To Sojourn

We know very little about Jesus. We know lots about what people said and wrote about him after his death. But the man himself is largely hidden from us. We know that his name was Yeshua, and that he was a Jew living in ancient Palestine. Historians suspect, for complex reasons that we need not get into, that Yeshua was taken in by an ascetic preacher named John.(1) This man initiated Yeshua into an apocalyptic strain of Judaism. This did not mean that Yeshua believed in our modern, cinematic version of the apocalypse—there was nothing of the End of the World in Yeshua’s words. He preached the arrival of a divine revelation, an unveiling of higher meaning and truth. God had touched down as a holy presence, ending the need for complex ritual and dogma. Yeshua took this message with him to Jerusalem during the busiest, most volatile day of the Jewish calendar. Local Roman authorities cruelly executed him shortly afterwards for nothing more than disturbing an already fragile civic peace. And that’s more-or-less what we know. Yeshua did not refer to himself as the son of God or as the anointed one, the Messiah or Christ. Those claims came later, as did stories of Yeshua's miracles and bodily resurrection.

Among the many things that we definitely do not know about Yeshua is the date of his birth. I am not surprising anyone when I report that the Christ Mass is celebrated on December 25 as part of a medieval Catholic attempt to convert non-Christians who celebrated the Winter Solstice. As such, Christmas is yet another thing obstructing our view of Yeshua, making us see what was not there. Which is unfortunate because the message of Yeshua is one worth preserving, whatever your beliefs. Yeshua’s God was an immediate presence, one beyond churches and superstitions. To quote Thomas Sheehan, “In Jesus’ preaching, the happening of forgiveness, the coming of the kingdom, was entirely the initiative of God. And yet at the same time it was not an objective event that dropped out of the sky. God became present when people allowed that presence by actualizing it in lives of justice and charity.”(2)

Behind all the dogma, myth, historical confusion, colonialism, and commercialism behind and surrounding December 25^th, there is a moment waiting for us—a parallel world of human simplicity, existing simultaneously with our own. One of the spiritual goals of the strands of Christian asceticism that provides the core to modern Systema, obfuscated by politics, consumerism, and a martial emphasis, is the actualization of this parallel world. Systema—at its core—seeks, after the words of one of the oldest letters of early Christianity, to transform its practitioners into foreigners and exiles with respect to the world, to inspire a transition from regular time to messianic time, “the time that remains between time and its end.”(3) As sojourners in this world, we place our faith in the sky and the heavens, the ever-present moment of opening that is human being, and the feeling of immenseness that accompanies that moment.(4)

The conversion of Ebenezer Scrooge, in Dicken’s Christmas Carol, is one from regular time to messianic time. Scrooge becomes a sojourner, faithful to the opening, enacting God’s presence in a life of justice and charity. He learns the true meaning of Christmas.

I saw a woman on the street today. She was speaking loudly into her phone, appearing agitated, but not speaking words of anger. She was stressed and frustrated. There was a doctor’s appointment to attend, family coming later that day, and some other difficulties. She looked hurt. Like life had taken something from her and she didn’t even realize it. Listening to her I thought of what Christmas had become. And then I remembered what it could be.

 (1)     Biblical scholars employ at least four criteria when determining whether elements of the gospel material are authentically historical: dissimilarity, coherence, multiple attestation, and language and environment. Whatever is reported of Yeshua that is dissimilar from the early Christian church or ancient Judaism, is coherent with other elements that are likewise dissimilar, written of in separate, unrelated sources, and typical of Aramaic speech and the cultural patterns of early Palestine, is probably authentically historical. See Sheehan, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity (Random House, 1986): 25

 (2)     Ibid: 67

 (3)     Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (Seagull, 2012): 1-8
 (4)     Nancy, God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues (Fordham, 2011): 15-16

Philosophy and Life

Those familiar with ancient and late-antique Mediterranean philosophical schools will probably also be familiar with the work of Pierre Hadot, an historian of philosophy who ended his career at the College de France. Hadot is famous (as much as any academic is ever famous) for treating ancient philosophical schools as coherent ways of life. Platonism was a way of life. Aristotelianism was a way of life. Stoicism was a way of life. Back then a student of philosophy did not simply ask questions about the fields we delineate under the categories of physics, metaphysics, and ethics for the sake of asking questions. These investigations, and the answers characteristic to the various schools, were not only guides to correct living, but exercises in themselves; they molded the psyche of their practitioner so that it conceived of the world in a way distinct from other schools. The leaders of these schools were far more like priests of the Most High Good than they were like modern university professors. In some cases, especially in the Platonic tradition, they approached the status of holy men.

