The Beginning of Wisdom is…Getting Real!

When Rudolf Botlamnn spoke about mythology in religious thinking and presented to scholarship the notion of ‘demythologization’, he rumbled the Christian theological scene. Yet, he also wiped a very think layer of dust off theology’s understanding of existence. Bultmann believed that whether Jesus of Nazareth existed once in history or not is not what really matters for the believer in the first place. What matters is what this Christ’s event means to the person in today’s reality, in the real ‘then’ and ‘here’ of being (Dasein). Thus, coming to terms with the meaning of the event called Christ in reality means actually coming to terms with the ‘real’ in this event; with this event’s core-reality. Be that as it may, ‘demythologization’ does not mainly state something about Christ’s historicity or non-historicity, but rather designates a concern about inviting the human to encounter reality and to be his and her Dasein via encountering in faith the event of Christ.

In this sense, demythologization is an invitation for standing in the real realm of existence; in the Da-sein, the ‘then’ and ‘here’ of the real world, of the realistic context of existence. The beginning of wisdom is, therefore, demythologization. It is just the beginning. Yet, it is the real, inevitable, even inescapable, beginning: demythologizing one’s self, one’s life, one’s belief and one’s disbelief alike, one’s view of the world and one’s relationships with the others. It is not an attack against historicity (Boltmann never said he is against the Quest of the Historical Jesus. he just thought questioned its relevance and structural textile). It is, rather, an invitation for existing historically, as well as, nevertheless, an invitation for realizing historicity by means of realizing that reality is what it is in its Dasein, not what one imagines it to be (mythologizes it) in one’s own mind. The same principle is applicable to the human position in relation to the world, to God, to disbelief in God, to the other etc. Demythologization means discerning the difference between these entities and their truth in one’s idealist mind (i.e. a difference that marks a distinction between Heidegger and Hegel, or between Boltmann’s disciples themselves: Käzemann and Konzelmann, on one side, and Ebeling, on another.)

When Jesus of Nazareth sent his disciples in mission, he asked them to enter the houses and reside therein. Yet, if came a time when their hosts happened to reject them, they should go out, wipe the dust of the city off their sandals and never look back. A strange, even provoking, demand from the one whose life and destiny are believed to reveal forgiveness, other-concerning and out-reaching spirit. One expects the Nazarene asking his followers to have patience, forgive their opposing hosts, to try again to win those who rejected them to the cause and to spend further time in the city to convince its people about the Kingdom of Heaven. To the contrary, Jesus said “who refuses you, refuse him back. Who says to you ‘get lost’, say back to him ‘get lose too’ and the erase the traces of your visit to his place completely of your clothes.” What is this really? It is a demythologization of the image of the Kingdom and the attitude of the people about it in the mind of the disciples. He is telling his group “do not have illusion about the definite and certain success of the Kingdom’s mission. If people rejected it and refuted you, which is natural and would happen anyway, carry on, do not look back and do not fight back upon stubborn imaginative expectations. Failure is also part and parcel to the reality of our cause.”

Demythologization is what humanity needs to survive from the plethora of nihilism our imaginative illusions are driving us through: modernist illusions about the superiority of human reason and knowledge and power, as well as postmodernist illusions about the superiority of communication and relatedness and globalization. Getting real is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of living in the ‘here’ and the ‘then’ of history, in order to travel beyond it. Demythologization of reality is the beginning of making it, of its being.

But, Why Writing Ever?

Once, I was asked: “how would you like your life-journey to end?” I said then: “I would like to die while sitting at my desk, reading and writing.” I still have the same wish and the same imagination, though my wishes are becoming gradually sort-of nice dreams clustering together as a herd of beautiful thoughts one entertains but never eventually owns or achieves.

The question of my relationship with the act of writing haunts me. It has always done! Not because I am a first-rate, perfectly prolific writer, but because I am sort-of addicted to writing. Words and sentences and lines have kind of a spell on my soul. In my poems, I expressed perpetually my wish to be free from writing. On the other hand, failing to publish every written work my fingers and pen produced, especially those which I believed to be publishable, should have, presumably, pushed me away from writing. But, just to the very contrary, the further I fail, the further I write.

It challenges me deeply the fact that Jesus left no written text whatsoever. He seems as cannot care less about writing. And when he faces us with this fact, we force on his story of the stoning of Mary Magdalene a claim that while the crowds were rioting, Jesus was writing with his finger on the floor. Where did we get this image from, when the biblical texts do not state so clearly whatsoever? Jesus was not a writer, though he does seem to show at some occasions that he reads; he has, that is, an interaction with written materials sometime, somewhere. When it comes to writing, Jesus is free, pen-less, paper-less, and even wording-less.

