E.

Falque

Birth and the Metamorphosis of Finitude: a Paradigm for the Resurrection?

I am going to make known to you a mystery, indicates St. Paul to the Corinthians. We will not all die, but we will all be transformed, in an instant, in a blink of the eye, at the sound of the final trumpet (1 Cor. 15:51-52). To think this transformation at the day of our final resurrection or more literally this becoming other (allass) will be the object of the present essay. In fact, it matters little to me that in his lifetime the Christ was transfigured, or better metamorphosed (metamorpho), in the eyes of Peter, James and John on the side of a mountain (Mt. 17:2); that he was in his death wakened from the dead as he had said (Mt. 28:67); that God raised him on the third day (Ac. 10:40); or still yet that he was seen by Simon (Lk 24:34) and more than five hundred brothers at once (1 Cor. 15:6); if it is not for me, and to me also, that this invitation to a new birth or rebirth is addressed. To believe and to say that this God who has raised the Lord will raise us also by his power (1 Cor. 6:14), that he will transform our humbled body to make it similar to his body of glory (Ph. 3:21), or still yet that all of us who, with face unveiled, reflect the glory of the Lord, are metamorphosed into this very image (2 Cor. 3:18) this is what cannot be taken for granted and must indeed still be envisaged if we do not want to make empty our faith and vain also our preaching in not believing in the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:13-14).

Nothing is more difficult, however, on this at once conceptual and experiential path, than to retrace the steps of a work that still awaits its publication and relates an itinerary given here to

share: that of the passage at once philosophical, theological, and spiritual from the Passeur of Gethsmani (a work published in 2000 on anxiety, suffering and death) to the Metamorphosis of Finitude (a work forthcoming in September 2004 on birth and resurrection).1 Indeed one does not go with impunity from the confession of suffering and of death to belief in the resurrection. And nothing is more false than a passage which, not measuring sufficiently the weight of the one (death), forgets what is going on in the transformational power of the other (resurrection). And yet, we must confess, the resurrection pertains to this type of theologumenon of which we speak little if at all today, besides some simple exegetical and homiletic commentaries on the apparition stories. It is not that it no longer constitutes the heart of the faith Saint Paul, we have said, does not stop insisting on it (1 Cor. 15:13-14) but that we fail to connect it to an experience or something lived capable of signifying it also for us today. Hence the legitimate [juste] question of Nicodemus to Jesus: How could a man, a second time, enter the womb of his mother and be born? (Jn. 3:4). Far from avoiding a response, to the contrary the Christ makes explicit use of this existential of our fleshly birth in order to speak our spiritual rebirth: what is born of the flesh is flesh, what is born of the spirit is spirit (Jn. 3:6). This verse is ordinarily interpreted in a dualistic way which must be understood primarily in an analogical manner. The phrase does not mean in fact that one must dogmatically oppose the flesh (sarx) and the spirit (pneuma), but it invites us, on the contrary, to think analogically what occurs in the resurrection of the whole of man in the very mode of what is seen in the act of birth of each man: just as you yourself know about the birth of your own flesh through the womb of your mother, or just as you know it because you yourself have also engendered through your flesh, Jesus

E. Falque, Le passeur de Gethsmani. Angoisse, souffrance et mort. Lecture existentielle et phnomnologique. Paris, Cerf, coll. La nuit surveille , 1999; and Mtamorphose de la finitude. Essai philosophique sur la naissance et la rsurrection [same publisher (Cerf) and same collection (La nuit surveille)], Septembre 2004 (forthcoming).

seems to respond to Nicodemus, so do you learn today what the re-birth of the spirit is all about on the basis of this first experience of birth either of your flesh or through your flesh. In other words, as the flesh is born of the flesh in the act of filiation and of begetting, so the spirit is born of the spirit in the act of baptism and even more of the final resurrection the second (the resurrection of the body) bringing to the first (baptism) the fleshly dimension that it lacks and that must nevertheless be read in every act of birth. To be reborn therefore is not to enter a second time into the womb of your mother and be born, hence the legitimate [juste] response of Jesus to the Pharisee. But it is to be born of water and of spirit, or even to be reborn of the body, just as I myself am born of the flesh and I draw the other from my own flesh out of which our own bodies remain forevermore woven. On the suggestion of the discussion of Jesus with Nicodemus, birth serves resurrection as an existential and gives meaning to it, prohibiting it from remaining a sort of empty word or flatus vocis inasmuch as it is not connected to a type of experience that belongs also to our humanity.

But there is more and better within the transformation awaited through resurrection as there is in the act of birth. Thought ordinarily, but most often in ignorance of the tradition, the resurrection is always confined either to the restoration of another world (the myth of the ages or a return to the garden of Eden) or to the fulfillment of this very world (a completion without a veritable change in the potentialities awaiting their deployment). One wonders, however: how does the resurrection, if it is only restoration or fulfillment, affect the ontological fate of the world without remaining a simple ontic event [vnement] within the world? In other words, is the resurrection the transformation or metamorphosis of a structure, or a simple return of the structure or completion within the structure? Surely the question seems abstract, but nevertheless it puts in

play the entirety of the philosophical conception of the world as well as the theological [thologale] power of its transformation. For if the resurrection has redemption for its motif and we have shown in addition how sin is the place of the self-enclosure of a finitude that is not in itself sinful2 it also contains a mode of solidarity with our humanity that it is suitable to think today to its end. The lesson of the Nicene creed (325) is known but must be recalled: death for our salvation is also death for us men, such that the Sons belonging to our finitude, be it non-sinful, could in principle suffice to account for his resurrected being. One need only recall Duns Scotus here to be convinced of it: even if neither man nor angels had; even if no man needed to be created besides Christ alone, he would have been expected just the same.3

One wonders, then: is it enough to invoke again and again the sole motif of redemption in order to say what the resurrection is all about and to present its dogma in the manner that responds to the demands of our epoch (John XXIII, Opening speech to the Vatican II Council)? Must we not first recognize what our own finitude is about that very finitude whose burden the Son of man duly took up to the point of transferring it to the Father so that he would metamorphose it in him? We would surely not deny the dimension of sin, since to recognize the Resurrected one is first of all to receive through him the deliverance from sin. But we will point out nevertheless that being resurrected, for the Son, like being born for us, does not mean simply annulling through a certain Odyssey the Iliad of our fault, nor accomplishing in a super-humanity a simple potentiality at the stage of its expression. It goes for the Resurrection as for metaphysical Desire in Levinas: it is of a country where we were in no way born,4 and in this sense we

2 3

Le passeur de Gethsmani, op. cit., p. 51. Jean Duns Scot, Reportata Parisiensa, III, d. 7, q. 4, n. 4, XXIII, 303 ab. Cit et comment par L. Veuthey, Jean Duns Scot, Pense thologique, Paris, ditions franciscaines, 1967, p. 82-83. 4 E. Lvinas, Totalit et Infini (1979), Paris, Biblio-Essais, 1990, p. 22.

would be able to expect from it neither a return nor a mode of completion. The Word made flesh, however, and he alone, is born in this Resurrection, or rather has traversed this passage of which we ourselves are the heirs. So we must with him [I] first measure the weight of this finitude, [II] then offer it through him to the Father so that he transform it, [III] to the point of making, finally, the act of resurrection into the place of a re-birth thought primarily in the mode of corporeity. Hence the path which goes (I) from the summary of finitude (III) to a phenomenology of resurrection, (II) in passing through a metamorphosis of man in God, who accomplishes the passage for man.

I. Synopsis of Finitude

Modern man is possible only as a figure of finitude, emphasizes Michel Foucault: our culture has crossed the threshold on whose basis we recognize our modernity, the day where finitude has been thought within an endless reference to itself.5 One could surely criticize, reject, or even condemn this presupposition of an identification of modernity with the postulate of finitude. And then one wont take long to invoke, to the contrary, the alleged contemporary aspirations to divinity in order to deny their validity. And this is even, paradoxically, the double movement adopted, and never, or hardly ever, interrogated, of phenomenology on the one hand and of theology on the other.

M. Foucault, Les mots et les choses, Paris, Gallimard, 1966, p. 323-329 : lanalytique de la finitude (cit. p. 329).

1. Insurpassable Immanence

First on the side of phenomenology, a constant preemption of the finite by the infinite seems to guide from start to finish the research of French phenomenologists today: the face in Levinas, the gift in Jean-Luc Marion, speech in Jean-Louis Chrtien, the flesh in Michael Henry or liturgy in Jean-Yves Lacoste are so many manners of taking over the Cartesian imperative never or rarely questioned: I have in some way, first of all in myself, the notion of the infinite as of the finite, that is to say of God as of myself.6 Interpreter of Kant Martin Heidegger had however warned: it does not suffice, in order to define the finitude of man, to cite haphazardly a few human imperfections; that path leads us at best to observing that man is a finite being.7 In other words, the phenomenological preemption of the finite by the infinite misses finitude as such, not only in that it chooses the absolute against the relative or the gift against the debt, but because it skips over the Being of man tout court: the one whose clouded horizon of existence constitutes its most proper truth as the heaviest weight, independently of any position of principle concerning the excess of donation over the weakness of the donee.

