But why is God dead at the end of your piece? The sentence makes me think I did not understand your post.
He is asking about the question, "How do you keep a promise to a dead god?" In putting this question, I seem to have fallen into (or fallen in love with) a way of talking that I don't understand and which in the past I myself have questioned. Now, I am like a fool who cannot even say what made him say what he said. It strikes me now as empty. Yet, I cannot persuade myself (is this just pride?) that I was a fool to say it.
Can we take this change as a case in point? Was there a god here making me say things I did not understand? Then where is that god now? If it is gone and dead, how can it have been a god? Certainly, it is not the God who "at every time and in every place,...draws close to man" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1). By withdrawing from me after exacting my promise it has withdrawn its right to be called a god. But a god does not change, so it never was a god. Never to have been a god: this is how a god dies.
Well, and if it is not that God beside whom we are to "have no other gods," why should I feel that I ought to remain faithful?
And so after many twists and turns, and feeling that I had escaped the danger, I find myself back in the same position as before, renouncing the unknown god.
Looking over your questions about past love, and wondering about the identity of this "dead god," I noticed your suggestion of the god's, at least temporary, irresistibility:
ReplyDelete"and being unable to resist but not having everything to give you promise it the future."
Now it is conventional to call the god of love irresistible. Lyricists, Troubadors, Petrarchan poets, and the popular song writers of our day have so named him again and again. But surely something so deliberate as "a promise" cannot be extracted merely by a god's irresistible power. Doesn't "promise" imply some kind of free human response, and only *therefore* the promiser's assumption of responsibility to that power?
Assuming, then, that a promise is a free act, this is how I would propose the possible solution of your dilemma.
It seems likely to me that some powers are essentially respond-able-to, and some are not. Certainly I may *try* to speak (or promise, or keep a promise) to a being who cannot hear or understand my words, but trying is not doing, even if there is something noble in the effort. (Isn't the very intention of a speech such as a promise premised on the essential respond-able-to-ness of the the one *to whom* the promise is made?)
Further, if I try to promise a promise that premises not just any respond-able-to-ness but a divine respond-able-to-ness in the power to which I try to promise, and try to keep that promise, and if there in fact there is no such god as promise premises, then I am in an analogous dilemma. I may try, but I will not succeed, though there may be something noble in the effort.
Nevertheless, if such a promise has been "made" to a god who is not such a god as to listen to or respond to or otherwise hold one to a promise, what then (as I think you are asking)? Was not the promise made in "good faith"? Can it simply dissolve into nothing?
Well, a promise is also made with secondary hearers in mind, witnesses, etc. who might hold one to one's promise, even if the one-to-whom-the-promise is made is absent or otherwise engaged--if such a listener might act as a fitting steward or proxy, as one might fittingly pay a debt owed to a dead man not to himself but his heir. But when a man promises to a god, can a human witness hope to supply, by fitting proxy, the respond-able-to-ness of a divine being? Or hope, with fitting authority, to assert the inherited demands of a god who chooses not to assert his own demands? Clearly not, not even should the promiser himself (out of a sense of loyalty) try and assert the rights of the absent god.
However, if another *god* (a truly respond-able-to and responsible one) should happen to overhear the promiser's speech, and recognizes the "good faith" of his intention, *this overhearing god* may effectually take up the promise made in ignorance and confusion, and offer it back the promiser as renewable in spirit and truth.
I wonder if the difference between a despondent god and a god who has *become* despondent can be so easily elided...
ReplyDeleteHere are my initial reflections on the problem of that "queer elision" here:
http://seynsgeschichte.blogspot.com/2010/08/ent-gotterung.html