Is this because he himself was ‘the Word’, as Christian Faith proclaims, and words are written by someone; they do not write themselves? But, the eternal Word did not become an incarnate text (opposite to the Islamic view of Qur’an), but an incarnate, infleshed being, a human with ‘Da-sein’. So, Jesus was not even per se written, despite being ‘the Word’. I wish I can hear Jesus’ opinion about writing. I wish I can ask him: “why didn’t you write? What do you think of writing? Have you ever written anything: words, ideas, dairies, poems, letters…anything?”

I wonder if writing is related to love, though. Is it possible that Jesus has no space for personal, private love in his life because he himself became the space for life to redeem itself by means of the love of its Creator? I cannot prove it. Yet, I can say that writing in my case has always been linked with the concept of ‘love’: personal, ideal, general, social, spiritual, etc etc. My act of writing has always been baptized with the truth of love, obsessively immersed with it; it was as such an act of love. By this, I do not mean the content of the writing action/event or the addressee of what I write. By ‘writing is an act of love’ (or even is a Dasein of love) I mean the state of writing as such: I write in love, I write out of love, I write to love, I write love, I write as someone in love. It does not matter anymore whether one writes or not words of love; whether one writes ‘I love you’ or never does. This cross of writing is a fate of love: almost a ‘to be, or not to be’ state of being (yet not necessarily Shakespearian one). So, to be or not to be is not ‘the question’, not any more in fact. It is rather ‘the writing’, ‘the love’ we need to survive. Something Jesus was not in need of, was not per se, because he was not focusing on survival or even on living; leave alone on dying. To write or not to write/ to love or not to love, this is the question.

Writing is my survival. And, when to my friends, who ask me “how are you?” I answer “surviving” I mean actually “I am still writing”, or even worse “I am still loving.”

Nietzsche Was Probably Right!

Dark, grim and eerie the amphitheatre that was built by the Nazis to serve their propaganda on the top of a hill shouldering Heidelberg. A huge venue on the top of the hill, where few ten meters down philosophers and poets used to stride discussing truth and pondering existence, contemplating human reason and expressing nature and beauty.
No sign to guide you to the place through the sloping road that digs its curvy tale through the high trees of the woods. As if nobody wants you to know it even exists or find your way to it. The overwhelming large construction stands all-of-a-sudden in front of you in its massive body, dressed up with its dark and solid and cold stones. It can definitely contains tenth of thousands of people, who would have been mostly university students and academicians: the minds of the future who would be summoned there, brain-washed and militarized with the ideologies that swerve the cause of the regime; of ‘Deutschland über Alles,’ of the myth of the ‘über Mensch’ of the ‘unique race’.






In the heart of the huge construction, when you set on one of the long and arch-like benches and stare at the main entrance with two bars that must have carried high the flag of Germany and the flag of the Gestapo and the oval-like stage, where probably the Fuehrer or one of his spokesmen stood to energize the crowd, history embraces you to the extent of suffocation with its think and heavy garment.

You look like an Ant in front of an elephant echo of ideology and fear. You linger like a helpless insect under the boot of a monster of death and human arrogance. Today, the monster was swallowed up by history, while the ants still visit the remaining witness and stare at the fading traces of the glory and power that are blown hither and thither by a roaring, devouring and smashing wind.




On the same hill, few meters further up, stands the remaining of another venue: an old Benedictine monastery. You climb up the wide stars of the amphitheatre and walked further ahead to find yourself walking into ruins of a chapel and an old convent that must have been one day big and lively; the oldest part of which goes back to the Middle Ages.
Side by side, stands two venues of two religions that once upon a time collided, clashed but even sometimes allied in ruling Germany: Christianity and Nazism.
On one hand, an amphitheatre, where people ‘gather to form the new German nation who obeys and does the will of its Führer’, as General Gobles, the media man of the rule says. And, on the other hand, a monastery where monks gather to form the community of the Lord who obeys the will of God. Two religions, one of obedience and one of submission, side by side, shoulder to shoulder: the religion of the human and the religion of the divine; each in its own shrines; in its own remains. Nietzsche was probably right: the death of God brings along with the death of the human self. I add, still, the other way round may be relatively as true.

Heidelberg, 28, Feb.2010