The letter of a bishop to the Pope has become a monstrous issue. A text brought out by any person is an undying witness to his/her interior life. And when someone of high stature writes a letter that is full of lies to his superior, it shows to what unfathomable depth he has descended. When it exceeds all limits of moral decency, we have a monstrosity of deceit. As Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “Where there is life, there is contradiction, and wherever there is contradiction, the comic is present, where there is unbelievable lie there is monstrosity.” And as Derrida once put it, “Monsters cannot be announced. One cannot say: ‘Here are our monsters,’ without immediately turning the monsters into pets.” “There are monsters on the prowl”, as Michel Foucault writes, “whose form changes with the history of knowledge.” Monsters are what keep us awake at night and make us nervous during the day. And even when they claim that “they only scare because they care”, they still scare.

We are unable to differentiate between diverse kinds of otherness in a culture where everything has become more and more undecidable – sometimes to the point where we have difficulty distinguishing self from the other in the first place. Clearly, some kind of philosophical questioning is called for if we are to try to understand the enigma of the self and the other or to explore modes of discerning between different kinds of self and different kinds of other. There are three main ways in which we might respond to our fundamental experience of estrangement: art, religion and psychoanalysis. Art offers therapy in terms of images, religion in terms of faith, and psychoanalysis in terms of a ‘talking cure’. The enigma of the other has been largely ignored by the mainstream thinking tradition – going back to Parmenides and Plato who defined the other in relation to the same – it resurfaces again and again throughout our cultural history in the guise of strangers, gods and monsters who will not go away and will continue to command our attention.

We start to see certain individuals in Church history and social life who behave in a manner that is totally unimaginable and unthinkable and cause trepidation and horror as do monsters. Unexpected demonstrations of evil, hatred and malice, which our consciousness in no way can tolerate, make of someone a monster. The big work of our civilization is to try to fight this hatred. Not all ‘selves’ are evil and not all ‘others’ are angelic. The possibility of imagining, narrating or interpreting alterity becomes impossible in certain situations. We witness here the death of phenomenological and hermeneutic inquiry. The silent dark of sublime unthinkability reigns supreme. We wait in paralytic fear for the return of the faceless repressed. Kratophany (fear of the unknown) replaces epiphany. Epiphany no more consists in soliciting us by his destitution in the face of the Stranger, the widow, and the orphan, but domination of the ego. We see the demonstration of monster like behaviour as a decease. We are horror stricken by the horror of the dark. That horror is a mask of behaviour run wild.

The enigmas of the imaginary and the attempt of naming the unnameable are the mystery of evil. We have to understand it from the viewpoint of diacritical hermeneutics. We have to make ourselves more hospitable to strangers, gods and monsters without succumbing to mystique or madness. We have too often demonized the ‘other’ out of fear. But if we can become more mindful of who the other is – and is it not a primary task of philosophy to foster such mindfulness? – we will be less likely to live in the horror of the dark. For the dark is all too frequently a mask for the alterity of our own death and a screen against the advent of strangers unbeknownst and still unknown to us. What happened is unimaginable failure in a high position, quite unbelievable and totally unforeseeable.

Inspired by Kierkegaard, Derrida made efforts to demythologize the institutional beliefs and practices of Christianity. Derrida nonetheless advocated the “de-Christification” of spirituality as an antidote to idolatry. Derrida memorably insisted,  “What has not yet arrived at or happened to Christianity is Christianity. Christianity has not yet come to Christianity.” Perhaps we are in the danger of deconstruction, perhaps even welcoming a “Christianity” of its own making, a Christianity without Christ. As Kierkegaard wrote, “The Christianity of the New Testament simply does not exist. Here there is nothing to reform.” One of the tragedies of modern times is precisely this – to have abolished the ‘I’, the personal I, and the moral responsibility. For this very reason, real ethical-religious communication is as if vanished from the world.