Doing violence upon God: Nonviolent alterities and their medieval precedents

Harvard Theological Review

Volumn 92, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 325-347

  Almond, Ian ^a  

^a ERCIYES UNIVERSITY   (Turkey)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 35448956354     PISSN: 00178160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000003424     Document Type: Review

References (56)

1. Emmanual Levinas, cited in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1978) 70
2. Meister Eckhart, "Renovamini spiritu," in Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings (ed. Oliver Davies; London: Penguin, 1994) 235
3. Meister Eckhart, "Haec dicit dominus," in Meister Eckhart: Sermons and Treatises (ed. M. O'C. Walshe; 3 vols.; London: Watkins, 1979) 2. 249
4. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 89
5. Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (New York: Harper and Row, 1966) 62
6. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1978) 71
7. Heidegger, Gelassenheit, 62
8. Jacques Derrida, "Post-Scriptum," in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay, eds., Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992) 316
9. Eckhart, Selected Writings, 245
10. Jacques Derrida, "Perhaps or Maybe," interview by Alexander Garcia Düttma, in Nick Midgley, ed., Responsibilities of Deconstruction (Coventry: Parousta Press, 1997) 4
11. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works (London: SPCK, 1987) 50
12. Grosseteste, the thirteenth-century commentator on Dionysius, best sums up this idea of multiplicity as a means of returning to oneness: "Without material forms and figures . . . we shall eventually contemplate the divine and intellectual beings, yet we shall not be able to attain to this contemplation unless we first use both the uplifting forms and the material figures." A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988) 169
13. "Doch sint uns die namen erloubet, dâmite in die heiligen genant hânt" (Eckhart, "Misit dominus manum suam," in Meister Eckhart: Werke [ed. Nikolaus Largier; Frankfurt am Main: Kohlhammer, 1993] 566
14. ET: Eckhart, Selected Writings, 129)
15. Cited in Arthur Hyman and J. Walsh, Philosophy in the Middle Ages (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1973) 492
16. "das si swigen und wolten nicht liegen" (Eckhart, "Eratis enim aliquando tenebrae," in Werke, 558
17. Cited in Hyman and Walsh, Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 376
18. "Wer dâ spraeche daz got guot waere, der taete im als unrehte, als ob er die sunnen swarz hieze" (Eckhart, "Quasi stella matutina," in Josef Quint, Textbuch zur Mystik des deutschen Mittelalters [Halle: Niemeyer, 1952] 12
19. idem, Meister Eckhart: An Introduction to the Study of his Works with an Anthology of his Sermons [ed. James M. Clark; London: Nelson and Sons, 1957] 207)
20. "Aber wir tuon im gewalt und unreht mit dem, daz wir in sînes natiurlîchen werkes hindern mit unbereitschaft" (Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Die deutschen und lateinischen Werke [ed. Josef Quint; 5 vols.; Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1936] 5. 281
21. idem, Selected Writings, 41)
22. The three citations (in order) are taken from "In hoc apparuit," in Sermons and Treatises, 1. 117
23. "Omne datum optimum," in Meister Eckhart: An Introduction, 173
24. and "Quasi vas auri," in Reiner Schürmann, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher: Translations with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978) 102
25. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976) 292
26. Meister Eckhart, "Mulier, venit hora et nunc est," in Schürmann, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher, 57
27. idem in Schürmann, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher, 125)
28. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 283
29. Schürmann, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher, 200
30. One could take issue with this, given the fact that in a number of sermons ("In his quae patris," for example) Eckhart quotes that Derridean epitomy of phonocentricity 2 Cor 3:6 "The letter (that is, all outward practices) kills, but the Spirit gives life." However, Eckhart's interesting amendment to the verse - "all outward practices" - suggests that what the Dominican understands by "letter" includes all discourse, written and spoken, a possibility reinforced by the verse quoted immediately afterward, Matt 6:7 "When you pray, do not use many words in your prayers like the Pharisees, for they think to be heard with much speaking" (Eckhart, Sermons and Treatises, 1. 36). Meaning may well be privileged and separated from discourse here, but it is difficult to see how speech is privileged over writing
31. "Aux prises avec des problèmes qui furent aussi bien ceux de la théologie négative" (Jacques Derrida, L'Écriture et la différence [Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967] 170
32. idem, Writing and Difference, 116)
33. "vielle amitié occulté entre la lumière et la puissance" (Derrida, Écriture, 136
34. Coward, Derrida and Negative Theology, 219
35. Joseph Libertson is cited in Robert Eaglestone, Ethical Criticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997) 131
36. see also John Llewellyn, Emmanuel Levinas (London: Routledge, 1995) 176
37. Emmanuel Levinas, interview by Richard Kearney, in Face to Face with Levinas (ed. Richard Cohen; Albany: SUNY Press, 1986) 23
38. idem, Writing and Difference, 114)
39. Eckhart, "Surrexit autem Saulus," in Schürmann, Meister Eckhart, Mystic and Philosopher, 125
40. In Nicholas's own library at Cues (or Cusa), on the river Moselle, the fifteenth-century churchman had in his possession Codex 21, one of the largest collections of Eckhart's Latin scholastic works. However, it was in a theological quarrel with the traditionalist theologian von Herrenberg that the Eckhartian influences of Cusano's works (particularly Of Learned Ignorance) were pointed out. For von Herrenberg at that time, "Eckhartian" is clearly just another word for "heretical." Cusano was, in turn, prompted to defend "Magister Eghardus" at some length in his Apologia doctae ignorantiae (1448)
41. See Giorgio Penzo, Invito al Pensiero di Eckhart (Milan: Bompiani, 1997)
42. "Devant une pensée comme celle de Levinas, je n'ai jamais d'objection. Je suis prêt à souscrire tout ce q'il dit. Ça ne veut pas dire que je pense la même chose de la même façon; mais là les differences sont très difficiles à determiner: que signifie dans ce cas-Ià la différence d'idiome, de Iangue, d'écriture? J'ai essayé de poser un certain nombre de questions à Levinas en le lisant . . . mais ce qui se passe là n'est pas de l'ordre du désaccord ou de la distance" (Jacques Derrida and Pierre-Jean Labarriére, Altérités [Paris: Éditions Osiris, 1986] 74. My translation.)
43. See, for example, Simon Critchley: "If there indeed exists this happy homoiosis between Levinas and Derrida ... then what on earth is Derrida doing in his extended, and at times highly critical, 1964 monograph on Levinas?" in Midgley, Responsibilities of Deconstruction, 94
44. Jacques Derrida, "Psyché: Inventions of the Other," in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (ed. Peggy Kamuf; Exeter: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991) 209
45. Jacques Derrida, "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," in A Derrida Reader, 414
46. Midgley, Responsibilities of Deconstruction, 3
47. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 131, 83
48. idem, "Intravit Jesus," ibid., 159
49. idem, "Et cum factus esset," ibid., 226
50. "L'abandon à cette Gelassenheit n'exclut pas le plaisir ou la jouissance, il leur donne lieu au contraire. Il ouvre le jeu de Dieu (de Dieu et avec Dieu, de Dieu avec soi et avec la création" (Jacques Derrida, Sauf le nom [Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993] 102
51. idem, "Post-Scriptum," in Coward and Foshay, Derrida and Negative Theology, 317)
52. Derrida, A Derrida Reader, 217
53. Derrida, "Perhaps or Maybe," in Midgley, Responsibilities of Deconstruction, 6
54. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 312, n. 7
55. Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 58
56. Denys Turner, The Darkness of God: Negativity in Christian Mysticism (London: Cambridge University Press, 1993) 278