Italics mine]. The post-modern distinction on the other side of Augustine is illustrated by Hans Blumenberg and in light of the reflection of Montaigne, Pascal, and Nietzsche upon the notion of an oceanic. “The skeptic’s abstention, which Montaigne had expressed through the image of remaining in the harbor, is in Pascal’s view not an option. The metaphorics of embarkation includes the suggestion that living means already being on the high seas, where there is no outcome other than being saved or going down, and no possibility of abstention. Pascal, whom Nietzsche for this reason saw as the ‘only logical Christian,’ excluded the thought of simple self-preservation, which does not seek the absolute raising of the stake, the infinite gain.” See Hans Blumenberg, Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor of Existence, trans. Steven Rendall, (London: MIT Press, 1997), 19. 99 G.R. Evans, Augustine On Evil, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 95. 100 Augustine, Confessions, 9.1: “The nub of the problem was to reject my own will and to desire yours.” 101 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 1.3, 21, 37; for the proper ordering and disordering of love as caritas and cupiditas, see Confessions 4.13, 18, 2.9, 13.10. 102 Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, I.ii.3.6; De Vera Religione, Xxi 41; xxii 43; xxxiii. 62; xxxiv. 63. 103 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.4–10. What does it mean to enjoy an ‘other’ or oneself? One thing is certain, for Augustine it must never be in contradiction to one’s relation to the Imago Dei; see also, Augustine, Confessions, 4.7–9. The treatment of uti and frui is fundamental to Augustine’s understanding of healthy ‘love.’ What is at issue in Augustine’s second category of ‘evil’ is how a self-asserted ‘will’ reaches an excess akin to Plato’s sense in the Republic X of “wrong doing [as] an offence against measure.”

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activities of human beings through further concentric degradations, like rifts on windswept sand into which one has poured one’s soul and cannot ascend out again alone.104 Perversus is thus a contradiction that cumulatively devolves into self-destructive love. The devolution of self-destructive love is what Augustine has in mind in the notion of concupiscence, or irreversible human pride, as an active “perverse desire of height, a wish to seem our own origin, an over-blown selflove” where we become existentially lost without a clear sense of the existentiell Imago Dei in us.105 Augustine states that due to the Fall into evil “the whole human race has been condemned in its first origin, this life itself … bears witness by the host of cruel ills with which it is filled.”106 The “cruel ill,” as an act of the will from self-destructive love that has forsaken measure, is first and foremost an intra-personal offence against oneself, insofar as such ‘cruel ill’ “consists of actions that harm the soul and impair its prospects for salvation.”107 This “profound and dreadful ignorance that produces all the errors that enfold the children of Adam” is self-reflexive “because it is committed by a person against his own soul [and] is not related to interpersonal violence.”108 The self-destructive love “of so many vain and hurtful things … produce gnawing cares, disquiet, griefs, fears, wild joys, quarrels, lawsuits, wars, treasons, angers, hatreds, deceit, flattery, fraud, theft, robbery, perfidy, pride, ambition, envy, murders, parricides, cruelty … [that] spring from the root of error and misplaced love which is born with every son of Adam.”109 104 Marthinus Versfeld, A Guide to the City of God, (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1958), 65. See also Augustine, City of God, xiv.27; xii.8. The quasi-Originistic notion of ‘evil’ as perversus is where “things [are not] bad in themselves, but our defection is bad because it is against the order of nature to sink from the higher to the lower.” Augustine, Confessions, 4..8. 105 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.13–15; see also, Versfeld, A Guide to the City of God, 88. 106 Augustine, City of God, 22:22; see also, Baraz, Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, (New York: Cornell University Press, 2003), 16. [Italics mine]. 107 Baraz, Medieval Cruelty, 16, 21, 24. [Italics mine]. Baraz assesses how Aquinas is concerned “only with the subjective psychology of the topic [cruelty]” in the latter’s Summa Theologica, 2.2.159. This may be true, but Aquinas’ insight reflected in the etymological study of chapter one must also be given credence. 108 Augustine, City of God, 22:22. [Italics mine]. See also Baraz, Medieval Cruelty, 16. “Cruelty figures only marginally in Augustine’s writings … Augustine’s passing remarks on the subject indicate that, for him, cruelty is primarily spiritual, not physical. Physical cruelty is natural to man in his fallen state; the sons of Adam are born with it after the Fall.” 109 Augustine, City of God, 22:22. [Italics mine].

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Before we assess Augustine’s thought, we will turn to our second theologian and set of classic texts. Suffice here to say that all of these above “vain and hurtful things” spring from a disordered self-love of oneself as an object. ii) Luther – Evil, Sin, Pretension Martin Luther’s interpretation of evil, sin, and the Imago Dei are supremely locatable in his Lectures on Genesis. After the flashpoint of creation out of the prima materia two analogies predominate – the external world as a house constructed by the divine,110 and the anthropological image of the clay to the Potter.111 The image of the Potter upon the clay, or the Imago Dei psychologized by Luther as an “enlightened reason, true knowledge of God, and a most sincere desire to love God and the neighbor” is delivered with an alarming caveat – “This is my image, by which you are living, just as God lives. If you sin, you will lose this image, and you will die.”112 What is under threat is the unreserved loss of the “ocean of knowledge and wisdom” given and administered by divine grace.113 Luther determines sin as a lack of obedience due to human pretension, as the Imago Dei eclipsed by the gradual and finally consuming presence of a will that makes itself its own highest object. The will becomes its own highest object through pretentiousness. And pretentiousness is the subtle, initial willful assent of the mind away from the will of God and reordered according to its own contrivances.114 The 110 Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis,” Luther’s Works, American Edition, 55 vols., ed. T. Tappert and H. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press), 1.73. (Hereafter, LW) “The heaven I have prepared as a roof; the earth is the flooring; the animals – with all the appointments of the earth, the sea, and the air … Moreover he [man] is to have knowledge of God. … Nothing is lacking;” see also, LW, 1.6–7, 1.36. “Thus He makes a superb beginning with the foundations and the roof of his house.” 111 Martin Luther, LW, 1.6–7, 82. “Until our death and in the grave we remain the clay of this Potter.” Prima Materia for Luther is “the primal sludge” as the universal stuff of ‘matter.’ 112 Martin Luther, LW, 1.63; see also LW 51, 57, Sermons at Leipzig & Erfurt 1519, 1521. 113 Martin Luther, LW 1.120. An interesting parallel is found in LW 51.39, Two Lenten Sermons, 1518, where Luther describes original sin as a paradoxical blindness to God and simultaneous opening of the eyes to the alienating disposition of tragic existence. 114 Martin Luther, LW, 1.147, 155, 159; see also Martin Luther, “Preface to Romans,” Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1962), 22. For a brief history of sin as assent, see Jeremy Cohen, “Original Sin as the Evil Inclination,” The Harvard Theological Review, (Connecticut: Harvard University, 1980), 501.

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turning away from relation to the divine and toward oneself is articulated in typical Luther fashion as a shift of the will from the ‘word’ of God to the object of its own ‘word.’ The ensuing states of psychological degradation borne by sin roam voraciously through the “leprous” effect upon mind, memory, and will until the former “ocean of knowledge and wisdom” in human consciousness crumbles, and the relation to the Imago Dei becomes veiled and inaccessible behind currents of conjecture and shadow.115 If the death fruit of sin is its existential degradation and existentiell disconnection, then Luther writes of the human march through ‘shamed hiddenness’ and into an excuse and defense of sin in the plea of innocent suffering. The near end-effect of sin is when the ‘word’ of the human will becomes the human subject’s highest object to the extent that the creator becomes despotic as the “author of human flight”: “This is the last step of sin, to insult God and to charge Him with being the originator of sin.”116 The end-effect is what, in reference to Luther, Chardin writes is humanity’s enduring “historical amnesia.”117 In a turn to the metaphor of the house, Luther writes that after the Fall, and like its progenitors, the descendents of Adam live and toil in dilapidated structures in a storm of Angst where “when they hear the creaking of a beam, they are afraid that the entire house may collapse.”118 This Angst is menacing; it is the fear of death and the dread of future damnation that is affixed to consciousness by the “Law of God” that confronts the ‘word’ of the human ‘will’ with a bad conscience, where the human bad conscience is the tantamount sign of singular damnation without grace.119 In a final appeal to the second metaphor of the Potter, without grace the bad conscience is only capable of, albeit negatively, imprinting upon the clay that it was ever formed at all.120 To be human without grace is to daily disintegrate even in one’s memory of the relation to the Imago Dei, a disintegration that induces 115 Martin Luther, LW 1.61, 120. Original knowledge “gradually became fainter … and has almost been blotted out. See also LW, 51.114 and Two Sermons at Weimar, 1522. 116 Martin Luther, LW, 1.143, 163, 175–9, 221, 266–7; see Dillenberger, Pagan Servitude of the Church, 302–3. 117 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man, ed., J. Chetany, (New Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1978), 16; see also LW, 1.35. For ‘sin’ as ‘forgetfulness’ see the corollaries in Ten Sermons on the Catechism, 1528. 118 Martin Luther, LW, 1.170. 119 Martin Luther, LW, 1.173–6; Dillenberger, Freedom of a Christian, 57. 120 Martin Luther, LW, 1.128, 51.39, Two Lenten Sermons, 1518.

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a simultaneous increase in depravity and the sense that one has become utterly tragic, even homeless in oneself.121 iii) Assessment – Objectification This language about utility and ‘the object’ for both Augustine and Luther is foundational to how human life finds itself abstracted, neglected, and removed from its true relation with God. For Augustine, the will turned inward in self-destructive love damages its relation to the Imago Dei where an ‘object’ is excessively desired and “enjoyed” as an end in itself, and where therein disorder is an excess in measure and discipline that is characterized by concupiscence.122 ‘Cruel ills’ – as radically intra-personal in the interiority of individual existence – thereafter consist in actions that self-reflexively chip away at oneself or “harm the soul.”123 The Fall, self-destructive love as concupiscence, resultant actions and ‘cruel ills’ denigrate the human relation to the Imago Dei, a degeneration that simultaneously makes the individual soul perverse, ushering forth further cycles of self-destructive concupiscence. Note that for Augustine the degeneration of self-love produces perversion. For Luther, the pretense behind self-destructive love of an object is further internalized and radicalized so that the desired object becomes the ‘will’ itself. The will hears its own word, exists in shamed hiddenness, seeks excuse, becomes “leprous,” confounds its own substance and tears down houses. All the while the self feels a throbbing Angst until comprehension of the loss of its true nature and its concurrent relation to the divine become only a matter of conjecture and shadow.124 Note that for Luther, human pretension produces the degeneration of self-love. For both Augustine and Luther, to treat oneself as an object is located in perversion and pretension. For Luther, human pretension produces the degeneration of self-love, whereas for Augustine the degeneration of self-love produces perversion. Whether pretension first or perversion

121 Martin Buber, “What is Man?,” Between Man and Man, (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 126, Buber identified out time as an “epoch of homelessness.” 122 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.3, 21, 37; Augustine, Confessions 4.13, 18, 2.9, 13.10; see also De Libero Arbitrio, I.ii.3.6, and De Vera Religione, Xxi 41; xxii 43; xxxiii. 62; xxxiv. 63. 123 Augustine, City of God, 22:22. 124 Martin Luther, LW 1.61, 120; 51.114 and Two Sermons at Weimar, 1522.

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last, both theologians are concerned with the conceptual ground of why and how it is that human beings treat not only themselves, but God and neighbor, as objects. In order to make sense of this human penchant, both Augustine and Luther turn to the narrative of the Fall of mankind, and the infusion of sin and evil into the world. This infusion of sin and evil is the very ground upon which the tradition has constructed a teleological and enclosed interpretation, not merely of the fallen human subject, but of reconciliation and redemption in light of the fall. We have resisted this teleological advance. We can also now glimpse how the hermeneutics of reconciliation must account for excess that is not readily enclosed in the traditional teleological topoi of sin and evil. Reconciliation that does not address the disfiguring ugliness of human cruelty, may offer a possibility for resolve to the enclosed theoretics of sin and evil, but it will miss the nature of daily human excess that desperately requires our attention. We resist the teleological advance of sin and evil enough to investigate once more the conceptual ground to which Augustine and Luther were drawn. Our preliminary question is this – What is so ugly and even treacherous about treating oneself, God, and others as objects?125 The disfiguring ugliness rests in how treating as an object (i.e., objectification) is an excess where we are implicated, and that blows apart the 125

This question is not hypothetical to our own age. Behind his critique of modern technocracy, is the later Heidegger being adamant about the deteriorative effect of selfobjectification. “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 147–161. Contrariwise, how we belong-to, as ‘zu etwas und irgendjemand gehören,’ is what it means to ‘dwell-well’ in ourselves and the world. For Heidegger, this art of belonging is compromised in our technocratic age of the object. See also, Tracy, Analogical Imagination, 30, and the abuse of ‘instrumental rationality.’ As true for Lamb that the “human sciences … treat humanity as made in the image of its own mechanized products,” as for Rorty regarding literature where one cannot “find inspirational value in a text at the same time that you are viewing it as the product of a mechanism of cultural production.” See Lamb, Solidarity with Victims, 15; Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 133. Both thinkers likewise owe a debt to Heidegger’s investigation and coinage of the technocratic. See also Paul Tillich, “The End of the Protestant Era?” The Protestant Era, 222–259. “The latent and potential disintegration which lies at the roots of modern industrial society becomes a tremendous actuality.” See also Tillich’s foundational study, The Spiritual Situation in our Technical Society, J. Mark Thomas ed., (Macon: Mercer, 1988). The abuse of technology in a technocratic age is not lost at the Hague either – see C.G. Weeramantry, “chapter six: The Problem of Appropriate Technology,” Justice Without Frontiers: Protecting Human Rights in the Age of Technology, v. 2, (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1998. See also, Paul Ricoeur, “The Antinomy of Human Reality,” The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), 33. “Human life is in danger of forgetting or of losing its goal by reason of the indeterminate character of

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interior existential machinations of the subject, one’s relation to the existentiell horizon (i.e., the Imago Dei), and a sense of mutuality, care, justice, respect, integrity and reciprocity between human beings who share in the Imago Dei. Whereas the human need to ‘step back’ and self-objectify is necessary in order to know oneself, to treat oneself as an object (i.e., self-objectification) is an excess where we transvalue love, justice, respect, and integrity in us until we, others, and the world are horribly changed and reduced. Human relation can be shattered. What is ugly about objectification as an artery of cruelty? Through our non-recognition of how we transform life into an object of death, our complicity in choosing to objectify ourselves and other human beings, and our uncanny ability to rationalize objectifying others through an appeal to Ideals that make it more palatable for us, we become ugly. We may seek revenge in the name of Justice, exclusion can be pursued through a rhetoric of Inclusion, or resentment may be concealed and active in expressions of Love. In all of these, our shared telos with others – of being there – is changed and reduced. Likewise, values such as justice, inclusion, and love become contradicted, changed, and reduced where others become mere objects for us. Human life is harmed. When the excess of objectification encounters human life, a lack of recognition, our complicity, and the complex nature of transvaluation, produce an ugliness in us. As an illustration of objectification, Job’s complaint is still meaningful and true for us today because, in stark contrast to his innocence, we see Job neglected and abstracted insofar as he has become an object in a cosmic tournament of good and evil. Our sense of tragic existence in the narrative of Job is precisely where innocence and objectification are placed on top of one another. The tragic sense grows in us when we perceive how inexplicable and excessive such treatment becomes for both Job and for us who read and identify with this narrative. Job complains that God is neglecting him. God stands off and does not assist Job in the pain he is experiencing. Job experiences himself as an object being utilized without a clear reason why. At least the reader knows a cosmic tournament is afoot. Job is fully in the dark, and he names this darkness, “cruelty.”

the threefold demand where the self searches for itself; and the strange thing sometimes happens, that the more our action becomes precise and even technical, the more its goals become remote and elusive.”

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Through our examination of Augustine and Luther, we have located the conceptual ground of treating oneself and others as an object, or objectification. We witnessed objectification in Job’s complaint to God who was “standing back,” and neglecting or abstracting Job. If objectification is our first artery in the greater fracture of cruelty, then we have to be able to identify the overlapping infringements (like contours in the artery) that make objectification so ugly. This ugliness is what we become when cruelty transvalues human life and relation, as a transvaluation that makes us ugly to ourselves. We recall that Job became ugly to himself, to the point of despising himself. We identified five infringements that Job endured. For heuristic purposes, these infringements operate like overlapping contours within the artery of objectification. Once we assess these five contours, then we will know more about how the artery of objectification transvalues our lives. Our task is thus: i) to assess each of the five contours of cruelty; next ii) we will show how each of these contours transvalues life and makes us ugly; and finally, iii) we will end by assessing the narratives of Adam and Cain in order to demonstrate how objectification is operative within these narratives. We begin first with an assessment of each of the five contours of cruelty, these being struggle, trauma, becoming an enigma, excision, and ressentiment. F) Five Contours in the Artery of Self-Objectification On Psychical Cruelty: All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses – Here is sickness. – Nietzsche, GM II: 18, 22. Naming a motive is not just naming a habit, however widespread. It is accounting for its appeal. … We can only do it by mentioning tastes whose roots are present in all of us – cruelty, the love of spectacle. …. – Margaret Midgley, Wickedness

i) Struggle Although I am blameless, I have no concern for myself; I despise my own life. – Job 9:21 Angry passions rise to cruelty [and] form the most detested of all vices. – David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature

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The first contour of cruelty within the artery of objectification is ‘struggle.’126 By struggle we do not mean the daily necessity of selfdifferentiation between dwelling-in and belonging-to oneself. Rather, we mean an excess where to ‘self-objectify’ gives way to objectification within oneself. We may not recognize it, but remain complicit in transvaluation that will change and reduce self-care into an irresolvable struggle. The pre-Socratic philosopher, Empedocles, wrote that human beings live in the tension between love and strife. But by the contour of struggle, we mean a particular kind of excess where intra-personal love is denigrated, changed and reduced within the excess of strife.127 Such change happens in an excess of struggle that, as Job attests above, can transvalue well-being into despising oneself. Our task is to clarify this excessive struggle. What is the form of struggle that exceeds love, even into despising oneself? And, how are we changed by this excess? In the gospel of Luke, Jesus remarks: “Your eye is the lamp of your body, when your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness.”128 Light, as a symbol for well-being, can be changed into darkness, a symbol for brokenness, and this happens through the unsound “eye.”129 The eye here operates as a symbol for the internal activity of the self. Does this verse assume a human internal propensity to change light into dark, and well-being into brokenness, through an unsound “eye”? Freud thought so, and he referred to this propensity as Bemächtigungstrieb, or the drive to dominate, that he witnessed “most clearly at work in the cruelty of children.”130 Freud’s signification of this drive to dominate, or to get to the bottom of a situation no matter the intra-personal cost, begins to uncover for us the human propensity for producing intra-personal strife in excess within us.

126 See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 5.97, for an interpretation of struggle that informs the above contour. 127 The point is that strife can transvalue love. See J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, 27. “Man as a warrior is only partly a man, yet, fatefully enough, this aspect of him is capable of transforming the whole.” 128 Luke 11:33–37. Darkness is a classic symbol for an irresolvable internal struggle. Augustine named self-destitution of this kind as an otherness that “lies at the bottom of the self.” The symbol of intra-personal darkness is also at the crux of St. John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul, (New York: Image Books, 1990), 5.4. 129 Matthew 6:22–23 – ‘But if thine eye be evil … how great is that darkness.’ 130 Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 180.

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This excess of strife is what initiates Job’s reference to a “darkening internal counsel.” And yet, by an excess of strife or struggle in oneself, we must pay attention to the symbol of an unsound “eye” that changes love into strife, and light into darkness. More to the point, by ‘change’ we mean ‘transvaluation.’ In the identification of transvaluation we return to chapter one, and to the heart of why cruelty makes one ugly. What makes the intra-personal self ugly is not an excess of strife by itself, but how this excess contradicts our core values, and our sense of personal justice, into a perpetual internal war. Through transvaluation Job learns to despise his own life, where well-being is transvalued into desperation: “Thou hast so completely stripped me of all my substance, that I am like chaff lifted up by the wind; or as a straw, the sport of every breeze; and at last carried totally away, being dissipated into particles by the continued agitation.”131 Job is “stripped,” objectified or made an object, which is the source of his neglect. It is within objectification that we see the contour of internal struggle grown to an excess that transvalues his well-being into chaff and straw that break and dissipate within the wind. Let us describe what form of excessive struggle we suggest transvalues well-being and makes us ugly. In part, this description has already been attested to by Hegel. Hegel writes in his Phänomenologie des Geistes of a ‘life-and-death struggle’ or a ‘fight-to-the-death’ within the intra-personal self (i.e., self-consciousness).132 Hegel’s terminological choices signify excessive struggle, and how such struggle produces a war within oneself. Hegel employs the nominatives Kampf and Angriff, and the verbs kampfen and angreifen to describe this intra-personal life-and-death struggle. Kampf is not merely a struggle or fight. Rather, Kampf is an “attack” or grabbing-onto oneself (Angriff) that represents a deadly siege, which fragments oneself and breaks open Abgründe

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Job, 9:21. G.W.F. Hegel, “Lordship and Bondage,” Phenomenology of Spirit, trans., A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), § 186. The ‘life-and-death struggle’ (i.e., Kampf zum Tod) is when the goal/object in contention within oneself is “absolute self-certainty upon which each Self-Consciousness must stake its own “life” in the “struggle for recognition.” We accept Hegel’s terminological choices without accepting the hermeneutic lenses of his ‘Master/Slave’ dialectic. See also, Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, ed., Alan Bloom, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969), 31–70. 132

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(fractures) in the course of the battle.133 Kampfen (to-grab-onto) and angreifen (weaken, attack, exhaust), represent the internal activity of this deadly siege where intra-personal division transforms oneself into an object against which one fights. A fracture develops in well-being, precisely where we dwell-in ourselves. The qualities of care, respect, and justice pour into the lacuna, and a deep personal sense of emptiness or homelessness replaces intra-personal integrity.134 Fractures within oneself transvalue care, respect, and justice into de-personalization, humiliation, and finally dis-integration.135 Fractures ultimately dis-integrate well-being within oneself. Abgrund, or fracture, is likewise a term employed by Heidegger to illustrate how an abyss opens in oneself that can produce “the complete absence of ground,” where Abgrund means the loss of integrity to the point of a loss of integration within oneself; fractures open up and can swallow one whole.136 If the above reveals an excess in struggle, then what makes this excess cruel? In chapter one, we discussed contradiction as having two internal forms of transvaluation. At the intra-personal sphere, the first form of transvaluation is when a value such as love-justice (i.e., solicitude) for oneself reaches an excess of obsessive grabbing-onto. The imprint of the original value of solicitude is thereafter crossed through excessive contradiction within oneself. The second form of transvaluation always takes the negative. That is, revenge can be hidden behind a 133 The image of fracture is as old as the narrative of Cain and Abel. Cain attacks his brother with a bone after luring him under a cloak of affection to a discrete corner of their fields, where thereafter the earth swallows Abel’s body in the Abgrund that cracks wide the loss of relation. God says to Cain: “The earth has soaked up your brother’s blood as if it had opened its mouth to receive it when you killed him.” See also, Genesis 4: 10. See also, Meyer Schapiro, “Cain’s Jaw-bone that Did the First Murder,” Art Bulletin (1942). Finally, for Abgrund see Heidegger, What are Poets For?, 92. 134 Edward Farley, Good & Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, 131. Tragic vulnerability that leads to “negation,” is in part what is meant by ‘homelessness.’ Farley also remarks that the ‘tragic’ springs up as “sin’s offspring.” My contention is that sin is a second-order interpretation, a concept as he employs it that is much newer to western thought than terms such as Ricoeur’s ‘pollution,’ or ‘fault.’ 135 Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 100–1. See Levinas’ discussion of disinterestedness and suffering. 136 God says to Cain: “The earth has soaked up your brother’s blood as if it had opened its mouth to receive it when you killed him.” Martin Heidegger, What Are Poets For?, 92.

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mask of solicitude for oneself; pain and umbrage can be concealed behind affection; spitefulness can be secreted within odes to personal well-being. Both forms of contradiction involve complex transvaluations that can make us terribly embittered. But whereas the first form represents a rather linear excess (from solicitude to excessive grabbingonto), the latter is excessive and destructive (from spite to odes of well-being) because the contradiction turns on a fulcrum of selfdeception. Self-deception may be well under the psychological waterline of awareness, and thereby must not derive from intentional normative judgments. Contradiction within intra-personal Kampf is where we have lost our internal orientation of value and our sense of dwelling. We become our own despised object as a wretched in curvatem se, and the nature of intra-personal contradiction may well mean that life becomes irreconcilable, harming and even killing some aspect of intra-personal well-being.137 Through intra-personal transvaluation, panic and a sense of existential diffusion (i.e., homelessness) gather within us through disillusionment and loss, disappointment and solitude, and shame and self-rebuke, until an internal darkening counsel breaks into an intra-personal struggle to get-to-the-bottom of this pain and this life-situation. But it is shame, above all else, that disintegrates the self from-the-inside-out.138 What transpires in cycles of self-defense can endure in an internal regression, dragging oneself down into a battle. The eye becomes unsound and light becomes darkness. Well-being changes to a place of solitude.139 Solitude, when one is alone after love and justice are harmed, makes life forlorn. One may even crawl up into a corner of

137 Proverbs 11.17 – “The merciful man does himself good, But the cruel man does himself harm.” 138 Existential guilt, and how it harms well-being, cannot be underestimated. See Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 83. See also, guilt as analogous to one’s being in Jasper’s “metaphysical guilt,” a trait shared by survivors of extreme social trauma and death. “That I live after such a thing has happened weighs upon me as indelible;” or Levi’s recognition in If Not Now, When? that “being alive isn’t a crime, but we feel it like a crime.” See Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 265. See also Primo Levi, If Not Now, When?, trans. William Weaver, (New York: Penguin, 1986), 295. Levi’s taking of his own life is handled by Todorov and is a testament, even if only partially, to the wrenching character of survivor guilt. Ricoeur’s fault of guilt is associated with sin, but in terms of ressentiment one is not only guilty but becomes guilt in self-loathing. When the self is not guilty for what one does but what one is, then one starts to eat-oneself-upin-guilt. 139 Volf, Exclusion & Embrace, 50.

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consciousness and away from intra-personal strife that draws near whenever old pains are rekindled.140 We can offer further classic examples of excessive struggle that make us ugly. Apart from Job, another classic narrative on cruelty is evident in the life-and-death struggle of Hamlet.141 Even in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, his struggle exceeds well-being into disintegration. Hamlet exclaims: O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on’t! ah fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this!142

Hamlet’s life is fractured, representative in his self-description of melting, thawing, resolving, weariness, staleness, and flatness. Likewise, Hamlet’s sense of the existentiell horizon is transvalued into the God who has fixed his canon against suicide. If we recall Aquinas’ notion of cruelty as rawness correlated to Hamlet’s intra-personal struggle to the death, then we understand Nietzsche’s reference to the cruel self that can become like a “chafing animal that rubs itself raw against the bars of its own cage.”143 Excessive struggle as Kampf has the capacity of transvaluing all that we hold dear in the world, and of making us ugly in ourselves. Throughout, we will employ this term Kampf to signify the excessive struggle within oneself that transvalues well-being and makes us ugly. 140 ‘Crawling up’ has psychological connotations of the return to a state before intrapersonal war, even as an infantile regression. See Anthony Storr, Solitude: A Return to the Self, (New York: Free Press, 1988), 9, 126 141 Further classic examples of Kampf are evident in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Dickens’s account of the French revolution in A Tale of Two Cities, and Joseph Conrad’s trip to the limits of intra-personal struggle in his Heart of Darkness, 142 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1995) 1.2.130–136. Hamlet’s first soliloquy is a reaction that transcends his rage over the marriage of his mother to his uncle. His sense of existence is thwarted and the earth seems a madhouse. 143 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 16, 22. [Italics mine]. Cruelty is also in William Blake’s The Tiger – “Tiger, tiger, burning bright/In the forest of the night/What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”

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chapter two ii) Trauma Ah, could my anguish but be measured and my calamity laid with it in the scales, They would now outweigh the sands of the Sea! – Job 6:1–7, 21 Certainly, morality includes the sphere of chosen actions, but it goes beyond it. … As a preliminary indication of this being so, consider people who habitually cause undeserved harm without choosing to do so. Cruelty due to lifelong brutalization, prevalent prejudices accepted as moral principles, an inability to love, or cowardice masquerading as prudence are often such unchosen failures. – John Kekes, Facing Evil

The second contour of cruelty within the artery of objectification is ‘trauma.’ We will identify how trauma is excessive when it becomes a contagion that contradicts and transvalues intra-personal well-being. Such transvaluation happens, as Job attests above, when a traumatic event can neither be endured nor forgotten. We turn first to the relation between Kampf and trauma. When Kampf exceeds self-care, or when the conflagration of excessive struggle ashens the limit and horizon of the self, then a query after an Urgrund (basis, source, or origination) for why such irresolvable darkness pervades, naturally rises.144 The psychologist, Sue Grand writes that “with or without the conscious intent to destroy, generation after generation mankind has turned against itself in cruelty.”145 We may read Grand’s assertion as self-evident; and yet, this assertion should give us pause. For is unintentional self-inflicted cruelty so universally true that this assertion is indeed self-evident for us? And what are the implications of this assertion of unintentionality, of cruelty without consent, regarding the origin of intra-personal excessive struggle? For instance, sometimes excessive struggle rises after a previous trauma, where an external trauma has crashed into our lives and fractured well-being. Research into the origins and epidemiology of trauma has evolved immeasurably since Pierre Janet first postulated in 1889 the 144 It is this darkened counsel within Job that has brought the crisis of his own struggle to a heightened pitch. 145 Sue Grand, The Reproduction of Evil, 10; Grand continues in her examples of “cruelty” through the generations – “… the familial violations of rape, child abuse, child neglect, and spouse battering; in the anonymity of violent crime; in the mass depredations of war, genocide, racism [may transpire] with or without the conscious intent to destroy.”

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physiological impacts of trauma upon intra-personal well-being. Today, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk is one of the luminaries in clarifying the connectivity between memory and trauma, and the exaction of re-associated trauma onto the physiological attributes and responses of the human subject.146 The hormonal stress response and psychobiological effects of post traumatic stress disorder, for instance, reap havoc on intra-personal memories, which range from disassociated memories to childhood traumatic events, which crowd the unconscious and produce reactions that seriously impede psycho-social health. The language within this section on the nature of intra-personal contagion and struggle due to trauma on the human subject must be read within the backdrop of these immense strides. For instance, Donald Hebb’s work on the limbic system or LM Williams’ studies on the effects of trauma in women years after childhood sexual abuse, are but a few of the cadre of breakthroughs by psychologists and psychiatrists, who have drawn our corporate awareness of trauma to its clearest moment yet. Consider as well Vamik Volkan’s work on how ‘chosen trauma’ is a form of trauma that, displaced from the historical traumatic event(s), becomes psychologized and mythologized into the identity of the agency of the social actor. Volkan, who has done extensive work in holocaust studies, refers to ‘chosen trauma’ for how one large group is victimized by another group. A group does not “choose to be victimized and subsequently lose self-esteem, but it does ‘choose’ to psychologie and mytholgiize – to dwell on – the event.” Both Van der Kolk and Volkan refer to the impact of trauma on memory and psycho-social health. For our purposes in Encountering Cruelty, and thus from the optic of a hermeneutic theologian, the essence of trauma is abbreviated into a determination that intra-personal trauma is a contagion to human well-being. The term ‘contagion’ signifies serious psycho-social effects on both the human being and the human community. Furthermore, reference to human ‘well-being’ includes the entire existential features of being human, which must necessarily include the impacts upon memory, physiological and neural structures, including but not limited to the presentation of physical 146 For timely reference, see especially Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Memory & the Evolving Psychobiology of Post-Traumatic Stress, (Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 1994, 1(5), 253–265; Vamik D. Volkan, Killing in the Name of Identity: A Study of Bloody Conflicts (Charlottesville, VA, Pitchstone Publishers, 2006);

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manifestations (such as auto-immune diseases correlated to childhood trauma). The meta-traumatic events of the 20th century alone can be enumerated from around the world. The account of the starved bodies of a young Armenian mother and her two children in the Arabian desert, or the Rwandan drawings of children that portray decapitations, beheadings, disembowelments, and rape, certainly present intrapersonal and psycho-social trauma upon human beings which cannot be excised, but must be identified and understood in such a way that some grade of health and well-being may return for the living.147 Theologians, like those trained in conflict resolution, do well to understand the depth of the current analyses and trends for understanding trauma, which has certainly illumined the mind of this writer. What’s more, I am suggesting that trauma, as a contour in the artery of intra-personal cruelty, has implications for any cross-cultural study of cruelty. Psychiatrists such as Van der Kolk are providing rich resources and standards for understanding trauma, which have significant bearing on any read of cruelty relative to a specific culture. The truth of the matter is that traumatic events can pierce our lives, and harm well-being and the art of care. As we discussed dearlier, dwelling and belonging become disoriented. A traumatic event can crash in and force us out of intneral sense of dwelling and belonging. The event disorients the furniture of our own dwelling. When we attempt to return we may find ourselves thwarted in how we belong-to ourselves with integrity, or in an integrated fashion. If through and after the traumatic event we do not recognize ourselves, if disillusionment and homelessness bring us to the brink of self-humiliation through excessive struggle without resolve, then the traumatic event has become internalized. Sue Grand identifies the internalization of trauma as “being anchored in a moment of cruelty.” To be “anchored in a moment of cruelty” is when the intra-personal self has become overwhelmed by a traumatic event. The trauma has been internalized. The heft of an anchor symbolizes this internalization. Further symbols include dissipation into the elements, such as wind, sand, earth, and sky. These symbols are attested to in our classic 147 James Nazer Ed., The Armenian Massacre, (New York: T&T Publishing, Inc.) 1970; Richard A. Salem, Ed., Witness to Genocide: The Children of Rwanda, (New York: Friendship Press, 1994). Both are helpful initial albeit graphic expositions of the effects of torture.

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literature, as is the case for both Job and Augustine. Job exclaims how he dissipates, and how his anguish “outweighs the sands of the sea.” Upon the traumatic loss of his childhood friend, Augustine writes in his Confessions how he felt he had “poured his soul into sand.” Heft and dispersion signify the internalization of trauma that exceeds intra-personal well-being. Internalized trauma is an excess, but it makes human life ugly – and certainly unbearable – insofar as this excess becomes a contagion that contradicts and transvalues who and how we desire to be in the world.148 Here we may not recognize the contagion, or how we are made complicit in our own pain, or even how values of wellbeing become slowly transvalued, like intra-personal integrity to disintegration. Internalized trauma is a contagion. A traumatic contagion pierces well-being, disorienting intuitions and convictions. Insofar as internalized trauma is a disorientation of the furniture of our own dwelling where the impact of such trauma reduces our ability to struggle without self-excess, then the traumatic contagion is anchored in a moment of cruelty. Trauma as an internalized contagion can lay at the origin of tremendous and excessive intra-personal struggle.149 Furthermore, trauma that fosters environments rife in irresolvable conflict can be correlated across all three spheres of existence, be they intra-personal, interpersonal, or institutional.150 A traumatic contagion can disorient existence in all three spheres, transvaluing well-being.151 Trauma is ugly in its contradiction and transvaluation of well-being. As a contagion, trauma a) disorients coping mechanisms in the art of care, and b) remains embedded as what can neither be endured nor 148 Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 16. “Thus the interdependence of malevolence and obscuring is an inevitability wherever evil originates in trauma survival. So ubiquitous is this process that it must be named. I refer to it as malignant disassociative contagion.” 149 We become our own unwelcome ‘other,’ and dis-integrate or depersonalize ourselves until Henry Vaughan’s poem, Man, acquires a more exacting meaning – ‘He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where/ He says it is so far that he hath quite forgot how to go there.’ See also the ‘First Mansion’ of Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle, (New York: Doubleday, 1989). Trauma, symbolic of the reptilian creatures, keep her from intra-personal well-being. 150 Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 5. If “evil is an attempt to answer the riddle of catastrophic loneliness,” then loneliness as a sense of one’s own homelessness from oneself and the ‘oceanic,’ is certainly hyper-catastrophic in nature. 151 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 35. Scarry writes of a torture victim who was severely beat with a telephone transformed into a hammer. Such trauma was relived whenever a telephone rang, long after the event and context of the original trauma had subsided.

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forgotten. In terms of what can neither be endured nor forgotten, a traumatic contagion has both bodily and psychological effects. First, with regard to the body, Grand writes that “bodily evidence remains as the living testimonial of the damned.”152 In particular, childhood and adolescent traumas can produce illnesses rife with the imprint of a contagion neither endured nor forgotten.153 Increasing evidence reveals a correlation between autoimmune disorders, even asthma and inflammatory bowel syndrome, which may not develop until well into adulthood. When one holds-everything-in-the-gut, when a traumatic contagion cannot be expunged, then what the mind lacks in resources, what “cannot be borne,” will find quasi-resolve in its externalization upon the body. Second, to the psychological effects of a traumatic contagion that can neither be endured nor forgotten. It is not uncommon for trauma to be rehearsed and repeated.154 One re-experiences the same trauma in a different context – an abusive friend like a former parent, a neglectful partner like the one before.155 The cyclic rehearsal and repetition threatens to transform oneself into a parody. Each rehearsal of a former trauma is an endless parody of similarity. The intra-personal self begins to dissolve underneath. Like a one-act play, every exit-scene reintroduces a similar entrance, where the unconscious return to cruel behavior undermines the conscious attempt to heal.156 As a contagion, trauma can anchor the psyche where one is trapped in a moment of cruelty. But even rehearsal and repetition of a traumatic contagion is an unconscious attempt to overcome cruelty.157 Grand writes, “When 152

Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 37. Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 22. Recalling one of her patients, Grand writes: “His loneliness was familiar, an old state now becoming an intolerable shadow. Professing to know nothing of the Armenian genocide [endured by his mother and aunt], his loneliness was a link to the massacre: to the unknown dead, to the absent selves and absent stories hidden inside his mother and aunt.” 154 Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 7, 121. “Thus, in a myriad of ways, victims return to their tormentors because being misrecognized feels so much more secure than being unrecognized and unknown.” 155 Other works, including Rachel Seiffert’s Die dunkel Kammer, are excellent resources for understanding intra-personal trauma. See, Seiffert, Die dunke Kammer, [Engl. The Dark Room] (München, Econ Ullstein List, 2001). 156 Anthony Storr, Human Destructiveness, 19. “Freud believed that the function of the mental apparatus was to rid the organism of disturbing stimuli, where these impinged upon it from the external world or originated as instinctual tensions from within … as if the sufferer were saying, ‘I will not allow this event to continue to cause me distress. I will get on top of it; I won’t allow it to get me down.” 157 Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 12. “For trauma is met and endured by a psyche that is creative in the exigencies of survival. Under threat of annihilation, the mind 153

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cruelty has collapsed the survivor’s pretraumatic self, rebirth is sought in the emphatic witnessing of the traumatized self.”158 After trauma, the story of how one lost one’s well-being must be told and re-told as a means of reorienting dwelling and belonging again.159 Through the repetition of what Hauerwas calls “the art of autobiography,” at some future time the traumatized self may exit stage-left and discover the parody resolved.160 As we witnessed with respect to the contour of Kampf, a traumatic contagion is also evident in our classic literature.161 Consider Augustine’s autobiographical account of trauma: Augustine’s childhood friend is deathly ill,162 and he chides his friend for having been baptized when the latter was unconscious with fever.163 Both friends had long been amused by Christian converts, so Augustine makes a reasonable choice to lift his friend’s spirits.164 Shocked, Augustine receives a stinging rebuke from his friend: “But he looked at me as if I had been his deadly enemy, and in a burst of independence that startled me warned me that if I wished to continue as his friend I must cease that kind of talk.” The rebuke is met by Augustine with anger, and the confrontation goes unresolved in death: “I postponed of telling him my feelings … within a few days he relapsed into his fever and died. And I was not there.”165 The trauma of death without resolve becomes a contagion. Augustine writes, “My heart was black with grief. Whatever I looked upon was death. My native place was a prison-house, and my home a strange

mobilizes primitive defenses, perceptions, cognitions, and affects in an attempt to mobilize that which cannot be borne.” 158 Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 4, 44. 159 Mudge, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Interpretation,” Rethinking the Beloved Community, 109; see also, Susanne Jacob, Narratio – Die Rolle der Erzählung in Ethikkonzeptionen der Gegenwart: Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre, (Jena: IKS Garamond, 2000), 104–108. 160 Stanley Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich” (with David B. Burrell), in The Hauerwas Reader, 217. 161 Ezra Pound’s poem, Ione, offer another classic glimpse into the trauma of death: “Empty are the ways of this land/Where Ione/Walked once, and now does not walk/ But seems like a person just gone.” 162 Augustine, Confessions, iv. “For he was in a high fever and when he had for a long time lain unconscious in a deathly sweat. …” 163 Augustine, Confessions, iv. “The fever left him and he recovered. As soon as I could speak to him – which was as soon as he could speak to me, for I had not left him and indeed we depended too much upon each other – I began to mock, assuming that he would join me in mocking, the baptism which he had received when he had neither sense nor feeling.” 164 Augustine, Confessions, iv. 165 Augustine, Confessions, iv.

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unhappiness.”166 The trauma dislodges Augustine from well-being, making him homeless in himself: “I remained to myself a place of unhappiness, in which I could not abide, yet from which I could not depart.”167 Grand writes: “Trauma survival is a mutually obscuring relationship between being alive and being dead.” Augustine recounts: “This is the root of our grief when a friend dies, and the blackness of our sorrow … and the feeling as though we were dead because he is dead.”168 Through what could neither be endured nor forgotten, a traumatic contagion transvalues his life. Ultimately, Augustine becomes a stranger and enemy in himself – “I became a great enigma to myself.”169 The contour of trauma makes us ugly when, as a contagion, it contradicts, changes, and reduces (i.e., transvalues) who we are in ourselves. Homeless, alone, and half alive, a traumatic contagion can undermine who and how we are between existential limit and existentiell horizon. We turn now to the third contour of cruelty, as the contour of the enigmatic. iii) To Become an Enigma Yet now they sing of me in mockery; I am become a byword among them. They abhor me, they stand aloof from me, they do not hesitate to spit in my face! … To subvert my paths they rise up; they build their approaches for my ruin. To destroy me, they attack with none to stay them. – Job 30:9–13 What does salt do when it loses its saltiness? – Jesus, Gospel of Matthew

The third contour of cruelty within the artery of objectification is entitled ‘to become an enigma.’ Augustine writes, “I became a great enigma to myself.” As we learned above, whatever else one is as an

166 Augustine, Confessions, iv, vi. “Rightly has a friend been called ‘the half of my soul.’ For I thought of my soul and his soul as one soul in two bodies; and my life was a horror to me because I would not lived halved. And it may be that I feared to die lest thereby he should die wholly whom I had loved so deeply.” 167 Augustine, Confessions, vii. “For where was my heart to flee for refuge from my heart? Whither was I to fly from myself? To what place should I not follow myself? Yet leave my native place I did.” 168 Sue Grand, Reproduction of Evil, 15. Augustine, Confessions, iv, vi, xi. “The more I loved him the more I hated and feared, as the cruelest enemy, that death which had taken him from me.” 169 Augustine, Confessions, iv.

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enigma to oneself, the loss ushers in intra-personal homelessness. Freud’s meaning of the Unheimliche, or literally ‘not-at-home’ within oneself, assists us in a first step toward understanding what it means to become an enigma.170 What Freud means by Unheimliche is a sense of personal estrangement from oneself as homelessness. Estrangement within oneself is a “radical strangeness.”171 The estrangement is radical insofar as the self has the sense that no matter how strange or homeless, there is always also somehow something familiar and ironic about this estrangement and homelessness.172 The sense of ironic familiarity in both being and not being at home in oneself, strikes the self as “uncanny.”173 For Freud, the uncanny sense of both being and not being at home within oneself is part and parcel to human life. In existential terms, Freud reveals how normal daily life includes a feeling of estrangement from oneself. However, the enigmatic does more than emit ironic familiarity. The enigmatic emits an excessive strangeness that is tragic in human existence. To become an enigma emits a double entendre, where the nominative ‘enigma’ implies (beyond estrangement) both the nominatives, stranger and enemy. Through Kampf and a traumatic contagion, oneself as enigmatic first implies a breech from well-being. For instance, Job becomes the stranger and enemy, the enigma, to those who “abhor” him. Still, more than well-being is affected in the double entendre of the enigmatic. This second point is explicated in how Jesus identifies the enigmatic as an excess that contradicts the nucleus of intra-personal identity. He queries, “What does salt do when it loses its saltiness?”174 Insofar as salt was used in offerings to Yhwh as a symbol of the well-being of the covenant with Israel, then Jesus’ query offers startling implications: What happens to intra-personal identity when in and through contradiction one becomes a stranger in oneself?175 A sense of self-complicity in contradiction, change, and transvaluation is built into Jesus’ query. The contradiction to identity is total

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Sigmund Freud, Complete Works, volume 17, 236. Noëlle McAfee, 118. 172 Anna Smith, 27. 173 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 17, James Strachey, ed., (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), 220–25; see also, Julia Kristeva, “Might Not Universality Be … Our own Foreignness?” Freud and Freudians on Religion: A Reader, 327–334. 174 Matthew 5:13. 175 See Leviticus 2:13, Numbers 18:19, and Chronicles 13:5. 171

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otherness (i.e., the accidents of salt that is void of substance), and the transvaluation is how such otherness harms human identity by introducing an excess that makes us ugly. Total otherness is an excess in intra-personal terms, where the identity of oneself is repressed and concealed underneath an autograph of what one is not. One becomes what Job refers to as a “byword,” as something fully other than what one was. Totalizing autographs repress and conceal the identity of the human being underneath. For instance, foreigner, infidel, enemy, and evil-doer, are all autographs where both well-being and identity are estranged from the subject who labors underneath the autograph. The intra-personal paramount example for western literature of self-repression and concealment is evident in the Garden, where Adam cannot escape his own “naked” form. Not unlike the account of Augustine, trauma that produces a deep sense of disillusionment and shame drives Adam from himself, making him a stranger and enemy in his own skin.176 To become an enigma like Adam and Augustine also carries interpersonal and institutional implications. The projection of totalizing autographs upon others can transform them into social and institutional enigmas, a pattern that is as undeniable as it is repetitive in the manifoldness of its varied literary and historical occurrence.177 The singular attestations to identity of others who are concealed underneath totalizing autographs will go unheard, where all kinds of malformation and maliciousness can appear somehow reasonable.178 Only in transforming ourselves and others into enigmas do we often find a rationale for being ugly to one another. It is so easy to find enemies lurking behind every shrub, always prudent ground for shaming

176 In philosophical and socio-economic terms, the enigmatic has been formative in Hegel’s notion of alienation (Entfremdung), early Marx’s concept of alienated labor, and Marcuse’s critique of estrangement from late capitalism. See also Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement, (London: Macmillan Press, 1996), 19; Lucio Colletti, Marxism and Hegel, trans. Lawrence Garner, (London: New Left Books, 1973); Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954), 283. 177 Kant writes of this manifoldness in “Perpetual Peace,” On History, Lewis White Beck, ed., (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 92 – “The state of peace among men living side by side is not the natural state (status naturalis); the natural state is one of war. This does not always mean open hostilities, but at least an unceasing threat of war.” 178 The 1992 documentary film, Baraka [Sufi for ‘essence of life’], shows silent images of other human beings in their native cultures. In our globalizing world, how we understand others without creating strangers and enemies is the challenge of our epoch.

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ourselves and others into enigmas, as a gift which can harm and even annihilate human beings. iv) Excision You who tear yourself in anger. – Job 18:4 They seize their bow and spear; They are cruel and have no mercy; Their voice roars like the sea, And they ride on horses, Arrayed as a man for the battle Against you, O daughter of Zion [Babylon]! – Jeremiah 6:23 and 50:42 A time to tear apart and a time to sew together. – Ecclesiastes 3:7

The fourth contour of cruelty within the artery of objectification is entitled ‘excision.’ Excision is the activity of separating us from ourselves or from others in a way that induces harm, and even destruction and annihilation.179 The activity of excising others usually transpires in a situation of crisis, and is typified through specific symbols that are prevalent and repetitious throughout western classic literature. The symbols include objects that cut, pierce, penetrate, and tear open.180 These objects may include the implements of knife, graving tool, axe, spear, a bitten lip, or a harsh word with a raw condemnation.181 For 179 Paul Ricoeur, “Fragility and Responsibility,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, Richard Kearney, ed., (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 15. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic intersection between fragility, the tragic, and responsibility is influential to understanding the contour of excision. 180 Our lodestar was the first to identify what we above coin as ‘excision.’ See Nietzsche, GM II: 3. Nietzsche refers to “stoning, breaking, piercing with stakes, tearing apart, trampling boiling [and] flaying alive.” At its extreme limit, certainly excision is represented in these symbols, but not only here. Excision is also represented in other more mundane ways not given to a theatre of tragedy, where Nietzsche sometimes strays. In the tragic sense, the spoken word that cuts and tears at ourselves and our relations is also an encounter with the contour of excision within the greater fracture of cruelty. See Storr, Human Aggression, 13. “The intellect is often referred to as if it were a knife or other cutting instrument [where] we sharpen our wits … we bite off more than we can chew” – the bitten lip in suppressed anger, hard bitten criticism and sarcasm, scratching in tooth and nail – “even the tongue is included amongst our aggressive oral armory when we refer to verbal reproof as tongue-lashing.” 181 Ezekiel 5:1 ‘razor,’ Exodus 20:25 ‘engraving tool,’ Ezekiel 26:9 ‘hatchet,’ Exodus 4:25 ‘flint knives,’ Joshua 5:2 the hereb or ‘waster,’ Genesis 22:6 ‘maakeleth – knife for slaughter, Proverbs 23:2 sakkin ‘table knife,’ Ezra 1:9 ta’ar – ‘slaughtering knife for victims of sacrifice,’ Psalms 57:4 – reproach of the tongues of men as a sharp sword. Psalms 117:13 – the piercing tongue of the wicked; Proverbs 23:2 – “Put a knife to your throat if you are a man of great appetite”; see also Romans 14:20, “Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food”; 1 Timothy 6:10 – “For the love of money is a

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instance, at 6:4, Job opines, “For arrows of the Almighty pierce me.” That which pierces is also excising (separating and harming) Job, his relation to others, and his former assumptions about the divine. Regarding how Job internalizes a traumatic contagion, his friend, Bildad, rebukes Job – “You are tearing yourself in anger.”182 And again, Augustine remarks: “For the grief I had pierced so easily and so deep only because I had spilt out my soul upon the sand. …”183 The trauma that Augustine cannot endure or forget excises him from his own life. Recalling our earlier contours, Augustine is traumatized, eventually becomes an enigma to himself, and is separated and harmed (i.e., excised) from himself by a grief that has so fully pierced him. But Job recognizes what is happening to him, and searches himself to see if he is complicit in the cruelty he endures. Nevertheless, what he endures is so contradictory and excessive that he becomes disfigured, changed, and reduced, excised from himself to the point of “despising” his own life: “You are cutting yourself in anger.” In Job we have the tantamount, innocent person under the throws of cruelty, and even here cruelty transvalues self-care into self-abhorrence. Still, Job does not relent. His value of justice remains intact. Examples of excision prevail in western literature, even to the Psalmist who writes at 73:21 that through a “grieving and reddened heart, I was pricked in my veins.” Where Kampf rises (symbolized in the reddened heart), it is possible to harm (prick) oneself, even to separate from oneself. What makes us ugly in the rawness of excision is not that we are pricked, but the harm and separation that can contradict and transvalue human life and relation. If contradiction and transvaluation are not reconciled, then the utmost threat of excision is that some form of psychological, physical, or psycho-social death will occur. We name such death ‘negative transcendence.’ Negative transcendence or death is the extreme limit of excision, something that is evident in both classic literature and contemporary existence. By negative transcendence as an extreme limit we mean the actual falling of human life

root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs”; Matthew 5:29 – “If your right eye makes you stumble, tear it out and throw it from you.” 182 Job 5:2, 8:3–6, 14:18–19, 18:4. 183 Augustine, Confessions, vii. Scandal to the promise of relation: Psalm 149:6 – two-edged swords, Jeremiah 46:16 – oppressive, Psalms 144:10 – painful, 1 Samuel 31:4 and Acts 16:27 – self-destructive, Luke 2:35 – mental affliction, Numbers 21:24 and Joshua 6:21 – destruction of the enemy.

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and relation into an Abgrund, or fracture. It is to this symbol of fracture that Olara Otunna, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Children in Armed Conflict, attested in his description of cruelty. As a fracture, human cruelty swallows people in crises from Abu Ghraib to Sierra Leone, Liberia to Cambodia, the Congo and Uganda to the Sudan. Drawing from his eye-witness accounts in these countries, Otunna stated at the UN: “You live in a harrowing hell, where the earth has opened up beneath you and… you are disappearing in the ground. Nobody out there can rescue you from this situation.”184 When we say that excision is ugly, and far from a hypothetical account, we mean this contour can contradict and transvalue care, love, justice, and integrity without our recognition, or with our complicity; what’s more, such transvaluation can disintegrate human life through falling into negative transcendence or death as into a fracture, where “the earth has opened up beneath you.”185 We can demonstrate the ugliness of excision that leads from separation to the extreme limit of negative transcendence. If we remember our anthropological assessment, and likewise that excision involves crisis, harmful separation, specific symbols, and the extreme limit of negative transcendence or death, then we can illustrate how this contour appears within the artery of objectification and the greater fracture of cruelty. We will assess two classic literary examples below for our demonstration. The first classic literary example of excision is from the Narrative of Abraham and Isaac.186 God asks Abraham where he is, and the father 184

“Role of Religion in Conflict-Torn Areas Explored at NGO Experts Meeting,” One Country, v. 15, Issue 4 (January-March, 2004), 12. Otunna made these remarks in March, 2004, at the UN conference entitled, “Societies in Transition: The Significance of the International Criminal Court in Peace and Reconciliation.” 185 Like the murdered Abel swallowed in fracture, cruelty is as tragic in our classic literature as in the seriousness of Otunna’s statement to the UN. In negative transcendence it is a tragic truism that life can become run-through with inexplicability, where one is not simply alone but abandoned and forsaken by the land of the living. The yearning of Jesus at Matthew 27:46 – “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” (My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?) – meets us in the silence of death. The inexplicability of being buried in an encounter of cruelty must be stared at hard in the face. It was at this extreme limit of an encounter with cruelty that Nietzsche caught the western tradition blinking in a return to both defeatism and triumphalism. His point was that we must learn not to blink, for we can deny and conceal this encounter in ourselves and in our world. But it will wait for us until it is unconcealed in human life and relation once more. Of that we can be certain. 186 See Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: The Social Legacy of Biblical Myth, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 115–19. Delaney offers an in-depth

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of Israel answers: “Here I am” (Gen. 22:1–2) to his Lord. Yhwh immediately commands Abraham: “Take your son, Isaac, whom you love, and offer him as a burnt offering.”187 Abraham obeys. Father and son carry the wood and a knife to the place of Isaac’s sacrifice, but the son is aware that they have brought no sacrificial lamb. His father’s protracted silence and the lack of the beast unnerves the son, and Isaac pines for paternal reassurance (22:7): “Father, am I your son?” This is the second time that Abraham is asked (first by Yhwh, and now by Isaac), about his identity. The subtext, of a paternal “being here” behind Isaac’s question is whether the father and son share a common telos, as “Here I am,” and “There you are” that is bound together in care, respect, love, justice, and integrity. Abraham responds for the second time: “Here I am, my son.” But the command by Yhwh, and Abraham’s Obedience, are already contradicting and transvaluing the father, as well as his relationship to his son and Yhwh. Through an earlier covenant, God had promised Abraham that he will be the father of future generations. Isaac is to be the bearer of this lineage. Abraham is facing an irreconcilable choice due to a monstrous imperative. For on the one hand, if Abraham obeys God and sacrifices his son then he loses his son, and the promise of the covenant of future generations; On the other hand, if Abraham disobeys God and does not sacrifice his son then he loses his relationship with God, and the promise of the covenant of future generations.188 Abraham chooses to obey Yhwh, and to excise his son (and his relationship to his son) into negative transcendence or death. Isaac’s life is only spared when an angel as a Deus ex Machina resolves the narrative quagmire by delivering Isaac from the symbolic implement of excision, the knife. The crisis moment of destructive separation by the father who obeys is not lost on Rembrandt, whose painting, Sacrifice of Isaac, depicts excision and negative transcendence that is halted and frozen on canvas.189 Isaac is the sacrificial lamb, whose chest is exposed and historical assessment from Maimonides and through the middle-ages regarding the reason God put Abraham on trial. 187 Von Rad, Genesis, 234. Abraham took the command and the threat seriously. 188 Von Rad, Genesis, 235. The reader understands something of the “agonies” of Abraham’s pathway. 189 The Sacrifice of Isaac from Genesis 22 hangs alone against an expansive white wall in the Alta Pinakotech Museum in Munich, Germany. The enormity of the work’s size and the position of the viewer below amplify the force of Abraham’s downward thrusting motion as well as the surprising posture of rebuke from the angel. One wonders if Rembrandt identified himself as artist in the seeming moral indignation of the angel.

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vulnerable to his father’s knife. Abraham’s enormous left hand covers his son’s face as a shield that serves to separate both father and son from their intimate relation and a common telos. The heavy brush strokes of Abraham’s left hand also conceal Isaac from the spectator. Isaac’s response, his thoughts and feelings of either betrayal or traumatized silence, and his identity are evaporating into the enigmatic. And yet, it is in Abraham’s eyes and the turn of his shoulders where Rembrandt directs the spectator. There is no doubt; left unchecked the father is going to slaughter the son. Abraham’s determined, furrowed stare that renders Isaac’s flesh opaque, coupled with the forward twisting thrust of his massive torso, bear witness to the fact that Abraham is already plunging the knife downward toward his son’s neck when the angel grabs his wrist and abruptly halts him. What Rembrandt freezes on canvas is obedience exceeding into excision and the cruel loss of human relation, of promise altogether. Abraham is obedient, but obedience can be cruel. Aristotle was aware of the tensions between obedience and cruelty inherent in tragic conflict, and recommended them as the height of dramatic art: “But the tragic incident occurs between those who are near and dear to one another – If, for example, a brother kills, or intends to kill, a brother, a son his father, a mother her son, a son his mother, or any other deed of the kind is done – these are the situations to be looked for by the poet.”190 Our sense of the tragic reveals the machinations of cruelty in this narrative. Analogous to Aristotle’s “poet,” Rembrandt reveals how the collusion of obedience and cruelty is also to be dramatically represented by the artist. A second classic literary example par excellance of excision is found in the Christian Scriptures, in the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus’ life is hemmed in by the contour of excision where Luke presents a narrative life that begins with piercing at birth (2:35) and ends with negative transcendence or death (23:44–48). At 2:35 Mary is told how Jesus’ life will produce a conflict that will “pierce her heart.” This foreshadow of lost relation through death is realized when the symbolic implements of excision scourge and pierce Jesus’ body. Through his death (23:44–48) near “the sixth hour” of Jesus’ execution, light fades and the horizon is darkened. The transvaluation of light into darkness ends when “the curtain of the temple is torn in two” and Jesus

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Aristotle, Poetics, XIV.

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is thereafter “pierced” with a lance as a final symbol of negative transcendence and death.191 Chapter four will further assess this second classic literary example of excision in cruelty at the public execution of Jesus, where cruelty is raw, inexplicable, contradictory, and transvaluative of human life. Chapter four will resist the mystic devotion to blood at the cross. Mystic devotion to blood transvalues Jesus’ public execution from a tragic and cruel event, to the celebration of a performable tragedy. The spectator becomes saturated in the suffering of Jesus, where the horror of shed blood in this narrative is transvalued into a sublime, aesthetic Ideal. v) Ressentiment A stone is heavy and the sand weighty; but a fool’s wrath is heavier than them both. Wrath is cruel, and anger is outrageous; but who is able to stand before envy? – Proverbs 27:3–4

The fifth and final contour of cruelty within the artery of objectification is entitled ‘ressentiment.’ Unlike the previous four contours, the French ressentiment will not permit itself to be directly described as either ‘resentment’ or ‘envy’ for two reasons: First, for semantic reasons the French term and Nietzsche’s employment of this term take on different qualities missing in an English equivalent. Second, ressentiment eludes easy classification because, when it comes to cruelty, this contour always turns on a fulcrum of deception. Consider Job. The mocking crowds may openly resent Job, but ressentiment is evident where Job’s friends and wife approach him through love or kindness. That Job is a sinner, or should “curse God and die,” are not statements evoked from love or kindness. If not from love or kindness, then from where do these statements arise? A first response to this query is clear in Jesus’ metaphor of wine that illustrates how human beings sometimes trespass one another. The accidents of wine may appear to be a gift of replenishment from viewing what Jesus calls “the outside of the cup,” but at the same time the substantive properties “inside of you” can be “full of robbery and wickedness.”192 The accidents will attract, but the substance underneath 191

Luke 23:44–48; see also John 19:24 – ‘tearing the garments of Jesus.’ Luke, 11.39 and Matthew 23.25f. “But the Lord said to them, ‘Now you Pharisees clean the outside of the cup; but inside of you, you are full of robbery and wickedness.” 192

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conceals the “venom of asps.” By association, the appearance of love can be cloaked in a deception, as the venom of an asp. Our task is thus to somehow locate ressentiment in the approach of an asp whose substance is no accident. We cannot describe ressentiment, since through description the ruse of deception may throw us off course. We might identify love and fail to attest to the deception underneath. Our trajectory will reach an understanding of ressentiment, but we will do so through a close assessment of two classic narratives from the Hebrew Scriptures. These narratives, of Adam and Cain, are chosen because they are the supranarratives of human trespass, and because they are still meaningful for us today. Through our exegesis of these narratives, we will have three aims: i) We will locate the first four contours within the artery of objectification, ii) we will reach an adequate understanding of our fifth contour, ressentiment; and finally, iii) at the conclusion of our anthropological assessment, we stated that our task for the remainder of this chapter was to answer a simple question: How does cruelty affect the human being? In order to proceed to chapter three, this task must reach its completion. Assessing what happened to Adam and Cain will bring us to this end. G) The Supra-Narratives of Adam and Cain i) Introduction – What Happened to Adam and Cain? In his assessment of the third chapter of Genesis, Augustine writes that Adam forsook God in a disobedience that transformed the progenitor into “an enigma.”193 Then, positioned in the very next chapter of Genesis is an account of a second Fall. Adam’s first-born son, Cain, becomes an enigma when he slays his brother, Abel. Is it not remarkable that only the first two chapters of the human epoch within the Judeo-Christian Scriptures begin in supreme bliss? Following Adam and Cain, our language has been attesting to the sound and fury of life on Eden’s eastern slope. Human existence and the cosmos can become one hammering and ugly fracture, splitting up and through human relation, and thundering off into the future.194 Our assessment of what happened to Adam 193

Augustine, City of God, 13.15; 22:22. This point is expressed in Gen. 5:29 and the name “Noah,” as the one brought “out of the ground which the Lord cursed [due to Adam and Cain] to bring relief from our work and from the toil of our hands.” 194

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and Cain is not a query after origination. Rather, ours is a concern for the eternal recurrence of the same in us: What happened to Adam and Cain?195 Our assessment of what happened to Adam and Cain could proceed en route through the traditional teleological interpretation of the topos of sin – through the symbolics of a half-eaten apple, a snake, a tree of life, a lost image, and a flaming sword that at last banishes both progenitors and humanity itself from the garden. We resist this route. Through the artery of self-objectification, we remain in the topos of cruelty, which is distinct from the topos of sin as perversion and pretension. How Adam and Cain became objects, and how they objectified others, must include our five contours if we are correct thus far about cruelty. This said, it may also be the case that both progenitors objectified themselves and others for differing reasons. Adam’s so-called “lust of the eye” recorded at Genesis 3:4–7 might be wholly different from what Cain encounters in his own skin.196 We will place ourselves in the hermeneutic world of the first four chapters of Genesis and the bookend narratives of Adam and Cain.197 Rather than begin our assessment with Adam, we turn first to the narrative of Cain, in the hope that the slight chronological distance of the second narrative will aid our understanding of what happened to Adam in the first narrative. This said, our assessment of the narrative of Cain is divided into two sections. The first section will develop an overlooked interpretation of the fundamental storyline. We will then proceed to the narrative of Adam and illustrate which contours of

195 Ricardo J. Quinones studies how violence in the Cain narrative breeds larger social consequences for us today than does the Adam narrative: “The proliferating nature of violence, its capacity to breed a response in its own likeness, may be the basis of something that is irreparable in the theme. For this reason, the children, Cain and Abel, may become more acceptable surrogates than might the first parents.” Accepting Quinones’ assertion, this section will attempt to disclose the violence Cain emits on Abel. See Quinones, The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 15. 196 Genesis 3:4–7. 197 Ricoeur, “Toward a Hermeneutic of the Idea of Revelation,” Harvard Theological Review 70 (1977), 1–38. The notion of “the world before the text,” essential for Ricoeur as to Tracy, is here being employed. Likewise, Whitehead’s method (illustrative in Schüssler Fiorenza’s work) of finding what is “awry” in the text is also employed. See Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), Introduction; “The Ethics of Biblical Interpretation: Decentering Biblical Scholarship,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 107.1 (1988), 3–17.