But the strangest thing, and what this time is bound to be interrogated with respect to the connection between Christianity and our modernity, is that what occurs today in the mode of phenomenology is also confirmed by theology itself. The debate, of course, is over this more restricted point, inasmuch as the dogmatic heritage will not be questioned here, but only formulated otherwise. With the method of immanence as a spearhead, one most often maintains,
R. Descartes, Mditations mtaphysiques, Paris, Garnier-Flammarion n328, 3me mdiation (AT, IX, 36), p. 117 (emphasis added). 7 M. Heidegger, Kant et le problme de la mtaphysique, Paris, Gallimard, 1953, 39 [Le problme dune dtermination possible de la finitude dans lhomme], p. 276. Cited and analysed in the work Le passeur de Gethsmani, op. cit., p. 36-37 : finitude, fini, et infini .
6

as established, the idea of the supernatural as indispensable as inaccessible to man, or in other words, and still in the terms of Maurice Blondel, the idea of a nature opened onto a super-nature that it cannot by itself attain.8 One wonders then, how to give an account of that very same thing which is to be transformed by resurrection. If it is indeed impossible to hold dogmatically and in a didactic manner the hypothesis of a nature without grace (Baius) or of a pure nature (Cajetan), as Henri de Lubac has very well demonstrated,9 must one not nevertheless lend it a certain validity, at least from the heuristic point of view or within the order of research? In other words, does the insufficiency observed within our nature suffice to raise the hypothesis, indeed the necessity, of a super-nature? Mustnt we somehow bring the method of immanence to its end, if only at first, and consecrate the point of view of the limit as the unsurpassable end of our humanity? In philosophy indeed, and contrary to what is almost always the case with theology, what is found at the end is not identical to what is posited at the beginning and to convince oneself one need only re-read the path of the metaphysical Meditations (from doubt to certitude). Against the Cartesian preemption of the finite by the infinite at the heart of phenomenology, one will therefore posit, as a first step and with Martin Heidegger as a guide, that man in his beingthere (Dasein) discovers himself first as [a] being-able whose future is closed and whose foundation is null.10 And against the alleged aspiration of nature to the supernatural, as if the aspiration were self-evident from the start, one will retort with Emile Boutroux interrogating the

M. Blondel, Lettre sur lapologtique (1896), in uvres compltes de M. Blondel, Paris, PUF, 1997, t. II, p. 131 [4me article]. 9 H. de Lubac, Le mystre du surnaturel (1965), in uvres compltes, Paris, Cerf, 2000, vol. XII, p. 125-127 [pour Baius] : the entire order of grace was nothing for this theologian other than a means in service of human nature and its act; this was a necessary logical complement to the creation of spirit, not a privileged condition elevating the spirit above its natural condition. (cit. p. 125-126) ; et p. 182-193 (for Cajetan, and before him Dennis of Chartreux): it is not appropriate to attribute to Suarez or to Molina, as has been done several times, the paternity of the theory which conceives human nature as an enclosure sufficient to itself [un tout ferm se suffisant]. Cajetan is, if not the first initiator, at least the patron and the guarantor of this. (cit. p. 185). 10 M. Heidegger, tre et temps (1927), op. cit. (Martineau), . 65 [ la temporalit comme sens ontologique du souci ], p. 231 (S. 330).

young Blondel at the time of his defense of lAction (1893): to will the infinite, is that not the point of departure and the petitio principii of all your research? And, with the infinite at hand, is it then surprising that you raise all the contradictions of the finite?11 To take the measure of the weight of finitude, and even at first to restrict oneself to it, is thus according to us the condition for giving all of its depth to temporality the very same that the Word made flesh, come to metamorphose it (resurrection), was determined first to embrace (incarnation).

2. From Time to Time

Before a panel of theologians at Marbourg in 1924, Martin Heidegger denounces all Christian pretensions to a deduction of temporality starting from eternity, be it more atemporal (above time and encompassing time) than intemporal (a continuum of successive moments): the philosopher does not believe, he states in a peremptory manner. If he poses the question of time, he is then determined to understand time on the basis of time Our approach is not theological.12 To speak humanly of time is therefore in a certain way to take the time to understand time on the basis of time, independently of the aim of any eternity that would somehow blunt the reality of time. We will not retrace here all of the steps that lead the Freiburg philosopher to intentionally disassociate that which, in the book of the Confessions of St. Augustine, would remain intimately linked: temporality and eternity on the one hand (Book XI), finitude and sin on the other (Book X). The result nevertheless is there: I am a weight for

11 12

E. Boutroux, Thesis defense of M. Blondel, in uvres compltes de M. Blondel, op. cit., t. II, p. 701. M. Heidegger, Le concept de temps (1924), Cahiers de lHerne (1983), Paris, Biblio-Essais, 1989, p. 33-54 (cit. p. 34). Unpublished public conference delivered in July 1924 before the Marburg Society of Theology. A text which, in the words of the commentators, at once delivers a first abridgment, already very complex, of his major work Being and Time, published three years later (1927), and a sample, so to speak, of the essence of its approach (note added to the text, p. 52-53).

myself, onheri mihi sum with the result that my being caught within trouble in St. Augustine (molestia) announces to him only the mode of being of care (Sorge) such as it is developed in Being and Time. Yet again, we must remember this when we have the task of recovering a sense of eternity which does not disdain temporality.13

The ambition of going from time to time, and thus of somehow reproaching Christianity for having taken root or fled into eternity, does not mask however a certain linear conception of eschatology that we will try here to avoid. For, to charge the resurrection with making us quit temporality is to forget that the Resurrected one also confines himself from the beginning to the heart of our humanity, if in a way not yet incarnate: the God of creation, the God of absolute beginning is the God of resurrection, emphasizes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a close but still too little known commentary on Genesis. Since the beginning, the world is under the sign of the resurrection of Christ from among the dead. Even more, it is because we have knowledge of the resurrection that we know also the creation by God.14 The Resurrection must therefore be posited, from the beginning, as the transcendental condition of every entry into Christianity and of what to be created means to say. There is no (Christian) creation besides this new creation which transforms and sheds new light on the old at the risk, conversely of remaining within the purest Judaism (creation without resurrection or with the expectation of a resurrection exclusively to come). The Resurrection, the cornerstone of Christianity, is ontologically at the beginning of everything, or better, of the whole including the beginning of creation itself as
Saint Augustin, Confessions, Paris, Descle de Brouwer, B. A n 14, X, 28 (39), p. 209 [onheri mihi sum] ; et M. Heidegger, tre et temps (1927), op. cit. (Martineau), 65 [ la temporalit comme sens ontologique du souci ]. 14 D. Bonhoeffer, Cration et chute [lecture at the University of Berlin during the winter semester 1932-1933], Paris, Petite bibliothque protestante, 1999, p. 32. A perspective which one will find most likely, and principally, developed in the tradition of Tertullian, La rsurrection des morts, Paris, DDB, 1980, II, 6, p. 43 : refuted then by the argument showing God as author of the flesh, and Christ as the redeemer of the flesh, they [the heretics] will also be convinced from then on of the problem of the resurrection of the flesh, a question which of course goes hand in hand with that of God author of the flesh and of Christ redeemer of the flesh.
13

intended by God. And this also one will remember, once again, when the Resurrected Word will appear in his proper metamorphosis as He who monadologically bears and gives birth to our proper transformation, and thus incorporates us into the Trinity. If the reflections of Martin Heidegger on time oriented unilaterally towards death therefore have no other goal, in the words of the philosopher himself, than not to be theology, they are no less predisposed to the question of eternity, certainly making it more difficult, but preparing it nevertheless in the correct manner for posing it truly.15 Still it is necessary in this case, and in this sense, to stop designating as tragedy that which today is the common lot of a large part of humanity, and what Christ comes also in his incarnation to assume, and in his resurrection to metamorphose: atheist humanism, which the Christian will learn this time to pass through rather than to condemn.

