The Guide to Gethsemane

Anxiety, Suffering, Death

Emmanuel Falque, George Hughes

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780823281978
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Systematic Theology & Ethics

Anxiety, suffering and death are not simply the "ills" of our society, nor are they uniquely the product of a sick and sinful humanity. We must all some day confront them, and we continually face their implications long before we do. In that sense, the Garden of Gethsemane is not merely a garden "outside the walls" of Jerusalem but also the essential horizon for all of us, whether we are believers or not.Emmanuel Falque explores, with no small measure of doubt, Heidegger's famous statement that by virtue of Christianity's claims of salvation and the afterlife, its believers cannot authentically experience anxiety in the face of death. In this theological development of the Passion, already widely debated upon its publication in French, Falque places a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ's suffering and death, marking the continuities between Christ's Passion and our own orientation to the mortality of our bodies. Beginning with an elaborate reading of the divine and human bodies whose suffering is masterfully depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and written in the wake of the death of a close friend, Falques's study is both theologically rigorous and marked by deeply human concerns.Falque is at unusual pains to elaborate the question of death in terms not merely of faith, but of a "credible Christianity" that remains meaningful to non-Christians, holding, with Maurice Blondel, that "the important thing is not to address believers but to say something which counts in the eyes of unbelievers." His account is therefore as much a work of philosophy as of theology—and of philosophy explicated not through abstractions but through familiar and ordinary experience. Theology's task, for Falque, is to understand that human problems of the meaning of existence apply even to Christ, at least insofar as he lives in and shares our finitude. In Falque's remarkable account, Christ takes upon himself the burden of suffering finitude, so that he can undertake a passage through it, or a transformation of it.This book, a key text from one the most remarkable of a younger generation of philosophers and theologians, will be widely read and debated by all who hold that theology and philosophy has the most to offer when it eschews easy answers and takes seriously our most anguishing human experiences.

PART I

The Face-to-Face of Finitude

1

From the Burden of Death to Flight before Death

§1 The Burden of Death

Is there a “Christian meaning” in our anxiety concerning death? It is a crucial question but, initially at least, insoluble: we are after all human beings before becoming believers. The anxiety of a Christian faced with death is, first of all, as I see it, quite simply anxiety about death—death as it is sent to the Christian. It is not that there is a Christian meaning in anxiety concerning death. If we rush into the question, we are in danger of neglecting the necessary and serious analysis of the problem of meaning. Moreover, since it is clearly not self-evident that there is meaning here, to insist that there must be meaning is not to respect either God or oneself, or our contemporaries. Not God, first of all, because he himself, in Gethsemane and Golgotha, intentionally lived through a certain anxiety about death. Not myself, because external juxtaposition of meaning on my life or on my death can cloud my judgment and is often used to cover up its striking meaninglessness. Not my contemporaries, because they rightly recall for me what is clearly its meaninglessness, even when for myself, I would prefer to deny the evidence. Initially, then, there is nothing left for the Christian, or indeed for all human beings, in the idea of one’s death, except the absolute meaninglessness of one’s own life. This is an inescapable perspective that undermines us from the inside, in the double sense that it both eats away at us and destroys us.¹

