Messiah (Messiah)

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Messiah (2008) is the title of a book written by an author with the pseudonym Antoine Derride SJ . It is subtitled A Deconstruction of Christian Theology . It was published by Passagen Verlag , Vienna, at the end of October 2008, too late to be discussed in the book by Karl-Josef Kuschel , professor at the Catholic-Theological Faculty of the University of Tübingen, Jesus in the mirror of world literature .

To clarify the term: deconstruction

Although the pseudonym of the author is reminiscent of Jacques Derrida , the term deconstruction in Messiah is not used exclusively in Derrida's sense. De-construction is here immanent in the text as the creative destruction of Christian theology . The term here cannot be compared to the deconstruction of Christianity by Jean-Luc Nancy .

content

Messiah is a fictional document preceded by a foreword and followed by an afterword titled And A Few More Revelations .

The preface

In this chapter a first-person narrator reports, the Jesuit Antoine Derride under what circumstances he came into possession of the records of his recently deceased friar and friend Dr. Josef Stein has come.

He describes Stein's records as one document, in which he reports that a mysterious man who visited him was the returned Jesus Christ , the Messiah . The partly satirical text of the deceased Jesuit irritates Derride no less than the messenger's statement that he recognizes himself in the strange visitor Stein, so that he - Derride - after verifying the authenticity of the text Stein by comparing the script with old letters from it has checked, meets the deliverer again to ask him various questions. His questions and the answers of Stein's visitor, who according to Derride would still like to remain anonymous, are summarized in his foreword.

The document

The document is a text divided into numbered sections of various lengths. Almost a novel .

The old, terminally ill Jesuit Josef Stein tells his own life, whereby his origins are reminiscent of Max Horkheimer 's. He was the only one of his family to survive the Holocaust , convert to Christianity after the end of World War II and join the Jesuit order.

The second main character of the “document” is a man who visited Stein often in his old days and now, shortly before his death, finally recognizes the real “comforter” and “advocate” ( Paraclete ) in the stone .

In a free literary arrangement, Stein tells of the first encounter with the strange visitor. He tells about their various conversations about God and the world: about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin ; about films like Dogville and In the Realm of the Senses ; about the singer Madonna , who is interested in Kabbalah ; about Theodor W. Adorno and his dog ; the performance artist Marina Abramović ; about Jean-Philippe Toussaint and his book The Bathroom . He also tells about the private life of his visitor and his girlfriend Lourdes.

The conclusion "And a few more revelations"

The book contains many intertextual references, for example to Malone dies by Samuel Beckett , to poems by Paul Celan , to works by the Swiss author and Dr. hc of the theology Peter Bichsel , as well as - very marginally - to a novel by the well-known Cuban author Guillermo Cabrera Infante , Three sad tigers . The last part, which consists almost entirely of blank pages, is reminiscent of a chapter from this book - "A few revelations". (Apparently a joke by the author and at the same time a reference to Infante.) Empty pages and then, at the very end, a poem “... in memoriam Friedrich Nietzsche and Franz Overbeck ” . The question remains whether the allusion to three tigers in the book Messiah is an allusion to a (mysterious) friendship between three men: true friendship between Jesus of Nazareth and the two named, the philosopher Nietzsche and the theologian Overbeck? It cannot be ruled out. And not only this question remains open after reading the book.

meaning

Messiah is a literary fiction riddled with real documents. The text is of theological or religious-philosophical relevance because it asserts the parousia of Christ in the present with unusual conviction. The messianic criticism of Christian theology is remarkable in this context. This can be found most succinctly in the demand of the returned Christ that Christian theology should fundamentally be questioned in essential postulates of faith after the Holocaust . He does this at a time when Christian-Jewish relations are being strengthened by the Good Friday prayer "For the Jews" in the version for the extraordinary rite of 2008 by Pope Benedict XVI. are burdened again, and he thereby also complements Daniel Goldhagen by pointing beyond the Goldhagen debate in a critical of religion.

Quotes

Antoine Derride in his foreword: “This foreword is not an“ instruction manual ”on how to read the book. As I remembered my friar, if he were still alive, he would have full confidence in the reader. Just as much trust as he had in chance and in the belief that his manuscript would one day find its readers in book form. I myself have - I admit - read the manuscript of my deceased friend with increasing irritation, partly because I found my name in it ... " (p. 12)

From the document: “It could look as if this death of one Jew was not quite enough to redeem all the baptized [...] It could seem as if many Jews had to die a kind of“ sacrificial death ”afterwards the sacrificial death of one Jew at that time. But no - it doesn't seem so! Otherwise the Christian doctrine of the exclusive "sacrificial death" of a single Jew would not have been able to survive the Shoah. Christianity as usual survived the Holocaust as an ideology, as a big lie. " (P. 44)

"There is no real reconciliation without theological consequence," he said to me at the time. I remember exactly. And what is still not called 'interreligious dialogue' to this day! A joke - that's not a dialogue! The word dialogue is not preceded by the Greek di-, “double”, as in the “dilemma” a Jew faces when he wants to be a Christian. Rather a slide 'through'. In a dialogue, the partners 'talk through' something. And how, in what way, they do this, the root word lógos indicates. The Lógos actually describes ratios, Lourdes explained this to me, numerical ratios, for example, like two to three, one to two. And corresponding 'analogies' and derivations such as logízesthai, 'calculate', Logismós, 'calculation' indicate that the Diálogos is about more than 'talking through', rather about 'calculating'. Lógos, 'relationship'. In Heraclitus, says Lourdes, the Lógos names the order that 'holds the world together in its innermost core', and also the reason that allows us to understand this order a little. Hence the common meaning 'language', 'speech'. Diálogos, dialogízesthai, that doesn't just mean 'to talk', blablabla, no, it's about persistent, mutual 'calculating' a matter ... " (p. 116)

“He asked me about my memories and I told him a specific example: The sky was blue on that day in question and a new sky in this blue appeared to me and a new earth seemed possible under this new sky. For a moment I saw through my delusion: the world would not end. Far from it. Maybe I would be forgotten, nobody would remember me. I wondered how this could be prevented. Should I write? How do you do that so that you survive yourself? - Vain questions! " (P. 133)

literature

  • Antoine Derride SJ: Messiah. A deconstruction of Christian theology, Passagen Verlag, Vienna, 2008, ISBN 9783851658705
  • Daniel Jonah Goldhagen: Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996, ISBN 0-679-44695-8
  • Walter Homolka / Erich Zenger (eds.): "... so that they recognize Jesus Christ." The new Good Friday Prayer for the Jews, Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2008, ISBN 978-3-451-29964-3