PAUL THELAKAT

Jean-Luc Marion, a Catholic Professor of the University of Paris (Sorbonne) in the Department of Philosophy, amazed me with this statement: “Orgasm, the only miracle that the poorest human condition can definitely experience – for it requires neither talent, nor apprenticeship, but simply a bit of naturalness – nevertheless leaves nothing to see, nothing to say, and carries away everything with it, even its memory.” I being a celibate Catholic priest am not a sexual or anti-sexual. I am still trying to understand the words of the fourth Gospel which is very central for Christians. But the fact of the flesh is something very common for man irrespective of religion. What is the flesh that I am? For Marion flesh is phenomenological term. The body appears and the flesh remains invisible. First of all, the flesh is bound to the givenness of the self, which I receive as a gift.
I must discover myself as a given and gifted phenomenon. Great invention of phenomenological thinking is not my existence as in Descartes, but the finding of the gift of existence. The giving itself is revelation of the giver. This makes me kneel and fold hands in great experience of veneration and thankfulness. A phenomenalization of the world passes through my flesh. The world would disappear for me without the flesh. I cannot separate myself from my flesh and precisely the flesh turns to be the factor that makes possible the appearance of the erotic.Erotic phenomenon is the maximum sign of pleasure achievable by people while they are on earth, but it is not the last one. Love seeks confirmation in eternity and has eschatological limits. There is an inner eternity to love. The erotic is the basic urge of the flesh to go out in love; ‘to know is to love’ according to the ‘logic of love’ which is no more logic, but creates a culture of love and horizon of love. The culture of love is giving without reason. “Man therefore does not receive the gift as such except in welcoming the act of giving, that is, through repetition by giving himself. Only the gift of the gift can receive the gift,” Marion wrote. It sounds like Pascal who wrote, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” There is no more logic in love, the moment love has a finality it becomes no more love but commerce. It is a culture of giving and receiving without realizing the givenness. Sex is probably the issue of our time that could be our ‘salvation’ if we thought it through.

“The future of Christianity, and of the Church, is to become an ever more refined religion of pure charity.”

