The Castelli Colloquium on Sacrifice

In Manoel de Oliveira’s Um Filme Falado (A Talking Picture, 2003), four people dine at the fcaptain’s table on a ship in the Mediterranean, each speaking their own language (Catherine Deneuve, French; John Malkovich, English; Stefania Sandrelli, Italian; Irene Papas, Greek) in an emblem of European unity and mutual understanding, reversing the curse of Babel. (Plot-spoiler: At the end of the film terrorists blow up the ship.) At the Enrico Castelli Colloquium held at the Villa Mirafiore of the University of Rome, January 4-7, 2008, this European dream came close to being fulfilled. Four languages – French, Italian, German, English – flowed as freely as the ideas, the jokes, and the wine. All this was enabled by the generous, discreet and warm hospitality of the Italian philosophers, who went far out of their way to arrange the smooth-running event.

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As Jean-Luc Marion pointed out, the Castelli colloquia have had a unique role in interrogating and overcoming barriers – between linguistic worlds, between analytical and continental philosophy, and between theology and philosophy. The themes tend to alternate between theological and philosophical ones. I did not attend the last colloquium, in part because I did not understand the topic “le Tiers” (the Third Person) – only philosophers can entertain such nebulous notions. But the present theme was at the other extreme: “Sacrifice”, the densest of religious institutions, which has exercised the wits of scholars since the beginning of history.

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The first event was a Mass at St Agnes’ Basilica in memory of the much-loved Marco Olivetti, whose untimely death was a great blow to the Castelli circle. Archbishop Bruno Forte delivered a moving homily – with his mitre and staff he is every inch an archbishop. Things he said as a theologian fall now from his lips with new rightness and ripeness, as if tel qu’en lui-même l’épiscopat le change – and already he is murmured to be “papabile”. A seminar on Olivetti’s thought followed, marked by a little too much of a certain Levinasian-Ricoeurian vulgate. Olivetti was the most generous and humble of professors, keenly following the new developments in philosophy that his students’ theses represented. An obligation hangs in the air to study his own reflections, notably in his Analogia del soggetto (http://www.bestwebbuys.com/Analogia_Del_Soggetto-ISBN_9788842039037.html?isrc=b-search). His name is consubstantial with the gigantic volumes of the Castelli proceedings; their new editor is to impose rigorous space limits.

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Next morning, Jean Greisch’s opening rehearsal of a set of questions about sacrifice seemed to be led by the regulative idea of finding a concept of sacrifice, of reducing it to its essence. But here from the start we stumbled on a huge difficulty of any talk of sacrifice. The vast pluralism of sacrificial practices, and the fact that they come down to us from prehistoric and preliterate times, make them peculiarly restive against the concept and against phenomenological reduction. The opacity of sacrifice must not be underestimated. Did the authors of Leviticus really know why they were going through the precise motions that had been handed down, and that they describe so meticulously? Do the endless discussions in Mishnah and Talmud take us any nearer to clarity about fundamental whys and wherefores? Are not the earliest Indian sources already an effort to rationalize the sacrificial practices whose original intent had become unclear? Many accounts of the semantics of sacrifice have sought to resolve all the issues at one fell swoop. Philo offers a Platonic allegorization of Old Testament sacrifices; Origen makes them all typologies of Christian redemption; more recently, René Girard has extended to a vast variety of phenomena his theory of mimetic desire culminating in a crisis of violent rivalry that seeks a sacrificial scapegoat for its resolution; Girard has also given a new lease of life to the idea that Christ’s was a sacrifice to end all sacrifices. None of these theories can be adequate to the complexity of the issue.