3. Is there a drama of atheist humanism?

One could wonder about the legitimacy of a reflection on atheism at the heart of an account whose aim remains Christianity and that which constitutes its center: the resurrection as such. The detour wants nonetheless to show that times have changed, and that the sound solutions of yesterday [H. de Lubac: The Drama of Atheist Humanism] are not or no longer necessarily those that today should be sought out. The debate over the interpretation of Nietzsche will thus make us see how the dogma of the resurrection of the body contains in itself

M. Heidegger, Le concept de temps, op. cit., p. 34. Appel relay dans une note de tre et temps : si lternit de Dieu devait se laisser construire philosophiquement, elle ne pourrait tre comprise que comme une temporalit plus originaire et infinie. La via negationis et eminentiae peut-elle constituer un chemin dans cette direction ? Laissons la question ouverte (op. cit., note 1 p. 290 [S. 427]).

15

10

what is attacked today, and from which it is necessary that Christianity find, in itself as well, the forces to recover.

In a time when Christianity began in a certain way to confront Nietzscheanism, one was able to interpret the madman's phrase God is dead in the sense of the murder of an idol of God that in the same blow liberates its icon. The resurrection, in a word, is here directly saved, for never having really been threatened. The death of a concept is not indeed that of a life: the god of Plato who dies, be it also that of the Christians, does not touch faith in its vitality (the resurrectional power of the Father), but only its pronouncement in its conceptuality (a God beyond being or without being).16 But there is more, and better, in the cry of Nietzsches madman having passed from God is dead to God remains dead (Gay Science III, 125).17 With the permanence of the dead God (God remains dead), it is not in fact the sole end of a conceptual idol that is envisioned, but its heart the resurrectional power of the Father and his capacity to raise us from among the dead: the [Christian] resurrection of the body of flesh in a spiritual body, of the terrestrial body in a celestial body, does not give back to the body its true power, emphasizes bluntly Didier Franck, an interpreter of Nietzsche, it is a false resurrection or a resurrection to a false life It is indeed by the resurrectional power of God that the power deployed through the eternal return must be measured.18

Nous renvoyons bien sr ici J.L. Marion, Lidole et la distance (1977) , Paris, Biblio-Essais, 1991, ch. II [Leffondrement des idoles et laffrontement du divin : Nietzsche] ; et (du mme), Dieu sans ltre (1982), Paris, PUF, 1991, ch. III [La croise de ltre]. 17 F. Nietzsche, Gai savoir, in uvres philosophiques compltes, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, Livre III, 125 [Linsens], p. 138 : Dieu est mort ! Dieu reste mort ! Et cest nous qui lavons tu ! Comment nous consoler, nous, les meurtriers des meurtriers ? . 18 D. Franck, Nietzsche et lombre de Dieu, Paris, PUF, coll. pimthe , 1998, respectivement p. 94 et p. 466 (nous soulignons).

16

11

The drama called atheist humanism seems here to reach its heights, and to border on despair when the Christian seems to have lost every reason for hope. But must we still today see a type of immense deviation or a drama in the sense that Henri de Lubac rightly lambasted in his time (1950)? Nothing is less sure. It probably no longer suffices to appeal to the Christian to simply read and understand Auguste Comte (positivism), Marx (communism) or Nietzsche (nihilism), in order then to demonstrate their inanity.19 Atheism, so virulent yesterday, has become coherent today, to the point of wanting to rid itself of this Christianity that yesterday it condemned without ceasing, nevertheless, to argue with it. The attack is now less severe, but more treacherous. The Christian will let him/herself be interrogated ad intra by the very same thing which s/he once combated ad extra: atheism itself. Every non-theism is not, in fact, an anti-theism or an a-theism as not so long ago one was often given to believe. One can be without God without being against him, unless we insist on seeing everything through the single vision of Christian faith: one misses philosophy when one defines it as atheism, emphasizes Maurice Merleau-Ponty appropriately to Henri de Lubac and Jacques Maritain at the time of his inaugural lesson delivered at the Collge de France (loge de la philosophie [1953]). It is philosophy as viewed by the theologian.20 Thus engaged, the debate about the resurrectional power of the Father assumes all of its force as well as all of its currency. It will no longer suffice to justify sub specie aeterni the legitimacy of the dogma of the resurrection of the body I will leave this task rightly to the theologian but I will measure it also, as a philosopher, according to the challenges which today are thrown at the believer, in order to test its capacity for being raised by the power of God himself.

H. de Lubac, Le drame de lhumanisme athe (1950), Paris, Cerf, 1983, Avant-propos, p. 7-8. M. Merleau-Ponty, loge de la philosophie, Leon inaugurale prononce au Collge de France (1953), Paris, Ides / Gallimard, 1960, p. 54-55.
20

19

12

II. Towards a Metamorphosis

1. Resurrection and Super-resurrection of the Body

We will not be able, within the scope of this single summary, to develop the totality of the debate initiated by Nietzsche with the dogma of the resurrection of the body. Let us note at the very least, as a beginning, that he points out the way of metamorphosis indicating thereby that a real recovery is inconceivable outside of a transformation that definitively leaves the shores of the restoration or the fulfillment that, finally, change nothing at all. In addition to the celebrated three metamorphoses (the camel, the lion, the infant), the metamorphosis of the convalescent young father in Thus Spoke Zarathustra recalls, in many respects, what the metamorphosis or the resurrection of Christ is all about: Far away he spewed the head of the snake and he jumped up. No longer shepherd, no longer human one changed [ein Verwandelter], radiant [ein Umleuchteter), laughing! prophesies Zarathustra,21 and God raised him (anistmi), releasing him from the pains of death, proclaims Peter on the Pentecost (Acts 2:24), followed by Mark in the episode of transfiguration: he was transfigured literally metamorphosed (metamorpho) before them (Mk 9:2). The same goes therefore, or nearly (with some most important differences, we will see), in the vision and the enigma of Zarathustra and in the resurrection of Jesus: rectification and transfiguration of man into superman on the one hand (Nietzsche); upraising and metamorphosis of man in God on the other (Christianity). The analogy, from Nietzsche to Scripture, could not be clearer. A triple burden then guides this
F. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Books, 1982, p. 272. Authors original: trs loin il cracha la tte du serpent : et dun bond se redressa (und sprang empor). Non plus berger, non plus homme, un mtamorphos (ein Verwandelter), un transfigur (ein Umleuchteter), il riait ! from F. Nietzsche, Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra, Paris, Aubier-Flammarion, 1969, t. II, L. III, 2 [La vision et lnigme], p. 27.
21

13

noble match Zarathustra/Jesus and requires the Christian to measure the strength of resistance of his own belief in the resurrection of the body to the challenge that the atheist seems to address to him: the accusation first (a) of the passivity of the subject, (b) then of the will to endure, and finally (c) of the standardization of all bodies into one. On the capacity of the Christian to respond depends not only his own faith, but also his credibility ad extra and the way in which he is always ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks for the reason of his faith, for the defense of the hope which is in him (1 Pet. 3:15).

(a) The first challenge that the Nietzschean super-resurrection throws at Christian resurrection, the raising of oneself by oneself and the calculated eternity of the return: you must learn to stand up for yourselves by yourselves or you will fall, emphasizes the philosopher, such that I will be revived eternally, not to another life, but to this same life and to this same world which I have just decided, and this eternal resurrection will be my way of life.22 The Christian faith can counter this point only with a categorical refusal. To the heroism and to the activism of the philosophical subject claimed by Nietzsche, Scripture clearly opposes the quasi defeat and passivity of the believing subject in his incapacity to lift himself up (by) himself: this man [] that you have handed over and oppressed by crucifying him at the hands of the impious men, proclaims Saint Peter on the Pentecost, God [or in other words an Other in him] has raised him up, delivering him from the pains of death, for it was impossible for him to be held in its power (Ac. 2:23-24). What is true for man in his relationship to God is thus still more true for the Son in his relationship to the Father: the triviality of the proposition according to which nothing raises itself, as we have noted in the Passeur of Gethsmani, "no longer comes down only to recognizing the immanence of an alterity in oneself from which any identity issues, but also to
22

F. Nietzsche (cit par D. Franck, Nietzsche et lombre de Dieu, op. cit), p. 426-427.

14

avowing the humble and necessary annihilation of self even if it is for God in his quality as the Son of man in a flesh that is corruptible to the point that another (his Father) assumes, for his Son first and then the whole of creation with him, the decision to enact thereby its upraising or recapitulation.23 As for the will of the return not to a new life, to a better life, or to a similar life, but for the same life, identical to that on which you now decide the Christian will maintain at least that it is not enough to quit the earth in order to celebrate the heavens. By espousing the after-world too much, Christianity has progressively forgotten how the Resurrected one came to impress a new manner of being on this world rather than a leap into another world. The lesson is too clear, to be raised is not to escape but to live otherwise a unity with He who is incarnate, and here too we must remember to define the nature of this world "become other" precisely through the metamorphosis of the Resurrected one.

