Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Giorgio Agamben

Language: English

Pages: 164

ISBN: 0804784043

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's power, so that his own motives and character are entirely indifferent as long as he carries out his priestly duties. In modernity, Agamben argues, the Christian priest has become the model ethical subject. We see this above all in Kantian ethics. Contrasting the Christian and modern ontology of duty with the classical ontology of being, Agamben contends that Western philosophy has unfolded in the tension between the two. This latest installment in the study of Western political structures begun in Homo Sacer is a contribution to the study of liturgy, an extension of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals, and a reworking of Heidegger's history of Being.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

argumentation, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and Jacob take the place of Cato, Pompey, Scipio, Philip of Macedon, and Tiberius Gracchus. Just as rigorous is the interweaving of officia and the virtues that the biblical examples are called upon to document. Just as Cicero derived from the four parts of honestum the same number of offices and virtues, so Ambrose, taking up Cicero’s list punctiliously (prudentia, iustitia, fortitudo, temperantia), affirms that “whatever category of duty you look

human minister by the divine effectus. Their effective unity is officium-effectum. This means, however, that officium institutes a circular relation between being and praxis, by which the priest’s being defines his praxis and his praxis, in turn, defines his being. In officium ontology and praxis become undecidable: the priest has to be what he is and is what he has to be. What is at stake in Ambrose’s strategy is clear at this point: it was a matter of singling out—beyond the principles of

executed with zeal, but it no longer has anything respectable in itself, because its command contains pleasure. While the operation of the Sadean turns immediately against the law as such, the masochist’s operation is turned against respect, which it undermines at its base and destroys. It is an ephemeral victory, however, because—as the modern masochistic masses, who do not respect the leader they  The Two Ontologies acclaim, effectively show—they certainly cannot for this reason be

that according to Christian theology, the process of trinitarian autohypostatization as much as the creation of the world are produced not a necessitate naturae but a voluntate divinae maiestatis (Victorinus, qtd. in Benz, 78): the trinitarian economy and the creation are thought according to the model of putting to work and energeia and not as an impersonal natural process. Hence also the necessity of identifying the potency of God with his will: haec semper voluntas a Deo et in Deo est potentia

of a “ministry,” which defines the specific praxis of the members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. 8. The doctrine of the liturgical character of Christ’s sacrifice has its root in the doctrine of the Trinity itself. We have shown how the Fathers, in order to reconcile the unity of substance with the plurality of persons in God and in close hand-to-hand combat with Gnosis, initially formulate the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of an oikonomia, of an activity of “administration” Liturgy and

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