Agape and Hesed-Ahava. David L. Goicoechea

love

      reciting beautiful poetry by heart.

      I discovered the three great secret things

      of sex, death, and religion

      and with Father Ambrose as my confessor

      I was able to be pure and

      not have to confess masturbation.

      For three years and three months I studied

      with the Sulpician Fathers at St. Thomas

      Major Seminary near Seattle, Washington.

      The Sulpicians were founded in order to

      educate men to become secular priests.

      Sulpician spirituality centered on the face

      of Jesus and seeing his face and showing

      his face to all the peoples of the earth.

      The Sulpician priests taught me to have

      Jesus in my mind and in my heart

      and in my hands and on my lips

      and to help all see the glory of his love.

      The priest would have Jesus in his hands

      as he brought the Eucharist to his people.

      At ordination he is given the special

      sacramental power to transform the bread

      and wine into the body and blood of Jesus.

      His mind and heart would be centered

      on that joyful, sorrowful, glorious Jesus

      as he did his spiritual reading and

      as he prayed the Mass, his Rosary, and

      the eight hours of the Divine Office.

      It was his task to speak of Jesus

      to others with Jesus always on his lips.

      As he went out among people his

      black suit and Roman collar would

      call those people to be reminded of Jesus.

      They could have a range of feeling

      for him from empathy and sympathy

      even to antipathy, just as they would

      toward Jesus, and in our secular society

      he would be a reminder of the agape of Jesus.

      At St. Thomas each of us could choose

      our confessor and I liked Father Gustafson,

      my philosophy professor, so much that

      I chose him, and each week I would

      kneel beside him and confess my sins.

      Strangely my impurity returned and he

      told me that he just did not understand me.

      He said that he never had such problems.

      Sex really became a great secret thing

      for as I tried to be celibate for nine years

      many mysterious things continued to happen.

      Perhaps celibacy can develop a kind of

      feminine spirituality within the male

      and perhaps the feminine became more lovely.

      After my ninth year I fell in love with Jane

      and experienced the sublimation that Plato

      describes in his Phaedrus with the myth

      of the charioteer and I came to know of

      erotic inspiration, enthusiasm, and divine madness.

      Father Gus taught me ten philosophy courses

      and I learned all about medieval philosophy

      and Augustinian, Thomistic, and Franciscan

      varieties of the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love.

      In my year and a third of theology

      two Scripture scholars introduced me

      to biblical studies in the old and new way.

      Every three years at daily Mass we had

      readings that covered the whole of the Hebrew Bible.

      I loved the philosophy and theology that I

      learned at St. Thomas so much that I wanted

      to do it for the rest of my life and

      thank God, I am still doing it even now.

      Levinas and Derrida

      For many years I had read Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

      as existentialists but it was Levinas and Derrida

      who first taught me the meaning of postmodernity.

      Levinas as a Rabbi had a deep understanding

      of the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish worldview.

      For him ethics had to be first philosophy

      and he heard from the infinite face of the other

      the call to serve widows, orphans, and aliens.

      Derrida as a Jewish Philosopher of great knowledge

      agreed with Levinas about ethics as first philosophy

      but as he wrote on Levinas’s book Totality and Infinity

      he showed how Levinas was still using a logic

      of exclusive opposites and thus excluded not only

      Buber but also Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

      Derrida showed how the infinite face of the other

      implied a metaphysics of excess that in turn

      would imply a logic of mixed opposites.

      Derrida’s deconstruction of Totality and Infinity

      made sense to Levinas and he went on to write

      Otherwise Than Being, which agreed with Derrida

      but went on to show how the epistemology

      of postmodernity had to be a nominalism.

      Levinas developed a new model of ethics

      as first philosophy with the Suffering Servant.

      Levinas went on to the passages in Second Isaiah,

      which had the Suffering Servant as suffering

      to the point of death out of love for others.

      The Gospels also used these images to show

      how Jesus fulfilled this Suffering Servant philosophy.

      This Suffering Servant as Levinas saw him

      already loved his enemy and would suffer for him.

      Derrida knows the history of philosophy

      very well and especially works with Kierkegaard

      and Nietzsche as he develops his own philosophy.

      Classical philosophy was based upon the four D’s

      of demonstrating a thesis with proper definitions,

      key distinctions, and a dialectical answering

      of objections to those first three procedures.

      As Derrida thought about ethics as first philosophy

      he saw with Kierkegaard that we cannot get

      objective