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cruelty are operative within this narrative. Thereafter, the second section of the narrative of Cain will assess how the contours of cruelty are specifically active within the narrative. In this second section we will locate the nature of ressentiment. ii) The Narrative of Cain – Section I In the same way Cain, too, is filled with resentment when he sees that he is being deprived of the glory of righteousness and grace before God. – Luther, Lectures on Genesis198

The narrative begins – Cain is born the farmer; his brother Abel is born the semi-nomad. Both brothers live in relation for each other’s mutual survival between care of the land and the raising of livestock. “In the course of time” these brothers make an offering to the ‘Lord God’: Cain brings the “fruit of the ground” and Abel brings the best of his flock. God favors Abel. In the narrative we are not given an explicit picture of Cain’s interior reaction, only that the Hebrew reflects that he “burned within him,” or “was very angry” and that “his countenance fell” into a “furious scowl.”199 We immediately assume that Cain feels resentment, fostering feelings of betrayal, offence, hurt, shock, envy, and dismay that come when the first-born does not receive the highest favor. Perhaps these assumptions go without saying.200 In fact, these assumptions could all be accurate and true, but their conclusive status pertaining to what Cain intra-personally endures would amount to partially informed conjecture. For the language of the narrative, particularly the original Hebrew, never once suggests that Cain feels any of this.201 The Hebrew only

198 Luther, M. (1999, c1958). Vol. 1: Luther’s Works, vol. 1 : Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 1–5 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Ge 4:6). Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 199 Genesis 4:5. 200 See also, Ricardo J. Quinones, The Changes of Cain: Violence and the Lost Brother in Cain and Abel Literature, 15. “But the fact that [envy] is endemic to human nature has not kept it from being considered the most repellent of emotions. … One of its qualities is a skulking interiority. Most vices are forward-moving and fairly out-standing; only envy is recessive, betraying a sulking neediness.” “One does not envy someone in the next village. Envy requires physical proximity, and brotherhood can provide the closest of physical relationships.” 201 Storr, Human Destructiveness, 21–22. “Aggression is liable to turn into dangerous violence when it is repressed or disowned [where the result is] to stab one in the back.”

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reflects that anger is written on Cain’s brow.202 Cain “burned within him,” as a kind of self-desolation that is analogous to the cruelty recorded in Isaiah 13:9 – “Behold, the day of the Lord is coming, cruel, with fury and burning anger, to make the land a desolation.” For reasons left imprecise in the narrative, Cain’s existential limits become agitated and his sense of relation to a hostile landlord (or Yhwh as the existentiell horizon) create deep internal strife. Whatever Cain is encountering, it is causing serious intra-personal systemic distortion and sickness in his own self-desolation.203 The narrative slows and forks into a dialogic pendulum between God and Cain, where the hearer or reader is required to take the expected third, the spectator as the living memory of what transpires next. The ominous exchange between God and Cain is hemmed in at four vectors – Cain’s agitation and silence, and God’s awkward reassurance and caveat. The voice of God directs the dialogue with the precise question that the reader hopes to thresh-out; the question is right on point: God asks: “Why are you angry, and why the furious scowl?” This question from God is often interpreted rhetorically, because in the written tradition God awkwardly reassures Cain of his acceptance in the very next verse, seemingly without taking a breath between ‘question’ and ‘reassurance.’ A pause and a breath are lost in this written text. But in the oral tradition, God’s question is so exacting of Cain that it draws a compulsory pause. God asked a question that is probing in its exactitude and requires an answer from Cain … but nothing happens. Between God’s question and his next awkward query of reassurance is the distance of Cain, who remains silent and offers nothing to the question in response.204 In the oral tradition and Cain’s silence, the entire dialogic exchange is caught off-balance; there is a pause and the silence lifts. The imbalance

202 There are Midrashic variants to this narrative where the two brothers are fiercely jealous of one another, or where Cain’s twin sister and Abel’s sisters also become involved. The Midrashic variants allow an interpretation of resentment that is concealed in the Hebrew Scriptures. In this story, resentment is left to the mind of the reader. See Martin Hirschberg, “Er Konnte es noch nicht wissen: Aggadasche und Mystische Texte zu Kain und Abel,” Brudermord: Zum Mythos von Kain und Abel, ed., Joachim Illies, (München: Kösel, 1975),123–55. 203 See Eli Weisel, “Cain and Abel: The First Genocide,” Messengers of God: Biblical Portraits and Legends, trans. Marion Weisel (New York: Random House Publishers, 1976), 37–64. 204 Abel’s Hebrew name is “vapor,” “breath,” or “nothingness.” Cain offers nothing to God’s query as his brother disappears into nothingness.

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is registered in a moment of divine reassurance, but in the awkward and elliptical form of a second question from God about Cain’s acceptance as a further attempt to prod a response from Cain: “If you do well, will you not be accepted?” God has asked another question. Another moment goes by. Cain continues in silence. He does not utter a word. God regains composure and the balance shifts back as the narrative dims and leans in on Cain in a foreshadow. God leans in as well, and delivers a caveat – “And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”205 Whatever Cain encounters in silence and in “not doing well,” God names aloud. Like a hungry animal, sin crouches, desires, and must be mastered. But what is this crouching sin? The narrative does not say. God does not say either, but rather indulges the recesses of Cain’s heart. It is in Cain’s silence of “not doing well” that the non-disclosure pours, vacuous and unreachable. At this point in the narrative, the ‘sin’ that is going to utterly change Cain’s well-being and excise him into the enigmatic remains hidden in Cain, and is consequently concealed from the reader in the narrative. The tempo of the narrative lurches forward without delivering the reader to an interpretive trace that would explain the rationale behind Cain’s intentions. These concealed intentions are too quickly borne in the next deadly act. In language that could not be more perspicuous: “Then Cain said to Abel his brother, ‘Let us go out to the field.’ And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.”206 The narrative shifts once more, and the second God-Cain dialogic exchange begins immediately thereafter. Again, God asks a third direct question that calls Cain to both self-accountability and to a common telos of intimate fraternal relation: “Where is your brother Abel?”207 Nothing is mentioned of Cain’s scowl or his general disposition, but whatever silence existed before finally breaks out into speech: “I don’t know,” says Cain. And then, in the hiddenness of a simple deception, Cain pauses, and suddenly asks God a question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”208 God’s next question snaps back in both alarm and condemnation. God’s answer is already squarely in the question: “What have 205 206 207 208

Genesis 4:7. Genesis 4:8. Genesis 4:9. Genesis 4:9.

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you done?” Cain remains hidden, but the final divine query is intimate, driven to the core of Cain’s identity and action. The dialogic exchange ends in a crash. God identifies Cain’s action, and whereas Cain would not speak before, this time God corners him and tells him to “Listen. Your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”209 This section concludes the overlooked reading of the fundamental storyline in the narrative of Cain. If we pause in this section and turn to correlate the God-Cain dialogic exchange with the God-Adam dialogic exchange, then by way of correlation this second dialogue may shed light on what has happened to Cain, and why he has done what he has done. iii) The Narrative of Adam The merciful man doeth good to his own soul: but he that is cruel troubleth his own flesh. – Proverbs 11:17 Then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired … she took. … – Genesis 3:4–7

In Genesis 2:7, Adam is placed in the garden. The world is new and Eve has not yet been created. God surveys the garden with Adam, takes him before a specific tree, and at its base provides Adam with a single rule. This rule is the foundational expression of the Imago Dei, of God’s trust in a perfect sharing of mutual love, care, respect, and integrity. God stands by Adam, and rehearses the rule for him: “You may freely eat of every tree in the garden. But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat it you shall die.” But why would Adam die? He is never told. Later in the day Eve is created. In the afternoon both Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil. After they eat the fruit, God brings Adam into a dialogic exchange that is hemmed in at four vectors in a crisis – Adam’s struggle, trauma, enigmatic state, and self-excision into death. It is evening time and Adam has hidden himself. God is walking through the Garden, enjoying the “cool of the day,” when he notices that he is alone. He searches

209 Genesis 4:10. “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.”

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and calls out: “Adam, where are you?”210 This question, “where are you”, is the first question from God to humanity following the completion of creation. The question from God calls Adam to his common telos. Adam is unable to raise his voice and utter, “I am here.” Still, unlike his son after him, he does not respond with silence and a simple deception. Adam does speak, and in so doing attempts to explain what has happened to him. Adam appears from the darkness: “I heard you in the garden; I was afraid and hid from you, because I was naked.”211 At this point in the narrative Adam is already an enigma. We must try to understand why this is the case. The immediacy of opened eyes is traumatic. In opening his eyes to both good and evil, the first traumatic contagion produces the response of shame that leaches into Adam and causes him to hide. The contagion has transvalued friendship into fear, and life into hiddenness. The internal struggle or Kampf of being hidden in shame between the poles of fear (“I was afraid”) and trauma (“I was naked”) delivers God beyond struggle, trauma, and shame, and straight to the rub of Adam’s enigmatic state; to the stranger Adam has become in his own skin. God asks: “Who told you that you were naked?”212 We have arrived once more at God’s question to Cain: “What have you done?” The second question to the son is the subtext of the first question to the father. The question to both father and son gather already on Eden’s eastern slope. That is, the question to father and son already includes brokenness. Like Cain, Adam is unable to say “I am here.” But if you are no longer here, then what has happened to you, where have you gone? Or: Who told you that you were a stranger to yourself, and why have you chosen death when all around you is paradise? What happened to Adam, in his own skin, reveals why he became an enigma to himself.

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Genesis 3:9. Genesis 3:10. [Italics mine]. 212 Genesis 3:10. Genesis 3:12. God asks: “Why did you do this?” Adam’s reason for hiding is a less sophisticated deception than Cain’s – ‘The woman made me do it.’ Martin Luther’s own account of psychological guilt in the creation story is influential to an understanding of cruelty in the first creation account above. See, Luther, LW 1.164, 14.106; 1.173, 176; 1.180–1, 219, 234. Law is ordained by God to convict the conscience in light of its sin. The Law does not convict the conscience in the midst of its own dark, sinful acts; rather, just as God approaches the ashamed and half-naked Adam in the Garden, not as a storm during the night, but instead through a gentle breeze. For Luther, in the unscrupulous light of the day, the conscience convicts itself. 211

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Neither pretension nor perversion is active in Adam while he is imbued with the Imago Dei. We know this because sin had not yet entered the world when Adam pondered the fruit. But Adam’s ability to choose was always present. If Adam had not had the power of choice, then why would God have trusted him in the rehearsal of the foundational rule? Eve took the fruit because it could make her wise. Adam was with her and he ate it as well. This is not even a story about overwrought desire. Rather, this is a story about reducing the whole world, interpersonal relations, and relation with oneself, to the level of a mundane object. What is treacherous and ugly about the reduction of everything to the level of an object is how such a choice is never a choice in favor of life. Adam does not fully recognize what he has done, but he is complicit in the choice nevertheless. Through the choice he is changed and reduced, contradicted and transvalued so that light becomes darkness, and well-being is forsaken in shame. In the choice, light is transvalued into darkness through an “eye” that objectifies oneself, others, and the world. The treachery and ugliness rests in how objectification is an excess that blows apart the interior existential machinations of Adam, and his relation to the existentiell horizon (i.e., the Imago Dei). His telos of ‘being there’ in mutuality, care, justice, respect, integrity and reciprocity is lost to a fracture. The traumatic contagion that expresses this loss is shame. Shame is what drives Adam away from himself, from God, and from the world. The tragic sense grows in us when we perceive how inexplicable, excessive, and contradictory Adam’s choice has become for him. Adam, and Eden itself, have been transvalued from light into darkness, from living flesh into death. Adam is the supreme progenitor of human volition. For in a bite his teeth cut into the fruit, and Adam excised himself into negative transcendence and death. In his painting, Expulsion from the Garden, the Florentine artist, Masaccio, captures on canvas this last picture of negative transcendence and death, the day that Adam and Eve walked out of Eden. Masaccio paints the expression of human shame as a traumatic contagion that transforms Adam and Eve into enigmas. Adam is stumbling, concealing and smothering his face with his right hand. But it is within Eve’s breathless expression and gaping mouth that we witness this unmistakable traumatic contagion in her attempt to exhale the gift of spirit, sundering it from her flesh. The trauma can be neither endured nor forgotten. The progenitors are nothing less than ugly, even horrifying. The fracture is augmented in Masaccio’s use of sharp light and shadow that fragments the entire scene.

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The scene draws our gaze deeper into the canvas. We are witnessing the ground of human loss and death. This painting proves that shame alone never has enough psychological inertia to propel one into hiding like Adam and Eve. The contradiction to impulses really his own, to eat or not to eat, drives Adam to a choice that changes his life through a traumatic contagion and into an irresolvable struggle. The trauma of eating the fruit, of discovering shame, is the source of his struggle where Adam grabs onto himself and forces his own life into the distance, even in paradise. The object of his own self-excision is the indigestible fruit that sours and contradicts Adam. He doubles-over, and life is transvalued. Through his eyes the entire horizon of paradise is changed into a place of estrangement. The urge to hide is irresistible. In the impulse to hide, shame is already exceeding itself as a contagion, and in an irresolvable internal struggle that regresses to the emission of fear-anxiety and guilt-self-loathing.213 To be eaten-up-withshame is when fear-anxiety and guilt-self-loathing increase until their fusion in the horizon of self-dwelling creates a self-consumption where one is lost, and one feels such dread that hiding is the only alternative to being found so naked, so homeless, so vulnerable, and so changed. Self-consumption is always shame-eating-oneself-up, but it is shame at the evaporation of well-being. Self-consumptive shame may at first appear to be the arching reason why Adam hides, but it is not. The memory of dwelling evaporates because the Imago Dei has poured out and he is homeless. Hiding, like denial, is an attempt to crawl back into a home that no longer exists. Like the fruit souring in his belly, self-consumption has bludgeoned Adam into the distance until he is trapped in a diffuse estrangement. His eye transvalues the light of paradise into darkness. It is after Adam’s life is transvalued into darkness that he fears God might see him naked. God is walking in the cool of the day, but Adam’s darkness is what undermines the world. The bitten apple is the symbol for an objectified world, where Adam has swallowed a fracture. Adam’s choice excises him into the enigmatic in the form he cannot endure, the symbol of his own death, his own skin. Thereafter, humanity has learned that cruelty to oneself, even as a

213 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 83. Ricoeur’s fault of guilt is associated with sin, but guilt as self-loathing. When the self is not guilty for what one does but what one is, then one starts to eat the self up with guilt. Guilt as one’s being is analogous to Jasper’s “metaphysical guilt” as a trait shared by survivors of extreme social trauma and death. Reference to shame above is similar to what Jaspers means by ‘metaphysical guilt.’

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fracture, is not something that arises from the metaphysical distance. Rather, fracture resides within the human frame, in the daily choices and machinations of human life and relation. iv) The Narrative of Cain – Section II Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death; jealousy is cruel as the grave.” – Song of Solomon 8:5–6

Returning once more to the narrative of Cain, God’s question is: “What have you done?” What has happened to you? Where have you gone? When God speaks is it ever rhetorical? This is not a rhetorical question. This question is also meant to produce a response, but if Cain’s return to silence signifies anything the imbalance now provokes not God’s discretion and reassuring gesture, but immediate disclosure and condemnation that shatters Cain’s question of being his brother’s keeper – “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground!”, a “ground” upon which Cain will now be a curse.214 God had sent Cain’s parents “out of the garden” a generation before and sealed it on “the east side.” East of Eden is where Cain will also now dwell, in the enigmatic land of the “Fugitive.”215 Even if we do not fully understand why Cain has become an enigma in who he is, God has made it clear that Cain will remain a fugitive in relation. Adam and Cain’s respective trek into the distance brings homelessness. Even if father and son remained in Eden, they would still be homeless, they would still have become enigmas.216 Adam becomes an enigma and is excised into death in the ways noted above. Cain becomes an enigma for none of these reasons. So what has happened to Cain? God’s question to Cain – “What have you done” – contains the reader within the artery of intra-personal selfobjectification. Through murder, Cain has objectified and broken not only intra-personal relation but every possible relation in his life. His contradiction is his failure to recognize a common telos with his 214 Genesis 4:10–11. Cain enters a fracture – “And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.” Deuteronomy 12:23. “This punishment is too hard to bear!” 215 Genesis 3:23–4, 4:14, 16. “Behold, thou hast driven me this day away form the ground; and from thy face I shall be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer of the earth. …” 216 See George K. Anderson, The Legend of the Wandering Jew, (Province: Brown University Press, 1965).

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brother. Insofar as he has dismissed this commonality with his brother, he has also damaged his own singular humanity.217 Cain has become an enigma. And yet, we cannot say that Cain struggled with his brother or with himself. At least, no discernable contour of Kampf is evident in this narrative because there is no traceable internal struggle to which the narrative allows access. Cain always remains “unwell” in silence. Guilt, self-loathing or a rising sense of shame that we witnessed in the father is nowhere visible in the son.218 Next, a trace of the contour of trauma may be evident, for certainly Cain’s rejection by God was traumatic; but if this trauma was internalized then it is revealed in the ‘furious scowl’ and immediately concealed in the absence of transition-time in the narrative; thereafter, the contour collapses before we can identify trauma as a contagion. We are in the intra-personal artery of self-objectification, and we have a narrative to chart our way, and yet we have lost all contour except to say that Cain has become an enigma. In Cain we witness inexplicability, contradiction, excess, and expulsion. However, thus far we have no means of charting our topography and of reaching an understanding of how Cain – in who he is in what he does – becomes an enigma. The narrative is guiding us in a distinct trajectory, nevertheless at this point there is no conceptual niche – something akin to Goethe’s ‘labyrinth of the breast,’ that reveals why Cain acts in the violent manner he does – which allows us a foothold into assessing why he became an enigma. We do not yet know what it is that drove Cain within himself to such ugly excision and death.219 And yet, at the contour of excision the narrative does allow for some illumination. Cain’s Hebrew name means ‘lance,’ or ‘that which pierces,’ in its English variants. If we attempt to rescue elements of excision from the narrative, then God’s caveat that Cain “master” his “crouching sin” is also an imploration to Cain that he must ‘step back’ and self-objectify 217 See Honor Matthews, The Primal Curse: the Myth of Cain and Abel in the Theatre (New York: Schocken Books, 1967) on the brokenness of Cain. 218 Genesis 4:13. 219 The outcast or the enigma is typically correlated to a vicious external world, as true in literature as in lived experience. As an instance, the Anabaptists were notorious for their modern reintroduction of a hostile and evil external world (see Schleitheim Confession, article four) to which one must yield in suffering (Gelassenheit). When one considers that Müntzer, Sattler, Hubmaier and other prominent Anabaptist leaders were put to death at that time by Lutherans and Catholics, their conception of a hostile external world that transformed them into enigmas is verified. It is the eternal recurrence of killing one’s brothers.

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from what he is encountering, otherwise he is spelling his own ruination. But Cain, as his name implies, strives beyond well-being and toward negative transcendence and death. What crouches at Cain’s door, in who he is becoming, brings murder; thereafter, negative transcendence is the result when Abel is “swallowed” in fracture and Cain becomes an enigmatic fugitive. But again, why does Cain choose death? The brief illumination into the contour of excision does not answer this question. Following excision we are immediately thrown back to the excessiveness of who Cain is becoming. We find ourselves confronted again with the problem of what motivates Cain to become who he is becoming, to pierce all of his relations and live as “a fugitive,” as an enigma in the world. In the narrative of Cain to this point, we have lost our bearing on the topos of cruelty. Perhaps the narrative is topographically flawed, misaligning human tragedy, suffering, and an encounter of cruelty. And yet, the Cain narrative has classic appeal for us; we identify with this story handed down through the ages. It is also no coincidence that this narrative is positioned immediately after the narrative of Adam as an account of the second great Fall of humankind. Why do we require a second narrative of a Fall? Is something not fully represented in the Adam narrative that must be further attested to by Cain? We suspend these questions momentarily in order to reaffirm that the histories of Adam and Cain are our supra-narratives insofar as they are shared at the epicenter of three of the world’s great religions.220 These are not narratives about Jews, Christians and Muslims. These are narratives about our shared humanity, asking us like Adam and Cain where we have gone. The only way forward is to continue asking after Cain. We return to the facts before us. Cain’s behavior is so excessive it brings physical death; he is silent, he lies, he deceives, he manipulates, he murders, and yet within the narrative there is only a single explanatory “furious scowl” offered for the reader to grasp what motivates Cain. The Hebrew offers nothing conclusive regarding internal struggle except the stark reality that whatever happens to Cain, whatever makes him unwell, “curses him” at the ground. Light becomes a shadow, and Cain is ever after “hidden [from] the face of God.”221 And yet, what

220 And yet, Martin Buber states that not Adam and Eve, but the Cain narrative “is the story of the first iniquity.” See Martin Buber, Good and Evil: Two Interpretations, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 80–89. 221 Genesis 4:14.

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we have failed to see until now is the rupture of a tragic fracture or narrative gap that predominates in this story. Our question of what motivates Cain to commit murder has in fact brought us to the precipice of this tragic fracture or narrative gap. The tragic narrative fracture rises in striking narrative opposites that are inexplicable, contradictory, and even irreconcilable. For instance, an irreconcilable fracture or gap exists between i) a “furious scowl” and the excess of murder, ii) fraternal relation and the contradiction of betrayal in death; iii) the lack of internal struggle and inexplicable action. If we pause and observe the storyline than we realize that the tragic narrative fracture has been well-preserved in the Cain narrative, even through millennia of oral and written tradition. Indeed, the tragic narrative fracture or gap has waited for us, inviting our interpretation that would fully describe the intra-personal motivation that propels Cain from a “furious scowl” to inexplicable murder. In sight of the amorphous nature of this narrative fracture, our minds are directed toward order. We want to construct something meaningful. We need to construct an explanation for such excess. In our need to construct an explanation, we reasonably interpret the Cain narrative as a lesson in Cain’s envy and resentment that fills in the irreconcilable gap between a “furious scowl” and murder. “Cain was jealous – that’s why he kills.” This construction has been our answer to explain what motivates Cain.222 Still, our sense of tragic existence has never dissipated although our construction of envy and resentment has seemed to suffice for us. The narrative invites our interpretation into the fracture, and even waits for us to do so. Why have we constructed the rationale of skulking envy and resentment in Cain’s dealings against his brother, Abel?223 We have even constructed elaborate systematic theories – such as the Girardian account of destructive human desire – to explain the fraternal complexities of this narrative. And yet, our construction for this narrative is almost fully unsupported in the story itself.224 Nothing in the Cain narrative 222 Storr, Human Destructiveness, 45, 52–3. “Human beings … react to love’s absence with resentment, even though they may not appear to know what they are missing.” Again, “It is postulated that people who are inhibited about the expression of anger and resentment built up hostile tension to the point where some provocation suddenly precipitates an explosively violent act.” 223 We have believed that Cain deceives and lies to God out of fear for being found out. What makes us believe this is true? See Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 43. 224 Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross, 96. Hamterton-Kelly’s read of desire in Cain is representative of an entire Girardian school of thought with respect to this narrative.

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leads with conviction to fraternal envy-resentment, since essential fraternal elements are absent. Abel never utters a single word in this narrative, debilitating an effort to meaningfully assess an exchange between the two brothers.225 In fact, the narrative intends for Abel to be an effigy of a real human being. Abel is a straw-man. As the Hebrew indicates, Abel’s name means “nothingness,” or a “vapor”, or a “breath of air.” Abel is already disappearing into nothingness before he is swallowed in a fracture. When Jesus later reflected on this story, he said Abel was a prophet.226 What does a silent prophet teach us? First, being a vapor offers us a narrative advantage. For through Abel’s silence what we know with certitude is that we know absolutely nothing about a fraternal relationship, where having a “brother” is as meaningless as a dissipating breath. And second, Cain never says that he loves or resents his brother, and a long and tortured path of rationalizations rises between a “furious scowl” and murder. Still, for the sake of argument let us assume that our construction is correct, and this narrative is a lesson in fraternal envy-resentment. We immediately encounter a new problem. For the Cain narrative refuses the identification of envy-resentment too thoroughly, just as through the ages of both oral and written tradition this narrative has been effectively and exceedingly cautious within its shape not to offer envyresentment as a conclusive rationale for Cain’s excess. Nevertheless, the narrative plays us a trick – it lets us construct this reasonable explanation while simultaneously allowing our sense of tragic existence to go unresolved between a scowl and murder. The narrative enables us to identify envy-resentment in the gap without allowing us to explain or somehow justify Cain’s resentment in a manner that coordinates his actions in a meaningful and explicable light. The singular direction of our minds to find enclosed order is foiled.227 What we therefore

225 Patrick H. Byrne, “Ressentiment and the Preferential Option for the Poor,” Theological Studies, 54 (Washington D.C.: Georgetown University, 1993), 213–241. Byrne recalls the thesis that Cain attacks Abel as a misplaced aggression that he really feels for God. This is a plausible possibility, but it is also absent in the narrative. 226 Luke 11:49–51 – “I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill and persecute … from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.” 227 Mudge, “Paul Ricoeur on Biblical Tradition,” Rethinking the Beloved Community, 114. “The question posed to us, the issue of our trial of truth, is whether we are confronted to the point of divestment of self by the claims of Scripture, rather than simply informed by schemas. …” The point of being ‘played a trick’ is in fact to recognize that Scripture is challenging us. Even here in the Cain narrative, what is being demonstrated in this section is that the ‘gap’ between the ‘furious scowl’ and murder is

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identify in the gap is a quasi-explanation of Cain’s identity, in who he is and what he does. Cain feels both envy and resentment, but this identification remains absurd in its excess, only partially having an origination, dangerous, unpredictable, incalculable, inexplicable, raw, and full of irreconcilable action that reaches its limit only in murder. What are we suggesting here with envy-resentment? Or rather, what kind of envy and resentment is this? Before answering that question, let us reorient our course. For the narrative is concentrating our attention not to God’s question of what Cain has “done,” but rather in the direction of who Cain is that motivated his action. These are different inquiries. The answer to the first is that Cain has murdered his brother and thrust himself into the enigmatic, but the reasons why are unclear so we are being driven closer toward Cain’s identify that motivates his action. We are truly seeking to know who Cain is in his intra-personal machinations within this story. We have already said Cain is resentful and envious. He objectifies his brother and murders him. Who Cain is thus opens for us a contour in intra-personal objectification. Let us temporarily entitle this contour ‘envy-resentment.’ The narrative itself will aid us in understanding what kind of envy-resentment we are in fact projecting onto Cain. We recall that Adam’s skin is marked by trauma and struggle, but we have already noted that there is no assessable trace of either a contagion or Kampf present in the Cain narrative.228 If we do not have another interpretive avenue, then let us accept the played trick in the narrative fracture or gap, stand by our convictions, and admit that we identify envy-resentment in Cain even though our explanation is only partially based upon the narrative itself.229 And yet, in accepting the played trick we must also recognize and accept three edgy hermeneutic truths that wait for us in the gap: a) this interpretation intentional. We are invited into the gap to make an interpretation of resentment, and thereafter we are confronted by the nature of this interpretation by the narrative itself. The narrative in fact waits for us in the gap. To say that Scripture inspires is to note that it challenges us to the point of divestment and self-reorientation. 228 After Cain’s condemnation he is terrified, but his terror rises in a fear of being killed himself, and is quite a far reach from either shame or regret as hints of the memory of relation. 229 Eugen Drewermanün et. al., Freispruch für Kain?: Über den Umgang mit Schuld, (Mainz: Matthias-Grünewald), 70. The issue of Cain and Abel as archetypes is raised. They are archetypes, and perhaps in the Jungian sense what we find in Cain is an archetype for ourselves, but the language can easily abstract our lives into the archetypal that is not identified intimately in daily existence. What we hope to find in Cain is our intra-personal self, without the distance of an archetype for humanity.

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of envy-resentment is what we bring to the text based upon the symbol of an abstracted “furious scowl.” Our need to explain the scowl is not so much a need to explain Cain as an intra-personal identity, since the narrative does not openly pair envy-resentment with Cain. Rather, our interpretation is an attempt to explain ourselves insofar as we are the ones who have located envy-resentment within Cain, and within this narrative.230 Next, b) since we remain convinced and press for envy-resentment in Cain, then we must accept that the narrative presses back, transforming our understanding of envy and resentment through the enigmatic nature of Cain. Finally, c) in implicating Cain with envy-resentment, we simultaneously implicate ourselves in lived experience. Cain speaks as an enigma, and the enigmatic nature of envy-resentment in the narrative reorients our projected identification as a self-implication in the living world. In this way, when we identify envy-resentment in the narrative, then the narrative readjusts this identification as something akin to a desire raw enough to precipitate murder. Suddenly, the question of who Cain is, is the question of who we are.231 What is the nature of envy-resentment that is implicating us? v) Ressentiment – The Lineage of Cain and the Civilization of Nod It is less offensive that you hurt, that you offend, that you fail to show love; on top of it all you are a cruel murderer, for you are destroying a brother, indeed, you are guilty of fratricide, which is most cruel. – Martin Luther232

230 Winfried Hassemer, “Rechtsschutz vor der Rache,” Kain und Abel – Rivalität und Brudersmord in der Geschichte des Menschen, (Freiburg: Katholische Akademie, 1983), 29–45. Hassemer’s discussion of the Cain narrative, and the contemporary need for Reshtsschultz (legal protection) against Rache (revenge) illustrates how well we situate ourselves within the Cain narrative. The narrative teaches us a lesson fundamentally about ourselves, not about Cain, and how we seek to destroy relation, unwittingly or otherwise. 231 Helmut Thielicke, “Der Kain in Uns,” Brudermord: Zum Mythos von Kain und Abel, 106. Thielicke asks: “Stehen wir heute nicht mitten in dieser Kainsgeschichte?” (Are we not today in the center of this Cain narrative?). We resemble Cain and Cain resembles us. It seems only fitting that a story about revenge could only significantly impact us and teach us about revenge by allowing us to identify ourselves as in a mirror. The second great Fall of the Cain narrative provides us just this opportunity. 232 Luther, M. (1999, c1972). Vol. 25: Luther’s works, vol. 25 : Lectures on Romans (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House.

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The peculiarity of the narrative of Cain is locatable in the lineage of this narrative. Whereas in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures the narrative of Adam is the face of human fallenness, the Cain narrative has gone largely overlooked, except as an addendum or aporia to a former fall. Jude 11 notes that we should resist being like Cain, but the lack of substantial clarification in both primary and secondary literature should perk our hermeneutic ears. It should also alarm us. The teleological optics of sin and evil do not sufficiently address this narrative, and when we test these optics they always diminish the story by provisionalizing human suffering and smoothing-over the fracture or gap in the narrative itself. What about excess, ugliness and cruelty? What could be rawer than murdering your own flesh, your own brother? This narrative is one of origination and the eternal recurrence of the same in the lineage of Cain and the symbolic civilization of Nod. This is a story about a fracture at the heart of human life, in its dailiness and intransigence. What does the narrative tell us about ourselves? Envy-resentment is an excess that is inexplicable, and contradicts the basic human qualities of care, respect, justice, and integrity. Unlike intra-personal Kampf and internalized trauma, the inexplicable nature of envy-resentment means that a reasonable source or Urgrund may not be identifiable. Through the unsound eye that turns light to dark, one may objectify oneself and one’s relations in a blink, obliterating mutual care and integrity. For our lodestar, Nietzsche, the nature of envy-resentment is what he terms the “venomous eye.” It is a term analogous to Jesus’ warning over the “venom of an asp” that approaches through deception.233 In chapter one, we assessed contradiction and its double form of transvaluation. At that time we said transvaluation contains the germ of self-deception. This is certainly true for the approach of envy-resentment, but also in what it does to human life and relation. In the Cain narrative we see how, within the contour of envy-resentment, self-deception can mean the remarkable inversion of all value.234 We see this because within the Cain narrative one aspect

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Friedrich Nietzsche, GM I:11. Nietzsche coined the phrase ‘transvaluation of values,’ but other thinkers such as Machiavelli and Pascal were also aware of how excess in value will undermine the various spheres of existence. Machiavelli wrote that Avarice and Ambition are the mother of Ingratitude, and warns against “excessive heights” where prudence is not exercised and one finally “falls to earth with a heavier crash.” See “Tercets on Ambition,” (10, 67, 735–6), “Discourses” (1.46–7, 290) and “Tercets on Fortune” (169, 749) in Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 1989). Pascal states 234

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always pervades. The envy-resentment that erupts in Cain does so through silence, speech, and action, and all three are located in the repetitive pale of deception. In the tragic narrative fracture between a “furious scowl” and murder, deception is Cain’s modus operandi. Cain’s deceptions to himself, his brother, and God, all happen before and after the physical murder. In silence and speech, brooding and action, the turn from solicitude into solitude, dignity into dis-integration, care into depersonalization, and finally from responsibility into annihilation of relation. It is deception that Nietzsche calls “the inversion of the value-positing eye.” Deception, as Jesus also warned with the image of the “unsound eye,” transvalues light into dark, and is the fulcrum upon which envy-resentment turns.235 In his Meditations, Marcus Aurelius attests to his own sense of deception correlative to envy-resentment: “Men despise one another and flatter one another; and men wish to raise themselves above one another, and crouch before one another.”236 As in the Cain narrative, deception has the character of “crouching,” of waiting to spring. Like Cain’s preludes to his brother, Aurelius notes that “the affection of simplicity is like a crooked stick. Nothing is more disgraceful than a wolfish friendship … the good and simple and benevolent show all these things in the eyes, and there is no mistaking it.”237 Crouching, the affected smile, the crooked stick, and the lust of the “venomous” and “unsound” eye, are all symbols of deception at work in envy-resentment. The danger of this contour is that – unlike irreconcilable Kampf that will take on a character of homelessness or objectlessness – envyresentment is offered as a gift, and through such preludes to genuine affection latches onto its object.238 In this contour one may even be aware of the magnitude of a self-trespass and the trespass of another, but such awareness is inconsequential to one who desperately desires to poison one’s object.239 that passion is “deceptive,” leading us to forget our duty, we deceive ourselves with “diversions, self-love, and custom.” (90, 97, 135, 139). See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, intro. T.S. Eliot, (London: Dutton, 1931). 235 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM, I:7, 10, 14, II: 16. BGE V: 195; GM I: 7, 11, III: 9. The ressentiment of the ‘slave revolt’ led to the transvaluation of values where “all good things were once bad things [and] every original sin becomes an original virtue.” 236 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.14–15. [Italics mine]. 237 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.14–15, 18. 238 Kuhns, 128–131. 239 Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 178–180. “This kind of satisfaction is fed by one thing only: my cognizance that the other has submitted to me. The power I enjoy over him is direct – the phenomenon I am describing is that of the libido domandi.”

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Aristotle’s’ “injustice to oneself:” To kill and love, declare peace and seek its distraction, to hope for reconciliation but inquire about disorder, to condemn the evil that the other does yet perpetrate evil oneself, to speak of equality yet endure in evasion, to seek honesty but offer oneself a charade, to seethe in envy and deceive with sociability, can have ultimately to do with the fact that all of these are daily possibilities in us.240 Driven by a desire to obtain even abstract goals, the objectification of oneself and of every relation merely because one can and one does reaches no further extra-ordinary Urgrund. Therefore, dear children, be circumspect! This sort of thing comes: take heed! You are still young: you do not know what a cruel beast a bad conscience is! – Martin Luther241

In the lineage of Cain, the narrative identifies envy-resentment in us. When we invert value, seek to embrace but drive toward exclusion and division, then we become part of the inexplicable and tragic narrative fracture within us. We can, we do because we can, or at least we may find it irresistible to feel alive in the rush of empowerment at the demotion of an other. Satisfaction can become saturated in knowing we are more gifted, whereas dissatisfaction through the symbol of the “furious scowl” can plague us with envy-resentment when we feel bested. We are sometimes absurdly, even madly, contented in the spectacle of watching others sweat with an issue, a situation, an idea, an approach, not because they will find resolve, but because they sweat, so that the Psalmist concludes – “The tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”242 Somehow uplifted that we are neither Pharisees nor lepers, nor evildoers in all of their manifold forms, envy-resentment has a way of breaking intra-personal and interpersonal relation and turning us into enigmas, sometimes even without our awareness. Much of envyresentment that unmakes relation in the enigmatic, comes down to the intra-personal and interpersonal passing of the raw-edge of human trespass typified in Aurelius’ crooked stick, to the trace of the ‘smirk’ 240 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Shelby-Bigge and P.H. Nidditch, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 604–6. Hume writes that “anger and hatred are passions inherent in our very frame and constitution.” The “certain indulgency due to human nature” is our capacity for revenge. We cannot forget that liberté, egalité, et fraternité was transvalued in the French revolution to the fraternité ou la mort. 241 Luther, M. (1999, c1970). Vol. 6: Luther’s works, vol. 6 : Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 31–37 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Ge 37:21). Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 242 Psalms 12.10; Friedrich Nietzsche, GM I: 14.

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on the human face, to Nietzsche’s “venomous eye,” or to Jesus’ “venom of an asp” and the “unsound eye” that can so quickly unmake human life and relation.243 Envy-resentment can objectify relation as if calcified stone, transvalue light to dark, and otherwise unmake us. When we turn inward, as an in curvatum se through envy-resentment, we gain unique insight into sense of this phrase. There is an additional reason why we implicate ourselves with envyresentment in the lineage of Cain; this reason reveals how inextricably bound we are to this lineage. When Cain is thrust from Eden’s eastern slope and given the mark of his enigmatic state, he journeys to the land of Nod where he builds the first outpost of civilization. The symbolic value of Nod as the first civilization is exactly where Cain’s intra-personal trespass is delivered into the interpersonal sphere. The progeny of civilization identify with its founder’s “furious scowl.” Nod is the symbolic bridge of envy-resentment between intra- and interpersonal cruelty, and between the psychological and psycho-social manifestation of cruelty. And yet, even here this lineage is by no means pre-determined. Long after Cain threw his brother into a fracture, the voice of God once more spoke about envy-resentment. This time, he spoke to Laban about his rage over Jacob (Gen. 31:25). Laban’s “cruel counsels and thoughts” will undermine his world. “You must not indulge your fury.”244 Laban does not act, but returns to well-being in the end. To this point, in our current contour of envy-resentment, and in the lineage of Cain and Nod, we observe the qualities of the “venomous eye,” deception (crouching and the crooked stick), contradiction of a shared telos, reduction, and transvaluation. These qualities are observable in Cain. Even if the narrative foils our effort to make Cain’s resentment more explicable, God reveals that Cain is complicit in his actions where assumed fraternal relation is transvalued and his world is unmade. Cain excises his brother into negative transcendence and death, and in so doing is also excised into the enigmatic and death. Cain is made ugly in himself. All of the above qualities now gather in the proper identification of our fifth contour within intra-personal

243 Grand, The Reproduction of Evil: A Clinical and Cultural Perspective, 23. “We know that as we draw close to malevolence, its secrets will elude us. We can investigate evil and retain evil’s raw edge. …” 244 Luther, M. (1999, 1970). Vol. 6: Luther’s works, vol. 6 : Lectures on Genesis: Chapters 31–37 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Ge 31:25). Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House.

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objectification. This contour is identifiable as ressentiment.245 Ressentiment is immersed in self-deception. For this reason, we were earlier unable to directly describe ressentiment without running the risk of being deceived ourselves. The narrative of Cain illustrated ressentiment in us as a tragic narrative fracture that disarmed our proclivity toward finding order and easy coherence when we read this story. Cain’s ressentiment is as unreasonable as it is inexplicable and raw. When we trace ressentiment in ourselves within Cain’s narrative gap, then we observe envy-resentment, deception, value inversion and the harming of human life and relation that renders us as ugly as Cain. In the silence of deception, postures that deceive before we utter the lie, in piercing hate and fabricated enemies, in the breaking of the sword above our own heads and the heads of those entrusted to us – these are all a part of ressentiment in how we identify Cain, and how Cain identifies us. Lacking a clear Urgrund, ressentiment rises and is here where “I am here,” and yet inverted value also makes me “not here” and “unwell” in how I dwell and belong. The question of Cain – of how he became an enigma – is a question of his identity, of who he is within the contour of ressentiment. Likewise, ressentiment is what the narrative of Cain wanted to attest to in us, and why it waited in the gap for us to interpret envy-resentment as a reasonable explanation. The sin crouching in Cain makes him an enigma before he is able to mount a defense against it, just as the ressentiment crouching in us was so ready to spring forward with an interpretation before we realized that the text was reading us at the same moment. Where we do not see or fully identify with the narrative of Cain in who he is, then the narrative will also leave as enigmatic our possibilities for thorough self-identification in who we are. But intra-personal cruelty is nothing without ressentiment, as a saturation so complete that no Kampf is necessary to draw us, like Adam, into the enigmatic. Ressentiment can crouch and unmake relation before we, like Cain, are often aware it is there. There we are, identified by the narrative and identifying ourselves within the narrative of Cain – the inexplicable reality of human trespass, and of “generation after generation turning against itself in cruelty.” 245 Nietzsche maintains a theory about how the historical hiddenness of cruelty originated within a “slave revolt” of the weaker types against the stronger. The engine for this revolt was ressentiment, as a lethal concoction of bitter resentment and the ceaseless pursuance of revenge and deception in order to get-one’s-do.’

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chapter two H) Remarks for Transition On Psychical Cruelty – All this is interesting, to excess, but also of a gloomy, black, unnerving sadness, so that one must forcibly forbid oneself to gaze too long into these abysses – Here is sickness. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals

In chapter one, we learned of the difference between teleology and telos-orientation in how we construct and understand human narrative. We also learned how easy it is to conceal and provisionalize the human experience of cruelty. Through chapter two we had to reach cruelty, and we could not do so by utilizing the traditional and largely teleological nomenclature of ‘sin’ and ‘evil.’ We had to first make a distinction between cruelty, sin and evil. Next, we committed ourselves to an anthropological assessment, wherein we identified a common intrapersonal telos. This telos, as an affirmation of subjectivity in “Here I am,” reflected in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, is the prevailing telos representative in Job, Abraham and Adam. We clarified this telos in the intra-personal moniker of a journey of self-intensification in order to reveal that human life is a journey of intensification between existential limit and existentiell horizon. We discovered in our anthropological assessment how human beings seek well-being through pursuing an art of self-care. Though care we are capable of love, mutuality, justice, respect, and integrity, among other virtues. But we also learned how easy it is for us to depersonalize, disrespect and disintegrate who we are in ourselves, as well as who we are for others. And yet, where we contradict and transvalue both ourselves and others is what Job ultimately taught us when he reflected on what it meant to become abstracted or objectified. This was the germ of his complaint to God, and he named his experience, “cruelty.” Thereafter, our task was to reach a conceptual ground for intra-personal cruelty, and we were able to do this by following Augustine and Luther. In our assessment of Augustine and Luther we discovered that to treat as an object (i.e., objectification) is at the core of human experience. Within objectification, we discovered five contours that harm human existence. Excessive struggle, trauma that we internalize as a contagion, turning ourselves and others into enemies and strangers, excising human life and relation, and pursuing a course of deception in ressentiment, are all ways in which we objectify and harm both ourselves and others. These are the ways in which we make ourselves and

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others ugly. Who and how we are when we transvalue and make ugly ourselves and others was reflected in these five contours, but also in the supra-narratives of Adam and Cain. We resisted the teleological structure of sin and evil, and instead pursued the distinct route of a topos of cruelty. In so doing, we were able to identify analogically how cruelty affects human beings in the ground of our classic literature. Chapters three and four will illustrate how the fracture of cruelty is encountered in interpersonal and institutional human life and relation. The five contours within the artery of self-objectification are also evident and accessible in interpersonal and institutional life. Our task in chapters three and four is thus to show how these contours affect who and how we are in the world. In following this course, we will come to a better approximation of how we encounter cruelty in human life and relation. We turn our attention now to chapter three, and to the disclosure of cruelty within interpersonal life and relation.

CHAPTER THREE

INTERPERSONAL CRUELTY The Artery of the Desire for Recognition The enemy was cruel, it was clear, yet this did not trouble me as deeply as did our own cruelty. Indeed, their brutality made fighting the Germans much easier, whereas ours sickened the will and confused the intellect. – J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors Then Saul and all the people who [were] with him rallied and came to the battle; and behold, every man’s sword was against his fellow, [and there was] very great confusion. – 1 Samuel 14:20

In chapter two we learned from our lodestar that “psychical cruelty” represents the broad canvas of intra-personal self-objectification, and is a self-trespass viewable in Adam’s own shame and Cain’s own selfdeception through the contour of ressentiment. In the lineage of Cain and Nod, intra-personal cruelty, as a psychical self-deception upon which ressentiment turns, retains the capacity of unmaking us in ourselves.1 The aim of chapter three is to continue the archeological charting of the phenomenological topography of the second interpersonal artery of cruelty, an artery to be identified as ‘recognition.’ Charting this topography means we continue to think through the interpersonal limit of cruelty within the contours of Kampf, trauma, ressentiment, excision, and becoming an enigma. The chapter begins a) by charting an interpersonal moniker in a correlative trajectory through classic [traditional and contemporary] sources; next, b) we visit the phenomenological activity of desire as an ontological feature of humanity, and trace how desire exceeds in the second artery of recognition within the larger fracture of cruelty. René Girard’s mimetic theory of violence 1

Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 18, 22.

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will be assessed as one important contribution to an understanding of interpersonal cruelty; c) interpersonal recognition will be hermeneutically approximated and the five contours of cruelty will be assessed within the interpersonal sphere via a ‘holy war mentality’ in the narrative of the annihilation of the Canaanites depicted in Deuteronomy 7 and 20; d) next, the trajectory will follow a correlation between altruistic benevolence and cruelty in an assessment of pity from Zeno to Nietzsche. We will discover how pity can be cruel. The chapter will conclude after this final correlation with a trajectory toward the topography of the institutional sphere of the Issue of Justice as the next artery of the encounter of cruelty. A) Introduction – Charting an Interpersonal Topography in Western Thought i) Two Assertions and a Problem in our Post-Modern Epoch The fiction of subhumanity may be accompanied by supporting ideology or not. In either case, this fiction will include a simple obliviousness to another’s personhood. This obliviousness makes otherwise decent people capable of heartbreaking cruelty. – Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other

The trajectory through interpersonal cruelty begins with proffering two assertions and a problem germane to our own contemporary epoch, all three of which will gain in clarity as we traject forward. Post-Modern Delphi – ‘Know Thyself and An Other’ The imperative ‘Know Thyself ’ is foundational to western thought, be it to theological ethicists, moral philosophers, or writers of children’s prose. This said, our first assertion is that the Delphic imperative has an interpersonal implication, an implication to which we are especially sensitive following Nietzsche’s critique of ‘Socratic scientism’ rehearsed in chapter one.2 We have been further sensitized in our own 2 The seedling argumentative context for Nietzsche’s critique of ‘Socratic scientism’ is the labor of the post-Structuralist critique of the Enlightenment. See David Tracy, Blessed Rage for Order, 11; Tracy’s post-modern masters of suspicion – Marx, Freud, Nietzsche and Kierkegaard – make the “cry of illusion” against the Enlightenment ipseitous Self. Through their critique of the Enlightenment, as we saw in chapter one, Delphi is reclaimed through post-Structuralist lenses. This critique has interpersonal implications for how the Knowing Self simultaneously understands itself and the other. Beyond the Cartesian cogito and the Absolute Idea, is the ipseitous and alteritous self, moved by economic (Marx) and subterranean (Freud) forces, and an arbitrary

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post-modern epoch through the twentieth century post-Structuralist philosophical vitalization of how we understand intra- and interpersonal ipseity (sameness) and alterity (difference or otherness) in the identity of the ‘self ’ being ‘known.’3 Theologians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists who are methodologically informed by and promote post-Structuralist thought in their respective work, articulate how an act of knowing oneself is simultaneously an act of knowing an other within oneself; likewise, an act of knowing an other external to oneself is also an act of knowing oneself in an other.4 Contrariwise, the abstract and totalized autographs of the ‘enemy’ within the contour of the enigmatic, such as and akin to foreigner, stranger, infidel, and evildoer, already mean a desensitization and even death within interpersonal life and relation, from the possibility of intimate conversation to international diplomacy.5 Deaths of this nature already precede the appendage of a totalizing autograph of the enemy, when the fear of difference and then the projection of this difference upon others, who are not the same as “us,” are dubbed sufficient to human life and relation.6 Identity and Action The second assertion is that creative, interdisciplinary, and practical resources toward understanding and reconciliation that address interpersonal conflict require our full attention and imagination now. The tenets of reconciliation will concern a differentiated consensus regarding the identity of who we are becoming in our post-modern context

mode of willing (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard). This illusion of autonomy, so much the product of an Enlightenment read of Delphi, is one teleological myths aside others. 3 Paul Ricoeur, “Introduction: The Question of Selfhood,” Oneself as Another, 1–25. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 125–27, and Glas, Richard Rand, trans., (Omaha: University of Nebraska, 1990); Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970), 85-89. 4 Jung, Answer to Job, 108. “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.” The post-Structuralist critique of the ego breaks apart Jung’s assertion. The ego is not only limited, but is a holism that is itself divided, not uniform or total, but somehow dispersive. 5 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 9, The stranger or “breaker” is the “man outside, the ‘man without piece’[who] is exposed.” See also, J. Glenn Gray, Warriors, 141. “But from abstract hatred, which remains remote from action and danger, only blank forgetfulness can result and an unrelenting heart which weakens the sympathies of its possessor.” 6 This notion of death in interpersonal reciprocity is assessed at the conclusion of the current section.

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and as a globalizing world, and how or what actions are possible for us through a differentiated consensus in the pursuit of common aims. In terms of human identity, or who we are, Jean Graybeal states, “the otherness that we so much fear and that causes us so much distress as we try to regularize and control it, is really within.”7 We noted this point on otherness within oneself above; and yet, even in the abundance of oracles that we turn to today from self-help books to trusted therapists and religious leaders, we know from experience that not all interpersonal disruption and strife comes from within. The manifold differences in daily life between human beings teach us that cruelty may land on your shores and exhibit, in Wendy Farley’s words, “a simple obliviousness” to the singular humanity of both oneself and others. In terms of human action, or how we are, Stanley Hauerwas writes that we may exhibit a “love of country that once inspired noble deeds [but that] can lead us to commit the worst crimes when we have lost the skills to recognize how other loyalties must qualify that of patriotism.”8 Identifying conflict for Graybeal or Hauerwas, of who and how we are, reminds us of the Aristotelian kernel of the problem of incontinence and a tragic sense about our own lives – that is, who we are and how we care for others may, at its best, hope for goodness but deliver terrible consequences.9 With our historically unparalleled swiftness of access to international media and events, we need only glance around us to observe interpersonal conflict from regional to global echelons based on anxious and agitated perceptions of difference between fellow human beings.10 These perceptions sour and denigrate human life

7 Jean Graybeal, “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical,” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, 33. See also Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 4, 26, 192, 195, 8 Stanley Hauerwas, “Self-Deception and Autobiography: Reflections on Speer’s Inside the Third Reich” (with David B. Burrell), in The Hauerwas Reader, 216. [Italics mine]. 9 Aristotle, Poetics. 10 Two days of global conflict and excessive cruel trespass – February 16–17, 2004. Race riots between Australian Aborigines and police after the death of an Aboriginal youth; in Uzbekistan, a sixty-five-year-old woman whose son was boiled to death in prison was jailed for six years on charges of religious extremism after finding leaflets in her house supporting Hizbut Tahrir, a non-violent grass-roots Islamic organization contrary to the regime; the hills of Jhabua, India, where violence erupted after the raped body of a nine-year-old girl was found in a Catholic mission school. Local and regional administrations turned their heads as Christians, who represent one percent

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and relation. Part of our post-modern epoch means that today we can attempt to be isolationists in form only. An Epochal Problem Finally, our contemporary problem is clear at the correlation of both assertions above, i.e., between understanding who and how we are, and coming to a differentiated consensus about sameness and difference in our world. The problem is that in our post-modern epoch the convergent lack of an agreed-upon and unified sense of identity and normative authority, and the multiple differences within our international environment, are both omnipresent in our globalizing world that is edging ever closer to itself replete with economic, social, religious and geopolitical agitations.11 It is no longer enough to represent such agitations in Schweitzer’s lamentation of the twentieth century where “the human race has become merely raw material and property in human form.”12 One must first return to the symbols of the nineteenth century and before in order to ferret out the truth of Schweitzer’s lamentation. It is beyond unintentional that the nineteenth century French Impressionist Gustav Caillebotte’s larger-than-life painting, Paris Streets, Rainy Day, confronts the viewer at the entrance of the Chicago Art Museum’s main exhibits, in one of the largest cities in the western hemisphere. This painting speaks the crises of our time in industrial images that long-ago detached modern western humanity from its conceptual moorings and physical worlds. The viewer is able to simply step through the frame and onto the downcast mood on the Rue de Turin in Paris two decades after the advent of the industrial age. The darkly-clad figures – atomized and ironically estranged under their mass-produced identical black umbrellas – walk down cold, wet streets. Their isolation from one another is made poignant in coal-stained walls that press these together on either side without ado; the remote grief of the detached working-man is a universal expression of humanity within the crisis of a fracturing reciprocity. The multiple cracks

of the population, were attacked and brutalized. The National Federation of Indian Women reported that no arrests were made regarding the death of the young girl. 11 Martin Buber, “What is Man?,” Between Man and Man, 126–30. Buber identified out time as an “epoch of homelessness.” See also, Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement, (London: J.W. Arrowsmith Ltd,), 1996, 23–27. Smith echoes Kristeva – “We can find no single moral code to integrate and transcend the space of our particularities.” 12 Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, 24–5.

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and fissures on sidewalk, gutter, and wall represent the fracturing disassociation of existential meaning in daily existence and the growing dwelling within distance. Painted a hundred years prior, Caillebotte’s is a symbolic canvas for Schweitzer’s lamentation and the coming flashpoint of western culture in crisis. Crises being what they are, this one – between the lack of a unified sense of identity and normative authority, and present entrenched global agitations – belongs tooth and claw to our own epoch. In light of this problem, our first contemporary challenge is to take Delphi at its word and get to know ourselves and others much better. ii) The Search for an Interpersonal Moniker The anthology of memories of the other is a book I hadn’t reckoned on. – Scots Poet, Iain Crichton Smith13

The earth is only almost twenty-five thousand miles in circumference. And, as the late renowned scientist and popular writer, Carl Sagan, poignantly reflected in his popular book, Pale Blue Dot, the passage of every human life, the tiniest features of human intimacy and history, all claims to peace and pretexts to war, and every display of grace and ingratitude has happened here where we dwell.14 Any direction up and out is a plunge into an immense universe. So far, this is the only home we’ve ever known. To become an enigma on this planet and in interpersonal conflict can be tangible and wrenching. July 30, 1990, Monrovia, Liberia – During the presidency of Charles Taylor nearly eight hundred people were executed on a single day in St. Peter’s Lutheran Church where they had sought political refuge. As these pages are written, almost seven-hundred-thousand people in Liberia alone remain displaced within that country’s borders.15 The reality of these thousands forced into the enigmatic roars up to orientate a concrete trespass in human life and relation that perforates intraand interpersonal well-being where we dwell. In light of trespasses 13 From Alan D. Falconer, “Identity and Boundaries,” World Council of Churches Commission on Faith and Order, February, 2003 (6). 14 Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, (New York: Random House, 1994). On ingratitude, see Machiavelli, “Exhortation to Penitence,” 172–3; “Tercets on Ingratitude,” 22.740, 184.744 in Machiavelli:The Chief Works and Others, 3 vols. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965). 15 Interview with Charles Pitchford, the Lutheran World Federation/Service Representative to Liberia, Presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Lutheran World Federation, Geneva, Switzerland, November 11, 2003.

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as in Liberia, our correlative sights are set on first locating an interpersonal moniker – analogous to the intra-personal moniker of the journey of self-intensification – that adequately and conceptually circumscribes the practical and dynamic nature of interpersonal relation. As for chapter two, this moniker is essential to locate, for it reveals our common interpersonal telos and serves as an existential benchmark in interpersonal relation upon which we measure the trespass of interpersonal cruelty. How do we search for an interpersonal moniker in the western tradition? Thoughtfully. In the topos of interpersonal cruelty we begin by resisting an appeal to an Ur-basis (as a forlorn utopia) that reveals how life was cultivated prior to our fall into the topoi of either Augustine’s ontology of sin and evil, or into Marx’s metaphysic of socio-economic oppression, which is, if nothing else, the transposition of ontological religious categories of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ between the socialist poles of “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie.”16 Rather, in the daily lineage of the eternal recurrence of the same since before and attested to by the narratives of Adam and Cain, our first task is to chart a fullness in western thought regarding interpersonal relation and its trespass. Our task is to find a moniker that affirms and enhances our classic traditional and contemporary understanding, and likewise does not provisionalize human suffering or conceal cruelty in our current epoch. This investigative task necessitates an analogical assessment of the Greek concept of philia [friendship], the Judeo-Christian understanding of hospitality, and the identity and action of both oneself and an other as participants in interpersonal relation.17 Our analogical assessment will commence at a significant pace, and this pace is intentional in order to reveal a developing analogical representation of differentiated consensus between these thinkers that will unlock for us an understanding of an interpersonal moniker.18 Regarding methodological criteria, our goal is to reach an interpersonal moniker that i) is reflective of our sense of existential limit and

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Margaret Midgley, Wickedness, 81. See also Charles K. Bellinger, Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 127. 17 Although the Hebrew word for ‘hospitality’ does not indeed appear in the Hebrew Scriptures, its closest Greek synonym would be philoxenia, or the love of strangers. 18 The method employed here is one aspect of a correlative cartographical approach that is conceptually rapid as the rapidity of shifting images on the television or computer screen.

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existentiell horizon – of humans as existential queries in relation to the oceanic – critical to the western tradition, ii) is contiguous with the very heart of Judeo-Christian normative teaching and interpersonal relationality, and iii) is relatively adequate as a proper characterization of a post-modern interpersonal Delphic – ‘know thyself and an other.’ Our hermeneutic cartography begins with an assessment of the Greek interpersonal moniker – philia. iii) The Greek Interpersonal Moniker – Philia To understand philia we begin by tracing back to the philosophical endeavors of both Plato and Aristotle and their respective ethical narratives on philia.19 At a first pass, we issue an interpretive caveat against unqualifiedly exchanging the Greek philia with its closest English equivalent, friendship;20 We issue this caveat because philia semantically circumscribes friendship, general acquaintances, and sociability in daily transactions within the Greek polis in a way that is culturally more specific and semantically broader than how we have come to understand friendship, at least since the modern era. When we do refer to friendship in relation to Plato and Aristotle below, it is with this qualifying caveat always in the fore. Chapter two asserted, with Aristotle, that interpersonal relation, including philia, begins in the care and responsibility of the intrapersonal self.21 In the western lineage through Aristotle, the well-being or ‘welfare’ of oneself is a lifetime journey of ‘caring-after’ that relatively satisfies human desire and brings happiness.22 Social well-being 19 Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross, 161-170. 20 See R.G. Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, (Oxford: Carendon Press, 1977), 14, 28. The Greek philia is representative of polis life and implies “a general sociability, a desire to cooperate in shared activity of any sort, from the utilitarian business transaction to the close, personal relationships of true friends.” 21 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.7, III. If human existence is an art of crafting life toward well-being, then interpersonal friendship will also be an essential aspect of a life well-crafted. A life well-crafted is what Aristotle entitles ‘the good life.’ A person who is ‘good’ will a) seek his own survival, b) spend time in solitude as well as with others, and c) will be assertive in his own decision-making. Interpersonal friendship follows intra-personal self-dwelling or self-care. 22 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3–16. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 12.4. “I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinion of himself than on the opinion of others. … So it is clear that we accord much more respect to what our neighbors think of us than to what we think of ourselves.”

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is set in motion by the self as the first-interpersonal-mover where the good of oneself precedes the other as a good in and of him/herself.23 This is not to begin an exposé of Aristotle the solipsist, for his Nicomachean Ethics are flush with a detailed and classic accounting of friendship, revealing complex gradations of equality and inequality that inform how friendship and justice correlate.24 Aristotle identifies three typologies of friendship within the polis – those based on utility, pleasure, and goodness – and then assesses the manner in which justice and injustice correlate to the intimacy of friendship as these types.25 “It is worse to rob your companion than one who is merely a fellowcitizen … so then justice naturally increases with the degree of friendship.”26 The trespass of justice involves a commensurate trespass in philia, and an enduring lack of friendship reveals a threat of injustice.27 In the polis, life with too much injustice between ‘friends’ poses an immediate social problem. The hermeneutic connection between justice and philia so closely tied in Aristotle is not lost on Paul Ricoeur. Ricoeur is the postStructuralist philosopher who brings Aristotle’s thought on friendship and justice into relation with our post-modern ethical concern. The interpersonal dialectic of understanding between love and justice, or what Ricoeur entitles solicitude, runs parallel with Aristotle’s interpretive navigation of philia.28 For Ricoeur, solicitude is the highest interpersonal virtue regarding how we craft the meaning of our lives in

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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII. “Each man desires good for himself most of all.” And again, “It comes to this; that each individual feels friendship not for what is but for that which conveys to his mind the impression of being good to himself.” 24 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 3. Friendship – ‘They wish goods for each other for each other’s own sake.’ The best of friendship is when two are as “a single soul existing in two bodies.” 25 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 153. 26 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 149, 4.2.15. “Quarrels arise also in those friendships in which the parties are unequal because each party thinks himself entitled to the greater share, and of course when this happens, the friendship is broken up.” Hospitality to the friend and fellow citizen is what Aristotle entitles “magnificence.” 27 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 157. 28 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 149. “It seems too, as was stated at the commencement, that friendship and justice have the same object-matter, and subsist between the same persons. [Friendships differ in degree] as is the case – “Different also are the principles of Injustice as regards these different grades, and the acts become intensified by being done to friends.” Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 181–2. “It does not displease me to travel along this road with Aristotle for a moment, in a study whose tone is Aristotelian from start to finish.”

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relation to others.29 The appeal to philia in Aristotle is surrogated by the ‘other’ in Ricoeur’s work. Behind Ricoeur’s surrogation is the premise that, although Aristotle’s philial affection applies to members of the polis, the contemporary and anonymous ‘other’ in our own postmodern epoch dwells in specific, regional, national, and global environs. Reference to the ‘other’ is meant to conceptually allude to these environs without collapsing into meaningless anonymity. For Aristotle, the reciprocal nature between philia and justice is bound-up in the relationship of friendship that has social, economic, and political implications in the polis.30 Aristotle’s friendship-in-thepolis takes on the character of solicitude-in-the-world for Ricoeur, where ‘I’ and the ‘other’ love and seek justice for ourselves, and likewise respectively love and seek justice for one another. For both Aristotle and Ricoeur, the contradiction of these values – philia and solicitude – is hazardous to personal, social, political, and institutional life: Friendship-love without the measure of justice quickly turns to imprudence, carelessness, irresponsibility, and obsession;31 and justice without relationality in friendship-love can lead from inequitability to irreconcilable cycles of vengeance.32 In both cases, friendship-love and justice weaken and may even risk eventually vanishing; throughout and thereafter, the art of crafting our interpersonal lives becomes confused, and even destroyed.33 Where friendship-justice and solitude (love-justice) do not find free expression between others, then interpersonal relation can quickly take on excessive and ugly hues. This recognition of interpersonal 29 Ricoeur, “Eighth Study: The Self and the Moral Norm,” Oneself as Another, 203–225. 30 Aristotle, Politics, 1.4. And yet, Aristotle did distinguish other typological ‘others’ in the polis who were slaves by nature [jύsei doûlon] and are thus unfit to rule themselves. 31 Ricoeur, “The Self and the Ethical Aim,” Oneself as Another, 175. What we mean here by ‘understanding,’ is in the sense of prudent or practical wisdom (phronēsis) in the normative approach to oneself and the other. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.6; 11.10. “If you find in human life anything better than justice … if, I say, you see anything better than this, turn to it with all your soul, and enjoy that which you have found to be the best.” Again, “In justice the other virtues have their foundation.” 32 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.148. “The bad, on the contrary, have no principle of stability: in fact, they do not even continue to like themselves: they only come to be friends for a short time by taking delight in one another’s wickedness.” 33 The language of justice to which both Aurelius and Todorov are attesting is contrariwise to Nietzsche’s belief that the value of justice is nothing other than – as Margaret Midgley coins it – a “skiving tendency of the mind.” (Midgley, Wickedness, 6).

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disturbance is delivered in a second, and certainly provocative, reading of philia by Plato in his extensive Socratic dialogue, Lysis (380 b.c.). Plato’s questions surprisingly reflect our contemporary interpersonal queries – What term approximates who and how we are to our closest relations, associates, and colleagues? How does one qualify the relationship between the Lover and the Beloved in friendship? Does like attract like, vice-versa, or is human relation less than predictable? Must friendship be a constant in interpersonal relation? Plato’s ethical prose is characterized by ‘the philosophical quest for truth in the pursuit of rhetoric.’ That is, his rhetoric walks his philosophy. Thus, one must pay close attention to his narrative style and slights, dialogic curve-balls and jolting rhetorical adjustments. For instance, Plato asks these aforementioned questions on the nature of philia not in order to reach a conclusion regarding friendship, but instead to draw the reader inward and therein reveal the inherent complexities in the nature of friendship itself. We know this because in the pages of Lysis a concrete understanding of philia is wholly absent. As a terrific irony, the last word on Greek friendship eludes the friends who are speaking about its very nature. Plato’s dialogic circle closes with a number of conditional answers on the nature of friendship, but it is the concrete epiphenomenal nonanswer that shines out in absence within this dialogue and serves to render the questions and complexities of friendship clear.34 Plato concludes Lysis in Socrates’ appeal to classic poetry and a brief summation of the argument’s main questions. But then Plato delivers us a rhetorical jolt. Immediately following the rehearsal of the main questions for the reader, an abrupt disruption is introduced that brings the narrative to its unsteady finish. The abrupt disruption in the narrative flow enters via the tutors of both Lysis and Menexenus, the youth who are engaged with Socrates in the dialogic exchange. Plato writes that the seemingly intoxicated tutors suddenly and intrusively appear “like an evil apparition … shouting in a barbarous dialect.”35 Plato’s rhetorical

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The last line of the dialogue – “How ridiculous [for us] to imagine ourselves to be friends – this is what the by-standers will go away and say – and as yet we have not been able to discover what is a friend!” 35 Plato, Lysis. “Here I was going to invite the opinion of some older person, when suddenly we were interrupted by the tutors of Lysis and Menexenus, who came upon us like an evil apparition with their brothers, and bade them go home, as it was getting late. At first, we and the bystanders drove them off; but afterwards, as they would not mind, and only went on shouting in their barbarous dialect, and got angry, and kept

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maneuver is not the reduction of an important inquiry upon friendship into two slapstick drunks that end a dialogue with a punch-line and a laugh. Plato is revealing something to us about interpersonal relation. His charged and totalistic autographs – “evil” and “barbarity” – are used to describe tutors who normally enjoyed a socially respectable position in Greek culture as ‘teachers of youth.’ What does Plato reveal to us in this incongruent parallelism of an ‘evil and barbarous tutor?’36 First, we learn that the abrupt and unsteady disruption and dispersion of others – including friends enjoying a conversation on the very nature of friendship – can take place even at the hands of the supposedly most socially and prudently advanced within the polis. Second, this dialogue about philia also reveals what philia is not – intoxicated, evil, unreasonably angry, unconstrained, and barbarous. The dialogue proceeds through an investigation of friendship and then jolts our minds far beyond the most beneficial advantages of philia within the polis, and toward interpersonal disruption and strife apparent in the barbarity of the tutors. Third, the kernel of what Plato finally teaches us is how quickly interpersonal life and relation exceeds his still undefined moniker, friendship – in this way, interpersonal fidelity is complex and fragile, and what’s more, the fragile heart of friendship as philial interpersonal relation is never wholly identifiable or circumscribable. At the correlation of Plato and Aristotle, friendship as philial interpersonal relation in the array of our social environs is fragile and difficult to fully circumscribe, is only what it substantively is in light of the common dialectical elements of love and justice, is essential to our lives in the manifold yet complex forms that ‘friendship’ takes, and begins at the self-care of ourselves in intra-personal well-being. iv) The Judeo-Christian Interpersonal Moniker – Hospitality In the realities of ‘friendship’ and disruption, solicitude and strife, our trajectory transitions to our second moniker, but this time inherited from the Hebrew Scriptures. This moniker has also been influential to calling the boys – they appeared to us to have been drinking rather too much at the Hermaea, which made them difficult to manage we fairly gave way and broke up the company.” 36 Again, there is more here than Socrates’ occasional dislike of sophists and his peer ‘teachers of youth.’