(b) The accusation of the will to endure, or even of the flight from the world, the second challenge launched by Nietzsche at Christian resurrection, itself relies not on Christianity alone [the house built on the rock (Mat. 7:24)], but finds its source also in Judaism [if you do not believe you will not be able to be stable (Is. 7:9)] and is completed in Cartesianism [the cogito as something firm and constant (2nd metaphysical meditation). The believer, in relation to this Nietzschean grievance, will also hold his breath. For to transfer the weight of life outside of life, the philosopher rightly emphasizes, is to withdraw all its weight from it. It will be appropriate in this sense, in a fair dialogue with nihilism and in order to respond once more to the demands of our time, not too immediately to sublimate the human in the divine, at the

23

E. Falque, Le passeur de Gethsmani, op. cit., ch. IX p. 136 [ du dessaisissement de soi lentre dans la chair ].

15

opposite risk of losing in the Creator what the depths of the creature and its difference with him are all about.24

(c) The matter finally takes a graver or rather a heavier turn, in its apparent opposition to Christianity, when a certain Christian conception of the standardized body must, it is said, be surpassed by a new mode of corporeity this time less archaic and obsolete. The debate that formerly in Platonism, as also sometimes in a certain deviation of Christianity, had to do with the immortality of the soul against the destruction or degradation of the body (soul/body), now centers on a certain type of corporeity opposed to another type of corporeity: active corporeity (Nietzsche) and passive corporeity (Paul). A hand-to-hand combat [un corps corps] therefore sets the Nietzschean eternal return against the Christian dogma of the resurrection of the body, de-centering the debate from the trivial opposition of the body and the soul towards that of the corporeity of the Resurrected one in conflict with the metamorphosis of the body as it is invoked by Nietzsche's Zarathustra. About this complex debate, whose lineaments alone we can introduce here, we will indicate only the double grievance that Nietzsche addresses to Paul on this point: the naturalization and the substantification of the body on the one hand, the standardization and the integration of all bodies into one sole body on the other hand. The first accusation [the substantification of the resurrected body] stems from the so-called opposition of the body of flesh and the body of glory (sown corruptible, it is raised in-corruptible; sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory, etc. (1 Cor. 15:42). To this we will respond on the one hand that the future eternal life in Christianity is not the negation of the present fleshly life, contrary to Nietzsche and to his interpreter Didier Franck (Deus qualem Paulus creavit dei negation), but

24

F. Nietzsche (cit par D. Franck) : respectivement p. 343 [la qute du stable], et p. 465 [le transfert du poids de la vie].

16

on the contrary its transformation: neither negation of corruptibility in Christianity, nor even surpassing, but only its assumption by the incarnation, which, in the act of the resurrection, converts its meaning. As to what determines the meaning of the resurrected corporeity on the other hand, this is not limited to its metamorphosis alone, but also includes its phenomenal mode as a type of apparition or splendor: there are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies but they do not have the same splendor (doxa), writes St. Paul to the Corinthians; one is the splendor of the sun, another that of the moon, another that of the stars; one star differs from another star. So it is also (auts kai) with the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:40-41). In short, Saint Paul had not learned Greek too well in offering the resurrectional power of God to metaphysics and metaphysics to God (D. Franck), he is to the contrary a non-Greek Jew who had learned to translate into Greek what is not Greek: a purely phenomenal corporeity whose apparition through he who receives it its splendor or its glory (doxa) takes precedence over its simple naturalization (the body as thing or substance).25 Hence the necessary response to the second accusation (the standardization of bodies in a sole body) which comes this time from a certain unilateral interpretation of Pauline incorporation: the body is one, and though there are many members, yet all the members of the body, despite their name, form only a single body: it is the same with Christ. (1 Cor. 12:12). From this grievance, one will remember first that there would be a real danger of making the resurrected body the pure and simple negation of the power of hierarchization and intensification of all bodies. The transformation of strength into weakness in Christianity, we will return to this, does not come down to accepting blissfully the paralogism of strength [the separation of strength from what it can do] but it consecrates to the consecrated one the Holy Spirit as he who accomplishes the powerful work of the raising of the Son by the
D. Franck, op. cit. (Nietzsche et lombre de Dieu), p. 75 [le corps glorieux comme ngation du corps de chair] et p. 74 [saint Paul qui a peut-tre trop bien appris le grec]. Ainsi que Nietzsche, LAntchrist, op. cit. [uvres compltes (Gallimard)], vol. VIII, 47 p. 210] : le dieu que Paul cra est la ngation de Dieu .
25

17

Father, in place and stead of the Nietzschean super-man. The negation of racial differences (neither Jew nor Greek), political differences (neither slave nor free man), and sexual differences (neither man nor woman) (Gal 3:8), does not indicate a process of standardization, but the assumption and the transformation, in He whose corporeity was metamorphosed, of our proper way of being in the world through our body. The difference is not destroyed in a resurrectional model thought in Christianity as fusional [fusionnel], it is posited otherwise because newly transformed.

The Nietzschean case against resurrected corporeity [(a) the passivity of the subject, (b) the will to endure, (c) and the standardization of all bodies into a single body] and to which we have attempted to respond point by point, is rooted thus in the necessary, but difficult, exit from biological corporeity in Christianity. The theological silence maintained today around the dogma of the resurrection of the body, and outside of simple commentary on the apparition stories (we have said), probably comes from the fact that we cannot, or can no longer today, take in the proper meaning or in a realistic manner that which yesterday we heard in the literal sense to which witness the multiple figurations of the biological exit from tombs at the portals of our cathedrals: in truth, in truth, I tell you, the time is coming, warns St. John, and has now come, where the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God Do not be amazed at this! The time is coming when those who lie in their graves will hear his voice, and those who have done what is good will exit from them for the resurrection that leads to life (John 5:25-29). What does it mean then for the Son himself to leave the tomb for the resurrection, and for us in him? What sense to give to this corporeity of the Resurrected one which is neither sublimated in a pure angelicism nor reduced to a simple naturalism or upraising of the biological? The question of the

18

metaphysical status of the glorious body, which yesterday filled entire treatises of theology [we need think only of distinctions 43-50 of the fourth book of Peter Lombard's Book of Sentences and of their numerous commentaries (De conditione resurrectionis et iudicii)], has scarcely any currency today. To return to it also through thought, and not only through faith, is however the condition of doing justice to it and not simply silencing in ineffable mystery (Denys) the Trinitarian movement of divine hypostases which also are made known to us (innotescunt nobis) (St. Bonaventure).26

2. The resurrection changes everything

Cur Deus resurrexit? -- why is God resurrected? The question is massive, and the extent of the task immense. We will not be able, however, to shrink back from this legitimate quest of our reason, which also motivates our faith. If God is resurrected, some necessary reasons and not only reasons of convenience, in order to follow the lesson of Anselm, must be able to justify it also today. Because the requirements of yesterday could not be fully identical to those of our time, we will endeavor thus to provide a type of intelligibility that, in conformity with dogma and its own demands, produces a mode of its exposition that responds to the demands our epoch while nonetheless never betraying thought.

The incarnation changes everything: the phrase is not from a theologian but from a philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.27 But the philosophical appeal to theology since the becoming

26

Nous renvoyons ici notre ouvrage : Saint Bonaventure et lentre de Dieu en thologie, Paris, Vrin, coll. tudes de philosophie mdivale , 2000, p. 71-75 : lhyper-cognoscibilit divine . 27 M. Merleau-Ponty, Foi et non foi (1945), in Sens et non sens, Paris, Nagel, 1966, p. 310 (dans un contexte la fois philosophique et thologique).

19

flesh (Es wird Leib) here draws on Husserl and not on any theologian28 - must now be taken over by a theological appeal to theology, be it also to work with the means of philosophy: The resurrection changes everything. To reveal the resurrection as metamorphosis we will not all die, but we will all be transformed, in an instant, in a blink of the eye, at the sound of the final trumpet (1 Cor. 15:51-52) and to show how it [is] the ontological event of the transformation of the world and not the simple ontic epiphenomenon of a fact which occurs within the world (cf. Introduction), we will think it here primarily in a Trinitarian manner, in order to follow the Bonaventurian a priori which will serve as a leitmotif in the present essay: if that is already said in view of creation, it applies first, however, in the heart of God.29 If nothing therefore occurs in man that does not first occur in God, except sin, (a) the trial of the Father will be at the same time the place (b) of the apperceptive transposition of the Son and (c) of the deployment of the strength of the Spirit. Not an affair of man, even if it is also for him, the resurrection is therefore primarily an affair of God of him, in him, and through him.

