Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea

Чтение книги онлайн.

Читать онлайн книгу Agape and Hesed-Ahava - David L. Goicoechea страница 23

Agape and Hesed-Ahava - David L. Goicoechea Postmodern Ethics

Скачать книгу

and Bill Wiegand,

      a brilliant student from Idaho who was a year ahead of me,

      let me use his notebook that he made the year before and I can

      remember even tracing some of his drawings and copying much.

      Learning the scientific method was a big part of seminary schooling

      and we learned how to put forth an hypothesis and to try to

      prove it mathematically, logically, and with experimentation.

      The five intellectual virtues according to Aristotle are science,

      art, intuitive reason, practical wisdom, and theoretical wisdom.

      Our schooling was meant to teach us many kinds of knowledge

      so that our intuitions could guide in science and help us

      to find a fruitful hypothesis as Mendel and Copernicus did.

      Intuitive reason and the scientific search that could grow out of it

      aided us even in getting a kind of certitude in our faith, hope, and love.

      Aristotle defined science as a certain knowledge of things through

      causes and our liberal education helped us to intuit probabilities

      so that with a practical wisdom we could integrate our lives

      as a universal whole within the big picture seen by wisdom.

      For Aristotle friendship was a unity of one soul in two bodies

      based upon common values but once we saw Jesus’ agapeic love

      for all, even enemies, we knew that we should be friendly to all.

      I,3.9 Nourishing Agapeic Mourning with History

      The monks nourished their agape artistically with music,

      scientifically with the sciences, mathematically with intuitive reason,

      and came to a practical wisdom that revealed their celibacy

      as a sublimated eros that facilitated a new affection and friendship.

      They nourished us in all of that historically, for we had art

      and music appreciation courses in which we came to know

      the history of art and music and we learned the history of ideas.

      We studied the Hebrew Bible in the nine stages of its history.

      All the fathers had majored in philosophy before they

      studied four years of theology and then studied their specialties.

      Just at the time that I went to the seminary around 1950

      Scripture study went through a revolutionary change in the Catholic

      world, for the higher biblical criticism was making an impact.

      Father Mathias was back from Rome and teaching us after getting

      his Doctorate of Sacred Scripture and William Foxwell Albright’s

      “From Stone Age to Christianity” was being read by Catholics.

      We saw how the Law and the prophets with their loves of

      Ahava and hesed prepared the way for the new agape of Jesus.

      We were beginning to understand the history of the various

      spiritualities, from the Benedictine to the Franciscan and

      Dominican to the Jesuit and the Carmelite; we started

      to understand the history of modernity, from Luther and

      Descartes to Calvin and Hobbes to Henry VIII and Locke

      to Spinoza and Leibniz to Berkeley, Adam Smith,

      Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Marx; and all of this at bottom was

      a history of agape, which gave us confidence even as high

      school students that all things work together unto the good.

      The monks, who knew this history so well because much of it

      was their own Benedictine history, gave us such a positive

      attitude that we could successfully mourn any loss that came our way.

      II. With Levinas and Derrida

      II,1 Levinas’s Ethics as First Philosophy

      II,1.1 Levinas Grew up with the Jewish Religious Ethics

      Emmanuel Levinas tells us that the Hebrew Bible directed his

      thinking from the time of his earliest childhood in Lithuania.

      He was born in 1905, and entered the University of Strasbourg in 1923.

      Besides studying philosophy and learning its history in the West and

      besides learning the contemporary philosophy of Heidegger and Husserl,

      he made a study of Talmudic sources under the guidance of a teacher

      who communicated the traditional Jewish mode of exegesis.

      Just as Maimonides came forth with a Jewish version of Aristotelian

      philosophy in the thirteenth century and just as Spinoza gave us his

      Jewish version of ethics in modern times, so Derrida and Levinas

      give us their Jewish version of the postmodern approach to ethics.

      From his perspective of Jewish responsibility Levinas reworked

      the whole history of Western philosophy and Totality and Infinity,

      which he published in 1961, gives the full view of the early Levinas.

      My world is a totality and I try to control every aspect of it.

      I might even explain it to myself and others with a philosophical theory

      that gives an account of its beginning, its process, and its purpose.

      Each person‘s religious worldview could let him or her order

      everything in a totality that again makes sense of all the parts.

      But, according to Levinas, the face of the other can call me out of

      my

Скачать книгу