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the entire Judeo-Christian tradition – hospitality.37 The English term, hospitality, has its closest approximation derived from within the Judeo-Christian Scriptures – a righteous disposition toward others, including friends, strangers, foreigners, widows, orphans, the dispossessed, and the poor.38 Particular to the stranger or foreigner, Yhwh might bestow his assistance upon them and not upon the chosen Israel.39 To be chosen is to show hospitality in one’s interpersonal relations. This said, hospitality, like philia, is about how we conduct ourselves in relation to other human beings. Hospitality is often symbolized by basic elements, such as water or bread. The lessons of hospitality begin at a narrative within Genesis 18:1–18 where Abraham shows kindness to angels who have come to tell him – after seating them, preparing the fatted-calf, and providing water for the ritual of foot-washing – that he will soon receive a son, Isaac.40 In the Hebrew Scriptures, displays of hospitality place the other before the needs of the self, a fixture of semi-Nomadic life. For the semi-Nomad, access to water is critical. As a case in point, hospitality is symbolized at the Well of Jacob, a location where water is given to drink in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament.41 At the Well of Jacob, the exchange of hospitality between Rebekah and Abraham’s servant, or later between the Samaritan woman and Jesus, is symbolized in the gift of water.

37 Ladislaurs J. Bolchazy, Hospitality in Antiquity: Livy’s Concept of its Humanizing Force, (Chicago: Ares Publishers, Inc., 1995), 1–54. Bolchazy reveals parallels between the Graeco-Roman ius hospitii and the Judeo-Christian Golden Rule. A magicoreligious xenophobia identifiable in early Graeco-Roman existence, equivalent to the findings of 20th century anthropology with the ‘stranger’ who is to be feared, later gives way to an altruism toward the stranger (hospis/hostis) that is receptive to JudeoChristian normative truth. 38 See Romans 12:13, Hebrews 13:2, 1 Peter 4:9–11. Henri J. M. Nouwen, Reaching Out: The Three Movements of the Spiritual Life (New York: Doubleday & Co., 1975). 39 See 1 Kings 17:1, 8–16; 18:1; 2 Kings 5:1–14. 40 See also Leviticus 19:33–4, 1 Timothy 3:2, and Hebrews 13:2. In Hebrews the imperative to show hospitality since Abraham takes the form of an adage – “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” See also Homer, Odyssey, 17.483–87 in Bolchazy, Hospitality in Antiquity, 12. “Aye, and the gods in the guise of strangers from afar put on all manner of shapes, and visit the cities, beholding the violence and the righteousness of men.” 41 Genesis 24:17 – “Please give me a little water to drink; Exodus 17:2 – “Give us water that we may drink; Judah 4:19 – “Please give me a little water to drink, for I am thirsty;” Matthew 10:42 – “And whoever in the name of a disciple gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water to drink, truly I say to you, he shall not lose his reward;” John 4:1–42 – “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

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Water will mean the difference between living and dying.42 Both Abraham’s servant and Jesus yearn for a drink under the blazing sun. The needs of the semi-Nomadic other, approaching ‘you’ from the desert, clearly reveal the original ethical landscape of interpersonal relation. This original ethical landscape in semi-Nomadic life reveals a significant distinction between the Greek and Hebrew understandings of human relation at the locus of expectations within social life and within a communal context. The collusion of both Greek and Hebrew thought brings us along to our next classic consideration within the moniker of hospitality shown toward the other in one’s midst. Our trajectory transitions to Augustine’s classic ordo amoris, or his ‘order of affections,’ as the central and classic normative thrust of the interiority of interpersonal relation. We turn to Augustine, i) because of his classic expression of anthropology and ethics that is tied to both neo-Platonism and Hebrew hospitality, and ii) due to the immense influence that his classic expression of human affection has had upon both Christian identity and action, of who and how we are as intra- and interpersonal existents. As we asserted, our analogical assessment remains at a significant pace, and this pace is intentional in order to reveal a developing picture of differentiated similarity between these thinkers that will unlock for us an understanding of an interpersonal moniker. We noted that for Aristotle social well-being is set in motion by the self as the first-mover where oneself as an end precedes the other as an end in him- or herself.43 The story of interpersonal ethical relation is psychologically more complex with a classic figure like Augustine. A significant Greek influence is evident in Augustine’s adaptation of Plato’s distinction between Lover and Beloved within the latter’s Lysis. Augustine adapts this distinction into his foundational theological rhetoric of tri-partite typologies – introduced in his Confessions, De Doctrina and De Trinitate – of the Lover, the Beloved, and the Loved. Augustine’s articulation of caritas is about the well-ordered affections within these typologies.44 Caritas may here be identified as the hermeneutic bridge between Greek and Hebrew thought. In caritas, we see 42

Genesis 24:1–67. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 3. Friendship takes three forms – friendship based on utility, pleasure, and those who are good. The third form is the most complete where friends are ends within themselves – ‘They wish goods for each other for each other’s own sake.’ 44 Augustine, De Doctrina, I; De Trinitate, VIII, Confessions, I–IV. 43

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the deep influence upon Augustine of Judeo-Christian hospitality shown to one’s neighbor. That is, following his order of affections, the backbone of Augustine’s interpersonal ethic – love God and your neighbor – is drawn from Jesus’ yoking of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 in the Pentateuch. Both of these texts were pivotal to the Hebrew understanding of interpersonal relation. Augustine’s sense of caritas is the locus of Hebrew hospitality in his thought. In his De Doctrina, Augustine introduces the classic four things to be loved in the ordo amoris – God, oneself, one’s neighbor, and the world “below us.”45 How one loves oneself precedes the love of neighbor insofar as this love is directed foremost to the immutable God.46 Love of neighbor is next, but Augustine’s sense of hospitality is positioned atop the identity of a weakened human subject, and this is a problem for his rigorous interpersonal ethic. The subject is infused with anthropological extremes so telling of a Manichean ontological influence identified in Augustine’s intellectual heritage and historical context. This influence is not simply registered in the neo-Platonic distinction between immutability and mutability within a single human subject. Rather, in the Manichean strain, ‘mutability’ is paired with Augustine’s development of the topos of an original, enduring, and incapacitating sin. Augustine’s use of language fuses both neo-Platonic and Manichean elements: Through sin the immutable-mutable subject is ontologically cleaved between spirit and flesh. In spirit and flesh the human subject is infused with this Manichean influence. Anthropological ontology and ethics intersect – “the spirit, having fled from the immutable light which reigns over all, acts so that it may rule itself and its own body, and thus cannot do otherwise than love itself.”47 Commensurate to the ontology of spirit and flesh, the human ethical capacity for love will always be between the cleavage of immutable and mutable objects. The love of oneself is divided into immutable spirit and mutable flesh – thus, one is both the object of love (spirit) and simultaneously the object of scorn (flesh). We are already crossing

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Augustine, De Doctrina, I.20–9. Augustine, De Doctrina, I.22. “He should not love himself on account of himself but on account of Him who is to be enjoyed … Therefore his enjoyment of himself is imperfect, for he is better when he adheres to and is bound completely to the immutable good than when he lapses away from it, even toward himself.” The emphasis of Augustine’s sense of spirit and flesh, the immutable and mutable, must never go underestimated in his order of affections. 47 Augustine, De Doctrina, I.23. 46

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an earlier artery from chapter two, for the self as an object of scorn has been taken up in our intra-personal trajectory toward selfobjectification in Augustine. Our current trajectory visits its interpersonal impact. At the interpersonal sphere, the result of such splitting between immutable spirit and mutable flesh means a rise in psychological and phenomenological dissonance that produces fear, guilt, and suspicion within a single human subject regarding the impact and enduring effect of the flesh upon the spirit. Thereafter, Augustine’s preoccupation with mutable flesh ushers forth a parade of vices in human corruption, concupiscence, viciousness, distrust, hate, and the aforementioned “cruel ills.”48 What transpires in the cleavage between immutable spirit and mutable flesh is that Augustine’s anthropological ontology overpowers his normative aspiration to ‘love,’ but then this division is precisely what Augustine means to introduce in his understanding of the effects of sin upon human life and relation. Augustine proceeds to leave unresolved the primary ethical dimension of ‘love of oneself ’ when he assumes that such love is both subsumed and implicit in the “great commandment – love of God and love of neighbor … nothing which is to be loved is omitted from these two precepts.”49 But then Augustine pauses in his argument, glances back and queries – “it may seem that nothing has been said about the love of yourself. But when it is said, ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself ’ at the same time, it is clear that love of yourself is not omitted.”50 We note that the sequential and logical primacy of love of oneself is reduced in Augustine’s anthropological ontology awash in human sin. Augustine’s uncharacteristic pause and effective non-answer to his own question of ‘love of oneself ’ may even reveal his own intuitive sense of an ill-addressed aberration between a weakened anthropology and a rigorous normativity. This aberration would grow from within his argument to be borne by later generations where often piously characterized selflessness and the righteous self-sacrifice of emptying oneself out for the other misses the entire point of the balance of reciprocity, of love and personal justice, between two others in hospitable relation. The imbalance begins in a lack of the normative sense of love of oneself that falls out of his argument and is seriously hindered, just

48 49 50

Augustine, De Doctrina, I.24–5. Augustine, De Doctrina, I.26. Augustine, De Doctrina, I.26.

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as by analogy Augustine’s anthropological ontology of fallen mutable flesh descends from the divine spirit and becomes damaged. At the interpersonal sphere, Augustine’s result is the clash of a powerful anthropological ontology with a simultaneously hindered ethical agency. Throughout, a theological platform is constructed for the denigration of oneself and one’s ethical capacity within the Christian tradition.51 In the clash of anthropology and ethic, what shines forth is a vulnerable self that learns to love between flesh and spirit but is oppressed by guilt and fear, and grows distrustful of its own native intuitions about how it may reasonably dwell in the world.52 This rise of fear, guilt, and self-suspicion hinders interpersonal love, and is what forms a ‘bad self-conscience’ that Nietzsche observed to be a sickness at the heart of western culture of which we are still far from resolved.53 The trajectory to understanding Augustine’s interpersonal relation is through his anthropological ontology. The different strands of influence in Augustine create striking contrasts – the spectacle of the fallen,

51 For contrast, see Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 98. “Man can and should make use of penances of some kind to organize the hierarchy of, and liberate, the lower powers within him. He can and should sacrifice himself when a greater interest claims him. But he has not the right to diminish himself for the sake of diminishing himself. Voluntary mutilation, even when conceived as a method of inward liberation, is a crime against being, and Christianity has always explicitly condemned it.” In the 20th century, del Chardin characterizes the problem of the Plotinian duality articulated by Augustine. A problem lies in how we envision this hierarchy and the proper division of the “lower” (mutable) in relation to the “higher” (immutable) powers within the human subject. Chardin identifies sacrifice, but beyond the abstract, how does one characterize a greater aim that requires one to sacrifice oneself? One can imagine how this form of logic is instructive toward the devices of oppression from domestic abuse to notions of holy war. Even for these reasons, to suggest that the difference between sacrifice and self-mutilation in Christianity has been “explicitly” clear, is an overstatement by Chardin. 52 Sallie McFague, “A New Sensibility,” Models of God. In our post-modern context, this dualism between spirit and flesh – along with the dualisms of reason/passion, human/nonhuman – is what McFague finds so troublesome to our own epoch. We live in a context that requires a holistic view of reality, rejecting these dualisms in favor a of an “evolutionary, ecological, and mutualistic worldview and ethos.” 53 Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture 13th – 18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 50–53. See also, Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, I: 53. Nietzsche’s assertion is succinct yet loses its argumentative effectiveness in his periodic anti-homiletic stance: “Oh, how much superfluous cruelty and vivisection have proceeded from those religions which invented sin! And from those people who desired by no means of it to gain the highest enjoyment of their power.” [“Oh, wie viel überflüssige Grausamkeit und Thierquälerei ist von jenen Religionen ausgegangen, welche die Sünde erfunden haben! Und von den Menschen, welche durch sie den höchsten Genuss ihrer Macht haben wollten!”].

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mutable subject’s desperate yearning to love a supreme and immutable God as well as one’s neighbor, testify to these different strands.54 Analogous to Ricoeur in correlation to Aristotle, is Gustavo Gutierrez in correlation to Augustine. If Augustine represents a classic and traditional Christian understanding of fallen ontology and its effect upon interpersonal relation, then Gutierrez is a theologian who represents a classic and contemporary Christian understanding of potential psychological and social liberation that frees interpersonal relation. Gutierrez’s work is a contemporary classic for the impact that it has had upon the methodological developments of Liberation and Feminist theologies since his crucial text, A Theology of Liberation, first appeared in 1971.55 In correlation, the radical denigration of the human agent in Augustine’s theology is juxtaposed with Gustavo Gutierrez’s radical call beyond psychological and social oppression and the possibility of one’s anthropologically unhamstringed ‘conversion to the neighbor.’ Gutierrez will also arch back to critique and reinvigorate the heritage of polis, philia, and caritas to reveal a social and radical hospitality at the crux of his theological endeavor. In his essay – Man, the Master of His Own Destiny – Gutierrez traces western identity from Descartes, Freud, Marx, and Marcuse. Through the lineage of Freud and Marx, the contemporary human subject has gained the resources to overcome the psychological and socioeconomic forces of past and current oppressions.56 Gutierrez revitalizes the notion of polis, but analogous with Ricoeur’s sense of the ‘other’ as global-other. For Gutierrez, the global-other is called beyond all former psychological, socio-economic, political, and historical oppressions. 54 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 5.1. Pseudo-Dionysius is one of its more radical proponents of the apophatic method, a method wherein the mind is emptied into the darkness of unknowing and waits there awaits the immutable God. Apophatic theology requires both a transcending of the limitations of language and the denial of the presence of the divine into the darkness of unknowing. 55 See Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone, and her understanding of “advocacy” for the oppressed that opens out into her four major components of a feminist method. See also James Cone, God of the Oppressed, “Freedom is obviously a structure of, and a movement in, historical existence. … a liberation in history;” and again, “Liberation is … a historical reality, born in the struggle for freedom in which an oppressed people recognize that they were not created to be seized, bartered, deeded, and auctioned.” 56 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 30. “… he seeks liberation not only on a social plane but also on a psychological. He seeks interior freedom … in relation to the real world of the human psyche as understood since Freud.”

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Gutierrez affirms that in the west and since the Greeks the polis is that arena of our social “solidarity [and thus] a dimension which encompasses and severely conditions all of man’s activity.”57 Gutierrez reinvigorates the political dimension as that dimension which can establish social freedom, since “everything has a political color.”58 He then asserts that the socio-political realm is collective, and “what is collective as such, has human value.”59 That which has “human value” is also an object of love for human beings. Insofar as the political realm has value, it is thus “a means and object of love. … Human love treads these lasting paths [and] these organizations of distributive justice.”60 What we immediately note is that the political realm does not simply have value as an end in itself; rather, the fair and equal distribution of justice within the political realm is what is to be valued. Thus, distributive justice is a chief value to be loved. We have already said with Gutierrez that political life can establish social freedom. This said, what is loved in political life is that which enhances social interpersonal relation. What is sought in interpersonal relation is the fair or just distribution of resources throughout human society and history.61 Those who have not been partakers of the vast array of the equitable socioeconomic distributions of justice have the Christian right to claim these for themselves. Upon what has been critiqued as a thoroughly Christian-Marxist read of history, Gutierrez lays down his theological interpersonal ethics, but the logic flows backwards this time, delivering his theology upon a historical landscape. He infuses the theological dimension into the socio-political one through the highest Christian value of caritas, or love for the oppressed global-other. What Gutierrez reclaims is a balance in interpersonal hospitality, but he does so with a rigor that is absent in Augustine’s weakened sinful subject.

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Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 47. Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 47. 59 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 11. “Theology must be the human’s critical reflection on him/herself on his/her own basic principles.” These “principles” involve economic, socio-political, and historical points of origination. 60 G. Cottier et. al., “Les masses pauvres,” Église et pauvreté, (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1965), 174 in Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 47. 61 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 10. The promise of the Eschaton “leads necessarily to the building up of that brotherhood and communion in history.” Here is the ground of Gutierrez’s interpretation of Orthopraxis. 58

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First, Gutierrez tells us that “God’s temple is human history.”62 Within this historical temple, the oppressed socio-political globalother is synonymous with the historically excluded “least of these,” to which Jesus revealed a preferential treatment.63 The ‘least of these’ excluded in history are to receive a “preferential option” through their diminishment and exclusion from the fair distribution of justice.64 The most diminished and excluded in history are the poor. The poor are the historical manifestation of the ‘least of these.’ The offices of Christ as prophet, priest, and king are to liberate all socio-political oppression in human life and relation beginning with the love of the poor in history.65 To follow the imperative set by Jesus, and to vie in a preferential option for the poor, means one is to value the fair distribution of justice for the oppressed global-other since “to love God is to do justice in the world.”66 Caritas is revitalized as agapic praxis, or an activated hospitality between love and justice that resists socio-political oppression and struggles for the poor in history.67 In the praxis of resistance and struggle for the oppressed, Gutierrez reveals his theological and ethical capstone as a “conversion to the neighbor.”68

62 Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 11. “The gift of the Kingdom of God is in the heart of human history.” 63 Mathew 5:19, 25:40, 45 – “Then He will answer them, Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” 64 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 36; “In the first place, liberation expresses the aspirations of oppressed peoples and social classes, emphasizing the conflictive aspect of the economic, social, and political process which puts them at odds wit wealthy nations and oppressive classes.” 65 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 55. The church has traditionally displayed an “ecclesiastical narcissism,” gerrymandering against the oppressed and in league with the more powerful. 66 Gustavo Gutierrez, “Chapter Ten: Encountering God in History,” A Theology of Liberation, 189–212. 67 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 63. Caritas within the ecclesia is an essential component of Gutierrez’s thought. He believes a public awareness is growing of the church as a political entity. Where ever the church “speaks,” “remains silent,” and nurtures “friendly alliances,” the poor have traditionally been marginalized. 68 Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 69–72; Gutierrez’s language of ‘conversion to the neighbor’ is adapted from Rahner, where ‘infinite openness’ is the concrete situation of the human being who has the vocation of communing with God through grace. For Gutierrez, this vocation must be lived from an historical point of view allowing us to “break out of a narrow, individualistic viewpoint and see with more Biblical eyes that humans are called to meet the Lord insofar as they constitute a community, a people.”

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v) Assessment – Reciprocity You shall not hate your fellow countryman in your heart. – Leviticus 19:17 The worst solitude is to be destitute of sincere friendship. – Francis Bacon69

We are on a trajectory toward interpersonal cruelty, and on the search for a moniker that reflects the fullness of human interpersonal life and relation. From Aristotle, Ricoeur, Plato, Augustine, and Gutierrez, we observe that interpersonal relation begins at oneself and an other, the relation of which is a paradigmatic core. Orbiting this core, even as concentric circles, are the elements of anthropology (who), normative action and ethics (how), socio-political and economic contexts, the complexities of philia-friendship, the solicitude of love-justice, and the requirement of interpersonal hospitality within human history. With a view to interpersonal relation, our requirement is to observe an appropriate thematic issue that – even in light of compelling differences within each thinker – reveals a differentiated consensus at the heart of daily interpersonal existence. If we consider again the chief characteristics of these independent thinkers, then we observe a hermeneutic gain – that is, each of these respective thinkers reveals a trace of reciprocity that is essential to their projects and to the crux of interpersonal relation. By definition, reciprocity is what takes place in interpersonal life and relation when particular actions and events enable persons to exist alongside one another in an equitable and mutual relation. For Aristotle, reciprocal philial relation means that prudence is displayed and justice is upheld. Ricoeur’s understanding of love and justice sees reciprocity built into the dialectic nature of solicitude. Solicitude is the dialogic play between love and justice. For Plato, dialogic reciprocity is the never wholly identifiable element of friendship that is lost through the intrusion of the ‘barbarous tutors.’ For his part, Gutierrez’s robust call for the poor beyond historical oppression is established upon the hope for a reciprocal relation within hospitality and between human resources and justice.

69 Nieves Mathews, Francis Bacon: The History of a Character Assassination, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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The lack of reciprocal relation is also identifiable in a correlation of these thinkers. This lack is clear in Aristotle when friendship fails through gradations of injustice. For Ricoeur, the collapse of solicitude between human beings means a loss of love and justice and the beginnings of misunderstanding that can lead toward anarchy. Plato’s group of friends discussing friendship finds their dialogue hijacked by intruders, and the result is dispersion. For Augustine’s topos of sin, reciprocity is lacking between the hindered human subject and the command to love one’s neighbor. Without divine grace, the subject is simply too weak to carry out the normative imperative when love turns inward (in curvatum se) and excludes other human beings. Finally, one can argue that Gutierrez’s call for the ‘conversion to the neighbor’ takes on a tone of proletariat revolution that lacks the equitable nature of JudeoChristian normative ethics, by i) pairing historical liberation too singly with distributive justice, which is the axis for the counter-cry of Marxism and reductive materialism, and ii) with respect to a preferential option, the question arises as to whom the neighbor must convert if not to his own victim-identity. Does such a conversion create a kind of ethical narcissism where hospitality flows in only one direction toward the oppressed global-other? In the trajectory for an interpersonal moniker, reciprocity is the existential adhesive that keeps the above elements – philia, friendship, justice, love, solicitude, caritas, hospitality, and agapic praxis – in relation to one another. At its normative and phenomenological core, without reciprocity between oneself and an other, then interpersonal relation begins to falter and plunge down the quick slope toward the contour of the enigmatic. A fundamental lack of reciprocity introduces a loss of love and philial interpersonal relation, and a rise in misunderstanding, scorn, neglect, injustice, exclusion, barbarity, and dispersion. In such loss and gain, reciprocity between human beings is an essential staple in daily interpersonal life and relation, clarifying Jesus’ comments regarding the salt as a staple of reciprocity – “Salt is good; but if the salt has lost its saltiness, how will you season it? Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another.”70 The classic texts that we have reviewed establish the central necessity for interpersonal reciprocity. We might halt our trajectory here, believing that daily reciprocity is our interpersonal moniker, without

70

Mark, 9:50.

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which interpersonal life and relation falters. We are in part correct. And yet, one of our criteria from the start was that our interpersonal moniker must be contiguous with the very heart of Judeo-Christian normative understanding. We have yet to reveal such a contiguousness, so this criterion remains unresolved. This said, in the western tradition, the Judeo-Christian texts that establish reciprocity as central to human life and relation must be assessed.71 When we seek for interpersonal reciprocity in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, then what we find in our trajectory are two fundamental imperatives central to how we understand interpersonal reciprocity. vi) Symbiosis – Two Imperative-Similes Love your neighbor as yourself.72 Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.73 Wretched custom has obscured the precepts of Christianity to such an extent that we think it absurd when in a given instance somebody practices what is acknowledged by all, namely, that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, although the force of these words is little pondered. – Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria74

The Judeo-Christian Scriptures reveal two imperatives that address both the intra- and interpersonal spheres of identity and action, of who and how we are. The correlation of these imperatives with the Apostle Paul’s comments about living in light of “the entire Law,” reveal the heart of the existential reciprocative character of human life and relation and the germinal veracity of human identity in the Judeo-Christian tradition. At the intra-personal sphere, we learned in chapter two of the commandment from within the Judeo-Christian Scriptures that clarifies our first imperative. In chapter two we investigated this first 71 1 Corinthians 8. See Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era, 174. According to Tillich, “rationalistic-progressive ethics,” indeed history, is grounded on love: “he who loves and he who is loved are equal for each other as far as they are worthy of love, the one for the other. But nothing else than just this principle of equality is implied – essentially implied – in love.” 72 Leviticus 19:18 and Matthew 22:39. See also Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, 60. 73 Ezekiel 19:10 and Luke 6:31. Mt 7:12 – ‘Do for others what you want them to do for you;’ Romans 12:8 – ‘Whoever shares with others should do it generously; whoever shows kindness to others should do it cheerfully;’ Galatians 5:14 – ‘For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 74 Jacob Spener, Pia Desideria, 60–1.

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imperative, and will summarize once more our discoveries here. This first imperative is articulated from Leviticus 19:18 to Matthew 22:39 – “Love your neighbor as yourself.”75 The imperative traces back for millennia and functions as a communal adhesive and narrative loadstone toward human well-being.76 The passage of time and the trans-cultural spread of Judeo-Christian values introduced in variation the values of mutuality, patience, equitability, justice, and hospitality in human life and relation, which are substantial features of love toward your neighbor. This imperative is a simile, or a figure of speech comparing and balancing two separate and singular existents – you as the neighbor. This imperative-simile in fact begins at the daily, existential and normative activity of you, who first loves yourself – whereafter you turn in reciprocation to love your neighbor as you have loved yourself. This is in fact correlative to Luther’s conclusion in his reflections upon Romans 13:14 – “For just as we should not be cruel to other people’s bodies or trouble them with unjust requirements, so we should not do this to our own bodies either.”77 In chapter two we discovered how the nature of this imperativesimile reveals that love of your neighbor originates in yourself in a selfresponsibility to love.78 In relation with oneself, the imperative to love harkens up self-responsibility, caring after, and the crafting of a narrative life in the aforementioned journey of self-intensification. Indeed, this imperative-simile recalls each of these features as aspects of the intra-personal promise of relation that begins in the interiority of the self where one dwells between existential limit and existentiell horizon. 75 Leviticus 19:18 – ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself;’ Leviticus 19:34 – ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God;’ Matthew 19:19 – ‘Honor your father and mother; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ See also Mark 12:31, Luke 10:27, and Romans 13:9. Gospel of Thomas, 25 – “Love your brother as your soul.” 76 The notion of ‘care’ is also evident in Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right, §§ 21–3, 37R, 41R. To “be a person” is not to “do anything against one’s own personality” first, and furthermore to “respect other persons” and not to do anything against “the personality of another” either. See also Seneca, Ep. 48.2 – “You must live for your neighbor if you would live for yourself.” 77 Luther, M. (1999, c1964). Vol. 27: Luther’s Works, vol. 27 : Lectures on Galatians, 1535, Chapters 5–6; 1519, Chapters 1–6 (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 78 Heidegger, “Building Dwelling, Thinking,” Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 147–161. ‘zu etwas und irgendjemand gehören,’ or as sense of “belonging to …” is what it means to ‘dwell.’

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We have reserved the following insight to this point, but both intraand interpersonal ‘promise’ implies the promise of what is incomplete being brought to completion. A promise of relation is thus – taken in Shoshana Felman’s sense – the postulation of oneself to an other of “a non-interruption, [a] continuity between intention and act.”79 In the dwelling-in and belonging-to of intra- and interpersonal relation, a promise of relation is the promise of continuity that forms in trust. In light of promise as a consistent trust, we recall that what maintains this trust is a non-separation between love and justice. Both the intra- and interpersonal promise of relation involves the reciprocity of solicitude – love and justice – and suggests that the singular character of human life, of human “nonsubstitutability” while we aim for wellbeing, is to love through an inseparable dialectic with justice – we become justified in love, or we simultaneously love through just acts toward ourselves.80 The object of love in the intra-personal sphere, however, escapes the bounds of oneself through a reciprocal looping that is directed outward toward the neighbor. This reciprocation directs us to the second until this point uninvestigated imperative within the Judeo-Christian scriptures. At the interpersonal sphere, the commandments from within the Judeo-Christian Scriptures are summarized in a second imperativesimile located in texts spanning from Ezekiel 9:10 to Luke 6:31 – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”81 This second interpersonal imperative is also a simile, which ends at the daily, existential, and normative activity of what you “do to others.” However, the 79 Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J.L. Austin in Eleanor H. Kuykendall, “The Subjectivity of the Speaker,” The Question of the Other: Essays in Contemporary Continental Philosophy, ed. Arleen B. Dallery and Charles E. Scott, (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), 145–56. 80 Karl Rahner, Hearer of the Word. The notion of ‘nonsubstitutability’ is metaphysically aligned to Rahner’s notion of Der Mensch ist Geist, or – “to be human is to be spirit, to live life while reaching ceaselessly for the absolute, in openness toward God.” Rahner’s Vorgriff (pre-conceptual) basis for sensing the existentiell horizon is also an irreplaceable reality of human existence. 81 Matthew 7:12a – ‘Do for others what you want them to do for you;’ Romans 12:8 – ‘Whoever shares with others should do it generously; whoever shows kindness to others should do it cheerfully;’ Galatians 5:14 – ‘For the whole Law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Forgiveness and reconciliation depend not first on what we “do unto others;” rather, these begin with how we would “do unto ourselves” if we were the other. And this means we have to think hard about who we would be as the other – about who we are and what we do. See also Seneca, Epistle 47:11, “Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters.”

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imperative-simile begins with the action of the “others,” with whom you are asked to identify. The first task requires that you identify how you would “do unto yourself ” if you indeed were the “others” doing “unto you.” Once you identify with the action of these “others,” then the imperative requires you to reverse your course. You are to take your new discovery – of what the others would do to you – and commit yourself to reciprocating action for “the others” with whom you first identified.82 This imperative requires that you think hard about identity and action with regard to the other and yourself – about who the other and you ‘are,’ and how the other and you ‘do.’ 83 Ultimately, the challenge set before you in identity and action – reverberated contrariwise in Jesus’ petition from the cross – is to know what you do, or what actions you take, so that you do not trespass other human beings.84 Similes capture surpluses of meaning that are released again in normative-existential and reciprocal flipping, where the axis ‘as’ remains constant and the other terms whirl around it. To capture these commandments between oneself and an other in imperative-similes means that the terms shift yet remain existentially commensurate and both semantically meaningful and true: Love yourself as your neighbor, do unto yourself as you would have others do unto you, or the foreshadow that in human life and relation one can anticipate that others will do unto you as you have done unto them.85 Not to do unto others, suggests one is also in some way done for. In the Christian tradition, these intra-and interpersonal imperativesimiles correlate through Paul’s purposeful intersection of human desire and the love of one’s neighbor in Romans 13:9–10. Paul writes, “Do not desire [epiqumía] what belongs to someone else [but] love

82

See Levinas’ discussion of disinterestedness and suffering, Totality and Infinity, 84. “I myself can feel myself to be the other of the other.” Jean Graybeal, “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings 38. 83 Anna Smith, Julia Kristeva: Readings of Exile and Estrangement, 22–23; see also Julia Kristeva, Étrangers à nous-mêmes, (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 9, 250. Smith writes, “… a stranger inhabits us: it is the hidden face of our identity, the space that ruins our resting place, the moment where understanding and instinctive fellow feeling become swallowed up. Recognizing the stranger within ourselves, we are spared from hating him in himself. …. ‘For the sole support that enables us to live with strangers is knowing that we are strangers to ourselves.’ ” 84 Luke 23:34a – Father [forgive] [them] for [they] know not what [they] do. 85 Ezekiel 9:10 – ‘I will do to them what they have done to others.’

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your neighbor as yourself.”86 We will shortly cover this complex notion of desire. For our purposes here, Paul’s continuation beyond simile in verse ten is especially telling: “… love your neighbor as yourself. If you love others, you will never do them wrong; to love, then, is to obey the whole Law.” The normative hermeneutic flipping of these imperativesimiles is locked by Paul in this verse with the removal of their axis (‘as’) “to love, then, is to obey the whole Law.” Paul is not without succinct precedent, drawing his conviction from both Jesus’ earlier yoking of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18, and from a conversation Jesus had with a lawyer over what is necessary “to inherit eternal life.” The lawyer reflects, ‘To love God fully in soul, strength and mind,’ and to “love your neighbor as yourself.” The law is fulfilled and Jesus responds – “You have answered right; do this, and you will live.”87 To live is to love God, and an other as oneself. Responsibility and care, love and justice, hospitality and integrity, become an inseparable affirmation about human interpersonal relation; in love of self and the neighbor, when you act in such a way that does not trespass human beings then you obey the entire law and ‘will live.’88 The normative and existential nature of the scriptural imperative-similes between oneself and an other is one of love, justice and action. The whole law – referred to by Paul as the kernel of

86 Romans 13:9; see also James 1;8 – “If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well.’ ” 87 Luke, 10:25–8. See Matthew 22:34–41 and Mark 12:28–34 for parallels and differences to this critical passage in Christian veracity. Paul’s “fulfillment of the law” is drawn directly from Jesus’ own reflections in the yoking as well as the parallel passages. 88 Rudolf Bernet, “The Encounter with the Stranger: Two Interpretations of the Vulnerability of the Skin,” The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, 43–62. Husserl makes an appeal to a “transcendental light,” where the worlds of two others light up in their meeting. The emphasis here is upon an irreducible difference where what ‘I’ and the ‘other’ lack must not compensate for each other. For Levinas, the imploration of the ‘other’ in my midst makes a demand upon me, and I am obliged to respond. Bernet asks – “Why must the gift I owe the Other be the sacrifice of my life? Is there then no limit on what I can be asked to give, no limit I may transgress in an excess of generosity without being obliged to do so?” The difference between Husserl and Levinas is not merely metaphysical, but normative, and is centrally about moral obligation between ‘I’ and the ‘other.’ The question revolves around how one views the proximity of humans one to an other. Husserl’s light or Levinas’ call, who and how gives and to what extent, identifies our post-modern problem which we have characterized as understanding difference and reconciliation to brokenness. For Levinas’ sense of call, see Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, trans. A. Lingis, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961), 53.

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Judeo-Christian belief – is what reminds human beings that they live and act in relation to the mystery that precedes them – Humans are existential queries drawn toward an existentiell horizon.89 What we note in both imperative-similes is the role of reciprocity in loving and doing between yourself and the other. This reciprocity is at the heart of the Christian understanding of agapic praxis, which is the balanced, daily, and existential action of loving and doing between you and the other.90 And yet, these two imperatives are not posited as similes purely to clarify daily and existential reciprocity. Upon closer assessment, these imperative similes are also occupied with the identity of the normative actor within daily existential affairs. The question of identity between you and the other who act is likewise held together in the tension of a simile – as. We have said that reciprocity appeals to the equitable and mutual activity of loving and doing. However, at the level of identity this simile reveals a reciprocative ontological relation between human beings in terms of the whom within the how. In the mutual Query within these imperative-similes of who you and the other are within normative action, then what is opened through these imperative-similes is an ontology of identity between two singular intra-personal humans being. Held in tension through simile form, this reciprocal ontology is best approximated in terms of a symbiotic relation. The relation is ontologically symbiotic since these imperatives require that both oneself and an other seek to identify with the ipseitous (similar) and alteritous (different) features of both acting identities.91 You and the other come face-to-face as existential Queries seeking to recognize and understand one another, even in light of extreme differences.92 What are held in

89 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 95. “Every metaphysical question can be asked only in such a way that the questioner as such is present together with the question, that is, is placed in question.” 90 Paul Tillich, “Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom of God,” Systematic Theology, vol. 3, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 44. For Tillich, oneself participates at the center of the other self. Levinas will reveal the problem of ‘sameness’ of which Tillich appeared unaware. Mathew Lamb, Solidarity With Victims, 10. 91 This notion of ontological symbiosis is a correlative term from the heart of western theology and philosophers of religion such as Levinas and Ricoeur. 92 Rahner, Spirit in the World, 58–59. The subject is “the question turned consciously upon itself, the transcendental question … [as the] question about being in its totality.” “The being that is questioned is at once the being of the question and of the one questioning.”

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tension are the very aspects that, as Ricoeur notes, ‘de-centers our perspective’ that draws us out of ourselves and for the neighbor.93 In these imperative similes are the mystery of the human gaze, of eyes that canvas and hold your eyes, the shape and surface of skin that passes by or meets your skin, the tone of voice that both calls on and rejects you, ears that receive you and your radical imploration, or forbid you as a person to be scorned.94 Normative reciprocal action transpires within a symbiotic identity between oneself and an other. Insofar as this symbiotic relation is an ontological reciprocity, it represents the broadest scope of existential and existentiell depth and breadth of a deep-structure interpersonal promise of relation.95 A symbiosis is represented between mutual responsibility, caring for an other as you care for yourself, solicitude between love and justice, the recognition of struggle and the right to dwell between limit and horizon with integrity.96 Contrariwise, an ontological symbiosis between oneself and an other also means that when interpersonal relation is broken upon the wheel of human trespass, then both oneself and the other are harmed. Harm happens at the level of existential reciprocity. In existential reciprocity, human

93 Paul Ricoeur, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), 126. See also, Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 74. Levinas calls the shocking reality of the ‘other’ in one’s midst “a traumatism of astonishment.” Finally, see Volf, Exclusion and Embrace, 70. 94 Jean Graybeal, “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, 33. “The responsibility of our own lives, and our own deaths, issues some days in despair, some days in judgmental self-righteousness, some days in anarchic rebellion. But we were aware of the questions, living in their light, groping in their darkness.” 95 Martin Buber, I and Thou, 112. Buber writes that once in a reciprocal interpersonal relation with an ‘other,’ the entire world is lit up differently where “all else lives in its light.” I owe a debt to both Buber and Levinas for their emphasis on the irresistibility of the ‘other’ who implores us. 96 The idea of a promise of relation is identifiable in at least three terms within the Christian Testament – society, fellowship, and one’s fellow. The Greek, koinwnίa, can be translated as a specific society of members with normative, phenomenological, and socio-political allegiances. SunergÓuV, as fellow workers, is another term for being bound together. United in a common fellowship, these terms are peppered throughout the Greek New Testament – John 1:6, “If we say that we have fellowship [koinwníav]. 1 Cor. 9:23, “I do all things for the sake of the Gospel, so that I may become a fellow partaker [sugkoinwnòV] of it. Koinwnίa and sunergÓV, to be in fellowship and a fellow partaker. See Langenscheidts Grosswörterbuch Griechisch Deutsch: unter Berücksichtung der Etymologie von Prof. Dr. Hermann Menge, (München, Langenscheidt, 1991), 395–398, 658–670; and also, Nestle-Aland, Das Neue Testament Griechisch und Deutsch, (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1986).

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relationships can be torn asunder and the reality of symbiosis can be denied and seemingly trampled underfoot. Still, there is always a germ of symbiosis, of a shared ontological reciprocity of human identity that calls perpetrators to account. Even in the destruction of all existential and daily reciprocity, including the murderous loss of human life, human beings are meant to dwell alongside one another. We are likewise held accountable for how we dwell together. The manifold cruelties exhibited against those others whose lives have been torn apart, means these others always have truth on their side, placing the oppressor in the judgment seat under the full weight of Judeo-Christian veracity – “I was thirsty and you gave me no drink. I was a stranger (hospes/xénoV) and you did not welcome me.” I was yours in the depth of relation, and you annihilated me.97 We do not often desire to hear it, but even our enemies are held in relation with us in symbiotic identity as the unshakeable depth of identity in the neighbor-other. Analogous to the apex of Robert Frost’s classic poem, The Tuft of Flowers – ‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart/ ‘Whether they work together or apart.’ Symbiotic relation means an ontological togetherness that is never fully obliterated when existential reciprocity is annihilated in broken interpersonal life and relation. We recall that the query of Yhwh to a blood-stained Cain – “your brother’s blood is crying to me” – testifies to the assumed nature of this symbiotic relation from the womb of creation even prior to the brood of Adam. Even in death and the grave, Cain is responsible for his brother. The blood that calls is a symbol for symbiosis not only between the living and the living, but between the living and the dead. In this sense, we are responsible for, and accountable to, the dead. The symbol assumes a former relation, and that relation is crafted in symbiosis. We have yet to discover that through the trespass of cruelty, human beings are harmed in the lack of existential reciprocity and the denial of a shared symbiotic ontology. But this next point must be made explicit – cruelty fractures daily relation, and these fractures are also returned, splintering across the divide of a simile of existential and ontological import, and reducing both you and the neighbor, oneself and an other, perpetrator and victim, the privileged and the impoverished.98 The reduction of human beings, one to the other, may mean 97

Matthew 25:42b-43a. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 9.4; “He who does wrong does wrong against himself. He who acts unjustly to himself because he makes himself bad. He often acts unjustly who does not do a certain thing not only he who does a certain thing.” 98

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that the perpetrator is never made aware of his fault in terms of distributive justice. This is too often a repetitive and tragic reality of human life and relation registered in our own sense of deepest offence, betrayal, and fury. Perhaps distributive justice must work hand-inhand with another understanding of justice, an essential topic for assessment that we suspend here until its further explication in chapter four. vii) An Interpersonal Moniker – Remembering Fellows Forgotten But how inconsistent it would be for us to expect the immortal gods to love and cherish us, when we ourselves despise and neglect one another! – Cicero, Fin. 3.20.66 In addition to protecting ourselves against foes, we also torture one another, exhibit cruelty toward members of both our own and other species, and kill when doing so is clearly not sensible from a Darwinian standpoint. – Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?

The Post-Modern Interpersonal Delphi The great classics of the western tradition illustrate the very best of human potentiality that can be nevertheless transmogrified through concurrent and actualized cruelties and horrors. Such cruelties and horrors, from the twentieth century alone, have shocked our sensitivities and allegiances, and continue to test the metal of our own cultural legitimation.99 This crisis of legitimation has had ramifications on how we interpret our own mythos and the specific narratives that affect who we are and who we will become. The ramifications of having to forget some stories and transform or learn new ones, is a challenge to both intra- and interpersonal identity in our time. We recall that Nietzsche’s challenge was leveled at the foundation of Delphi, and what it means to “Know Thyself.” Our trajectory, through a correlation of select thinkers who represent our classic – traditional and contemporary – loci, was to reach an interpersonal moniker that revealed three aspects essential to our post-modern existence. First, this moniker must be reflective of our sense of existential limit and existentiell horizon – of humans as existential queries in relation to the oceanic so critical to the western

99 Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, (London: Black, 1929), 24. [Italics mine]. He comments after the first World War that “we tend to forget our relationship with our fellows; and are on the path towards inhumanity. ”

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tradition.100 Next, this moniker must be contiguous to the very heart of Judeo-Christian normative veracity that remains essential to the moral realities of our globalizing world; third, this moniker must represent a proper characterization for a post-modern interpersonal Delphi and our attentiveness to the seminal ipseitous and alteritous features of oneself in relation to an other. The trajectory began with an assessment of classic conceptions of interpersonal relation. Greek philia understood through Aristotle’s ‘friendship’ revealed the need for justice, Plato’s friendship revealed its disorientation. Ricoeur vied for a dialectic between both love and justice, Augustine’s ethics revealed an ontology of the weakened human subject while Gutierrez’s was a call for psychological and social liberation. What we observed was a trace of existential reciprocity essential to the respective labors of each of these thinkers. Next, the JudeoChristian imperative-similes reach through and beyond existential reciprocity and to the core of an ontological symbiosis between oneself and an other. Both ontological symbiosis and existential reciprocity are respective to human identity and action, or the who within the how. Know thyself as an other and an other as oneself, and seek action for others as for yourself. That is, respect, love, illicit justice, treat others ‘as’ though you would have them do the same to you. This kind of reciprocity is what it means to live within “the whole law.” As the Psalmist illustrates – have “fellowship together” by walking “in the house of God.”101 In our assessment of existential reciprocity and ontological symbiosis we have revitalized what we have, in fact, known all along within the classic expressions of human action and identity. Reciprocity and symbiosis are viewable in Luther’s revolutionary concept of a “priesthood of all believers” and reverberated in the Vatican II Lumen Gentium’s “common priesthood of the faithful.”102 Or in former Pope 100 The oceanic, internalized within the thinking-subject as the “mysterious darkness of unknowing” by Pseudo-Dionysius, acquired a long history for the Carthusians and the “cloud of unknowing.” See Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology, 1.3. 101 Lamb, Solidarity with the Victims, 9. “Far from a passive resignation in the face of injustice, such a self-transcending love (agape) intensifies participation in the humanizing and personalizing historical efforts for justice.” See also Tzvetan Todorov, Voices, 16. Two millennia after Aurelius, Todorov’s sentiments are of like ilk: Justice “is born within us spontaneously and freely. It may be dormant for years, but it is easily awoken.” In light of justice, “we can affirm that the worst is neither inevitable nor irreparable: something in human nature prevents humanity from destroying itself forever.” See also, Psalms 55:14. 102 Vatican II, Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, 10.

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John Paul II’s Dives in Misericordia, where Christians are called to have mercy, as the mediating term between “love” and “justice.”103 Lonergan’s notion of becoming a “person” as a “being in love” within interpersonal relation, as well as Jürgen Moltmann’s sense of “personhood” as determined by “being-in-relationship,” both reveal the nature of reciprocity and symbiosis.104 Reciprocity is the lodestone for Martin Buber’s sense of “the inborn Thou,” to whom we have an “impulse of relation,”105 or of Edward Farley’s notion of humans “being founded” in relation to one another,106 or in Thomas Ogletree’s call for hospitality and repentance that ushers in a new dialectic toward liberation,107 and finally negatively in Albert Schweitzer’s insightful remark written in 1929 – which reflects 1 Samuel’s account of “every man’s sword against his fellow” – that “we tend to forget our relationship with our fellows; and are on a path towards inhumanity.”108 The Corinthian question of “what fellowship [Koinwnίa] has light with darkness?” is a query into the substantive nature of being a fellow in oneself to an other.109 Fellowship is what it is in light of reciprocal and symbiotic fellows, or it is nothing at all indeed.

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John Paul II, Dives in Misericordia, 1981, 14. Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, 103–105, 115, and ‘Love as Selfsurrender’, 122 – “For falling in love is a new beginning, an exercise of vertical liberty in which one’s world undergoes a new organization.” Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, (London: SCM Press, 1992), 14, 268–70. Part of Moltmann’s project is to wrest the notion of ‘personhood’ free from the hands of Boethius and his heritage as “an individual substance rational in nature,” and to reformulate this relationally. 105 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 27, 131 in Donald L. Berry, Mutuality: The Vision of Martin Buber, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 42, 91. For Buber, “mutuality is most fully and clearly disclosed when two individuals speak ‘Thou’ to one another.” 106 Edward Farley, Good and Evil: Interpreting a Human Condition, 139–153. Farley’s Heideggerian adaptation of ‘being founded’ is also herein informative. 107 Thomas W. Ogletree, Hospitality to the Stranger, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), 7, 35–63. “In this frame of reference it is Christ who decenters me from my egoistic orientation to life, and in the process makes room in my life for my fellow human beings. Apart from the grace of God, the prudent are surely those who acknowledge the brokenness of the world and take self-interest to be the base point of all human action.” 108 Albert Schweitzer, The Decay and Restoration of Civilization, (London: Black, 1929), 24. [Italics mine]. “Wherever there is lost the consciousness that every man is an object of concern for us just because he is man, civilization and morals are shaken, and the advance to fully developed inhumanity is only a question of time.” 109 2 Corinthians 6:14. 104

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The moniker for the fullness of interpersonal relation rises from the imperative-similes themselves, and finally lands in the center of equitability and mutuality in fellowship. Human beings, reminded of their existential and ontological proximity to one another, are fellows in the fullest interpersonal sense.110 Cicero’s omnium mortalium societate, or fellowship of humankind, is an ontological and existential quality of being human.111 From lover and friend to dictator and the other underneath abstract-totalized autographs of the ‘enemy’ – on our small planet these are all the neighbor or other, one’s fellows in mutual worth despite the tragic and ugly reality of the cruel trespass of human worth.112 The tragic and ugly reality is as true today as it was when numerous in the Anabaptist leadership – including Müntzer, Sattler, and Hubmaier – were put to death by Lutherans and Catholics over issues of theological disagreement that were having serious political consequences.113 In our own epoch, in the fluidic nature of ipseitous and alteritous existence, to consider oneself as an other, is to think upon the action and identity of your fellow human beings. This point of one’s fellow as symbiotically and reciprocally present, is no less represented in W.H. Auden’s poem, September First, 1939, which he wrote in response to Germany’s invasion of Poland. For all their emotive import and their issuance of nearly unimaginable complexity, these words present an undeniable challenge to the problem we face in our own post-modern epoch – “We must love one another or die.” Todorov’s account of Bulgarian Prime Minister Bogdan Filov reminds us that a

110 Fellow, or the old English feolaga, “partner,” denotes economic relation. The Latin socius corresponds to ‘fellow’ after 1449 in relation to university life. Even ‘fellow-feeling’, early 17th c., is in correlation to the Latin compassio and the Greek sympatheia. Cicero, Fin. 5.9.24. “Hence we must now conceive of this whole universe as one commonwealth of which both gods and men are members” in Bolchazy, Hospitality in Antiquity, 56. 111 Cicero, Fin., 2.14.45, 3.19. 12–63 in Bolchazy, Hospitality in Antiquity, 57. “From this impulse [to love] is developed a sense of mutual attraction which united human beings as such; this also is bestowed by nature. The mere fact of their common humanity requires that one man should feel another man to be akin to him.” 112 Consider also Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.8. “So, too, a man, when he is separated from another man, has fallen off from the whole social community. Now as to a branch, another cuts it off but a man by his own act separates himself from his neighbor when he hates him and turns away from him, and he does not know that he has at he same time cut himself off from the whole social system.” 113 The Anabaptists were notorious for their modern reintroduction of a hostile and evil external world (see Schleitheim Confession, article four) to which one must yield in suffering (Gelassenheit). The loss of their leadership only confirmed this point in martyrdom.

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more grave option always awaits us in the complexities of interpersonal relation – “One cannot speak of a sense of humanity when our enemies’ planes are blindly killing women and children, sowing death and destruction. We are forced to wage a total war: we will either win or die.”114 To love – or win and die. We have it within our identity to resist vengeance and seek reconciliation while remembering the integrity of our fellows where reciprocity and symbiosis were forgotten, as they were for the aforementioned hundreds executed at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Liberia. How we do this, in light of wrenching moral quagmires and debilitating historical trespasses, or with regard to the height and depth of manifold interpersonal cruelties that bring still untold harm and the destruction of human life and relation, will remain our question. The task here was to clear some hermeneutic ground for an answer by reaching an interpersonal basis of who we are for one another in an accessible interpersonal moniker. Having identified this, we are now in a position to observe and approximate what cruelty does to interpersonal relation, between true fellows. Finally, who we are for one another reveals our common interpersonal telos within our being human. At our best and in our utter worst – we are always fellows in oneself as an other. B) The Role of Desire in the Interpersonal Struggle for Recognition Do not desire what belongs to someone else [but] love your neighbor as yourself. – Apostle Paul, Letter to the Romans115 Let your desire find its termination. – Marcus Aurelius116

114 Tzvetan Todorov, “Charles Rédard’s Report to the Federal Political Department in Berne, The Fragility of Goodness,” 92–4. See also, 86. In Filov’s personal diary and account of his conversation with Rédard, he remarks, “We both agreed that the war was growing crueller by the day.” [Italics mine]. 115 Paul, Letter to the Romans 13:9; see also James 1:8 – “If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘you shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ you are doing well.’ ” 116 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 5.34.

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Our task now is to understand the age-old query of how human desire and interpersonal conflict correlate.117 The task of understanding desire and conflict will open for us the interpersonal artery of the struggle for recognition within the greater fracture of cruelty. Human beings desire to be recognized by one another. We must first think upon the role of desire in interpersonal relation, and what role desire has in interpersonal recognition and conflict. In order to proceed, our trajectory makes a preliminary detour through Aristotle and then to a thinker, René Girard, who’s reading of both human desire and the origination of social violence has gained popular acceptance in theological circles. A review of Girard’s systematic theory regarding human desire and violence assists us i) in understanding the inexplicable and excessive nature of cruelty in interpersonal human life and relation, and ii) in understanding the irreducible well-being of the human subject within interpersonal conflict. Our trajectory will ultimately lead us to two major accounts of interpersonal cruelty in a ‘holy war mentality’, and to cruelty concealed within pity. The nature of desire [orexis] in interpersonal human life and relation has been a topos in western philosophy since before Socrates first suggested there is a definite non-contradiction between what one desires to do, on the one hand, and the impossibility of not doing what one knows is best, on the other hand.118 In short, despite contending desires, Socrates believed we always do what we know is best. But, of course, we know in saturated experience how we often eagerly do what we desire even when we know it is not best for us. In chapter two, we noted how Aristotle inherited this problem; he couched the dissonance between desire and not doing what we know is best in his famous problem of Incontinence – or the problem of the awareness that what

117 At least two approaches on the nature of desire from this era are divided according to the relation and priority of desire to the subject. Either – a) Along the trace of Aristotle-Hegel-Freud-Lacan, desire is an essential aspect within the human subject who is involved in both an interplay of deliberation, and intra- and interpersonal recognition. Even though the subject remains mysterious and fractured, it paradoxically retains a sense of its own inseparable and internal cohesiveness in its desire to acquire recognition. Or – b) Along the trace of Aristotle-Sartre-Foucault-Derrida-Girard, language and existence itself is a perpetual power exchange where human subjectivity is secondary to the differentiating and relatively overwhelming essentiality of desire in existence. Both approaches reveal how desire can become defective in human culture. The divergence in the wood between these two approaches is at an understanding, not of desire, but of the essentiality of the human subject. 118 Plato, Protagoras, 352B–353A.

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one desires and does, can be contrary to what is best for oneself.119 Why do we choose to do the things that we desire but know are not good for us? This is a question without rust. We noted in chapter two how Aristotle believed the answer revealed a defect in human character, as misplaced desire. Following Ricoeur, we chose not to speak of human defect, but of a self-trespass of injustice to intra-personal wellbeing. But we remark here that since human character is flush with desire, then such injustice to well-being can be serious and debilitating to human integrity. We turn first to Aristotle and to the conceptual western ground for ‘desire.’ We will briefly assess three specific texts by Aristotle on the nature of human desire. The first two texts where we locate the ground of desire are Aristotle’s On the Soul and his Nicomachean Ethics. Regarding these texts, Jonathan Leer writes, “Aristotle distinguishes different faculties of the soul by their different functions – and yet desire seems to cut right across the various ‘parts’ of man’s soul.”120 The human mind is “an expression of desire,” and the process of intra-personal deliberation [bouleusis] for the object of desire involves an interplay between the object, the subject’s rational thought, and the subject’s growing desire to acquire the object.121 Thus, the ‘interplay of deliberation,’ as we call it – between rational thought, desire, and the object – is “a transmitter of desire” within the human subject. Aristotle’s point is that, within this triadic interplay, desire can rise up and confound rational thought. It is precisely in confounding rational thought where we do what is not best for us. For instance, the attainment of the object (say, happiness) can become confounded when desire exceeds rational thought – I must be happy now! This is the ground underneath the contemporary issue of instant gratification to which psychologists and sociologists attest. We can glimpse what happens when the reckless attempt to attain personal happiness can create an injustice in oneself, or create conflict with other human beings.122 Ultimately, what is confounded in the interplay

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Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VII. Jonathan Leer, Aristotle: The Desire to understand, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 142; see also, Aristotle, On the Soul III. 9–10. 121 Jonathan Leer, The Desire to Understand, 143. 122 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III 3–5; see also Jonathan Leer, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, 145, 174–5 – “An agent’s awareness that he wishes for a certain end is itself a manifestation of that wish. Then commences a process of deliberation, a reasoning backward from the desired goal ‘through a series of steps which could best lead to that goal. …” 120

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of deliberation is well-being, where desire can be rapacious and overwhelm the art of self-care, and care for others, all together. Above all else, the deliberation of desire is a deep-structure and complex aspect of who and how we are as human beings in the living world. Alongside Aristotle’s interplay of deliberation in the world, a third text on desire is often drawn from Aristotle’s Poetics. The form of desire within this text has to do with imitation (i.e., mimesis): “Man differs from animals in his greater aptitude for imitation (mimesis).”123 Through mimesis one learns what to desire by observing and imitating the desire of others. It is interesting that Aristotle’s reflections on mimesis are made in his Poetics, and thus within the context of Greek performable tragedy, so there is some question about whether mimesis is a general deep-structure aspect of anthropology brimming up into daily existence, or whether humans exude a need for performance as a selfcritiquing mirror that imitates existence – after all, art imitating life assists us in reflecting upon how desire affects daily human existence.124 In Greek performable tragedy, imitation or mimesis happens within a teleological context, with its enclosed and pre-determined beginningmiddle-end. We note that in real life, the interplay of deliberation is complex and is telos-oriented, or open-ended and less than predictable. So, whereas desire in mimesis has a predictable beginning-middle-end in Greek tragedy, desire (even mimetic desire) in the interplay of deliberation is more complex and tragic when it confounds well-being in the living world.125 What does this tell us about mimesis? It tells us that mimesis is but one aspect of the complexity of being human, and although mimesis is important in the living world, we also learn about interpersonal mimetic activity through the reflective mirroring in Greek performable tragedy. Next, in daily life, human beings exude a deep-structure anthropological interplay of deliberation between rational thought, desire, and the object. And mimetic desire is immanently more complex in the living world.

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Aristotle, Poetics, IV.2. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.5–6. “At first tragedies were brought on the stage as means of reminding men of the things that can happen to them, and that is according to nature for things to happen so, and that, if you are delighted with what is shown on the stage, you should not be troubled with what takes place on the larger stage.” 125 Aristotle, Physics, II.2. 124

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C) Girard’s Delphi – Mimetic Rivalry and the Concealment of Cruelty The post-Structuralist thinker, René Girard, interprets Aristotelian mimetic desire as the deep-structure anthropological ground of human existence. His popular theory of mimetic rivalry is an attempt to locate the site of this anthropological deep-structure, hidden pre-historically underneath human subjectivity since before the foundation of the world. Like Aristotle, Girard asserts that mimetic desire is basic to animals and human culture. However, Girard superimposes mimetic desire of Greek performable tragedy into the living world at the cost of the interplay of deliberation. In this superimposition, mimesis acquires a primordial status within human consciousness that Girard believes existed long before our own subjective and self-conscious awareness of mimesis. Within the context of performable tragedy, Girard discusses how, in the animal kingdom, two ‘others’ locate an object, imitate each other’s common interest, and compete for possession of the object.126 Unlike the animal kingdom, in human cultures mimetic desire accelerates until it reaches a violent crisis. What Girard reveals to us is a direct line of ascendancy from a primordial mimetic desire to externalized violence, and a commensurate lack of awareness of this ascendancy that is concealed in human rituals and prior to self-reflective human subjectivity. To understand Girard’s argument, we trace his ascendancy between mimesis and internalized violence in human cultures:127 Mimetic rivalry begins when two human ‘others’ desire the same object. Attraction for the object increases through a mutual and imitative rivalry between these ‘others.’ Through the mimetic rivals, desire automatically increases.128 As the mimetic rivalry increases, the desired object

126 René Girard, “An Interview with René Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 203. “The non-Hegelian starting point changes everything. If there is a conflictual mimesis before anything definable as human, in animal life itself, how can we say that mimesis does not precede representations and sign systems?” See also, Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 6. “To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human all-too-human principle to which even the apes might subscribe; for it has been said that in devising bizarre cruelties they anticipate man and are, as it were, his ‘prelude.’ ” 127 René Girard, “What is a Myth,” The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 24–44. 128 René Girard, “Mimesis and Violence,” The Girard Reader, trans. James G. Williams, (New York: Crossroads, 2000), 9–19.

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curiously loses its original attraction, and the true aim of mimetic rivalry becomes the desire to out-desire the rival that one is imitating.129 In this way, mimetic rivalry becomes contagious where “imitation imitates imitation” that destabilizes human relation.130 The result of the increasingly uncontrolled rivalry is an endemic violence that churns up from within the deep-structure of mimetic desire itself.131 Through uncontrolled mimesis, human violence “breeds upon itself ” and wreaks havoc upon human cultures and societies.132 The risk of such havoc means that the exertion and torque of violence must be somehow released, or else end in unchecked, cultural destruction.133 What could procure such release from unchecked mimetic waves of violence? The answer is in mimesis itself – due to its deep-structure status, mimesis is also discoverable in the first theatre, in religious sacrifices within human culture and ritual, where the sacrifice of both animal and human relieved a crisis with the divinities and served a psycho-social need by ending the mimetic rivalry.134 The sacrificial victim, or scapegoat (Pharmakos), fulfills the psycho-social need in establishing both the victim and savior of uncontrolled mimetic rivalry.135 That is, the scapegoat is both the victim of sacrifice and savior of society by bringing an end to cycles of violence in the theatrical, ritualized and irretrievable stroke of his own annihilation. What Girard uncovers is the cultural production of the victim, what he terms the ‘scapegoat mechanism,’ or an automatic (i.e., a verifiably repetitive and universal)

129

René Girard, “An Interview with René Girard,” To Double Business Bound,

202. 130

J. Bottum, First Things 61, (March, 1996), 42–45. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 1–17. 132 René Girard, “The Origins of Myth and Ritual,” Violence and the Sacred, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 89–118. 133 René Girard, “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double,” Violence and the Sacred, 143–168. 134 René Girard, “The Sacrificial Crisis,” Violence and the Sacred, 39–67. 135 René Girard, “An Interview with René Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 218. “In spite of their still partly mythical nature, the texts of persecution already testify to that decreased efficacy: the victims are still perceived as omnipotent for evil but not for good anymore. They are no longer truly divinized in other words.” See also, René Girard, Resurrection from the Underground: Feodor Dostoevsky, ed. and trans. James G. Williams, (New York: Crossroad, 1997). See also Girard, “The Unity of All Rights,” Violence and the Sacred, 306. “All religious rituals spring from the surrogate victim, and all the great institutions of mankind, both secular and religious, spring from ritual.” 131

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mechanism within human culture.136 What we note in this brief encapsulation of the main tenets of Girard’s theory of mimetic rivalry, is his explanation of the ascendancy of mimesis into violence and the scapegoat mechanism that increases from within mimetic rivalry that finally ends in the dissemination of violence.137 What we resist in Girardian thought is already what he and his fellow Girardians resist in us as a misappropriation of the mimetic theory of violence. However, through our review we will discover why our resistance is not a misappropriation of Girard’s theory. i) Daily Tragic Existence and Performable Tragedy What we resist first is the too easily conceived, even de facto, synthesis between daily tragic existence and performable tragedy in Girardian thought. Performable tragedy conceals the tragic content underneath, so the former resists synthesis with the latter. We recall that this was Kuhn’s assertion insofar as the construction of performable tragedy “is itself a denial of the tragic content of the art work.”138 Ricoeur proffered an analogous point – the tragic resists thought and thought resists the tragic.139 Both Kuhns and Ricoeur offer us a hermeneutic caveat that thought can never fully grasp daily tragic existence through the systematic lenses of performable tragedy. Girard’s theory of a mimetic rivalry does not reflect this caveat, but rather superimposes mimesis as performable tragedy over desire in the interplay of deliberation within the living world.140 For this reason, the few critics of Girard always come away soured, as though something significant is simply missing and terribly insufficient in the theory itself. This theory does not really 136

René Girard, “An Interview with René Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 204. “My interest in mimetic phenomena, in and out of literature, led me to the victimage mechanism. I now understand that the anthropology based on the victimage mechanism is the first to do away with the metaphysical postulate of absolute human specificity, still present in Marx and in Freud without espousing the simplistic assimilation of man and animal practices by the ethnologists.” 137 René Girard, “A Conversation with René Girard,” The Girard Reader, 266. “When I use the term ‘mechanism,’ as in ‘scapegoat mechanism,’ I mean basically and simply a generative principle which works unconsciously in culture and society.” 138 Richard Kuhns, Tragedy: Contradiction and Repression, 72. 139 Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 214–230. 140 Bouchard, 42. Bouchard writes that “Girard discovers in tragedy the secret of human, not divine, violence, in disguised social cycles of vengeance. The roots of hubris are internal, in the heart of humanity.” But Girard does not distinguish the difference between the tragic of human existence and performable tragedy. This is a point of contention.

