The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death

by Emmanuel Falque, George Hughes (Translator)

Overview

Anxiety, suffering and death are not simply the “ills” of our society, nor are they uniquely the product of a sick and sinful humanity. We must all some day confront them, and we continually face their implications long before we do. In that sense, the Garden of Gethsemane is not merely a garden “outside the walls” of Jerusalem but also the essential horizon for all of us, whether we are believers or not.

Emmanuel Falque explores, with no small measure of doubt, Heidegger’s famous statement that by virtue of Christianity’s claims of salvation and the afterlife, its believers cannot authentically experience anxiety in the face of death. In this theological development of the Passion, already widely debated upon its publication in French, Falque places a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ’s suffering and death, marking the continuities between Christ’s Passion and our own orientation to the mortality of our bodies. Beginning with an elaborate reading of the divine and human bodies whose suffering is masterfully depicted in the Isenheim Altarpiece, and written in the wake of the death of a close friend, Falques’s study is both theologically rigorous and marked by deeply human concerns.

Falque is at unusual pains to elaborate the question of death in terms not merely of faith, but of a “credible Christianity” that remains meaningful to non-Christians, holding, with Maurice Blondel, that “the important thing is not to address believers but to say something which counts in the eyes of unbelievers.” His account is therefore as much a work of philosophy as of theology—and of philosophy explicated not through abstractions but through familiar and ordinary experience. Theology’s task, for Falque, is to understand that human problems of the meaning of existence apply even to Christ, at least insofar as he lives in and shares our finitude. In Falque’s remarkable account, Christ takes upon himself the burden of suffering finitude, so that he can undertake a passage through it, or a transformation of it.

This book, a key text from one the most remarkable of a younger generation of philosophers and theologians, will be widely read and debated by all who hold that theology and philosophy has the most to offer when it eschews easy answers and takes seriously our most anguishing human experiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823281954
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	11/06/2018
Series:	Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	264,816
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Emmanuel Falque (Author)
Emmanuel Falque is Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic Universityof Paris. His most recent book in English is The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: Eros, the Body, and the Eucharist.

George Hughes (Translator)
George Hughes has served as Professor in the Faculty of Letters at the Universityof Tokyo.

Table of Contents

Translator's Note xiii

Preface to the English-Language Edition xv

Opening: The Isenheim Altarpiece or "The Taking on Board of Suffering" xvii

Introduction: Shifting Understandings of Anxiety 1

Part I The Face-To-Face of Finitude

1 From the Burden of Death to Flight before Death 7

§1 The Burden of Death 7

§2 Fleeing from Death 8

2 The Face of Death or Anxiety over Finitude 10

§3 Death "for Us" Humans 10

§4 Genesis and Its Symbolism 11

§5 The Mask of Perfection 12

§6 The Image of Finitude in Man 13

§7 Finitude: Finite and Infinite 16

§8 Finitude and Anxiety 16

§9 The Eclipse of Finitude 17

§10 The Face of Death 18

§11 To Die "with," 19

3 The Temptation of Despair or Anxiety over Sin 22

§13 Inevitable Death 22

§14 The Conquest of Sin 22

§15 Sin and Anxiety 23

§16 The Temptation of Despair 24

4 From the Affirmation of Meaninglessness to the Suspension of Meaning 26

§17 The Life Sentence 26

§18 The Christian Witness 27

§19 Meaninglessness and the Suspension of Meaning 27

Part II Christ Faced with Anxiety over Death

§20 Two Meditations on Death 29

§21 Alarm and Anxiety 31

5 The Fear of Dying and Christ's "Alarm" 33

§22 Taking on Fear and Abandonment 33

§23 The Cup, Sadness, and Sleep 34

§24 Resignation, Waiting, and Heroism 35

§25 The Silence at the End 36

§26 The Scenarios of Death 37

§27 The Triple Failure of the Staging 38

§28 From Alarm to Anxiety 39

6 God's Vigil 41

§29 Remaining Always Awake 41

§30 The Passage of Death, the Present of the Passion, the Future of the Resurrection 42

