NP but grace in Camus.

[ish mailian]

Great connections there, Mark.
The Brothers K, more about disgrace than grace, is surely the source
for Camus here. Ivan's chapter "Rebellion" is, if not consciously,
subconsciously (Bloom's Anxiety of Influence) the palimpsest text,
where poor Richard's execution, a human sacrifice that God doubles
down on (OT Issac and NT Jesus) with His Grace, thus making human
sacrifice a disgrace, is presented to the young brother novitiate,
who, having addressed the problem in the monastery is now confronted
with a brother who argues, as Freud would later in several of his
famous essays in including "Civilization and Its Discontents" (quoted
below)), argue:

 “I must make you one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never
understand how one can love one's neighbors. It's just one's
neighbors, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love
those at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a
saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into
his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth,
which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced
that he did that from ‘selflaceration,’ from the self-laceration of
falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance
laid on him. For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon
as he shows his face, love is gone.”

“The commandment, 'Love thy neighbour as thyself', is the strongest
defence against human aggressiveness and an excellent example of the
unpsychological [expectations] of the cultural super-ego. The
commandment is impossible to fulfil; such an enormous inflation of
love can only lower its value, not get rid of the difficulty.
Civilization pays no attention to all this; it merely admonishes us
that the harder it is to obey the precept the more meritorious it is
to do so. But anyone who follows such a precept in present-day
civilization only puts himself at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the person
who disregards it. What a potent obstacle to civilization
aggressiveness must be, if the defence against it can cause as much
unhappiness as aggressiveness itself! 'Natural' ethics, as it is
called, has nothing to offer here except the narcissistic satisfaction
of being able to think oneself better than others. At this point the
ethics based on religion introduces its promises of a better
after-life. But so long as virtue is not rewarded here on earth,
ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain. I too think it quite certain
that a real change in the relations of human beings to possessions
would be of more help in this direction than any ethical commands; but
the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and
made useless for practical purposes by a fresh idealistic
misconception of human nature.”


On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 4:20 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> in *The Plague*, Camus gives us a priest, Paneloux, who
> embodies the religious response to the plague. (and, in a
> later post, you will learn of a wonderful original aspect of
> Camus's creation) but here we have only this:
>
> Paneloux responds to the horror of an innocent child's suffering and
> dying, surely a reworking of that conceptual presentation in *The Brothers
> Karamazov.*
>
> *P: *'that sort of thing is revolting because it passes our human
> understanding. But perhaps
> we should love what we can't understand." [no question mark]
>
> Dr Rieux "No, Father, I've a very different idea of love. And until my
> dying day I shall refuse
> to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture."---The
> almost direct allusion to* The Brothers K. *
>
> A shade of disquietude crossed the priest's face.
> "Ah ,doctor', he said sadly, I've just realized what is meant by grace"
>
> Gimme 25 words on the old-fashioned religious notion of grace. Calvinist or
> Catholic, and its use here. And its
> similarity or difference from Pynchon's usages. (Okay, you're allowed
> another 25 words)
>
>
> In other news, Trump and his Trumpeters are advocating euthanasia for old
> folks so as to preserve a hardy heartless capitalism.
> A new meaning to 'late capitalism".
>
> Tom Friedman should commit seppuku to preserve the full humanity of public
> discourse.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l