Cardinal Henry de Lubac stated, “Man is made in such a way that he cannot give meaning to something without choosing his perspective.” The perspective is basically a stand of ocular view. St. Paul spoke of a Christians walking not with light but by faith. Faith accordingly is not an ocular perspective. Jose Saramago tells the story of a city gone blind with a plague of white blindness. This blindness is very close to the blindness which the angels in Sodom caused to the immoral people who surrounded the home of Lot (Gene.19:11).  It was not blindness of physical nature but of look, which is commnodifying, belittling and subjugating. It is a look of the solar perspective.

There is an ocular centrism understood as the hegemony of vision in our cultural paradigm of knowledge, truth, and reality. The conquest of the world seen as a picture. As Hegel said, all conceptual understanding is equivalent to murder reduced into a picture. Plato had made vision the measure of truth – violence of light. The light that permits encountering something other than the self makes it encountered as if this thing came from the ego. The light, brightness, is intelligibility itself, making everything come from within me. Here, the idealist metaphysics of esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived) comes to rule. Considered in this light, speaking is a curious right of possession and subjugation. Light is the most powerful of all metaphors.

If the same metaphor is borrowed for God, we are in a dangerous situation. As A.N. Whitehead has stated, “There in one religious dogma in debate, what do you mean by God?” Cardinal Lubac wrote, “With no regard for genuine Christianity, today every species of the ‘sacred’ or even every tawdry imitation thereof, every religion, every spirituality, every culture is being exalted, amid total confusion and with no effort at discrimination. Here and there clerics, who despite their name had been asleep in profoundest ignorance, are dazzled by the discovery of the vast universe; they are quite prepared to admire everything about it without understanding it and have no critical re-sources (or what they believe to be such) except against the faith which nourished them. They have become blind to the unique contribution of Judeo-Christian revelation, as well as to the lights, overpowering on discreet, shed by holiness.”

The Roman emperor Constantine is said to have converted himself into Christianity, but the real conversion was turning Christ into the Sun, God of the Empire. He is reported have had a vision on the Milvian Bridge when in war with Maxentius. He saw above the Sun the cross and under the cross the writing, “in hoc signo vices”–  by this sign you shall conquer. From then onwards the cross became a symbol of conquest – crusades started with Constantine.  It amounted to a tragic deconstruction of the crucified. The same emperor started the Sunday holiday, Christmas on December 25, which is the birthday of Sun God, the official deity of the empire. And Easter was made to coincide with the feast of the spring goddess, and that too fell on a Sunday. And so Christians turned to the East, to the rising Sun.  Worship of Christ crucified was transformed into worship of the Sun – worship of the dominating power of Light.  The Bible believes not in seeing but in hearing the word of God. The ears are the most ethical of human organs. Just as in the case of the oracle through whom the Divine speaks, God himself is never present in His speech, and it is the absence of God that speaks then.

The ear is uncanny. Uncanny is what it is; double is what it can become; large or small is what it can make or let happen, large or small as well the manner in which one may offer or lend an ear.  You transform yourself into a high-fidelity receiver, and the ear – your ear, which is also the ear of the other. The mother is the faceless figure of hearing. She lends her ears to all by losing herself in the background of the scene like an anonymous person. Everyone comes to her, beginning with life; everyone addresses her and destines itself to her. She survives on the condition of remaining at the bottom.