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The two contributors least likely to underestimate this enigmatic opacity were Marcel Hénaff, an anthropologist of great learning, brilliance and wit, and Guy Stroumsa, a historian of religions who works at the crossroads of ancient and modern religious pluralism, with all the tensions it bears, in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Stroumsa’s paper was a meditation on post-sacrificial Judaism as a religion of God's absence in which the reassuring formula of do ut des did not work any more. In contrast early Christianity was vigorously sacrificial – and perhaps this is something he would think questionable. He cited the Martyrdom of Polycarp as an example and was quizzed by Dehandschutter, who denied that the text contained all that much in the way of sacrificial reference. Stroumsa claimed to have the perspective of the religion scholar, methodologically atheistic, which can detect anthropological patterns between the lines of religious texts. Such language as “He waited to be betrayed as also the Lord had done” (Mart. Polyc. 1.2) or “I must be burnt alive” (5.2; 12.3) certainly strikes a sacrificial note, as similar language in John does, even if the actual terminology of sacrifice is not used. “By a single hour purchasing eternal life” (2.3) could also be parsed according to a sacrificial do ut des calculus. The climax is explicitly sacrificial: “he was bound, as a noble ram out of a great flock, for an oblation, a whole burnt offering made ready and acceptable to God” (14.1); “May I, today… be received as a rich and acceptable sacrifice” (14.2), which retrospectively allows the whole text to be read as a kind of ritual narrative of sacrifice. Scholars play down this language, Stroumsa contended, reducing it to mere metaphor. Historically, Girard’s claim that Christ’s death spelt the end of sacrifice is unfounded.

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At table Stroumsa jousted with his old acquaintance Marion on the Virgin Birth, asking why no one ever notices Philo’s parallel account of the virgin birth of Isaac. Curious, I looked it up: “He [Moses] shows us Sarah conceiving at the time when God visited her in her solitude (Gen 21:1), but when she brings forth it is not to the Author of her visitation, but to him who seeks to win wisdom, whose name is Abraham” (De Cherubim, 45). Interesting to know if any other Jewish sources read Gen 21:1 in that way.

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Richard Swinburne presented the Atonement in rather inappropriate quantitative terms – Christ helps us to atone for our own sins and those of our ancestors. I demurred: atonement is God’s work not a human effort, 2 Cor 5:18; it is a radical gift, Rom 3:21-26; one should not say divine forgiveness is contingent on human response, or that forgiveness not made so contingent is lacking in virtue, Lk 24:34; Acts 7:60; the notion of penal substitution is not just an invention of the Reformers but has biblical warrant, Isaiah 53:6. But the problem is that philosophers are very often tone-deaf to biblical language and insufficiently at home in the broad perspectives of Scripture. This is particularly true of analytical philosophers, but Michel Henry was to my mind a clear case of a continental philosopher distorting Scripture in the service of his theory; it was at the Castelli colloquia that he first developed this tendency; I recall that when he spoke in 2000 the room was suddenly thronged with the ladies of Rome; challenged on some strange reading of John he replied, “Vous savez, je ne suis pas exégète”! In any case, Swinburne, whose rationalistic commonsense approach to Scripture used to drive the doughty Welsh philosopher-priest D. Z. Philips crazy, replies with the most courteous calm to every irritated objection, carrying with him the pleasing atmosphere of the Oriel Common Room. Philips is a missed presence, not least for his explosive humour. I was also sorry to note the absence of Walter Jaeschke, admirable historian of German idealism, his fellow-connaisseur Emilio Brito (see his Festschrift, Philosophie et théologie, ed. É. Gaziaux. Leuven UP, 2007), and the Leiden theologian Hendrik Adriaanse.

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Did Jesus ever utter the words, ‘This is my body’? Dehandschutter and Gabriel Vahanian were the only participants to raise this question, with Vahanian strongly asserting that the sacrificial interpretation of Christ’s death was an early church interpretation already estranged from his radical eschatological message. Swinburne maintained that the concordance of testimonies from Paul and the Synoptics made such scepticism unjustifiable, and that John, though he does not report the words of institution has Jesus talking about eating his flesh and blood all through the first part of the Gospel. To my mind, that missed the point. Of course the Eucharist was well-established by the time Paul wrote 1 Corinthians. The later Synoptic texts are thus no sort of independent historical witness (and of course Luke and Matthew rely on Mark in addition). As to John, the only reference is John 6: 51-58, which Bultmann saw as a later interpolation by the ecclesiastical redactor. Analytical philosophers of religions always pooh-pooh such critical or hyper-critical considerations. On the other hand, it may be that our scholars have a tendency to underestimate the accuracy of ancient historical reporting. There is nothing implausible in the idea that Jesus would have used paschal symbolism to interpret the sense of his forthcoming death, and the expressions “this is my body” and “this is my blood” take their meaning within that context, with reference to the unleavened “bread of affliction” and the sprinkled blood of the Covenant.