(a) That the passion and the resurrection should be a trial for the Father, one will be convinced when divine impassibility could no longer be postulated without contradicting, if not a few rare theologians (in particular Origen and Bernard of Clairvaux, we are going to return to this), at least the most ordinary message of the Old Testament when the God Yahweh reveals himself to Moses: I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt, he confides to the shepherd who has passed by the burning bush, and I have heard them cry out under the blows of their oppressors. Yes, I know their sufferings (Ex. 3:7). The formula of Origen drawn from his Homilies on Ezekiel is in this sense well known: ipse Pater non est impassibilis the Father himself is not
E. Husserl, Recherches phnomnologiques pour la constitution (Ideen II), Paris, PUF, 1982, 36, p. 207 : le senti qui sincarne et devient chair (es wird Leib) dans lexprience du touchant-touch. 29 H. Urs von Balthasar, La gloire et la croix, Paris, Aubier, 1962, Styles 1 [monographie sur Bonaventure], p. 262.
28

20

impassible.30 This passion of charity (passio caritatis) given and experienced from the instant of creation, and not only the passion according to the Alexandrian, could however reduce God to our simple human passions. We will avoid then the Origenist deviations of Patripassianism, widespread today, by distinguishing, following Bernard of Clairvaux, the impassibility of God, on the one hand, and his compassion, on the other: Deus est impassibilis sed non incompassibilis God is impassible but not incapable of compassion, states Bernard in his Commentary on the Song of Songs in Sermon 26 given on the occasion of the death of his brother Girard (1138), and as if to take over from Origen. It is appropriate in this sense to distinguish divine affection, always intentional and voluntary, and our human affect which remains ever suffered and received in a manner that is most often involuntary, even pathological. Hence the Bernardine definition of God as affection (affectio) but not directly as affected (affectus) in the treatise of the Consideration this time, which precisely separates him from man without, however, silencing his divine passibility: non est affectus Deus, affectio est God is not affected, but he is affection.31

(b) In the figure of the Son, then, is formed our finitude, of which the Father--voluntarily affected by it since the creation and driving it to its limit on the day of his passion--produces the metamorphosis through the resurrection. Surely, as we have said, the weight taken and borne by the Son is also and first that of the sin from which he comes to deliver us. But as we have also
Origne, Homlies sur zchiel, Paris, Cerf, 1989, SC n 352, VI, 6, p. 231 ; ainsi que notre article en guise de commentaire : Origne : Intersubjectivit et communion des saints , in Marco M. Olivetti, Intersubjectivit et thologie philosophique, Actes du colloque Enrico Castelli (Rome), Biblioteca dell Archivio di Filosofia , Milano, 2001, p. 541-560. 31 Cf. Bernard de Clairvaux, respectivement Sermons sur le Cantique, t. 2, Paris, Cerf, SC n431, 1998, n 26, 5 (sermon prononc loccasion de la mort de son frre Girard [1138]), p. 289 [Dieu impassible mais non pas incapable de compassion et le transfert dans les affects de Dieu] ; et De la considration, Paris, Cerf, 1986, V, VII, 17, p. 133 [Dieu nest pas affect, il est affection (trad. modifie)]. Nous renvoyons sur ce point aussi notre article paratre (Revue des sciences philosophiques et thologiques) : Exprience et empathie chez Bernard de Clairvaux .
30

21

emphasized, sin as self-enclosure of oneself upon oneself is transplanted or grafted onto a finitude that is not in itself sinful. In short, there is an anxiety of finitude that is not identical to the anxiety of sin, even though the latter would rest upon the former.32 It is therefore also from this finitude, that is to say this legitimate anxiety of death (Heidegger), that the Father comes to liberate us in the Son not that it is sinful or that it no longer has reason for being, but in that it returns properly to the filial and divine way of experiencing it without ever breaking the relation with the one to whom it is addressed: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me (Mk. 15:34), Father into your hands I commend my spirit (Lk. 23:46). The resurrection in the Son, then, in a certain way effects the passage to the Father (Metamorphosis of finitude) of the finitude which he suffered also in his passion (Passeur of Gethsemany): The Son has become so totally man, Gustave Martelet audaciously suggests, that he is henceforth capable of experiencing (the worst of) the human in his flesh and of making the one from whom he comes experience it. Become one of us, he is authorized to reveal to the Father, in a manner no longer only divine but entirely human, this drama that is truly ours and which is at first only ours.33 One will ask then, and in an almost trivial manner: what reasons could the Father have found for thus effecting the metamorphosis of our finitude in his Son, and did he not know already what was at stake for man in the weight of his existence "tout court" in order now to liberate him from it, or at the very least to carry it with him? To the first question (the motives for the resurrection) we will respond, and because we will not be able to develop here what moreover makes the entire object of a chapter, that the Son differs from man in that he possesses in himself the full

Cf. Le passeur de Gethsmani, op. cit., ch. II, p. 23-46 [la face de la mort ou langoisse de finitude] ; ch. III, p. 4754 [la tentation du dsespoir ou langoisse du pch] ; et en particulier p. 27 [pour la dfinition du pch comme auto-enfermement sur une finitude quant elle non pcheresse ]. 33 G. Martelet, Dieu na pas cr la mort, in Christus, n 68, 1995, p. 464 (avec la mise entre parenthse de la formule le pire de pour viter ici tout jugement axiologique sur une finitude non pcheresse mais dont le pch, nous lavons dit, vient se greffer sur elle).

32

22

capacity, because he is God, of making the Father experience the same thing that he himself experiences: you, Father, you are in me and I in you (Jn. 17:21). The divine empathy however (Einfhlung), of which one will find in Max Scheler one of the first founders, is not here simple affective fusion in the manner of a Lipps for example (Einsfhlung), for the modes of experiencing it do not stop differing according to the hypostases: without flesh for the Father and through the flesh for the Son. In short, in order to carry through to the end the requirement of a motive for the resurrection, we will say that the Father makes the decision in the Son to metamorphose our finitude in that he receives through him the burden and sees with him its impossible lightness. The apperceptive transposition of the Son toward the Father is thus realized fully in God, and motivates his demand to effect the metamorphosis of that of which, in the first part of the essay, it was plainly a question: the synopsis of finitude.34 As for the second question [divine omniscience of the weight from the moment of creation], it still awaits its response, and must devote itself to explaining the meaning of the decision of the resurrection. In order to do this, we will emphasize, following Maurice Merleau-Ponty, that a lived situation" (Paul suffers because he lost his wife, or he is angry because soneome stole his watch") is never identical to an appresented situation (I suffer because my friend Paul is upset, and I am angry because he is angry").35 But in the case of God precisely, because the affection is voluntary and does not reduce to affect alone (St. Bernard), the passions superimpose themselves and interpenetrate one another. Surely the Father knew his mortal [mortelle] creature, having to bear its weight, but by his Son he experiences how heavy it is, even impossible, to carry and makes the decision in his Son if not to annihilate it, at least to give us the possibility of carrying it and

34

Pour tout ce dveloppement, nous ne pouvons que renvoyer directement notre ouvrage, en indiquant cependant les racines husserliennes [Mditation cartsienne (5me Mditation)] et schelerienne [Nature et forme de la sympathie] de ses tenants et aboutissants. 35 mon ami Paul a de la peine, et je suis en colre parce quil est en colre

23

bearing otherwise and with him. There is an abyss between knowing and doing, between knowing death (ones own death), and moving to it, emphasizes Charles Pguy.36 And from this abyss comes, in our view, the distinction that is necessary to maintain between the omniscience of the Father (the knowledge of the death of man) and his affection in the moment of passion (the experience of man suffered in his Son and moved through toward him). The knowledge of the finitude and the death of man in the act of creation is not identical, for the Father, with the trial of the finitude and death of his Son in the act of redemption. The metamorphosis of the world thus becomes the metamorphosis of God, so thoroughly that the world is comprehended in God.