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account for the ugliness that we intuit in human existence. What is missing is an account of real human existence, even in the face of a mesmerizing theatrical portrayal. We already know from our assessment in chapter one how life never fits so cleanly into teleological systems that fully enclose existence, and this is also true of desire in daily existence, with their pre-determined beginning-middle-end.141 Of course we do know that human existence is flush with patterns of desire and mimesis, where mimesis can be hidden underneath every narrative crumb. But to universalize mimetic desire in a systematic theory as a bonafide hermeneutic key to human violence constitutes a beginning-middle-end, or teleology, to the complexities of human existence. It is as if the doors to enlightenment are simply waiting to be thrust open, revealing the hidden breezeways toward fully understanding human violence within. Such systematic theories will in fact always obscure both the singular human subject and the true nature of excess in human trespass when, indeed, excess exceeds the teleological structure itself. The Karamazovs remind us that children are senselessly killed every day, so how can I portend an understanding of the violent, hidden ways of man’s inhumanity to man? As another case in point, human excess in violence outside of mimesis is precisely what Gray attests to as the “Mephistophelean cry that all created things deserve to be destroyed. Sometimes there is no more concrete motive for destroying than this one. …”142 When excess in human violence is not applicable to the enclosed mimetic theory of violence, then the teleology of mimesis will determine such excess to represent either inconsequential anomalous misinterpretations of human existence, or even worse, such excess will be consumed within the theory through manipulation and reduction. But excess cannot be reduced without destroying it. With regard to cruelty, a systematic and teleological theory of mimesis could therefore never account for cruelty as an excess, although it would be successful in concealing cruelty by constructing a parody of cruelty in its reduction and transmogrification to the stage. In excluding excess, the Girardian theory confuses daily tragic existence for performable tragedy. But then an appeal is usually made to 141 Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence: Paul’s Hermeneutic of the Cross, 161–71. 142 Gray, The Warriors, 55. “We are tempted under the influence of Darwinian thought to explain away man’s delight in destruction as a regressive impulse, a return to primitivism and to a animal nature. … When man is at his destructive work, he is on a different plane from animal altogether.”

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recover the realm of the real within theatre. The Girardian, Andrew McKenna, commits himself to just this error. In the opening lines of his book, he writes, “Aristotle defines man as the political and rational animal. …” No mention is made of something akin to what we termed the interplay of deliberation that can exceed human well-being. Instead, McKenna turns immediately toward Aristotle’s performable tragedy, forfeiting how desire exceeds daily human well-being in favor of mimetic Poetics – “… but the readers in this book are guided by his [Aristotle’s] observation that ‘man differs from other animals in his great aptitude for imitation.”143 What McKenna trades is Aristotle’s understanding of excess in real human existence for performance and a teleological theory of human mimesis. Thereafter, McKenna’s study of how philosophy coincides with Girardian mimesis will naturally exclude excess in daily human existence due to a paradigmatic forking and exclusion of Aristotle against himself, which McKenna reinforces. Excess will be concealed, no matter how much a thinker attempts to resituate daily tragic existence in the performance of Girardian systemic theory. As an example of difference between inexplicable excess in existence and a teleological theory of mimesis in performance, Girard is able to coax mimesis out of Shakespeare’s performable tragedy Julius Caesar, but this is not an analogous endeavor evident in the excessive and tragic, actual and inexplicable, historical death scenes of the Roman Caesars.144 Interestingly enough, the Romans did reflect upon the shameless excesses of their Caesars. How did the Romans interpret such excess? Asko Timonen writes, “The violence of a bad ruler is turned into a topos of cruelty for which reasons are sought from its past.”145 The Roman Historia Augusta and Cassius Dio exude precise attempts to understand the excesses, and by excess we mean the ugliness, of their native Caesars – why was Commodus “violent,” or 143 Andrew McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, (University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1992), 1. See also 182 where McKenna comments on Rorty’s “loathing for cruelty” and then immediately subsumes any mention of the topos of cruelty within “mimetic desire” and the opposition of “violent doubles,” and other such catch-phrases. 144 See Markus Müller, “Interview with René Girard,” Anthropoetics II, no. 1, (June, 1996). 145 Asko Timonen, “The Death Scenes of the Powerful,” Cruelty and Death: Roman Historians’ Scenes of Imperial Violence from Commodus to Philippus Arabs, (Turun Yliopisto, 2000), 217, 141–222. “An early interest in vices and cruel habits is observed in Commodus … a vicious character in general offers fertile soil for violence.”

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Carcalla “bloodthirsty,” or Macrinus “sadistic?”146 In short, what was underneath all the embroiling violence that the Caesars displayed against their own citizenry? “Crudelitas.” The originating remarks upon such violence reveal a search for crudelitas as rawness like rohmeat in habit and personal traits that aid Roman historians in locating how the ugliness of their Caesars led to later eruptions of interpersonal conflict. Not unlike the Romans, we pursue analogous queries today in the correlation between childhood cruelties and later criminal conduct. Like the Romans, we are not discussing performable tragedy, and even when we discover strong mimetic traces in daily life and relation, this does not portend a hidden teleology of mimetic desire concealed since the foundation of the world. To do the latter is to reduce the inexplicabilities and ugliness of human excess that will not be mollycoddled into a theory. What is forfeited in the latter effort is the very rawness of human existence that a theory hopes to capture, but which vanishes in the increasingly systematic, even dogmatic, clutches of the theory itself. ii) Performable Tragedy – Hamartia and Catharsis Second, with respect to performable tragedy, Larry Bouchard suggests that many of Girard’s conclusions on the Greek tragedies “tend to dissolve the distinction between integrity and fault so important for understanding the drama of a Prometheus and an Oedipus as they pass through crisis to disaster.”147 Integrity and fault in the protagonist (as in our earlier example of Oedipus) are a matter of hamartia in Greek tragedy – the integrity that becomes a fault attests to the singular excess of the subject that cannot be categorized in a meta-mechanism of the scapegoat. It is precisely here that some critics of Girard feel most unsatisfied. They are unsatisfied because the linkage between integrity and fault (or a virtue that unmakes one’s life) works in performable 146 Timoren, “The Death Scenes of the Powerful,” Cruelty and Death: Roman Historians’ Scenes of Imperial Violence from Commodus to Philippus Arabs, 217 – “In Dio’s opinion, Macrinus suspected people of finding fault with both his birth and the manner of his accession. The author of the vita Macrini elaborates from these elements a characteristic: crudelitas.” The Historia Augusta explains Macrinus’ “violence basically through his ‘barbarian’ background: his actual ferocity manifested itself as cruel actions.” 147 Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought, 23.

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tragedy, but we know that although performable tragedy reflects human life, it does not fully represent it. Our sense of tragic existence demands a more accurate representation of human ugliness. But the Girardian systematic theory always superimposes performable tragedy over the tragic. Girard writes: “The theater has played the role assigned to it by Aristotle. It has disguised and suppressed its mimetic-sacrificial infrastructure.”148 And yet, Girard misses excess concealed in performable tragedy by reintroducing a ‘mimetic-sacrificial infrastructure’ precisely in performable tragedy.149 In this vein, Bouchard notes, “Tragedy, by Girard’s reading, is thus an inquiry into the origins of violence.”150 The meta-narrative of the Girardian systemic theory becomes blinded by its own theoretical lenses, and to the tragic that is never fully represented in performable tragedy. Consider Girard’s interpretation of Aristotle’s catharsis – “Even if, on this particular point, this philosopher [Aristotle] is more enlightening than anyone else, he does not entirely dispel the obscurity that is constitutive of cultural foundation. He never focuses his attention directly on the source of it all, the foundational murder. Catharsis seems to spring from nothing.”151 In chapter one, we learned that for Aristotle, pity-fear-catharsis come as a conceptual package, and do not merely spring from “nothing.” As A.C. Bradley notes in Hegel’s reflections upon Aristotelian tragedy, genuine pity (i.e., empathy) and fear “are due to the spectacle of the conflict and its attendant suffering which do not appeal simply to our sensibilities or our instinct of selfpreservation, but also to our deeper mind or spirit.”152 This ‘nothing’, to

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René Girard, Theatre of Envy, 223. René Girard, “From Mimetic Desire to the Monstrous Double,” Violence and the Sacred, 168. “Greek tragedy, like the festival and indeed all other rites, is primarily a representation of the sacrificial crisis and the generative violence. The use of masks in the Greek theater requires, therefore, no special explanation; the masks serve the same role as they do elsewhere.” 150 Larry D. Bouchard, Tragic Method and Tragic Theology: Evil in Contemporary Drama and Religious Thought, 44. 151 René Girard, Theatre of Envy, 222; see also, René Girard, “The Unity of All Rites,” Violence and the Sacred, 291. “It is precisely because Aristotle failed to penetrate the secret of sacrificial rites that his tragic katharsis ultimately constitutes only another sacrificial displacement. It takes its rightful place among all the other displacements, gravitating around the generative violence that owes its enduring efficacy to its elusiveness.” 152 A.C. Bradley, “Hegel’s Theory of Tragedy,” in Anne and Henry Paolucci, ed., Hegel on Tragedy: Selections, 367. 149

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which pity-fear-catharsis appeals in us, is precisely the site to which we are directed by the Greek chorus. Only in the Greek chorus, are the excesses of daily tragic existence signified, although never fully encapsulated, in performable tragedy. What Girard locates as “springing from nothing” is in fact that source underneath pity-fear-catharsis, of inexplicability and excess in human life and relation that is anomalous – as if springing “from nothing” – to an enclosed theoretical paradigm of mimetic activity. The Greek chorus teaches that, among other vices, human ugliness is what it is because it always subverts our ability to fully conceptualize its nature, can fracture our dwelling in the world, will contradict our values, and may thrust us into the enigmatic. The Greek chorus’ appeal to our “deeper mind or spirit,” informs our intuitions about human excess, even though we cannot fully explain it. For instance, the Greek chorus appeals to ugliness as the unsleeping Ate – of a foolhardy or ruinous impulse – that springs from the excesses we surmise in our sense of tragic existence. We noted earlier that when cruelty as an excess conflicts with the Girardian systematic theory of mimesis, then it will naturally be perceived as an anomaly, as if springing from nothingness. We should thus not be surprised that such excess is intuited as though it has no origination in the Greek chorus of a performable tragedy. Girard is correct, mimetic desire is a fundamental aspect of interpersonal tension and violence, but if we perceive it as that “thing hidden” since the foundation of the world, then the Delphic systematic theory that we construct atop fracture will be employed to explain violence from the first cultural murder to tomorrow’s café bombing, but it will miss the inexplicable nature of violence even while theorists defend that they have missed nothing whatsoever. We may conceal the ugliness or excess that fractures human life and relation underneath clean paradigmatic representations. But following Nietzsche’s way of cruelty, fracture will not so readily disappear in spite of every new glimmering Delphi. iii) The Mimetic Victim and the Abstracted Subject Third, reading the record of the mimetic theory of violence together with Girard’s conception of the scapegoat mechanism leaves one with the intuitive sense of a skip in the hermeneutic needle. Girard writes, “If desire is the same for all of us, and if it is the key to the system of relationships, there is no reason not to make of it the real ‘subject’

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of the structure – a subject that comes back to mimesis in the end.”153 McKenna writes, “What takes precedence to subject and object alike, and to all ontological determinations, is desire … it is still ontological desire, as it were, if it is conceived as a desire for being that the other unknowingly transmits to the self, with which the other contaminates the self.”154 In the correlation of Girard and McKenna, mimetic desire is hyper-elevated over the essential struggle between two competing interpersonal others. We assessed in the Girardian systematic theory how performable tragedy is superimposed on our sense of tragic existence. But what we note in Girard and McKenna’s remarks above is how Aristotle’s interplay of deliberation is fully confounded insofar as not only the object, but the human subject as a rational presence, both vanish! We are left only with desire, where the superimposition is complete and human suffering and cruelty are provisionalized and concealed. This turn away from the subject is not rooted in Post-Structuralist philosophy, but in Girard’s famous rejection of Hegel’s absolutized subject seeking recognition.155 But Girard and McKenna throw the baby out with the bathwater.156 They are not throwing out the absolute subject, but subjectivity altogether. Ironically, these thinkers furthermore replace the absolute subject with the absolute ontology of mimetic desire.

153 René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, 303. A further problem is apparent in the attribution of mimesis, or mimetic-like, qualities between human beings and animals. Despite a strong case for such synthesis, Midgley also delivers an equally plausible alternative for cruelty – Cruelty, “like other malfunctions, would not develop if we were not prone to them. Simpler, non-social creatures are not capable of these responses and do not show them. Neither do some defective humans. Emotionally, we are capable of these vices, because we are capable of states opposite them, namely in the virtues. …” See Midgley, Wickedness, 3. 154 Andrew McKenna, Violence and Difference: Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, (University of Illinois Press, Chicago 107. [Italics mine]. 155 René Girard, “An Interview with René Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 201–203. 156 The protean influence of Hegel upon Lacan’s thought is interesting insofar as Lacan’s extensive work on jouissance and desire did not require the rejection of the Hegelian dialectic. In this vein, desire is ontological without the abstraction of human subjectivity. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1985), 167; see also, Patrick Fuery, “Jouissance and Its Paradox,” Theories of Desire, (Malasia: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 7–34; and again, Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 268.

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Mimesis becomes the scapegoat of subjectivity – that is, the subject is not the issue, since the subject vanishes into mimetic desire.157 But to abstract the subject through mimesis is to conceal the main query of what Nietzsche calls “the true biography” of human beings, a biography that is concentrated in how cruelty rises from within the subject. What transpires in Girard’s thought is the abstraction of the Hegelian subject by the absolute Geist of mimetic rivalry.158 The emptying of the singularity of the subject is analogous to the emptying of inexplicable excess by reading carte blanche daily tragic existence within performable tragedy through the systemic theory of a “mimetic-sacrificial infrastructure.” Both the abstraction of the human subject and the reduction of excess in performance happens through what we now observe as the lifting-up of a theoretical Ideal of Mimesis. The Ideal of Mimesis will never be allowed to be undermined in the Girardian teleological structure. The scapegoat mechanism as a pattern of cultural victimization is uncovered at the price of the abstraction of singular subjectivity to Mimesis. To not see this point is to fall victim to the mechanism purporting to reveal how sacrifice functions. Aristotle’s desire within the subject’s interplay of deliberation, and Hegel’s notion of desire in the Kampf for recognition between subjects, both become “derivative” of the Ideal of Mimesis. When we return once more from theatre and engage the reality of daily tragic existence, then the Ideal of Mimesis becomes ever more problematic. This Ideal represents an unwarranted and unwise abstraction of the human subject. As an example, when the North Tower of the Twin Towers fell in New York City, a man named Peter Alderman died along with his colleagues. “Every time we can put a human face on this it is no longer just a mass murder,” his mother, Elizabeth Alderman, stated later to the press.159 Next, the call for ‘a human face’ is analogous to Hegel’s understanding of “friendship and love [where] I give up my

157 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM III:19. “ “Dishonest falseness – an abysmal falsity, which is, however, an innocent, true-hearted, blue-eyed, and virtuous falsity. These ‘good people’ – who among them could endure even one truth ‘about human beings!’ … Or, to ask the question more precisely, who among them could bear a true biography.” 158 René Girard, “An Interview with René Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 201– 203. “The dynamics of mimetic rivalry are rooted in a disputed object and not in that ‘Hegelian desire for recognition’ that I have always viewed as derivative. …” 159 Joel Achenbach and Brooke A. Masters, “They’re Jumping Out of Building One,” Washington Post, Friday, August 29, 2003.

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abstract personality and thereby win it back as concrete.”160 Third, J. Glenn Gray writes in his war journal how, “abstract hatred and not the greater savagery of contemporary man… is responsible for much of the blood lust and cruelty in recent wars.”161 Abstract hatred has an excessive quality that is not explainable by Mimesis. Clarifying this point will be our task in approximating the relation between human desire and cruelty in the next section on a ‘holy war mentality.’ iv) Unfalsifiability Finally, all systemic theories of the Ideal reserve for themselves a yank in the hermeneutic chain – which we identify and then explain as ‘logical unfalsifiability’ – as old as the Katy-bar-the-door tactics of Gnosticism itself. Logical unfalsifiability simply means that the logic of a systematic theory with its enclosed Ideal can be verified from experience, but never disproved. There is no way to effectively discuss a theory like this without gaining the attention of its adherents by first hacking down its fundamental non-disclosed presuppositions. One of these presuppositions in the Girardian camp is that there is a fundamental, causal and originary relationship between religion and violence. This presupposition is the sacred cow of Girardian thought in that the destructive force of violence in religion is Mimetic. Indeed, for Girard Mimetic desire first turns violent in human history through an originary murder and the religious sacrifice. And yet, Girard’s is a highly arguable and often unclear presupposition of an ilk that theologian Edward Schillebeeckx fully rejects – “[People] often come to the conclusion, albeit wrongly, that there must be an intrinsic connection between religion and violence.”162 Why must Mimetic violence be assumed endemic to the rootstock of religion? We have license, like Schillebeeckx, to be suspicious. But then to do so, and in consideration of the record of objections to the Girardian theory, we must consider the logic of unfalsifiability from the Girardian camp that will take two predominant reactionary forms: a) If the reader

160 Hegel, “The Consummate Religion,” Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827). [Italics mine]. 161 J. Glenn Gray, Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, ix, 14, 134, 137 140. “No one should underestimate the cruelty and the delight in cruelty when a soldier – or a civilian – is impelled by such personal, abstract hatred.” 162 Edward Schillebeeckx, “Documentation: Religion and Violence,” Religion as a Source of Violence? 131.

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does not understand or agree with the Girardian systematic theory of Mimetic violence in religion then this is due to the fact that Mimesis remains concealed to our western sensibilities of myth and ritual, and truth takes time after the fall of all former “dogmatic methodologies”;163 next, b) the second form of unfalsifiability is to deny the existence of a systematic theory of Mimesis altogether. This is not a systematic theory; it is simply the discovery of an anthropological truth, of a repetitive and seemingly universal pattern of Mimetic rivalry and a coordinated mechanism of victimization since pre-history that has gone wholly, explicitly overlooked by the brightest minds of western consciousness. Such a claim would couch the Girardian teleological theory, with its Ideal of Mimesis, in a logic that makes it verifiable and never disprovable – that is, unfalsifiable.164 Unfalsifiability is a trick of reason to construct and conceal truth. Thus, the problem is not one of the verification or non-verification of Girardian ‘truth;’ the problem is that the Girardian systematic teleological structure conceals an implicit logic of unfalsifiability. What is operative within an unfalsifiable systematic theory? Not merely a theory, but the advancement of a theoretical and teleological Ideal, the very thing that Girard purports not to do.165 v) Conclusion Charles Bellinger, in his work, The Genealogy of Violence, comments with respect to Girardian thought that “the basic presupposition of this book is that human disorder has an intelligible order. Though the ultimate springs of evil will always remain a mystery, human pathology can be understood to a great extent. … The categories for understanding violence are not lacking.”166 This last sentence about human pathology is quite a claim. We commented earlier that one must always carefully assess the ontologically packed category of ‘evil.’ Is this existentialist

163 René Girard, “An Interview with Rene Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 212–14. 164 René Girard, “An Interview with Rene Girard,” To Double Business Bound, 214. It is not uncommon to dogmatically defend one’s theory against dogmatism. This too is mimetic, but perhaps not only that. 165 Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994). 166 Charles K. Bellinger, The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil, 130–31.

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secular evil, classic Augustinian evil, Humanist evil, Kantian radical evil, Dostoyevsky’s evil of abandonment, Joseph Conrad’s evil as a heart darkened to barbarity, or a popular fusion of these and more? In the topos of cruelty we have been exceedingly cautious in the belief that we can reach all of the “categories” for understanding both cruelty and violence attributed to cruelty. Indeed, many are convoluted in the “mystery,” as Bellinger calls it. And even from an intuitive spark, these categories within cruelty will never be flush with those of Mimetic violence. Certainly some of the categories for understanding cruelty are lacking and cry out for the labors of interdisciplinary contributions to understanding. If such categories exist, then they must be reached through an approximative effort that remains exterior to teleological Ideals and enclosed systematic theories. Finally, with regard to the rush of enthusiasm over newly found teleological truth, history teaches that neither regimes nor research institutes, whose aim it is to dogmatize enclosed teleologies, are ever far behind. Our contemporary vulnerabilities produce analyses, such as the Girardian ‘mimetic theory of violence,’ that return us again to a (this time formerly non-disclosed) teleologically fixed Ideal, or a “generative mechanism” somehow hidden since the foundation of the world. The difference between an approximation of the fracture of cruelty and the clean presentation of the ontology of Mimetic violence is that the former lands in the middle of a hostile hermeneutic environment, in the recognition of Angst, wonder-awe, the inexplicability and singularity of cruelty upon the human subject, and the excessive reality of cruel displays echoed with sometimes heart-wrenching honesty as was the case for Job. An approximation of cruelty resists – not mimetic desire in daily existence – but the Girardian systematic theory of Mimetic rivalry that provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty within a teleologically fixed Ideal of Mimesis. We believe we have discovered it, a hidden Mimetic theory that traces desire to social violence.167 We are only partially correct, for how

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René Girard, “The God of the Victims,” The Postmodern God, ed. Graham Ward, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1997) 107. See also, Anthony Storr, Feet of Clay: Saints, Sinners, and Madmen: A Study of Gurus, (New York: Free Press, 1996), 175–6. “The distress of chaos followed by the relief of finding a new order is as typical of scientific and mathematical discovery as it is of the resolution of inner personal problems.” And again, “As a species, we are intolerant of chaos, and have a strong predilection for finding or inventing order. This is an inescapable part of our biological endowment.”

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do we account for the disfiguring ugliness that is the excess of cruelty within the teleological framework of Girardian Mimesis? How is the rawness, inexplicability, and disfiguration of cruelty to be enclosed in an Ideal? Our investigation shows how such enclosure is impossible. How excess exceeds itself into inexplicability and contradiction outside of Mimesis is what the Ideal of a generative mechanism can never portend. Furthermore, in the hyper-elevated essentiality of Mimesis, the singularity of the human subject becomes abstracted, and the abstracted ‘self ’ is reduced to the oh-so-avant-garde emanation of Mimetic difference, like terminally vanishing ghosts in a hall of mirrors within a performance. But performing ghosts in mirrored halls don’t write books about a lack of their own Mimetic non-subjectivity. Ex nihilo nihil fit. With all the intellectual goodies that mimetic desire offers for reflection, in the end it is the teleology of Mimesis, and the reduction of abstracted subjectivity, that are the bitter narrative pills post-modern consciousness cannot swallow. This is not due to their veritable piggy-back on the brilliant poetics of the twilight of all truth, but because they represent the reversion of all thought thinking itself, the nihil contrariwise to Augustine’s subject curved inward. The abstract subject curved outward in terminally mirrored desire evaporates as shadow and a thought into the Mimetic reflections themselves. When ghosts vanish they stop writing books, but then the next generation picks up the quill and starts again. Where to begin? At least Nietzsche’s will to power had meat on its bones.168 Our next task is to identify the artery of the struggle for recognition within the interpersonal sphere. To this point, we have asked after the connection between desire and struggle within interpersonal recognition, and we have learned i) that desire (even mimetic desire) within the interplay of human deliberation does not portend the raising up of an enclosed Ideal of Mimesis. Next, ii) desire that exceeds in interpersonal struggle does not happen between abstract human subjects. Rather, desire that exceeds well-being is exhibited between subjects, or fellows, who exude both an ontological symbiosis, albeit a harmed reciprocity. The tragic sense in us reveals how excessive desire transvalues the nature of such fellowship in how it harms and even

168 Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, I, 21. A common misconception is that Nietzsche’s ‘will to power’ is a call to construct new anthropological ontologies. He adamantly resists such efforts as yet another round of nutcrackers “cracking nuts.”

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annihilates other human beings. Then, iii) within the interplay of deliberation, desire is not alone in exceeding human well-being. Rationality or reason can also construct grounds for such excess and thereby provisionalize human suffering and conceal cruelty. For instance, as we will see, the protection of the Ideal of Freedom may necessitate slaughtering others. Reason constructs and conceals. Finally, at the beginning of this chapter we noted that our historical epoch is in the midst of a serious crisis of who (identity) and how (action) we are, and by what authority we qualify our actions in the world. Once we understand the interiority of interpersonal cruelty in the following sections, our hope is that we will see interpersonal cruelty as, at the very least, a path we trod without any confidence for a peaceable future in which fellow human beings will mutually participate. D) The Artery of Recognition Never before in human history have so many humans slaughtered their fellow human beings on such a massive scale. – Mathew Lamb, Solidarity with the Victims Today … we confront an economic and political integration on the scale of the planet: shall we be, intimately and subjectively, able to live with the others, to live as others, without ostracism but also without leveling? – Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves Until this moment, sir, I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. … Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you no sense of decency? – Attorney Joseph Welch to Joseph McCarthy, during the McCarthy hearings

10:15 a.m., November 9, 1993, Mostar, Croatia – The “slender arch” of the stone Stari Most, or ‘Old Bridge,’ built in 1557 by Ottoman Emperor Suleiman the Magnificent, collapsed after being shelled at close range by a tank from the Bosnian Croat’s militia (HVO). For four centuries, the bridge had come to symbolize the unity of Muslims, Jews, Croatian Catholics, and Serbian Orthodox living together in a multicultural Bosnia.169 Nearly as a presage two millennia before, Seneca

169 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1376230.stm. The costly effort of building a new and similar bridge where the old one stood began in June, 1997.

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writes – “Our relations with one another are like a stone arch, which would collapse if the stones did not mutually support each other, and which is upheld in this very way.”170 The Corinthian exclaims that “We are God’s fellow [sunergoí] workers … God’s building.”171 Seneca’s fellowship of stones analogy where fellows are “all members of one great body,” is here correlated with Scripture and the collapse of the Stari Most to approximate the truth that if we are to exist together then at fundamental levels we must recognize each other as humans being. Reciprocity and symbiotic relation is when we recognize the other in our global midst as a fellow in the fullest sense of this term. Aristotle writes that “recognition, as its name indicates, is a change from ignorance to knowledge.”172 In the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, two imperative-similes require our recognition of interpersonal life and relation as both reciprocally and symbiotically a) singular and b) collective. Thereafter, the imperatives require that we take action on behalf of oneself and an other through agapic praxis, or that is, through activated caritas. At the intra-personal sphere such praxis is in the art of personal care, whereas at the interpersonal sphere the art of care is a specific kind of responsibility to recognize the mutual attestations of an other as oneself in our midst. Todorov reminds us that “responsibility is a particular form of caring.” That is, the ‘art’ of caring after others as oneself is a central and reciprocal responsibility in how we live alongside one another.173 In correlation of these three, recognition is both the overcoming of ignorance through an increase of knowledge, as well as love that is activated in caring for oneself and an other. The common telos of being fellows is daily evidenced in our mutual responsibility, in how we dwell, belong alongside or distance ourselves, cross one another’s paths, regularly intersect one another’s routines, and traverse one another’s singular experiences and existences. As living Queries, we are always already in a position to recognize one another and at least

Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, “It was one of the most beautiful bridges in the world … a slender arch lies between two round towers, its parapet bent in a shallow angle in the center.” 170 Seneca, Epistle, 95.53 in Bolchazy, Hospitality in Antiquity, 64. 171 1 Corinthians 3:9–10 – “According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and another man is building upon it. For no other foundation can any one lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.” 172 Aristotle, Poetics, 549. 173 See also Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 100–104, 144–6. Responsibility involves placing oneself within the context of the other.

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temper both ignorance and a lack of hospitality in favor of a growing solicitude.174 a) To know oneself as a collective other in its global religious context is expressed by Gordon Graham’s statement that, today more than ever, Christianity is “among other [religions] in a pluralistic sea.”175 To exist collectively requires our recognition of the plurivocity in interpersonal life and relation that determines our own post-modern age, religious expression, economies, geopolitics, cultural similarities and differences, and the complexities of our local and global environments. An appeal to a “critical pluralism,” as the Presiding Bishop – Mark S. Hanson of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America calls it, begins with a responsible and reflective awareness of our own historical epoch.176 b) To know oneself as a singular other in the global interpersonal context is to recognize the narrative unity of an other’s particular existence.177 Narrative unities are articulated through the singular and personal reflections or attestations upon our lives.178 As we learned in 174

The idea of a telos in common is analogous to Levinas’ sense of the other as an appeal or givenness that reveals how “transcendence is not a vision of the other, but an original givenness.” This givenness between others, as a common telos, reveals an ontological and reciprocal symbiosis between others. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 174. 175 Gordon Graham, Evil and Christian Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 18; see also Lewis S. Mudge, “Moral Hospitality for Public Reasoners,” Rethinking the Beloved Community: Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, Social Theory, (New York: University Press of America, 2001), 275–296. Plurivocity is simply the recognition of sameness and difference, fragmentation and correlation, of where we stand in history. 176 Presiding Bishop Mark S. Hanson, An Ecumenical Agenda Taking Us to 2013: The Task before Us, (National Workshop on Christian Unity, Savannah, Georgia, May 2003). 177 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 178. The notion of a “narrative unity of life” means that one is normatively engaged in the interpretation and action that creates and endorses a ‘life plan’ in a ‘narrative sense’ and as an aspiration toward the ‘good life,’ all three of which gather to comprise a sense of one’s “narrative unity.” Next, Levinas offers an extensive assessment of the ipseitous nature of the subject, a critique that resists the totalistic constraints of a Cartesian cogito – see Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 118–19. 178 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 178–180. Ricoeur discussing ‘narrative unity’ as “the connection narrative makes between estimations applied to actions and the evaluation of persons themselves. The idea of the narrative unity of a life therefore serves to assure us that the subject of ethics is none other than the one to whom the narrative assigns a narrative identity.” The subject’s singular narrative unity involves continual self-interpretation, and it is on this basis that oneself esteems the meaningfulness of oneself and one’s life (hence, self-esteem).

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chapter two, singular and personal attestations are gleaned from the constellation or anthology of our own singular memories. The constellation of memories activated through attestation is what our lodestar Nietzsche entitled mnemotechnics.179 The interior labor (technik) of remembering (mnemonikos) gives historical sustenance to current existence, speaks in the formation and advancement of personal hopes and aims, directs us in the daily accountabilities of existence and is that which substantiates the narrative unity of our lives. Memory is singular to human identity. Memory is also related to a collective ethnicity, religious tradition, socio-political status, and other like affiliations. At the singular limit, however, memory is the other’s complex yet inherent passport, an anthology of him- or herself. At the extreme of interpersonal abandonment in social atrocities and conflagrations, the grievous labor of destroying other human beings means that the recognition of the other’s attestations to his or her singular and collective memory and identity must always be obliterated through means such as renaming the enslaved, liquidating so many gold fillings in bins, eradicating others into heaps of unpaired shoes, and accumulating a disassociated menagerie of contextless heirlooms. In the twentieth century alone, the abhorrent pogrommatic erasure of both identity and the recognition of attestation to singular memory and subsequent redistribution of ‘product’ coincide with a furnace, a mass grave, or a ditch. But, in recalling Wendy Farley, to be “oblivious to another’s personhood” must never be so broad or so contemporary. From the Homeric account of the destruction of Troy to Tertullian’s Praescriptions Against Heretics, the negligence of the other is both historically proficient and even celebrated.180 From the root of Christian ecumenism, Tertullian writes that dwelling outside the “living stones” built into a “spiritual house” of the regula fidei, are the “ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing.” These other early Christian groups are the ‘heretics,’ ‘false prophets,’ and ‘abusers of Scripture’ who “more easily accomplish the ruin of standing houses than the erection of standing ruins.”181 For Tertullian, these

179 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II:3. “If something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stays in the memory.” 180 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 7. “The Greeks, Homer, the Trojan Wars – There can be no doubt whatever: they were intended as festival plays for the gods.” 181 Tertullian, Against Praxeas, chapter two; see also, Praescriptions Against Heretics, 4.i, 15.1, 42.i.

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formerly living stones have fallen into ruin. But if we stand by reciprocity, then the absolute tone of decrial from Tertullian regarding the other’s ruination signifies something spoiling in this early church father as well. Ricoeur’s call beyond the “ruins of descriptive discourse” is a challenge to elevate ourselves from the enclosed teleological Ideals that reduce both our classic literature and one another.182 We can consider again our relations analogous to Seneca’s “stone arch,” where the other is the present living Quarry and unfolding attestation to everything gone before. Alternatively, we can also choose the enigmatic slope of Cain, where we ignore the Question, fail to recognize the other, and allow our ignorance to unmake the proximity of the other as us, and us as the other.183 i) Introduction If religion is the most significant value in human life, as people who believe in God experience it to be and may rightly claim it to be, then any theoretical or practical misuse of religion leads to the cruellest inhumanities. Here too the corruption of the best is the worst. People have fought and killed in the course of history in the name of God. –Edward Schillebeeckx184 Our contention is that one must also ask why terrorist acts are committed. We believe that the answer lies in zealous forms of civil religion whose origins can be traced back to biblical archetypes that are honored by zealous strands of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam – and now influence other movements throughout the world. – Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America185 The modern soldier who is totalitarian in his thinking, a devoted follower of communism or fascism, feels perhaps more intensely than did the Moslem of medieval times that he is on the side of the divine. His mission is the termination of those who oppose the truth, and it is a holy mission. The enemy is trying to destroy the only revealed truth, the only moral order, the chosen nation, [the enemy] embodies the very essence of evil, which is

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Paul Ricoeur, Toward a Hermeneutics of the Idea of Revelation. Wendy Farley, Eros for the Other, 11. Characterizations of human beings as ‘niggers,’ ‘white trash,’ ‘evil,’ et. al. “are failures to recognize the kind of being that is encountered. This moral failing is at the same time a failure to grasp the reality of the other: it is a metaphysical mistake.” 184 Edward Schillebeeckx, “Documentation: Religion and Violence,” Religion as a Source of Violence, 131. 185 Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, Captain America and the Crusade Against Evil, 22. 183

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chapter three the devil, or at best he is possessed of some demonic power which renders him incapable of perceiving what is plain as day to the faithful. – J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, First Edition, 1959

Our trajectory turns in the aforementioned direction of the excessive interplay between recognition, desire and interpersonal struggle. The desire for recognition between singular and collective human beings can reach an excess of unmitigated conflict. The excess within this interplay means the cruel reduction of human interpersonal relation as the reduction of both us and our fellows. Excessive desire and struggle transpire in the interpersonal interplay of recognition; in short, desire and struggle are nothing without the mutual commitment to, or obliteration of, interpersonal recognition between fellows. In consideration of the obliteration of ties between fellows, we do well to assess, even in a preliminary manner, the work of noted psychologist James Waller. Waller traces the social construction of cruelty by asking how ‘kindness’ is left behind in inter-personal relations, and replaced by the barbarism of evil.186 Waller’s premise, and one we share in Encountering Cruelty, is that no simple explanations of human beings “born evil” will ever suffice to answer his, and our, question. We did refine our question earlier, however, by suspending within our study any explanatory power to the classical teleological structures of ‘evil’ in human life and relation. One of Waller’s key contributions to this discussion of recognition is his identification of social bonding that becomes unhinged in a social context or situation of cruelty, which perpetrators simultaneously create, and are created by. For Waller, as for Hannah Arendt, the lunacy of extraordinary evil is not due to the imposition of evil people, but is carried out by ordinary people like you and me who live in extraordinary situations.187 Although Waller does not define the nature of cruelty, he does recognize the transvaluation of value that takes place inside of the social construction of cruelty. Simply put, good is diminished and heinous behavior is re-appropriated as the good, or at least as the prudent.

186 James Waller, Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing, (Oxford: University Press, 2007). The entire work is recommended, with particular attention to chapters 4, 5, and 8. 187 See Becoming Evil, 269.

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For our purposes, and in consideration of creating a standard for the analysis of cruelty in multiple cultures, Waller’s study is deeply helpful. As a case in point, we noted that part of the social construction of cruelty will involve an excess in the elements of desire, struggle, and recognition of fellow human beings. At the intersection of these elements, the binding factors of social cohesion are twisted in the steady transvaluation of other human communities. Following Waller, what we may identify as a ‘re-binding’ is introduced where reciprocated kindness is displaced by a growing wedge between “us” and “them.” Re-binding in culture is daily reinforced through the routinization of conduct, ritual that enforces the mythos of oneself against the other, the professionalization of activity that encourages objectification and the growing divergence between groups, and the concurrent diffusion of responsibility for care of the other in an external group. Within a social context of cruelty, the broken and rebound structures of social cohesion creates (and is created by) a total system where “… ordinary people can be immersed in total situations … that can transform who they are in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, character, and morality.” All in all, Waller is important because he reminds us that any cultural assessment of cruelty that does not clearly understand the social binds of that particular context, will lack clarity on how the struggle for recognition between groups can become so exacerbated. Through re-binding within a social context of cruelty, recognition of inter-personal fellows will be re-associated and create a fracture between human beings. This fracture is one we witness in our classic texts, in our cultures, in our local communities, and even in our individual families. For Waller as for us, when the virtue of kindness is transvalued, recognition of the other is always diminished; left unresolved, healthy reciprocity between individuals and groups is on the road to deep interpersonal and social vanquishment. We will assess the second artery of inter-personal cruelty as the ‘struggle for recognition.’ That is, the struggle for recognition is the interpersonal artery within the fracture of cruelty. When the desire for recognition turns excessive through struggle, then at least five contours of cruelty appear yet again. As we have already located the nature of these contours, this chapter will assess the artery of the struggle for recognition and its contours in light of a classic pericope from the Hebrew Scriptures regarding the nature of what is often, albeit

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ambiguously, ascribed as ‘holy war.’188 The excessive interplay between recognition, desire, and interpersonal struggle are clearly evident inside a ‘holy war mentality.’ Moreover, such a mentality is once again explicit in our own historical epoch. Due to the clear excess of the struggle for recognition paired with politico-religious rhetoric, and its unfortunate contemporary reactivation, the Deuteronomic text merits serious theological investigation.189 Finally, the topos of cruelty offers the correct theological criteria upon which to interpret and resist such excessive human trespass, as prescribed in both the Deuteronomic text and within our own contemporary context. Throughout our investigation, the strongest criticism will assuredly be that the highest altruistic or benevolent aims of religious and political freedom must sometimes sadly justify cruel means in order to accomplish the aims of Truth. In interpersonal conflict, including a ‘holy war mentality,’ cruelty is often couched behind “benevolent motives [that are] necessary for the prevention of even greater cruelties.”190 We both disclose and hardily resist the justification that conceals cruelty inside a politico-religious rhetoric, a ‘holy war mentality,’ and more generally under the sublime rationale and prudent façade of altruistic Benevolence. The mastering of such rhetoric was the labor of Hitler, Goebbels, Stalin, and any form of growing fascism within national consciousness that is harnessed by an increasingly aesthetic Ideal of ethnic Right, Nationhood, or ambiguous Freedom.191 Within

188 Adolf von Harnack’s Militia Christi is a seminal work for any discussion that covers both a holy war mentality and the rootstock of the western Christian criteria for the co-existence of Christian and national military life. See Harnack, Militia Christi: The Christian Religion and the Military in the First Three Centuries, trans. David McInnes Gracie, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981). 189 Such texts have been informative from the crusades, conquests, and in the execution of Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin. In the last case, Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, a Jewish extremist who believed that Rabin’s peace proposals and potential capitulation of Jewish settlements threatened God’s will for Israel. 190 John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 842. “In the scheme of cruelties justified under the guise of benevolence, the “victims are the broken eggs of the ideological and religious omelettes that crusaders, inquisitors, conquistadors, commissars, and SS men and, yes, women as well have been cooking.” James Holloway, “The Ethical Dilemma of Holy War,” Southwestern Journal of Theology 41 (Fall, 1998): 47–48. Holloway makes an important contribution to how the concept of holy war is appropriated by a modern terrorist mentality. 191 Charles K. Bellinger, The Genealogy of Violence: Reflections on Creation, Freedom, and Evil, 116–127. “When a society consists of demonic aesthetes, it cries out for a ‘leader’ who will facilitate its flight from the future. It wants to be ‘led’ by a charismatic individual who knows what it wants and can articulate its goals and bring them to

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such justifications is the meaning of Nietzsche’s exclamation that “blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all good things!”192 The Ideal of Benevolence that justifies both cruelty and violence has always been the rallying cry of religious and political extremism. The German ghetto was for the Jews’ own good, the sequester of Japanese-American citizens served the greater safety of the citizenry of the United States, the annihilation of the ‘evil-doer’ or infidel is necessary for either Righteousness or the Ideal of Freedom. In the last case, the thoughtful aspirations of liberal democracy are alarmingly silent in light of the Ideal of ambiguous Freedom. The Ideal of ambiguous Freedom is couched in the tag-line of defending a “way of life,” although what exactly that ‘way of life’ is, remains unclear.193 What is implied is a ‘way of life’ that is “free,” but then this ill-conceived Freedom is unhinged from self-critical and “rational” liberal democracy, and becomes an ambiguous shining Ideal.194 The historical lineage of cruel means to acquire a benevolent Ideal is no less true today. We resist the argument that favors cruelty in order to prevent cruelty, or that conceals violence underneath a façade of prudent Benevolence in order to illicit Freedom. We resist this justification, where the Ideal of any stripe offers a sublime comfort in the destruction of one’s fellows. Our trajectory now turns to an investigation of a ‘holy war mentality,’ to Deuteronomy 7:1–2 and 20:1–20, and to the Narrative of the Canaanites. E) Deuteronomy: 7.1–2 and 20:1–20 – The Narrative of the Canaanites Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel. – Isaiah 13:8 fruition.” Bellinger quotes Kierkegaard – “For to win a crowd is not so great a trick; one only needs some talent, a certain dose of untruth and a little acquaintance with human passions.” 192 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II:3. 193 Ninan Koshy, The War on Terror: Reordering the World, (Hong Kong, DAGA Press, 2002), 161. Tony Blair’s elaboration of “liberty” and “freedom” remain as unclear before his Labor Party as George Bush’s appeal to freedom as “a way of life” at the State of the Union. 194 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 10.8. “And remember that the term ‘rational’ was intended to signify a discriminating attention to every object and freedom from negligence. …”

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chapter three Sensing that their end is near, Hitler and his satellites and satraps have lost all restraint. … Never in history have greater cruelties and more barbaric acts been perpetrated against a European national minority than those being committed by German fascism against the Jews. – Article from the Fatherland Front, 31 December, 1942195

i) Socio-Historical Context A ‘holy war mentality’ may be defined as the presence, in a pretension toward or an actual situation of war, of a ‘sanctifying’ principle from the ‘deity’ that transfers religious righteousness to the acts of believers in violence. This definition of a holy war mentality requires specific socio-historical consideration regarding the Deuteronomic text. Historical-critical consensus identifies the Sitz im Leben of our pericope is the post-Exilic era after the fall of the Temple in 587 b.c.e.196 The Assyrians had vanquished Judah. Afterward, a Josianic national and political process of revival and national development was interwoven throughout the Deuteronomic redactions.197 Thus, Deuteronomy may be considered as a series of laws, regulations, and promotional speeches toward obedience that were addressed to the adherents of a new national religion, adherents who were to prepare themselves for godly deeds of liberation.198 The new adherents of the Israelite religion were identified with the earlier traditional Israelite and divisional

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In Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria’s Jews Survived the Holocaust, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001), 73. 196 Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Deuteronomy,” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, (New Jersey: Prentice Hall Publishers, 1990), 99; see also Christoph Bultmann, “Deuteronomy,” The Oxford Bible Commentary, ed. John Barton and John Muddiman, (Oxford, University Press, 2001), 137. Deuteronomy “must be seen against the background of this exilic age.” Gerhard von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel, trans. Marva J. Dawn, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991): 125; see also Moshe Weinfeld, “Book of Deuteronomy,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, v. 2, ed. David Noel Freedman, et. al., (London: Doubleday, 1992): 175. 197 Gerhard Von Rad, Holy War in Ancient Israel, 126. 198 Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Deuteronomy,” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, 95. “At the risk of oversimplifying, the message of Deuteronomy can be summarized as: one God, one people, one sanctuary.” It should also be noted that the andocentric nature of these speeches suggests that they were written to the generic Israelite and masculine subject; see also, Harold C. Washington, “ ‘Lest He Die in the Battle and Another Man Take Her’: Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Laws of Deuteronomy 20–22,” Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, ed., Victor H. Matthews et. al., (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998), 199. Washington discusses the violation of women in Deuteronomy 20, which would add further insight into the objectified nature of the ‘infidel.’

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cultic groups, but the book is delivered at a broader national level with sweeping revolutionary mandates, one of these being that the budding Israelite nation could not suffer the expression or influence of external foreign cultures, which included foreign religious influence.199 Such external influences were a pollution not only to Israelite national identity, but were an offence to the deity itself. Ambiguity in how we appropriate the term ‘holy war’ is one reason why recent scholarship upon the Hebrew Scriptures draws a distinction between the phenomena of ‘Yhwh war’ in Deuteronomy, and a ‘holy war mentality’ that is distinct in nuance from, say, the respective cross and sword mentalities of the Crusades or the Conquests.200 ‘Yhwh War’ in Deuteronomy is distinct because the form of war herein elucidated was indeed never an actual historical achievement of the ancient Israelites as described in our pericope – or at least no extant literary and archeological evidence suggests that this form of war was either perpetrated or sustained.201 However, the diffusive nature of concluding from historical- and form-criticism that Deuteronomic ‘Yhwh War’ is solely fictional (that is, as nothing more than a literary convention of national obedience to the deity) is insufficient at the normative level insofar as both the concept of a divine command against the national ‘enemy’ or doer of evil (i.e., infidel), and the pursuant cruel conduct of the righteous believer, have been appropriated literally in both historical and contemporary notions of war and terrorism.202 Furthermore, contemporary Christian, Muslim and Jewish examples

199 Moshe Weinfeld, “Book of Deuteronomy,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary 175. Weinfeld offers insight into the prohibitions of other religions; see also, Deuteronomy 12:29–31. 200 Likewise, sermons preached during the Thirty-Years war reveal a similar religious zeal or ‘holy war mentality.’ Many of these sermons from 1630 to 1631 are at the University of Leipzig. 201 Susan Niditch, “Deuteronomy 20:1–20 Commentary,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, v. 2, (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), 440. Deuteronomy is “more concerned with theology and the belief in the divine control of history than with what happened on the battlefield.” See also Harold C. Washington, Lest He Die in the Battle and Another Man Take Her: Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Laws of Deuteronomy 20–22, 196. The herem is designed as a “literary presentation” of past events of Israelite achievement. 202 Allen C. Brownfeld, “Religious Extremism and Holy War: Jews as well as Muslims Must Put House in Order,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 85–87. “Religious extremists have been brutally slaughtering their opponents ‘in the name of God’ from the beginning of recorded history.” See also Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Sacred Age of Terror, (New York: Random House, 2002). The authors were advisors for

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of holy war aggression are now well-financed, well-armed, and versed in the avaricious art of twenty-first century propaganda combined with the disseminational speed provided by the Internet and mass media.203 With respect to our current historical context, the founding principles and symbols inter-laden in Deuteronomy have been informative to an extremist zeal within the Judeo-Christian tradition – as Jeremiah was for the Crusades of Pope Innocent III. The normative import of Deuteronomy and like-texts deserve serious investigative efforts. In the end, the principles and symbols within classic texts such as Deuteronomy remain for many theologically and politically persuasive in our own contemporary epoch.204 Our approximation of interpersonal recognition that rises in excessive desire and struggle is situated within two vectors: i) the Aristotelian ‘interplay of deliberation’ between the object, the subject’s thought, and the subject’s growing desire to acquire the object;205 and second, ii) the notion of mimesis in human life and relation that is active without succumbing to a systemic theory of Mimetic rivalry. In light of these vectors, the sphere of interpersonal recognition will be explored within three distinct personas that are attested to within the Deuteronomic text. These personas are: the sanctifying-national deity, the enemy, and the righteous warrior. ii) The Persona of the Sanctifying-National Deity We have noted that a ‘holy war mentality’ may be defined as the presence, in a pretension toward or an actual situation of war, of a former U.S. President Clinton, and they give specific testimony to the contemporary adaptations of a ‘holy war’ mentality. 203 Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God, (New York, HarperCollins, 2003). See Part II in particular, “Holy War Organizations,” pp. 139–296. 204 Roland Herbert Bainton, Christian Attitudes toward War and Peace: A Historical Survey and Critical Revaluation, (New York: Abingdon Press, 1960): 44. “The crusade stemmed out of the holy war which sought to ensure the favor of Yahweh by observing the conditions conducive to his good pleasure.” See also, Allen C. Brownfeld, “Religious Extremism and Holy War: Jews as well as Muslims Must Put House in Order, 85–6, for an interesting assessment of “God’s war” in the Crusades. See also Harold C. Washington, Lest He Die in the Battle and Another Man Take Her’: Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Laws of Deuteronomy 20–22, 195. Washington queries – “Are the legal materials ‘rules’ of conduct, reflections of legal practice, instructions for magistrates, or popular propaganda?” An analogous contemporary query is – ‘How are these texts appropriated in a manner that promotes current popular propaganda and strife?’ 205 Jonathan Leer, The Desire to Understand, 143.

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‘sanctifying’ principle from the ‘deity’ that transfers religious righteousness to the acts of believers in violence.206 The sanctifying deity will make the believer righteous in his obedience toward the deity’s defense and the restoration of honor that has been offended by another culture, nation, or religion. The command to obey the sanctifying deity and restore honor against the enigmatic evil-doer is the foundational justification for violence against other human beings.207 The command is to obey the deity and defend the national Right. In our pericope, the Ideal for the national Right of the sanctifyingnational deity is unambiguously located in the ancient herem. The ancient herem is the explicit divine command that a) first fixes other human beings within the contour of enigmatic “evil-doer” or “infidel,” and b), following the fixed enigmatic autograph, allows for the necessary excision and negative transcendence or death of the other.208 The herem justifies both the enigmatic and excision. The herem in our text is exhibited respectively at Deuteronomy 7:1–2 and again at 20:16–17: “And when the Lord your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them,” and again: “You must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them … just as the Lord your God has commanded.”209 And yet, in the call for destruction and annihilation, a contradiction or transvaluation of the deity is located within the herem, and its defense of the national Right. 206 The criteria for the following argument is informed by two essential resources. These are, Lee Griffith’s The War on Terrorism and the Terror of God, (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans), 2002, and Mark Juergensmeyer’s Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence, (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2000). 207 Harold C. Washington, Lest He Die in the Battle and Another Man Take Her’: Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Laws of Deuteronomy 20–22, 213. The force of Deuteronomic laws is that “they actually authorize the unleashing of violence.” 208 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 35. Scarry’s hermeneutic of torture is essential in any discussion of the autograph of the enemy. In the torture chamber, the torturer and victim “turn the moral reality of torture upside down by absolving the torturer of responsibility and imputing it to the victim.” Through interrogation, the torturer is seen as principled and obedient to the rule of law, “providing him with a justification, his cruelty with an explanation,” whereas the victim has brought the unfortunate torture upon himself. The world of both torturer and victim are unmade. In the imputation of the autograph of the enemy, reciprocity is broken and the true reciprocal nature of oneself as an other is lost to a façade or face-off. 209 Wayne A. Meeks, ed. et. al., The Harper Collins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1993). [Italics mine]. See also a discussion of “destruction” in Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Deuteronomy,” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, 99.

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A transvaluation arises regarding the persona of the deity. In Deuteronomy, the deity is first and foremost conceived to be the architect and creator of the known universe, including universal humanity [Gen. 1:1, 26–27, Deut. 1:10]. The architect-creator deity [Gen. 1–2], and its universal creative qualities, are contradicted in the construction of the sanctifying-national deity who issues the herem [Deut. 4:23–24, 7:1–2, 20:16–17]. The herem of the sanctifying-national deity transvalues the creative characteristics of the older conception of the Israelite deity of hospitality who issues the earlier command of reciprocity – to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’210 By transvaluation, we mean that the architect-creator deity is both reduced and exceeded by the construction of the sanctifying-national deity.211 The architectcreator deity is reduced and exceeded through a national appropriation that sanctifies the annihilation of reciprocity between fellow human beings. Furthermore, the existential reciprocity of humankind is forfeited in the enigmatic where fellows become strangers and enemies. Through the transvaluation, human beings become enigmatic to one another and risk mutual excision where interpersonal well-being is fractured; the aims of interpersonal care, respect, justice, and integrity become vanquished. In our text, the transvaluation arises when the herem conceals the historically original qualities of the architectcreator deity of the universe. The herem is in fact the teleological command of obedience to protect the national Right. There is no other creative possibility except to objectify the other and engage in a Kampf that excises other human beings into negative transcendence and death. Every command that excises other human beings develops in its native socio-historical context, a context that encapsulates the religious, political, economic, and cultural customs of the time. In our own age, the Ideal of ambiguous Freedom is a concealment of the foundation of self-critical liberal democracy; just as the Ideal of radical external Jihad is a concealment 210 Leviticus 19:18 – ‘You shall not take vengeance, nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself;’ Leviticus 19:34 – ‘The stranger who resides with you shall be to you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.’ 211 The distinction between architect-creator deity and sanctifying-national deity, although not his terms, is inspired from Gordon Graham’s Evil and Christian Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001): 94–101. According to Graham, in the dissonance between competing groups and competing deities, the ultimate choice is either a deity of universal creation or a deity of regional-particular allegiances.

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of the foundation of Islamic hospitality.212 What we note in these examples is that obedience is required of the righteous in order for the Ideal to be protected. And yet, where the above Ideals demand obedience that forgets one’s fellow, then they contain a reduction and excess that transvalues the very things they hope to protect – namely, self-critical freedom and hospitality. In order to further reveal the transvaluation in the Deuteronomic herem, we need to know more about how this herem is enforced within Israelite society. The herem in Deuteronomic ‘Yhwh war’ includes a theological or paraenetic justification for the war itself. Such paraenetic justification is in fact a charismatic method where religious and political ideology become fused. Through the fusion, self-critical awareness is traded-in for a politico-religious charismatic appeal, where the multiple loose rationales for going to war – even during and after a war – are never wholly clear. In our text, the Israelites go to war because they must protect themselves against the “the abhorrent things” the Canaanites “do” [20:17]. The text never tells us what these abhorrent things in fact are. Charismatic politico-religious appeals never require much explanation. Our pericope is distinct in that no single text within the Hebrew Scriptures exhibits as extensive politico-religious justification in a paraenetic tone as in Deuteronomy.213 In support of national consciousness, a godly mission on such a paraenetic scale will crystallize in a rhetoric of fear that codifies the nature of the enemy, the need to struggle against this enemy, the aim of excising the enemy, and the just cause of defending the Ideal of national Right against the enemy. What is concealed underneath such rhetoric is the death-fruit of cruel trespass, of excess in the name of an Ideal. The paraenetic tone is exhibited in the priest’s blessing of the righteous warriors [20:2], the qualifications of those who are to carry out the herem [20:3–9], and the deity’s wishes on the commencement of war proper against those who are external to the Israelite national Right [20:10–20].214 In this light, the command for the “afraid or disheartened” not to fight on behalf of the Israelites [20:8] is about not

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Moshe Weinfeld, “Book of Deuteronomy,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 181. Christoph Bultmann, “Deuteronomy,” The Oxford Bible Commentary, 135. Deuteronomy retains an “unrivalled paraenetic tone.” 214 Rolf P. Knierim, “On the Subject of War in Old Testament and Biblical Theology,” Horizons in Biblical Theology 16 (June, 1994): 17. 213

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introducing a traumatic contagion into the body of the righteous warriors that immobilizes those who obey the herem.215 Not mercy, but fear that these men and their contagion will corrupt the violent acquisition of the Ideal, is why they are forbidden to fight. The herem, as both command and Ideal, remains the most defensible charismatic justification of the will of the sanctifying-national deity to draw clear lines of demarcation between Israelite national identity and the enigmatic other symbolized within the autograph of the national enemy.216 The sanctifying-national deity and his adherents will never publicly and sufficiently address the reality of the other underneath the autograph of the enemy. Rather, in defense of the Ideal of national Right, this deity will sanction both new national reforms for the security of the land, and likewise ensure practical means of achieving these reforms through clear and precise commands to ‘priests,’ ‘military officers,’ and the prevailing national consciousness.217 The Ideal and way of life of the nation encapsulated within the herem are thereby protected against the enigmatic strangers and enemies that threaten this Ideal.218 What will always remain enigmatic, which is indeed necessary for the rise of a charismatic national consciousness, is any extensive understanding of the other underneath the autograph of the enemy. Akin to the architect-creator deity, the fundamental tenets of selfcritical liberal democracy and the hospitality implicit to Islamic hospitality, are reduced and exceeded in the absolute Ideal. The paraenetic politico-religious zeal behind the Ideal conceals, contradicts and transvalues the deity, human freedom, and interpersonal hospitality. Furthermore, the excess of doing unto others by annihilating fellow human beings means a perpetual Kampf where human beings are

215 Susan Niditch, “Deuteronomy 20:1–20 Commentary,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, 439. Niditch’s suggestion is that the contagion to the “morale in battle” is the rationale behind the “afraid or fainthearted” not to fight. 216 Susan Niditch, “Deuteronomy 20:1–20 Commentary,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, 440. “For the deuteronomists, war was a deity-ordained means of land acquisition and religious purification.” 217 How these precise commands are carried out in a liberal democracy is a question of so-called Moral Machiavellianism where deceit or ‘dirty hands’ is allowable if it protects a way of life. See Paul Rynard and David P. Shugarman, eds., Cruelty and Deception: The Controversy over Dirty Hands in Politics, (Australia: Pluto Press, 2000). 218 J. David Pleins, The Social Visions of the Hebrew Bible, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001): 54. “Deuteronomy represents a legal tradition self-consciously in the making.”

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first objectified and then grabbed-onto. The enigmatic is established through totalizing autographs (such as evil-doer, infidel, enemy, cultural stranger, or religious and political foreigner). Thereafter, the instruments of excision do their work.219 Finally, as we witness in the above, the paraenetic tone of a charismatic politico-religious appeal will be based on what both Brecht and Midgley identified as “well-directed fears.” The residual effect of such rhetoric is a resultant psycho-social trauma that will remain for generations within the nation that grabs-onto. Heightened paranoia, projected misunderstanding, and an increasing ressentiment of the other, come home to roost. When a culture or nation succumbs to an Ideal that requires the annihilation of other human beings, then a consequence is an indiscriminate fear, anxiety, and resentment that grows in the very sinews of the nation itself. A culture or nation becomes saturated in fear. The death-fruit of doing unto the other in this way is also to do unto oneself. If the enemy is savvy, then he will do little, and only observe how the nation weakens in itself through fear. iii) The Persona of the Enemy We turn now to the persona of the enemy in the Deuteronomic text. History teaches that the enigmatic is never difficult to accommodate. Doers of evil, infidels, witches, heathen, heretics, foreigners, fugitives, and the apostate lurk behind every shrub.220 From the corners of the earth, be they Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Bosnia or El Salvador, cruelty is nothing without the contour of the enigmatic and the construction of strangers and enemies.221 With reference to the enigmatic, we illicit John Kekes’ assertion that “cruelty requires both an agent and a victim,” which involves the

219 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 9. Punishment is a “normal attitude” toward the “hated, disarmed, prostrated enemy” who has lost “right, protection, and hope of quarter.” 220 As a case in point, the Spanish conquistadors were known to carry copies of works from writers such as Sir John Mandeville. In Mandeville’s “Travel Stories,” the foreigner is wild and savage, half-man and half-beast. The conquistadors already had it in their power to render enigmatic the other in Latin America before they had ever met him. See Sir John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, (London: Penguin Books, 1983). 221 Wim Beuken and Karl-Josef Kuschel, eds., Religion as a Source of Violence?, (London: Orbis Books, 1997), see especially part I and Jon Sobrino’s reflections upon Guatemala.

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infliction of pain upon the victim.222 The Israelites are commanded to destroy the Canaanites so that they “may not teach you to do all the abhorrent things that they do” [20:17]. Once more, we are never told what these “abhorrent things that they do” in fact are. We only know that this enemy is deemed heinous insofar as it threatens the entire way of life of the national Ideal laid out in Deuteronomy.223 This threat is enough. But then, we must ask ourselves by association what is gained by treating others as enigmatic strangers and enemies.224 Consider Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1596), where the creditor Shylock seeks a “pound of flesh” from the body of the debtor, Antonio, who is unable to reimburse an original debt to Shylock.225 The infliction of the pound of flesh has neither a direct monetary value nor a direct punitive value; but the infliction does offer something in the value of power and humiliation.226 Power and humiliation is evident in the growing crowd, in a public scandal, in the spectators come for the festival of punishment. Within the spectacle, the loss of reciprocity and concurrent rise of cruelty can introduce an ugly reality of being human that both Nietzsche and Camus identify and deprecate – “Without cruelty there is no festival: Thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches, in punishment there is so much that is festive!”227 What the trespass of cruelty gains in its excessive infliction upon the enemy is a spectacle, a festival, or a celebration.228 The value of power and 222 John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 837. “The agent acts and the victim suffers. … Cruelty may then be said to include three essential elements: the agent’s state of mind, the agent’s action, and the victim’s suffering.” 223 Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, 4. “The face that is so other bears the mark of a crossed threshold that irremediably imprints itself as peacefulness or anxiety.” 224 Jessica Stern, Terror in the Name of God, 9–62. See Stern’s chapters particularly on Alienation and Humiliation, and how this informs a reactive violence from the enigmatic victims themselves. 225 The metaphor for distributive justice in a ‘pound of flesh’ is found in an earlier source, an Italian play II Pecoron (1378) by Giovanni Fiorentino; see also, Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V: 82–97. ‘Creditor-Debtor’ language is utilized from Aristotle’s discussion of injustice and the attainment of justice between two parties involved in “exchange” or trade. 226 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 6; Daybreak 18, 77, 113. “For revenge merely leads us back to the same problem: How can making suffer constitute compensation? There is no logic to support this except … the festival.” 227 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 6; see also Camus, The Stranger, 123 – “I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.” 228 J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, 29. “What are these secret attractions of war, the ones that have persisted in the West despite revolutionary changes in the methods

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humiliation, conjoined in the spectacle, is where the imprint of the trespass of cruelty is always evident. We will return to the persona of the enemy in a moment, but let us first segue to the nation that rises against its fellows for the sake of the Ideal. Once we understand more about such society, or national identity, we will be in a position to clarify how the struggle between enemy and nation reduces and exceeds both. iv) The Persona of the Righteous Warrior We turn now to the persona of the righteous warrior, called upon to defend the herem and the Ideal of national Right within the Deuteronomic text. How will the adherents of Israelite society come to understand the other underneath the autograph of the enemy? Absolute obedience in the Ideal of the herem is purchased at the price of interpersonal relation. Unlike the architect-creator deity in 1 and 2 Kings, the sanctifying-national deity will fail to exhibit hospitality to the stranger or foreigner.229 Rather, the Ideal will cast upon the other the absolute autograph of the enemy – evil-doer, infidel, absolute foreigner, total stranger – and thereafter the same fidelitous and obedient zeal will transvalue reciprocity into interpersonal ressentiment and the other into a total threat. The transvaluation of reciprocity (from fellowship to ressentiment), is often imperceptible to the believer because such transvaluation takes place in the pale of self-deception. Selfdeception of the nature of the other is concealed through the contour of the enigmatic where a sense of shared humanity is fractured through the inversion of interpersonal human relation. Such self-deception takes place within Israelite society in our pericope. Why does selfdeception transpire? Consider Max Weber’s reflections upon Protestantism in the United States. He writes that divine grace “of the elect and holy was accomplished by an attitude toward the sin of one’s neighbor, not of sympathetic understanding based on consciousness of one’s own weakness, but of hatred and contempt for him as an enemy of God bearing the signs of eternal damnation.”230 Even if Weber’s observation is given to of warfare? I believe that they are: the delight in seeing, the delight in comradeship, the delight in destruction.” 229 See 1 Kings 17:1, 8–16; 18:1; 2 Kings 5:1–14. 230 Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 3–5. See chapter one.

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hyperbole, the kernel of truth in recognizing oneself as a righteous society and the external other as analogous to the fusion of a secularreligious ‘enemy’ merits our consideration in an epoch where the enigmatic other is stained by politico-religious rhetoric. A sense of existential reciprocity, and of “a sympathetic understanding” is transvalued and the other is cast as the model of irreligiousness, moral perversity and political danger. The other is concealed underneath the absolute crust of the Ideal, absorbed as an anathema into the labor of the Ideal for which society is concerned.231 The Ideal transvalues what and who it touches. When other human beings become enemies, we have been deceived into thinking they are other than we are. We must ask ourselves: Why would a given society treat other human beings this way? Society acts this way because the Ideal constructs not only internal fear and paranoia, but also an internal narcissism. The society of the righteous warrior wants more than self-protection. It wants to restore a national Right or ambiguous Freedom through aggression that reduces and exceeds the very imperatives by which it claims its own well-being. How is the relation between self-protection, aggression, narcissism, and interpersonal cruelty understandable in this light? Thomas Parisi’s assessment of Freud’s ‘thanatos’ or ‘death instinct’ offers us a way of comprehending this complex relation. Parisi traces a direct thread regarding human aggression from Freud’s ‘death instinct’ to “cruelty,” a trace that merits review here. Freud’s theory of a ‘death instinct’ in human consciousness arose from a narcissism he noted but could not initially rationally account for within the psycho-social underpinnings of civilization. Such narcissism was a psycho-social systemic distortion that included even the petty “narcissism of minor differences,” as Freud called it, within what Parisi terms the “world of geopolitics,” as an aggression that resists precise description.232 Narcissism manifests in a social compulsion to master the current order and return to a former order, and is polymorphously symbolized in the desire toward a paradisal return to a former utopia.233 The return of the Israelites to a national Right after their captivity in our pericope, the return to an Ideal of ambiguous Freedom

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J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, 36. Thomas Parisi, Civilization and Its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 41. 233 Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 38. 232

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in our own context, or the return of Honor to an offended sanctifyingnational deity, all hearken for a restoration of a former Ideal or order. Indeed, the charismatic and paraenetic rhetoric surrounding the Ideal calls one to master and return to such order. Through the Ideal, the return and restoration of order is principally accomplished insofar as “the most important derivative of the death instinct, by contrast, is aggression.”234 What do we make of aggression that assists in restoring a former order?235 B.F. Skinner and Konrad Lorenz of the behaviorist school hypothesized that an aggressive instinct must still remain necessary to human life and relation or, put simply, such aggression “would not have been carried down through the generations.”236 To suggest that aggression is necessary renders it benign, and introduces the logical construction of a vicious circle – aggression remains with us because it serves a useful purpose and in terms of utility it stays with us because it serves a purpose. We might argue with Clara Thompson in believing that certain forms of aggression are even good for social progress.237 But we would also have to contend with the fact that ‘benign’ aggression becomes malignant when “ingredients of anger, rage, or hate become connected with it.”238 Eric Fromm was aware of this problem. He confounded the simplicity of the behaviorist hypothesis by returning us to the irresolvability of narcissistic aggression toward order noted by Freud.239 Fromm makes a distinction between “benign aggression” and

234 Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 39. 235 Gerda Siann, Accounting for Aggression, (London: Allen & Unwinn, 1985), 227. Aggression is multifarious and complicated, so there is no single response sufficient to the above question. 236 Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 40. 237 D.W. Winnicott, “Aggression in Relation to Emotional Development,” in M. Masuds and R. Kahn, eds., Thought Pediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, (London: Hogarth Press, 1975), 204. “At origin aggressiveness is almost synonymous with activity.” 238 Clara M. Thompson, Interpersonal Psycho-Analysis, (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 179 in Storr, Human Destructiveness, 16. “Aggression is not necessarily destructive at all. It springs from an innate tendency to grow and master life which seems to be characteristic of all living matter.” 239 For Fromm, “ethics has to do with the nature of human character,” and the aggressive aspects of human character are not merely split into benign and malignant aggressions. See Jean Graybeal, “Kristeva’s Delphic Proposal: Practice Encompasses the Ethical,” Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writings, ed. Kelly Oliver, (New York: Routledge, 1993), 32. See also, Don S. Browning, Generative man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), 124.