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That afternoon A. G. Conte spoke of the syntactics and semantics of sacrifice. Leviticus, the Mishnah and the Talmud work out the syntax, the rules of the game, down to the minutest details – though there are lots of inconsistencies in what the Bible prescribes on that level. But the point of these rules has often been lost and they have become stubbornly opaque. The Bible also sketches a variety of theories about sacrifice, attempting to impose a luminous semantics on the obscure syntactics, but these explanations only go half way to cover the details. On a lighter note, Prof. Conte also distinguished pragmatics and praxiology, or the science of effective action. If a man plays chess according to the rules, in order to win, that is pragmatics. But if a man plays chess with a beautiful woman on the beach, dragging out the game and allowing her to win, that is praxiology.

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Next morning, Eleanor Stump, the only American (unless one counts Louis Dupré, who seems proud to call himself an American), and along with Swinburne one of the two analytical philosophers courageous and open enough to penetrate into this lion’s den of continental phenomenological murkiness, effectively refuted Kierkegaard’s account of the binding of Abraham as a suspension of the ethical. Someone objected that that is not really what Kierkegaard meant, but she sensibly pointed out that whether this is so or not the understanding she was refuting is that which is most widely influential. Unfortunately her own reading, though sensitively attuned to Jewish tradition, was pegged to a traditionalist interpretation of Genesis, which treated the doublets as separate historical incidents – so that in the second text in which Hagar is abandoned with her child in the desert, the child must be imagined as a sturdy fifteen-year-old! As a firm believer in the cleansing power of critical biblical scholarship and the impossibility of avoiding its powerful grip, I deplore that someone of sharp intelligence and deep religious conviction should set up this barrier. When I queried at table Swinburne’s and her own reference to the long post-Resurrection conversations of Jesus with his disciples, pointing out that all the words ascribed to the risen Jesus are in the style of the respective Evangelists and add nothing to what the pre-Paschal Jesus said, her reply was, “If I must choose between how the Church has always understood her faith and the findings of German exegesis, I know which to choose.” Karl Barth, I recall, made much of the early Church’s memory of conversing with the Risen Christ; but I suppose the basis of such memory is prophetic utterances at spirit-filled assemblies of the early community.

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Next, Emmanuel Falque spoke dazzlingly of the Real Presence but, coming from Tours, he took as his text the scandalous confession that Berengar was forced to sign in 1059, according to which we mash and munch Christ’s body. I urged a more Augustinian approach, stressing the spiritual nature of Christ’s presence, not as a thing but in the eschatological dynamic of the paschal mystery. Kevin Hart, among the many philosophers and literati who have embarked on theology in recent years (for reasons redolent of ecclesiastical crisis), is the one who veers closest to theological normalcy; his paper, as a result, was almost bland, when set against Falque's spice of provocation.

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The afternoon brought a lecture from the sole theologian among the “orators” (the inner circle), Ingolf Dalferth. As a Lutheran he is not very sacrifice-friendly, and after a brilliant deconstruction of sacrificial calculation he presented Maximilien Kolbe’s act of generous love as the model of Christian action, beyond any such considerations. But I imagine that this act of love was rooted in a long practice of sacrificial thought and praxis. Like the Behm article, haima, in the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament that treats the blood of Christ as a mere metaphor for his self-offering, Dalferth’s contribution to the article Opfer in Theologische Real-Enzyklopädie treats NT talk of sacrifice as just a set of images chosen by Christ or Christians to talk about redemption. While deploring the fetishistic physicalism of some eucharistic theologies, I also deplore the haimophobia that would wipe away all the sacral overtones of blood-sacrifice from the death of Christ and his martyrs and from the Eucharist. To talk of metaphors is all right if one remembers that a metaphor, as Heidegger suggests in Der Satz vom Grund, can be a way of naming being. The reality and power of Christ’s sacrificial language is equally missed by those who obsess about transubstantiation, ripping the Real Presence from its total network of relations, including the temporal play between anamnesis and eschatological expectation, and those who dephysicalize it to the point of making Christian assembly a mere meeting of minds and hearts rather than incorporation into the Body of Christ.

