Paul Thelakat

1. Authentic to the Interior

There is definitely a crisis of obedience in the Syro-Malabar Church. We are compelled to ponder over this relentless intrigue of obedience. Martin Heidegger wrote: “All is sincerity.” The ultimate authenticity of life is one’s sincerity towards one’s own interiority. It is the unity of the self with the inner self. The guiding word of sincerity is dedicated to revealing such a translation as a task of repetition. This interpretation does not consist of merely the movement from one language to another, from a foreign language to the mother tongue, but of words that convey the spoken world itself. Speaking is in itself a mode of translation. In every conversation or soliloquy, an original translation prevails. This dialogical movement is nothing but a kind of logos that sees life in advance. The process of thinking is both a dialogical process and a translation process. The so-called translation and transcription always compulsorily follows the transposing of our whole essence into the realm of a transformed truth. We are held in the care of the word. The more difficult task is always the translation of one’s own language into its own best word. What is one’s own must be learned no less than the foreign, since what is one’s own in this sense still calls for its translation. This sincerity names the collective hearing of the foreign that belonging together of the strange. Authenticity names precisely the belonging together of the strange. This authenticity precisely is a mystery which I am and belonging to being.

“Christ is one with his Father; that unity expressed itself in conflict with the religious and political powers. His justification of God resulted in his death on the cross. Justification of God continues in history on the Way of the Cross.”

Sincerity names nothing romantic or sentimental, but rather the “fundamental tone” or the undertone of poetizing. Sincerity prevails only where there is intimacy. Intimacy denotes differences and the unifying of things different. Language is original and proper while poetizing, which is not taken as the occupation of writers and speakers – the realm of the poetizing power. Hearkening and being able to hearken are the fundamental condition for any genuine reading of the genuine word. What is proper is not simply received; it must be learned with effort. The most difficult and burdensome part of it is the free use or free relation to what is one’s own.

2. The Absent God

Inauthenticity occurs when a person embodies only the reality he or she has thrown into and their fallenness, falling into tasks that other people tell them to do. They live as the irresponsible crowd without ever considering the possibilities at their disposal about other ways of living life. The ego rules, the interiority is silenced. The eros of domination reigns to the effect that the author is dead. The author is exiled. As Augustine confesses, “you were with me, I was outside.” He is cut off from the “interior intimomeo” (Confessions 3.6.11). Ego disguises as the absolute in its cunning rationality. What kind of monsters they obtrude upon us as divine is well know. For what are the pictures or statues to which they append the names of saints, but exhibitions of the most shameless luxury or obscenity? The dress of the martyrs is in no respect more becoming. Once the author is exiled from the linguistic process what remains is conflict of egos and politics of domination in monologue.

3. Authenticity at Odds

Authenticity to the interiority can flow out as silence, assent and dissent. Being true to oneself one can become not at home in the world; this nostalgia may express with revolt and disobedience to those in higher up. The Greek tragedies are stories of interiority which is one with oneself and at odds with the world. Dramatic stage becomes interior conflicts of consciousness. All spirituality lies in consciousness. Antigone of Sophocles wants to bury the dead body of her slain brother. She is in conflict with the king who forbids. Keeping the faith in the divine law, she disobeys the king and dies. Socrates was authentic to himself and the interior power, but he was condemned to death by the Athenian judges as he was accused of corrupting the youth. He tells: “Here we part, you to live, I to die, which is better? God alone knows.” Christ is one with his Father; that unity expressed itself in conflict with the religious and political powers. His justification of God resulted in his death on the cross. Justification of God continues in history on the Way of the Cross. Peter and the other apostles replied: “We must obey God rather than human beings! (Acts 5:29).The debate over the question of circumcision for new Christians resulted in “much debate” and finally concluded, “we should not cause extra difficulty for those among the Gentiles who are turning to God” (Acts 15:1-41). Contact becomes tenderness and responsibility.

4. Obedience is Hearing

The question of sincerity is a question of justice. “Who” before all? A decision is needed, but who decides? Who says “yes” first is the other. It is not I – it is the other that can say yes. The tone of discourse points to the existence of a yes older than naive spontaneity, before the I-that-decides. There is there only listening and answering. This is also the so-called hospitality or welcoming. These notions indicate a relentless ‘intrigue’ of obedience. To welcome is to obey, what could also be called ethics, metaphysics, hospitality, responsibility, fecundity, substitution, subjectivity, prophetism, etc. It is not a question of affirming any obedience, which can also be read as a discourse on disobedience. Heidegger identifies listening with the primary and authentic nature of being because “we can listen in a hearkening way”, “our hearkening… is somehow an obedience.” If we compare speaking and listening as two forms of communication, then the former is clearly social in nature, while the latter is more solitary: one can simply be motionless. This listening to one’s own interiority or the Other within of it is always mysteriously uncertain and wavering. What I read has to be checked and counterchecked with as many possible as the uncertainty will linger. Unless one hears others one doesn’t hear oneself or does check one’s egoist reading. Ludwig Wittgenstein says in his seventh proposition of Tractatus: ‘That whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.’ Maybe the fate of the humankind depends on how attentively we can authentically listen to obey the interiority and the people. The soul is the other in me.