(c) The Holy Spirit, the last hypostasis to consider in the act of resurrection after the trial of the Father and the apperceptive transformation of the Son, becomes then, and properly speaking, the place of the meta-morphosis of the Son by the Father, thus offered to man: may you be transformed (meta-morpho) by the renewal of your mind, instructs St. Paul to the Christians of Rome (Rom. 12:12). The insistence of all pneumatology that ordinarily makes of the Holy Spirit either the act of the union of the Father with the Son (a Latin scheme, immanent and circular) or the gift accorded by God to the world (a Greek scheme, linear and economic) forgets sometimes its first definition as strength (energeia): the begetting strength of the Son in Mary his mother the Holy Spirit will come upon you and will cover you in its shadow (Lk. 1:35) and resurrecting or upraising strength of the Word made flesh and of us in him: with him you also have been resurrected because you have believed in the strength of God (energeias tou theou)

36

Ch. Pguy, Le dialogue de lhistoire et de lme charnelle, in uvres en proses compltes, Paris, Pliade, 1992, p. 741. Voir l aussi notre article : Incarnation philosophique et incarnation thologique : une histoire arrive la terre et la chair. Lecture du Dialogue de lhistoire et de lme charnelle , in Lamiti Charles Pguy, n 102 [Pguy et lme charnelle], Avril-Juin 2003, p. 164-178.

24

that raised him from the dead (Col 2:12). The Holy Spirit, as the metamorphosis of the Son by the father and of man in him thus rejoins, paradoxically, what Nietzsche however deplored not finding in Christianity the separation of strength from what it can do.37 Against all the perversions of Christianity denounced by nihilism merit taken for weakness, goodness for impotence, humility for baseness, obedience as submission to those one hates, not wanting to avenge oneself for being unable to avenge oneself, etc."38 - the Holy Spirit to the contrary, and He alone, will thus rival the ambitions of the Superman. Because it is strength against strength, it also surpasses man in giving him the possibility of surpassing himself, but only in that the believer agrees this time to let himself be sur-passed, that is to say, to be traversed rather than surmounted. God for man is therefore not only substance, even though he may also be substance in the Trinitarian determination of dogma (Council of Nicea-Constantinople). He is also and first power, considered thus from the point of view of the Resurrection and of the strength raising the Son by the Father in the Holy Spirit: our bodies have to be resurrected not in virtue of their substance (non ex sua substantia), proclaims Ireneus with assurance, but by the power of God (sed ex Dei virtute).39 What happens then to our own body, taken precisely within the metamorphosed corporeity of the Resurrected one? Such is the question opened by Trinitarian incorporation and the phenomenology of the resurrection, declined now in the mode of corporal birth in order to speak the proper meaning of our fleshly rebirth.

F. Nietzsche, La gnalogie de la morale, in uvres philosophiques compltes, op. cit. (Gallimard), Premire dissertation 13 [mtaphore des agneaux et de loiseau de proie], p. 241 : exiger de la force quelle ne se manifeste pas comme force [], cest aussi absurde quexiger de la faiblesse de se manifester comme force . Sur le sens de cette non sparation de la force et de ce quelle peut comme clef dinterprtation de tout le nietzschisme, voir G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, Paris, PUF, 1973, ch. II p. 44-82 : Actif et ractif . [Compare page 481 of GM from Basic Writings of Nietzsche Modern Library] 38 [Pg 483 of GM, Basic Writings of Nietzsche.] Ibid. (Gnalogie de la morale), Premire dissertation, 14 p. 243. 39 Irne, Contre les hrsies, Paris, Cerf, 1969, SC n 153, V, 6, 2, p. 85.

37

25

3. Incorporated man

We will say nothing, or almost nothing, about the incorporation of man in God. Not that it does not matter, far from it, since our own metamorphosis depends on it and therefore also our resurrection. It matters little to me, in fact, we have emphasized it, that the Christ was transfigured or rather literally metamorphosed (metamorpho) before the eyes of Peter, James, and Jean (Mat. 17:2), that he was even in his demise awakened from the dead as he had said (Mat. 28:6-7), or that he was seen by Simon (Lk. 24:34) and more than five hundred brothers at once (1 Cor. 15:6), if it is not also for me, and to me, that this invitation to a new birth or rebirth is addressed (cf. Introduction). The thesis of Trinitarian incorporation will insist, then, and will endeavor to show how the metamorphosis for God is also a transformation for man, taken and comprehended in him. We are indeed monadologically contained in the Son, such that the very thing which occurs in the Word happens also for us in a filial and adoptive manner at least: in him (en auto) everything was created recalls St. Paul in his hymn to the Colossians, everything is created through him (di autou) and for him (eis auton) everything (ta panta) is held in him (en aut), and he is himself (autos) the head of the body that is the Church (Col. 1:16-18). Christianity goes in fact so far into the assumption and the transformation of our humanity that it dared to place the (human) body in the most hidden depths of God emphasizes Romano Guardini.40 In other words, through the operation of the metamorphosis of God, it is no longer only the soul of man that alone wants the world to be inscribed in it and it in God (Bonaventure), but its entire body, which, carried with him into the divine fabric, is itself there also metamorphosed. Before and after the reascent of the Son to

40

R. Guardini, Le Seigneur, Paris, d. Alsatia, 1954, t. II, p. 126 (cit par F. Varillon, Joie de croire, Joie de vivre, op. cit., p. 43).

26

the Father, neither the Son nor we ourselves are in reality the same (ones). The Son first, because the trinity Father-Son-Spirit is in a certain way turned into Father-Christ (incarnate Son, dead and resurrected)-Spirit: he causes his fleshly humanity, and our own corporeality, to enter into the heart of divinity. Ourselves next, because in dying it is not any longer the soul that escapes the body following the example of the Platonic scheme, but our entire body that joins the movement of the ascension of the Son we mean here the movement of incorporation towards his Father. To hold with Gregory of Nazianzus that anything that is not assumed is not saved, and that only that which is united with God is saved (Letter to Cledonius)41 comes down then to seeing in the resurrected Son not only He who calls us to divinize us, but also He by whom our animality is assumed and transformed, in that it is that with which we must always begin: what is first, St. Paul specifies again to the Corinthians, is animal being (psuchikon), not spiritual being (pneumatikon); it comes later (epeita) (1 Cor. 15:46).42 In short, we will have understood, the man incorporated in God in the figure of the resurrected Son is not simply superadded to the three persons of the Trinity as in the sort of quaternity always condemned by the Church [condemnation of the 4th Lateran Council (1215)].43 On the contrary, he receives for himself everything that the Son received from the Father for himself, to the point of manifesting in our flesh what only a phenomenology of the resurrection makes appear as the act of a spiritual rebirth thought first in the mode of a fleshly birth: [with Christianity], specifies Paul Claudel, it is not the Spirit alone that speaks to the Spirit, it is the flesh that speaks to the flesh. Our flesh

41 42

Grgoire de Nazianze, Eptre 101 (Lettre Cldonium), op. cit., P. G (Migne), 38, 181c. Cit et comment par Bernard de Clairvaux, Trait de lamour de Dieu, op. cit. (SC n 393), VIII, 23, p. 119 [premier degr de lamour de Dieu]. 43 Cf. Dumeige, La foi catholique, Paris, d. de lOrante, 1975, n224, p. 119 (Dz 804).

27

has stopped being an obstacle, it becomes a means and a vehicle, it has stopped being a veil, it becomes an apprehension.44

III. Phenomenology of the Resurrection

It remains now to develop in this phenomenology of the resurrection (3rd part) what the metamorphosis (2nd part) transformed of the summary of finitude (1st part). The task will be more rapid, and even more simple, though more delicate when it attempts to express what is lived in an experience whose evangelical account remains the principal support. To insurpassable immanence (I, 1) answers the world become other (III, 1), to the termination "from time to time" (I, 2) the passage from time to eternity (III, 2), and to the impossible drama of atheist humanism (I, 3) the necessary, or at the very least supplementary, hypothesis of a flesh to be reborn with God (III, 3). From the incarnation to the resurrection is thus woven a continuity of the flesh in Christianity, which probably constitutes its greatest specificity (conclusion).

1. The World Become Other

Christianity suffers nothing more than the separation of the worlds inherited from Neoplatonism, whose consequences, as we have seen with Nietzsche, are considerable with respect to the constitution of the Kingdom as a sort of after-world. St. Augustine himself had taken care to not identify the heavenly city with the world of Platonic ideas, nor the earthly

44

P. Claudel, Sensation du divin, in Prsence et prophtie, Paris, Gallimard, 1958, p. 55. Cit et comment par Hans Urs von Balthasar, La gloire et la croix, Paris, Aubier, 1965, t. I (Apparition), p. 340.

