Читать книгу Agape and Hesed-Ahava - David L. Goicoechea - Страница 7

For nine years with the Benedictines of Mt. Angel

and the Sulpicians of St. Thomas-Seattle

I learned of agape as fulfilling hesed-ahava.

With their wise teaching and loving example

they taught me that if we love the Lord our God

with our whole heart, mind, and soul

and our neighbor as ourselves with ahava

and because God loves us with his hesed,

or his everlasting love, we can discover

the glory of Jesus’ reconciling agape.

As Derrida and Levinas pushed each other

further and further into the loving wisdom

of their Jewish tradition in their postmodern ways

Levinas came to define glory

as the manifesting of the unmanifest

even in its unmanifestness.

The two thousand years of the Jewish tradition

before Christ was a progressive revealing

of the glory of Yahweh, or Elohim.

The Jewish people came to know

more and more the mystery of God

as Yahweh revealed his hesed to David

and as they practiced

love for God and each other.

Matthew, by showing how Jesus revealed

agape as fulfilling hesed and ahava,

clarified its nine unique traits.

Agape as altruistic, universal, and eternal,

as childlike, unconditional, and celibate,

as missionary, purgatorial, and loving of love

gives us a faith and hope in agape that

the family of humankind can be reconciled.

The Minor Seminary—The Major Seminary

From the time I was fourteen until twenty

I studied with the Benedictine Monks of Mt. Angel.

Their special spirituality of “ora et labora”

nourished me in the habit of prayer and work.

The monks lived in the atmosphere of agape

as they chanted the eight hours

of the Divine Office each day,

prayed a private mass and

a common chanted mass each day

and each said his daily Rosary.

Then they worked for hours each day,

be it physical work or intellectual,

or often a combination of both.

We seminarians were nourished

by our Alma Mater in the heart’s love,

the mind’s wisdom, the soul’s moral virtue,

and the body’s physical strength through

constant physical, moral, intellectual, and

spiritual exercises that became habitual.

What could be more loving than prayer?

Prayer is a making of love with God.

Our Abba Father leads us to prayer

with his grace, inspiration, love, and mercy

and as we respond our hearts can grow

daily in love and as we pray for

our loved ones we love them more each day.

We awakened each morning at five-thirty

and after years that became a habit

that let us rise and shine for prayer

and then for work throughout the day,

and that habit still lives with me today.

Often at mass we would pray and sing

the Gloria in Excelsis Deo

(the Glory to God in the Highest and

on Earth Peace to People of Good Will).

The monks and the seminarians both

wanted to give glory to God and for that

we would live in poverty, celibacy, and obedience.

We believe that God is love

and that our purpose in living is

to make God and his love more manifest

so that all can love God and

grow in the peace of a good will.

Often each day in the Divine Office

and at mass and with the Rosary

we would pray and ponder:

Glory be to the Father and the Son

and the Holy Spirit as it was

in the beginning, is now and ever

shall be world without end. Amen.

At Mt. Angel we received

a wonderful liberal arts

education so that we would be free to

learn anything we wanted.

By studying Latin for six years

we came to appreciate literature and

history and to develop especially our

memory so that we came to love

reciting beautiful poetry by heart.

I discovered the three great secret things

of sex, death, and religion

and with Father Ambrose as my confessor

I was able to be pure and

not have to confess masturbation.

For three years and three months I studied

with the Sulpician Fathers at St. Thomas

Major Seminary near Seattle, Washington.

The Sulpicians were founded in order to

educate men to become secular priests.

Sulpician spirituality centered on the face

of Jesus and seeing his face and showing

his face to all the peoples of the earth.

The Sulpician priests taught me to have

Jesus in my mind and in my heart

and in my hands and on my lips

and to help all see the glory of his love.

The priest would have Jesus in his hands

as he brought the Eucharist to his people.

At ordination he is given the special

sacramental power to transform the bread

and wine into the body and blood of Jesus.

His mind and heart would be centered

on that joyful, sorrowful, glorious Jesus

as he did his spiritual reading and

as he prayed the Mass, his Rosary, and

the eight hours of the Divine Office.

It was his task to speak of Jesus

to others with Jesus always on his lips.

As he went out among people his

black suit and Roman collar would

call those people to be reminded of Jesus.

They could have a range of feeling

for him from empathy and sympathy

even to antipathy, just as they would

toward Jesus, and in our secular society

he would be a reminder of the agape of Jesus.

At St. Thomas each of us could choose

our confessor and I liked Father Gustafson,

my philosophy professor, so much that

I chose him, and each week I would

kneel beside him and confess my sins.

Strangely my impurity returned and he

told me that he just did not understand me.

He said that he never had such problems.

Sex really became a great secret thing

for as I tried to be celibate for nine years

many mysterious things continued to happen.

