Christ’s Agony and Faith’s Wakefulness—Reflections on a Remark of Pascal

Author:

Ziegler Philip G.1

Affiliation:

1. Philip G. Ziegler is Professor of Christian Dogmatics at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.

Abstract

This essay reflects upon a remark of Blaise Pascal. His gloss upon the story of Christ in Gethsemane is punctuated with the arresting comment that “Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world: during that time, we must not sleep” — “Jésus sera en agonie jusqu’à las fin du monde: Il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là”. In close conversation with the work of Lev Shestov, I explore the unsettling suggestion that for Christian faith the time before the eschaton is fundamentally “gethesemanean” in quality, i.e., is marked by Christ’s own saving agon and so also by faith’s proper struggle to awaken to it and keep vigil with it. For Shestov, Pascal’s disquieting vision demands that the Christian life “seeks with lamentation” to resist the false consolation of trading the travail of discipleship for the confidence of clear understanding. To the agony of Christ there corresponds the agon of faith: it is the labour of discipleship to shake off the sleep of reason in the time that remains.

Publisher

University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress)

Subject

Religious studies

Reference32 articles.

1. "Jésus sera en agonie jusqu'à las fin du monde: Il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-là."-Blaise Pascal, Pensées #736 in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), 1312. Counted among the fragments not passed on to the copyist and so not included in the "first copy" of the Pensées, this section comprises fragments gathered in the Recueil Original and is not always reproduced in all editions. It is rendered in the English version published as Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (London: Penguin Classics, 1995), #919 [553]: "Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world. There must be no sleeping during that time." As Leszek Kolakowski remarks, Pascal had a "talent in using dramatic rhetorical cuts that lent traditional doctrine striking freshness. That Jesus Christ's passion and humiliation opened up to us a liberating path to God has been a part of the established teaching of the Church

2. but it took special spiritual skill to phrase it in this way" (God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995], 182).

3. David Gascoyne, “Ecce Homo” (1940), inNew Collected Poems 1929–1995, ed. Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon Press, 2014), 127–129 (emphasis added).

4. For discussion of their interrelation, see Robert Fraser,Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 144–147, and Gascoyne’s own essay, “Léon Chestov,” inSelected Prose 1934–1996, ed. Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon, 1998), 79–93. Cf. Benjamin Fondane,Rencontres avec Léon Chestov(Paris: Plasma, 1982), as well as Matthew Beaumont,Lev Shestov: Philosopher of the Sleepless Night(London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 26. He describes Gascoyne as a “passionate admirer” of Shestov and links this 1940 poem directly to Shestov’s work on Pascal.

5. Léon Chestov, La nuit de Gethsémani: Essai sur la philosophie de Pascal, trans. J. Exempliarsky (Paris: Éditions de l'éclat, 2012). The English text is found as "Gethsemane Night," in Lev Shestov, In Job's Balances. On the Sources of Eternal Truth, ed. Bernard Martin and trans. C. Coventry and C.A. Macartney (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1975), 375-435. Both the subject matter and approach reflect the lecture series on "Dostoevsky's and Pascal's Ideas" that Shestov delivered in 1923/24 and again in 1924/25 at the Sorbonne

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