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At night, over a grappetta in the bar Marion entertains us with a long discourse on viticulture – on the relative proportions of le cep et le sol, stock and soil. Let no one imagine that normaliens spend their time discussing the enigmas of the Transcendental Deduction; their conversation turns mostly on cyclism, cartoons and soccer – one can end up trapped in an endless discussion of these topics; or they talk of philosophy in tones of high mockery – Neoplatonism was demolished lock, stock and barrel at lunch next day, despite the fact that Marion’s beloved Denys was up to his eyeballs in Proclus (though an ancient pious take on the pseudo-Areopagite airbrushes this). The occasion was Vincent Carraud’s exposition of the incredible theology of annihilation promoted by Condren of the French school of spirituality. “Dieu seul devrait exister; tout l’univers devrait être détruit à sa gloire”. I suggest that a good inquisitor could find in such propositions the synthesis of all heresies, beginning with a Manichean denigration of the created order. The sober Jansenists occupied all the attention of heresy-hunters, mostly for political reasons, while such monstrosities went unremarked. On the way back from the lecture I learned much from Marion about the analogous extravagances of Malebranche. I was horrified to hear that a great number of copies of Carraud’s brilliant study on the principle of sufficient reason, Causa sive Ratio (http://www.decitre.fr/livres/Causa-sive-ratio.aspx/9782130501800), a book that should be in every university library, had been pulped by the publisher. Is this not vandalism? The Latin title apparently scared away buyers. One even sees books published in Paris with Greek titles in Greek script – a strange departure from common sense. Carraud laboured on his work for years in tranquil Caen; it would be impossible to erect such a monument amid the distractions of the Capital.

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Professor A. Poma took up Michel Serres’ polemic against sacrifice, which obviously owes a lot to Girard, and which seems to be predicated on a Rousseauistic dream of some prior state of benevolent chaos, in which all possibilities were accessible, before the violent institution of civilization by the sacrificial act curbed and repressed them. Hegel, whom Serres sees as imposing the dialectic of the powerful, was surely closer to the mark in suggesting that human history has always been structured in determinate ways, which have always involved, and necessarily, a degree of tension and violence. The utopia Serres dreams of does not lie in the past, but perhaps in a utopian future. The Girardian shortcut to grasping “the logic of sacrifice” is not easy to relinquish, especially when it is cemented by assumptions of Catholic piety, more tenacious among the Italians than among the French. Poma, a very sympathetic man, a devotee of Proust, listened ruefully at table to Marcel Hénaff as he pointed out all the problems with Girard’s theory when measured against the broad range of complex empirical fact and criticized his friend Serres for imposing models of thought drawn from mathematics and physics on the texture of empirical history. I learned that Poma is related by marriage to Carla Bruni, innamorata of the French President (recently installed as Canon of the Lateran Basilica – the President not the innamorata –, with the historic privilege of entering the Basilica on horseback; his remarks compromising the Separation of Church and State were gratifying to his papal host but sparked a furore in Paris; he praised the Pope’s French and received the reply, “Oui, je l’ai appris au gymnase” – in the gym!). I also discovered that Richard Swinburne is a relation of the Victorian poet.

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If the gift is a Trojan horse in the city of phenomenology, by reason of its irreducible pluralism, how much more is the institution of sacrifice unamenable to the search for a pure phenomenological essence. Yet Marion, in the closing paper, added a chapter to his famous work Étant donné by parsing sacrifice as well in terms of the categories there developed. He illustrated his case by a discussion of the binding of Isaac, which became an epiphany of givenness or donation. What he said on that chimed well with Jewish tradition. Isaac is no ordinary first-born but the child of the promise, and in giving him back to God Abraham receives him anew as pure gift; all the children of Isaac likewise hold their existence and calling as a gift from God’s hands; their wandering through history is stamped with the mark of sacrifice. But there is much more to the phenomenology of sacrifice, in its vast historical and prehistorical reach, than one reading of the story of Abraham and Isaac. Again I find myself reaching for the expression “irreducible pluralism” that I have always opposed to Marion’s crystalline constructions, ever since the days of Heidegger et la question de Dieu (1980). See http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/the_gift_a_troj.html

and http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/10/the_gift_at_the.html.