5. Call of the Conscience

For Heidegger the call of conscience proper is the call to one’s constitutive responsibility. The conscience calls “in the mode of keeping silent” and so distinguishes itself from the voice of the ‘they’, which is the irresponsible crowd. The call of conscience is a “giving-to-understand.” When man hears a call there is nothing to say or argue, not because the call is forceful, but because “this hearing appropriates the sense of the call uncoveredly.” If I genuinely hear the call of conscience proper, then, evasive casuistry is not a possible response. The call is indeed precisely not and never is not something that we ourselves planned nor prepared for, nor deliberately performed. ‘It’ calls contrary to expectations as “It is raining.” There is no identifiable subject that is raining. The call comes from me and also from beyond me and over me. The call is only ever heard from within a fundamental attunement. The attunement to it is not “a consequence or side effect of our thinking, doing and acting, but – speaking crudely – it is the presupposition for them, the ‘medium’ in which they first happen.” An attunement is a standing in a disclosure of the Being. In this attunement I find myself “not-at-home” in the world of the crowd. The call of conscience leads me to a moment of insight – a “glance of the eye.” I see the utter groundlessness of my existence: I see that my own being is a question for myself. The call of conscience I see the genuine possibilities before me, the possibilities ordinarily concealed by the irresponsible crowd. The call of conscience discloses my own responsibility to respond to my own possibilities – a responsibility that in its specifics is different for each man. There are two dangers that destroy the very thought.

1. Thoughtlessness: The growing thoughtlessness must, therefore, spring from some process that gnaws at the very marrow of man today. Man today is in flight from thinking. This flight-from-thought is the ground of thoughtlessness. But part of this flight is that man will neither see nor admit it. Man today will even flatly deny this flight from thinking. He will assert the opposite. Thoughtlessness is an uncanny visitor who comes and goes everywhere in today’s world. H. Arendt met Rudolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Nazi criminal who transported 6 million Jews to be killed to the Concentration camps. In the doc she met was not a monster nor a devil but a simple man. She wrote, “It seems to me that we have to see these things in their total banality, in their prosaic triviality, because that’s what truly characterizes them. Bacteria can cause epidemics that wipe out nations, but they remain merely bacteria. I regard any hint of myth and legend with horror.” The banal evils that threatens society is “technocratic thoughtlessness.” You need only thoughtless men and women to commit horrors. Thoughtlessness can become part of the banality of evil of the society not concerned with preventing evil through education for action.
2. Calculative thinking: The calculation is the mark of all thinking that plans and investigates. Such thinking remains calculation even if it neither works with numbers nor uses an adding machine or computer. Calculative thinking computes ever new, ever more promising and at the same time more economical possibilities. Calculative thinking races from one prospect to the next. Calculative thinking never stops, never collects itself. Calculative thinking is not meditative thinking, not thinking which contemplates the meaning which reigns in every-thing that is. There are, then, two kinds of thinking, each justified and needed in its own way: calculative thinking and meditative thinking. This meditative thinking is what we have in mind when we say that contemporary man is in flight-from-thinking.

Man is threatened today at his core! The loss of rootedness is caused not merely by circumstance and fortune, nor does it stem only from the negligence and the superficiality of man’s way of life. The age that is now beginning has been called of late the atomic age or technical age. We remain as far as possible from a reflective insight into our age. Why? Because we forget to ponder. Because we forget to ask: What is the ground that enabled modern technology to discover and set free new energies in nature? In all areas of his existence, man will be encircled ever more tightly by the forces of technology. Noble-mindedness would be the nature of thinking and thereby of thanking. We fail to recognise thanking, which does not have to thank for something, but only thanks for being allowed to thank.

6. Prayer is Listening

As we get in any synagogue you cannot escape the prayer of Psalm 81: “Hear, O My people, and I will warn you: O Israel, if only you would listen to Me!” The ear is most ethical organ. Prayer is listening to the prayer of the ultimate source of life. Simone Weil wrote: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our minds towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself. Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious. Everyone is capable of attention to the voice which is within. Authority is within and with us. It is authentically attuned to the interiority of the ultimate which is present in the interiority. But the question is how am I sure of my interpretation or my reading or translating the inner voice within me. This ambiguity is with all. Sanctity is a mystery of secrecy. There is no way of proving holiness. Attires adorn but does not sanctify. How can I measure up my reading? The temptation to do the right thing for the wrong reason is real. There is no other way than to listen to others without boundaries and frontiers. Such wide listening is also prayer, to the Holy Spirit not only within but around us. It is not impossible to reach a consensus by listening and talking to each other. It can become an authoritative discourse is not a particular voice within, but a particular way of combining many voices within. As Bakthin tells, “consciousness takes shape and never stops taking shape, as a process of interaction among authoritative and innerly persuasive discourses.” All words have the ‘taste’ of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work. A divine procedure to hear the author can meet with the danger of the authority to make its author itself than the Other within and around. Here there is the absence of sincerity or authenticity to impose the will of those in power and not the will of the author who is Christ and His Spirit. Obedience is translated as “fear of heaven,” that is, fear for the other or trembling before the mystery of the other. One fears death that may be under the weight of my deaf, blind, impure hands that decide at will, alone or by naive carelessness. Certainly, hands that are always dirty, but that can still save, practice justice, hands willing to sacrifice.