28

city with the world of things, as some have wrongly believed at times. The earthly city and the heavenly city are not in fact two worlds according to the Bishop of Hippo, but two different ways of being in the world, modalities of the subject rather than two divergent and opposite topoi: love of self to the point of hatred of God, the earthly city (civitate terrenam); love of God to the point of hatred of self, the heavenly city (civitatem caelestem).45 The heaven is not the top in Christianity, but the way, opened to God, of living our relationship to the world; and as for the earth, it is not the bottom, but the way, enclosed on oneself, of living our relation to others and to ourselves. To be of heaven is not to consecrate some being elsewhere over against being-there (Dasein), but to the contrary to open ones being-there (Dasein) to the dimension of an elsewhere that prohibits it this time from giving the last word to death, even though it will always be the first. Even more, and in a manner diametrically opposed this time, the earth does not designate in the New Testament only a type of relation (closed) to the divine. It is also and above all that on the basis of which and in which things announce themselves as if our proper experience would remain forevermore the loam on the basis of which God addresses himself to man: if you do not believe when I tell you earthly things [birth], Jesus says with indignity, always before Nicodemus, how will you believe if I told you heavenly things [of rebirth]? (Jn. 3:12). To pray and to say our Father who art in heaven (Mat. 6:9) is not thus, or rather only, to confine the Father on high in his glory, while we would grieve ourselves here-below in our misery. For the Jew, as well as for the Christian, the heaven outlines the vault that shelters man and makes the earth his dwelling, rather than the opening

Saint Augustin, La Cit de Dieu, in uvres de Saint Augustin, Paris, Descle de Brouwer, 1959, B. A n 35, 1960, XIV, 28, p. 465. Sur le sens exact des ces deux cits chez Augustin, on lira avec profit, I. Bochet, saint Augustin, La cit de Dieu, La nouvelle bibliothque augustinienne n3, Paris, 1993, Introduction 8, p. 42-50 : linterprtation des deux cits .

45

29

onto another world as inadequate as it is independent of ours.46 Thus the will of the Father on earth as in heaven (Mat. 6:10) will become all the more so in the measure that the unity of the same divine-human world will be held from end to end by the act of Resurrection (incorporation of man in God), and in the measure that an analogy and not an opposition is established between the earth and the heavens.47

In this sense, but in this sense alone, there will not or no longer be two worlds through the resurrection, but two different ways of living the same world: we confuse another world and the world become other, states Franois Varillon in a masterful expression. This however is not the same thing! Strictly speaking (per the Resurrection), there is no other world, no other life, but this world becomes entirely other, this life becomes entirely other.48 The world in the Christian system, as moreover Being-in-the-world as such in phenomenology, is not the packaging in which an event [vnement] would come to rise up the resurrection for example but to the contrary it is the Event itself, which in a certain way worlds the world or makes the world: the event means, for the one who understands it, emphasizes Claude Romano, the advent of a new world At play through this metamorphosis of the world, indeed, is the passage to another sense of world, of the eventful [vnementiel] sense in the eventual [vnemential]

Cf. X. Lon-Dufour, Dictionnaire du Nouveau Testament, Paris, Seuil, 1975 (coll. Livre de vie ), respectivement art. ciel , p. 167-168 : le ciel est moins un lieu quun point de dpart de la Seigneurie divine []. Les juifs savaient que le ciel nest pas un lieu, mais Dieu mme celui que les cieux et mme les cieux des cieux ne peuvent contenir (Col 1, 16). En ce sens, le ciel nest pas au-dessus de nous, il est en nous, tout en restant distinct de nous []. Le couple terrestre / cleste qualifie lorigine, le comportement et la destine des hommes. Crature de Dieu, la terre est bonne, mais elle est en souffrance jusqu ce quelle soit transforme (Rm 8, 22) . Voir aussi larticle terre , p. 519. 47 Note TOB Mt 6, 9 (note w) : Lexpression dans les cieux ne veut pas localiser le Pre ; elle correspond une tournure smitique qui affirme simultanment que Dieu domine la terre entire (dans les cieux) et que Dieu est, par son amour, tout prs des hommes (Notre Pre) . 48 F. Varillon, Joie de croire, Joie de vivre, Paris, Le Centurion, 1981, p. 174.

46

30

sense.49 In other words, the Resurrection makes the world, or deploys at the heart of this world a new way of being in the world. Not the way that opposes the deceased, on high, who are in glory, to us below, who grovel in misery; but the way whereby we recognize one another all together and gathered in the world of God, some in the face to face mode of vision, and others neither living nor experiencing it except in a mirror or in part (1 Cor. 13:12). The former and the latter, however, belong to the same divine world, such that no one is in the world in Christianity if he is not born newly to God, that is, in anticipation himself of his own metamorphosis or transformation: the deceased, or rather the saints, await us yet (expectant nos), emphasizes Origen, even though we delay, even though we straggle: for there is not for them any perfect happiness inasmuch as they are afflicted by our errings (pro erroribus nostris dolent) and mourn our sins (et lugent nostra peccata).50 On the mode of presence that we have maintained with the living during their life depends therefore in a certain way the modality of the relation that we establish with them in their survival in God. Thus it is necessary to make of eternity a concept that is not temporal, but cognitive or mystical, a mode of relation to God given for today rather than some prolongation of time promised for tomorrow: eternal life is that they should know you, emphasizes St. John, you the only true God, and the one whom you sent, Jesus Christ (Jn. 17:3).

Cl. Romano, Lvnement et le monde, Paris, PUF, 1988, p. 91. Nous tenons ici lexemple type dune nouvelle perspective phnomnologique [sur le sens de lvnementialit] dont les consquences thologiques sont immenses quand bien mme elles ne seraient pas, juste titre du point de vue de lauteur, dveloppes par louvrage lui-mme. 50 Origne, Homlies sur le Lvitique, Paris, Cerf, SC n 286, 1981, VII, 2, p. 317.

49

31

2. From Time to Eternity

Just as the transformation of immanence (I, 1) does not lead to another world but to another way of living this same world in the mode of the heaven as an opening to God (III, 3) so the metamorphosis of the passage from time to time (I, 2) does not lead to quitting temporality, but to living it in another mode, that is to say integrated in this God who is the Eternal. We have shown following Martin Heidegger commenting on Augustine, man is essentially oriented towards the to come whose trouble (molestia) or care (Sorge) constitute his most proper being. The resurrection, however, or the metamorphosis of man into God (II), produces another and new relation to time. Not that the Christian is released from care for the future and thus quits the entirety of humanity, but only that he consecrates with God the moment in place and stead of eternity, and therefore of the full realization of divine providence. With Saint Augustine in fact, the moment of the encounter with God becomes for him the moment of all times not a point of time, but the point of its transformation whereby all times are measured: Take up it and read, Take it and read, one reads in book VIII of the Confessions. At this (statim) I looked up For in an instant (statim), as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.51 The ecstases of time thus are concentrated in the present for Augustine, not for the sake of the philosophical motif of the presentification of presence (Heidegger), but because God alone invites us theologically to the joy of receiving the present as present that is to say as the reception of the moment for sure, but also and above all as a gift (present) of what I receive as coming from him in my way of being in the world or of living each ecstasis of time. Such is

51

[ Saint Augustine, Confessions. New York: Penguin Books, 1961, VIII, 12, 177-178.] Saint Augustin, Confessions, Paris, Descle de Brouwer, 1962, BA n 14, VIII, 12 (29), p. 65-69.

32

the temporal metamorphosis that the Resurrection produces, which transforms my relation to time, made of all the ecstases of the time of modes of the moment, which leads to finally living the so justly celebrated saying of the Confessions: hodiernus tuus aeternitas Your today is eternity.52 The today of eternity in fact designates neither the prolongation of time (indefinite time) nor the enjoyment of the moment (carpe diem), but the place and the act of begetting by which the Son is recognized anew (de noveau) by his Father and us in him: this is why you begat him coeternal with you, continues Augustine, to whom you said: I have begotten you this day (Heb. 5:5).53 The true joy in Christianity the very same that liberates from the anxiety whose future constitutes at once the driving motor and the care (Heidegger) consists therefore not only in the enjoyment of the moment, but in the act in the present of the transformation of oneself by an Other, an evident sign of the passage of that Metamorphosis which is God himself (I am the Resurrection (Jn. 11:25)), and of which I am, for my part, the principle recipient: joy (laetitia), emphasizes Spinoza, is the passage from a lesser to a greater perfection I say passage (transitionem) because joy is not perfection itself.54

3. A Flesh to be Reborn

It is in the passage precisely from existentielle anxiety (Heidegger) to the joy of the beatitude of the here-below (Spinoza) that we then recover birth, or better, rebirth as an existential of the resurrection (Nicodemus). Speaking phenomenologically and theologically, the joy of the birth of the infant matters in fact less than the birth of the joy that is this birth itself the one concerning beingness [tantite] (the birth of the infant) and the other the lived experience
52 53

Saint Augustin, Confessions, op. cit., XI, 13 (16), p. 299.. Ibid. 54 B. von Spinoza, thique, Paris, Vrin, 1983, III, 2-3 [dfinition des affections], p. 367.