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“malignant aggression.” The latter encompasses the experiential and historical truth that there exists “hardly a destructive act human imagination could think of that has not been acted out again and again.” Moreover, this social act of “malignant aggression seems to have much more to do with a desire to restore a state of affairs that once existed, whether in reality or in the imagination.”240 Fromm has bypassed the “benign aggression” of the behaviorists through an assessment of “malignant aggression” that is underneath the desire to restore order. In Fromm we have made a full return to Freud’s narcissism and his accounting for it in the death instinct to master and restore order. Moreover, Fromm reinvigorates the problem of human aggression by resisting its categorization as having benign utilitarian value. In search of examples within the hermeneutic trajectory of Fromm – and of a former order “whether in reality or in the imagination” – Parisi notes Hitler’s program for the restoration of the Aryan race; we might note Islamic Jihad, or the questionable fight for a return to both security and ambiguous Freedom as a “way of life.” In all of these forms, the argument deposits us again at social narcissism and a form of malignant aggression that manifests in society. But then at this deposit Parisi makes a courageous hermeneutic turn beyond Fromm and underneath Freud that confronts the teleologically enclosed accounting for human aggression within the framework of an ‘instinct’ at all – “Human aggression cannot be at all well understood in a simple instinctivist framework. Something more convoluted is called for. …” This idea of “something more convoluted” must somehow account for both benign and malignant aggression, and be “an idea that encompasses not only humankind’s propensity toward polymorphous perversity but also polymorphous aggression and cruelty, not only to others but to ourselves.” For Parisi, cruelty always affects both others and ourselves, breaking what we have termed reciprocity. The hermeneutic key to understanding such convolution is clear in Parisi’s other observation that “only human beings are polymorphously cruel.”241 For Freud, there is no civilization “without the death instinct,” but this is precisely the instinct under which Parisi directs our attention. Whereas Freud noted narcissism that he enclosed within a death 240 Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 41. 241 Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 42.

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instinct, Parisi sees “something more convoluted” that, if pursued, must account for human narcissism, aggression and the machinations of the desire for mastery and restored order.242 The convolution brings Parisi to what, following our lodestar, we first identified within the topos of cruelty. Although Parisi resists telling us of the inter-workings of cruelty within convolution, the fracture underneath even the social “narcissism of minor differences” and brutal social aggression, are identified as the unsystematic convolutions of cruelty.243 Such acts are tied to a desire and deception within society that denies reciprocity between human beings, and conceals desire and deception underneath the Ideal that will provide restored order, even when such Ideals are in the crust of the benign. Why society acts in aggression will be informed by what we termed the fractures underneath, or what Parisi identifies as the convolutions of cruelty. As a case in point along our trajectory, society will conceal its transvaluations of the very principles by which it dwells. Such concealment happens through the introduction of a symbolic ban. In our periscope, Israelite society also conceals its own transvaluation through the symbolic ban [20:17].244 The ‘ban’ is the projection of society’s own ugliness upon the unprotected other. Society utilizes the ‘ban’ as a common prescription of both control and mastery toward a restored situation. In the ‘ban’ as a projection, society seeks a measurable stratagem to protect the Ideal, or in this case, the reigning national Right.245 In the ban, society identifies with the politico-religious rhetoric for the Ideal, disintegrates the other fully into the enigmatic and accepts the risk of excising the other. The other may be following a similar course of

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Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 43. “Cruelty is to the death instinct as perversion is to the sex instinct. If there would be no civilization without sexuality, neither would there be civilization without the death instinct.” 243 Thomas Parisi, Civilization and its Discontents: An Anthropology for the Future?, 43. “Not only can we never get what we really want, it is only because we can’t ever get it that we have anything at all: perversion and cruelty, yes, but also love, the internal compulsion of ethics, and more.” 244 G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, v. 1, ed., Peter C. Hodgson, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995): 336–337. Hegel describes the ‘cultus’ with its rules, regulations, and parameters to the community of faith, which informs the notion here of a threat to the paradigm. 245 Christoph Bultmann, “Deuteronomy,” The Oxford Bible Commentary, ed. John Barton and John Muddiman, 149. The other may also be treated as an infiltrator that can be internalized into national identity through physical and/or psychological enslavement [20:11].

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action, deliberating and desiring in a course toward mutual destruction. All of these actions can have a cascade effect where human beings enter into an excessive struggle or Kampf that induces a grabbingonto. As a contemporary example, on March 22, 2004, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, founder of the radical Palestinian Hamas movement, was assassinated by the Israeli government. The course of mutual destruction and containment is unmistakable, especially during episodes of increased trespass within the dangerous volley of a politico-religious rhetoric. Israeli Brigadier General Ruth Yaron announced the assassination for the Israeli military, describing Yassin as “the mastermind of all evil,” and “a preacher of death.”246 Hours later, a purported “al Qaeada linked” group made headlines throughout the world by calling for Islamic unity “to strike this Jewish-crusader snake, this despotic enemy.”247 Ismail Haniya, one of Hamas’ top leaders, retorted at a mosque that in Yassin’s death “is the beginning of the annihilation and end of the Zionist project.”248 Diplomacy, as an instrument of the art of reconciliation, must always have a grappling-hook in reciprocity. When reciprocity is forsaken in an excessive struggle that cloys or grabs-onto other human beings in a mutual Kampf toward mutual destruction, reconciliation becomes simply hard-pressed. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the killing as “contrary to international law,” but the further urging by him to remain calm will in fact mean a socio-political roiling repression.249 Haniya states, “Words cannot describe the emotion of anger and hate inside our hearts.”250 To further repress anger and hate, and assist future cruel episodic explosions, the U.S. and Australia cut down an official United Nations condemnation against Israel’s attack and the latter’s breech of international law, crushing any hope for an official international statement against Israel’s premeditated assassination. Indeed, no official, unified international statement exists today, once 246 Israel Kills Hamas Founder in Airstrike (Associated Press, Monday, March 22, 2004). 247 Alleged Qaeda Letter Threatens U.S. Over Yassin Death (Reuters, March 22, 2004). 248 Israel assassinates Sheikh Yassin, Hamas pledges all-out war (AFP, Monday, March 22, 2004). 249 Israel Kills Hamas Founder in Airstrike (Associated Press, Monday, March 22, 2004). 250 Israel Kills Hamas Founder in Airstrike (Associated Press, Monday, March 22, 2004).

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again rendering the international credibility of the UN – and thus its prowess at assisting the restoration of reciprocity – alarmingly irrelevant. Without an official statement, such international silence unofficially enables adherents of politico-religious rhetoric to continue their deadly volley. Finally, Yassin’s burial at “martyrs’ cemetery” in Gaza, and at that time Arafat’s official sending of Yassin – “May you join the martyrs and the prophets. To heaven, you martyr” – opens a course of mutual destruction that not only leads to a lineage of cruelties without resolve, but paves the further politico-religious landscape for the easy license to escalations in cruel trespass.251 In this particular conflict between Israel and Palestine, if the early perpetrators of trespass assume that such assassinations end at Yassin, history teaches that they will be tragically proven wrong. In this case, the ban of an international voice, and the further ban against the Palestinians through assassination, is one instance of the symbol of the enigmatic in our contemporary epoch in the hope for mastery and a restored situation. In the ban, the enigmatic other is both grabbed-onto and encircled. The Deuteronomic narrative illustrates this point. The enigmatic Canaanite has the opportunity to surrender, but in order to do so he must forfeit his town, wife, livestock, and very life to “forced labor” [20:13–20]. Reflective of what it means to be a living enigma, the other has the opportunity to surrender everything for nothing. For Nietzsche it was the “stranger” or “breaker” who became “a man without peace;” The art of power and humiliation thereafter takes on the quality of being a “normal attitude” toward the “hated, disarmed, prostrated enemy,” who has lost “right, protection, and hope of quarter.” Following the rights of war there is only left the “victory celebration in all its mercilessness and cruelty.”252 If the stranger does not surrender and accept nothing, then the command and Ideal of the herem justifies and requires that the righteous warrior dispossess the enemy of all of these, burn down the town – except for the fruit trees as a fluidic symbol of a valuable national resource – and thereafter excise the enemy through the piercing symbol of “the sword.”253 Both options deliver the other’s 251 Israel assassinates Sheikh Yassin, Hamas pledges all-out war (AFP, Monday, March 22, 2004). 252 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 9. 253 Tikva Frymer-Kensky, “Deuteronomy: Women as Objects in the Laws,” Women’s Bible Commentary: Expanded Edition, eds., Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 1998): 60–61. Frymer-Kensky provides an account of the objectification of women, or the ‘wife’, particularly with respect to

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life to double psycho-social and physical negative transcendence and death.254 The sword is the excising symbol of the enemy’s going-down into fracture, and of the splintering of cruelty across an imperative simile where reciprocity is vanquished.255 Thereafter, any future hope for reciprocal relation will be nearly impossible to gain again on trust.256 One street-fight and terrifying explosion of human ugliness gives way to another where not merely solicitude, but the hope for solicitude, becomes a terminally difficult endeavor. When interpersonal struggle is irresolvable in this way, for some the only course of action will be to construct high walls or barriers, poignant and tragic symbols of human ugliness, and of the collapse and further abandonment of reciprocity between nations. But it is never true that strong fences make good neighbors, where the raw animosities on either side remain fatally unmended. If the veil of such cruelties are not lifted, then animosities slip further down the slope to collective doom. To this point we have identified the sanctifying-national deity and the autograph of the enemy. Although we have assessed society and the righteous warrior who obeys the command and Ideal of the herem, we still have one additional point to make. Our point is that the righteous warrior is the first to construct and project the anthropomorphized sanctifying-national deity upon the originary architect-creator deity. Within the construction and projection of the sanctifyingnational deity, the truth of the righteous warrior’s fear, charisma, zeal,

Deuteronomy 20. “Women can also be acquired during war, for the women … of Canaan are the spoils of war in which the men are killed [20:14].” See also Harold C. Washington, “ ‘Lest He Die in the Battle and Another Man Take Her’: Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Laws of Deuteronomy 20–22,” Gender and Law in the Hebrew Bible and the Ancient Near East, 187, for an engaging account of how violence against women is promoted throughout with respect to the Deuteronomic texts: “As foundational texts of Western culture, these laws authenticate the role of violence in the cultural construction of gender up to the present day.” 254 J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, 158. “The worst effect [of the image of an enemy] is that it usually instills in the soldier a conception of himself as an avenging angel. The self-satisfaction of such a soldier, his impenetrable conceit, makes him essentially incapable of growth.” 255 Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag, 22. In a totalitarian society, “once you were identified as an ‘enemy,’ the consequences were simple: if, following an initial warning, you did not quickly adopt the life of absolute servility, you would be arrested, beaten (if a man), and bundled off to camp.” 256 J.L.A. Garcia, “Proportionality,” Encyclopedia of Ethics v. 2, ed., Lawrence C. Becker, (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992): 1027–1028. The labor of reaching legitimate proportionality or ‘reciprocity’ is difficult and fragile.

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ressentiment, narcissism, and even forgetfulness of his fellows is concealed. Indeed, this is what we meant when we suggested that cruelty fractures across the reciprocal imperative simile of oneself “as” an other. Reciprocity is fractured. The righteous warrior is concealed in the projection of the sanctifying-national deity, just as the other is concealed underneath the projection of the autograph of the enemy. The unconscious cloak-and-dagger reality of this dual concealment means reciprocity is terminally arduous. If we view the above points critically, then they appear to suggest that only two personas are at play in a holy war mentality – the sanctified warrior’s own self-projection upon a deity and the other concealed underneath the autograph of the enemy. However, we proceed in consideration of three personas, since our Deuteronomic narrative will reject that this view of the deity is wholly reducible to a social and anthropomorphic projection. We take our pericope on its own narrative terms and remain in the narrative and hermeneutic thrust of Deuteronomy by resisting the competing hermeneutic temptation to do otherwise. Our trajectory now turns further inward toward the interplay between the three personas – the sanctifying-national deity who issues the command and Ideal of the herem, the righteous warrior who obeys, and the enigmatic other underneath the autograph of the enemy. v) The Interplay of Three Personas in Holy War The summary of the three personas is as follows: First, i) the persona of the sanctifying-national deity is protective of the national Right, instructs the means for its enforcement and sustenance, and commands or sanctions for the purposes of protecting cultural and national identity.257 The command and Ideal of the herem means that those evil-doers or infidels within the autograph of the total enemy are the target of this deity’s judgment. Next, ii) the persona of the righteous warrior includes priests, military officers, and the multitude of endorsing and acquiescing adherents of the burgeoning, charismatic national consciousness. The righteous warrior adheres to the command and Ideal of the herem and is the composite extension of human

257 Susan Niditch, “Deuteronomy 20:1–20 Commentary,” The New Interpreter’s Bible, 440. “Overall the book of Deuteronomy is a startlingly and dangerously militaristic work, reflecting the situation its authors saw to be facing Israel.” See also Moshe Weinfeld, “Book of Deuteronomy,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 162.

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obedience.258 Third, iii) the other underneath the autograph of absolute enemy is the banned an irreligious model par excellance.259 We have discussed how the writers and redactors of Deuteronomy are fundamentally about the work of shoring up a burgeoning Israelite identity of national Right.260 The laws, regulations, and promotional speeches in Deuteronomy are a way of reinforcing the security of the land. And yet, of fundamental importance is that both the adherents of national Right and those external to this identity recognize the supreme reality of this identity.261 Obedience to the command and Ideal of the herem is what enables the nation’s adherents to recognize the supremacy of their own existence. Unlike interpersonal relation that flows freely between oneself as an other, where the Ideal is concerned, recognition will always take on the radiance of obedience and coercion toward obedience. The growing internal fear and paranoia of whether one is a true believer or patriot will increase. Particular to a politicoreligious context, new laws will spring up that bind both religious belief and national patriotism to obedience. The struggle for recognition of the Israelites becomes rapacious, analogous to Aristotle’s deliberative interplay of desire that falters toward an imbalance in the interplay of deliberation itself. The struggle is loosed from its binds of reciprocative dwelling-in and belonging-to one another, or to self-critical reflection upon the imperatives of the architect-creator deity, or the principles of liberal democracy, or the historical authoritative Imamic voices of Islamic fidelity to the stranger. Still, although the believer may intuit a fundamental contradiction in annihilating other human beings, the nation that desires to win recognition must forge ahead while the zealous politico-religious embers are still sweltering. It is the righteous warrior’s rapacious struggle that forces the absolute enemy to be brought under control.262 In this light,

258 Deuteronomy 7:1–2 and 20:16–17. Obedience remains essential in the need for righteousness, since it was not for righteousness’ sake that the Canaanites were being expulsed. 259 Moshe Weinfeld, “Book of Deuteronomy,” The Anchor Bible Dictionary, 175. 260 Joseph Blenkinsopp, “Deuteronomy,” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, 95. 261 Alexandre Kojève, “Desire and Work in the Master Slave,” Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts an Commentary, ed., John O’Neill, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996): 49–65. The notion of ‘recognition’ is Hegelian, but drawn from Kojève Marxist interpretation. 262 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans., A.V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): 109. The autograph of the enemy is exemplified in the term – “infidel” – as well as in the literary persona of the Hegel-Kojèvian “slave.”

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our Deuteronomic pericope is fundamentally about the value of power in the promotion and maintenance of the internal and external struggle for recognition of an Ideal. In society’s struggle for recognition of an Ideal and a return to a former order, more is transpiring between the sanctifying-national deity, the righteous warrior, and the absolutized enemy than we might suppose at face value. Through ressentiment the Israelites objectify, depersonalize, and abstract the integrity of their neighbor in a politicoreligious rhetoric. Charismatic voices level accusations that are never substantiated in the Deuteronomic text itself. The humanity of the other is ultimately reduced to that of an object worthy of levels of both enslavement and annihilation [20:13–20].263 Common humanity and divine creativity are both reduced and exceeded, and interpersonal social aggression or ugliness is the result.264 When this level of aggression is reached, then the Israelites proceed to the land of the Canaanites under the symbol of excision, with sword in hand.265 What happens next traditionally takes years to be recorded in the annals of history, a record that is also not present in our pericope. The particularities of annihilating other human beings are what go unofficially unrecorded until the righteous warriors and some historical remnant of the other return fractured from the battle and attest to the trauma that met them in the distance.266 The historical remnant of the other will often memorialize the cruel trespass or massacre, such as the remaining villagers from My Lai, Vietnam; a statue, the local museum, and specific markers and plaques reveal where in 1968 villagers were slaughtered by U.S.

263 J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors, 149. “The enemy is sought out to be exterminated, not subdued. There is no satisfaction in capturing him and exacting obedience and respect.” 264 René Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988): 47. Desire for recognition reaches a point of excess where it confounds itself. What has gone assumed but unstated for our present purposes in the paper is how the desire for recognition drives the objectification of the ‘other.’ 265 Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the Extreme, 178, 186; “Fragmentation and depersonalization do not kill, of course, but they threaten our humanity nonetheless.” 266 Herbert C. Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience: Towards A Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 4–22, 75. The My Lai Massacre in Vietnam is one example where this historical silence of cruel trespass was relatively brief. “Many verbal testimonials to the horrors that occurred at My Lai were available. Entire books have been written about the army’s year-long cover-up of the massacre and the cover-up was a major focus of the army’s own investigation of the incident.”

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army forces from Charlie Company in what has since been identified as the My Lai Massacre. We exemplified reciprocity in even a brief synopsis of Aristotle’s philia and justice, Ricoeur’s solicitude, Hebrew hospitality, and the Judeo-Christian imperative similes. These reveal to us a fundamental excessive contradiction in the struggle for recognition when one’s fellows are trespassed. A fundamental lack of reciprocity introduces a loss of love and philial interpersonal relation, and a rise in misunderstanding, scorn, neglect, injustice, exclusion, barbarity, and dispersion. Where are these excesses evident in our pericope that destroy existential reciprocity even when ontological symbiosis remains intact? After all, at the conclusion of Kampf, the victory from the success of the battle brings a conclusion to the aggression. That is, the winning of the Ideal brings not only national Right, but divine sanctification to the righteous warrior.267 Obedience to the Ideal has indeed purchased divine sanctification. Internal and external recognition of the Ideal of the righteous warrior is finally fulfilled. The Ideal is won through trespass, and the righteous warrior is elevated above his fellow who labored underneath the autograph of the absolute enemy. The righteous win their Ideal and acquire a sanctified status promised them in the Ideal of national Right.268 What is the explicit gain for the victorious righteous warrior when the other underneath the absolute enemy is objectified, depersonalized, and abstracted? We have stated that in essence the gain is in the Ideal of national Right, a return to offended honor, and of course sanctification awarded by the sanctifying-national deity.269 And yet, the winning of both the Ideal and sanctification are never what they promised to be.270 What the righteous warrior loses is his own common humanity. In truth, the righteous warrior has also been objectified, depersonalized, and abstracted. How can it be true that the righteous

267 Allen C. Brownfeld, “Religious Extremism and Holy War: Jews as well as Muslims Must Put House in Order,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, 87. 268 Michael Walzer, “The Idea of Holy War in Ancient Israel,” Journal of Religious Ethics 20 (Fall, 1992): 216–217, 225–228. 269 See John Milbank, “Sovereignty, Empire, Capital, and Terror,” Strike Terror No More, 65–74 for an assessment of the objectification of the other as an enigma. “This is barbarism. … And to deny the categories of either warrior or criminal is to reduce suspects to sub-humanity; it is to deny the imago dei in them.” 270 Alexandre Kojève, “Desire and Work in the Master Slave,” Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts an Commentary, 64.

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warrior is also objectified, depersonalized, and abstracted, especially given that he has won both the Ideal and sanctification? The righteous warrior is lost because in annihilating other human beings, he had to learn first to objectify, depersonalize and abstract his own humanity; in short, he had to sever his sense of common humanity in the breech of reciprocity with his fellows. The trespass of cruelty affects both the righteous warrior and the enemy on either side of the imperative simile. At the heart of excess, to transvalue both oneself and an other is to lose sight of the symbiotic telos held in trust in a common humanity.271 For the righteous warrior to win the Ideal and sanctification, such transvaluation was essential: One must obey the herem and fail to recognize the attestations of the other. The other must become enigmatic through a social ban, must be excised through the sword or some other symbol of excision. If the other is not concealed under the autograph of the enemy, then the awareness that one is killing others as fully human and worthy as you will foil the politico-religious rhetoric that guides the Ideal of national Right. Analogous to the other as enemy, oneself as the righteous warrior has been objectified, depersonalized, and abstracted. In fact, both oneself and an other have become enigmatic. But if oneself is also concealed underneath the enigmatic autograph of the righteous warrior, then who is the true winner of sanctification from the sanctifyingnational deity? It is certainly the case that the righteous warrior is sanctified. Still, oneself underneath the autograph of the righteous warrior has lost its orientated telos and is a reduced and exceeded human subject.272 The reduction and excess of common humanity in a shared telos between oneself as the righteous warrior and the other underneath 271 Heda Margolius Kovály, Under a Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941–1968, 150. Kovály retells a conversation between two women sitting next to her in the waiting room of a doctor’s clinic. Here the transvaluation is entrenched: “I tell you, I was so sick,” said one of them, “and they sent me from one doctor to another and none of them helped me a bit until that one. He fixed me up in no time. He took such good care of me that if it hadn’t been for him I’d be six feet under by now!” “Really? What kind of doctor was he?” Asked her listener. “Oh, you know, one of those dirty Jews.” This text found in Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag, 32. “It was in the camp that the prisoner suffered complete self-degradation; it was in the camp that the men who guarded this prisoner also suffered complete self-degradation. … The souls of those who participated in this repressive system will forever be blighted.” 272 This is the crux of Kampf, that it ends in the objectification and mutual annihilation of all personas involved, at least as described with reference to the elements of a ‘holy war mentality.’

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the autograph of the enemy, is only one problem in the interplay within our personas. We must also turn to consider the relationship between the sanctifying-national deity and the righteous warrior. We are crossing our earlier trajectory regarding the sanctifyingnational deity who both reduces and exceeds the originary architectcreator deity. Due to the aforementioned reduction and excess of the originary architect-creator deity by the sanctifying-national deity, sanctification is also reduced and exceeded of its sanctifying substance. What the righteous warrior gains in the excessive struggle for the Ideal is a parody of sanctification based on a parody of the first deity. The Ideal is indeed won; but it is empty of content. The Ideal of national Right or ambiguous Freedom for which the righteous warrior fought, for which the sanctifying-national deity promised him through the herem, and for which he was willing to fight even to the death to protect a “way of life” and restored order, is the new dwelling place at last reached in the long trespassive journey. The cost of this trespassive journey was a loss of existentiell understanding to the architect-creator deity, a loss of existential reciprocity in fellowship, a loss of oneself as an other, a loss of self-critical liberal democracy to ambiguous Freedom, a loss of care, respect, justice and integrity, and finally, a loss of honor. The Ideal brings loss as the new dwelling place in the distance. There is no mistaking that the Ideal is won, but the architect-creator deity, restored honor, freedom, and both oneself and an other underneath the enigmatic autographs of the righteous warrior and enemy, are all reduced and exceeded. Sanctification was a gift of the sanctifyingnational deity, but from before we know how the excessive nature of a gift can also be a poison to human life and relation. The concealment of both warrior and enemy ushers in loss. In fact, through reduction and excess the Ideal has proven itself to be a cold and lifeless orb. What is at last reached is the burned-out quasar of an Ideal in the distance, to which one may belong only through the calcified façade of altruistic benevolence and the repression of cruel trespass through prudent custom once politico-religious rhetoric has finally cooled. The righteous warrior affirms that he is victorious, or will someday be victorious, but cruel trespass reveals that Kampf, ressentiment, trauma, continued excision, and the enigmatic are never overcome as evidenced in lingering distrust and animosity never extinguishable in this cruel art. Through the Ideal of the herem, the sanctifying-national deity, the righteous warrior, and the enemy, are all the triangulated

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reductions and excesses of the architect-creator deity, oneself underneath the righteous warrior, and the other underneath the autograph of the enemy.273 The hard-fought Ideal of Right brings mutual negative transcendence and death through a parody of sanctification that is substantively vacuous.274 In the cruel trespass of the excessive struggle for recognition, there are no victors after all – only repressed existential awareness of telos, abstracted common humanity, and existentiell divine absence.275 All that remains thereafter is what caused the conflict in the first place – fear. And fear that slips easily toward a hyper-protectionist social neurosis, as history teaches, is the ruin of civilization. vi) Conclusion Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. – Bertrand Russell When the war finally ended for me, in the heart of Germany sixteen crowded months later, the cruel, the momentous, and the strange were blended as never before. – J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors

The excessive struggles for the Ideal and sanctification in a holy war mentality obscures the reality. But it is more than this as well. The artery of interpersonal cruelty is located in a struggle that reduces and exceeds human beings. Obedience to the enclosed Ideal excludes reciprocity in a Kampf that rises in increasing concentricities, which threaten interpersonal well-being. The contagion of trauma, the enigmatic in the symbol of the ban and excision in the piercing symbol of a sword, the deception, and transvaluation of reciprocity exhibited against one’s fellows through ressentiment, are ugly and disfiguring features of human history. They remain ugly and disfigure us today. The 2008 so-called Christmas Massacre by the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda of hundreds of adults and children was horrific, but details of the attack in Doruma on December 26th are a tangible and sickening reminder of

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G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 110. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 206; see also Kojève, 53. 275 Alexandre Kojève, “Desire and Work in the Master Slave,” Hegel’s Dialectic of Desire and Recognition: Texts an Commentary, 54. 274

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disfigurement, where over four dozen massacred were dismembered, their body parts spread throughout church grounds. Charles Taylor’s exploits in Liberia and Sierra Leone were equally horrific. Rape, mutilation, murder, sexual slavery, and cannibalism are some of the categories of disfigurement, but the disfigured are the dead and mutilated, the emotionally and physically scarred, and the losses that escape explanation. Taylor’s own defense before the International Criminal Court on war crimes included a self-portrayal of a peaceful and democratic family man. This too is a disfigurement of historical memory of the injured and missing, of the transvaluation of the truthfulness of historical events themselves. No greater abuse of truth is so emblematic of our contemporary epoch. Auden’s “to love one another or die,” is here contra-poised to Filov’s “to win or die.” Choosing the rhetoric of the latter is a dangerous venture into continuing escalations of ugliness and disfigurative excess in interpersonal human life and relation. F) The Artery of Recognition Continued – Cruelty in the Name of Love This hint will at least make less enigmatic the enigma of how contradictory concepts such as selflessness, self-denial, self-sacrifice can suggest an ideal, a kind of beauty; and one thing we know henceforth – I have no doubt about it – and that is the nature of the delight that the selfless man, the self-denier, the self-sacrificer feels from the first: this delight is tied to cruelty. – Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, II:18. Even those cities which seem to enjoy peace, and where the arts flourish, the inhabitants are devoured by more envy, care, and uneasiness than are experienced by a besieged town. Secret griefs are more cruel than public calamities. In a word, I have seen so much and experienced so much that I am a Manichean. – Voltaire, From Martin to Candide: Candide

i) Introduction – The Query of Cruel Trespass in the name of Love Cruelty is the desire whereby a man is impelled to injure one who we love or pity. – Spinoza

The above inquiry led to a greater understanding of one example of excessive cruel trespass in light of the loss in interpersonal life and

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relation. Fracture in the topos of cruelty always transpires at the frontier of human life and relation, these relations being intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional. The task of restored relation includes a restoration in interpersonal reciprocity to one’s fellows. This task was earlier asserted as the art of recognizing one’s fellows, an art that involves a lessening of both ignorance and inhospitality and a gain of these in responsibility, knowledge, and action.276 These qualities of the art of recognition have also been summarized as activated caritas. In light of recognition, activated caritas is the agapic art of hearing, speaking, and acting with regard to the other’s attestations of his or her singular memory and identity. And yet, if we rest on the best of interpersonal recognition as an activated caritas, then we are also obliged to reveal the subtleties of its excessive trespass. We remain, after all, in the topos of cruelty, so the question of hermeneutic suspicion regarding the art of recognition cannot so easily succumb to generalized and less than subtle implorations of mutual love for one another.277 In our above assessment of excessive cruel trespass in a holy war mentality any professions to love were either absent or proffered as altruistic benevolence. We resisted altruistic benevolence in that section with the exception of noting its concealing characteristics, but we are forced to deal with it at a more approachable microcosmic degree here. In the case of love as cruel, we cannot simply resist the expression of altruistic benevolence but must assess at least one aspect of its occurrence. What are we to make of excessive cruel trespass at the very center of professions of love, and in particular of love that presents itself as sincere, caring, and generally benevolent? The gain of such an assessment is that if we are able to identify how elements of recognition (i.e., agapic art or activated caritas) can exceed themselves into interpersonal cruelty, then this identification will reveal the prolific access that potential cruel trespasses have in our daily interpersonal lives and relations. At its most rudimentary, our question is – Can love be cruel, and if so, then how and why? This question may seem at the same time both intuitively obvious and terribly broad, so it helps that our question lands in a larger philosophical inquiry. To understand this inquiry and gain access to an answer regarding cruel love, our trajectory turns first to John Kekes, a contemporary thinker who addresses

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Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, 100–104, 144–6; Totality and Infinity, 174. See also, Aristotle, Poetics, 549. 277 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, 32–34. “Hermeneutics of suspicion.”

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the moral complexities of interpersonal cruelty and in his own way assists us in reorientating and rendering specific our question – In what ways are displays of love (i.e., caritas, benevolence, clemency) in interpersonal life and relation susceptible to the excesses of cruel trespass? Or, put simply, in what way is love cruel?278 In a preliminary appraisal, Kekes recalls that according to both Montaigne and contemporary Humeans, cruelty is the “summum malum” or the absolute worst thing we can do to one another.279 To confront this summum malum of cruelty, Montaigne believed that Christian caritas was the best remedy. Kekes then turns to assess what he terms caritas’ secular contemporary version – or benevolence. According to Kekes, contemporary Humeans cite secular benevolence to confound the wiles of cruelty. To this point, whether Christian caritas or secular benevolence, both have the potential for healing or confounding interpersonal cruelty. So far, these variations of interpersonal love are essential to the dissolution of interpersonal cruelty. And yet, along the path of caritas-benevolence that confronts cruelty, Kekes stops us short at a logical burr – “Benevolence can lead to great cruelty.” If this is true of secular benevolence, then it may be retrogressively true of Christian caritas. Indeed, we already know this to be the case from our earlier assessment of both Thomas Aquinas and Spinoza.280 For the former, cruelty is a rawness or excess in the active heart of human relationships; Spinoza is ever more explicit in his conviction that cruelty includes “what we do to those we love.”281 If cruelty can transpire in the intimate machinations of how we love those we love, 278 John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 843. Kekes at least attempts to define cruelty! “Given these supplements, the dictionary definition may be amended as follows: in its primary sense, cruelty is the disposition of human agents to take delight in or be indifferent to the serious and unjustified suffering their actions cause to their victims.” 279 John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 841. “That cruelty is a vice is true; that from it flow detestable actions and unconscionable suffering is also true. But why is it the most extreme, the most detestable of all vices? Why is cruelty the worst thing we do?” 280 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2.159; Seneca, De Clementia ii, 4. See Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, ed. Ford Lewis Battles and André Malan Hugo, (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1969). See also Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); see also, Spinoza, “Ethics,” Collected Works of Spinoza (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988), 3.38; 540. 281 John Kekes, Cruelty and Liberalism, 841–43. There are significant points of concern in Kekes’ assessment: a) Kekes rejects the argument for caritas-benevolence as adequate to cruelty. He asserts instead that the best way to counter excess is to return to balance. Our task is thus to “balance the agent’s state of mind, the agent’s action, and the way the actions affect other people. The balance … includes the weighing and harmonizing of their competing claims with a view of maximizing human

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then we would be helped by rehearsing even a single explicit instance of how and why this happens in interpersonal relation. If our example of cruelty in the name of love is explicit to human life and relation, we note that it can likewise be simultaneously subtle, so that we hardly if ever recognize its daily trespass. Revealing both an explicit and subtle cruelty in human life and relation is not a simple task. And yet, if we achieve explicit subtlety, then our gain is in a recognition of cruel excess of other less subtle forms of human love that may become more transparent to us over time. Spinoza’s explicit assertion is correlated to our question – ‘In what way is love cruel?’ In this correlation, our trajectory begins where cruelty is “what we do to those we love,” but in the name of love. This trace of cruelty-to-those-we-love-in-the-name-of-love is different than our assessment of the narrative of Cain, where his murder of Abel excluded any mention of affection. Following the criteria of explicit yet subtle cruelty in the name of love, our trajectory turns to the problematic nature of pity. Pity is chosen due to the stamina of its explicit yet subtle historical and literary occurrence and even condoned status in welfare and minimizing human suffering.” Kekes call for balance resembles the age-old Socratic cry for moderation. But moderation can be excessively pursued. Shall we have moderation of moderation? b) Next, Kekes’ argument loses steam when he asserts that cruelty is not a summum malum, just as we have no access to a summum bonum in interpersonal life and relation. Thus, “There is no doubt that cruelty is very bad, but it is not the worst thing. The worst thing is what causes the most evil.” We are suddenly thrown back into the topos of evil. What we both resist and learn from Kekes will orientate our trajectory toward the excessive nature of caritas-benevolence as an excess even within human recognition. First, insofar as Kekes is addressing the topos of evil, then he is correct that cruelty is not the summum malum; of course evil is. The problem is one our lodestar taught us about the western tradition, and one which Kekes unwittingly repeats; that is, there is a paradigmatic inconsistency between the topoi of cruelty and evil that is not resolved through their collusion, but only through their correlation. Kekes commits himself to the former. We resisted from the start the topos of evil because we understood in chapter two how the kernel of this topos emits ontological assumptions about human beings and the cosmos that, even in Kekes’ secular clarification of ‘evil,’ go hidden and uninvestigated. Furthermore, we wanted to take cruelty upon its own terms, uncorrupted by the topos of evil, in our knowledge that the ambiguous rhetoric of ‘evil’ would phenomenologically swallow up any collusive investigation of cruelty. c) Kekes’ argument assumes that the nature of Christian caritas is an easy semantic equivalent for secular benevolence. What he misconstrues in his assertion is the nature of Christian eschatology that informs caritas and that is either abandoned or deformed in Humean benevolence. Caritas and benevolence are in fact quite distinct from one another and are never easily correlatable to each other. For the moment, we resist an extensive correlation by hedging toward a broad middleterm that unequivocally includes aspects of both caritas and benevolence – i.e., love. Kekes and Spinoza reveal to us how interpersonal love, like all virtues and values, is never free from both excess and contradiction.

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western life and relation. Our assessment is thus the trace of pity as an explicitly subtle cruel trespass in the name of love. The trajectory begins at this trace. ii) The Trace of Pity in the Name of Love April is the cruellest month, breeding. Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing. Memory and desire, stirring. Dull roots with spring rain. – T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

Lilacs breed out of the dead land in April, and this is precisely why April can be cruel. Pity grows out of trespassed love in friendship, and this is precisely why friendship can be cruel. But why cruel? In truth, neither lilacs nor pity grow from either death or love. Eliot has built a contradiction into the image of the lilac, revealing the transvaluative and deceptive nature of cruelty. April and friendship become cruel when an excess transvalues dead land into life, and love into pity. But this transvaluation is deceptive, for even if lilacs do bloom, and pity does grow, both are still within a deadened Waste Land and trespass of love. If you receive a lilac from dead land, or pity through trespassed love, then both lilac and pity are a deceptive ruse. The lilac is the ruse of life that conceals death, and pity is the interpersonal ruse of love that conceals a trespass. As a lilac springing from death, or pity springing from a trespass in love, the transvaluation and deception of both are implicated in Eliot’s “the cruellest month.” April’s lilac and pity in friendship are both cruel – as we shall see, both involve the deceptive breeding of a tender ruse, the excessive mixing of memory and desire, and a transvaluative stirring at the deepest roots of interpersonal life and relation. A Tender Ruse: Breeding Lilacs out of the Dead Land In his essay entitled De Clementia, Seneca understands clemency as that practice analogous to compassion, moderation, justice, kindness, tenderness, leniency, mercy, and forgiveness – clemency is as close to solicitude between love and justice and the interpersonal imperative similes of oneself as an other as we may hope for.282 If the art of

282 Ford Lewis Battles and Andre Malan Hugo, trans., Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, Book II, chapter iv 1, or pages 355–357.

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interpersonal recognition is an agapic art, then we are well grounded in Seneca’s interpretation of clemency. Seneca begins his assessment of pity by flatly concluding that it “is a mental defect.”283 More to the point, pity is a mental defect that trespasses clemency in interpersonal life and relation. Interestingly enough, this same essay on clemency is also the precise essay where Seneca delivers his interpretation of cruelty at length – “We ought to avoid both pity and cruelty, closely related as they are to strictness and to clemency, lest under the guise of clemency we lapse into pity.”284 According to Seneca, cruelty undermines strictness and clemency, and clemency is also the guise under which pity is hidden.285 What Seneca does not achieve in this essay is a correlation of cruelty and pity; this task was unwittingly left to another thinker. What was discovered by this later thinker was that the mediating term which bound pity and cruelty is indeed joy. Seneca’s dyadic but incomplete relation between cruelty exceeding clemency, and clemency as a guise for pity, is completed by our lodestar. Nietzsche is able to draw a correlation between the expression of pity and what he terms the “joy in cruelty.” Akin to Seneca’s “guise of clemency,” pity is a quasi-love insofar as it appears benevolent, but in fact conceals a hidden interest in the other’s sufferings and conflictions that transvalues (or is contrary to) benevolence. If benevolence is transvalued in pity, then pity is in fact a deceptive quasi-love, or worse.286 This said, the first reason pity is cruel is due to its deceptive approach in interpersonal relation as a quasi-love that exceeds that which it purports not to exceed in its approach, or namely reciprocity in benevolence. The second reason pity is cruel is found within the deception, or in what pity conceals in the deceptive approach of quasi-love. What is

283 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.ii.30.2. Aquinas takes an opposite approach. Pity is not a defect, but a defect in our human nature due to sin is the reason for taking pity. Aquinas is not clear about distinctions between misericordia, clemency, ‘true sympathy,’ and pity. Such lack of clarity lends some strength to Nietzsche’s critique of pity in the western tradition. 284 Ford Lewis Battles and Andre Malan Hugo, trans., Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, Book II, chapter iv 1. or pages 355–357. [Italics mine]. 285 Calvin’s Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, Book II, chapter iv 1. or pages 355–357, “What then is set over against clemency? It is cruelty, which is nothing else than harshness of mind in exacting punishments.” 286 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human all too Human, II: 43; Daybreak IV: 238. Nietzsche asserts that human nature is either inclined toward “cruelty” or “charm.” Charm, under false pretenses, reveals something of self-interest, power, and the virtues of the strong.

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concealed in pity? Nietzsche writes that the deceptive quasi-love of pity conceals a joy underneath the “guise” of sincere care that seeks its satiation in an other’s attestations to singular suffering. This concealed “joy” is “adorned with such innocent names that even the tenderest … is not suspicious of them – i.e., ‘tragic pity’ and ‘les nostalgias de la croix’ [the nostalgia of the cross] is another.”287 Pity is cruel because it is a deceptive joy that exceeds other human beings through the guise of love. Consider the guise of reverence for the suffering hero and the satiation that comes in commemorating his suffering. Or consider the guise of affection for the social ‘leper’ which is really a “lording it over” him, as a repulsive form of satisfaction gained in his presence that you are simply what he is not.288 Underneath this guise, as in the gospel of Matthew’s “like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful,” the enjoyment of the other reveals the interior “full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness.”289 The substance of this enjoyment of the other is also no accident, although in the accident is the guise of insipid quasi-love. Because such satiating joy is concealed and not transparent, it manifests easily as a sincere or tender ruse, for instance of oneself earnestly seeking to hear the other’s attestation to suffering – ‘You poor dear.’ But this particular lilac grows out of a dead land.290 The appearance of the most “innocent” and “tenderest” “self-sacrifice” of genuine concern or care as a prefatory remark within gossip over a friend or colleague conceals what Nietzsche understands as a quiet celebration at the expense of an other human being. Pity, as an excessive yet subtle or quiet celebration is cruel due to both its deceptive approach of quasilove and a peculiar joy as a “delight [that] is tied to cruelty.”291 The subtle nature of joy in pity as a quasi-love is evident insofar as both the pitier and the pitied may not even be “suspicious” of a cruel trespass.

287 Friedrich Nietzsche, “Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche,” Menschliches, Allzumenschliches II: 366; see also GM, II: 7 [30–4]. 288 Ricoeur, Oneself as an Other, 191. “… thanks to which sympathy is kept distinct from simple pity, in which the self is secretly pleased to know it has been spared.” 289 Matthew 23:24–33. 290 Nietzsche, GM, II:5. “Cruelty is a ‘voluptuous pleasure’ [doing evil for the pleasure of doing it], punishment and the right of the masters, to see him ‘despised and mistreated’ by self or the authorities as ‘compensation’ – ‘The compensation, then, consists in a warrant for and title to ‘cruelty.’ 291 Nietzsche, GM, II:18.

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When one is not suspicious, then the joy in pity is below self-cognitive intentionality.292 If the joy of pity is often below intentionality, then what is the difference between something like honest sympathy and the insincerity of pity akin to Thomas Aquinas’ misericordia?293 Or between Mitleid (to suffer with and through) and Barmherzigkeit (compassion for) or the Latin true compassio?294 In order to understand the difference between honest sympathy and pity, we first take note of an equivocating remark by Seneca – “Many commend it [pity] as a virtue, and call a pitying man good.”295 What does this statement suggest about those who do not commend pity as a virtue? What we discover underneath Seneca’s equivocation are two schools of thought regarding pity that are as old as Zeno’s view that pity is a disease, and Lactantius’ retort that Zeno’s view of pity is a “cry of madness” followed by Lactantius’ rebuff that pity is in fact “a manifestation of humanitas or fraternity, the sentiment which alone makes possible cooperation among men.”296 Our curiosity rises – for why indeed is interpersonal pity so starkly contested between Lactantius’ virtue of fraternity and Zeno’s social disease? One wonders if Lactantius and Zeno are talking about the same term. Hegel assists us at the semantic grade by first orientating a difference between interpersonal pity and what he identifies as “true sympathy,” an orientation that is heuristically helpful to our task.297 In his Tragedy as a Dramatic Art, Hegel asserts that ‘true sympathy’ “is an accordant feeling with the

292 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 50. Regarding intentionality, “I have in mind people ruled by vices that cause them to act in certain ways, yet they have not chosen either their vices or their evil-producing actions. Cruelty due to lifelong brutalization, prevalent prejudices accepted as moral principles, an inability to love, or cowardice masquerading as prudence are often such unchosen failures.” 293 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.ii.30.1. It remains to my mind unclear in significant portions of Aquinas’ discussion of misericordia where an abiding difference between ‘pity’ and ‘true sympathy’ is exhibited. Part of the issue is one of historical difference and shifting semantics for the term ‘pity.’ Still, Aquinas remains unclear so one must proceed cautiously. 294 Duden, Etymologie Herkunfswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache; 2. völlig überarbeitete Auflage, 1989. 295 “In the latter case [the case of pity] a lighter risk is involved, it is true, but the error is equal, since in both [both pity and cruelty] we fall short of what is right.” 296 C.N. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), 192. 297 Donald L. Beny, Mutuality: The Vision of Martin Buber, 44. Buber does not recommend ‘empathy,’ but vies for the term ‘inclusion,’ since he believes that empathy is too aesthetic a category in interpersonal relation where the other is “not sufficiently safeguarded.”

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ethical claim at the same time associated with the sufferer – that is, with what is necessarily implied in his condition as affirmative and substantive.” The “ethical aim,” of true sympathy is “the only real and absorbing interest in such cases [and] ought to be an eager desire to afford immediate assistance.”298 In short, true sympathy is an ethical desire to immediately and substantially assist the other who suffers and is in pain. Next, we note that, like Zeno and Seneca, Hegel is no great fan of interpersonal pity. In brief, Hegel writes that pity is expressed by “ragamuffins and vagabonds,” and is a sentimental platitude where “your countrified cousin is ready enough with compassion of this order.” In Hegel’s candid remark we register his disgust comparable to pity as a disease, but our trajectory is especially assisted in his interpretation of true sympathy as an “ethical desire,” an interpretation of desire that will assist us later in seeing through the opacity of pity. The trajectory now turns to our query regarding the explicit trespass of pity in interpersonal life and relation between oneself and an other. An Excessive Mixing of Memory and Desire – Perhaps the best way to consider the explicit trespass of pity is to make an initial appeal to our own reflective experience in daily life and relation in correlation with Aquinas’ assertion that “properly speaking, a man does not pity himself, but suffers in himself, as we suffer cruel treatment in ourselves.”299 Our correlative appeal is likewise orientated by the criteria of deceptive quasi-love and joy that exceeds human life and relation. Let us begin by asking this question – What does pity gain both the pitier and the one being pitied? The pitier coos over the other’s pain – the interpersonal cooing of “You poor dear,” and also the intra-personal victimage of “Woe is me” never produces the “ethical desire” to offer assistance, since the root of this peculiar desire is not genuine affection, but a transvaluation of true affection. Oddly enough, the gain of pity at first appears to be in passivity, as a kind of languishment or commiseration in suffering. But is pity truly passive?300 In fact, pity requires an enormous amount of activity.301 Consider intra-personal self-pity first,

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Hegel, “Tragedy as a Dramatic Art,” in Anne and Henry Paolucci, ed., Hegel on Tragedy: Selections, 51. 299 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.ii.30.1. 300 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM I: 10. “Slave morality always first needs a hostile external world … its action is fundamentally reaction.” 301 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM I: 10: “This inversion of the value-positing eye – this need to direct one’s view outward instead of back to oneself – is of the essence of ressentiment; in order to exist, slave morality always first needed a hostile external world;

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where the pitier is also his own self-pitied object. We acquire the sense that the self-pitier gets pleasure from pitying himself by attesting to his own pain and then bemoaning his own passive or languishing state. Indeed, if we observe closely, his self-pitying brings a peculiar gain. He seems somehow to enjoy his own suffering, caught in a circle of selfsatisfaction and satiated in his own self-victimization.302 In terms of enjoyment, self-satisfaction, and satiation, the labor of pity is in fact quite active indeed. Aquinas rejects the activity of selfpity and recognizes how we “suffer cruel treatment in ourselves” where clemency finds no ready harbor.303 This desire for enjoyment and even quiet delight is only different by degree within interpersonal pity. Have you not experienced the bitter taste pity leaves in your mouth in the briefest recognition of a smirk or the lust of a venomous eye where the listener of your pain and suffering does not desire to assist you in any way, but only desires to enjoy your plight by cooing over it?304 The active desire of pity is a desire to enjoy without offering assistance; this desire approaches under the guise of genuine affection that conceals joy at your expense, which means pity is a significant trespass. This brief appeal to the subtle experience of pity points us to an explicit dynamic

it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all – its action is fundamentally reaction.” 302 Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag, 33. “We all know people who, in their private lives, would happily surrender the satisfaction of their desires for the right to complain endlessly over their dissatisfactions. It is no less the case for public life, where the official status of victim guarantees a certain convenience. But such a role ultimately corrupts those who assume it.” When well-being is harmed through self-pity, then this is a form of self-hostility or enmity that burrows away at oneself within one’s own selfobjectification in the autograph of ‘the victim.’ At the intra- or interpersonal spheres, this form of self-victimization is the contradiction of self that transforms oneself and others into ‘the enemy.’ Next, Luther’s meaning of Anfechtung, as the self ’s own “delicious despair” in his Theology of the Cross must also be examined for its cruelty. See Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis,” LW, 113. See also E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, 170–171. 303 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.ii.30.1. 304 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, V: 536. “One finally grows indignant to see again and again how cruelly everyone reckons up the couple of private virtues he happens to possess to the prejudice of others who happen not to possess them, how he plagues and teases other with them.” See also Paul Ricoeur, Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 217. Influential is Ricoeur’s concept of the ‘listener,’ an interpretive basis drawn principally from Heidegger’s challenge to ‘listen’ and to ‘recollect’ difference; see also, Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1977), 32.

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in a return to the key points of ‘performable tragedy’ in chapter one, and thereafter to Nietzsche’s coinage of “tragic pity.” First, if we recall, performable tragedy’ requires at least three essential parts – the distance of a stage, a tragic actor-spectacle, and a spectator305 Consider Pentheus’ Bacchae, for instance. Pentheus is the tragic actor-spectacle who defies the deity, Dionysus, and is devoured by his mother, Agauë.306 The distance of the stage allows the polis, as the collective spectator, to experience pity, fear, or catharsis. In the experience of pity is fascination, delight and satiation, a generalized triadic enjoyment that evokes a response for which the spectators paid the admission fee to view the tragic performance in the first place. In this way, the enjoyment of pity is essential to the nature of performable tragedy. Without pity, the performance is rendered ineffective. Aristotle reckoned pity and fear as an enjoyment of performable tragedy where the performance is a “miniature” teaching us about what M. S. Silk calls the “patterns of action in life.”307 And yet, following the trace of Nietzsche, “tragic pity” is indeed the confusion of real existential tragic existence with the three essential parts of performable tragedy just noted. This form of ‘tragic pity’ “reveals how one gives up the whole will to live, the cheerful abandonment of the world in the consciousness of its worthlessness and vanity.”308 Stage, actor-spectacle, and spectator. In terms of ‘tragic pity,” a) the other is transvalued into an actor-spectacle, his attestations to pain and suffering open and vulnerable for the enjoyment concealed within the pity of the spectator; b) oneself approaches the other as actor-spectacle in pity as a guise of affection, where pity creates the performance and not vice-versa, as in performable tragedy. In pity, the other as actor-spectacle performs for 305

Aristotle, Poetics, 14. Euripides, “Bacchae,” The Bacchae and Other Plays, trans., Philip Vellacott, (London: Penguin Books, 1973): 213. 307 M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 300. 308 M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, 329. “Christian tragedy” as Nietzsche calls it, reveals a pity that passively coos over the suffering of others as something to be endured. My point is that Hegel’s ‘true sympathy’ is a true affection toward action, not passivity. To affirm the will to live is to see suffering for what it is – an aspect of tragic existence that requires active reciprocity toward change, not passive endurance. Nietzsche would certainly have taken issue with how the Christian moral framework would be able to undergo such change, but then he was unable to debate with other comparable philosophical and theological engines such as Heidegger, Rahner, Lonergan, Levinas, Gutierrez, et. al., who have respectively contributed significantly to the discussion of human affection and action after the meta-horrors of the 20th century. 306

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the enjoyment of the spectator. The other is ‘not suspicious.’ Why should he be? After all, his expectation of friendship and relation assumes that his pain would not in some subtle manner be transvalued into a performance; c) the distance of a stage performance of oneself as spectator to the other as spectacle-actor is precisely where reciprocity fractures. In the distance of a stage the actor-spectacle performs. Such distance is beyond helpful objectivity and instead is in the upper decks of abstraction. Through abstracting the other, oneself as spectator is an active hearer disguised in affection but desiring to be satiated. With enough distance, the spectator can become thoroughly satiated in an other human being. But what about the other abstracted underneath the actor-spectacle? He is not to be enjoyed like a performing marionette, tumbling on the floor and roiling through crises. Whereas pity in performable tragedy approaches the actor in the authenticity of a performing art, pity is an inauthentic excess when it approaches the other in tragic existence through the guise of love that transforms the attestations of the other into a caricature. Pity in tragic existence is not love as ‘true sympathy’ but the quest for the attainment of a modicum of joy taken at the expense of the other as an actor-spectator – and herein is the dark heart of the joy of pity in the name of love. In the daily context of tragic existence, the enjoyment of pity is a spectacular theatrical joy that is utterly misaligned in daily human life and relation. Far removed from Lactantius’ ‘sentiment of fraternity’ stands the ignobility of pity that disrupts fraternity and reciprocity. For Hegel, such ignobility is analogous to Ricoeur’s caution regarding “sentimental platitudes” that fracture the solicitude of love and justice in interpersonal life and relation.309 Thus far we have suggested that pity is an excessive, deceptive desire for joy at the expense of other human beings. We may also note that concealed in pity is not merely joy, but a desire for more joy at the other’s expense. In the face of suffering the other desires to be satiated, satisfied, even delighted, and in pity this desire is often delivered through the guise of innocent ‘self-sacrifice.’ It is easy to surmise why the desire behind joy in pity is antithetical to Hegel’s “ethical desire” to offer immediate and substantial assistance, or Seneca’s “clemency,” or what we identify as interpersonal existential reciprocity. The desire 309 Paul Ricoeur, “Love and Justice,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, Richard Kearney, ed., (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 23–39; see also, Luke 18:11. “The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.”

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for the joy of pity is the fascinated, delighted, and satiating yet quiet celebration of an other’s pain. What kind of desire is indeed behind the excess of pity? Montaigne notes this peculiar desire as a Schadenfreude – or literally shadow-joy – that seeks the pain of an other but is concealed and even ravenous.310 In Schadenfreude, desire is never fully satiated. Lacan refers to uninsatiated destructive desire as a metonymic “desire for something else” that, because it is never fully satisfied, skips from object to object.311 The desire behind pity remains concealed, but skips from one narrative increment to an other.312 The usefulness of pity may even appear discarded in a desire for joy that not only listens to the attestations of suffering, but because it is uninsatiated begins to finally sensationalize the suffering other. Whereas the other was first abstracted, he becomes a parody of his own life performed upon the stage, and extended parodies introduce a further excessive slide into the sensational. In the sensational is the ravenous flipping from one narrative increment to the next. The desire to enjoy the other is concealed not always in a kind of prudent pity, but rather in the prudent “need” to “become informed.” Does “becoming informed” mean I desire to offer assistance through and after being informed about the other’s plight? If the answer is blasé or lackadaisical, then the desire of pity still lingers in my prudent enjoyment of “being informed” through the sensationalized other. Joyful pity masquerading as quasi-love desires the other’s performance, but this desire sensationalizes the attestations of the other through the uninsatiating nature of joy attained in the performance. Still, in the sensational performance, one gawks, yearns for satisfaction, celebrates that one is not the performer, and yet desires to hear more of the other’s 310

Tzvetan Todorov, Voices from the Gulag, 6. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1985), 167. Largely through his studies of both Hegel and Freud, Jacques Lacan develops his reflections upon the nature of jouissance, the paradoxical meaning of which is difficult to locate, but is akin to blissful desire that is both before and beyond daily ‘desire’ exhibited in any of our language systems. Jouissance is before the signifier or postCartesian ‘subject’ and determines human deliberation and action. See also, Patrick Fuery, “Jouissance and Its Paradox,” Theories of Desire, (Malasia: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 7–34. 312 Patrick Fuery, The Theory of Absence: Subjectivity, Signification, and Desire, (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995), 45–7. Fuery discusses Barthes’ reflections upon jouissance, which reveals a non-maliciousness to the desire behind pity. To the discourse between others rests an implicit narcissism. The return to narcissism harkens Thomas Parisi’s comments once more about the convolutions of cruelty within both narcissism and aggression. 311

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attestations from the performable narrative. To sidle up to an other in pity may involve both the conscious and unconscious desire that one will become satiated in the performance. But the “Isn’t that just terrible. … Tell me, then what happened?” of pity need not be intentional, and this is Nietzsche’s point about ‘tragic pity.’ The performance of the actor-spectacle is mesmerizing. Narratives of the dead iconichero or the religious martyr can bring the identification of pity so overcome in satiation that the adherent may weep in satiation, celebrating the death of both in an explicit satiation wherein the other’s pain becomes a ritualized celebration. Such desire can exceed so far into the sensational that pity seems to disappear or become diffusive within the excessive joy that learns to first abstract and then sensationalize other human beings. Pity becomes diffusive when the purely sensational blooms under the guise of prudent ‘information gathering.’ The purely sensational, as an excess of excess within the joy of pity in the name of love is when the celebration reaches such a pitch that the actor-spectacle risks becoming a divinized totem.313 Media and a Transvaluative Stirring At the Deepest Roots of Life and Relation We can note such a trespass in pity becoming diffusive through the sensational if we transition from the microcosmic hearing of an other’s singular attestation, and to an account of the increasingly macrocosmic global others whose singular attestations are transvalued into ‘becoming informed’ through “media events.” This instance is indeed a serious risk in our globalizing environment with its access to an exponential gathering of ‘media events.’314 One manner in which macrocosmic desire in pity under the guise of quasi-love transpires is through

313 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Sheridan, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 268. 314 Nietzsche writes that pity “saves us in a way from the primordial suffering of the world.” He did not view pity, as Aristotle did, as a purgation of “a dangerously strong feeling by its vehement discharge.” Rather, for Nietzsche pity is useful “in order to be oneself in the eternal joy of becoming.” For the tragic philosopher, even pity is useful as a “delight in destroying” and then building anew. The understanding of Nietzsche’s ‘tragic pity’ or “Christian tragedy” is not seminally about theatrical pity, but how he understood the abuse of theatrical pity in the daily lives of the Christian “herd,” articulated in his Genealogy of Morals. For a discussion of theatrical tragic pity, see M. S. Silk and J. P. Stern, Nietzsche on Tragedy, (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 125, 233, 269–71.

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specific forms of entertaining contemporary news media, as an often sensationalized performance that reflects the affective qualities of those who are “becoming informed” or entertained.315 The layout, image, and tone are so fully satiated in the desire for satisfaction in pity that society is unable to see the concealment of joy in satiation, or the concealment of ‘becoming informed’ in pity, that lay at the deepest roots of globalizing interpersonal life and relation.316 This is not a carte blanche critique of news media, as Wolfgang Huber noted in 1996, “To make direct causative links would be premature, it would add to the confusion, as well as be innocuous, to simply blame the media for new forms of violence in [for example] the schools or for right-wing extremist cruelties against foreigners, migrants, or minorities.”317 We must query deeper down. We have to pause and ask ourselves if the flipping images on the screen render ‘true sympathy’ as Hegel’s “desire to afford immediate assistance,” or whether this desire to be informed is really insatiable pity indeed, as an active sensational joy flipping from one narrative increment or “report” to the next. Evident in the value of every report of singular attestations to suffering are the media headlines of “America at War!” followed by the sober commentating of children losing life and limb. Enjoying the ravages of the other in the joy of pity fills the viewer with performance. The narrator’s tone is inconsistent with the report. Stories flip from one increment to the next. The victim’s migration through a waterless existential desert shows no relief in sight. A bus bomb maims and kills. Explosions in a Spanish train reveal a little girl’s loss. Each report

315 Media (twenty-four hour news, arrays of Internet and computer entertainment, television ‘programming,’ commercialization, etc.) in the west blurs the line between the ‘real’ and the ‘sensational.’ One may recall the CNN coverage of the ongoing “Showdown in Iraq,” where the ‘real’ is fused with the “designing of the spectacle” (Aristotle, Poetics, 544) before our eyes, and where borders between the theatrical ‘spectacle’ and the ‘real’ vanish. The result of this oft cited fusion between spectaclereal, or art-life, produces in the west a cynicism where ‘parody’ loses its originary point of reference, ‘satire’ forgets its object, and ‘irony’ becomes an end within itself – irony becomes ironic. What this fusion of art and life implies about human consciousness, how history and theology are now to be shaped, and what it means regarding our ability to endure a future together, are yet to be seen. 316 Georg Cavallar, The Rights of Strangers: Theories of International Hospitality, the Global Community, and Political Justice since Vitoria, (Vermont: Ashgate, 2002), 338–40. The notion of “implied justice” includes a set of assumptions that are exceedingly difficult to maintain in our own globalizing historical epoch. 317 Wolfgang Huber, Violence: The Unrelenting Assault on Human Dignity, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996), 13. [Italics mine].

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receives a dramatic tag-line and scenes flash in repetition. The sequence is repeated along with the reporting of the carnage. Questions are strange and desensitizing – how tremendous were the explosions? What kind of life will this child have now? How were the civilians killed? How will you survive now that your relatives are dead? The joy in pity has a way of sensationalizing other’s lives. The performance playing within the screen maintains enough distance to simply enthrall the viewer with waves of fascination and satiation. In such enthrallment is the fascination of the constellation of actor-spectacles, the rush of worthy ‘news events,’ and the repetition of these events that aim to increase the satiation of what the ‘viewer’ or spectator failed to hear and see before. Schadenfreude at this level remains restless until the next ‘media event’ skips from one increment to the next, from one increment of the sensational, joy and pity to the next. Many of us will have difficulty recalling the performable tragedies of the week prior. Still, in the staged distance of a television screen, we are enabled to sidle up in pity as spectators without the sensationalized actor-spectator ever-knowing we are there.318 What does it mean to “become informed” through the desire in pity? When pity is involved, the nature of this information suggests that we ask ourselves if ‘becoming informed’ requires us to be anything more than a spectator viewing a performance. If the answer is that the requirement halts at being a viewer-spectator, then the joy of pity in the guise of affective ‘being informed’ shines in its opacity. For Seneca, Nietzsche and Hegel, pity retains a history of varied receptions. The trace of the joy of pity under the guise of quasi-love is not an embedded cynicism about human life and relation. It is also not to suggest that clemency, benevolence, or agapic praxis, are not active in our pluralistic world. Rather, the joy of pity is a brief assessment of an explicit yet subtle trespassive cruelty in interpersonal life and relation. Our task was to understand even one instance of how and why love can exceed into cruelty, and what we discovered through Seneca and Nietzsche was the example of pity under the guise of love that produces joy. Joy in the spectacle of an other’s plight can be subtle and ravenous, and disguised in prudence. We identify this joy with celebration and a yearning for satiation that Aristotle both revealed and concealed in performable tragedy. 318 Joan V. Bondurant, Conquest of Violence: The Gandhian Philosophy of Conflict, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 39, 228.