Perhaps celibacy can develop a kind of

feminine spirituality within the male

and perhaps the feminine became more lovely.

After my ninth year I fell in love with Jane

and experienced the sublimation that Plato

describes in his Phaedrus with the myth

of the charioteer and I came to know of

erotic inspiration, enthusiasm, and divine madness.

Father Gus taught me ten philosophy courses

and I learned all about medieval philosophy

and Augustinian, Thomistic, and Franciscan

varieties of the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love.

In my year and a third of theology

two Scripture scholars introduced me

to biblical studies in the old and new way.

Every three years at daily Mass we had

readings that covered the whole of the Hebrew Bible.

I loved the philosophy and theology that I

learned at St. Thomas so much that I wanted

to do it for the rest of my life and

thank God, I am still doing it even now.

Levinas and Derrida

For many years I had read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

as existentialists but it was Levinas and Derrida

who first taught me the meaning of postmodernity.

Levinas as a Rabbi had a deep understanding

of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish worldview.

For him ethics had to be first philosophy

and he heard from the infinite face of the other

the call to serve widows, orphans, and aliens.

Derrida as a Jewish Philosopher of great knowledge

agreed with Levinas about ethics as first philosophy

but as he wrote on Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity

he showed how Levinas was still using a logic

of exclusive opposites and thus excluded not only

Buber but also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

Derrida showed how the infinite face of the other

implied a metaphysics of excess that in turn

would imply a logic of mixed opposites.

Derrida’s deconstruction of Totality and Infinity

made sense to Levinas and he went on to write

Otherwise Than Being, which agreed with Derrida

but went on to show how the epistemology

of postmodernity had to be a nominalism.

Levinas developed a new model of ethics

as first philosophy with the Suffering Servant.

Levinas went on to the passages in Second Isaiah,

which had the Suffering Servant as suffering

to the point of death out of love for others.

The Gospels also used these images to show

how Jesus fulfilled this Suffering Servant philosophy.

This Suffering Servant as Levinas saw him

already loved his enemy and would suffer for him.

Derrida knows the history of philosophy

very well and especially works with Kierkegaard

and Nietzsche as he develops his own philosophy.

Classical philosophy was based upon the four D’s

of demonstrating a thesis with proper definitions,

key distinctions, and a dialectical answering

of objections to those first three procedures.

As Derrida thought about ethics as first philosophy

he saw with Kierkegaard that we cannot get

objective certainty about religious ethical decisions.

Rather those decisions made over the abyss

of indecidability will bring us to Derrida’s four D’s

of deconstructing demonstrations, by showing

the dissemination of definitions and the differance

of all distinctions that takes dialectics into

the realm of an existential uncertainty about decision.

Derrida’s aporetic faith lead from pride to humility

as he discovered a logic of the paradox and

its mixed opposites that governed each decision

that we make over the abyss of indecidability.

It moved him from pretension to honesty

as the question of responsibility about the

dissemination of all knowledge and definition

led him to a metaphysics of excess.

It led him from being ponderous to being humorous

with a psychology of the decentered self

because of the differancing of all distinctions.

It led him from being pompous to being healthy

because of his new epistemology of embracing

uncertainty as he saw justice as deconstruction.

With this Derrida made clear for me

the meaning of a postmodern philosophy.

None of the modernists from Luther and Descartes

to Calvin and Hobbes, to Henry VIII and Locke,

to Newton and Rousseau, to Hume and Kant

and to Hegel, Marx, and Adam Smith got to

this postmodern view that Levinas and Derrida

spell out with such philosophical clarity.

One could show that their postmodernity

goes back to the premodernity of the Franciscans

as their thought culminated in the metaphysics

of excess with Scotus’s haecceity and then

the consequent nominalism of Ockham’s epistemology.

With this help from Derrida I came to see

how Kierkegaard had first clearly spelled out

the logic of mixed opposites as he built his

philosophy around the paradox of the God-man.

Levinas’s definition of glory as a manifesting

of the unmanifest even in its unmanifestness

clearly expressed the paradox of giving glory

and this helped me to understand Kierkegaard’s

Works of Love, which would give that glory

and the Drama of Zarathustra, which revealed

more and more glory with each act of the Drama.

Any act of love that we perform, be it of

Nietzschean amor fati or Kierkegaardian works of love,

does make the God of love more manifest.

But Levinas and Derrida remain Jewish

and do not make the leap of love that

would let them love Jesus as the Messiah.

Derrida argues for a messianicity

without a Messiah and Levinas does not

see any fulfillment of hesed and ahava

in an agape that would take them further.

Levinas and Derrida can greatly help us

to understand hesed and ahava and how

far they can go in the direction of agape.

Derrida could be seen as developing a

preparation for the gospel, which makes clear

how far he will and will not go in loving.

