Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)
Giorgio Agamben
Language: English
Pages: 164
ISBN: 0804784043
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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