§31 Theological Actuality and Phenomenological Possibility 43

7 The Narrow Road of Anxiety 45

§32 Indefiniteness, Reduction to Nothing, and Isolation 45

§33 The Strait Gate 46

§34 Anxiety over "Simply Death," 47

§35 Indefiniteness (Putting off the Cup) and the Powerless Power of God 47

§36 Reduction to Nothing and Kenosis 52

§37 The Isolation of Humankind and Communion with the Father 54

§38 Of Anxiety Endured on the Horizon of Death 55

8 Death and Its Possibilities 57

§39 Manner of Living, Possibility of the Impossibility, and Death as "Mineness," 57

§40 Being Vigilant at Gethsemane 59

§41 From the Actuality of the Corpse to Possibilities for the Living 60

§42 The Death That Is Always His: Suffering in God; The Gift of His Life and Refusal of Mastery 63

§43 The Flesh Forgotten 66

Part III The Body-to-Body of Suffering and Death

§44 Disappropriation and Incarnation 69

§45 Embedding in the Flesh and Burial in the Earth 70

9 From Self-Relinquishment to the Entry into the Flesh 73

§46 Suffering the World 73

§47 Living in the World 74

§48 Otherness and Corruptibility 74

§49 Self Relinquishment 75

§50 Passing to the Father 76

§51 Oneself as an Other 77

§52 Destitution and Auto-Affection 78

§53 Alterity and Fraternity 79

§54 Entry into the Flesh 80

§55 The Anxiety "in" the Flesh 81

§56 Toward Dumb Experience 82

10 Suffering Occluded 84

§57 An Opportunity Thwarted 84

§58 Called into Question 86

§59 Toward a Phenomenology of Suffering 86

11 Suffering Incarnate 88

§60 Perceiving, or the Challenge of the Toucher-Touching 88

§61 The Modes of the Incarnate Being 91

§62 The Excess of the Suffering Body 94

12 The Revealing Sword 97

§63 Sobbing and Tears 97

§64 Fleshly Exodus 99

§65 The Vulnerable Flesh 100

§66 The Non-Substitutable Substitution 101

§67 The Act of Surrendering Oneself 103

§68 Toward a Revelation 104

§69 Useless Suffering 104

Conclusion: The In-Fans [without-Speech] or the Silent Flesh 107

Epilogue; From One Triptych to Another 111

Notes 115

Index 157

Editorial Reviews

In this dramatic opening to his triptych on Christ’s passion, Emmanuel Falque demonstrates—once again—his complete refusal to rest with easy answers. Christ, he argues, experiences anxiety and suffering that are just as real and confusing as that of any ordinary person. The result is that God does not suffer at some comfortable distance but right here in our midst. One can hardly read this book without being deeply moved.—Bruce Ellis Benson, author of Liturgy as a Way of Life

From the Publisher

What this book does with power and sensitivity is to call Christians to a reflection on the reality of suffering and death, and to point unbelievers to the resources at the heart of Christianity, coming from Christ himself, for speaking to the reality of suffering and death.

Modern Theology

Death is a problem. No, not a problem. The problem. So painful, so tragic, so crushing is the fate that awaits us that we mortals tend to ignore it altogether. An old professor of mine used to quip that philosophers make for bad party guests because we are always thinking about death. Yet, as Emmanuel Falque rightly points out in his provocative book The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death, all of that good philosophical thinking amounts to little more than a flight from death, an unwillingness to look the raw brutality of finitude in the eye.

Reading Religion

In this dramatic opening to his triptych on Christ’s passion, Emmanuel Falque demonstrates—once again—his complete refusal to rest with easy answers. Christ, he argues, experiences anxiety and suffering that are just as real and confusing as that of any ordinary person. The result is that God does not suffer at some comfortable distance but right here in our midst. One can hardly read this book without being deeply moved.

Bruce Ellis Benson