Agape and Bhakti with Bataille and Mark at Loyola and St. Francis. David L. Goicoechea
God Helps Him to Love God
III.7.5 And to See that God is Like a King
III.7.6 And that the Poor People can be the Most Loving
III.7.7 Bhakti is an Indescribable Mystery
III.7.8 Bhakti, though One, Appears in Eleven Forms
III.7.9 And it Manifests Itself Through Lovers
III.8 The Bhakti Movement and Bhakti Literature
III.8.1 All the Arts of India Express Bhakti
III.8.2 But Singh Concentrates Especially on Literature
III.8.3 And Brings out Bhakti as the One in the Many
III.8.4 Singh Quotes Krishna Sharma to Bring out Differences
III.8.5 And Yet he Must be Critical of Even Her
III.8.6 What is the Sikh View about Bhakti?
III.8.7 Bhakti is the Prime Mover of Art in India
III.8.8 Chandulal and Raj Singh on Bhakti
III.8.9 From Bhakti and the Caste System to Agape
III.9 Bhakti and the History of Western Agape
III.9.1 Jesus, Krishna and the Caste System
III.9.2 Augustine, the Caritas Synthesis and Serving Others
III.9.3 Benedict and Bringing Agriculture to Europe
III.9.4 Dominic and Serving the City’s Poor
III.9.5 Francis and Agape for all God’s Creatures
III.9.6 Ignatius Loyola and Modern Agape
III.9.7 The Agape of St. Theresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross
III.9.8 Mother Teresa’s Agape for the Poor of Calcutta.
III.9.9 The Brock Philosophy Department Learns from all the Others
IV. Which Science Cannot Know
IV. 7 Missionary Love and the Bataillean Simulachra
(From Bataille to Klossowski)
Successfully Proclaiming the Gospel
to Every Creature with a Communication
that Fails and the Simulachra of the Gita
IV.7.1 Communicating the Movements of Pathos with Simulachra.
IV.7.2 Which are Not Ideas but like Ideas
IV.7.3 Which can Poetically Express the Agony and the Ecstasy
IV.7.4 And the Carefree Abandon that Brings One to Laughter
IV.7.5 So that We Might Die with Laughter.
IV.7.6 And Express our Laughter Until we Cry
IV.7.7 Over an Expenditure Tending towards Pure Loss
IV.7.8 Bataille is a Missionary Speaking in Poetic Simulachra
IV.7.9 That Others Might become Sovereign Suffering
IV.8 Purgatorial Love and Battaillean Violence
(From Bataille to Derrida)
Mourning the Guilt of Decisions
Made over the Abyss of Indecidability
For Justice must be Done
in this Life or the Next
IV.8.1 The Instant of decision is Madness (Kierkegaard)
IV.8.2 The Decision to Give the Pure Gift
IV.8.3 And Move from a Restricted to a General Economy
IV.8.4 On to the Move from Hegel to Nietzsche
IV.8.5 And from Hegel’s Lordship to Bataille’s Sovereignty
IV.8.6 And from Hegelian Continuity to the Simulacrum
IV.8.7 Brings us from Desoeuvrement to Dissemination
IV.8.8 And from Dramatization to Difference
IV.8.9 For in doubling Lordship Sovereignty is Dialectical
IV.9 Loving Love and the Bataillean Sacrifice
(From Bataille to Boldt)
The New Mystical Theology’s,
Nine Philosophical Implications
Mark’s Agape and its Nine Implications
The Gita’s Bhakti and its Nine Implications
IV.9.1 Bataille’s New Mystical Theology
IV.9.2 Implies a New Ethics of Altruistic Love
IV.9.3 And a New Economy of Pure Giving
IV.9.4 And a New Politics of the Human Family
IV.9.5 And a New Metaphysics of Excess
IV.9.6 And a New Epistemology of Nominalism
IV.9.7 And a New Logic of Mixed Opposites
IV.9.8 And a New Psychology of Embodied Spirit
IV.9.9 And a New Poetics
Introduction
As we continue these millennial meditations
on two thousand years of agape
we now have the opportunity to see how
agape and bhakti do and can complement each other.
The four-thousand-year-old history
of mysticism and its kind of love in India
has been a great gift for the entire family of man.
As I made my transition from seminary life
at Mt. Angel and St. Thomas Seminary in Seattle
to the Jesuits of Loyola of Chicago
and the Franciscan Sisters and students of Joliet, Illinois,
I was greatly helped in coming to understand
the efforts of meditation and the gifts of contemplation
by Jane Sheldon during the first love of that Sun Valley summer
to the sublimation of erotic inspiration.
I was advised to leave the seminary and then
the Jesuits opened me to all of philosophy.
Mark’s good news is the story of Jesus’ agape
in all nine traits of its altruism, universality,
eternality, unconditionality, childlikeness, celibacy,
missionary love, purgatorial and love of love.
The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus shows us
how to love the other as more important than ourselves.
This agape is the fulfilment of bhakti in all nine ways
and lets us appreciate in the Bhagavad Gita
the two great ways of loving God.
Bataille brings all of this together by showing us
love’s nine great secret things in sex, death, religion,
art, sovereignty, transgression, sacrifice,
violence, and the economy of the gift.
Graduate School
From the Seminary to Loyola of Chicago
After being in the seminary for nine years
I still had to confess the sin of masturbation.
But then I met and fell in love with Jane
and soon I