MDMD(8) Christ's true Pity

[Vaska Tumir]

[taken from Doug Millison's recent post on the topic]:

>>231.16 - 231.18  "for Christ's true Pity lies so beyond us, that we may
>>best jump and whimper like Dogs who cannot quite catch the Trick of it."
>>What is Christ's true pity?  What does this remark reveal of Fr. Maire
>>and Pynchon's attitudes towards him?  (It is significant to consider this
>>question in terms of Dogs we have encountered.)

Wish I had a Bible on me, but for those of you who know your New Testament
better than I, this will come as no surprise.  Remember the little episode
in one of the Gospels where a non-Jewish woman walks up to Jesus and pleads
with him to save her dying child?  His first reaction is to shoo her off as
a "dog" -- since she's not one of the chosen people [according to the
commentaries on the episode I've read, the term was a standard contemporary
Jewish slur on the members of other nations].  When she reminds him that
even dogs are granted scraps and crumbs from the master's table, Jesus
relents and heals the child.

It never struck me as an example of real compassion [truth to tell, it
chills me just to think of it], but Pynchon may well be reading it in that
spirit [or not?].  Fr. Maire certainly does and is definitely referring to
that New Testament episode, the only one to my knowledge that combines both
canine metaphors for "the Other" *and* Christ's capacity for compassion.  

Vaska, who might be able to get along with Spinoza's or even perhaps the
Stoics' God but is otherwise an unreconstructed atheist, too