Wednesday, June 08, 2005
(3:34 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Irenaeus on the Great Reboot
Irenaeus maintains throughout his Against all heresies that Christ is "recapitulating" Adam, doing it all over, except right this time. Here is one example where he extends the metaphor the most fully:That the Lord then was manifestly coming to His own things, and was sustaining them by means of that creation which is supported by Himself, and was making a recapitulation of that disobedience which had occurred in connection with a tree, through the obedience which was [exhibited by Himself when He hung] upon a tree, [the effects] also of that deception being done away with, by which that virgin Eve, who was already espoused to a man, was unhappily misled,--was happily announced, through means of the truth [spoken] by the angel to the Virgin Mary, who was [also espoused] to a man. For just as the former was led astray by the word of an angel, so that she fled from God when she had transgressed His word; so did the latter, by an angelic communication, receive the glad tidings that she should sustain (portaret) God, being obedient to His word. And if the former did disobey God, yet the latter was persuaded to be obedient to God, in order that the Virgin Mary might become the patroness (advocata) of the virgin Eve. And thus, as the human race fell into bondage to death by means of a virgin, so is it rescued by a virgin; virginal disobedience having been balanced in the opposite scale by virginal obedience. For in the same way the sin of the first created man (protoplasti) receives amendment by the correction of the First-begotten, and the coming of the serpent is conquered by the harmlessness of the dove, those bonds being unloosed by which we had been fast bound to death. (Book V, Chapter 19, Paragraph 1, bracketted notes inserted by translators, not by me)The parallel between Mary and Eve is by now a very familiar point, in Catholic theology in particular. The parallel between the serpent who deceived Eve and the dove (representing the Holy Spirit, who descends on Christ in the form of a dove, and by whom Mary conceives) is new to me.
I bother to point this out for a few reasons. First, it's interesting that there should be an animal representative in the "redo" -- this ties in nicely with what Derrida does in "Literature in Secret" concerning the covenant after the Flood and the inclusion of animals therein, as well as with what Paul does in Romans 8, where the whole of creation groans as it waits to see how the drama of (primarily) human (but not only human) redemption plays out. Second, what is Irenaeus saying, consciously or unconsciously, about the role of the Holy Spirit in Mary's decision-making process? Some theologies want to make Mary out to be a baby-producing machine, custom-tailored so that she was perfectly suited to bear the Messiah and nothing else -- but the serpent, if we'll recall, is a seducer. Could we say that the Holy Spirit had to "hit on" Mary? In this context, it would be interesting to interrogate the ordering of the prayers in the Angelus:
The Angel spoke God's message to Mary,Third, where is the Father in all this? Some radical Catholic theology has spoken of Mary as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit, but if the serpent and the dove are parallel, then that's not possible in this interpretation. Instead, just as Eve first affirms the disobedience that Adam confirms, so Mary affirms the obedience that Christ confirms -- the action might "belong" to Adam/Christ on the formal level, but in actual fact, the sinful as well as the salvific act is decentered from just the one person. This is necessary if Christic humanity is to recapitulate Adamic humanity, because Adamic humanity is irreducibly multiple: "Male and female he created them." The only place left in this dyad/triad for the Father is where he in fact is in both stories: nowhere. At the moment of Adam's completion of the disobedience, he is absent and clueless, needing to wander around the Garden looking for the guilty couple. At the moment of the supreme obedience on the Cross, the Father is similarly absent; but whereas Adamic humanity experiences the absense of God as a tantalizing opportunity to indulge "just this once" in the fruit, Christic humanity suffers the absense of God, as if the worst suffering in the course of one of the most brutal punishments ever devised is precisely that absense of God.
and she conceived by the Holy Spirit.
Hail Mary, etc.
"I am the humble servant of the Lord;
may it be done to me according to your word."
Hail Mary, etc.
And the Word became Flesh,
and dwelt among us.
Hail Mary, etc. (then concluding prayer)
So I think that passage from Irenaeus is fairly interesting, then.