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chapter three G) Remarks for Transition

Chapter three investigated the artery of the struggle for recognition within the interpersonal sphere. The chapter began with two assertions: The first assertion was that the Delphic “know thyself,” which informed our intra-personal anthropological assessment in chapter two, likewise had interpersonal implications in chapter three. To know oneself as an other, and an other as oneself, served as the hermeneutic bridge between the intra- and interpersonal spheres. Next, the second assertion was that our contemporary context is one of a serious crisis of authority, is flush with interpersonal cruelty, and thereby demands our full attention toward reconciliation now. Crises being what they are, this one – of a lack of normative authority in a globalizing context flush with displays of cruelty – belongs tooth and claw to our own epoch. In light of this crisis, our first contemporary challenge is to take Delphi at its word and get to know ourselves and others much better. The chapter had four aims. First, we located a moniker as a single word or phrase that summarizes the complexity of interpersonal relation. We investigated and correlated the Greek concept of philia (i.e., friendship), and the Hebrew understanding of hospitality. Both philia and hospitality are classic concepts still meaningful for us today. Through an assessment of classic philosophers and theologians, we discovered the repetitive theme of interpersonal reciprocity within their respective works. Daily reciprocity between human beings signifies an interpersonal art of care, trust, respect, and justice. In our search for a moniker, we correlated and bolstered our sense of daily reciprocity with a turn to the Judeo-Christian Scriptures. As was the case in chapter two for the imperative “loving … as yourself ”, in chapter three the interpersonal Scriptural imperative was to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Both verses are mutual imperative similes – love and do “as” to oneself and another. These imperative similes delivered us beyond daily interpersonal reciprocity, and to an ontological symbiosis between human beings. Our common telos is that we are meant to know and love oneself “as” an other, and vice-versa; thus, a daily reciprocity toward justice revealed for us a deeper assumed ontological symbiosis in our classic literature. This point about an ontological symbiosis was attested to in our classic narratives, such as within God’s question to Cain after the murder of Abel. God asked: “Where is your brother?” God assumes an ontological connection that was not erased in death. This connection allowed

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us to read philia and hospitality not in terms of a daily kindness toward friends and strangers, but in terms of a necessary fellowship between human beings. Ultimately, the repetition of “fellowship” in our classic literature becomes the moniker that signifies the true nature of human symbiotic and reciprocal relation. Our second aim was to show how an interpersonal desire for mutual recognition can lead to an excess that harms or annihilates interpersonal reciprocity. Ontological symbiosis is never damaged. Even when we murder one another, we are still meant to live otherwise. In this sense we are responsible for the dead. But unlike ontological symbiosis, daily human reciprocity can be harmed or annihilated when the desire for recognition creates a struggle that contradicts interpersonal well-being. Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic violence is the prevailing, contemporary systematic theory that attempts to explain how the desire for recognition destroys human life. The Girardian theory was assessed, but was revealed to be a systematic Ideal of Mimesis enshrined with a teleological beginning-middle-end of Mimetic rivalry. In the Girardian theory, a sense of tragic existence is marginalized, and in its place is constructed an elaboration akin to a Greek performable tragedy. The cathartic response happens in the sacrifice of a scapegoat, and interpersonal life returns to a state where human desire is temporarily released from human excess. Our contemporary vulnerabilities produce analyses, such as the Girardian mimetic theory of violence, that return us again to a teleologically fixed Ideal, or a “generative mechanism” somehow hidden since the foundation of the world. The difference between an approximation of the fracture of cruelty and Girard’s presentation of mimetic violence is that the former lands in the middle of a hostile hermeneutic environment where interpersonal well-being is contradicted, grows inexplicable, and exceeds interpersonal fellowship. An approximation of cruelty resists – not mimetic desire in daily existence – but the Girardian systemic theory of mimetic rivalry that provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty within a teleologically fixed Ideal of Mimesis. Our third aim was to discover how cruelty is active in interpersonal life and relation. We chose an assessment of a ‘holy war mentality’ in Deuteronomy 7 and 20, suggesting that the principles of holy war are also active in our current socio-political and religious contexts. The artery of interpersonal cruelty was located in the desire for recognition that reduces and exceeds humans being. The Ideal of national Right and

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a systematic logic of the herem (the divine command to annihilate the other) were investigated. We discovered that in the desire for national Right, and by analogy the desire for ambiguous Freedom, a triadic transvaluation ensues: The creator deity is reduced to the national deity, oneself is reduced to the Holy Warrior, and one’s fellow is reduced to the stranger-infidel underneath the autograph of the Enemy. Kampf rises and threatens interpersonal well-being. The contagion of trauma, the enigmatic symbol of the “ban,” and excision in the piercing symbol of a sword, are all tragic and make us ugly in a holy war mentality. Life is transvalued. The holy warrior is obedient and indeed wins sanctification, but this sanctification is vacuous when it is given from the reduction of a sanctifying-national deity. Obedience can be cruel. The war produces animosities that are arduous to future prospects for reconciliation. In the interpersonal artery of the desire for recognition, a holy war mentality transvalues interpersonal well-being, and ultimately concludes in fear. The assessment revealed how ugly cruelty can make us. Finally, our fourth aim was similar to the third, which was to disclose a further specific accounting of cruelty in interpersonal life. This time, however, we turned to cruelty concealed as pity. Pity has been a topic of concern from Zeno to Nietzsche. For his part, Spinoza wrote that we are cruel to those we love. These things in tow, our trajectory began where cruelty is “what we do to those we love,” but in the name of love. This trace of cruelty-to-those-we-love-in-the-name-of-love was different than our assessment of the narrative of Cain, where his murder of Abel excluded any mention of affection. The assessment revealed how pity masquerades as a quasi-love that desires a performance from our fellows. Pity sensationalizes the attestations of the other through an insatiable joy attained in the performance. In the sensationalized performance, one gawks, yearns for satisfaction, celebrates that one is not the performer, and yet desires to hear more of the other’s attestations from the performable narrative. We discovered how pity is operative in modern media that sensationalizes the viewer. Where a reaction to offer help was void, akin to Hegel’s “ethical desire” to offer immediate and substantial assistance, we discovered how pity feeds on the struggle and trauma of others. Pity in the name of love transvalues how we normally desire to love our fellows insofar as it excises others from us, and reduces these others to enigmatic. Our task in chapter four is to understand cruelty within the institutional sphere. It is to this labor that we now turn our attention.

CHAPTER FOUR

INSTITUTIONAL CRUELTY The Artery of Injustice Mercy does not destroy justice, but is a certain kind of fulfillment of justice. … Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution [and] justice without mercy is cruelty. –Thomas Aquinas Wrath is cruel. – Proverbs 27:4

Our labors continue in the topos of cruelty, charting a trajectory for this new topos for the consideration of public theologians and for interdisciplinary scholarship.1 Chapters two and three illustrated a correlative cartography as we charted the phenomenological topography of both intra- and interpersonal cruelty. Two arteries within the larger fracture of cruelty were approximated in human life and relation, these being intra-personal self-objectification and the interpersonal struggle for recognition. With reference to the arteries of both selfobjectification and recognition, we likewise identified common monikers for both the intra- and interpersonal spheres of human existence. By moniker we have meant a single and simple word or phrase that identifies the multiplicity of who and how we are as human beings. Our moniker for the intra-personal sphere has been the journey of selfintensification, whereas the moniker for the interpersonal sphere was fellowship. In the intra-personal sphere, where the cruel trespass of selfobjectification does not reign, then an intra-personal journey of selfintensification (i.e., a promise of self-relation in responsibility, the art of care, integrity, love, and justice) flourishes. Likewise, in the interpersonal sphere, where the fierce struggle for recognition as a cruel 1

Our topological consideration of cruelty began with Nietzsche’s Morgenröhte I:18 – What is the “way of cruelty” that preceded “world history” but “the actual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of mankind.”

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trespass of the other does not rule, then interpersonal fellowship (i.e., of existential reciprocity, friendship, and the recognition of a mutual ontological symbiosis) thrives. Where we approximated how both the intra-personal journey of self-intensification and interpersonal fellowship do not flourish or thrive in human life and relation, our task was thereafter to identify the prevalence of five contours (Kampf, trauma, excision, the enigmatic, and ressentiment) in both arteries of intra-personal self-objectification and the interpersonal struggle for recognition. We approximated the above contours in both of these arteries within the greater fracture of cruelty as an excessive trespass in human life and relation. What made this trespass cruel was how such excess contradicts and transvalues how we normally wish to conduct life. We clarified how both contradiction and transvaluation can make us ugly to ourselves and to one another. Our final task in chapter four is to identify and introduce the moniker of the institutional sphere in human life and relation and then approximate how cruelty trespasses this sphere, or how we become ugly. To accomplish this task, we will chart the following course: The chapter begins a) by reaching the highest moniker of the institutional sphere as a prevailing ‘issue of justice’ in human life and relation; then, b) the chapter considers what will be identified as the “death zones” within the institutional sphere where cruelty trespasses human beings. Next, two narrative, historical episodes of the cruel trespass or transvaluation within the issue of justice will be assessed, wherein the prevalence of the five contours (Kampf, trauma, excision, the enigmatic, and ressentiment) will be clarified. These two narrative, historical episodes are c) the 2001 public execution of David Jr. Ward in North Carolina Central Prison, and d) the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The chapter begins by charting toward the deep-structure moniker of the institutional sphere. In order to reach this moniker, we first begin by examining why justice is a fundamental issue for human beings. A) Introduction – Toward a Moniker of the Institutional Sphere Behold, I cry out of cruelty, but I am not heard: I cry aloud, but there is no judgment. – Job 19:72 2 The Hebrew Omx, transliterated as chamac, takes the possible translations of violence, wrong, injustice, and cruelty. See The King James Version of the Old Testament Hebrew Lexicon.

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i) The cry of Injustice and the Issue of Justice In chapters one through three, we asserted that the Delphic imperative Know Thyself is fundamental to western thought. In light of fracture underneath Delphi, Nietzsche’s challenge is to think outside of what he terms Socratic Scientism and toward creative action. His challenge is to attest from our intra-personal memories the nature of who we are as human beings. For instance, one “knows oneself ” not as a Socratic, fixed, teleological set of rigidly summarized quasi-empirical data, but as a creative, dynamic, unfolding telos-oriented intra-personal journey of self-intensification. In the Nag Hammadi gospel of Matthew, Jesus states – “Let the one who seeks not stop seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished.”3 Job seeks, finds answers, is troubled by their implications, and is finally astonished by what he learns. From seeking to astonishment, Ulrich Simon notes Job’s “wonder and awe” in the face of an excessive whirlwind that has unmade his life. Job teaches that we can remain and attest to cruelty’s thorny trespass, yet creatively throw ourselves out into the world and return to dwell-in and belong-to ourselves once more.4 With regard to confronting cruelty, Nietzsche often paired creative action with the virtue of courage. When cruelty encounters and troubles our lives, it takes courage to be a classic figure like Job yet again. Through tracing the Delphic imperative, intra-personal “Know Thyself,” we likewise noted that this imperative has interpersonal (i.e., Know an Other) implications. To know oneself as an other captures the breadth of the imperative similes to ‘love your neighbor’ and ‘do unto others’ [as] yourself. To know oneself as an other, or an other as oneself, is not simply an example of hermeneutics at play; instead, the thoughtful, self-reflective, self-critical, empathetic, and (as Aquinas noted in the preliminary chapter quote above) even merciful approach to oneself as an other and vice-versa is essential to the

3 Gospel of Thomas, 69; see also Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, (New York: Random House, 2003), 57; In Luke, Jesus says “Blessed are they who have been persecuted in themselves. It is they who have truly come to know the Father.” 4 Job 30:21 – “You have become cruel to me; with the might of Your hand You persecute me.” the Greek άnelehmÓnwV means inhospitable, unmerciful, uncharitable, and is usually interpreted as grausam [cruel] in the German. The Latin Vulgate for this passage is “mutates es mihi in crudelem.” To be inhospitable, unmerciful, uncharitable is interpreted as both grausam and crudelem [cruel]; See also Ulrich Simon, Pity and Terror: Christianity and Tragedy, (London: Macmillan Press, 1989), 41.

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western conceptual ground of the issue of justice. That is, reciprocity or fairness is central to justice as an issue for us. But then what is the issue of justice that is so important for us? Ricoeur reminds us of Aristotle’s belief in a “sketch” of justice given to us in common sense and received ideas [endoxa], whereas Ricoeur writes of a “sense of justice and of injustice” made immediate to us in our mode of complaint regarding injustice first – “ ‘Unjust! What injustice!’ we cry.”5 Ricoeur’s point is likewise earlier registered by Tillich, who writes that the originary human “complaint” of injustice will always be “the first principle of justice.”6 This was true for Job, where his complaint of injustice warranted his pursuit of justice. Tillich suggests that the originary “complaint” of injustice is the first moment where justice is an issue for us. And furthermore, justice is an issue for us, which determines the response of justice to the originary complaint. For his part, Reinhold Niebuhr asserted that “the spirit of justice” is that which governs the affairs of politics and community and provides criteria for later “detailed definitions of rights and duties.”7 In a correlation of these four thinkers a number of preliminary observations can be made: i) The language of justice as “sketch, sense, spirit, or first principle,” all reveal distinct attempts to approximate what we call a primary issue of justice as a fundamental issue for human beings; ii) the content of the originary cry of injustice – “Unjust!” – is the same content that determines the primary issue of justice as a first response to this cry. That is, the content of the originary cry of injustice begins in the cry and informs the issue of justice as a first response to the cry; in this way, iii) what may be called a deep-structure content that begins within the originary cry of injustice is in fact the content shared by the issue of justice and informs a first response to the cry. In short, the originary cry of injustice and the issue of justice as a response share the same content. For instance, the content of the cry – “save me from this oppressive grave!” – is the content of the issue of justice – “she must be saved from this oppressive grave!” In this case, the content has to do with ‘this oppressive grave’ that first rises in a cry ‘to be saved,’ and 5 Ricoeur, Oneself as an Other, 198. [italics mine]. See Aristotle, E.N. 5.1.1129a6–9 – “We see that all men mean by justice that kind of state of character [hexis] which makes people disposed to do [praktikoi] what is just and makes them act justly and wish for what is just.” 6 Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 58. 7 Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Wrings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D.B. Robertson, (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1957), 25.

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becomes an issue for justice as a first response ‘to save her.’; iv) finally, this deep-structure, shared content that begins within the originary cry of injustice and informs the primary issue of justice as first response likewise informs all later historical developments of the institution of justice (i.e., institutional justice), including the subsequent developments of justice in its punitive, distributive, compensatory, or conciliatory forms. With respect to these four observations, our task is to attempt to discover the nature of this deep-structure content that is shared between the cry of injustice, on the one hand, and the issue of justice as a first response to the cry, on the other. If we can identify this deep-structure content, then the relationship between the cry and its response will be rendered clearer, and we will have likewise identifi ed the moniker that underlies the sphere of the institution of justice. What is the deep-structure shared content of both the cry of injustice and the issue of justice as a first response to the human cry? We have in fact already begun to answer this question, for the issue of justice in human life and relation is so fully saturated in our classic literature that it has already been partially approximated in the course of our trajectory in chapters two through three. In light of our partial approximation to this point, charting forward to understand the deep-structure content of both the cry of injustice and the issue of justice as a first response begins in first reclaiming what we have already understood about justice. Our guiding question remains: What is the deepstructure content shared by the originary cry of injustice and the primary issue of justice? We will attempt to answer this question of a deep-structure content first from the perspective of the originary cry of injustice, and next from the perspective of the response of justice to the cry. We begin with the cry and move to the response. The content of the originary cry – The way through fictional, classic narratives of justice A first popular way of understanding this shared, deep-structure content is to begin with the originary cry of injustice and assess specific fictional, classic narratives of this cry. In this way, we could chart back once more to the narrative of Job when he is treated “cruelly” and assess his specific cry of injustice from the divine who allows such cruelty to take place. But in order to deepen our understanding of the content of this cry we would eventually likewise investigate narratives like Shylock’s motivating ressentiment underneath his desire for recognition in excising a “pound of flesh” from Antonio. Both Job and Shylock

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cry out of injustice. And yet, even at first blush these two cries present starkly differing ideas for how justice should respond and the methods used in extracting justice. One cries for liberation through understanding whereas the other cries for retribution through sanctioned revenge. Differing cries of injustice mean that the responses of justice also take differing forms, so how would we resolve these differences and thereby understand the common deep-structure content of the originary cry of injustice underneath both liberation and revenge? We will move forward and attempt to answer the question of the deep-structure content of justice from the perspective of the response of justice to the originary cry. The content of the primary issue of justice – The way through non-fictional, historical examples of injustice A second popular way to attempt to resolve these differences and discover the shared deep-structure content between the originary cry of injustice and the primary issue of justice is to both leap from fictional, classic literature to the non-fictional and historically concrete, and also identify the issue of justice through visible instances of its opposite – injustice. In this second way of non-fictional, historical examples of injustice (which usually enlists macrocosmic examples), we would begin our course in the recitation of instances of injustices like what the Argentine army did to civilians in the late 1970s, or how the North Sudanese brutalized the South Sudanese for nearly twenty years until 1972, or how Christians and Muslims displaced and murdered one another in places such as Lebanon from 1975 to 1990. One recitation of injustice would give way to another since there is no shortage of historical excesses or trespasses that make life unjust. It is precisely through this recitation of injustices that our aim would be to approximate the primary issue of justice as a first-response to these injustices. If we could approximate this primary response, then we would draw closer to the deep-structure content shared by the issue of justice and the cry of injustice. And yet, through historical example we are painstakingly aware of how the perpetration of injustices upon fellow human beings is often carried out in the name of justice, as would be true of the above concrete, historical examples. We quickly reach a disturbing historical burr – what happens if, in our aim to understand the deep-structure content of the issue of justice by first identifying injustices, we mistakenly confuse the response of justice as an injustice carried out in the name of justice? In the historical burr we discover how

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injustice cloaked in a rationale of justice in fact does not share the deepstructure content of the originary cry of injustice! Again, what we note is that where the response of justice does not share the content of the cry of injustice, then it is not justice that is responding but rather cruelty concealed as justice. But this discovery runs counter to everything we have said above about the shared deep-structure content between the originary cry of injustice and the issue of justice as a first response to the cry! Even a tertiary knowledge of history reveals all kinds of historical injustices that are concealed in a rationale of justice, and this follows easily until we finally recognize that the content of the originary cry has gone unheard by the response of something more ugly concealed as justice. How can we be made aware when something concealed as justice is not addressing the deep-structure content that begins in the originary cry of injustice? In answering the above question we must first resist moving too quickly into this popular second way and thereby not recite but rather halt at the cusp of the historical cries of injustice. In so doing we note that these cries of themselves implore us to tread lightly on hallowed ground. For on the other side of this cusp reside not only injustices, but history’s deep rupture of excessive trespasses, of brutality and murder, of child abuse, genocide, and the most ugly human violations of those swallowed up in fracture like Abel or where “the earth has opened up beneath you … and you are disappearing in the ground,” like Olara Otunna’s description to the United Nations of life for many in the Congo, Uganda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cambodia.8 Insofar as the rupture of these excessive trespasses implores us to tread lightly, think upon the following from a book of Nazi propaganda entitled Documented Polish Cruelty (1940) that was published to justify a response of Nazi Germany’s own excessive trespass against the socalled “cruelty” of the Polish people. In the middle of the book the reader is confronted by the picture of a decomposing, anonymous young woman.9 The only semblage of her beauty is evident in her remaining thick, shoulder-length brown hair. But some others – for certainly this excessive trespass was carried out in concert – cut off her fingers at the knuckle without removing her thin wedding ring. Her uncradled baby, 8 “Role of Religion in Conflict-Torn Areas Explored at NGO Experts Meeting,” One Country, v. 15, Issue 4., (January–March, 2004), 12. 9 Dokumente Polnischer Grausamkeit (Berlin: Im Auftrag des Auswärtigen Amtes auf Grund Urkundlichen Beweismaterials Zusammengestellt, Bearbeitet und Herausgegen von der Deutschen Informationsstelle, 1940), 307–407.

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that was born while her body was being horribly violated, lay untouched even once by its mother, dead on the earth between her legs. At the end of her brutalization this anonymous, young woman and new mother confronted the end of her life alone through a high-powered weapon to her face. This woman’s story, and that of her baby’s, is raw and horrifying enough, but the memory of her dying was also “documented” in a book of Nazi propaganda that called for a response of justice to the injustice of her death. Nazi cruelty concealed in a call for justice manipulated her memory by photographing and printing her cruel death and thereafter publishing these photographs in pages of propaganda. Her ruptured life and memory of the “oppression of the grave” was transfixed in a contextless image that helped roil the anger of Germans against Poles, and assisted in justifying the future deaths of millions. The deepstructure content of her cry of injustice was twisted by a response of justice that buried her memory in a lie. At the bottom of this rupture, Nazi “justice” never responded to, because it obliterated first, the deepstructure content within her cry of injustice. What did respond was the Nazi call to future cruelties concealed in a rationale for justice. The murder and manipulated memory of this woman and her child cries out from multiple injustices. Our solemn imperative is never to mistake a further injustice concealed in call for justice, and thereby resist the justification of tomorrow’s excessive trespasses that obliterate the deep-structure content within the cry of injustice today. In so doing we are not to fail in mistaking treachery concealed in a rationale for justice, and likewise fail to identify cruel trespass concealed in the cloak of justice itself. In attempting to understand the deep-structure content between the originary cry of injustice and the primary issue of justice, we resist two popular yet problematic ways, these being the way through fictional, classic narratives of justice and the way through non-fictional, historical examples of injustice. Rather, our course is to risk a detour into classic thought about the ground or primacy of justice as an issue for human beings. Here a wager is made: Once we begin approximating this shared content between the cry of injustice and the issue of justice as a first response to the cry, then such cries remembered so well in the mind of the reader will automatically rise from the rupture of human trespasses within our own experiences and from what we alluded to above. The immediacy of such cries remembered so well by the reader will rise and render concrete approximations of the issue of justice as a first response to the cries themselves.

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ii) The Irrevocable Correlation of Love and Justice Yet [justice] cannot exist without love and remain justice. For without the grace of love, justice always degenerates into something less than justice. – Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice10 All things and all men, so to speak, call on us with small or loud voices. They want us to listen; they want us to understand their intrinsic claims, their justice of being. They want justice from us. But we can give it to them only through the love which listens. – Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice11

Aristotle’s Philia and Justice First, we begin our detour into classic thought about the issue of justice by returning to what we already learned from Aristotle, as one of the paramount thinkers on justice. If we recall, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics are flush with a detailed and classic accounting of both justice and friendship [philia].12 By friendship Aristotle means to include all social and civil relations within the polis, albeit by degree. Aristotle identifies three typologies of friendship in the polis – those based on utility, pleasure, and goodness – but his thought is to understand the manner in which justice correlates to these types of friendship, especially friendship as goodness.13 What Aristotle discovers is that friendship and justice comprise an irreducible and mutual correlation as they take place within the polis – “It is worse to rob your companion than one who is merely a fellow-citizen … so then justice naturally increases with the degree of friendship.”14 Within the polis, the irreducible correlation of justice and friendship means that friendship without justice is the end of those basic qualities of friendship that make friendship what it is. Likewise, justice without friendship is the end of those basic qualities that make justice what it is.15 When this irreducible correlation between justice and friendship is threatened within the polis, then 10 Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Wrings of Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. D.B. Robertson, (Louisville: Westminster Press, 1957), 28. 11 Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 84. 12 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.3. Friendship – ‘They wish good for each other for each other’s own sake.’ The best of friendship is when two are as “a single soul existing in two bodies.” 13 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 153. 14 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 149, 4.2.15. “Quarrels arise also in those friendships in which the parties are unequal because each party thinks himself entitled to the greater share, and of course when this happens, the friendship is broken up.” Hospitality to the friend and fellow citizen is what Aristotle entitles “magnificence.” 15 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 157.

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human life and relation is violated beginning with degrees of carelessness, irresponsibility, impudence, and finally ending in all forms of excessive trespasses with impunity.16 Ultimately, life in the polis devoid of this irreducible correlation between justice and friendship brings society to anarchy and social madness. We resist further discussion of Aristotle’s distinction between distributive and retributive justice and note only that for this thinker justice as an issue for human beings is irreducible from friendship in the polis, and without this irreducible correlation life in the polis fails. Ricoeur’s Love and Justice Aristotle’s irreducible correlation between friendship and justice is the hermeneutic engine within Ricoeur’s essay “Love and Justice” and his collected work, Oneself as Another.17 Although for Aristotle the irreducible correlation of justice and friendship applies to members of the polis, for Ricoeur the anonymous, contemporary ‘other’ outside the Greek polis dwells in specific regional, national, and global environs. In light of these environs, Aristotle’s irreducible correlation of friendshipand-justice-in-the-polis takes on the character of an irreducible dialectic between love-and-justice-in-the-world, for Ricoeur. By ‘love’ Ricoeur does not mean a frail reduction of human affection in terms of mere “sentimental platitudes.” Instead, ‘love’ signifies a selfreflective fullness in every advance of understanding between oneself and an other. This self-reflective fullness is what Ricoeur characterizes as ‘care’ between oneself and an other, since genuine ‘care’ requires that one reflect upon a particular situation if one were as an other, and viceversa. Care is an irreducible dialectical art between love and justice that is solicitous of the other in order to meet the other’s need. Ricoeur identifies this art of care as an irreducible dialectic between love and justice in his term, solicitude.18 The dialectical nature of solicitude 16

Ricoeur, “The Self and the Ethical Aim,” Oneself as Another, 175. What we mean here by ‘understanding,’ is in the sense of prudent or practical wisdom (phronēsis) in the normative approach to oneself and the other. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.6; 11.10. “If you find in human life anything better than justice … if, I say, you see anything better than this, turn to it with all your soul, and enjoy that which you have found to be the best.” Again, “In justice the other virtues have their foundation.” 17 Paul Ricoeur, “Love and Justice,” Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Action, Richard Kearney, ed., (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 23–39. 18 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, 149. “It seems too, as was stated at the commencement, that friendship and justice have the same object-matter, and subsist between the same persons. [Friendships differ in degree] as is the case – “Different also are the principles of Injustice as regards these different grades, and the acts become

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[as the mode of care being solicitous to the other in need], as Ricoeur calls it, is in fact an art of care that seeks justice in human life and relation.19 As is true with Aristotle’s irreducible correlation of justicefriendship, for Ricoeur human relation void of solicitude places at risk personal, social, political, and institutional life. When solicitude as a dialectical art of care between love and justice is not present, then human life will sooner than later erupt in volatility and end in anarchy.20 Aristotle’s pairing of friendship-justice, and Ricoeur’s dialectic of love-justice, reveal a non-separable, irreducible correlation between justice and an art of care (i.e., philia and solicitude) for the other. Justice does not operate alone but through a social fellowship of care one to an other; justice without the art of care (love and friendship) is spoilt. Thus, from hereon our use of ‘justice’ as an issue for human beings will always imply an internal and irreducible art of care. This point made, we are now in a position to ask after the shared deepstructure content between the originary cry of injustice and the primary issue of justice for human beings. iii) Toward a Moniker of the Institutional Sphere We have said that justice is an issue for human beings as a response to an originary human cry of injustice. Furthermore, this response creates the criteria for the development of the institutions and later detailed definitions and institutions of justice. We have noted the art of care as an irrevocable correlation between love and justice, and we proceed by taking up Ricoeur’s hermeneutic path – what is the primary issue being addressed in justice as an art of care? That is, what is in fact being cared after or for in justice? Ricoeur concludes that the ‘other’ is cared after and ‘equality’ is cared for, for the sake of the other. Equality is thus the highest virtue, or what Niebuhr calls “the regulative principle” of justice.21 And yet, Tillich notes that the “complaint” is “the first intensified by being done to friends.” Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 181–2. “It does not displease me to travel along this road with Aristotle for a moment, in a study whose tone is Aristotelian from start to finish.” 19 Ricoeur, “Eighth Study: The Self and the Moral Norm,” Oneself as Another, 203–225. 20 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VIII.148. “The bad, on the contrary, have no principle of stability: in fact, they do not even continue to like themselves: they only come to be friends for a short time by taking delight in one another’s wickedness.” 21 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man II, 254; see also “The Problem of a Protestant Social Ethic,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, November 1959, 4 in

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principle of justice” and “equality” takes a secondary position. In correlation, equality is a “regulative principle” of institutional justice; however, the “first principle” of justice is not equality but the aforementioned sense, spirit, or what we have called the issue of justice.22 The issue of justice as a “first principle” is historically prior to the development of the institution of justice with its “regulative principle” of equality. The issue of justice is the primary response to the originary cry of injustice. What are above all else cared after or for by justice are thus first and foremost the essential elements necessary for the protection and integrity of human life. The cry of injustice thus anticipates a response from justice in terms of care or protection of elements necessary to human life which begins with a modicum of integrity in the recognition of one’s basic and shared humanity. The originary cry of injustice anticipates a response from justice, but anticipation implies an expectant hoping by the one crying-out from injustice. We have before asserted that a symbiotic relation exists between human beings, so the ‘other’ crying-out hopes for a response from his fellows.23 At its most essential, the hope within the other’s cry of injustice is the hope to be kept from harm and saved when future harm erupts, to be ‘saved from the oppression of the grave,’ as we noted before.24 And yet, we have said that the primary issue of justice is a response to an originary cry of injustice, and justice is a response to particular human needs prior to justice as a response to hope rising from these needs.25 Another way of saying this is that the cry of injustice rises from a deep-structure human need prior to the hope of this need being fulfilled. And furthermore, if hope rising from such need goes unarticulated then hope is not only vanquished, nor is the need in the human cry underneath hope lost, but the human voicing both need Reinhold Niebuhr, Love and Justice: Selections from the Shorter Wrings of Reinhold Niebuhr, 25. 22 Paul Tillich, Love, Power, and Justice, 58. 23 Martin Buber, I and Thou, 112. Buber writes that once in a reciprocal interpersonal relation with an ‘other,’ the entire world is lit up differently where “all else lives in its light.” I owe a debt to both Buber and Levinas for their emphasis on the irresistibility of the ‘other’ who implores us. 24 Gutierrez’s remarks about a “conversion to the neighbor” are correct. The cry of injustice hopes for the identification of one’s fellows to one’s plight. See Gustavo Gutierrez, A Theology of Liberation, 69–72. 25 Geneviève Jacques, Beyond Impunity: An Ecumenical Approach to Truth, Justice and Reconciliation, 36. “The more difficult question in the aftermath of conflict or massive violations of human rights is how to respond to the victim’s need for justice by bringing the accused to the bar of justice.” [Italics mine].

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and hope vanishes into the rupture of historical trespasses. Tracy writes, “The final indignity for anyone is to be forbidden one’s own voice or to be robbed of one’s own experience.”26 The originary cry of injustice is an articulated or unarticulated cry of need prior to its articulation in the form of hope. To this point we have been concerned with the cry of injustice, but it is really the need underneath this cry that is the deep-structure content of justice. We already know what this need is, and we’ve seen it rise although remain inexplicit in our work to this point. However, when we think about it, this need has always been before us, as it is now. What was the fundamental need of Job when God was standing off ? What was the need of Isaac under the knife, or Abel disappearing into the ground, or Adam left naked and alone? What were the needs of the Canaanites under the swords of the Israelites? What are the needs of those who are pitied without the relief of empathy? What is our need when we objectify ourselves and risk intra-personal homelessness? What is the other’s need who is transvalued into a stranger and enemy? What is the common need of all those who risk negative transcendence and death when human beings have forgotten reciprocity and are falling into a fracture? In short, in the face of cruelty what is the need against such ugliness that disfigures human life? The need of all of these is clear, when we reconsider what we have learned from the above. It is the need not to be abandoned. A Moniker of the Institutional Sphere The deep-structure human need that is the shared content of the originary cry of injustice and the issue of justice is a need not to be abandoned. The fear of being lost, of being left to perish alone, are signifiers for what psychologists call an Angst of estrangement, or of becoming estranged. And yet, even here becoming estranged is far too neutral a term to how we experience, and to attest to, the painful threat of being abandoned. Unlike mere objectless estrangement, abandonment has a proper object to which the need-filled cry of injustice appeals – “I am here,” this one here, do not abandon me. The proper object of the cry of injustice is a cry not to be abandoned by one’s fellows, by those with whom one shares a common telos of being “here” in the world together. If this were not so, and estrangement were the case, then the needful human cry would not be one of injustice, but rather something akin to 26

David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 106.

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Munch’s objectless scream before death. The deep-structure human need within the originary cry of injustice, as a need at the heart of our humanness, is the need not to be abandoned in the world.27 This deep-structure need against abandonment is simultaneously the shared deep-structure content in the cry of injustice that rises and which becomes a primary issue for justice as a first response against abandoning one’s fellow human beings. The content of the cry of injustice not to be abandoned was as true for Job as it is today for over one million men, women, and children who are threatened in the Darfur region of Sudan, or for those struggling in urban areas within the United States. Like Job, who in struggle becomes the imploring Question itself that he offers to the divine, or Abel whose unanswered cry of injustice dissipates with his name like a breath [Hebel], the human who suffers and cries can become nearly identical with the cry itself – “Do not abandon me, me this one, who is already vanishing!” We asserted that the deep-structure need not to be abandoned is the content within the originary cry of injustice, and this content is likewise that of the primary issue of justice. That is, the issue of justice is a positive first-response to the negatively expressed need in the cry of injustice not to be abandoned by one’s fellows. Long before institutional justice demands “equality,” the first response of justice is the immediacy of a positive response – You will not be abandoned! The issue of justice is a first response that goes to the heart of the human cry of injustice, and to the human being who is crying out. The shared deep-structure content of the cry and the issue is the need against abandonment. iv) Remarks for Transition If the primary issue of justice as a first response to the smallness of the human cry of injustice did not reach first and foremost to the heart of this deep-structure human need, what would justice as an issue for us 27 Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich: An Anthology of the Writings of Paul Tillich, ed. F. Forrester Church, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 165–67. “The state of existence is the state of estrangement. Man is estranged from the ground of his being, from other beings, and from himself. The transition from essence to existence results in personal guilt and universal tragedy. …” See also, G.W.F., Hegel, “The Consummate Religion,” Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 447: “Human beings are inwardly conscious that in their innermost being they are a contradiction, and have therefore an infinite anguish concerning themselves.”

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be then?28 When all later developments of justice forget the primacy of the issue of justice itself against abandoning fellow human beings, then the primary issue that should underlay these developments is vanquished, and justice itself becomes something other than its name. When justice forgets its content and is no longer an issue for us, then human beings are swallowed by the earth, abandoned. We have at last reached the moniker not only of the issue of justice, but of justice itself in its polymorphous forms. The moniker of justice is in fact identical with the shared content of the originary cry of injustice and the primary issue of justice – this moniker of justice is the deep-structure human need not to be abandoned. The moniker of justice is negatively expressed as the need against abandonment. B) The Trespass of Cruelty in the Institutional Sphere: Rising-In-Thought, Diving-Down i) Death Zones The moniker of justice is the need not to be abandoned. Further definitions of the institutions of justice (i.e., institutional justice) as “established customs, practices, and systems” with a “set of rules and principles … in a civilized society,” or institutional justice in a particular “historical community” of “people, nation, or region,” are supremely relevant but not primary to where our trajectory takes us next.29 The institutions of justice can trespass human lives, but our trajectory remains with the singular and collective human beings trespassed first, with the ones who attest to their own abandonment in the originary cry. Through our hermeneutic trajectory, trespasses of institutional injustice will “light up” before us as the contradiction of Gadamer’s sense of the phenomenological world ‘lit up’ between two others in reciprocal relation. In our approach, institutional injustice lights up in the harm and even annihilation of the other, where the cry of abandonment goes unheeded and obliterated. What is lit up around the human being, are a constellation of cruel trespasses from within the institution that transvalue human life and relation into what we will 28 Matthew 5:19, 25:40, 45 – “Then He will answer them, ‘Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” 29 John Kekes, Facing Evil, 149; Ricoeur, Oneself as an Other, 194. See also Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man, II, 254.

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refer to as “death zones.” At the institutional sphere, transvaluation through human ugliness creates death zones. We refer to death zones as symbolic for the reduction and excess where human beings are transvalued into objects. Human beings once more become objectified, or are treated as objects, in an institutional trespass that constructs death zones in our world. We refer to the phrase – death zones – for two reasons: First, the term “death zone” is coined by Etinne Balibar in his essay Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty, to describe the plight of “what some Latin American sociologists provocatively call población chatarra, [or] garbage humans, [who are] thrown away, out of the global city,” from this-side-of-the-border to across-the-border.30 Singular and collective human beings who are abstracted, neglected, reduced, and exceeded from well-being, discover themselves, as Balibar continues, “in the face of a cumulative effect of different forms of extreme violence or cruelty which are displayed in what I call the death zones of humanity. …”31 In the cruelty of human death zones, Balibar writes that what we encounter appears to be “an absolute triumph of irrationality.”32 In chapter one, we noted how reason provisionalizes human suffering and conceals cruelty. Reason commits us to an inexplicable and contradictory trespass of the other, stirring great injustices, even in the name of Justice. In order to transvalue human beings in this way, reason must justify the most obscene irrationalities, even in the name of reason. Of course, the irrationality of death zones in human existence can be traced prior to their macro-cosmic and geopolitical manifestations, where Balibar’s labors are located. The macro-cosmic global and geopolitical environs likewise suggest that “death zones” begin deeperdown in the local, regional, and national narrative myths that form injustices. Rationality transvalues justice inside-out, after which “irrationality” triumphs. Thereafter, no appeal to the advance of justice will

30 Etienne Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” Constellations Volume 8, No. 1, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), 15–29. 31 Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” 24. “This [geopolitics], among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of ‘topography, by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective.” [Italics mine]. 32 Balibar, “Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,” 24–5.

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easily contradict an already irrational contradiction of reason. For instance, in chapters two and three we attested to the irrationality of death zones in the lineage of Cain who kills Abel to win God’s favor, only to lose it because he killed Abel. Likewise, Abraham faces the monstrous imperative to either obey God (kill Isaac) and lose the promise of the covenant, or disobey God (not kill Isaac) and still lose the promise of the covenant. Third, the righteous warrior fights for the Ideal of ambiguous Freedom and sanctification yet loses sanctification and gains an increase of fear. Death zones are irrational because the justifications for their construction are contradictory to every sphere of human existence, be they intra-personal well-being, interpersonal fellowship, and the human need not to be abandoned. The second reason we refer to “death zones” in the ugly trespass of other human beings is drawn from our etymological study of chapter one. “Death zones” appear irrational when we consider our former etymological approximation of cruelty in the term trucido. In our etymological study, we assessed how the terms crudelitas and Grausam are semantically analogous and correlative. Latin terms that bind this correlation include atrocitas [harsh, horror, cruel], atrox [terrible, horrible, harsh, cruel], and atrocity [appalling or atrocious condition, quality, or behavior in the form of violation against other human beings], as well as barbarus, [rawness, inhospitable excess against an other human being]. These terms signify a reduction and excess as an inhumanus [cruelty as inhuman and uncivilized], where inhumanus is the abstraction and objectification of singular and collective human life, annihilating the integrity of existence. Trucido binds crudelitas and Grausam upon singular and collective humanity through the institutional sphere, where trucido is the transvaluation of justice accompanied with the spectacle of butchery, massacre and slaughter of human beings. In trucido is an excess leveled against humanity that is marked in near limitless ways and means in which the other can be objectified and oppressed within the institutional sphere. Trucido is the black hole of human institutional activity, shocking human existence in a rawness so indicative of the trespass of cruelty by the institution upon the body of the abandoned other. The gravitas of trucido, as a cruel trespass, transvalues human existence into a “death zone” that is irrational because it is contradictory to every sphere of human existence. We may not recognize how our irrationality abandons other human beings, but this does not suggest that we are also not complicit in the ugliness that transvalues the world.

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“Death zones” are ugly and cruel because they are irrational, tragic, and inexplicable to well-being, to life itself. In terms of our reflections in chapter two regarding human life between existential limit and existentiell horizon, cruelty at the institutional sphere is a fracture that also encounters every sphere of human life. This fracture lights up in trespassive arteries that encounter us in every aspect of who and how we are in the world. The encounter of cruelty can gain inertia and fracture up and through the limits and horizons of existence. From the supra-narratives of Adam and Cain, the encounter of cruelty thunders off into the future, and can shake the very foundations of what it means to exist at all. ii) Cruelty as Encounter Earth has been shaken; The reverberant thunder is heard from the deep … And the sky and the sea in confusion are one: Such is the storm Zeus gathers against me. – Prometheus33 The foundations of the earth do shake. Earth breaks to pieces, earth splits to pieces, earth shakes to pieces … under the weight of its transgression earth falls down, to rise no more! – Isaiah 24:18–20 We happen to live in a time when very few of us, very few nations, very few sections of the earth, will succeed in forgetting the end. For in these days the foundations of the earth do shake. May we not turn our eyes away; may we not close our ears and our mouths! But may we rather see, through the crumbling of a world. … – Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations34

Aristotle concludes that the polis fails without the irreducible correlation between justice-friendship; we further noted that for Ricoeur life erupts in volatility and anarchy without solicitude as an art of care between justice and love. Through failure and eruption, not only institutional life, but all spheres of human existence within the polis or society have the potential to fall to ruin. Throughout we have located these spheres as intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional. The moniker of the intra-personal sphere was the journey of self-intensification,

33 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, trans. George Thomson, (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1995), 47. 34 Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948), from Tillich’s sermon entitled “shaking of the foundations” delivered in 1942.

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that of the interpersonal sphere was fellowship, and finally the moniker of the institutional sphere is the underlying deep-structure human need against abandonment. In the last sphere, when justice does not heed the needful and originary human cry of abandonment, then any other advance of institutional justice will prove irrelevant. Moreover, when justice in the institutional sphere does not answer this deepstructure human need against abandonment, then both intra- and interpersonal life and relation correspondingly dissolve. Where all three spheres of human existence come under threat, this is where we located cruelty as a “death zone” in the institutional sphere. As a death zone, and given the heuristic metaphor of cruelty as fracture, the artery of injustice is wide indeed, insofar as many forms of concrete, historical excessive trespasses threaten to annihilate human beings not only in the institutional sphere, but in all other spheres of human life and relation when justice fails. We recall that the arteries of intra-personal self-objectification and the excessive struggle of interpersonal recognition are all shared arteries within the greater fracture of cruelty in human life and relation. When the ugliness of cruelty rises through these arteries, the risk and threat to human beings is where they run deep through the depressions each of the contiguous spheres of human existence to produce a deep-structure disfigurative ugliness in who and how we are in the world. Ugliness rises from within human existence and encounters human life as a fracture, splintering across and through care, respect, justice, and integrity. In the encounter of this fracture in human life, we may reduce and exceed ourselves and others in interpersonal and institutional forms that fail our common humanity. Cruelty encounters us as a death zone, where the irrational, inexplicable, and contradictory combine into a transvaluation of all we first hoped for in the world. As an encounter with ugliness that fractures human life at every sphere, cruelty retains the potential of shaking human life at its foundation.35 In terms of cruelty’s potential in our lives, we refer to it as an encounter that may rise from within us, within our relationships, and within our institutions. Cruelty is an encounter within human existence that fractures us and can unmake the world through terrible ugliness.

35 Gray, The Warriors, 56; see also Ulrich Simon’s chapter five on Job in Pity and Terror: Christianity and Tragedy.

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We have argued how the moniker of justice is the cry against abandonment. We further remarked that the institution of justice is not our first aim. Rather, as we have done in chapters one through three, we turn foremost to the attestations of suffering and cruelty from both singular and collective humanity. Our course is not novel, but it must be trodden carefully. For we follow the trajectory of Voltaire and Camus, Nabokov and Todorov, Joseph Conrad and the Psalmists.36 The attestations of these thinkers to human suffering and cruelty reveal abandonment voiced, for instance, by the psalmist who was “pricked in his veins,” or Camus’ Stranger who succumbs to his own public execution and the “indifference of the world.”37 In these thinkers, the expressions of abandonment by the human subject are first for us. We turn to the attestations of the human being trespassed, rather than the institution committing the trespass. In light of the subject prior to the institution, we have two tasks that will guide the remainder of this chapter. First, i) we will remain as aware as possible of how abandonment is prevalent in the following two narrative, historical episodes named below. Second, ii) in his project of interpreting justice, Ricoeur considers how justice “faces in two directions” – “toward the good [and] the legal.”38 Our second task is rather to understand how cruelty is a contradiction and transvaluation within the teleological face of Justice. To accomplish these above tasks, we will consider two distinct and separate narrative, historical episodes where the legal appeal to the “good” abandons human life, even while the face or Ideal of Justice appears unblemished. The two narrative, historical episodes we will consider are, first, the 2001 public execution of David Jr. Ward in North Carolina Central Prison, and second, the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. We mentioned above that the two narrative, historical episodes are distinct and separate. Although these episodes are positioned in such close proximity to one another, it would be unhelpful to conclude that a contemporary case of capital punishment somehow recasts the victim 36 Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of the Americas, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 133, 143, 171, and Facing the Extreme, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 214. 37 Psalms, 73:21; Albert Camus, The Stranger, 122–23. 38 Ricoeur, Oneself as an Other, 197.

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of the death penalty in a messianic light. Such a conclusion would be nonsense, irrelevant to our task, and introduce an idea that renders enigmatic the singular human being underneath a new totalizing autograph. The encounter of cruelty in human life affects all three spheres, manifests in our world in similar ways even through the millennia, and abandons specific human beings in the deceptive transvaluation of revenge to justice: These are the things to be looked for in our assessment of the historical episodes. We turn now to an assessment of the historical episodes – the public execution of David Jr. Ward, and the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. C) The Public Execution of David Jr. Ward They are such scoundrels that when they ought to help and comfort and, as [the Psalmist] says, “show kindness” to someone who is poor, needy, and troubled, they are most cruel to him and try to kill him. And then they claim that they are doing God a service by such a deed (John 16:2)!39 – Luther, Selected Psalms Ladies and gentlemen, the highest aim of every legal contest is the ascertainment of the truth. Somewhere within the facts of every case the truth abides, and where truth is, justice steps in, garbed in its robes, and tips the scales. … Yours is a solemn duty to let your verdict speak the everlasting truth. – Presiding Judge, State of North Carolina vs. David Junior Ward, Defendant

i) Introduction On the week before Easter, 1992, David Jr. Ward was tried and convicted of the capital crime of first degree murder and was sentenced to death. At the “expiration of the death sentence,” David was further ordered to serve forty years for armed robbery plus thirty more years for the conspiracy to commit armed robbery.40 David would be freed of his crimes seventy years after his execution. I met David in the 39 Luther, M. (1999, c1958). Luther’s Works, vol. 14: Selected Psalms III (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Ps 109:16). Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House. 40 Legal Transcript, The State of North Carolina vs. David Junior Ward, Defendant., 11 vols., Mark W. Garvin, Official Reporter, (General Court of Justice, Superior Court Division, Greenville, Pitt County, North Carolina, March 3, 1992), 11. 1805–1814.

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spring of 1995 at North Carolina Central Prison, three years following his conviction. I worked at a law firm in Durham, North Carolina. An attorney there was part of a legal team that represented North Carolina citizens convicted of capital crimes. This attorney represented, through the post-conviction process, those who had been earlier convicted of the death penalty. The post-conviction team requested that I visit David periodically and conduct research at the North Carolina Supreme Court in Raleigh for inclusion in a database on the death penalty being compiled at the University of North Carolina. The visits to North Carolina Central Prison were frequent, but I did not initially approach David through some iconoclastic conversion to the neighbor. I had read the capital transcripts beforehand and was both skeptical of David and unnerved by the senselessness of a woman murdered. At the first meeting with David, I felt like I had stumbled into an empty, dark place. I did not want to become that pitying and self-flattering rescuer of memory and moral righteousness, as a contradiction that turns the perpetrator into the victim of justice at the expense of annihilating the memory of the dead. At first, I arrived at the prison in Raleigh, listened as well as I could, delivered questions from his attorneys, and left. I don’t think David ever knew it, but I really wanted to get the hell out of there. Years have a way of reshaping our convictions, of reforming us from the inside out, in ways we never anticipated beforehand. How David experienced his life, his imprisonment, the arbitrariness of the North Carolina judicial system, and the morose miles and years to his execution, took from me my former ideas about the role of capital punishment in society. Over time, David and I became friends, and then confidants. There were years and conversations together with David whose substance I cannot now recall, although their residual effect on me after his death are things I learned to endure, although never truly forget. But there was something else. The substance of David’s trial transcripts struck my skull like a hammer, but I couldn’t tell you why at the time. It seemed to me that within those thirteen volumes resided an irrationality, a kind of inexplicable reality, an aggravating question mark that always resurfaced, and the entire time I kept wondering if this was really what we meant by justice. Yes and no. Were there plenty of moments in the conviction and post-conviction appellate process that worked as they should? Yes. Was the judicial system absolutely corrupt in the ultimate execution of David? No. Was David poor and

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black, and did these facts work against him? Yes, unquestionably. Did this mean David was somehow no longer complicit in his crime? No. But was the judicial system also somehow complicit in the execution of David? Yes, yes, yes. That inexplicable point was terrifying in the transcripts. Ultimately, nothing could have stopped David’s execution; no appeal to justice would have been sufficient for justice’s advance. And what did all of that mean? How can the face of Justice point to the good and the legal when there were serious and specific injustices also perpetrated against David within the court proceeding? The sublime gaze of Justice had measured David, but whose Justice was this when losing a friend was horrific enough? It was too easy to throw up one’s hands and exclaim that the judicial system was a total wreck. I wanted to know what happened back there. Some part of me probably hoped to reclaim a small imprint of the man, of my friend also, in some thin but unbreakable thread that was gone. The 11th of September had happened only thirty days prior to David’s execution. The language of revenge and retribution was filling the air. The month seemed dead enough already. I wanted to just escape or disperse, or something. But then, I started to thinking: The long-suffering and inexplicably intact universal, quasi-rationale in the United States that, “murderers deserve what they get,” is as morally paper-thin as it is dubiously irrational.41 To stand by such quips requires one to believe that state-sanctioned murder is both rational and moral, and therefore legally justifiable. And yet, few would disagree in principle that murder is an immoral, irrational, and illegal injustice because it destroys human life. Can an immoral, irrational, and illegal murder lead to the justification of a state-sanctioned moral, rational, and legal murder? Of course it can, and through sound judicial argument. But occasionally, and even with sound argument, a deadly contradiction or transvaluation within what we mean by “justice” takes place. This transvaluation is deceptive in how it conceals revenge inside seemingly sound argument, and in the name of Justice. In such cases, the juridical becomes the engine for revenge, where the revenge driving legal argumentation is typically emotionally charged for the defense of Justice, and where revenge appears both moral and rational – “He did not let his victim live, so why should the perpetrator

41 Ibid., 1701, Prosecution – “I suggest that he deserves no better, not one bit better than what he did to Dorothy Mae Smith.”

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live?!”42 Such juridical argumentation sees justice as purely retributive, of getting a pay-back, rather than seeing the larger good of society, and indeed, the larger good of justice itself. Legal appeals of this nature nevertheless claim to uphold the defense of Justice, so that revenge becomes encloaked as prudent Justice (i.e., state-sanctioned revenge). Once in place, state-sanctioned revenge drives juridical argumentation in the defense of Justice, and will appear both moral and rational. And yet, strip away the appeal to Justice – revenge is neither moral nor rational, even when it appears legitimate in its concealment within the juridical for the defense of Justice. In appearing moral, rational, and justifiable, state-sanctioned revenge provisionalizes human suffering and conceals how it exceeds the integrity of human life. Perpetrator, victim, and society are not reconciled through revenge, but then this is not its aim. Revenge is about power, humiliation, and the spectacle of celebration, even when it makes grand appeals as Justice. In truth, state-sanctioned revenge is neither moral nor rational in its defense of Justice. But it pretends at such, which means that arguments for statesanctioned revenge are at their core, deceptive. They pretend to defend the “highest aim of justice” as “the ascertainment of the truth” through juridical argumentation that appeal to morality, rationality, the sake of truth for the victim, the future of an ambiguous society, and all in the name of Justice. That is, in the deception of revenge cloaked as Justice, the excessive trespass of human life will exhibit heart-wrenching emotional appeals for the victim, for the return to moral uprightness and rational prudence, but it will pursue aims that care nothing for the perpetrator (who, we must remember, is innocent until proven guilty), nor for society, nor for the meaning of the reconciling features of justice. But arguments for state-sanctioned revenge do not inform the jury, “ladies and gentlemen, we are about the work of revenge.” This would be the truth. Instead, such arguments speak in a rhetoric of Justice, because to speak otherwise would appear ugly. In the rhetoric of Justice, state-sanctioned revenge will conceal and deceive the public through hyperbolic appeals to the trauma of the victim in the first murder, to the helpless struggles of the first victim to 42 Ibid., 1425, Prosecution – “So with that in mind, I want to ask you when you look over and you look at David Ward, do you think about what the state is trying to do to him, trying to convict him of first degree murder? I want you to think what David Ward did to Dorothy Smith.”

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escape, to the negative transcendence and tragic death of the victim as he or she was excised from this world, and to the inhumane nature of the perpetrator. These appeals may very well be true! But they do not address the identity of the perpetrator, nor attempt to understand the larger social problems that contribute to some murders, nor attempt to seek, not retributive justice, but the features of justice toward reconciliation. The above appeals are meant to elicit, not justice for the sake of society, but responses to an underlying revenge underneath the Ideal of Justice so spurned. Through this form of argumentation, revenge makes a caricature of suffering, and conceals cruel trespass under a façade of Justice. A well-trained attorney who knows the mandates of the law will not argue with this assessment, state-sanctioned revenge is a form of “justice.” The point is, we should call revenge by its own name, and leave the equitable, sustaining, fair, and restorative features of justice intact. Instead, we harm justice in the lifting of revenge as an Ideal. Our sense of justice becomes transvalued, and the former features come under threat. In the rhetoric of revenge cloaked as Justice, the contours that help us locate cruelty rise, if our assessment of cruelty in human experience and literature is correct. Kampf, trauma, ressentiment, the enigmatic, excision, and negative transcendence – all of these become entwined in a web of appeal and persuasion utilized in a prosecution’s argument against a defendant. And yet, this web of appeal and persuasion is deceptive, provisionalizing underlying factors, such as socio-economic factors, that make a difference in how we measure the equitability and fairness of justice. In truth, within American jurisprudence with regard to capital litigation, many of these underlying forces are taken into account as “mitigating circumstances.” Mitigating circumstances are those features, such as a defendant’s socio-economic status, that aim to clarify the character and social bearing of the defendant in light of criminal conduct. And yet, in a capital crime, mitigating circumstances are only considered in the sentencing phase, after the defendant has already been found guilty of murder.43 State-sanctioned revenge 43 Are we still talking about the same defendant, the one who voluntarily assisted the sheriff ’s department at numerous occasions and was disoriented? What the jury did not know was that David had shaved his grandfather when the grandfather was too weak, or that on numerous occasions he had physically bathed his grandmother when she could no longer care for herself, or that he had stayed in the hospital with his brother until his brother was healed, or that he had scraped money together to pay child-support for his young daughter, or that he cared deeply for and cared after his

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conceals from society the larger fracture splintering underneath its appeal to the Ideal of Justice. Here is ugliness. Here is the lineage of Nod. The question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is buried in state-sanctioned revenge, cloaked as Justice. In state-sanctioned revenge, one so easily gives oneself over to cruelty. The following transcripts reveal the narrative, historical episode of a criminal trial; throughout, these transcripts also provisionalize the narrative truth of a singular human life, David’s life. The narrative begins and ends below. ii) The Beginning of an Execution This is a strange world we live in. We’ve got two wrongs. Well, we’ve got one wrong which is going to make another wrong less wrong. That’s a strange circumstance and that’s a strange world we live in. – Defense for David Jr. Ward44

On the evening of April 3, 1991, a woman named Dorothy Mae Smith, the wife of Seymour Smith, closed her convenience store around 10 p.m. in a small town in North Carolina. She picked up her .38 revolver, various food items, and the cash-box which contained approximately four-thousand dollars from the day’s revenue, and stepped outside with her brother.45 Dorothy stepped in her truck and her brother followed from his car a short distance to her house, watching the taillights as she pulled the truck around the back of the house. This was the last time Dorothy was seen alive. Dorothy parked her truck, picked up her food items, gun and cash-box, and was preparing to go inside her house when she heard something rustle to her right. From this point forward the events are shrouded in arguments from both Prosecution and Defense. Of far more importance, Dorothy was killed, collapsing onto the ground only moments later with five gunshot wounds in her body. She died alone on her porch that spring evening.

mother and sister, or that he was in special education classes through school. The jury could not have known these things because these facts only came out as possible mitigating circumstances in the sentencing phase of the trial and after the defendant has already been found guilty. These facts did come out when the jury was deciding whether David should receive life-in-prison or the death penalty. The Prosecution had so thoroughly deconstructed David’s humanity by then that the jury knew, as an intuition of common sense constructed atop a shared ressentiment, that David would never be rehabilitated. 44 Defense closing argument, 1744. 45 Ibid., 1075.

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On April 4th, the following day, David Jr. Ward was picked up by a sheriff from North Carolina Pitt County for the murder of Dorothy Mae Smith and taken to the county courthouse. David had not eaten anything in twenty-four hours;46 he was advised of his rights by a sergeant from the sheriff ’s department and was questioned by the investigating lieutenant around 1:00 p.m. that same afternoon.47 David signed the ‘waiver of rights’ form placed in front of him, which stated in part, “I do not want a lawyer with me when I am questioned or when I make a statement.”48 Whether David understood what the legal term “waiver” meant was a critical moment in the trial.49 No one explained to David what in fact a ‘waiver’ was, or what the legal implications would be for him if indeed he said or wrote anything without an attorney present.50 After signing the waiver the investigating lieutenant began asking David questions. In a glaring lack of standard operating procedure, the lieutenant made no notes of the interview with David while the interview in fact took place, instead writing his professional notes, as he said at the trial, “later that afternoon.”51 The investigating lieutenant never took a moment to ask David whether the lieutenant’s notes were an accurate depiction of what David had told him earlier in the day. This would have been prudent, given that the investigating lieutenant wrote his notes hours after David’s investigation.52 Despite these problems in accruing evidence, the investigating lieutenant’s notes would be of critical importance to the Prosecution and the outcome of the trial. In fact, the lieutenant’s notes proved to be only one of two chief incriminating pieces of evidence that convinced the jury both of 46

Ibid., 1470. Ibid., 1230–1235. 48 Ibid., 1233. 49 Ibid., 1245, 1725. What is in the word “waiver?” – Defense: Did you tell him what waiver means? Lieutenant: Sergeant E. advised him of his rights. Defense: Did anybody explain to him what waiver means? Lieutenant: It meant that he understood his rights and that he was waiving his right to an attorney at the time. Defense: Did anybody explain to him what waiver means? Lieutenant: Yes sir, that is what waiver means. He was waiving his right to an attorney to be present with him. Defense: Well, I understand that you know that. But did anybody explain to him what waiver means? Lieutenant: That is what I just told you. Sergeant E. advised him that that is what – that he was waiving his right to an attorney when he signed this form. 50 Ibid., 1245–47, 1469. 51 Ibid., 1236. 52 Ibid., 1457, 1474–5, Defense – The lieutenant never said, “Hey, Dave, I’ve written it down and now I want you to read over it and make sure it is right, because this is a murder case … You’ve got to ask the questions right. You’ve got to get the right answers.” 47

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David’s guilt and likewise helped convince the jury that David should receive the maximum penalty of death. The second chief incriminating piece of evidence came from David himself. Without an attorney present, since he had waived his rights, David was instructed to write down to the best of his recollection the events of the prior evening. He followed this instruction and wrote his statement on the back-side of the waiver of rights form that he had signed moments before. David wrote – “ ‘I David J. Ward, come to Greenville yesterday and got in touch with Wesley Harris. And he told me that he had a job to do. He said that he was going to rob Seymour Smith’s wife that night. And he said that he might have to take her out. So we went by the store and she was there. We went riding until it got dark. And when she closed the store that night, we went across the road. We sat in the bushes. And she pulled around the back and got out and that is when we started shooting. He [Wesley Harris] went and got the money box and ran across the road, drove off, and put the money up until the next day.’ Signed, David J. Ward. 4:45 p.m.”53 Wesley Harris, who had contacted David, contrived the plan to ‘do a job, to rob Dorothy Mae Smith, to possibly “take her out,” and to take the money box until the next day,’ was tried for Dorothy’s murder by a different jury weeks before David’s trial began. The same prosecuting attorneys who tried Wesley on behalf of the State likewise tried David’s case. The jury found Wesley guilty of first degree murder and sentenced him to life without parole. But what the Prosecution learned in Wesley’s trial was applied to David’s trial. David, who did not contrive these plans and volunteered to assist (and indeed did assist) the sheriff ’s department on numerous occasions, was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. The question of proportionality, of arbitrariness, was raised in David’s post-conviction and appellate process. Under direct examination by the Prosecution, and with reference to his notes written in his office later in the afternoon of April 4, the investigating lieutenant stated that David said the following: “David said Wesley said they were going to rob Seymour Smith’s wife when she closed the store … I had a rifle and Wesley had a pistol … the rifle was

53 Ibid., 1241. During the court proceedings, the investigating lieutenant misread David’s statement on the stand, exchanging “we” for “he … went and got the money box.”

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a .22 caliber and the pistol was a .32 caliber.”54 At David’s trial the investigating lieutenant stated that the interview with David concluded no later than 2:00 p.m., but as noted above, David wrote 4:45 p.m. at the end of his statement. Why was there a discrepancy in time? It was clear in the trial through defense direct examination, and later acknowledged by the lieutenant himself, that David was either disoriented at the time he wrote his statement, or he could not tell time.55 No one wondered why David made this notation, and no one bothered to ask. In fact, at around 4:45 p.m. later that same day of April 4, David had already voluntarily directed a Pitt County sheriff ’s office crime scene technician and numerous sheriffs to where he remembered Wesley Harris dropped the cash-box by the side of the road; David had likewise voluntarily identified Wesley and directed the sheriffs to Wesley’s house; finally, David voluntarily identified a green duffle bag found in the attic of Wesley’s house, where Wesley had concealed the weapons after he had left David.56 In Wesley’s house the crime scene technician found two .22 caliber rifles and one .32 caliber pistol.57 The two .22 caliber rifles were a Ruger semi-automatic rifle and a Westpoint single-shot bolt-action rifle. The first .22 rifle could fire ammunition automatically and in quick succession, whereas the .22 Westpoint single-shot boltaction required one to unshoulder and reload the weapon after every shot.58 Three weapons were in the duffle bag when it was found in Wesley’s attic. David’s Defense maintained throughout the trial that Wesley held and fired the .32 caliber pistol at the scene of the crime. When the pistol jammed on Wesley, he pulled the automatic rifle from his duffle bag. If this were true, then David had only a single-shot rifle. The state fire-arms inspector indeed verified that the .32 caliber pistol was defect, which appeared to assist David’s Defense. Still, the investigating lieutenant had written in his office later that afternoon that David had a .22 rifle and Wesley had the .32 caliber pistol. On the afternoon of April 4, neither David nor the investigating lieutenant said or wrote that David had the automatic rifle on the night

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Ibid., 1067, 1236–39. Ibid., 1241. Defense: So why is 4:45 written beside his signature? Lieutenant: I have no idea. He wrote that on there. Defense: He wrote 4:45? Lieutenant: Yes, sir. Defense: So apparently he didn’t know what time it was, did he? Lieutenant: Evidently, he didn’t. 56 Ibid., 1295. 57 Ibid., 1266–1287. 58 Ibid., 1270–71, 1299, 1282. 55

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of the murder. But the Prosecution did state that David carried the automatic rifle. There was no evidence and no ground upon which to base this conclusion. The Prosecution argued throughout the trial that David not only had a rifle, but that he had the automatic rifle.59 Prosecution – “… and she was walking towards her house and David Ward and Wesley Harris jumped up out of the bush – and David Ward’s got a rifle, Wesley Harris has a pistol – and David Ward shoots her four times and Wesley Harris shoots her once with the .32.”60 Based on what evidence could the Prosecution make the case that David carried the automatic rifle? Prosecution – “And David Junior Ward fired four shots into her back.”61 The Prosecution argued that David had the automatic rifle not from what David and the investigating lieutenant said or wrote, but strangely enough from what David and the investigating lieutenant did not say and did not write. How could the Prosecution assert something that was not in the evidence?62 After all, David had already volunteered to waive his rights, gave his full recollection of the night before, and furthermore cooperated with the sheriff ’s department throughout the day of April 4, 1991. His conduct and subsequent cooperation revealed sincere intent not to conceal anything he remembered.63 Still, that David carried the automatic rifle was a critical argument for the Prosecution since it was proven that a rifle had killed Dorothy Mae Smith.64 How would David’s defense have strengthened its case that David indeed did not carry the automatic rifle? The Defense would have strengthened its case by appealing to the jury to consider whose fingerprints were on which of the weapons. It is standard operating procedure that in a crime scene scenario, the crime scene technician is required to follow a standard protocol upon locating weapons. Upon locating weapons he is to dust for fingerprints. The crime scene technician did not dust the three weapons

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Ibid., 1062. Ibid., 1427, 1435. 61 Ibid., 1063. 62 Ibid., 1473, Defense – “Because I said, Mr. H., David Jr. Ward, when you started asking him questions, did he tell you that he would tell you what happened to the best of his recollection? ‘Yes, sir, he said he would tell me to the best that he remembered.’ So he remembered. That’s what he remembered.” 63 Ibid., 1350–51, 1382. 64 Ibid., 1168–1211. 60

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for fingerprints.65 In fact, he could not remember under direct examination at David’s trial whether the guns were even loaded at the time he inspected them. He could not remember these facts because he too took no notes during his inspection. The crime scene technician shed no light at the trial except that, indeed, he had found three weapons in a green duffle bag.66 Upon direct examination, the Defense questioned the crime scene technician for these failures – Defense (Q): “Mr. M., do you know if these weapons were dusted for fingerprints?” Crime Scene Technician (A). “They were not.” Q. “They were not dusted for fingerprints?” A. “No.” … Q. “Who would have made that examination and would have made that notation?” A. “I probably would have and should have, but I did not; I failed to do so. I did not make a notation of it.”67 David voluntarily led the sheriff ’s department to Wesley’s house

65 Ibid., 1394–95, Defense – “But the best evidence of this would have been fingerprint examination. We have no fingerprint examination. The deputy in charge of taking possession of the guns didn’t dust for fingerprints. Now what better way to determine which party had which gun than to dust it for fingerprints? This, ladies and gentlemen, is the best evidence. There would not be any doubt in any body’s mind at that point. But the deputy, for whatever reason, in his zeal, in his hurry to get the guns up to Raleigh for ballistics examination, neglected to dust for fingerprints. Now ladies and gentlemen, these are trained personnel. These are individuals who have been trained in identification procedures and issues of evidence and they know the importance of fingerprints; but yet, it wasn’t done. And the state is asking you to conclude on the basis that there were – evidence of five shots, plus a neighbor who heard the five shots. They are asking you to find beyond reasonable doubt that David Ward had the .22 semi automatic. See also, 1463 – Defense – “Mr. T., did you find any motor vehicle tracks? ‘No, sir.’ Find any footprints? ‘No, sir.’ Did you find any – did you make any hair analysis? ‘No, sir.’ Fiber analysis? ‘No, sir.’ Chemical Analysis? ‘No, sir.’ Fingerprints? ‘No, sir.’ 66 Ibid., 1466, Defense – “… ‘Did you make any notes, Mr. M?’ ‘No, sir, I didn’t make any notes about what David Jr. Ward said.’ Murder case, testifying a year later, testifying to thinks of what David Jr. Ward said and he made no notes whatsoever. And the State wants you to find him [David Jr. Ward] guilty.” 67 Ibid., 1300–01, 1351, 1394, Defense – “Mr. M., do you know if these weapons were dusted for fingerprints? Crime Scene Technician (CST): They were not. Defense: They were not dusted for fingerprints? CST: No. Defense: You don’t have any specific knowledge as to whether any fingerprints were on those weapons or not? CST: No, sir. Defense: Who would have made that examination and would have made that notation? CST: I probably would have and should have, but I did not; I failed to do so. I did not make a notation of it. (What’s more, .32 caliber shell casings found in a green duffle bag were never sent to the State Bureau of Examination). Defense: So you don’t know if those shell casings were fired from the .32 caliber gun or not? CST: That’s correct; I don’t know. See also 1351 when the Prosecution later cross-examined – Prosecution: “Why didn’t you dust the guns for fingerprints?” Crime Scene Technician: “Well, probably should have been done, but I was more concerned at the time of getting the guns submitted to the state’s bureau of investigation for firearm analysis and I just neglected to do it.” No weapon was ever linked to David.