He does develop a psychology of loving ours

without loving all and of rescuing his cats

but not of loving all flesh as eternal.

Levinas thinks carefully and often about

the difference between Jewish and Christian love.

He does develop the idea of a third but

without thinking of God as a Trinity of Persons.

Derrida and Levinas both think deeply

about glory and the glory of love and at Brock

we had a conference on Derrida’s Glorious Glas.

As Kenneth Itzkowitz says in his article

in the proceedings of that conference Glas

might be thought of as The Tolling Knell,

The Mournful Knell and the Tolling-Mournful Knell.

It has to do with the mourning process

and with turning sorrow into joy through glory.

If one goes through the mourning process

in a successful way one can be healed of

one’s grief and even get in touch with

the spirit world as did the Shamans.

So the question that Derrida and Levinas

raise is about the difference between

Jewish love and glory and Christian love and glory.

We can now consider love in the Hebrew Bible

and love in Matthew and see how Jewish

love prepared the way for the good news of agape.

Hesed and Ahava

Nelson Glueck’s wonderful book, Hesed in the Bible,

which was published in 1927, is so helpful

in clarifying the kinds of love in the Bible.

In the 1967 edition there is an introductory essay

by Gerald A. Larue that treats eighteen responses

to Glueck and that are very enriching.

Glueck shows how there are three basic kinds

of hesed in the Hebrew Bible for as loving conduct

it can have secular, religious, or divine meanings.

Its main importance as a forerunner of agape

is the divine meaning that begins with God’s

promise of an everlasting love to David and

his house, which appears in 2 Sam 7:14–16:

I will be his father and he shall be my son.

When he commits iniquity, I will chasten

him with the rod of men, with the stripes

of the sons of men; but I will not take away

my hesed from him, as I took it from Saul,

whom I put away from before you. And

your house and your kingdom shall be made

sure forever before me; your throne shall

be established forever.

In the New Testament Jesus is seen as the son

of David and his kingdom of love or agape

is seen as the fulfillment of this kingdom of hesed.

Matthew sees Jesus’ altruistic agape as extending

this hesed to the entire human family and

the followers of Jesus are to be missionaries

who bring the Good News of God’s love to everyone.

This promise makes sense of suffering, which

can be seen as punishment bringing us to God.

Ahava is quite different from hesed

as we see in Deuteronomy 6:5

Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one,

the only Yahweh. You must love Yahweh

your God with all your heart, with all

your soul, with all your strength.

Ahava is very different from hesed in that

hesed is a duty to do good to the other whereas

ahava is a felt desire to be with and is

what we mean by the various kinds of love

such as affection, friendship, eros, and agape.

The root ahava is used well over 200 times

in the Hebrew Bible and is an emotional feeling

that is contrasted with any sort of hatred.

Ahava has to do with our love for God

and our love for our neighbor and thus

ahava is the source of the Jewish ethics.

The Song of Songs gives a beautiful description

of ahava in which each image expresses

a quality of ahava and its lovely love,

for his banner over me is ahava

and I am sick with ahava

for Ahava is stronger than death

and many waters cannot quench ahava

for Yahweh’s conversation is sweetness itself

and we belong to each other

and my love’s desire is for me

and all my desire is for him.

So hesed is a promise of love from God

if we do our duty to him and others.

Ahava is the yearning to be close to

and a love for each other with our very veryness.

As we can see in the Psalms there is

a variety of ways to understand hesed

and ahava for in Psalm 5 we wonder

if hesed is primarily God’s love for man

and in Psalm 69 it is indicated that

we must love our neighbor with hesed.

Psalm 119 tells us

that we come to see God’s ahava for us

which he shows us with his hesed.

So in the Psalms these terms get

opposite meanings and in the prophet Hosea

that opposite usage is very evident,

for according to Hosea

Yahweh has ahava for Israel

and she should have

a responsible hesed to him.

She goes a whoring with a false ahava

but God’s Davidic hesed will save her.

For even though Israel betray ahava

and then betray hesed

Yahweh’s hesed will bring her back to Ahava.

This last statement seems to be

an excellent understanding of hesed and ahava

but what goes before seems confused.

In any case the Hebrew view is that

because God first loved the Jews they

are God’s chosen people and they will

be able to love God and each other.

And if they do not God will be merciful

and bring them even through punishment to love.

As we ponder how the agape of Matthew’s Jesus

will fulfill the hesed and ahava of the Jews

we might in general terms think of Ahava

as belonging to the Mosaic covenant theology

and hesed as belonging to the Davidic

promise theology with its emphasis on duty.

The command to love with Ahava tells us

that we should have as our main task

to nourish a loving heart that can feel

great affection for God and for our neighbor.

God’s promise of an everlasting hesed to David

can be associated with his grace

that will help us to grow in piety and do

the right thing and if not we will be punished.

