Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea
ethical decisions.
Rather those decisions made over the abyss
of indecidability will bring us to Derrida’s four D’s
of deconstructing demonstrations, by showing
the dissemination of definitions and the differance
of all distinctions that takes dialectics into
the realm of an existential uncertainty about decision.
Derrida’s aporetic faith lead from pride to humility
as he discovered a logic of the paradox and
its mixed opposites that governed each decision
that we make over the abyss of indecidability.
It moved him from pretension to honesty
as the question of responsibility about the
dissemination of all knowledge and definition
led him to a metaphysics of excess.
It led him from being ponderous to being humorous
with a psychology of the decentered self
because of the differancing of all distinctions.
It led him from being pompous to being healthy
because of his new epistemology of embracing
uncertainty as he saw justice as deconstruction.
With this Derrida made clear for me
the meaning of a postmodern philosophy.
None of the modernists from Luther and Descartes
to Calvin and Hobbes, to Henry VIII and Locke,
to Newton and Rousseau, to Hume and Kant
and to Hegel, Marx, and Adam Smith got to
this postmodern view that Levinas and Derrida
spell out with such philosophical clarity.
One could show that their postmodernity
goes back to the premodernity of the Franciscans
as their thought culminated in the metaphysics
of excess with Scotus’s haecceity and then
the consequent nominalism of Ockham’s epistemology.
With this help from Derrida I came to see
how Kierkegaard had first clearly spelled out
the logic of mixed opposites as he built his
philosophy around the paradox of the God-man.
Levinas’s definition of glory as a manifesting
of the unmanifest even in its unmanifestness
clearly expressed the paradox of giving glory
and this helped me to understand Kierkegaard’s
Works of Love, which would give that glory
and the Drama of Zarathustra, which revealed
more and more glory with each act of the Drama.
Any act of love that we perform, be it of
Nietzschean amor fati or Kierkegaardian works of love,
does make the God of love more manifest.
But Levinas and Derrida remain Jewish
and do not make the leap of love that
would let them love Jesus as the Messiah.
Derrida argues for a messianicity
without a Messiah and Levinas does not
see any fulfillment of hesed and ahava
in an agape that would take them further.
Levinas and Derrida can greatly help us
to understand hesed and ahava and how
far they can go in the direction of agape.
Derrida could be seen as developing a
preparation for the gospel, which makes clear
how far he will and will not go in loving.
He does develop a psychology of loving ours
without loving all and of rescuing his cats
but not of loving all flesh as eternal.
Levinas thinks carefully and often about
the difference between Jewish and Christian love.
He does develop the idea of a third but
without thinking of God as a Trinity of Persons.
Derrida and Levinas both think deeply
about glory and the glory of love and at Brock
we had a conference on Derrida’s Glorious Glas.
As Kenneth Itzkowitz says in his article
in the proceedings of that conference Glas
might be thought of as The Tolling Knell,
The Mournful Knell and the Tolling-Mournful Knell.
It has to do with the mourning process
and with turning sorrow into joy through glory.
If one goes through the mourning process
in a successful way one can be healed of
one’s grief and even get in touch with
the spirit world as did the Shamans.
So the question that Derrida and Levinas
raise is about the difference between
Jewish love and glory and Christian love and glory.
We can now consider love in the Hebrew Bible
and love in Matthew and see how Jewish
love prepared the way for the good news of agape.
Hesed and Ahava
Nelson Glueck’s wonderful book, Hesed in the Bible,
which was published in 1927, is so helpful
in clarifying the kinds of love in the Bible.
In the 1967 edition there is an introductory essay
by Gerald A. Larue that treats eighteen responses
to Glueck and that are very enriching.
Glueck shows how there are three basic kinds
of hesed in the Hebrew Bible for as loving conduct
it can have secular, religious, or divine meanings.
Its main importance as a forerunner of agape
is the divine meaning that begins with God’s
promise of an everlasting love to David and
his house, which appears in 2 Sam 7:14–16:
I will be his father and he shall be my son.
When he commits iniquity, I will chasten
him with the rod of men, with the stripes
of the sons of men; but I will not take away
my hesed from him, as I took it from Saul,
whom I put away from before you. And
your house and your kingdom shall be made
sure forever before me; your throne shall
be established forever.
In