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where the green duffle bag was found. Without fingerprint analysis, there was no way to assert or prove which of the three weapons David carried the night of the murder. The prosecution put an automatic weapon in David’s hands, but they had no evidence upon which to make this argument. Failing to have fingerprints, the sheriffs department should have realized the mistake and simply inquired at some time prior to trial – ‘David, which weapon did you have?’ No one inquired.68 Why not? The Defense had a relevant response to this quandary – “Sometimes you think you know everything so you stop asking questions.”69 When David finally had the chance to locate an attorney he was already indicted for the murder of Dorothy Mae Smith, and was being held in the Pitt County Jail. David was raised in one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. He could not afford a defense counsel, so one was appointed to him. David’s defense team was comprised of an attorney who graduated from law school three months prior to the trial, and a second attorney who had not tried a capital litigation in almost thirty years. Both of David’s appointed attorneys appropriately yet unsuccessfully implored the judge not to slate them to David’s case for reasons of lacking sufficient or recent professional experience in capital litigations. Another reason for this imploration may have been that the chief prosecutor in the case was well known for his argumentative prowess in capital litigations, and had likewise been the District Attorney for the past nineteen years at the time of David’s trial.70 The issue was not whether David’s defense attorneys could put forward a credible defense; rather, against such a powerful prosecution even a minor mistake by the Defense at a critical moment in a capital trial could mean the difference between David’s life and death. In fact, a major mistake at a critical moment in the trial is precisely what happened when, in the first thirty seconds of his closing argument, the lead defense attorney all but conceded to the jury that David committed the capital crime of murder – “Now the burden is not one of preponderance of the evidence: it is not one of, well, it is more likely

68 Ibid., 1473, Defense – “Hey, Dave, will you tell us about that rifle? Is this the one you had? Did anybody ask him which one he had. It is simple as can be. Hey, Dave, is this the one you are talking about? We found this in the duffel bag. You know, sometimes you think you know everything so you stop asking questions.” 69 Ibid., 1473. 70 Ibid., 1455.

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than not that David Ward committed these crimes. The burden, ladies and gentlemen, is [for] the state to show beyond a reasonable doubt as to each and every element of each and every offence for which David Ward has been charged.”71 Who cares about “each and every offense” to construct reasonable doubt for the jury when your defense attorney has just stated you are guilty of a crime against which he is defending you. Why did David’s Defense make this drastic misstep? The Defense made this misstep because it was preoccupied with a new course pursued by the Prosecution that was both disrupting the pursuit of justice in David’s trial and was undermining the Defense’s ability to defend David at all. What threatening new course did the Prosecution pursue? iii) A Change of Course – From ‘burden of proof ’ to ‘Common Sense’ This is not a revenge case. As I said, killing David Jr. Ward will not bring back Dorothy Mae Smith. I’m asking that you stop the violence here. Stop the circle of violence here. Don’t make more victims. – Defense72

In the United States judicial system the prime operative presupposition is that the defendant is always innocent until prosecutorial argumentation founded upon incriminating evidence proves legal fault and one is judged to be guilty or not guilty by a jury of one’s peers. Due to this presupposition underlying the U.S. judicial system and criminal fault, the burden of proof to establish a reasonable doubt of guilt always rests upon the prosecution. That is, the prosecution must show the jury how the preponderance of evidence proves to the jury the guilt of the defendant beyond a reasonable doubt.73 The prosecution proves guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and the jury then decides a verdict for the defendant of guilty or not guilty. In David’s trial, the Prosecution knew it did not have strong evidence to convict David and gain a sentence of death. So the Prosecution presented weak evidence, and then told the jury to use their common sense in deciding guilt or non-guilt. Weak evidence and the common sense of the jury have nothing to do with presenting a strong burden of proof. But it was just this weak evidence and an appeal to the jury’s “common sense” that ended David’s life. 71 72 73

Ibid., 1379. Ibid., 1778, closing argument. Ibid., 1379.

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In David’s trial the Prosecution had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt based on incriminating evidence that David committed the crimes of which he was accused. And yet, in David’s trial there were no fingerprints taken. Furthermore, no chemical analysis or fiber analysis was conducted. Next, a second crime scene technician failed to include items at the crime scene in his final drawing of the crime scene penned twenty-five days after the incident.74 Then, as noted, there was no evidence whatsoever that David fired the automatic rifle except that the Prosecution said he fired the automatic rifle.75 The Prosecution had a weak case due to weak evidence. As noted above, the Prosecution had two chief pieces of incriminating evidence. These pieces of evidence were: a) the words of the investigating lieutenant penned later in the afternoon after David’s investigation, and b) David’s own testimony that he voluntarily gave to the investigating lieutenant after he had wittingly or unwittingly ‘waived’ his rights to the presence of an attorney.76 In light of minimal and weak evidence, the Prosecution set upon a new course that was already hinted at when the Prosecution argued David had a weapon that neither David nor the investigating lieutenant corroborated in their own testimonies. The Prosecution had no evidence linking David to the automatic weapon that killed Dorothy Mae Smith. The Prosecution set upon a new course. It shifted from “reasonable doubt” to establish a burden of proof, and instead appealed to what the Prosecution called the jury’s “common sense doubt.” First, to establish its new course, the Prosecution argued to the jury that “a common sense doubt” was synonymous with “a burden of proof,” the latter of which was based on evidence. This was a fallacious argument. If not evidence, then upon what was the jury’s ‘common sense doubt’ established? Or rather, what was to be the content of the

74 Ibid., 1163–66, 1464. Defense – “So it comes my time. Mr. T., is that the only sketch you have ever done? Oh, yes, sir. When did you do it? Twenty-five, thirty days after the incident. That’s the only one you have ever done? Yes, sir. Did you make any photocopies of it? No – oh, yes, we had some photocopies made. So I handed him a photocopy and I said, Mr. T., I hand you what has been marked defendant’s exhibit number 1; can you identify this? Yes, sir, it’s the same sketch that I made, same thing. Mr. Tripp, do you see the coffee cup on this sketch, my exhibit number 1? No. Do you see the comb on my exhibit number 1? No. What’s going on? This is a murder case. We don’t play around like that.” 75 Ibid., 1382, 1464–65, Defense – “There is no indication that David Ward fired the gun from which the bullets came that killed Dorothy Mae Smith.” 76 Ibid., 1463.

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jury’s ‘common sense doubt?’ We will shortly respond to these questions. For now, our task is to assess the Prosecution’s change of course. Second, in order to legitimize the jury’s “common sense doubt,” the Prosecution appealed to case law, State vs. Hammonds. In State vs. Hammonds, Justice Denny spoke for the court and said that “a reasonable doubt, as the term is employed in the administration of criminal law, is an honest, substantial misgiving generated by the insufficiency of proof.”77 According to the Prosecution’s interpretation of the case law, “a common sense doubt” could find a defendant guilty based on “the insufficiency of proof.” The jury was given license to rely upon their “common sense doubt.” In fact, the Prosecution’s argument manipulated Justice Denny’s meaning. Justice Denny wrote of “an honest, substantial misgiving” based on “a lack of proof.” But the Prosecution argued for evidence that did not exist in order to engineer a “substantial misgiving” for the jury. Even here, an engineered “substantial misgiving” does not establish “a burden of proof.” The Prosecution was speaking a rhetoric of justice, but it had just skirted the fundamental operative presupposition in capital litigation – establishing a burden of proof. They traded this for “a common sense doubt.” This was a true travesty of jurisprudence. Third, with case law behind them, the Prosecution was able to establish for the jury members the meaning of their “common sense doubt.”78 Speaking to the jury, the Prosecution stated that a common sense doubt is “that good common sense day-to-day process that you bring when you come in this courtroom, when you sit and listen to the evidence, is the best way to find the truth.”79 A common sense doubt will deliver truth, but it will also deliver justice, as the Prosecution established next: “… and I suggest to you that if you don’t look at it as dayto-day human events using your good common sense, that justice is going to escape us all.”80 The Prosecution asserted to the jury that the day-to-day variety of their ‘common sense doubt’ would establish David’s guilt. And yet, the Prosecution did not assert upon what evidence the jury should appeal in establishing its ‘common sense doubt.’ 77

Ibid., 1409. Ibid., 1408–09, “A common sense doubt, [is] a doubt based on reason and common sense.” 79 Ibid., 1406. 80 Ibid., 1407–09, Prosecution – “And that if you leave your common sense outside this courtroom, justice is thwarted.” 78

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What went overlooked was that the jury’s ‘common sense doubt’ based on an ‘insufficiency of proof ’ could never be equivalent to a ‘burden of proof ’ based on sustained argument and strong evidence. The Prosecution’s change of course rattled David’s Defense and forced it into the awkward position of reminding the jury of the Prosecution’s own responsibility to establish a burden of proof. The rattle and force is clear in the aforementioned misstep of the lead defense attorney as he rushed to remind the jury of the Prosecution’s responsibility to prove a reasonable doubt based on the evidence. Defense – “The burden, ladies and gentlemen, is [for] the state to show beyond a reasonable doubt as to each and every element of each and every offence for which David Ward has been charged.” The assisting defense attorney more concisely identified the Prosecutorial threat – “Mr. H. has been a D.A. for nineteen years and he knows that I don’t have any burden of proof. They [the Prosecution] have the burden of proof. This is a criminal case. We don’t have to prove anything.”81 We return now to our above questions regarding the nature of the jury’s ‘common sense doubt.’ If the content of the jury’s ‘common sense doubt’ should normally be based on sound argument and strong evidence, then what did the Prosecution believe was to be the content of the jury’s ‘common sense’ that ultimately determined David’s guilt and his death?82 The content of the jury’s ‘common sense doubt’ was formed upon two inseparable maneuvers within the Prosecution’s change of course. The Prosecution, a) summoned up in the jury fear and ressentiment, and b) distanced the jury’s humanity from the defendant’s humanity, facilitating the jury’s ressentiment not against another human being, but against the enigmatic murderer. David had not only murdered, he was a murderer. The enigmatic autograph of murderer, which dissolved human reciprocity, enabled ressentiment to rise. Without a burden of proof based on strong evidence, the jury’s common sense told them David was really a murderer, no matter the evidence. His humanity was less significant to the lack of evidence. The features of equitability and fairness in justice were transvalued by a ressentiment that began to seek revenge for murder. David could be excised because he had excised first. But justice hopes for something greater than revenge, and where

81 82

Ibid., 1455. Ibid., 1456.

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it does not, then revenge in the name of Justice will seek the excision and death of another human being. Transvaluation of justice transpired just so quickly in David’s trial. How did the Prosecution simultaneously summon up ressentiment and the enigmatic autograph of David as the murderer? Failing at a burden of proof, the Prosecution told a story that the jury would believe. The story was inaccurate, but this made little difference. Where the facts are missing, hyperbole is always a good substitute. The Prosecution created a distinct narrative of a spectacle-murder that the jury could believe.83 “Folks, using your good common sense, you know it didn’t happen that way. That’s not what the evidence shows. They went there to rob her and kill her. They armed themselves to rob and kill her. They talked about robbing and killing her.”84 The Prosecution was exaggerating, since the only evidence they had lacked the dramatic flair of their story. Despite the evidence, the Prosecution reconstructed a spectacle of horror or a hyper-emotionalized narrative of a murder that hyperbolized the facts. The Prosecution appealed to both the trauma and death of the first victim, and the monster-predator lurking in the shrubs – “I guess we can just thank God of all the shots one did finish her off, one killed her, so she didn’t have to lay there in her own blood, in her own driveway waiting to die while these people – and I use the word very loosely. …”85 And again, “I’m not going to call this man a gentleman … He’s not a gentleman. Maybe that is something in the way I was brought up, folks. You know there is a difference between a gentleman or a lady and a murderer.”86 In its narrative of a spectacle-murder, the Prosecution argued that lurking within the shrubs the night of the murder was a defendant who was callous, shrewd, deceptive, unrepentant, and a predator that would kill again.87 Prosecution – “He had her life in his control and he killed her. And each time he pulled the trigger, he had to at least think about it somewhat. And he pulled it, and he pulled it, and he pulled it, and 83 Ibid., 1454, Defense – “[The Prosecution] says, oh, look at them throwing stuff down the roadway. … Did you hear any evidence like that? All I heard was they found some stuff on the driveway … what do they want you to believe? Whatever is most favorable to the State.” 84 Ibid., 1420. 85 Ibid., 1426, 1452. 86 Ibid., 1687. 87 Ibid., 1452, 1478. Defense – “… Ingenuity of Counsel. It starts dehumanizing him before the trial begins, so you won’t have any trouble finding him guilty. And if you find him guilty, so you won’t have any trouble putting him in the gas chamber.”

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he pulled it.”88 Where was the Prosecution getting the facts of this story? Clearly the Prosecution has David pulling and pulling on the automatic weapon, but based on what evidence? The absence of evidence became irrelevant in light of the hyperbolized storyline. The Prosecution was too busy deconstructing David into the enigmatic and striking ressentiment in the jury. The Prosecution later belittled David for not taking the stand to defend himself, creating doubt in the mind of the jury that David had something to conceal. Prosecution – “And on cross-examination I asked her [the deputy clerk of court], well, now isn’t it true that the defendant in this case was called as a witness in the trial of the co-defendant [Wesley]? Yes. And isn’t it true that he refused to testify? Yes. … Refused to testify.”89 In fact, David was exercising his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent while his attorneys represented him. David’s appeal to the law for protection was manipulated by the Prosecution, casting David as somehow deceitful, not to be trusted. By the sentencing phase of the trial, the Prosecution deconstructed David’s humanity and constructed the enigmatic autograph of a murderer. Prosecution – “In this case he is not rich, doesn’t have – doesn’t live in the house on the hill, but he’s got something more important and that’s a good family. And despite that, despite that, he becomes a murderer.”90 The Prosecution then made an additional turn. They asserted that the Defense was not really defending David in an honorable way. Rather, the defense was the one creating a story as an “ingenuity of counsel.” The Prosecution, which had just established a hyperbolic story not based on evidence, now turned on the Defense, asserting that it was the latter which was being farcical and deceptive. The Prosecution constructed a space for ressentiment in the jury, deconstructed David into the enigmatic murderer, and now claimed that the Defense was not representing the truth. A rhetoric of revenge cloaked in Justice cares little for the truth. The game is winning all or nothing. David’s Defense team took immediate exception with the Prosecution’s new course. They shot back that not they, but the Prosecution was fabricating a story in the “ingenuity of counsel.” The Prosecution was truly fabricating a story. But this counter-claim of “ingenuity” was inept in the hands of the Defense, who had little experience with 88 89 90

Ibid., 1448. Ibid., 1700. Ibid., 1707.

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argument of this ilk in a capital litigation. It is ironic and tragic that the Defense was now placed on the defensive, as though the burden of proof for David’s innocence (and not guilt) had been thrust upon them. Ressentiment in the jury, David as the enigmatic stranger-enemy, and the claim that the Defense was fabricating the truth, are not merely tragic. This was an ugly series of outcomes and events. And all of it, transpired in the deceptive pale of revenge cloaked in the Ideal of the pursuit of Justice. The Prosecution came out appearing as very much the defenders of the truth. The Defense continued with its counter-claim that the Prosecution was using an “ingenuity of counsel’ in their story that constructed a simultaneous “character assassination” of David. Defense – “Ingenuity of counsel. It starts dehumanizing him [David] before the trial begins, so you won’t have any trouble finding him guilty, and if you find him guilty, so you won’t have any trouble putting him in the gas chamber.”91 The Defense was too late. The Prosecution was engineering the jury’s ‘common sense doubt’ to instruct them not be deceived by a murderer, or his lying Counsel. He is a murderer and he will kill again, and his existence should be feared. Prosecution – “This is a man with a short fuse. I suggest to you this is a man that can kill again.”92 And again, “I ask you what kind of respect does he have for human life? What value does he put on human life? None.”93 Once more, “What kind of man is he? Have you seen any remorse? Have you seen the sorrow, the remorse? No. This is a man who has no value on human life, but money.”94 In truth, the Prosecution had constructed a story, exhibiting an “ingenuity of counsel.” For none of the above statements are reflected by not only weak evidence, but any evidence whatsoever. When revenge is cloaked as Justice, a story that fabricates the generation of ressentiment in the jury is the great elixir where evidence lacks. The Prosecution’s spectacle-murder storyline beckoned the jury to listen attentively as it reiterated the bloody murder of a woman by this murderer before them; what about the evidence? Evidence was less relevant because something with more girth than a ‘burden of proof ’ was transfixing the jury. The Prosecution’s spectacle-murder storyline guided the jury’s ‘common sense.’ At the close of their story, the aim of 91 92 93 94

Ibid., 1452. Ibid., 1691. Ibid., 1690. Ibid., 1691.

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the Prosecution was completed. This would have been brilliant argumentation if it had only been true. The Prosecution had constructed the story of a spectacle-murder, like a Greek tragedy replete with the jury’s cathartic response. The Prosecution had only to point dramatically at the enigmatic murderer, as they did earlier in the trial, as the vessel of the rational receptacle for the ressentiment of the jury. Prosecution – “I say to you that this defendant is guilty of all of these charges beyond any reasonable common sense doubt.”95 Ressentiment is regrettable but understandable; common sense must not waver in what must be done. These were still good citizens, but even good citizens must be about the hard work of excising other human beings sometimes. Because the deconstruction of a fellow human being took place through hyperbolic emotional appeals, ressentiment had risen and searched for an object. The Defense recognized the danger and attempted to defuse it by returning David’s humanity and balancing the story – “We are all sorry Mrs. Smith died … We are here to see if David has committed a crime. If you think of Mrs. Smith … maybe you’d be more likely to find him guilty because there is nobody else in here to find guilty for the crimes. Wesley Thomas Harris has already been tried.”96 A consensus rose within the jury, and their ‘common sense’ informed them of David’s guilt. At least, this appeared to be the case for the jury until one jury member wrote David a letter two weeks after the trial. She asked for David’s forgiveness, saying later that she was bullied by other jury members into agreeing upon the death penalty. She had been bullied in particular by a fellow juror who said he knew Dorothy’s husband personally, thought that he was a good man, and that death was the only punishment acceptable for David. Ressentiment, the enigmatic murderer, and the fabrication of the Defense: Revenge is a difficult adversary of justice, and had deadly consequences in David’s trial. Try convincing jury members that their decision in the name of justice to kill a man based upon “a common sense doubt” in fact distressed justice by sending a fellow human being to his death without producing “a burden of proof.” Try convincing a jury that the Prosecution engineered its appeal to “common sense” and

95 96

Ibid., 1424. Ibid., 1453.

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anesthetized the jury while opening breezeways to injustices that trespassed the basic aims of justice and the integrity of human life. Try convincing a jury that although they believe they have upheld Justice, in fact they have just participated in an ugliness that concealed the features of justice. In short, convince a jury that they were being suckers for cruelty that week before Easter, 1992. This was the task set before the Defense, to convince the jury that the Prosecution’s narrative of a spectacle-murder was not evidential to David’s case, that David was not an enigma, should not be excised, and that no burden of his guilt had been established according to the features of fairness and equitability in the pursuit of justice. The Defense was never equipped to take on such a strategic change of course by such a powerful Prosecution. iv) Negative Transcendence and Death The decision was made for you by David Ward as you look down the barrel of that .22 rifle. … You wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here. It is Easter week. We don’t have court this week usually.”97 – Prosecution, Sentencing Phase What does the Bible say about mercy? What does the Bible say about revenge? Leviticus: ‘You shall not take vengeance or bear any grudge against the sons of your own people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ Micah: ‘And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love mercy.’98 – Defense, Closing Argument

Defense – “The only evidence they [the Prosecution] had against David Jr. Ward that he did anything was his own statement. So all we are saying is if his statement convicted him, let his statement now count for something. If it is going to count for anything, let it count to saving David Jr. Ward’s life.”99 The Defense argued the above in the hope of gaining David life in prison without parole. At the trial, it was reported to the jury that from April 4, 1991, until his trial the following March of 1992, David had been sitting in Pitt County Jail. There were no windows and he was never taken outside. He sat in a jail cell, twenty-four hours a day for nearly three-hundred-and-sixty-five days. The capacity of the jail was for eighty-three persons, but Pitt County Jail was reported to house typically over a hundred people at any one time. David sat in 97 98 99

Ibid., 1708, Prosecution. Ibid., 1777, Defense Closing Argument. Ibid., 1759, Defense Closing Argument.

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his cell for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Until the day of his trial, David shared a cell with eight to ten other men, and one common toilet for them all, for over a year.100 At the sentencing phase of a capital trial, the prosecution argues for what are called ‘aggravating circumstances.’ Aggravating circumstances are a group of facts that the prosecution argues will make a specific murder particularly deserving of the maximum punishment of death as prescribed by the law.101 For their part, the defense argues for what are called ‘mitigating circumstances.’ Mitigating circumstances are a group of facts that do not reduce a crime of first degree murder, but which reduce the moral culpability of the defendant’s act of murder, making the defendant less deserving of the extreme punishment of death in relation to other examples of first degree murder.102 The Prosecution in David’s trial chose only one aggravating circumstance, which was that David had committed this murder for pecuniary or monetary gain.103 David’s Defense argued fifteen mitigating circumstances. These included the following: David confessed guilt the day following Dorothy’s death; he voluntarily waived his rights to remain silent, to have an attorney present at any questioning, and to have an attorney appointed to represent him during any questioning by law enforcement officials; he revealed where Wesley lived and identified Wesley to the law enforcement; the plan to commit the crimes against Dorothy were not planned by David; David had a history of addiction to drugs and alcohol; David was of less than average intelligence; David was in special education in school; David had continued support from family members and was one of eight children; David was a loving father and enjoyed a good relationship with his daughter; David did several things throughout his life to help his family; David financially supported his mother and his daughter. The judge denied the Defense one critical mitigating circumstance; he denied the jury knowledge that Wesley Harris had weeks previous received a life sentence without parole for Dorothy’s murder.104 Through the sentencing phase of the trial David’s Defense called family, friends, an educator, and other relations to testify on David’s

100 101 102 103 104

Ibid., 1769. Ibid., 1685. Ibid., 1685. Ibid., 1683, 1716. Ibid., 1735.

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behalf. David had been protective of his mother since his father’s death when he was fourteen years old, and had assisted her financially ever since. The Defense called David’s mother to the stand, after which the Prosecution cross-examined his mother. She was frail and under duress, and the Prosecution’s cross-examination was demeaning and confusing for her. David reacted. The Psychologist, Dr. Patricio Lara, who had earlier assessed David’s state of mental health, said that what happened next was due to both the aforementioned compounding stress from a year-long incarceration and from the strain of just having been convicted of first-degree murder.105 David stood up. He was a large, African American man, robust and intimidating looking. David took a few steps forward, and addressed both the Judge and the Prosecution – “You are talking about my fucking life!”106 He demanded to tell his side, to speak for himself, but that they leave his mother alone. Sheriff ’s deputies seized and constrained David and took him from the courtroom. David’s Defense conferred briefly with David and within fifteen minutes David was brought back into the courtroom.107 This time, however, by judicial order he wore handcuffs, his legs were manacled, and a chain attached both hand and leg restraints together. The jury witnessed the outburst and to the end of his sentencing phase the jury remained in clear view of the restraints on David. This last fact alone should have proven prejudicial to a jury, and to the sentencing phase of the trial itself. David’s Defense argued for prejudice but it was denied by the presiding judge. The Prosecution used the outburst as a bulls-eye with a jury that saw David as a menace to society. Prosecution – “A man that has no respect for human life. I suggest to you has no respect for this court. As the evidence by what you saw on Friday, obviously no respect for his mother, cursing there and here in the courtroom in her presence. You saw that. You saw it. I mean it is vivid in your mind. … I say to you that he is eminently deserving of the death penalty.”108 In U.S. jurisprudence, when did disrespecting one’s mother merit the death penalty? The argument was absurd.

105

Ibid., 1768–9. Ibid., 1768. 107 Ibid., 1769. 108 Ibid., 1702–03, 1691, “He thought so much of her that while she is sitting on the witness stand he is willing to stand up here in this courtroom and curse me in this court in the most vile and reprehensible language.” 106

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The jury unanimously recommended that David be sentenced to death.109 They also recommended that he receive maximum sentences of forty years for armed robbery and thirty years for conspiracy to commit armed robbery, to run at the expiration of the death sentence.110 Despite appeals that lasted nine years, David was executed on Friday, October 13, 2001. v) Epilogue I was feeling physically unwell. But I flew from Chicago to Raleigh to visit David at Raleigh Central Prison on October 12, 2001. We spoke behind bars and thick plastic plating. He was distressed, afraid that ‘the little red man’ would take him after his death. I leaned over and told him to ‘save a place for me in hell right next to you and we’ll visit the little red man together.’ David was shocked. ‘Why?’ ‘Because,’ I said, ‘God is One of grace and love. You are a child of God. So am I. God is present in friendship, in who we are for one another. It’s just who we are, what we are. Where you are is where I’ll be. Save a place for me.’ David said he would. There was an awkward moment. ‘But David, when you get to heaven and you see God, I want you to do a favor for me.’ ‘Yes?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Ask God to help all of us down here, because, ya know, we sure do need it. I mean, really David, please ask God to help, I need that also. Can you do that for me?’ David looked at me for a moment. There was something. ‘Please?’ ‘Ya, okay, I’ll do that. Sure? Ya, don’t you worry little brother, I’ll do just that.’ David had found a mission. The Governor did not stay David’s execution. We spoke again fortyfive minutes before his death. He talked about his daughter and growing strawberries. We said goodbye. The needle excised his flesh. The following Friday after the execution, when I returned home in the afternoon, I opened the mailbox to discover a get-well card and a handwritten letter in the mail from David. He had been dead a week. Numerous others on death row had signed the card. But David’s words were unmistakable. The content of that letter was enough. Some fractures never go away.

109 110

Ibid., 1805. Ibid., 1814.

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vi) Remarks for Transition We turn now to the second historical, narrative episode, as we have termed it, of the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. David’s trial, appeal, and execution were based on attestations from experience and court transcripts. The life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth are based on our classic texts from the gospels. As we previously discussed, these two events are meant to be correlative to the extent that cruelty is a death zone at the institutional sphere that encounters, harms, and can even annihilate intra-personal, interpersonal, and the institutional life. Furthermore, cruelty in human life is an ugliness that appears similar, whether yesterday or two thousand years ago. No other correlations between David’s life and that of Jesus are even suggested, nor should they be. To do so is to disrespect the singular human subject, provisionalize his suffering, and draw analogies that confuse more than clarify. In chapter one, we stated that cruelty comes from within human existence, and has a potential of transvaluing everyone it encounters. These are the things to be looked for in these accounts of public execution. We turn now to the second historical, narrative episode, or the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. D) Cruelty at the Cross He knows he hath a home, but scarce knows where/ He says it is so far that he hath quite forgot how to go there. – Henry Vaughan, Man

i) Introduction That humanity is lost or homeless, as Henry Vaughan attests to in his poem Man, has lasting metaphorical import as a sense of the tragic in human existence. That humanity is existentially and existentielly lost and found at the same moment, represents the height and depth of the great span of the tragic in human existence that is attested to in the luminescent singular experience and understanding of our individual lives. A sense of tragic existence can also reveal the topos of cruelty to us. Where the tragic sense is one of human inexplicability, the contradiction of value that implicates our own initial values, and excess that lead to multifarious trespasses, then we have found the trace of cruelty in human life and relation. Existential and ontological confirmation to

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the duality of being lost and found and thus to a sense of the tragic are far too prolific in extant western literature to attempt even a partial cataloguing here. Suffice it only to say that a sense of the tragic as a middle term is attested to in the distance within our literature between Empedocles’ ‘strife’ – ‘love,’ Nietzsche’s ‘to suffer cruelty’ – ‘positive creation,’ Pascal’s sense of ‘human partiality and nothingness’ – ‘the force of a Wager,’ Freud’s ‘Thanatos instinct’ – ‘Eros instinct,’ and is embedded within the simultaneity of Luther’s ‘simul iustus et peccator’ and his Theology of the Cross.111 Irrespective of whether one reads the Lukan account of Jesus executed on the cross through Feuerbachian112 or Barthian interpretive lenses, this classic intersection of being simultaneously lost and found that posits itself as both oceanic ‘loss’ and the existential exemplar of being ‘found’ – even being found as a single hope for reconciliation! – should drive a permanent wedge into naive human aspirations toward constructing enclosed teleological systems that consign one span of the sense of the tragic either in nihilistic defeatism that denies the possibility of being ‘found,’ or in eschatological, sublime triumphalism that denies the enduring wretchedness of what it means to be ‘lost.’113 Between ethical freedom, the hope for redemption, and our “tragic destiny,” Tillich asserts that “if one or the other side is denied, the human situation becomes incomprehensible. Their unity is the great problem of the doctrine of man.”114 On the one hand, defeatism denies the possibility for being ‘found’ akin to both a Foucaultian import to power, or through Bousseut’s chilling claim that “in Jesus we find a new ‘Law,’ viz. charity [where] we love to the point of hating ourselves … ;” On the other hand, triumphalism, as a dogmatic adherence to a theory 111 Alister E. McGrath, Luther’s Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther’s Theological Breakthrough, (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1985). McGrath’s account of Luther’s theology of the cross remains one of the clearest and is a ready source to students of theology. 112 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 193. This section contains the main thrust of Feuerbach’s critique. 113 The point of economic, social, political, ideological, and theological isolation, as an urgent sense of being lost, seems to me to be the thrust in the argument of liberationist theologies that call us to praxis in the principle of ‘a preferential option.’ H. Richard Niebuhr’s claim that heuristic categories for understanding the crucifixion, as temporally and culturally situated in a particular historical era, is also informative to the contemporary need to understand cruelty at the cross. See Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, (New York: Harper, 1951), 234. 114 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, 3 vol. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 2:38.

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of a particular ilk of sacrificial atonement and eschatological judgment in ‘the last days’ lifted out of works akin to Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, has misunderstood the enduring human experience of being lost as described in Anselm’s universal “fool” in his Proslogion, that ultimately seeks not after retribution but rather personal reconciliation.115 In a scuffle for veracity, defeatism or triumphalism (as second- or thirdorder interpretive responses to the execution of Jesus) exhibit a tendency to drive confidently and rather roughshod over what it is that the tragic senses or understands in the public execution of Jesus.116 What does the tragic understand at the cross? The writers and redactors of the gospel of Luke provide us a reflective answer to the question of what the ‘tragic senses’ at the cross by way of a return to the stark recognition of what is unfolding within the crucifixion itself in Jesus’ ‘petition’ – “Father [forgive] them, for [they] know not what [they] [do].” The petition is based upon a hope for reconciliation and a simultaneous window toward the propensity of human destruction even while the execution is unfolding, redoubling the vacuous reality of cold loss of life. Nevertheless, Nietzsche believed that Luke misrepresents the rawness that the tragic senses at the cross, a rawness not reflected in a response to the petition itself. Since the writers of Luke do not have the capacity to directly know “what [they] do,” then “we alone know,” or that is to say, Nietzsche will deliver us to an investigation, first, that omits the possibility of a teleological narrative-myth of sacrificial atonement and triumphalism, and second, that attempts to name ‘suffering and cruelty’ at the cross for the rawness that the Lukan appeal implicates in our humanness.117 What do “they do?” They are cruel, even without knowing it. However, in his effort to sense the tragic, Nietzsche fuses ‘they’ with an understanding of a monomorphic Christianity, asserting that ‘they’ are “the impotent herd mentality,” “the weak and miserable mutterers and counterfeiters,” and what they ‘do’ is participate in the joyful celebration of an execution and its reinterpretation of a theology of glory where forgiveness and love of the enemy is paramount, even though

115 Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Discourse on Universal History, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 19. 116 For a balanced effort at understanding the marginality of the Jesus of history underneath efforts at triumph, see John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 117 Friedrich Nietzsche, GM I: 14.

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‘they’ “sweat” in the process. This penchant of identifying monomorphic Christianity with the route to cruelty has been recently repeated in Horst Herrmann’s book entitled Passion der Grausamkeit: 2000 Jahre Folter im Namen Gottes (Passion for Cruelty: 2000 Years of Torture in the Name of God), where cruelty is the signifier to “Christianity” as the signified.118 Herrmann’s identification of cruelty as a Christian or religious phenomena that need be unmasked to reveal the evil thing underneath, is a style of argument since Nietzsche that misses the point about cruelty in the west. The terrible thing about cruelty is identifiable in correlation to that other theological topos of evil – that is, we are not ‘evil-doers’ by identity, but we can enact some horrendous evil. The difference between these two positions is extreme. In any event, for both Nietzsche and Herrmann cruelty will sometimes appear as an epiphenomenon of the Christian religion, and this is increasingly problematic as, like human identity, Christianity never takes a monomorphic form.119 The identification of cruelty with monomorphic Christianity misses wide the true nature of both. There is something else transpiring in Nietzsche’s read of the Lukan petition. Nietzsche appears to hear the Lukan petition as the threat Pentheus heard from the cloaked god Dionysus – “You know not what you are saying, what you do, nor who you are.”120 For Nietzsche, god is cloaked and threatens rather than registers a petition in vulnerability, “who [you] are” is transliterated into an accusative “who [they] are,” plurivocity is lost to monomorphism, and what the tragic senses in the execution of Jesus is unfortunately mistreated.121 Nietzsche earlier 118 Feuerbach offered a synonymous connection between suffering and Christianity. See Ludwig Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Christentums, (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1984). See especially Das Geheimnis des leidenden Gottes, 117–148. p. 123. “Suffering is the highest offer of Christianity – the history of Christianity itself is of the history of human suffering.” Leiden ist das höchste Gebot des Christentums – die Geschichte des Christentums selbst die Leidensgeschichte der Menschheit. 119 Horst Herrmann, Passion der Grausamkeit: 2000 Jahre Folter im Namen Gottes, (München: Bertelsmann Verlag, 1994), see especially 296. John Kekes understands Christianity through monomorphic lenses as well – “Christianity is one way of succumbing to false hope. … The fundamental idea … is that reality is governed by a rational and moral principle and that it is tending toward a final purpose.” Kekes’ concern is not with Christianity but with teleology that defines either religious or philosophical movements. See Kekes, Facing Evil, 29. 120 Euripides, The Bacchae and Other Plays, (London: Penguin Books, 1954), 206. Pentheus, the protagonist, desires that his city of Athens be rid of the debaucherous god, Dionysus. 121 Jacques Dupuis, Who Do You Say I am?: Introduction to Christology, (New York: Orbis 1997), 36.

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addressed suffering and cruelty as a caveat to the western tradition, but here his poetic style stumbles into what can be referred to as an antihomiletic where hyperbole further enshrouds the execution of Jesus in what Ricoeur witnesses in Nietzsche as a polemical identification of Christianity with a Marxist “opiate of the masses.”122 In further relation to Nietzsche’s anti-homiletic stance, Ricoeur also differentiates the symbol of ‘sacrifice’ and of ‘buying back’ from the brand of “cheap triumphalism” that Nietzsche attests to in Christianity; the Semitic and enduring issue of ‘pardon and return’ illustrated in Isaiah 44:22 (“Return to me, for I have bought you back,”) and Deuteronomy 21:8 (“O Eternal One, thy people Israel, whom thou hast bought back”) relates an oriented telos for humankind that is distinct from teleological dogmatism or threatening gods.123 Rebecca West, in her book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, offers an answer to the ‘sense of the tragic’ at the cross and the possibility of a correlation between the Lukan petition and the Nietzschean caveat to the western tradition. West recounts her experiential sense of the tragic in the sacrifice of black lambs in Yugoslavia that were meant to offer relief from the hardships and cankers of daily peasant existence, and reflects in this moment upon at least two classic theories of atonement that were developed after the execution of Jesus. “I knew this rock well,” she writes, “I had lived under the shadow of it all my life. All our western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing. Here it could be seen the meaning of the Crucifixion had been hidden from us, though it was written clear. A supremely good man was born on earth, a man who was without cruelty, who could have taught mankind to live in perpetual happiness; and because we are infatuated with this idea of sacrifice, of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages, we found nothing better to do with this passport to deliverance than to destroy him.”124 West is denouncing the triumphalist interpretation constructed atop Anselm’s ransom theory of Atonement, as well as the Calvinist substitution theory of Atonement, and she is not alone in her convictions. As Charles K. Bellinger recounts, Abelard had earlier rejected as

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Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 93. Paul Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 93, 270–275. 124 Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, (New York: The Viking Press, 1943). See also, Gray, Warriors, 49. West was an English journalist and critic who is best known for her reports on the Nürnberg trials (1945–46). 123

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“cruel and wicked” the idea that God would “demand the blood of an innocent person as the price for anything, or that it should in any way please him that an innocent man should be slain – still less that God should consider the death of his Son so agreeable that by it he should be reconciled to the whole world!”125 What Anselm, Nietzsche, West, and Abelard retain in common are correlative convictions regarding the execution of Jesus as a tragic passage of events that teaches us about the ugliness in human life and relation. Their respective ire is delivered against the concealment of these tragic events not in love but in triumphalist sacrificial love, a concealment that also teaches us much about various anthropological needs within human existence. Even as a start, what does the tragic sense at the cross? Devoid of mystic sentimentality – that is a living man sweating and dying there, those are real nails being driven through wrists and ankles; a sense of the tragic at the cross does not first describe or even approximate a theory of atonement, but only whispers the Nietzschean caveat alongside the Lukan petition that, insofar as this event has anything to say about love, it must be a love that shines out not from the triumph of sacrifice, but from resistance and a petition for self-understanding, forgiveness, and reconciliation even throughout human ignorance and events surrounding a public execution. This is an execution that is soaked in suffering and ugliness. That is, cruelty within this execution is satiated in the whisper of the tragic sense within human life and relation.126

125 Charles K. Bellinger, The Genealogy of Violence, 137. See also the Fairweather edition of A Scholastic Miscellany, 283. In his own style, Nietzsche agrees fully with Abelard on this question of atonement. See Friedrich Nietzsche, GM II: 21. 126 To understand cruelty at the cross, prior to theories of sacrificial atonement, is not to cancel the latter, but it is to introduce a hermeneutic move that will be critical of sacrificial language that conceals: a) the cruelty of the execution of Jesus, b) the execution of Jesus as also meaningless as an encounter of cruelty and as a part of our human nature, and c) the ‘sense of the tragic’ at the cross that must not be concealed under platitudes of triumph. Jürgen Moltmann’s encapsulation of theories of atonement is covered in his Der Weg Jesu Christi, (München, Kaiser, 1989), 181–218. Although his interpretations of Christ are represented, they are all based on a single theory of sacrificial atonement, interpretations that do not reflect, to my mind, the radical nature of a petition from the cross to ‘forgive,’ a petition that calls for transformation beyond cruelty that is especially relevant today. See also Gordon Graham, Evil and Christian Ethics, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) 29–73. Graham briefly reviews the three quests for the historical Jesus, and does not rest on the exclusivity and even priority of “Jesus as moral teacher,” something I am also avoiding here. As a teacher, Jesus is not only engaging moral righteousness, but a phenomenological approach to existence. This is not an appeal to Jesus the phenomenologist, only that many

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E) The Life and Public Execution of Jesus of Nazareth 27

This is what I say to all who will listen to me – Love your enemies, and be good to everyone who hates you.28Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel [έphreazÓntwn] to you.35But love your enemies and be good to them. … [God] is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel [ponhroύV]. – Jesus, Luke 6.27–35

i) Introduction The specific elements of the narrative history of Jesus, his life and work, and his public execution at Golgotha, remain in some measure historically enshrouded. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the three academic efforts of the so-called ‘quest for the historical Jesus’ to crack the historical codes of this narrative led Albert Schweitzer to finally caution that an assessment of the historical Jesus always bears the imprint of its interpreter. That is, one often finds what one seeks in this historical narrative, from the Humanist-pacifist Jesus to Jesus the radical marginal Jew of Galilean stock. In response, we first recall that all classic narratives are open to plurivocity. But Jesus’ life and death were unique in this regard, open as they were to plurivocity even before the classic historical accounts were written, which helps to explain why numerous gospel writers (even as contributors to each gospel text!) attest to differing distinct kernels of his life and death. In short, the historical accounting of Jesus is not merely a monomorphic synoptic singularity, but a set of classic and correlating synoptic attestations to the complexities of his life, work and death. Next, in light of Schweitzer’s caveat, our task remains thankfully limited in scope to these classic narratives. We remain within the topos of cruelty, and the trajectory continues through the life and public execution of Jesus in an effort to understand where cruelty appears in these historical attestations. Like previous narratives of Adam, Cain, Isaac, Job, and the Canaanites,

parables do not receive their full existential import when left at the nouveau of normative and ethical applicability. The methodology of E. P. Sanders in discussing the historical Jesus underlines hermeneutic efforts at understanding the historical Jesus within this study; see, Sanders, Jesus and Judaism, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985), and The Historical Figure of Jesus, (New York: Penguin, 1993), 280. Sanders second study ends with the integrity of a conviction even amidst what remains unknown: “That Jesus’ followers had resurrection experiences is, in my judgment, a fact. What the reality was that gave rise to the experiences I do not know.”

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our aim herein is to orientate and interpret these narrative attestations while simultaneously being awake to how the narratives are orientating and interpreting us. In this sense, we are not merely imprinting but also being imprinted upon in a dialogic approach that challenges both us and the narratives. In our dialogic approach, three orientating points need be made: First, in light of our current artery of the ‘issue of justice,’ we will reflect upon how justice is transvalued from a social ‘Right’ to revenge sanctioned by those in positions of authority. Second, we will remain attentive to how the excessive trespass of cruelty is an encounter that affects all three spheres within human life and relation – these being intrapersonal, interpersonal, and institutional. Finally, reflection upon the nature of the narrative attestations of the life and public execution of Jesus resists sacrificial and corollary theories of atonement. We follow the trace of Abelard who did not accept the nature of many of these theories as rendering further interpretations that did not perceive the “cruel and wicked” nature of the execution of Jesus. Our trajectory in this section is meant only to clear space for a discussion of cruelty in the life and public execution of Jesus that will encourage further publicly theological and interdisciplinary considerations in order to assist us in understanding how these narratives inform our own contemporary epoch. Our trajectory begins with the narrative life of the historical Jesus and concludes with an assessment of the trespass of cruelty in the issue of justice and at the public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. ii) John the Baptist and the Beginning of a Prophet in his own Town Every one who comes to me and hears my words and does them, I will show you what he is like: he is like a man building a house, who dug deep. … – Jesus, Luke 6:47–49 But when this cruel Herod found that the wise men did not come back to him … he called his soldiers and captains to him. … The soldiers with their swords killed all the children they could find. – Charles Dickens127

In all three synoptic gospels, Jesus’ birth is preceded by Isaiah’s poetics of a voice calling in the wilderness – John the Baptist will be the “prophet of the Most High” who “prepares the way of the Lord” and

127 Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord, (New York: Simon and Schuster, First Printing, 1934), 15.

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anticipates Israel’s reception to “make his paths straight.”128 Only in Luke does John’s father, Zechariah, confirm the name of his newborn son in a manner that stirs Angst, wonder and awe “through all the hill country of Judea.” Judea queries – “What then will this child [John] be?”129 What John will be is a preacher of the “baptism of repentance.” The preparatory locus of John’s ‘baptism of repentance’ is already fleshing-out the life and work of the ‘one’ for whom he prepares. According to John, the coming “way of the Lord” means that “every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways shall be made smooth; and all shall see the salvation of God.”130 The ‘one’ for whom John prepares a “straight path” shall likewise make straight “the crooked,” where the depth and height of valley and hill will be scrutinized and smoothed. John’s repentance is indeed aimed at “the crooked,” who turn against the divine, invert true relation, have forgotten their mutual responsibility, who deceive themselves and others, and who exhibit envy and resentment one to an other. We have identified these qualities within the classic symbols of the “crooked stick” and the “venomous eye” in the contour of ressentiment, but John’s fiery, prophetic rhetoric renders this connection clear – “You brood of vipers!” The giftig or poisonous nature of “this generation,” its lack of steadiness of heart, bad conscience, deceptive nature, envy, and resentment will be identified in both depth and height by the ‘one’ who is coming. Thereafter, the ‘way of the Lord’ will hack through “the crooked” and ‘venomous’ in an act of excision where “even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees.” In repentance, what does not “bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” John likewise eschews the comfort his listeners may attempt to gain in finding safe haven through the covenant or ‘promise of relation’ between God and Abraham – “… and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.’ ” The listeners are

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Malachi 4:5; Mark 1:3; Matthew 3:3; Luke 7:26. Luke 1.63–7. Zechariah confirms John’s name by writing the same name for his son as was earlier spoken by Mary. That both chose a name without a familial lineage was unconventional; that they both choose the identical unconventional name causes “marvel,” Angst-awe [“fear”], and wonder. In the name is the sign of oncoming tumult. 130 Luke 2:7–10. 129

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instead to “bear fruits that befit repentance” in preparation for the ‘one’ who will divide the truly obedient from the disobedient. John’s interpretation of the Abrahamic covenant affronts and frightens his hearers – “What then shall we do?” How do we bear fruit befitting repentance that saves us from the axe at the root? Here we might anticipate that John’s rhetoric shift to concrete images of dust-andashes, to fasting or extended reflection upon the Torah that would maintain the sharp concision of his prophetic motifs. Instead, John’s response is an abridged interpersonal imperative that fuses both obedience and interpersonal reciprocity. For John, “bearing fruit befitting of repentance” is so simple it is arresting – “He who has two coats, let him share with him who has none; and he who has food, let him do likewise.”131 John’s baptism of repentance is a fusion of obedience and a return to interpersonal reciprocity. It is also the sign of someone who takes preparation seriously, remaining concise without risking too much regarding the ‘one’ whose work is defined in the future. With regard to the encounter of cruelty, the life and death of Jesus are hemmed in by the contour of excision where Luke presents a history with piercing at 2:35 and 23:44–48 that gathers together both birth and death in a single narrative. First, Simeon, a man who was “righteous and devout, looking for the consolation of Israel,” journeys to the politico-religious and economic center of Jewish life – the temple. He holds Jesus in his arms, proclaims salvation to both Israel and the Gentiles, and further surprises Mary and Joseph with his oratory – “This child is set for the fall and rising of many in Israel, and for a sign that is spoken against, that thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed [and then Simeon turns to Mary alone] – and a sword will pierce through your own soul also.”132 Simeon’s proclamation of salvation resembles the radical nature of John’s call to repentance. And yet, Simeon is explicit not only regarding excision that pierces and the Kampf of being spoken against. The life of Jesus is the correlation of both of these with trauma. The foreshadow to Mary is that her “soul” will also be “pierced.”133 The excess concealed in Simeon’s oratory is 131

Luke 2.7–10. Luke 2:25–35; see also, Luke 23:44–48; see also John 19:24 – ‘tearing garments of Jesus.’ [Italics mine]. 133 Luke 23:44–8. In “the sixth hour” of Jesus’ execution, the horizon darkens, where the diffusion of light and dark unmakes a world of relation in negative transcendence when “the curtain of the Temple is torn in two” and Jesus is also “pierced” with a lance as a symbol of his death into nothingness. 132

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delivered in a foreshadow that reveals how interpersonal and institutional trespasses upon Jesus’ life and body will tender an intra-personal trauma for his mother as well. In the correlation of John’s baptism of repentance and Simeon’s proclamation of salvation, what Jesus will speak against reveals the content of the human heart in relation to obedience and reciprocity. At the start of his ministry, Jesus speaks in his hometown synagogue and the listeners question his authority. They are skeptical because what Jesus says affronts accepted custom regarding the proper representation of divine-human relation. Jesus responds by plainly noting to the synagogue’s inhabitants that “no prophet is acceptable in his own country.” But Jesus takes a step further. Many of Jesus’ actions are enacted parables, in which his listeners act-out a parable rather than hear one – the moral of this one is that when ressentiment rises, prophets get killed. In terms of enacting a parable, Jesus enables his listeners to reveal to themselves the moral by taking on the persona of the unacceptable prophet himself. He accomplishes this task through his inclusion of two precise examples of natural catastrophe and disease where the prophets Elijah and Elisha were only sent to relieve two foreigners in Sidon and Syria, lands outside of Israel. What is more offensive, the two foreigners who were spared were but a widow and a leper, even though there were many widows and lepers within Israel at the time of their deliverance. In Jesus’ reading of these prophets, God is shown to bless the enigmatic and external other first. But this interpretation of priority given to the enigmatic other, contradicts the listeners’ image of a loving God, specifically inverts the order of interpersonal relation in favor of the stranger before the chosen nation, and broadly undermines the customary interpretation of interpersonal relation and hospitality within the body of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus is both radical and dangerous. It is also a tragic and ugly aspect of this narrative that while God favors the life of the stranger, Jesus’ own neighbors seek to murder him, even in the defense of God. Jesus’ offense strikes ressentiment deep in his listeners where the synagogue is immediately “filled with wrath.” The following outburst supports Jesus’ point and Simeon’s proclamation – prophets are spoken against and unacceptable because through the spilling of their blood they reveal the content of the human heart to a particular historical context. The spilling of Abel’s blood revealed the content of Cain’s heart, as well as the hearts of all those who came after Cain in the first civilization of Nod. And herein is the ressentiment of Cain against his

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brother, Abel, signified in a further reflection by Jesus’ own analogy – “I will send them prophets … some of whom they will kill and persecute … from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah.”134 With regard to the “they” who “kill,” Jesus is speaking directly to the progeny of both Cain and Nod, to the first murder and civilization. As Cain against Abel, Jesus’ listeners immediately ‘rise up,’ lead him to the outskirts of the city and civilization in the distance away from dwelling, and attempt to throw him headlong into a fracture.135 The fracture is a symbolic projection of the listeners’ own ressentiment and fear grown to excess, but an excess they cannot overcome without a return to reciprocity. Like Cain, they blindly vie for excess instead.136 Abel is swallowed in the earth as a symbol of negative transcendence and death; Like Cain, Jesus’ listeners are swallowed in the fracture of cruelty that they externalize by trying to throw him into a physical fracture outside of their dwellings. However, Jesus escapes this fate. He passes through “the midst of them” and through the midst of an excessive encounter of cruelty gathered around him; he leaves the fracture behind him “and goes away.” iii) The Crescendo of Interpersonal Relation in the Good Samaritan and Cruelty The law says she shall be pelted with stones until she is dead. But what say you? What say you? Jesus looked upon the noisy crowd attentively, and knew that they had come to make him say the law was wrong and cruel. … – Charles Dickens137

Throughout the gospels, Jesus’ rhetorical style often circumscribes established mores, and then transvalues and re-establishes these mores – “You have heard it said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ ”138 “But this is what I say to all who listen to me: Love your enemies, and

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Luke 11:49–51. Luke 4:24–30. “And they rose up and put him out of the city, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built that they might throw him down headlong.” 136 Luke 6:39 – “Can a blind man lead a blind man? Will they not both fall into a pit?” 137 Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord, (New York: Simon and Schuster, First Printing, 1934), 62. 138 Mathew 5:38–48. 135

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be good to everyone who hates you.”139 Jesus’ authoritative hermeneutic license draws from a yoking of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 in the Pentateuch so that versions of the imperative simile – “as you wish that men would do to you, do so to them” – take precedent.140 In addition, the re-established meaning is usually so radical given the daily dynamics and expectations of human life and relation that Jesus queries whether his listeners (including his own disciples) understand what he means beyond straightforward literalism regarding something as opaque as ‘bread’ – “How is it that you fail to perceive that I did not speak about bread?”141 But Jesus’ inversions are not merely a matter of differing interpretations upon a classic text or within a tradition. Jesus is instead confronting what theologians identify as the phenomenological and normative ground of human existential and existentiell life and relation in a rhetoric that is even more radical than John’s ‘baptism of repentance.’ We recall how John’s imperative is that “he who has two coats” should “share with him who has none,”142 but Jesus asserts – “and from him who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt.”143 Treating the other as oneself in this manner is always underlined in Jesus’ rhetoric; it is a rhetoric that finally reaches a narrative and normative crescendo in the Lukan gospel attestation popularly entitled ‘The Good Samaritan.’ It is to this classic attestation that we now turn. In the gospel crescendo of the Good Samaritan, an attorney queries about the specific nature of the “neighbor” who one is to love as oneself.144 If Jesus leaves the ‘neighbor’ ill-defined or wanes in his approximation within this narrative, then his entire message will weaken. 139

Luke 6:27–35, Contemporary English Version. Luke 6:27–36. 141 Mathew 16:8–11a. “But Jesus, aware of this, said, ‘O men of little faith, why do you discuss among yourselves the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive? Do you not remember the five loaves of the five thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? Or the seven loaves of the four thousand, and how many baskets you gathered? How is it that you fail to perceive that I did not speak about bread?’ ” See also Mark 8:17–18. “Why do you discuss the fact that you have no bread? Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?” 142 Luke 2:7–10; See also Mathew 22:34–46 and Mark 12:28–37. The account of the Good Samaritan is only recalled in Luke, as an addition to fulfilling the whole law in the above sections. 143 Luke 6:27–36. See also Luke 18:18–22 where a ruler asks Jesus how he shall inherit eternal life. Jesus instructs him, akin to John – “Sell everything you own and distribute it to the poor.” But Jesus also makes an addition – “and come, follow me.” 144 Luke 10:25–37. 140

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Why should we care about this? Because the length of Jesus’ three-year ministry is staked on an awareness not only of the kingdom of God but also upon the singular relation of humans belonging to both this kingdom and to one another. “Who is my neighbor?” – Jesus’ response thrusts the question itself back upon the juridical mental acuity of the attorney: A man was stripped, humiliated, robbed, and beaten. A priest, a Levite, and a culturally foreign Samaritan arrived one after the other. The first two trespassed or “passed by” the beaten man. But the enigmatic Samaritan dressed his wounds and paid all further medical and hotel costs until the man was healed. “Which of these three, do you think, proved neighbor to the man who fell among the robbers?” The answer is clear, and Jesus then says to – “Go and do likewise.”145 At the gospel crescendo of interpersonal reciprocal relation, what are we to make of the trespass of both priest and Levite? Another way of asking this question is by querying after what advice Jesus gives the humiliated and beaten man in regaining his health and composure. Jesus makes his response clear in this same section – “Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel [έphreazÓntwn] to you.” Why pray for the cruel? First, in Luke, praying provides a model exhibited foremost by “God in heaven … [who] is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel [ponhroύV].”146 Second, in Matthew, through praying for those who persecute [diwkÓntwn] you, “you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the cruel [ponhroύV] and on the good.”147 The Greek έphreazÓntwn means to threaten, endanger, maltreat, or ill-treat, abuse, or swear at. The Greek ponhroύV means sick, of a bad or wicked state, vicious, malicious, causing pain, arduously troublesome. The German translation for the latter is often Bösen, or one who

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Luke 10:25–37. Luke 6:27–35. In the Matthew parallel [Matthew 5:38–48] persecution is emphasized with a change in the original Greek – “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute [diwkÓntwn] you.” The attestation of the gospel of Luke is about more than trespass, but also the interior machinations of human subjectivity and trespass. 147 Matthew 5:38–48; 7:12a. See also Calwer Bibellexikon (Calwer Verlag, Stuttgart, 1959), 445. The Calwer Lexicon will translate diwkÓntwn not as ‘persecute,’ but as ‘grausam’ or ‘cruel.’ In German, both diwkÓntwn and έphreazÓntwn are often translated with verfolgen or mibhandeln [to persecute]. But in defining έphreazÓntwn above, we note how this term is unique from the English ‘to persecute.’ 146

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is evil-wicked. However, what is more explicit and precise in both άnelehmÓnwV and ponhroύV is a shocking and inexplicable lack of hospitality or charity that exceeds human life and relation in a way that is raw, malicious, vicious, and wicked. Such excess renders a trespass between human beings. This explicit excess is why άnelehmÓnwV and ponhroύV have also been translated in both German and English etymological resource material as ‘grausam’ or ‘cruel.’148 When we reflect upon the etymological nature of these terms, then we are able to offer an interpretation of the Good Samaritan narrative: The priest and Levite were cruel, the Samaritan became his neighbor as the beaten man, and the beaten man and listeners were asked to resist cruelty, model care for those who are cruel, and pray that they may become ‘sons of the father.’ The model of resisting, praying and caring is precisely the model Jesus offers in his petition on the cross – “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” ‘What they do’ draws us back to Nietzsche’s ‘way of cruelty’ revisited in chapter one and the idea of a trespass of cruel excess. Nietzsche’s own reflections upon Jesus’ petition are only partially correct regarding the cruelty ‘that they do.’ As we see at the crescendo of interpersonal existence, Jesus identifies and attests to the tendency toward cruel excess in human life and relation, but unlike Nietzsche he did not conclude that personal liberation resided in harnessing cruelty through the expression of one’s singular will to power. Instead, authentic singular human existence means human beings are to turn to one another in reciprocity, oneself as an other, even through and after the trespass of cruelty, and to “pray for everyone who is cruel [since] God is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel.” iv) Fundamentals of Message, Rhetoric, and the Symbol of the Temple Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! – Jesus, Luke 19:41–44

148 Etymological resources – New Jerusalem Bible: Einheitsuebersetzung mit dem Kommentar Jerusalemer Bibel, Herder, Freiburg, 1980; Synopsis Quattuor Evangeliorum, Locis Parallelis Evangeliorum Apocryphorum et patrum adhibitis edidit. Kurt Aland, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1988 [all bible referencees]; Septuaginta, Id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes, edidit Alfred Rahlfs, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1979; Biblioa Sarca: Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, Stuttgart, 1983; Walter Bauer, Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament. All references.

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The excess of cruelty is prolific in the Psalms and throughout the JudeoChristian scriptures;149 indeed, cruel excess in its intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres symbolizes the Christian pinnacle of loss and return of relation in both negative- and reconciledtranscendence through the public execution of Jesus. John’s birth, ministry, and even the memory of his death presage the end of Jesus’ life. Having been brought to the attention of the ruling authorities, Herod remarks in the same sentence that he had already excised John into negative transcendence and death, but the new threat was unclear – “John I beheaded; but who is this about whom I hear such things?”150 The gospel attestations to who the authorities believe Jesus is that precipitates his public execution, begins to form when Jesus “set his face to go to Jerusalem” at the end of his ministry and during the Passover festival.151 Jerusalem is not only the center of Jewish politico-religious and economic life, it is also often a symbol for a repetitive theme in Jesus’ relation to “this generation.” ‘This generation,’ or Jerusalem, is referred to in terms of both maternal affection – “How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” – and scolding – “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you and bear with you?”152 In the gospel narrative attestations, Jerusalem is the embodiment of a gathering crisis with ‘this generation,’ and a crisis that begins when Jesus weeps upon entering the city – “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!”153 In consideration of the fundamentals of Jesus’ message and his rhetoric in Jerusalem, it is not Jesus the innocent lamb of sacrifice who we witness in the topos of cruelty; rather as we see in the narrative crescendo of The Good Samaritan, Jesus seeks resistance to daily and commonplace excesses and abuses, clarity through inversions to accepted truth, reconciliation between God and humanity, and renewal of relations between human beings. And yet what is ironic and frequently disturbingly problematic is that these fundamentals of

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Psalms 117:13 – the piercing tongue of the wicked, Psalms 57:4 – The persecution of the wicked, Psalms 37:14 – the end of the wicked. 150 Mathew 14:3–12, Luke 9:7–9 and Mark 6:17–29. “And he sought to see him.” 151 Luke 9:51–2 – “When the days drew near for him to be received up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem … but the people would not receive him, because his face was set toward Jerusalem.” Luke 19:31–34 – “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem. …” 152 Luke 13:35 and 9:41–3. 153 Luke 19:41–44.

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resistance, clarity, reconciliation, and ultimately renewal are often delivered in Jerusalem in a rhetoric of division and destruction for ‘this generation.’ If we had to locate a symbol that embodies both Jesus’ complex rhetoric of destruction and his fundamentals of resistance, clarity, reconciliation, and renewal, then such embodiment is to be found in the symbol of the ‘temple.’ In accepting the symbol of the temple, we first resist overlaying the symbol of a sacrificial lamb who blindly stumbles unawares into a politico-religious whirlwind at the temple on Passover. Instead, Jesus’ own rhetoric that delivers the fundamentals of his message at the temple reveals a conscious awareness of both the very authorities he is criticizing and the elevated danger of this criticism when Jerusalem is annually stretched to its political and populas mass during Passover. Within this heightened danger, hypocrites, lawyers, Pharisees, Sadducees, money-changers, and others become the targets of Jesus’ persistent resistance to established mores embodied within the symbol of the ‘temple’.154 The formerly rejected “cornerstone” of the temple will become the new foundation or basis that inverts, destroys, and renews human life and relation. Jesus will become this new cornerstone who resists, clarifies, reconciles and renews all other symbols of human life and relation, but this entails that old symbols must be destroyed first. The destruction and renewal of symbols is saturated in Jesus’ rhetoric and phraseologies within and around the ‘temple:’ He condemns the public executions of others through “stoning those who are sent to you.” He employs dangerous metaphors of a “forsaken house.” He threatens to raze “this temple, and in three days raise it up.”155 In the temple he questions the established politico-religious authorities – “I also will ask you a question; now you tell me. …” He offends the rich by contrasting them and their temple gifts to those of a righteous “poor widow.” And finally, he employs provocative language within the very temple itself about how God will “destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others.”

154 Luke 11:52. “Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.” Matthew 23:13 – “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees. …”; Luke 19:41–44. 155 Luke 21:5. “And as some spoke of the temple, how it was adorned with noble stones and offerings, he said, ‘As for these things which you see, the days will come when there shall not be left here one stone upon another that will not be thrown down.”

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This rhetoric of destruction and renewal symbolized in the temple is what lands squarely upon the shoulders of the politico-religious authorities who Jesus is scrutinizing.156 Herod’s earlier question of “who is this” of whom he has been hearing, is precisely what Jesus makes exceedingly clear in his own rhetoric and the fundamentals of his own message. Even so, Jesus’ rhetoric of the “cornerstone” is one step too far for the “scribes and chief priests.” The threat in their own house accelerates a grabbing-onto or Kampf that Jesus will be unable to escape – “And they tried to lay hands on him at that very hour.” In the topos of cruelty, the advance toward Jesus’ public execution reveals his resistance at every corner of the excesses that destroy divinehuman relation correlated to a newly constructed symbolic meaning of the ‘temple.’ From a singular perspective, Jesus’ own resistance of cruelty in human life and relation transforms him into the object of cruel trespass, as we shall see in the trajectory toward the execution. This trespass transpires not through Jesus’ resigned blind sacrifice, but through his solicitous active resistance. Ultimately, although Jesus was able to escape fracture in his home-town, his presage that prophets do not get killed for condoning the status quo is coming true. His ministry will end steeped in the cruel trespass of a public execution that is immanently bound to his rhetoric at the temple. v) Judas’ Conspiring and the Symbolic Cluster of Coins “And every day he was teaching in the temple.” Luke’s summary of Jesus’ last days in Jerusalem reveals no change in rhetoric or the fundamentals of his message; such persistence is correlative to the ressentiment of the authorities. Jesus spends his nights in the distance of mount Olivet and early every morning he rises and returns to the temple.157 Daily at the temple is bred an increasing ferment of offence, ressentiment, and fear. Crowds are listening. The internal struggle of the authorities widens and they plan to grab-onto [angreifen] Jesus without raising the ire of his growing listeners. Luke writes that the temple chief priests and scribes first “pretended to be sincere” in order to both undermine Jesus’ teaching and gain a foothold in recognition through

156 Luke 20:1, 9–19. “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.” John 2:18–22. “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days?” 157 Luke 21:37–8.

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deception that is telling of ressentiment: “Teacher, we know that you speak rightly, and show no partiality.” But as John proclaimed, the “way of the Lord” was precisely about revealing both partiality and straightening the crooked. Jesus perceives the crookedness of deception and ressentiment concealed underneath sincerity, and he responds with partiality – “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”158 Later, when the Sadducees approach him in the temple to condemn his teaching on the resurrection, Jesus resists the deception and thrusts them an exegetical burr from the Psalms about how the Christ could be both David’s son and Lord.159 Jesus speaks, is attacked, and then repeatedly resists the attack by questioning the authoritative and exegetical prowess of the politico-religious elite in the center of temple life. Collective resistance will only endure so long, for it is not Jesus who starts to lose his dwelling or intra- and interpersonal bearing, but his disciples. Deceptions from the politico-religious authorities due to fear and ressentiment must have increasingly pressed upon the disciples, who may have felt in no theological or political position to challenge the establishment to such a dangerous degree and in their own house. If the disciples failed to understand many of Jesus’ teaching in the three years up to the temple, we cannot assume that this group of fishermen and tax collectors were suddenly able to converse with expertly trained religious thinkers. And yet they need not be capable of such conversation to know the palpable danger of an irresolvable struggle edging ever closer. Judas is the first to decide to leave as the pinnacle celebration of Passover draws near. But he does more than decide to leave, he conspires. Judas consults with the chief priests: what the gospels interpret as betrayal, the religious authorities interpret as fidelity. In the second interpretation, the chief priests “were glad and engaged to give Judas money.” He agrees to help grab-onto Jesus when no one is hearing, and sets his mind to the task of betraying Jesus to them “in the absence of the multitude” and away from the ire of Jesus’ listeners.160 In the first interpretation, this labor of betrayal – of breaking interpersonal reciprocity in the face of increasing hostility – is to what the synoptic gospels attest. Judas climbs out of relation and receives coins where the 158 159 160

Luke 20:20–37. Luke 20:41–4. Luke 22:3–6.