But that punishment is a type of grace itself

and it can help David and the children of David

do their duty and be loyal to Yahweh.

The Hasidic Jew who is faithful to

the covenant will go beyond what

the law requires and strive to be selfless.

The promise to David shows an

unconditional loyalty of God’s hesed

toward the family of David forever.

Agape’s traits of eternal love and

unconditional love are already there

in hesed and it is this Davidic promise,

which is given to Abraham, that

he will have land, nation, and name.

And in the Davidic promise of hesed there

is even something of universal love,

for Abraham is promised that his name

will be a blessing for all peoples of the earth.

Matthew’s Agape Fulfills Hesed-Ahava

In the Sermon on the Mount we hear how

the agape of Jesus fulfills hesed and ahava

for at Matthew 5:43–47 we read

You have learned how it was said:

you must love your neighbor

and hate your enemy.

But I say to you: love your enemies

and pray for those who persecute you.

In this way you will be

sons of your Father in Heaven,

for he causes his sun to rise

on bad men as well as good,

and his rain to fall on honest

and dishonest men alike.

For if you love those who love you,

what right have you

to claim any credit?

If we go beyond Jewish ahava to an agape

that loves everyone even our enemies

we will have an agape like God’s hesed

that sends sun and rain to all.

Our love should be like God’s love

so that his kingdom of love might come

and his will be done on earth

as it is in heaven, and this is the main

point of the Gospel of Matthew, which

shows how Jesus’ agape fulfills hesed

by showing us that all belong to the house

of David and all will receive his promise.

It fulfills ahava by showing us how

we should love all, even our enemies.

One might wonder why Matthew’s Gospel

is placed first in the New Testament

as if it were written before Mark’s

upon which it depends so much.

But, Matthew’s Gospel is not only synoptic

in that it builds upon Mark, but

it also contains an Infancy Narrative,

the sayings of Jesus in Q 1, 2, and 3,

and Matthew’s own special material.

The Q 1 sayings and the Infancy Narrative

are earlier than anything in Mark so

it is justified to see Matthew as first.

Once we read the Sermon on the Mount

which is part of the Q 1 sayings

and learn about God loving non-Jews

and sinners then we can understand

how he always loved that way and

we can see this in the Infancy Narrative.

This special hesed can be seen in relation

to the four of Mary’s predecessors:

Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba.

In the Infancy Narrative we also see

a new hesed—agape in the fulfilling

of the five dreams and then in

the fulfilling of the five prophecies.

However, the main message about agape

in Matthew is found in his own perspective

in terms of which he sees agape

as fulfilling hesed and ahava in

terms of nine new dimensions that

let agape build upon Jewish love but

go beyond it by fulfilling it.

According to Matthew we should obey Jesus

and live righteously as did he

to bring about the kingdom of love.

Matthew shows how Jesus revealed

nine new dimensions of his kingdom.

1) It will be an eternal kingdom

2) The chosen people will include all.

3) It will be a kingdom of altruistic love,

4) which will especially love enemies.

5) It will be for childlike believers.

6) The closest disciples will be celibate,

7) that they might bring all to the kingdom.

8) Purgatory will let us all be reconciled

9) and we should love agape more than anything.

So, agape as Jesus revealed it is

1) an eternal love 2) a universal love

3) an altruistic love 4) an unconditional love

5) a childlike love 6) a celibate love

7) a missionary love 8) a purgatorial love

9) and a love that loves love above all.

Matthew shows us how the disciples

both men and women followed Jesus

and worked more and more for

the mysterious kingdom of heaven.

But they often failed to obey him

as did Peter and yet agape reveals

how Peter is a saintly sinner.

So this kingdom of agape is glorious

and the whole task of agapeic lovers

is to give glory to God by manifesting

more and more his mysterious love

so that all might begin to see it.

The only mention of reconciliation

in the Four Gospels is at Matt 5:23–24

where Jesus says:

If you are bringing your offering

to the altar and there remember

that your brother has something

against you, leave your offering

there before the altar, go and be

reconciled with your brother first,

and then come back and present

your offering.

This can be understood as having to do

with the entire family of humankind.

Kierkegaard has shown us the logic

of this reconciliation and with Nietzsche

we can understand its physiology, but

with Levinas and Derrida we can

better understand how glorifying God

can help bring about this reconciliation.

Jesus gives his followers the task

of going out to all persons and teaching

them of this reconciling agape that

aims at bringing us all to love each other.

All nine points that make up agape

as Matthew spells them out aim at

this reconciliation of all of God’s people.

As Matthew shows us Jesus explained

agape in terms of hesed and of ahava

and the notions of glory for the Jews

were connected with this and can be

fulfilled if all Christians become good Jews

in really loving God and all as our neighbor.