33

of this beingness (the joy in myself that this birth provokes). So it goes, and very exactly, with the Kingdom of God as place par excellence of the birth in myself of the joy of God (char), duly distinguished by Luke from simple human happiness (euphrosun) in the parable of the prodigal Son: it was necessary to feast (euphranstai (bonheur)) and to rejoice (charnai (joie)), because your brother here was dead and now lives, was lost and is found (Lk. 15:23). To return into the interior of God which sin alone makes one leave, such is the redemptive sense of the resurrection that grafts itself this time onto the ontological transformation of the world in God that occurs by the act of the recovery of the Son by the Father under the strength of the Spirit: my son, you are here with me always, everything I have is yours (Lk. 15:31).55

In this way one is present at ones own resurrection as at a birth, precisely in not being present. For the paradox for birth from the point of view of consciousness goes also for the resurrection: always obscure for him who is born (birth is observed only after the fact), it is no less clear for those who have produced it (the mother, perhaps still more than the father, who carries its trace in her body). Obscure, rebirth remains so for Nicodemus who receives it, condemned therefore to seeing it only by its effects rather than knowing its passage: the wind blows where it blows, and you hear the sound it makes, warns Jesus, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit (Jn. 3:8). But birth is also clear in the evangelical account for the women who gives her flesh in the figure of Mary or Elizabeth (when Elizabeth heard Marys greeting, the infant leaped in her womb, and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit (Lk. 1:41)) and for the man who gives the name in the figure of Zachary (He asked for a tablet and wrote, John is his name (Lk. 1:63-64)). Our Resurrection,
On trouvera une analyse serre de cette parabole du Fils prodigue comme passage du bonheur la joie dans L. Basset, La joie imprenable, op. cit., 1re partie, p. 25-122 : Lc 15, 11-32 (en particulier p. 95-122 : la nonexclusion, une joie qui simpose ).
55

34

following the example of our birth, is thus received from another flesh and identifies us with another name, without, however, our ever being able to give them to ourselves. The other of the flesh causes me to be born to the Resurrected one, such is the role of the Church following the example of Mary begetting the incarnate Word; and the other of the name that designates me as the called or the "in-voked," such is the function of the Father of the heavens who designates me as his adoptive son: if one is born to possess the worldly heritage of a human father, Augustine teaches, masterfully commentating on Nicodemus, one must be born of the womb of a fleshly mother (nascatur ex visceribus matris carnalis); but in order to possess the eternal heritage of this Father who is God, one must be born of the womb of the Church (nascatur ex visceribus ecclesiae).56

Nevertheless the flesh to which we are born in the temporal (Being-in-the-world) is dedicated to letting itself be converted from today on in the knowledge of the Eternal (Being-toward-God). Only an anthropology adequate to a non-unilaterally biological corporeity will allow one, then, to escape from the purely naturalist meaning that is sometimes attributed to the last article of the confession of faith in the Apostles Creed: I believe in the resurrection of the flesh and in eternal life. Amen. We will not lose sight, surely, of the exit from the tombs (Jn. 5:25-29), for such is the profound and veritable mystery of the Christian faith. But from the tombs a corporeal or material substance will not exit, as impossible to think from the philosophical point of view as difficult to hold from the theological point of view. Nevertheless we will not further reduce that which comes out, as an infant is pulled from the womb of his mother, to a pure spirit at the risk contrarily of lapsing into the still more serious deviation of Gnosticism (in

56

Saint Augustin, Homlies sur lvangile de saint Jean I-XIV, Paris, DDB, BA n 71, 1965, Tractatus XII, 5, p. 639.

35

particular Marcion and Valentine). Fleshly Being, and this time it is Husserlian phenomenology that informs us, is not identical to corporal Being. Not that the flesh and the body have to be opposed one to the other, as at other times one thinks spirit and matter or soul and body in a dualizing way; but that they constitute the one and the other two layers, quite distinct, but of which the second alone (the flesh) and not the first (the body) constitutes me properly: thus the body (Krper) and the flesh (Leib) are from the point of view of perception essentially distinct, emphasizes Husserl in the Krisis (1936) fleshly manifestly does not signify simply corporally, but the term refers to this kinesthetic function that is egological in its own manner, and in the first place to seeing, to hearing, etc functions under whose province still more egological modalities quite clearly fall (for example to rise, to carry, to strike).57 Independently of any anachronism that would falsely lead one to believe in a possible identification of the caro in Latin with the Leib in German, the hypothesis then will emerge: if the flesh (Leib) designates phenomenologically speaking our proper and egological mode of living our body (Krper), is it not the same for our proper fleshly being that will be reborn at the end of time: this kinesthetic function, proper to each and by which we recognize one another, in our way of rising, carrying, striking, seeing, hearing, etc.? In other words, is it the objective body (Krper) that is resurrected, or rather, in a more evident manner, the subjective way of living and of experiencing our body (Leib), since it is through the latter that we are properly constituted in our most fundamental experiences (birth, sexuality, death)?

The apparitions of the Resurrected one ever witness to it, he who is recognized by his flesh (Leib) and not by his body (Krper) the only possible explication moreover of the seeing of the

57

E. Husserl, La crise des sciences europennes et la phnomnologie transcendantale [Krisis, 1936], Paris, Gallimard, 1976, p. 122-123.

36

disciples who recognize him or not (one normally recognizes a body unless it is completely mutilated, but not necessarily a flesh that presupposes an original empathy as the condition of recognition). The following witness to it successively: the address of Jesus (i) to the disciples at the edge of the lake, (ii) to Thomas in the Upper Room, (iii) and to Mary Magdalene at the garden at the sepulcher. (i) To the disciples first. The invitation to come eat (Jn. 21:12) is not that of a famished body that does not seem to belong to a resurrected being, but that of a transfigured flesh that recalls that it is made exemplarily to give itself: Jesus came over and took the bread and gave it to them, and in like manner the fish (Jn 21:13) (cf. Sec. 29). (ii) To Thomas next. The one who wanted to see his body in his hands the mark of the nails or in his side the puncture of the spear (Jn 20:25) finally perceives in it a flesh when the Lord proposes to him precisely to confine himself to this first corporeity: Thomas responds: my Lord and my God (Jn. 20:28). (iii) To Mary Magdalene last. She saw Jesus there but she did not know that it was him (Jn. 20:14) (Mary in her beingness), but because it is he (in the modality of teacher) who turns her and confides to her his voice anew: Jesus said to her: Mary She turned and said to him in Hebrew: Rabouni, which means teacher (Jn. 20:16). (i) Neither famished (the apparition at the edge of the lake), (ii) nor yet healed (apparition to Thomas), (iii) nor simply disguised as a gardener (apparition to Mary Magdalene), the corporeity of the Resurrected one is therefore not, or no longer, of the order of the materiality of his body, but of the expressivity of his flesh: God raised him on the third day and granted that he become visible (emphan genesthai), St. Peter exemplarily proclaims at Cornelius the centurion's house, not to all people, but to us, the witnesses chosen by God in advance, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.

37

In his incarnation through his way of being in the world through his body, the Word therefore experienced and prepared his resurrection as the full and complete revelation of the mode of being of his flesh: in sharing anew in eating and drinking with them (the disciples), in making them recognize him in his fleshly texture as in his wounds (Thomas), and in calling by her name the one who, in another way, receives his voice (Mary Magdalene). His becoming body (incarnation) has thus anticipated his becoming flesh (resurrection to which, this time, and in an exemplary manner, the account of his fleshly glory or of his transfiguration bears witness: he was transfigured (metamorpho) before them: his face shone like the sun, his clothing became white as the light (Mat. 17:2). The Metamorphosis here completes its transformation: not as a break or caesura of corporeity (Bultmann), nor even only as incorporation of the whole of man in God (II, 3), but this time as the full and entire epiphany of a fleshlyness that alone is able to bear the weight of such a phenomenality. We will anticipate, then, from the parousia, or from the fulfillment of time, that man should manifest in his transfigured flesh the plenitude of this revealed "glory" (kabd). The Son of man, having embraced completely the movements of our flesh (kinesthetic), to the point of making himself recognized therein as the Resurrected one, thus consecrates his corporeity as the most expressive and residential place of his divinity: Christ inhabits corporally, states St. Paul very precisely in the epistle to the Colossians, the whole fullness of divinity (Col. 2:9).

Translated by Alison Bjerke with Thomas A. Carlson

38