Saturday, December 2, 2006

Suffering: the submissive response

If we are damaged or deprived by someone we can get into a state of mind where we accept the result and moreover accept the other one in a way that we give him more than he demanded.
I'm calling that the "submissive response", even if "meek, humble or modest response" would ring less offensive in our ears. I concede that the point is not that one is obedient vis-à-vis one particular transgressor. The point is, as far as I see, that one doesn't lay a claim on anything vis-à-vis life, that one "un-claims" or "dis-claims" everything one has had.

That's unusual insofar as we are used to think that under law (or ethical "law") there ought to be a difference between "need" and "greed": on the one hand things we can lawfully (or rightly) claim because we need them, on the other hand things that we cannot lawfully claim and that we demand only out of greed. So the submissive response seems to presuppose that there is no (valid) law which allows us to distinguish need from greed - something to retain for a later post.

The submissive response pattern was virulent in early monasticism (leaving an inciting tradition for monks and saints of all centuries) and, thereafter, in early anabaptism (leaving an inciting tradition to christian pacifism). From a geographical point of view, it was most virulent in Russia where it inspired saints and sectarians just to the times of Tolstoy.
The submissive response pattern has often been grounded in the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount. In fact, traditional theology mostly maintained that the antitheses were meant that way, and disputed only how far the antitheses were obligatory for the everyday christian person.

Traditional interpretation was challenged since the last century from two sides. Modern Jewish theology tried to interprete the sermons of Jesus in the frame of Jewish thinking which normally meant watering down the "submissive" content of the antitheses. And left protestant theology interpreted the antitheses not as "dis-claiming" or "un-claiming" but as a particular strategy to get what one has claimed. But I'll postpone that for the moment.
On the whole, I think we have firstly to admit that there's a clear distinction between the submissive response pattern and other patterns of acting. Which way of acting is in fact "authorized" by the alleged words of Jesus is a secondary question.

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