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