In a very short radio broadcast, transcribed in Philosophical Chronicles, Jean-Luc Nancy explores the act of philosophizing, contrasting it against the image of the philosopher presented above. Asking whether or not philosophy gives form to life, he determines that the question itself is about energy, about the difference between Descartes and Heidegger. “In one case, one supposes that the order of reasons generates energy, and in the other, one affirms that the effectivity of this energy is of an order different from the order of reasons. One thus poses the problem of the passage from one order to the other.”  Reasoning through concepts and ideas somehow mobilizes life into a particular configuration or it does not. In the latter case, we are speaking of two distinct forms of energy.

Nancy goes on to assert that this tension between ‘form’ and ‘life’ is necessarily internal to philosophy. Why? Because “a philosopher immediately disqualifies the notions of both ‘form’ and ‘life’ understood as frame and content or even as signification and experience…Neither form, nor life, nor concept, nor intuition, but from one to the other, or rather, from one within the other, through the other, but also one against the other, a tension without resolution.” Here Nancy efficiently twins a series of words which roughly sum up human being: frame-form, content-life, signification-concept, experience-intuition. Frame-form rests opposite content-life; signification-concept opposite experience-intuition. The philosopher, in thinking, thinks within and through and against and between the four polarized ends of this axis, mixing and matching, transposing and contrasting. According to Nancy, this tangle is the truth of life, which is “never simply available but is always caught up in its own practice.”

“Thus philosophy is less a ‘form of life’ than life forming itself, that is to say, thinking itself, in accordance with its excess over every given form or signification. Which also means, of course, this life thinking itself even in its death.”

We are reminded of Phaedo now. Philosophy is practicing to die. We are also reminded of the later Platonists who sought, through the practice of death, an ineffable and illuminating experience of Mind or the One. But those goals are not what Nancy is attempting to describe, are they? For Nancy, philosophy is a process that both produces itself and overcomes itself. It is a fundamental quality of life-as-thinking, which is the necessary life of humanity. Its purpose is to create and explore space in being. "Between religion and lived experience--in a space, let us note, where one also finds politics, science, and art--philosophy has the task, if I may say so, of spacing as such." According to Nancy, philosophy performs its work on the organization of society, on the investigation and cataloging of natural phenomena, and on the expression of lived experience. Like the ancients, Nancy's philosophy is an art of all arts.

  

Here we might infer Nancy’s evaluation of the philosophical schools described by Hadot and other historians of ancient and late-antique philosophy. They were bad at making space between religion and lived experience. Why? Perhaps because their philosophy, their life-thinking, was focused overly on the future of life-ending or life-over. The foundations and ends of their frame-form and signification-concept were gods or God. In which case, Nancy's philosopher would be a modern invention, or--if we are being charitable--a full flowering of philosophy's potential. I would say that Nancy's philosopher is one who faces death much less often than the ancients and early moderns would have faced it. It is the philosophy of a life possessing social services.

Whatever the case, it is interesting to note that much of Nancy's most recent thought has concerned religion. Having written this out, I now see that, through thinking, he is attempting to create space not only between religion and life, but within religion itself, transforming that age-old thought barrier into philosophy as such.

I wish him luck and success.

Jean-Luc Nancy - God, Justice, Love, Beauty: Four Little Dialogues

"Why have religions used this word god? Why even outside of religion is it not so easy to do without naming god in one way or another? Because it is not enough to use abstract names like Love, Joy, Mercy, or Justice in order to name this dimension of opening and going beyond. It is necessary to be able to address oneself to or to relate to this dimension. Why address oneself to this dimension or establish a connection with it? In order to be faithful to it.

What does it mean to be oneself as much as possible? It means nothing other than being faithful to this opening or to this infinite going beyond of the human by the human. It means being faithful to the sky or the heavens, in the sense I've spoken of."