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Hegel at the end of his life was steeped in empirical research into the history of religions, research that challenged his powers of systematic integration. This voracity for empirical input is less apparent in Marion. It is a pity that no one among the “orators” brought out the big guns of Hegelianism; Jean-Louis Viellard-Baron, who could have done so, sat like myself in the humble ranks of the “participants”. Adriaan Peperzak told me at table that Hegel disliked Beethoven and loved Rossini, going twice to the opera in Vienna to hear a soprano who had struck him. Nonetheless, Beethoven, his exact contemporary, is close to Hegel in the cult of development, Durchführung, and in the assertion of spirit and freedom. Beethoven is the Hegel of music and Hegel is the Beethoven of philosophy. Hegel might affect to be a Stendhal when on holiday, but his true sister-soul is the master of Bonn. Bernhard Casper talks of the unforgettable Bernhard Welte, who preached at Heidegger’s funeral and wryly told me in Freiburg back in 1979 how Heidegger fell victim to a foolish ambition: den Führer führen. Casper’s edition of Welte’s Gesammelte Schriften is now in handsome progress

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Leaving, I thank two of our gracious Italian hosts. One mentions Claudio Moreschini (http://www.amazon.com/s?ie=UTF8&search-type=ss&index=books&field-author=Claudio%20Moreschini&page=1), and I launch into praise of the great army of Italian philologists who have done so much for the study of Philo and Origen and a host of other subjects. Marion pipes up with praise of Italian prowess on the soccer pitch. On the way to the airport I have the excellent company of Maurice Boutin who chats of Bultmann and in the airport lounge that of Adriaan Peperzak who fills me in on the American theological scene. On the flight to Amsterdam I talk of the terrors of turbulence with a Roman who is half-German and he mischievously tells some more of those gruesome crash jokes (“Folks, put your passports in your mouth, they may be needed for identification”) pointing to the serene Peperzak in the window-seat as a true philosopher well-prepared to face a sudden encounter with his Maker. Schiphol airport, the most civilized in the world, offers its usual batch of contemplative paintings on loan from the Rijksmuseum. Then, the long journey back to Tokyo.

Comments

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Pilot to Control Tower: We have a problem. The joystick is stuck and the plane is going straight up.

Control: Right, just press button A firmly.
...
Pilot: Hello, I pressed button A but the plane is still going straight up. What should I do?

Control: In that case, just press button A and button B together and hold them down for 30 seconds.
...
Pilot: Hello again, I did what you said, but the plane is still going straight up...

Control: Just pull the red lever on your right and all will be well.
...
Pilot: I pulled the lever, but the plane is still going up.

Control: Right, in that case just repeat after me: Our Father, who art in heaven...

[Spirit of Vatican II]

Bush, Putin and the Pope are traveling in the VIP cabin, with three special parachutes in their locker. But the Pope has invited a young seminarian to join them.

The pilot announces an engine failure. Everyone is very worried.

The the pilot makes a second announcement: "Sorry, folks, our last engine has failed. I am now resorting to my parachute. You will find yours in the lockers behind you."

Putin is up like a shot, dons his gear, leaps out the window.

Not to be outdone, the leader of the free world is up like a shot, dons his gear, leaps out the window,

The seminarian says, "Holy Father take your parachute quickly."

The Pope says, "No, my son, I am old and you are young, and, who knows, you may be a pope some day. You take my parchute."

The seminarian says, "But, Holy Father, there are two parachutes left! I think Mr Bush must have taken my coat."

[A reader from London]

Prof O'Leary: I have profited greatly from reading your essays and the illuminating comments that you post on Fr Zuhlsdorf's "WDPTRS" site. Your comments are balanced and start from less of a parti pris than most of the other "liberal" and all of the "conservative" blogs.

I will be in Tokyo in a bit over a month and would enjoy meeting you, but this site has no contact address. Perhaps you could reply using the e-mail address given with this post.