Pope Francis speaks of Synod as more than a parliament. The dialogic means of seeking truth is counter-posed to official monologism by those who pretend to possess a ready-made truths. This is where the synod fails. The relevant questions is what makes the Synod more than a parliament? The synod’s expression must carry the Galilean perception of language, one that denies the absolutism of a single and unitary language that is, that refuses to acknowledge its own language as the sole verbal and semantic centre of the ideological world. This difference is epitomised in humanity’s relationship with God. The concept of the author is derived from God the Creator, and the paradigm for responsible, active self-hood is found to be Christ. God is at one and the same time, both inside me and outside of me. My inner infinity and incompleteness are fully reflected in the image of me, and its outsidedness is likewise fully realised in it. It is impossible for the primary author to be an image; he slips out of any figurative representation. The discourse of the primary author cannot be his own discourse: it requires illumination by something higher and impersonal – God who cannot be known directly, to whom we have no access and about whom we may not speculate. The connection between authorial activity and divine creativity, leading to the conclusion that God, retreats into silence. On the level of daily life, each self plays an essential part in authoring, or bestowing aesthetic form on, everyone and everything which is other to him or her; separateness is guaranteed by physical distinctiveness, the incarnation of consciousnesses in bodies. On the level of literary creativity the author functions as the self who moulds and shapes others’ values. God appears as the higher authority, the ‘supreme outsidedness’, an ultimate Self-giving aesthetic significance to all human lives.
In fact, it is I who give the other his value by exploiting my external position and its corresponding `surplus of vision’ with respect to him in order to bestow an integral and complete image upon him. To be for oneself means still to be forthcoming to cease being forthcoming; to prove to be already complete here means to die spiritually. From within myself, in my lonely and pure relationship with myself, only the eternal judgement of the soul is intuitively comprehensible, and only with this judgement can I be in inward solidarity. The iron law of self-rejection is underlined time and again. Life from within itself is in essence powerless. We may say that this is the Fall, which is immanent to being and experienced from within it: it lies in the tendency of being towards self-sufficiency; this is the inner self-contradiction of being. This is absurd and perplexing completeness experiencing the shame of its form. As in the biblical account, the fall entails a lie, the lie of unjustified self-expression and results in a lie, the lie of being. It also entails the falling of life away from the absolute future, its transformation into a tragedy without either chorus or author. The proper attitude of the self, if it is not to fall prey to the temptation of pride, is penitence; this is one of the most persistent motifs in author. In one’s moral self-reflex inner givenness can only be apprehended in penitent tones. The denial of justification here and now, passes over into the need for religious justification; it is full of need for forgiveness and atonement as an absolutely pure gift, of pardon and blessing from an axiologically utterly other world. On the level of interpersonal relationships my right to a loving reception of my external form descends on me from others like a gift, like a blessing which cannot be inwardly grounded and understood.
From within myself there is no soul as a given, axiological whole is already present in me; in relation to myself I have nothing to do with my soul; my self-reflex, insofar as it is mine, cannot give rise to a soul, but only to an evil and fragmented subjectivity, something which ought not to be; my inner life, following in time, cannot be condensed for me into something valuable, precious, deserving of preservation and eternal life. The soul descends on me as a blessing upon a sinner, as an unearned and unexpected gift. Every act of evaluation is the taking up of an individual position in being; even God had to be incarnated in order to show mercy, to suffer and forgive, to come down, as it were, from the abstract viewpoint of justice.