At our beach house south of Sydney, two days after Christmas, I was walking to fetch myself a coffee from the café near me. I thought I’ll take with me my 8 month-old grandson,Taka, in his pram. A minute or so into our stroll we encountered a local woman I vaguely know. After a lot of oohing and aahing she looks at me and says, ‘he’s adorable.’
The fact that it was Christmas and her usage of the word ‘adorable’ sent me remembering another Christmas period many years ago, like some 35 years ago, when people’s usage of the word ‘adorable’ when meeting my baby daughters, and the fact that Christmas is structured around the adoration of Christ as a child, made me curious as to what kind of imaginary lies behind the concept of adoration. I started reading and taking notes about what philosophers and theologians had to say about ‘adoration.’
I couldn’t stop thinking about those notes trying to remember what was in them. I recalled that it was where I started reading the work of the Catholic philosopher, and Derrida’s student, Jean Luc Marion, who left a lasting impression on me. I wanted to re-read what I had written about him. Remembering the notes also took me to a time when I became more open to the idea that religious thought in general had important things to say about the world, and can help me think through certain issues I wanted to explore. I no longer saw it, as I did in my radical student days, as that which needs to be opposed before all else.
No sooner did I get back home to Sydney than I immediately went looking for my notes. Miraculously (a Christmas miracle?), I found them very quickly, in a box where I kept a number of summaries of texts and notes that I have taken while working at the University of Western Sydney between 1988 and 1994. They were only about ten pages and I read them the next day, on the plane, on my way from Sydney to Hobart where I was heading to spend the rest of the Christmas/New Year holiday period with my other, equally ‘adorable,’ 2 year-old grandson, Luca.
The notes related to the specificity of Christian adoration as a relation to the divine and how it is manifested in the adoration of children. I am keeping them below in their unconnected dot point state and will only feature the bits of writing that I have managed to make coherent enough to share with others. I have therefore added words and changed sentences here and there that give further clarity to the text
- The philosophical and theological issues raised around the adoration of Christ take us straight to the heart of the Christian belief in the dual, human and divine, physical and metaphysical, finite and infinite, nature of Christ. But it also raises the question of how the divine, the metaphysical and infinite can be adored via the worship of the physical and the finite.
- Unlike, admiration or respect, adoration, as far as Christians are concerned, is a form of worship that can only be offered to God as a divine being. Thus the adoration of Christ is an affirmation of the belief that Christ despite being wholly human is also, and at the same time, wholly divine. I need to go back to those texts that debate the way adoration is similar and different from devotion as it figures in Greek philosophy (…)
- There are special forms of worship that can be directed at saintly people, like Mary the mother of Christ. I can’t believe myself remembering the teachings of father Chahine (the priest who taught me Maronite religious studies in my early teens)! He’d be very proud given that he thought I was a lost cause, or perhaps not. If I recall (!), there is a difference between ’ibadat and tabjeel, adoration and veneration. Mary can be and is an extremely loved and venerated figure for us Maronites. One can paradoxically express love towards her more than to Jesus himself. Nonetheless, it would be blasphemous to adore her. For though she is indeed greatly loved, and immensely loving, such love and such immensity were within our human capacity to imagine and understand even as we classify them as ‘immense’. What is beyond our capacity to understand was God himself, because not only was he immensely loving, he was the very source of love. That is what constitutes, to use an anthropological term for what is beyond our comprehension, the radical otherness of God. And it was that divine radical otherness that made Him worthy of absolute reverence: adorable.
- Unsurprisingly, the above links very neatly with Jean-Luc Marion’s differentiation between Idole and Icône (Finally, since coming across his work in Derrida’s Donner la Mort, I have now read more carefully some select passages from L’Idole et la distance (1977) and Dieu sans l’être (1982).)
- For Marion the idol embodies the divine in so far as the divine remains within the intellectual grasp of the believer. Idolatry is not so much a blasphemous worship as a limited one. The idol captivates us and ‘saturates’ our field of vision and comprehension such as it does not leave room for anything beyond it and beyond ourselves. Conversely, there is something that is always mysterious, in excess of our field of vision and comprehension, in the icon. This is why it invites adoration. It mediates the existence of that which cannot be grasped about the divine: the fact that it cannot be fully comprehended, and the fact that its existence cannot be cognitively demonstrated. If I understood this correctly, this makes Jesus Christ the most absolute iconic figure.
- Another important dimension of Marion’s treatment of adoration, and that takes us closer to understanding the relation between the adoration of Christ and the adoration of children, is his association of adoration with giftedness. This makes him particularly interesting from an anthropological perspective. Against the traditional critiques of religion that see in adoration a relation of domination, where the adoring subject submits to the adored God, Marion sees adoration as residing primarily in the appreciation of the divine as a gift. Rather than the order of domination and submission, adoration belongs to the order of receptivity to the divinity of what is being offered. To adore is not to say I obey and submit but to say: wow I can’t believe I am receiving such a wonder-full, in the literal sense of the word, gift. And nothing exemplifies that wonder-full gift as God’s ultimate gift to humans: baby Jesus.
- There’s a lot of Christian philosophical and theological gymnastics that goes into explaining this divine gift, that is also a gifting of the divine. I don’t know if it is the same for all Christians now but this ‘dual nature of Christ’ used to cause wars between Christians in the past. The Maronites escaped the Syrian interior to Lebanon because of this. Their Catholicism entailed an insistence that Jesus is born as fully human and fully divine. Not sometimes this and sometimes that. Not as half-half. Not human in form but essentially divine. He is both human in form and essence and divine in form and essence. In this sense, the divine gift that is Jesus, is a divine-human converter: through his existence he makes the human divine and the divine human. This is most exemplified in the experience of vulnerability.
