04 December 2008

Called By Other Names

"Quid ergo amo, cum deum meum amo?"
~ Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book 10 (Chapter 7)

.OOOOOOO.

"[Jacques] Derrida was intrigued by Saint Augustine, a fellow North African. With Saint Augustine he asked, 'What do I desire [love] when I desire [love] my God?' This question has no certain answer but it is worth asking because it opens up expectations and possibilities for God's action. Derrida compared his mother with the mother of Augustine, Monica who worried about their children's faith. He writes, '...my religion about which nobody understands any more than my mother who asked other people a while ago, not daring to talk to me about it, if I still believed in God ... but she must have known that the constancy of God in my life is called by other names, so that I rightly pass for an atheist, the omnipresence of what I call my God in my absolved, absolutely private language being neither that of an eyewitness nor that of a voice doing anything other than talking to me without saying anything, nor a transcendent law or an immanent schechina, that feminine figure of a Yahweh who remains so strange and so familiar to me..' (Derrida in 'Jacques Derrida' p.154)."
~ John Paolini, "The Possibility of God: An Essay in the Philosophy of Religion" (2003)

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