No pastoral letter addressed by a bishop to clergy or laity, whether a definitive testimonial or just irretrievably conservative (the one thing often simply being the reverse side of the coin to the other) will meet humanity in the fullness of our flesh if it does not explore such depths. There is no “small remnant of Israel” left today, any more than there was in the past, that does not need to come to terms first of all with what is true for the great “remnant” of all humanity. The choice (or election) of a possible sharing of anxiety over death along with Christ cannot turn into a privilege of some kind for the Christian only, into an “easing” or “release” from the anguish (angustia) of facing one’s own death. As opposed to what are in effect falsehoods from Greeks such as Socrates, Epicurus, or Epictetus, the Bible already symbolically sets up, on different grounds, a universal “dread of the day of death” that weighs on all the children of humankind “from the day they come out of their mother’s womb, till the day they return to the mother of them all” (Si 40:1–2 JB). Contemporary humanity joins up with the realism of the incarnation for all humankind, especially insofar as contemporary ideas include getting in touch with ourselves and reaching down into our own depths. If I try to explain and analyze the anxiety of humankind, I primarily recall struggles of my own. Even St. Paul wished at one stage to be “accursed,” indeed to be separated from Christ, to rejoin “for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to my flesh. They are Israelites” (Rom 9:3–4). Maybe we do not live “according to the flesh” (Rom 8:13), but surely it is also important for us today not to give up on those whom Bernanos calls our “brother humans,” those who share our flesh?² Along with them we come forward to the gates of death, and it is thanks to them moreover that we can live and inhabit our own particular anxiety concerning death. Only in terms of the weight or consequence we give to death can we estimate the weightiness that should be accorded to resurrection—our own and that of Christ.

§2 Fleeing from Death

As we all know, or at least as we all feel, there are many ways of fleeing from death. But is it just the prerogative of philosophers to effect such a flight? Christians are not exempt from the temptation: far from it. The escape routes worked out by Epicurus or Epictetus are so well known that we hardly need to rehearse a rebuttal here. We should perhaps remind ourselves simply that for Epicurus it is our lack of experience of death that prevents us from talking about it.³ As far as Epictetus is concerned, a transformation of our opinion of death allows us to overcome it.⁴ But in the long run adroit thought-play of this kind is neither intellectually nor emotionally satisfying. Both philosophers simply gloss over anxiety with rationality and multiply twofold our metaphysical question, our why in the face of the absurdity or meaninglessness of death. Christians are often convinced that they have privileged access to anxiety, as well as the secret of how to overcome it, and that their flight from death is more subtle because it is not strikingly obvious, if not in their own eyes, at least in the eyes of their “fellow human beings.” A double positioning in Christianity hides, in my view, both death and the impossibility of overcoming it. The first position (rather “conservative”), tends toward Pelagianism.⁵ It reaches its summit in nineteenth-century pietism, when it is supposed that we can gain salvation through the double merit of enduring suffering and obedience to the virtues. According to this view, in becoming in some way myself through the exercise of my liberty and its exertions, which are what determine the extent of my salvation, I guarantee in this world that I will have an afterlife in death. This suppresses the ineradicable anxiety that exists on this side of death.⁶ The second position (rather “progressive”), tends toward Origenism.⁷ It culminates today in a faith that is undoubtedly often strongly confirmed and that goes so far as to suggest an absolute affirmation of grace and divine redemption and thus a denial of all human liberty. In this view Christ’s Resurrection and his victory over death are so total that we can forget the possible self-condemnation of humankind by humankind and humankind’s inevitable “confinement” in sin. Precisely because there is a hell that confines me and lies to me [enfer-me-ment], making me believe falsely that it is nonexistent, should I not hold on to the idea of hell? Should I not ensure that it remains a question for me, a question that is addressed to me, and is indeed my question?⁸ A place that is probably empty of the supposed unpardonable sinners, it nonetheless emerges as a possible horizon of all my thoughts and all my acts; and perhaps I shall myself, and by myself, be one day a prominent guest and figurehead in such a dwelling.⁹ The probability of a “restitution of all things” (apokatastasis) thus leads to nothing if it invalidates both the solidity of my existence and the exercise of my freedom.¹⁰ So while the first position (Pelagianism) allows too much to humankind and not enough to God, the second (Origenism) attributes too much to God and not enough to humankind. The one is flawed by an excess of freedom (or of merit) and through the lack of grace; the other by excess of grace (or redemption) and through a lack of freedom.