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breech of true fidelity in friendship and allegiance can never be purchased without a price. The coins are the clustered symbols of Judas’ interpersonal betrayal of Jesus and the entire community of disciples. The gospels attest that his interpersonal trespass will also accrue in worth as a traumatic contagion, compounding and splintering across the divide of a simile [‘as’] and thrusting Judas into an intra-personal distance which turns him into an enigma and rapidly excises him from his own life. None of the gospels assert that Judas merited death, and no mention either way suggests Jesus is made aware of his friend’s suicide at the time. But in the trespass of deception, in fear and ressentiment that contradicts oneself into a kind of enigmatic homelessness, in the objectification of friends and oneself, in the grabbing-onto of others where integrity disintegrates and one becomes unwell, in the rawness of betrayal, and finally in the internalization of a traumatic contagion – Judas’ life became contradicted and he was unable to recover. For Adam, the bitten apple was the symbol for an objectified world, where he had swallowed a fracture. Adam’s choice excised him in the enigma of his own skin. The enigmatic Judas ultimately excised his own flesh in a way Adam did not. vi) A Tragic Last Meal and a Prediction of Brokenness Judas’ intention to conspire becomes clearer on the day of Unleavened Bread. In a secluded guest room where they are sharing the Passover meal, Jesus speaks of “earnestly desiring to eat this Passover meal with you before I suffer.”161 Herein are the last moments of uninterrupted friendship, with Jesus speaking of dwelling and belonging through thanks for broken bread, the affirmation of a return to relation after suffering, and what first appears to be a cryptic language about giving and pouring body and blood. Through resistance, a new covenant of hope and love, clarity and reconciliation, redemption and renewal is coming, and in this light the division of body and bread, blood and wine, is to be interpreted through the auspices of a living human memory. Jesus’ modeling of an inimitable attestation of memory to a “new covenant of my blood” must have confused and startled his disciples, but not perhaps as much as when Jesus shortly thereafter declares that a betrayal is not only already ushering in his impending death, 161

Luke 22:15.

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but furthermore that “the hand of him who betrays me is with me on the table.”162 The sharing of the simultaneous last meal as the first Eucharist transpires in an air of betrayal through the hand that will grab-onto. In this meal the first attestation to renewal tragically coincides with the brokenness of relation and body. Excess in interpersonal life and relation rises. The disciples turn “to question one another” regarding who would betray Jesus; what is striking in the narrative is how quickly this query directs the disciples into an interpersonal “dispute” or struggle for recognition regarding who is the greatest among the twelve.163 Even at their last intimate meal together, the disciples’ query for the source of betrayal leads without a narrative hitch to a mimetic struggle and toward an inversion of true relation. But if the disciples have learned anything in three years, it is that ‘to follow’ implies service, and Jesus reminds them of this in a personal appeal – “You are those who continued with me in my trials.”164 Where the first are last, the task is not a mimetic struggle for recognition regarding who is best, but a recognition of who serves well even through the daily trials of friendship. Jesus’ appeal stays the inversion and conversation returns once more to a query after betrayal; Peter, however, remains unsatisfied with the abrupt change in course and alters it once more from an interpersonal conversation to an intra-personal confession of allegiance. He announces rather perfunctorily that, even if he is not recognized as best, he certainly would never betray Jesus. But Jesus’ next response identifies interpersonal betrayal for a second time in a single evening. He addresses Peter directly – “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail …” – But as Jesus continues his phraseology renders clear that Peter will indeed fail – “… but when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren.”165 Peter is taken aback and redoubles his efforts in an intra-personal confession by returning the gesture of addressing Jesus directly: Not only will his ‘faith not fail,’ but – “I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” Jesus’ response is personal and immediate – “I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day, until you three times deny that you know me.”166 162

Luke 22:20–1. Luke 22:24–28. 164 Luke 22:28. 165 Luke 22:31. 166 In John 6:67–69. Jesus’ response to Peter is more desperate following Judas’ betrayal – “Do you also wish to go away?” 163

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Jesus’ awareness of rising broken intra- and interpersonal relation is driven to point: Not only will Peter’s faith fail, but he will not once but three times actively deny not merely his faith but that he knows Jesus in any form whatsoever.167 The foreshadowing of intra- and interpersonal abandonment and alienation swiftly overcomes a conversation about recognition and betrayal, and the disciples fall silent. The present meal is hemmed in by the past of a still undisclosed Judas who has already conspired, and by the future of Peter’s explicit denial that will break reciprocity and thrust his relation with Jesus into an enigmatic quagmire. What a tragic happening that at this single, important last meal among friends about a new covenant the conversation includes Jesus’ awareness of two separate betrayals from within the enduring group of friends itself. When the meal is completed, the disciples follow Jesus once more to Mount Olivet.168 vii) A Kiss, a Seizure and Growing Distance “Why do you sleep?” Later on that same night Jesus had been praying only “about a stone’s throw” from his disciples with the simple request beforehand that they stay awake.169 They fall asleep. The foreshadowing of distance and an accompanying growing loneliness go unresolved in these classic accounts, for “while he was still speaking” about remaining wakeful Judas arrives in the garden with “the chief priests and officers of the temple.”170 The paradigmatic clash between what the symbol of the temple has been and what it will become meet in the garden of Gethsemane. Judas arranges beforehand to identify Jesus to the authorities through a kiss; it is a breathtaking ruse of affection out of dead ground where Jesus is the enigmatic other to be seized by the “hand of him who betrays.” Jesus sees the deception for the inversion of value and relation that it is, and his address to Judas is personal and immediate about an accountability in a former reciprocal promise of relation – “Judas, would you betray the Son of man with a kiss?”171 Tension accelerates to excess and one of the disciples strikes with a sword, piercing and excising the ear of “the slave of the high priest.” Jesus rejects the disciple’s act of excision – “No more of this!” – as an adequate form of

167 168 169 170 171

Luke 22:31–34. Luke 22:39. Luke 22:40–45. Luke 22:47. Luke 22:48.

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resistance, but he simultaneously turns and resists the “gathering crowd” before him by holding them to the same standard contra excision – “Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs?” They may not excise him into negative transcendence now, but excess has finally manifested in broken reciprocity, a serious threat to well-being, and a growing spectacle. “I was with you day after day in the temple,” Jesus states, yet “you did not lay hands on me.”172 “Then they seized him and led him away.” In the Kampf for recognition, Jesus is grabbed-onto and taken into the distance “into the high priest’s house.” “Peter followed at a distance,” already struggling in the dialectic between dwelling and belonging in relation. The struggle does not endure long, for even in Peter’s first denial around a fire-circle outside, Jesus’ prediction is sealed – “Woman, I do not know him.”173 Peter’s awareness of hiding and not being there in friendship is exposed with crowing; the burden of the traumatic events of the previous evening degenerates into a contagion that saturates him until he objectifies both himself and his closest relation. Peter knows that he has contradicted his life in exhibiting the opposite of the allegiance he confessed only hours before; that for which he hoped in interpersonal relation is first dashed by fear and a betrayal of his own intra-personal convictions. His hiding and denial bring not only self-betrayal but broken relation and alienation away from dwelling and belonging altogether where thereafter he is homeless in distance – “and he went out and wept bitterly.”174 From this time forward scant mention is made of the other disciples, except to say that deception through the ruse of affection, the laying-on of hands by the politico-religious authorities, and the respective treks of Jesus, Peter, and Judas into distance away from well-being are all due to an encounter with an excessive and raw trespass that is crossing intra-personal, interpersonal and institutional human life and relation. viii) Interrogation – Chief Priests, Pilate, Herod Through the night Jesus is interrogated, “mocked, beaten, blindfolded,” and then told to “prophesy! Who is it that struck you?”175 Fear and 172

Luke 22:49–53. Luke 22:57. “Then a maid, seeing him as he sat in the light and gazing at him, said, ‘This man also was with him.’ But he denied it, saying, ‘Woman, I do not know him.’ ” 174 Luke 22:62. 175 Luke 22:63–64. 173

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ressentiment exceed into humiliation, disorientation, and torture. Jesus is in fact already positioned in the distance of a cruel trespass “when the day came … “and they led him away” to a council of both “chief priests and scribes” from the temple. The paradigmatic clash of the symbol of the temple continues in the interrogation: “If you are the Christ, tell us.” But ressentiment operates on the fulcrum of deception. The values of human well-being are contradicted, the art of hearing and speaking are transvalued, and violent excess breaks in so that “If I tell you, you will not believe, and if I ask you, you will not answer.”176 Ressentiment in the ruse of deception will never truly speak or hear. Jesus does not relent to “what they do,” but rather resists the ones who trespass and harm him. “Are you the Son of God?” Fear and ressentiment give way to the enigmatic and excision. Jesus bypasses their attempt to impugn him and levels a response against their contradiction of reciprocity, of human well-being altogether. He asks them to hear what they are speaking: “You say that I am.” The “furrowed scowl” of Cain must not eternally recur against the prophet, Abel. But accusation and impugnation – and never true understanding – is the aim of an interrogation. They do not hear but crouch – “What further testimony do we need? We have heard it ourselves from his own lips.”177 What Jesus spoke to was an attestation of resistance, but through their ressentiment and deception what they heard transforms Jesus’ attestation into his own self-condemnation. “Then the whole company of them arose, and brought him before Pilate.” The three accusations are made clear – “We found this man perverting our nation, forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar, and saying that he himself is Christ a king.” Perversion of local Jewish custom is an internal issue, but the accusation of forbidding tribute to Caesar and claiming kingship is a more serious matter – “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asks. Jesus’ response is identical to the one given to the earlier inquiry as to whether he was Christ – “You have said so.” It is mystification and not ressentiment, local rivalry and not state criminality, that Pilate hears in Jesus’ attestation – “I find no crime in this man.” The chief priests and scribes “were urgent” persisting that Jesus is more than a public nuisance – “He stirs up the people, teaching throughout all Judea, from Galilee even to this place.” Relieved to have those before him go away, and upon learning that “the man was a 176 177

Luke 22:67–69. Luke 22:71.

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Galilean” and “belonged to Herod’s jurisdiction, [Pilate] sent him over to Herod who was himself in Jerusalem at that time.”178 When Jesus stands before Herod he is already a spectacle. Three years before Herod wondered who Jesus was “about whom I hear such things;” and yet, the Jesus he “had long desired to see” was not Jesus the prophet, but Jesus the performer. Herod was “hoping to see some sign done by him.” It was Herod who beheaded and excised a prophet, John, so Jesus’ reaction to Herod’s questioning “at some length” is not surprisingly met with silence. Jesus resists his own abstraction into the object of a spectacle by refusing to perform. In an earlier reference to John, Jesus had asked about “the men of this generation… like children sitting in the market place and calling… ‘We piped to you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep.”179 Whereas John fasted and was rumored to have a demon, Jesus ate and drank and was rumored to be a glutton and a drunk. Either way, when one is objectified and abstracted then one becomes a spectacle even without consent. Throughout, “the chief priests and the scribes stood by, vehemently accusing him,” but Jesus remains silent. Herod grows weary and “with his soldiers treated him with contempt and mocked him.” If he refuses to perform at least he cannot refuse the attire of a performer. Jesus is adorned a king replete with a ridiculous and painful coronating crown. The thistles pierce his scalp, excise his flesh, and he is dispatched once again to Pilate. Jesus is returned to Pilate, and the latter tells “the chief priest and the rulers of the people” that neither he, nor Herod, “find this man guilty of any of our charges against him.” Jesus is an enigmatic spectacle, but there is nothing in him deserving of excision and negative transcendence into death. The official status and opinion of both Pilate and Herod are irrelevant. Pilate then attempts twice more to procure Jesus’ release. He first tries coercion, offering them a choice between the murderer Barab’bas and Jesus. They choose Barab’bas. Pilate next suggests a compromise. “I have found in him no crime deserving death; I will therefore chastise and release him.” But “voices prevailed” to “crucify him!” Pilate grants the request, releases Barab’bas, and delivers Jesus to the chief priests and local rulers of the people to be taken to Golgotha and executed. If at no other time, then it is here, when

178 179

Luke 23:2–7. Luke 7:31–5; Matthew 11:17–19.

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Pilot releases Jesus, that the institution has abandoned another human being to a rising spectacle, injustice, and death. ix) The Sentence of Death and the Public Execution of Jesus That you may know what the people meant when they said, “Crucify Him!” I must tell you that in those times, which were very cruel times indeed (let us thank God and Jesus Christ that they are past!) it was the custom to kill people who were sentenced to death. …180

The unfolding events are attested to swiftly in the gospels, whereas to prolong their telling is to mystify and even find delight in the historical spectacle itself. There is nothing remotely delightful about the public execution of a human being, unless one is fascinated by the skin of abstraction that conceals the human who is being excised instead. Jesus and two others ascend the slope together. Due to the scourging, depletion of nourishment, and lack of rest, Jesus grows weak. Simon of Cyre’ne is made to carry the cross behind Jesus. Along the way, Jesus struggles to speak to his loved ones and when he does he offers a prophetic lamentation for the present and the future. The crowd arrives at Golgotha, a site for city refuse and the administration of public executions. Jesus is pierced and excised; nails puncture his hands and feet. His objectified, abstracted, and abandoned status as a spectacle is exemplified in the mocking plaque – ‘King of the Jews’ – that hangs above him. The synoptic gospels recount the final scenes of Jesus’ life, public ministry, and death through different hues. Excess is difficult to delineate in a single narrative, but the stereoscopic depictions of Jesus’ final moments from the gospels of Mark and Luke offer nuance and reveal two distinct Christian communities struggling to come to terms with the cruelty that encounters their leader at the end of his existence. First, the gospel of Mark recounts Jesus emptied and alone. Job had stormed the gates of heaven, that existentiell horizon, and asked God why He had become cruel to him. Jesus’ question is analogous, and marks the final moments of the voiceless descending into fracture: “Why have you abandoned me?” As with Job, Jesus’ cry contra abandonment is a horizontal score across the institutional, interpersonal, and intra-personal spheres, in the descent of the powerless and the

180 Charles Dickens, The Life of Our Lord, (New York: Simon and Schuster, First Printing, 1934), 109.

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final plea not to die in isolation.181 But Jesus’ cry is also a vertical ascent from the existential question to the existentiell horizon, where Jesus becomes the Question himself. Job received a lesson in geology, but in Mark Jesus meets silence in death instead. In the gospel of Luke, there is also a vertical ascent from the existential to the existentiell horizon, but this time Jesus does not become the Question himself. Instead, the silence is lifted, and Jesus petitions the Father for the sake of those who are killing him, even for the sake of the world. In Luke, Jesus does not die as the Question, but casts a net on humankind and draws these up before the gaze of the divine. Jesus utters his petition that the Father forgive the tormenters in spite of their excessive intra- and interpersonal trespass. Jesus’ petition is for the father to forgive what is done. But the Father is likewise to forgive that which even the perpetrators are unaware regarding their own actions. That is to say, in his petition ‘what is done’ is so fully contradictory and inexplicable to human well-being that Jesus identifies how the act of his own execution exceeds even the epistemic awareness of its perpetrators who ‘do not know what they are doing.’ Jesus’ petition for forgiveness is fundamentally about the complex and multifarious aspects of reconciling a relation through and after excess. Jesus hopes that the Father will forgive his perpetrators for what they have done, their awareness of this act, and their ignorance – ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do.’ Knowledge and ignorance chafe into excessive intent and act that is a contradiction to human well-being. Jesus’ petition for forgiveness is a single hope thrust upward and outward from within the heart of this inexplicable ugliness, from the center of a descent into fracture. Thereafter, Jesus’ garments are divided and gambled for, dispersing the memory of a man not yet dead.182 The crowd stands “watching” the spectacle as the rulers and one of the men hanging next to him chide him for not saving himself. Jesus is offered vinegar on a sponge, he speaks to the other man hanging beside him and assures him of meeting in paradise even as they both sink into negative transcendence and death.183 The “sun’s light fails” in the late-afternoon and the sky

181 Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, (New York: Random House, 2003), 42. “At the desolate scene of the crucifixion, Mark tells how Jesus cried out that God had abandoned him, uttered a final, inarticulate cry, and died. …” 182 Luke 23:35. 183 Luke 22:41.

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darkens. The narrative attests that “the curtain of the temple was torn in two,” signifying the new cornerstone fully descending into fracture and death, where the piercing of existence drives Jesus beyond the enigmatic and into his own negative transcendence. Like Abel, Jesus will also be swallowed up in fracture and the ugliness of cruelty. The last possibility for Jesus is to commend his spirit into his Father’s hands, which he does. If a centurion or two thereafter break the illusion of the spectacle by proclaiming – “this man was innocent!” – they nevertheless remain in the “distance” with “all of his [Jesus’] acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee.” Silence after a public execution is not reflective, but rather vacuous and traumatic. There can be no doubt that some who where present that day heard the pounding of a hammer for years afterward. This narrative of a cruel excess that runs through brutal violence and ends in death also ends with distance. The loss, abandonment, and pain of an execution is an excess to which no “rock-hewn tomb” can ever bring solace. Only Joseph from Arimathe’a could offer this forlorn landscape a small comfort by petitioning Pilate to give him Jesus’ body. Joseph had likely seen the cruel ills all along because he was a voting member of the council, although he did not consent to the execution. He saved the body from a common grave and placed it in his own personal tomb. Even death needs a place to rest for a man “looking for the kingdom of God.”184 F) Remarks for Transition – On This Side of a Narrative Lacuna Chapter four investigated the artery of injustice within the institutional sphere. This chapter had five aims: First, theologians have been concerned with why justice is an issue of concern for human beings. The issue of justice underlies all of our later constructions of institutional justice. We assessed four theologians who respectively write of our first approach to justice as a “sketch, sense, spirit of, or first principle.” We discovered that the issue of justice is a serious concern for us when we hear the cry of its opposite – “Unjust!” from our fellow human beings. We assessed how the cry of

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injustice and the response of justice rise from the same deep-structure content that informs both the cry and the response. What we discovered is that this deep-structure content is in fact expressed negatively as the human need not to be abandoned in the world. When all later developments of justice forget the deep-structure content of the human need not to be abandoned, then justice becomes something other than it claims to be. We reached a moniker of justice that is identical with both the cry of injustice and the response of justice. This moniker of justice was negatively expressed as the human need against abandonment. Our second aim was to assess cruelty in the institutional sphere. However, rather than investigate institutional justice first, we remained with a view to the attestations of singular and collective humanity who are voicing the cry against abandonment. We took the side of those being abandoned, first. We assessed how cruelty in the institutional sphere likewise affects the other two spheres of human existence. Insofar as institutional cruelty is so disruptive, we referred to its impact on human existence as a kind of “death zone” across all spheres. First, following scholarship, we saw how cruelty produces a death zone of “irrationality” and has concrete, spatial, political, and economic impacts on human life, all of which lead to abandoning our fellow human beings. Violence attributable to cruelty reveals how abandonment can transpire even when we say we act for the sake of justice. Second, we saw how cruelty is likewise a death zone in our return to the etymological study of chapter one. The term, trucido, revealed how cruel trespass transvalues human existence. Death zones are ugly and cruel because they are irrational, tragic, and inexplicable to well-being, to life itself. Cruelty at the institutional sphere is as a fracture that can simultaneously harm and even annihilate well-being in every sphere, as a death zone. Our third aim was an extension of the second aim. We revealed how, given that all three spheres are violated when cruelty erupts, we could refer to cruelty as an encounter within human life. The heuristic device of fracture was further employed. Cruelty encounters life as a fracture, splintering across and through care, respect, justice, and integrity. In the encounter of this fracture in human life, we may reduce and exceed ourselves and others in interpersonal and institutional forms that fail our common humanity. Cruelty encounters us as a contradiction that transvalues all we first hoped for in the world. As an encounter with ugliness, cruelty retains the potential of shaking human life at its

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foundation. Cruelty may rise from within us, our relationships, and our institutions. The encounter of cruelty in human life can unmake and disfigure the world through terrible ugliness. The fourth aim was to reveal how the encounter of cruelty affects the human subject within the institutional sphere, and indeed all three spheres. The author worked with a team of attorneys for the sake of appealing death-penalty cases in North Carolina. One case in particular exhibited cruelty that violated all three spheres. David Jr. Ward was executed on October 13, 2001. One need not impugn the entire judicial system to see that the machinations of cruelty assisted in ending David’s life. Thirteen volumes of the case transcripts were assessed. The five contours of cruelty, in particular the enigmatic, excision, and ressentiment, were revealed as operative in David’s trial. The institution had abandoned David, an injustice that went unresolved through nine years of the post-conviction appellate process. The fifth aim was like the fourth. Cruelty was located in the life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth. The assessment of David’s trial, appeal, and execution were based on attestations from experience and court transcripts. The life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth was based on our classic texts from the gospels. These two events were meant to be correlative to the extent that cruelty is a death zone at the institutional sphere that encounters, harms, and can even annihilate well-being in all three spheres of human existence. Furthermore, cruelty in human life is a disfiguring ugliness that appears similar, whether yesterday or two thousand years ago. No other correlations between David’s life and that of Jesus were suggested, nor should they be. To do so would have been to disrespect the singular human subject, provisionalize his suffering, and draw analogies that confuse more than clarify. In chapter one, we stated that cruelty comes from within human existence, and has a potential of transvaluing everyone it encounters. These are the things we looked for in the two distinct accounts of public execution. The life and public execution of Jesus of Nazareth were assessed. We searched for the imprint of tragic existence and the contours of cruelty primarily in the gospel of Luke, with reference as well to the other Synoptic gospels. What we discovered is how cruelty encounters Jesus’ life, the lives of his disciples, his experiences in Jerusalem, and ultimately in his public execution at the cross. Jesus’ parables and conversations revealed a resistance against cruelty. At the gospel crescendo of interpersonal reciprocal relation, Jesus made clear that we should

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“Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel [έphreazÓntwn] to you.” Why pray for the cruel? First, in Luke, praying provides a model exhibited foremost by “God in heaven … [who] is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel [ponhroύV].” Second, in Matthew, through praying for those who persecute you, “you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes the sun rise on the cruel [ponhroύV] and on the good.” Finally, the epilogue does not move us immediately to the resurrection account. What is suggested is a resistance of too easy a coherence of theories of atonement on the far side of death that may provisionalize human suffering and conceal cruelty in the world. The epilogue concludes this study with threads of theological possibility for a beginning discourse toward reconciliation through and after cruelty’s advance in human life and relation. In short, the epilogue will identify several tenets for consideration that should be taken into account by any adequate public theology of reconciliation through and after cruelty. These tenets offer a trajectory out, and do not represent a coherent argument, which awaits a substantial intellectual effort in its own right.

EPILOGUE

A DISPATCH Consideration of Some Tenets for Reconciliation Blessed is the man that loves Thee, O God, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses no one that is dear to him, if all are dear in God, who is never lost. – Augustine, Confessions 4.9

A) Introduction – Reviewing the Project Our telos from the start has been an archeological and genealogical consideration and construction of a relatively adequate phenomenology of the encounter of cruelty in human existence. Our method has been a hermeneutic charting that created a dialogue between four spheres of interest: the attestations of human experience, the history of the concept in our classic literature, the plurivocity of perspectives from complementary fields of interest, and praxis.1 From the start, both our telos and our method have been an exercise in public theology, a theology which uses all of the resources at its disposal to think upon, correlate, and construct a relatively adequate approximation of human life and relation. The challenge of identifying and constructing an awareness of cruelty in all three spheres of human existence – intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional – has been the project of this study. The first four chapters plumbed the depths of cruelty within these spheres. If this challenge has been adequately localized and identified, then the next several steps require public theologians to consider the development of certain approaches in reconciliation that both discourage cruelty’s advance, and likewise enhance various forms of liberation or 1 Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, (London: Verso, 1993), 21; see also, David Tracy, Analogical Imagination, and Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974); see also, Emmanuel Levinas, Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 201–207.

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redemption from cruelty in human life. This said, two further points must be made, which are pertinent to cross-cultural realities and the constraints upon reconciliation in this study. First, as I noted earlier, Encountering Cruelty is principally an archeological and genealogical exploration of cruelty, inasmuch as this kind of spadework has not been previously undertaken theologically, and only recently in philosophy. As with any archeological dig, focus is relative to a specific site, where the layers of life and culture are imprinted and textured on the earthen walls of a specific context. The site chosen for Encountering Cruelty has been within the parameters of Western thought, specifically in its nineteenth and twentieth-century layers. And beyond that, the encounter within the temporal layer of Western philosophy and Christian theology. Consequently, there has been a somewhat monocultural or mono-civilizational tone to the work. And yet, without taking this topos seriously at the site of its first philosophically cognizant appearing in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, there could not have been any materially recognizable intercultural encounter with other sites. A sincere hope is that the reader sees avenues, trajectories, and in general horizons for now identifying (and expanding) awareness of cruelty particular to a given cultural context. Such spadework remains the condition of possibility for intercultural approximation, and yet provides only the beginning to an informed conversation that requires the voices of multitudes. Second, from the introduction onward, I argued that we can work toward the possibility of reconciliation only after we are aware of how cruelty is present in human life. Indeed, throughout Encountering Cruelty, significant reference was made to the practical possibility of reconciliation in, through and after the encounter of cruelty in the world. From the beginning, I emphasized that any reference to reconciliation in this study included a recognition of the following: Reconciliation is in and of itself a term freighted with cultural complexity, so it is essential for any substantial trajectory of reconciliation to be both aware of cross-cultural constants and deeply inclusive of unique cultural features in relation to the entire enterprise of reconciling activity in the world. I will provide reference in the tenets below for some cultural markers that require further exploration. The implications of reconciliation in relation to cruelty reach beyond Christian theology to a broader discussion today about the nature of reconciliation across culture and religion. A thick approximation of the structures of reconciliation in relation to cruelty will require efforts that

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expand beyond this Epilogue, as a kind of dispatch to the public square. Finally, even though the thorough advancement of reconciliation in light of cruelty exceeds the limits of our investigation, it is now possible to identify several items or tenets for consideration that should be taken into account by public theologians who seek reconciliation in light of cruelty, once having understood the machinations of cruelty in human life and relation. The epilogue will identify, even though tertiary in scope, several of these items or tenets that merit further consideration. Absent the possibility of describing at this time specific intercultural encounters of cruelty with attendant possibilities for reconciliation, what will be most useful is to indicate cross-cultural horizons in the possibility of reconciliation for specific quadrants of the world. As I noted in the introduction, by “cross-cultural” I mean to signify those commonalities that arise among cultural configurations, which provide points of comparison and suggest to the reader a trajectory for deeper insights into the phenomena under study. This study concentrated on the cross-cultural horizons as a stimulus both to understanding instances of cruelty and to reflecting upon what can be discerned as common dynamics of cruelty across cultural boundaries. The Epilogue opens a possibility for later serious assessment of cross-cultural horizons in light of the common features of reconciliation drawn from within the dynamics of cruelty. B) A Dispatch – Consideration of some Tenets for Reconciliation Does anyone really wish that Luther, instead of simply stating, “Here I stand; I can do no other,” had added sotto voce, “But if it really bothers you, I will move”? Any pluralist who cannot learn from Luther’s classic interpretation of Christianity can hardly learn from any interpretation of religion at all.2

The aim of the epilogue is to address the kernel of the following query – “In, through and after an encounter with cruelty in our lives, what are helpful tenets for any public theology of reconciliation?” Our tenets for consideration toward reconciliation are rendered from within our

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Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, 91.

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identification and awareness throughout the first four chapters of cruelty in human life and relation. That is, the following series of tenets are indigenous to (i.e., already within our identification of) the fracture of cruelty in human life and relation. i) First Tenet: Reconciliation rises from an awareness of cruelty The first guiding tenet to any public theology of reconciliation through and after cruelty is that both our account of the fracture of cruelty, and the possibility for its reconciliation, must rise from the same awareness of human identity, and of our current historical ontology of ourselves – of ‘Knowing Ourselves.’ Beginning with the Delphic Apollo “Know Thyself,” the first four chapters approximated who and how we are in the intra-personal, interpersonal, and institutional spheres of human existence. In light of these spheres, we examined cruelty as an irrational, inexplicable and tragic excess that disfigures human existence and renders us ugly. Reconciliation must rise from a clear awareness of what cruelty is within us, and how we are rendered ugly by it. Culturally specific assessments of cruelty – from Taliban pressure on local communities in the Peshawar province of Pakistan to the forced removal of Cherokee Indians in the southern United States – will require fresh archeological explorations and genealogical delineations of cruelty. The cross-cultural constant in the heuristic of fractureartery-contour offer tools for digging, but each cultural ground will be, and must be seen as, rendering distinct contributions to reconciliation in, through and after the encounter of cruelty. More to the point, although the heuristic optic will reveal cross-cultural constants in the irrationality and inexplicability of cruelty, disfigurement will be distinct to the memory, narrative and truth of each culture. The practical possibility of reconciliation rises from the archeological sites of those specific contexts, as it must, just as any investigation of forgiveness (and the unforgivable) will likewise begin in the contextually specific locus of our inquiry from the beginning of Encountering Cruelty – What was done there? Who are they that did this? And what do we do now? ii) Second Tenet: Reconciliation treats cruelty first as a distinct topos The second guiding tenet labors in the supposition that reconciliation through and after cruelty is not transferable as a quasi-Ideal of Redemption to the constellation of sin and evil. We are not after the

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Ideal of Reconciliation, but the practical possibility of its true idea. We noted earlier that cruelty is distinct albeit not necessarily separable from a non-teleological account of sin and evil. Insofar as cruelty is distinct, reconciliation through and after cruelty is also initially and necessarily distinct as a response to cruelty. Thus, as we noted all along, we are not dismissing these topoi of sin and evil, or redemption in light of sin and evil. We are however noting that we have located another topos (i.e., cruelty) that requires a distinct accounting of reconciliation, just as the topos itself is distinct. The location of a distinct topos is no easy endeavor. For instance, the genealogy of cruelty in the Balkans is so complex – even from the First Balkan War in 1912 to the wars between members of former Yugoslavia – that no single originating site external to an anthropological assessment of cruelty would be acceptable, or perhaps even necessary. Serious awareness of the topos of cruelty does not require an originating point internal to culture. What is required is a gathering consensus on how the topos of cruelty is located in the separable radiating points within the constellation of memories and cultural narratives that attest to cruelties within local communities. Likewise, within this tenet an equal requirement is ‘openness’ to new features of reconciliation drawn from within episodic cruelties relative to these culturally radiating points. These would be new features of reconciliation that we did not consider prior to looking the disfiguring reality of cruelty in the face. iii) Third Tenet: Reconciliation does not provisionalize suffering or conceal cruelty The third guiding tenet is drawn as well from the first two tenets and the supposition therein that reconciliation through and after cruelty is distinct in its inability to become the rational representation of a new shining Ideal with a beginning-middle-end to cruelty in our lives. Reconciliation can never first assume a pre-established solution to cruelty, for were it to do so, then it would have forgotten how cruelty is always concealed precisely underneath teleologies that recast life in the sublime, and consequently provisionalize human suffering and conceal cruelty in our midst. Cruelty is never so easily or quickly thwarted by the advance of a rationale to reconcile cruelty in human life through a predetermined enclosed solution. When rationality does advance in this way, then reconciliation that conceals yesterday’s cruelties becomes the unwilling handmaiden of human trespass tomorrow.

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To state that reconciliation of cruelty is not a pre-established enclosed solution is in no way to suggest any arguments for an anemic form of reconciliation. Reconciliation is not reducible to a psychobiological trauma or emergency room surgery, only patching wounds and setting broken bones. To the contrary, arguments for reconciliation must be courageous in exhibiting and seeking what is necessary in order to dress present wounds, and resist future injuries and tomorrow’s fractures. Stated positively, reconciliation through and after cruelty must finally seek healing, transformation, and renewal, but these will remain open-ended in how healing takes time, open to wonder and awe at the often tumultuous daily advent of transformation, and open in seeking renewal without provisionalizing the human attestations to suffering or concealing past, present, and future cruelties. Culturally and religiously specific contributions abound in consideration of how one interprets both the nature of suffering, and its possible alleviation. The noble eight-fold path for attending to personal and communal suffering, and attendant notions of the relation between suffering and moderation, craving, and the transitory nature of pain, are specific cultural stamps relative to Buddhism. An array of religio-cultural stamps such as these will deepen any consideration of both suffering and commensurate qualities of reconciliation. Thus, within the third tenet is the presupposition that suffering will risk less provisionalization when it is considered in the daylight of cultural narrative truths. Like suffering, reconciliation does not initially originate in any way external to cruelty. Instead, the possibility of reconciliation rises from within, through, and after this excessive and disfigurative ugliness in human life. Reconciliation begins inside of cruelty. In a likeminded manner, the experience of the fracture of human trauma is never wholly done away with by reconciliation, and thus remains in the identity or landscape of the one who has been fractured. But this is a necessary advantage for the one who becomes aware of cruelty, resists it in the development of new coping-mechanisms, reorients the art of wellbeing that transcends coping, and ultimately hopes beyond the perpetuated ugliness of cruelty that disfigures human life and relation. iv) Fourth Tenet: Reconciliation is possible given an aesthetics of human ugliness Throughout this study, cruelty was identified as an ugliness in human life and relation. This ugliness was viewable as a phenomenological

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fracture, with arteries and contours that assisted us in locating cruelty for how it disfigures human life. The heuristic of fracture-arterycontour offered the heuristic optic for identifying the dynamic and excessive reality of cruelty in human life. By ‘reality,’ we meant that cruelty in human life exudes a kind of internal and ugly aesthetics (i.e., art or craft) that is complex and contoured, just as a fracture is complex and contoured. The aesthetics of the phenomena of cruelty included the following: Cruelty becomes concealed underneath teleologies; struggle can exceed into an irresolvable Kampf ; trauma can be internalized as a contagion; the enigmatic may transvalue fellows into strangers and enemies; excision is signified in how humans are harmed and even annihilated; finally, ressentiment transpires within the fulcrum of deception. All of the above are part and parcel to the ugliness of the phenomena of cruelty as a fracture in human life. We furthermore identified how intra-personal life can exceed into self-objectification, how interpersonal recognition can dissolve through destructive desire, and how institutional justice can be thwarted by revenge cloaked as justice that abandons fellow human beings. These above features likewise assisted our location of the phenomena of cruelty as an ugliness in human life. What we have shown through our assessment is that cruelty is never passive or stagnant, neither in its encounter within human life, nor in how it fractures the human heart. But insofar as cruelty is as a fracture, or fault line in human existence, it has a way of rising and falling in human life and in specific contexts with very little warning or awareness. In our first pass at clarifying what we meant by “phenomena of cruelty,” we were drawn to a more specific way of discussing cruelty as an “aesthetics of ugliness.” We learned that the term “aesthetics” is usually employed in the appreciation of beauty, where certain features coalesce and render a painting “beautiful”, for instance. When these features coalesce then we find an object aesthetically pleasing. That is, features coalesce that produce in us a sense of pleasure. Cruelty as a human ugliness also has an aesthetic value. An aesthetics of cruelty is where certain features coalesce that render life ugly: Distortion, disfiguration, scarring, defacement, trauma, mutilation, and excision – these are all non-exhaustive yet part and parcel to an aesthetics of cruelty that render life ugly. An aesthetics of ugliness is that coalescence of features that reveal cruelty in human life. The aesthetics of human cruelty is where we are attentive to features in human life that coalesce and render us ugly.

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An aesthetics of ugliness enabled us to see cruelty in its true presencing – an irrationality that can be systematically planned, a tragic moment concealed in the performance of tragedy, a source of intergenerational denial, and ultimately an ugliness well-hidden in a sublime beauty. Cruelty as an “aesthetics of ugliness” signified for us how the complex fracture of cruelty was likewise not wholly unpredictable. In terms of reconciliation, this last point means that, as an art or craft, cruelty can be foreseeable, predictable, and even preventable in human life. Insofar as cruelty has the possibility of being foreseen, predicted, and prevented, then cruelty can also be named, resisted, and has the possibility of being reconciled in us. But what is the distinct nature of the possibility for reconciliation within an aesthetics of human ugliness? This is the question germane to our fourth tenet. If reconciliation is possible within cruelty as an aesthetics of human ugliness, then public theologians will be required to demonstrate this possibility. The seeds of this possibility are already firmly situated in the narratives that were investigated within the first four chapters of this study. The connecting-points of our classic narratives are where their meaning reaches a surplus that spills over and into our lives. In this way, specific accounts of reconciliation in our classic narratives are also germane to our reconciliation today. Where did reconciliation transpire for Adam, Cain, Abel, Isaac, and Job? Adam learned the truth of transvaluing the world and his existence into a mundane object, of shame and enigmatic homelessness, and of excision from his former dwelling. But Adam and Eve both lived to sweat and plow a field in a new dwelling outside of Eden. Cain murdered his brother, was the same narcissist at the end of the story as he was in the beginning, and ultimately became an enigmatic fugitive, expulsed from any proximity to Eden and into the distant land of Nod. Still, even as a fugitive, Cain was permitted to leave, although the fracture that swallowed Abel remained the ground of Cain’s unresolved state. Isaac was objectified and almost excised by the traumatic event of his father’s near murder of the son. But Isaac did survive to climb off the sacrificial rock, redeemed as the promise of future generations. That Adam and Eve learned to till, Cain escaped to Nod, and Isaac was reestablished as the icon of promise, represent only a certain and partial beginning of the aforementioned narrative reconciliation that spills over into our lives today. In terms of reconciliation, these narratives are classic for us insofar as they reveal a deeper possibility of reconciliation in the lives of listeners and readers. When we lean in and

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assess these narratives, then the possibility of reconciliation in our lives is apparent in light of the aesthetics of ugliness that each of these figures endures. Consider Isaac: Isaac was reestablished as the promise of future generations, but the conceptual moorings of ‘promise’ could be tempered in the traumatic memory of having been harmed by his father, where obedience exceeded into cruelty and disfigured his bearing on the world. Obedience can exceed into cruelty. Where is reconciliation present for Isaac, and for us? The possibility for reconciliation is evident in Isaac’s hope to endure, and to have his father reaffirm the fidelity of their relationship. Even though the relationship with his father is harmed, the advent of reconciliation would be evident in Isaac’s ability to reshape his dwelling, to heal enough so that the trauma is no longer a contagion, to reclaim a form of well-being, and to learn how to revalue the idea of “promise” that had been transvalued from former trust. If Isaac does not learn to revalue trust and “promise”, then the aesthetics of this pattern of cruelty can become a contagion, refined and repeated in his adult relationships. Even those closest to Isaac will, albeit unwittingly perhaps even to Isaac, contend with Isaac’s inability to redefine his place in the fidelity of human commitments. Would examples of contemporary domestic abuse be much different, for the daughter who, having been abused by her father, lives in a home quite different from a place she might desire to dwell-in? She will have to discern what happened to her, relearn and reshape the art of dwelling, and revalue her understanding of being at ‘home,’ or she will remain somehow homeless in her adult life. Consider also Job: Job endured cruelty, which he named through his experience of neglect, abstraction, and objectification. Excessive struggle, the traumatic shock of losing everything he loved and valued in a single day, ressentiment endured by friends and his wife, and social excision, all assisted in transvaluing Job’s well-being into the enigmatic; Job became a stranger and enemy to others as a “byword,” and to himself in his attestation, “I despise myself.” In the midst of the ugliness he endured, Job still hoped for justice in a divine accounting of his life disfigured around him. In the narrative, the possibility of reconciliation was already evident in Job’s untrammeled hope. In dust and ashes, Job repented, having somehow located an advent of renewal. Afterward, Job relearned the art of well-being and of revaluing the nature of trust. Trust may come in small narrative increments, relying upon the counsel of friends in tempered ways. As we know from history and our

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contemporary world, Job’s story is neither unique nor unrepeated and unrefined today. Objectification, poverty, hunger, abandonment, disease and war that destroy families only appear farther off when we live in a powerful country with relative security. Even then, classism and poverty are never as far off as we might suppose when national catastrophes shine a light on how we have abandoned our fellow human beings. In truth, millions of people in the world ask Job’s question with a similar grit. For Adam, Isaac, the abused daughter, Job, or the victims of catastrophe, the possibility of reconciliation will begin in the midst of the aesthetics of ugliness first, and the imprint of this ugliness will remain in the identity or landscape of those seeking reconciliation. We can observe this truth in our narrative accounts above. Key criteria appear to rise within our assessment of these narratives, even as they did throughout the four chapters of our present work. These criteria for reconciliation include personal discernment, relearning and reshaping the art of dwelling, and revaluing what has been transvalued. These criteria appear similar in the possibility of reconciliation within our daily lives. The fractures of former cruelties remain, but we may discern what has happened to us, relearn and reshape well-being, revalue what has become disfigured, and reposition dwelling in the world. Through every hue of denial we can only cosmetically or forensically conceal our experiences of cruelty in the world. Experiences of cruelty are as fractures within us when they are internalized, and have even become part of the landscape of our respective identities. The first advent of the possibility for reconciliation is our awareness of where these fractures depress the landscape of who we have become in the world. Awareness is already the dawning of reconciliation with respect to the transvaluative nature of these fractures. The labor of our own reconciliation within ourselves and with other human beings will rise from what we endured, and in what we learned again to revalue in the experience of an aesthetics of ugliness. Our fourth tenet to public theologians who treat reconciliation through and after cruelty, is that reconciliation is possible even in the midst of cruelty (i.e., an aesthetics of ugliness in human life). This said, given our account of cruelty in human life, we must also grapple with accounts of suffering and cruelty where reconciliation does not apparently transpire in the narratives throughout this study. We know of such accounts from chapter one where our tragic sense of existence will not gloss over these other accounts. For instance, Job’s children

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never return from the dead, Abel’s body remains swallowed by a fracture in an open field, and Canaanite families are slaughtered. Consider also what we learned in the fourth chapter: Both David Jr. Ward and Dorothy Mae Smith are excised into negative transcendence and death, Judas does hang himself from a length of rope, and Jesus is executed on a cross. These examples reveal for us that any cross-cultural assessment of the semantics of reconciliation in the midst of cruelty must also be ready for narrative endings that never resolve well. Not to do so would risk misaligning our shared tragic sense in human existence, and ultimately misalign the nature of reconciliation. In further terms of a cross-cultural assessment of an aesthetics of ugliness, we may often begin with no clear sense of the nature of sustainable reconciliation at all. Augustine knew this to be true in the death of his friend, and he identified such loss with enigmatic homelessness. On the other hand, the Ecclesiastian response that “there is a season for all things,” can for some become a cold comfort in light of irretrievable human homelessness and death. This latter response may produce the perception of vaulting over the tragic sense of death. Where culturally specific narratives about the disfiguring excess of cruelty are recounted, any comparative aesthetics must never provisionalize suffering, and likewise never vault over the tragic sense within cruelty. To provisionalize and vault in this way is to fail to understand the nature of how death also may teach us about hope, and precisely in deepest loss in life. Furthermore, a culturally comparative aesthetics of ugliness, along with the tragic, must fundamentally begin with the desire to hear the memory, narrative and truths of each cultural context, as these are embodied in the human beings who represent these features. The common marker of disfigurement in any comparative aesthetics will necessarily be borne out in the culture’s own self-articulation. A cross-cultural comparative aesthetics must thus begin at the shared intersection of tragic disfigurement and excess, yet in specific relation to the dailiness of cultural self-understanding. Jesus was executed, and his followers did not have a clear idea of an alternative ending to their friend’s life at that time. With all of our unique differences in tow, if cultures desire to understand the gospel hope of resurrection in this world, then we must endure with one another in empathic attestation to tragic disfigurement and death symbolically aligned to that dark lonely weekend in the narrative, and not alternatively in the pre-established resurrection hope of “Good Friday.” In situations of conflict lasting reconciliation must rise from

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our shared attestations to disfigurement, or not at all. If we can help it, we should not miss the stories before us, as Jesus’ followers did that lonely weekend. They could not conceive of reconciliation even as it accompanied them along the road; such an expectation was fully contradictory to any advent of possibility on that lonely weekend. v) Fifth Tenet: Reconciliation will exude Christological Veracity Our fifth and final tenet that must be evident in any adequate accounting of reconciliation by public theologians through and after cruelty, concerns the Christological veracity of reconciliation with respect to human life and death. Christological veracity, in accord with both Scripture and living cultural tradition, is at the center of public theological claims on the nature of reconciliation. In this way, reconciliation within Jesus’ life, death and resurrection offers a gathering surplus of meaning that is central to all Christian claims to truth, through and after the encounter of cruelty in human life. From this Christological centrality of meaning and truth, one can speak of reconciliation. Here again whereas the constant in reconciliation centers on a Christological optic, the expressions of this optic in relation to reconciliation are manifold in culture. Christ the Healer has particular emphases in southern Africa where HIV is epidemic in scope, or the incarnation (avatara) of Christ in Asia embodies the qualities of an avatar (such as patience, purity and protection), or Christ the Liberator that is specific to cultural contexts ranging from Latin America and Arab Christianity to Black Theology in the United States, or Christ as the second Adam that relies heavily on the proto-ancestor motif within African traditional religions: These examples and more represent specific culturally based and deeply held Christological convictions that will be a central marker for any consideration of Christ as the one who reconciles the individual, family, community or world. The hope for reconciliation in human life and death that draws from Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, has abounded throughout these cultures and through the centuries in the interpretations and experiences that are situated in cultural specificity. Throughout Encountering Cruelty the figure of Christ was largely monoculturally situated, even as Schweitzer reminded us by analogy is also the case in our assessment of an historical Jesus. What remained meaningful and constant in our study was drawn from Jesus’ life and death. Indeed, assessments of Jesus’ life and death were instrumental

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in chapters two through four. In chapter two and three, Jesus’ life and commensurate teaching were the hermeneutic infrastructure for both our intra-personal anthropological assessment and our consideration of interpersonal relations. Chapter four offered an examination of Jesus’ life, teaching and public execution that were drawn from the gospel of Luke in particular. This last examination was significant for reconciliation in, through and after cruelty. Rather than assess the historical resurrection account, we remained on this side of death, and thus in Jesus’ life and execution. What became perspicuous was how even in his death Jesus exhibits the possibility for reconciliation between human beings and the divine. And yet, the cultural markers for Jesus’ life and death, considered separately from the reconciliatory features of Christ, will not be an acceptable starting point for some culturally specific Christological convictions in relation to the person of Jesus Christ. I am suggesting that a constant marker of reconciliation in the public execution of Jesus is how human trespass and trauma, excision and loss, and abandonment and injustice, never separate creation from the love of God in the petition of Jesus during his own public execution. We will briefly consider chapters two through four as heuristic sites where public theologies may begin developing an adequate accounting of reconciliation through and after cruelty in human life and relation. Interpretation of the activity of reconciliation relative to Jesus Christ must include encouragement for cultural contributions that embolden cross-cultural conversation and discovery about the fullness of the activity of reconciliation in the breadth of Christological veracity in the world today. Within Encountering Cruelty, we noted first, in our intra-personal anthropological assessment, that the backbone of Augustine’s interpersonal ethic – love God and your neighbor – is drawn from Jesus’ yoking of Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 in the Pentateuch. Both of these latter texts were pivotal to the Hebrew understanding of human relation. In our assessment, loving and knowing oneself was drawn from this yoking to love your neighbor as yourself. We followed a similar course in chapter three, and the consideration of interpersonal relations. To love your neighbor as yourself, and do unto others as yourself, was representative of Jesus’ teaching ministry. Our point was not to illustrate an image reduced to a social gospel alone. Instead, these verses are imperative similes throughout Judeo-Christian Scripture and living tradition. The simile of oneself as neighbor/other, and neighbor/other

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as oneself, opened for us an understanding of interpersonal existential reciprocity and underlying ontological symbiosis. In short, our language of the journey within oneself, as well as of being fellows in the world, was drawn from Jesus’ yoking of these verses in the Pentateuch. But our language was also drawn later from their application by both Paul and Augustine, and indeed within the living fabric of the JudeoChristian tradition. Responsibility and care, love and justice, and hospitality and integrity, become an inseparable affirmation about human interpersonal relation; in love of self and the neighbor, when you act in such a way that does not trespass human beings then you obey the entire law and ‘will live.’ The normative and existential nature of the scriptural imperative-similes between oneself and an other is one of love, justice and action. The whole law – referred to by Paul as the kernel of Judeo-Christian belief – is what reminds human beings that they live and act in relation to the mystery that precedes them. Next, in chapter four, we examined the life and public execution of Jesus. The veracity of reconciliation was located in two places that may offer heuristic optics for public theologians speaking to reconciliation through and after cruelty. Jesus answers the question, first in the context of the narrative of the Good Samaritan, of the “neighbor,” regarding who indeed one is required to “love as oneself.” Jesus responds, “Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel to you.” Cruelty is to be resisted, where God, who “makes the sun rise on the cruel and on the good,” is “good even to people who are unthankful and cruel.” At the close of the Good Samaritan narrative, Jesus says to those who desire to be sons of the father, to “go and do likewise.” Here is offered clear identification between Jesus, the Father, and those who wish to be “sons of the father.” The last instance of possibility for public theologians with respect to reconciliation through and after cruelty, in fact is as a hermeneutic thread evident throughout the book, even from the first page to the final pages of chapter four. During his public execution, Jesus offers a petition to the father – “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus’ petition for forgiveness is fundamentally a hope for reconciliation in his dying moments. The petition is heavily nuanced: i) Jesus utters this petition that the father forgive the perpetrators for what they do, and their awareness of what they do, in the midst of their cruel trespass upon him; ii) next, the father is again petitioned to forgive what is done by the perpetrators, but this time the father is requested to forgive what the perpetrators are unaware of with respect

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to their own actions. “What they do” is contradictory to, and transvaluative of, human well-being. Jesus identifies (i.e., “for they know not”) how the act of his own execution exceeds the awareness of his perpetrators, and how, even in their ignorance, they are implicated in this contradiction and transvaluation of human life. Thus, Jesus’ hope in the petition is for the father to forgive his perpetrators for what they have done, their awareness of this act, and their ignorance. In this nuanced form, Jesus’ petition to the father is a single but clear hope thrust outward from within the heart of this inexplicable ugliness, from the center of a descent into fracture. If public theologians around the world desire to address in an adequate fashion the hope for reconciliation through and after cruelty – and given that this will include multitudinous Christological veracity as central to Christian claims of meaning and truth – then this last petition extant in the gospel of Luke bears inclusion. There are historical and hermeneutic reasons for such inclusion, as well as exegetical and theological. For it was at the Lukan petition that Nietzsche believed Christians did not understand the nature of cruelty that Jesus endured, or that human beings endure from one another in general. If we understand this petition to represent the ground of Nietzsche’s challenge to the Christian tradition, then it was fitting to end here. We responded early on to Nietzsche through an investigation of thinkers, which led us to the conclusion that Nietzsche appears to import an unwarranted agency in cruelty. Later, in our assessment of Jesus’ petition, we identified how cruelty will harm and even annihilate human life, but cruelty is not the radical agency of some transcendent winged thing external to daily human existence. Rather, cruelty is always also only a possibility in daily life that can be resisted, wherein and whereafter even the beginning hope for human well-being can be crafted from within the experience of cruelty, as Jesus exhibits on the cross. In an account of his death, Jesus casts a net on his perpetrators and draws these up before the gaze of the divine. Death may have the last word, but hope and love for one’s fellows can also rise from the center of human ugliness. We are not suggesting that reconciliation always rises, neither are we delimiting the rawness of cruelty in human life, but we are reiterating from the center of Christian claims to meaning and truth that reconciliation is possible in the world, and worthy of our attention and advancement. Nietzsche was wrong on this point about a weakness at the ground of Christianity. His mistake is evident in a central underestimation of

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the gospel of Luke to identify the cruelty Jesus endured both before and through his public execution. This gospel does speak directly to cruelty, and even so Jesus never requests the reigning down of revenge and the excision of his perpetrators. He prays instead “for everyone who is cruel.” In short, Jesus does not provisionalize suffering or conceal cruelty, but he also resists the furtherance of cruelty and turns to the hope for a reconciled relation instead. In order to respond to Nietzsche’s challenge it was essential to meet him on the terms of his own argument. We thus responded to his critique by remaining on this side of the resurrection account, where we ultimately ended at the public execution of Jesus itself. That said, the question that awaits on the other side of death, in the historical and narrative resurrection of Jesus in relation to the encounter of cruelty, remains open for far-reaching theological possibility. C) Concluding Remarks We can seek reconciliation within, through, and after cruelty, where we have been disfigured, in the world. Reconciliation begins in the midst of the aesthetics of human ugliness, and the imprint of this aesthetics will remain within reconciliation. The epilogue outlined several tenets for consideration that should be taken into account by public theologians who seek an adequate interpretation of reconciliation in light of cruelty. Our brief efforts were meant to open windows for consideration by public theologians, and not to construct a cohesive argument or series of arguments for reconciliation. Nevertheless, this effort was meant to offer a kind of dispatch to the public square of initial tenets for public theology’s advancement of reconciliation through and after how cruelty encounters human life. In terms of cruelty and reconciliation, one thing is certain – Who we are today, and who we become tomorrow, is determinative upon the clarity of how we hear our past. When the past speaks from fracture, and we do not provisionalize or conceal its message to us, then the advent of reconciliation can arrive within ourselves, with others, and in the world, where the sun rises “on the cruel and on the good.”

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INDEX Abraham, 7, 62, 183–185, 208, 223–224, 331, 367 Adam, 7, 10–11, 120, 130, 160, 162, 166, 180, 187–188, 192–196, 198, 201, 203, 207–209, 211, 217, 240, 327, 332, 365, 378, 400, 402 Aeschylus, 95 Angelou, Maya, 50 Anselm, 50, 56, 131, 361, 363–364 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 27, 85–86, 89, 117, 119, 140, 171, 298, 303–305, 315, 317 Arendt, Hannah, 31, 92–93, 119, 132, 268 Aristophanes, 91 Aristotle, 55, 96–99, 105, 144–146, 167, 185, 205, 218–220, 222, 224, 228, 231–232, 242, 246–249, 253, 255, 257–258, 264, 280, 290, 292, 297, 306, 311, 318, 323–325, 332 Augustine, 8–10, 49, 56, 115, 119, 126, 130, 135, 137, 157–161, 163–164, 166–167, 175, 177–178, 180, 182, 187, 208, 217, 224–229, 231–232, 242, 262, 391, 401, 403–404 Aurelius, Marcus, 136, 143–144, 204–205 Baier, Annette, 30 Balibar, Etinne, 25, 134, 330 Bataille, George, 140 Bellinger, Charles, 260–261, 363 Boethius, 56 Bouchard, Larry, 109, 254–255 Bradley, A.C., 255 Brecht, Bertolt, 64, 95, 279 Browning, Christopher, 31 Buber, Martin, 243 Cain, 10–12, 14, 120, 166, 187–193, 196–207, 209, 211, 217, 240, 267, 299, 312, 314, 331–332, 365, 369–370, 382, 398 Calvin, John, 49 Camus, Albert, 132, 280, 334 Chiaromante, Nichola, 129–130 crucifixion, 39, 45, 361, 363

death penalty, 4, 40–41, 44, 116, 335–336, 354, 357, 388 death zone, 15–16, 316, 329–333, 359, 387–388 Delphi/Delphic oracle, 4–7, 11, 48–51, 54, 60–62, 64, 73, 78, 80–81, 83, 95–96, 108, 112, 116, 123, 135–136, 142, 212, 216, 218, 241–242, 249, 256, 312, 317, 394 Dickens, Charles, 366, 370 evil, 1, 6–9, 24–25, 64, 68, 92–94, 122–127, 130, 134–135, 151–152, 156–161, 164–165, 172, 180, 192–193, 203, 205, 208–209, 213, 217, 221–222, 260–261, 267–268, 271, 273, 275, 279, 281, 286, 289, 362, 373, 394–395 execution, 4, 16, 18, 26, 40, 42–45, 47, 61, 115, 185–186, 316, 334–337, 340, 358–359, 361–366, 368, 374–376, 384–386, 388, 403–406 excision, 6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 97, 117, 120, 157, 166, 181–186, 192, 197–198, 211, 275–276, 279, 291, 293–295, 314, 316, 339, 351, 367–368, 380–383, 388, 397–399, 403, 406 existential, 7, 9, 46, 52, 57, 60, 79, 81–82, 88, 90, 101, 103, 129, 135–139, 142–143, 147–150, 162, 165, 170, 173, 178–179, 190, 194, 208, 216–218, 232–242, 244, 276, 282, 292, 294–295, 306–307, 310, 316, 332, 359–360, 371, 385, 404 existentiell, 7, 9, 79, 81–82, 88, 90, 101, 135–138, 143, 147–149, 155, 158, 160, 162, 165, 171, 178, 190, 194, 208, 218, 234, 238–239, 241, 294–295, 332, 359, 371, 384–385 Farley, Edward, 138, 243 Farley, Wendy, 212, 214, 266 Felman, Shoshana, 235 Foucault, Michel, 143 Freud, Sigmund, 128, 138, 167, 228, 282–284, 360

424

index

Girard, Rene, 12, 70, 211, 246, 249–251, 253–260, 313 Girardian, 13, 29, 199, 251–253, 255–256, 258–262, 313 Graham, Gordon, 265 Grand, Sue, 119, 172, 174, 176, 178 Grausam, 84–88, 91–92, 331, 373 Gray, J. Glenn, 211, 252, 259, 268, 295 Graybeal, Jean, 214 Gutierrez, Gustavo, 35, 115, 228–292, 242

John Paul II, 35, 50, 243 Jung, C. G., 52 justice, 4–5, 7–10, 12, 15–16, 37, 41, 43, 45, 63, 88, 102–104, 106–107, 111, 116–117, 135, 139, 143, 145–149, 155–156, 165, 168–170, 182–184, 194, 203, 208, 212, 219–220, 222, 226, 229–232, 234–235, 237, 239, 241–243, 276, 292, 294, 300, 307, 312, 315–316, 318–340, 347, 349–355, 366, 386–387, 397, 399, 404

Hallie, Philip, 93 Hanson, Mark, 265 Hauerwas, Stanley, 141, 177, 214 Hegel, G.W.F., 14, 52, 54–55, 73, 79, 131–132, 137, 141, 168, 255, 257–258, 303–304, 307, 310–311, 314 Hegelian, 14, 132, 258 Heidegger, Martin, 52, 142, 148, 169 Heideggerian, 24 Hemingway, Ernest, 90–91, 119 Hill, Edumund, 115 hospitality, 5, 11–12, 87, 108, 139, 154, 217, 222–225, 228–232, 234, 237, 243, 265, 276–278, 281, 292, 297, 312, 313, 369, 373, 404 Huber, Wolfgang, 310 Hume, David, 66, 166 Humean, 298

Kampf, 10, 13, 120, 168–172, 177, 179, 182, 193, 197, 201, 203–204, 207, 211, 258, 276, 278, 286, 292, 294–295, 314, 316, 339, 368, 376, 381, 397 Kant, Immanuel, 56, 59, 76, 99, 132, 141 Kekes, John, 279, 297–298 Kristeva, Julia, 140, 263 Kuhns, Richard, 94–95, 98, 251

Ideal, 4, 5, 8, 13, 50–51, 53, 59, 61–68, 71, 73–78, 80–81, 91, 104, 108, 110–111, 116, 123–126, 130–132, 134, 143, 145, 151–153, 155, 165, 186, 258–263, 267, 270–271, 275–283, 285, 287–296, 313, 331, 334, 339–340, 353, 394–395 injustice, 15–16, 26, 44–45, 108, 145–146, 205, 219, 232, 247, 292, 315, 317–322, 325–330, 333, 337, 355, 384, 386–388, 403 Isaac, 183–185, 223, 327, 331, 365, 398–400

Lacan, Jacques, 131, 308 Lamb, Mathew, 104, 263 Leibniz, Gottfried, 66, 103, 105 Lessing, Gotthold, 66, 68 Levinas, Emmanuel, 131, 148 Longeran, Bernard, 89, 243 love, 5–7, 9–10, 12, 14, 26, 35, 37–38, 40, 43, 49, 63, 68, 97, 102–103, 107, 109–111, 117, 123–125, 135, 137, 139–140, 142–143, 145–146, 148–150, 153–154, 158–161, 163, 165–170, 172, 183–184, 186–187, 192, 196, 200, 202, 205, 208, 214, 219–222, 225–237, 239, 241–245, 258, 264, 276, 292, 296–302, 304, 307–309, 311–312, 314–315, 317, 323–325, 332, 355, 358, 360–1, 364–365, 370–371, 378, 384, 391, 403–405 Luther, Martin, 8–9, 35, 138, 157, 161–164, 166, 189, 202, 205, 208, 234, 242, 335, 360, 393 Lutheran, 46, 216, 244–245, 265 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 58

Jesus, 4, 10, 16–18, 26, 45, 47, 49–50, 115, 167, 178–179, 185–186, 200, 203–204, 206, 223–225, 230, 232, 236–237, 316–317, 334–335, 359–388, 401–406 Jewett, Robert, 267 Job, 8–10, 30, 62, 120, 151–157, 165–168, 171–172, 175, 178–182, 186, 208, 261, 316–319, 327–328, 365, 384–385, 398–400

Machiavelli, 63 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 119 Marcuse, Herbert, 228 Mathewes, Charles, 29, 126–128, 130, 151–152, 158 McAfee, Noelle, 52 McFague, Sallie, 35 McKenna, Andrew, 253, 257 Midgley, Margaret, 64, 68, 166, 279 mimesis, 13, 248–253, 256–262, 274, 313

index mimetic, 12–13, 211, 248–262, 274, 313, 379 Moltmann, Jurgen, 35, 52–53, 243 mythos, 54–55, 57, 59–60, 64–66, 70, 72, 75, 78, 80, 83, 241, 269 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 318, 323, 325 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 4–7, 10, 19, 26, 35–40, 45, 47–48, 51, 53–54, 56–57, 60–61, 64–65, 67, 69, 71–79, 83–85, 92–96, 99, 101, 107, 111–113, 115–117, 120–121, 123–126, 128, 130–131, 134, 142, 148, 150, 166, 171, 186, 203–204, 206, 208, 212, 227, 241, 256, 258, 262, 266, 271, 280, 287, 296, 301–302, 306, 309, 311, 314, 317, 360–364, 373, 392, 405–406

425

350–354, 367, 369, 370, 376–378, 382, 388, 397–399 revenge, 4–5, 15, 45, 63, 102–104, 106–107, 111, 124, 165, 169, 320, 335, 337–340, 347, 350–355, 366, 397, 406 Ricoeur, Paul, 34, 79, 83, 107, 112, 121, 145–146, 148, 151–153, 219–220, 228, 231–232, 239, 242, 247, 251, 267, 292, 307, 318, 324–325, 332, 334, 363 Rorty, Richard, 69–70, 119 Ryan, William, 28

quasi-love, 14, 301–302, 304, 308–309, 311, 314

Sagan, Carl, 216 Scarry, Elaine, 115 Schillebeeckx, Edward, 259, 267 Schussler-Fiorenza, Elisabeth, 7, 50 Schweitzer, Albert, 215–216, 243, 365, 402 September 11, 2001, 27, 33, 337 Shakespeare, William, 95, 253, 280 Shklar, Judith, 19, 70, 84, 94 Silk, M.S. 306 Simon, Ulrich, 317 sin, 1, 6–9, 24–25, 27, 29, 36, 122–127, 130, 134–135, 151–152, 156–158, 161–162, 164, 188, 191, 194, 197, 203, 207–209, 217, 225–226, 232, 281, 394–395 Smith, Ian Chrichton, 216 Socratism, 64–65, 80–81 solicitude, 145–146, 169–170, 204, 219, 220, 222, 231–232, 235, 239, 265, 288, 292, 300, 307, 324–325, 332 Spener, Jakob, 233 Spinoza, 14, 66, 125, 296, 298–299, 314

Rahner, Karl, 82, 138, 140, 142, 148 reciprocity, 5, 9, 12, 14–15, 165, 194, 215, 226, 231–233, 235, 238–240, 242–243, 245, 262, 264, 267, 269, 276, 280–282, 284–289, 292–295, 297, 301, 307, 312–313, 316, 318, 327, 350, 368–370, 373, 377, 380–382, 404 reconciliation, 1–5, 9, 11, 14, 17–18, 21–22, 26, 33, 35, 40, 43, 45, 47, 116, 164, 205, 213, 245, 286, 312, 314, 339, 360–361, 364, 374–375, 378, 389, 391–396, 398–406 redemption, 7–9, 73, 97, 122–128, 130, 134–135, 151–152, 155, 164, 360, 378, 392, 394–395 ressentiment, 10, 11, 16, 120, 166, 186–187, 189, 202, 207–208, 211, 279, 281, 289, 291, 294–295, 316, 339,

Taylor, Charles, 137 teleology, 7–8, 57–59, 62, 65, 70–75, 89, 96, 98, 125–128, 130–133, 135, 151–152, 208, 252, 254, 262 telos, 7, 17, 57, 59, 61, 65, 73, 78–82, 100, 116, 135, 148–153, 155, 165, 184–185, 191, 193–194, 196, 206, 208, 217, 245, 248, 264, 293, 295, 312, 317, 327–363, 391 terrorism, 27–29, 39, 273 Tertullian, 39, 266–267, 310 Tillich, Paul, 129–130, 138, 147, 158, 318, 323, 325, 332, 360 Timonen, Asko, 253 Todorov, Tzvetan, 30, 90, 119, 147, 244, 264, 334 torture, 23–24, 43–44, 50, 241, 362, 382

Ogletree, Thomas, 243 Orwell, George, 43–44, 70 Pascal, Blaise, 50, 54, 136, 360 Parisi, Thomas, 241, 282, 284–285 Peperzak, Adriaan, 132–133 philia, 11–12, 217–223, 228, 231–232, 242, 292, 213–313, 323, 325 Plato, 69, 218, 221–222, 224, 231–232, 242 Platonic, 127, 225 Platoism, 224 polis, 63, 95, 98, 218–220, 222, 228–229, 306, 323–324, 332

426

index

tragedy, 4, 13, 47, 50, 72, 80, 84, 94–100, 105, 108, 116, 125, 186, 198, 248–249, 251–260, 303, 306–307, 311, 313, 354, 398 trauma, 3, 6, 8–10, 13–14, 26, 108, 117, 120, 154, 157, 166, 172–178, 180, 182, 192–195, 197, 201, 203, 208, 211, 279, 291, 294–295, 314, 316, 338–339, 351, 368–369, 378, 396–397, 399, 403 Tracy, David, 19, 27, 34, 82, 112, 128, 148, 150, 327

Vatican, 66, 242 Volf, Miroslav, 130 Voltaire, 94, 103, 296, 334 Ward, David Jr., 16, 40–45, 316, 334–337, 340–359, 388, 401 Weber, Max, 281 Westphal, Merald, 36 West, Rebecca, 363–364 Wolff, Christian, 58