- In gifting the divine to become subjected to the human condition, God is agreeing to something paradoxical: making the divine experience vulnerability. But, and this is what I find interesting, this gift also entails making vulnerability divine. Hence lies the iconic adorability of baby Jesus: he, like all babies, is ‘passively sitting there’ innocent, helpless and vulnerable. We adore the fact that God, the all powerful divine, is presenting himself to us in such a human way. But in the process we also adore the fact that this human mode of existence of the divine transforms this vulnerability into something divine.
- Associated with the above, though I am not sure I fully understand the nature of the association, is the idea that, more generally, children’s state of innocence and vulnerability is the condition of openness to those dimensions of the divine that cannot be captured cognitively, what Marion (noted above) sees as the radical otherness of the divine. Most importantly, this innocence and vulnerability is also seen as the condition of receptivity to ‘grace.’ It seems that it is here that resides the original Christmas experience of every child as ‘deserving’ a gift. There also seem to be a Christian argument that the above makes every child, not just Christian children, receptive to and partaking in the divine?
- Note: This idea that the child’s innocence and vulnerability makes them inhabit a pre-symbolic and pre-cognitive reality is also echoed in Levi-Strauss’s argument concerning children’s ability to exist in a mythical reality rather than ‘interpret’ myths. It is also echoed in Benjamin’s argument concerning children’s access to a form of meaning that is outside functional language.
- Some possible concluding points:
- In adoring the beauty, helplessness and vulnerability of any child we are adoring it as a portal to something which religious people refer to as the divine and that those of us who are not religious still experience as something sublime beyond rationality and cognition.
- The Christian experience of vulnerability as divine gift subverts the opposition between strength and vulnerability. It turns vulnerability into strength. It defines, scholastically rather than practically though, a radically other horizon for politics and ethics where innocence is knowledge, helplessness is power, vulnerability is strength.
This covers the core and most coherent part of my notes. There was nothing particularly political behind my interest in adoration when I wrote them. I was only driven by intellectual curiosity. And I remember experiencing a certain pleasure writing them. I was at a relatively early stage in my academic career, and I had just began to realise that there were convergences and possibilities of dialogue between theological thought and certain secular moral and ethical issues such that I can develop arguments grounded in both. This was liberating because, as a student, when thinking radical philosophical and ethical questions, I imagined religious thought as what I needed to escape at all cost. Part of the pleasure came from a certain form of reconnection and reconciliation with some of the religious sentiments that have shaped me as a kid. Though I did so without becoming religious again or at least not in the sense of a born-again Christian.
Reading the notes was an ambivalent experience. Rereading what certain philosophical and theological texts say about ‘adoration’ and the kind of thinking it generated in me about the relation between Christmas, children and adoration. This was as enlightening and pleasurable as it was thirty five years ago. And I like reading the way the question of ‘adoration’ brought out to me some of the more politically and ethically radical dimensions of Christian thought. I could see my interest in ‘alter-politics’ even though I did not begin thinking and writing about this until twenty years later.
What was unpleasant was the gap between these thoughts and the reality we are living in today. How can one read about Christmas and the adoration of children without thinking of the more than twenty thousand children massacred by Zionists in Gaza? Furthermore, particularly for those of us living in the Western world: how can we stomach the West’s extraordinary hypocritical ability to celebrate the birth of Christ, and the adoration of children seen as an extension of Christ himself, while being complicit in the mass murdering of Palestinian children, and the banalisation of their death. By the time I finished reading the notes, the plane was landing in Hobart and I was genuinely depressed.
Let me be clear that I am not so naive as to believe that, before Gaza, the West or any other place for that matter, allowed its national and international politics to be guided by Christian or any other moral values. At the same time though, I have never thought of the nations’ upholding of their ‘moral values’ as an empirical descriptive statement. Even when the colonial West continuously proclaimed ‘Western Values’ while doing the exact opposite of what it proclaimed, I always believed that there was something positive to the proclamation in that it worked as a ‘causal horizon’: an aspiration whose mere statement, even when everything happening was contrary to what it states, still had the effect of limiting the damage, no matter how minimal that effect was. But this is no longer the case.
Along with the disgusting governmental acquiescence to the killing of children, I could not help thinking about how far we are from that wonderful Christian idea I described above as ‘innocence is knowledge, helplessness is power, vulnerability is strength.’ In Israel and the United States we have two states where governments, supported by large sections of the population, are busy instituting themselves as cults of hyper-militarised power and strength that celebrate the unhinged enactment of killing, destruction and domination in a way we have not seen before. Vulnerability, if anything, is the enemy. ‘Weak’ seems to be one of Netanyahu’s favourite insults, directed among others at our Prime Minister.
What was depressing about those notes was that they highlighted to me how far we have gone from a mere disparity between ‘moral values’ and politics. We are now witnessing the way those values, even as aspirations, have been, along with all the dead and everything that has been destroyed, massacred before our very eyes. Gaza has been the abattoir of ‘Western Values.’ In this sense, my notes on adoration made me confront the way the Gaza genocide has obliterated the idea that the world we live in had any moral foundations left at all.