2

The Face of Death or Anxiety over Finitude

§3 Death “for Us” Humans

This double flight of Christians in the face of anxiety about death has its roots in an unwavering Christian tendency to see death, even if only biological death, within the horizon of sin. Is the only way for me to achieve salvation by enduring a series of sufferings? Or should I be unconcerned about making an effort to obtain salvation because of the boundlessness of divine mercy? And in either case, would the death of Christ not remain a death of redemption rather than of communion?¹ But still another question crops up. Christ very certainly dies for my sins (Rom 8), but doesn’t he also die through the pure and simple humanity that he shares with me—that is to say, by virtue of his very ordinary participation in the law of corruptibility of all living things (the principle of entropy)? If he dies “for our salvation” (propter nostram salutem), as the Nicene Creed expresses it, is he not dead also and first of all “for us men” (propter nos homines) simply through sharing our fleshly humanity, as even the terms of the creed suggest?²

The Son having chosen to “come to (human) life,” or to be born at Bethlehem remains then, like all humankind, always already old enough to die—whether by a natural or by a violent death: we can take up in the Christian context the famous Heideggerian formula that he quotes from a Bohemian peasant: “As soon as man comes to life, he is at once old enough to die.”³ But how can we consider the incarnation of the Son as man without first of all feeling that it is a real and total communion with the suffering and death of humankind as such, independently of all sinful characteristics? Or, to put it another way: how can we explain in Christian theology an eclipse of human finitude that then enshrines death forever, not simply spiritual death but also biological death, as the consequence of a transgression whose atonement on the cross then leads only to viewing, in Heidegger’s phrase, “death together with its interpretation of ‘life.’ ”⁴

§4 Genesis and Its Symbolism

Everyone knows, or recognizes today, that the myth of Adam in Genesis has symbolic rather than historic meaning.⁵ But, as I see it, the symbolism does not stop there, in a general interpretation of the whole narrative and its sources. It operates more precisely in the hypothetical link between original sin, suffering, and death that we find in the verdict most often misunderstood, or at least misrepresented, in the book of Genesis: “You will die of death” (Gen 2:17).⁶

It is by no means certain that this sentence does not first of all outline a death that is primarily spiritual: that is, the separation of human beings from God that I would identify as “anxiety about sin,” but not over finitude. The theologian Gustave Martelet suggests, “In symbolising sin by death, the Bible does not intend it to be taken for granted that biological death comes only from sin.”⁷ And the charge of heresy against Pelagius by the Council of Carthage (418), because of his supposed uncoupling of biological death from original sin, reminds us simply that between sin and death there is a symbolic link of “signifying” rather than a relation of effective “causality.” Apart from registering the boldness and theological pertinence of new perspectives, we need also to explore the metaphysical consequences to its limits. We cannot just stick with simple epistemological considerations whose obvious validity (as in the hypothesis of evolution) is not enough on its own to account for the metaphysical.⁸

If it is appropriate that we finally stop “harping on about original sin to explain that we die,”⁹ that is first of all because dying cannot and should not, any more than physical suffering, tell us simply about an impairment or failure in humankind, even in the hypothetical first humans, the couple Adam and Eve. While the argument still rages today—and can be read between the lines in differences between the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the French Bishops’ Catechism for Adults,¹⁰ it would probably not be profitable to develop it any further here. We all know, or feel, that neither sickness nor death can decently be derived from an original transgression without a distorted image of humankind and of God (vengeful even so far as to transfer onto a third party, his own Son, misdeeds of which the Son was not the perpetrator). And it is not a question of denying here so much the reality as the efficaciousness of sin, when it is completely taken in charge by Christ on the cross. Separating sin from consequences that in no way belong to it (physical suffering and biologic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Announcement Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Preface to the English-Language Edition
• Opening: The Isenheim Altarpiece or “The Taking on Board of Suffering”
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Shifting Understandings of Anxiety
• Part I: The Face-to-Face of Finitude
• Part II: Christ Faced with Anxiety over Death
• Part III: The Body-to-Body of Suffering and Death
• Conclusion: The In-Fans [without-Speech] or the Silent Flesh
• Epilogue: From One Triptych to Another
• Notes
• Index
• Series Page