The first hour opened with a return to Problemata VII, 7 and the question: what is the origin of compassion? Aristotle relates compassion to seeing. Compassion begins at the sight of passion: at the spectacle of pain. There is no compassion without spectacle, and no spectacle without compassion. There is no identification with a sufferer without seeing suffering. In short: there is no compassion without image. This brings us back to the "divinization" of Francis of Assisi. According to Bartholomew of Pisa, the life of Francis is a reproduction of Christ's: a carbon copy. The figure of Francis among the German Dominicans, Eckhart and Suso, is again a figure of conformity. Their readings of conformity contrast: for Eckhart, it lies in "detachment"; for Suso, in "suffering". To give this observation its full archaeological significance, we returned to Francis' "vision": the six wings of the Christ-like seraph. We showed that it synthesized three earlier visions: the vision of Isaiah (Is 6:2) for the seraphim, the vision of Ezekiel (Ezek 1:5-14) for the four-winged creatures, and the structure of the Ark of the Covenant (Ex 25:10-22), for the two-winged cherubim. We then turned to the Eckhartian interpretation. Eckhart's thesis is that, already in this life, man can be "transformed into a divine image". True "conformation to Christ" is perfect poverty and humility: Francis' state before stigmatization. There is a "blissful life" here below for the viator, which is the inchoation of the beatific vision. Emphasis was placed on the Eckartian redefinition of the theology of Glory: theosis (deification) and rapture - the "rapture into the Third Heaven" whose prototype is Paul's rapture, according to the Latin sermon XXII. Conformation to Christ through Eckhartianapatheia, rather than through Susian pathos, articulates what Lutherans would call the kenotic and majestic genres, humiliation and elevation, kenosis and apotheosis. Eckhart's revolutionary interpretation of the tolle crucem in Mt 16:24: " Si quis vult post me venire abneget semet ipsum et tollat crucem suam et sequatur me." According to Eckhart, the meaningis not: "If anyone wishes to come after me, let him renounce himself, take up his cross and follow me". The Middle High German ûfheben by which Eckhart renders the Latin tolle, meaning both "to take up" and "to lay down", we have shown that Eckhart's theology of the Cross is founded on what Hegel precisely calls Aufhebung: the "overcoming" that both suppresses and preserves, a new, specifically medieval figure of the "impassible suffering" and/or "suffering impassibility" of Greek patristics. The end of the hour was devoted to outlining the initial conclusions of the lecture. Four questions emerged from the open files: 1) Can pain be expressed? 2) Can pain be shared? 3) What is the subject of pain? 4) What functions does compassion have in psychic life? We noted a dual relationship: between suffering and language, and between suffering and spectacle. We developed the second by looking at Christianity and the spectacle of pain, which led to the banning of gladiatorship in Rome (P. Veyne), sympathy/empathy pairs, the libido nocendi and kat'allo suffering. We looked at the Augustinian analysis of the "pleasure taken in seeing others suffer", the Circus games, and the strange story of Alypius. We returned to the importance of the expression "souffrir kat'allo " discovered in the lessons on the Montbéliard colloquy, and to the Augustinian definition of suffering. Sufferings "of the flesh" are sufferings of the soul, and the pain of the body is the pain of the soul in the body, because of the body, a kat'allo suffering. We set up the notion of the "chiasm of compassion", and concluded with a few remarks on the very notion of "chiasm", in fact omnipresent in the lecture, by evoking two series of texts by Paul Valéry and the latest Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
17:00 - 18:00