He speaks of miracle of the erotic. Miracle is an event of which the effectivity proves the possibility of that which was definitely held as impossible. Wonder is called an event, essentially an experiential space which cannot be explained, laws cannot explain it. There is no reason for it to happen. Every phenomenon comes to me as if it was a miracle, and is experienced as a quasi-divine appearance from nowhere. There is no logical possibility for it to be.The quest for reasons and explanations is therefore never-ending. Every act of ethics is a miracle. Alterity is possible only as a miraculous abundance. Anything beyond the order of created nature can be called a miracle.
Any moral act or any spiritually motivated act has no natural reason. Any gift, any act of love falls outside the realm of the nature. Probably the best theological translation of Being Given is a miracle. It is in this sense that revelation remains inscribed within the transcendental conditions of possibility available to both believers and non-believers. The lived experience of miracle would, thus, in phenomenology still be miraculous. The erotic act remains miraculous for it involves giving with no return.
The phenomena show themselves, which properly are “monstrations” of their appearance, their manifestations, their revelation. How is it demonstrating or revealing? Logos denotes the world as appearing. The manifestation which occurs in the absence of all transcendence is nevertheless the manifestation of transcendence itself. The flesh certainly seems to show, to hear, and to be affected. Self-affection would allow rediscovering, a life manifests in every ecstasis of thought. In order to reach this life, it is only a barbarian who refuses to speak the language. Self reveals itself only in life as the proper self-revelation of this life—that is, as its Logos. But pathos is reversal of language, and in fact can reveal a new sense of culture and of unconscious, repressed life. In as much as the essence of community is affectivity, it includes everything that is defined in itself by the primal suffering of life and thus by the possibility of suffering. We can suffer with everything that suffers. That pathos – wich is the broadest form of every conceivable community. The self-communication of the pathos, narration allows pathos to narrate its own narration which is a cry.
Augustine, sick of flesh, becomes a question to himself. He seeks God in Himself as a creature. But Augustine says in Book 13 of his Confession, God does ‘not exist in a certain way, but he is is’ (non aliquo modo est, sed est est, Conf. 13.31.46). By reduplicating the word est, Augustine invokes Exodus 3:14 and suggests that God is simply, without qualification. All creatures exist in a certain way – the way God made them. God’s existence is not anything separate in the world. Every existence is shared and given, and so He is so close and so far,God ‘most hidden and most present’ (secretissime et praesentissime, Conf. 1.4.4). He is more intimate than I am to myself. The person with such an awareness is ‘on fire for imitating’ (exarsi ad imitandum, Conf. 8.5.10). This being on fire creates with a grammar of the divine within. The deep grammar of it is distilling the flesh. It is this distilling of the flesh which makes the Word of the divine. My flesh is every day transubstantiated into acts and words of love in relation. Or, in other words, the divine takes on a body in my flesh and dwells among us. The Eros is the desire to receive that from the other which, in order to be happy or to flourish, is converted by the divine grammar to a gift-love, which is the attitude of giving myself in service to the other. That which, in suspending economic calculation, no longer gives rise to exchange. If love is reciprocal – in order for the erotic phenomenon to be achieved – will it be doomed to be cancelled by reciprocity? The gift as a gift has no reason to be given. A gift is perfectly given even under the condition of the receiver’s lack of awareness. That which opens the circle so as to defy reciprocity or symmetry, the common measure, and so as to turn aside the return in view of the no-return. The moment the gift, however generous it be, is infected with the slightest hint of calculation, it ceases to be a gift. The lover, in the very moment of the most headlong advance, frees him from reciprocity and from economy.Passionate love, which enjoys itself and possesses the other, would contrast with virtuous love, which gives to the other and forgets itself. The divine grammar within does the metamorphosis of Eros on the Mount Moriah of everyday mysticism involving asceticism.
The divine longs to become acts and words of God. God in me discloses in words, that is, it occurs in and through language – language as flesh of thought. If language is the house of Being, such a house is created in our midst. Sex and love are pure givenness “perfect event”, one that is “pure givenness” rendering possible the impossible… surpassing all expectations, all promised, and all predictions. Such word or action is at once an idol and metaphor of the divine, asserting its ability to cause bedazzlement, disbelief, amazement, etc. The religious saying is only constituted in the interplay between story and prophecy, history and legislation, legislation and wisdom, and finally wisdom and lyricism. Naming God is, at best, a poetic activity without any bearing on description; that is, without any bearing on true knowledge of the world. Within poetic discourse, language celebrates itself. Only writing can, by addressing itself to anyone who knows how to read, refer to a world that is not there between the interlocutors, a world that is the world of the text and yet is not in the text.
The biological and social aspects of sex are reducible to neither anatomy nor socialization. The shape or form of the body as it is represented in culture. The body constituted as meaning is the only body to which we have access. The natural reality of sex is not merely natural, but is attributed meaning and value through language. Sex is the basic dynamo of the person in his exodus of love. The Eros is the force within which it can become the heaven of love and hell of hatred. It is the grammar that transmutes the fire to wonders of love and impossible miracles of everyday life. The image of God imprinted in the flesh is the capability “to love what you see and the supreme happiness is to possess what you love. An unutterable vision of truth,”Augustine wrote in The Literal Meaning of Genesis. Love has no religion, for all religions preach it in some form or another. Religion without the religious has brought to it a rigorous exploration of both negative theology and the prophetic/apocalyptic strands of the Bible. Postmodern theology with its new forms of language, rendering excess, gift, desire, prayer, has mediated with return of God to the centre of theology. Christianity is marching in a direction that can only be that of lightening and weakening its burden of dogma in favour of its practical and moral teaching. In that sense too, charity takes the place of truth. The future of Christianity, and of the Church, is to become an ever more refined religion of pure charity.