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Jean Marie Lefévre, The White Thinking
Page 4
"For one to answer the question 'who am I', the only thing one has to do is to form oneself. We are not data, we are not archives at Humanity's register that you can study if you have access. We are relationships".* My question is, can we escape self-justification without abolishing judgment? What kind of formation and what kind of relationships can we have without judgment? Where Michaela talks about love she makes an attempt to be more specific by grounding judgment to love. The other persons, the persons that I love, and God himself, as the source of all love, are the source of my criteria.
After this, necessarily one asks "how can I love?", to which Michaela replies "you can not", meaning that there isn't any method of loving. She doesn't hesitate to add "without knowing it you will approach - if you have the blessing - Colchis". There isn't any know-how of love, this is obvious, but, is love just the outcome of God's blessing? In such a case, what kind of freedom can we have and what kind of God would deny this "privilege" to anyone? Moreover, to "translate" love to principles one must approach God with a request and God's answer has to be interpreted according to that request. Is this request also just a matter of blessing?
May you know yourself and become what you are. Know yourself. Love all men like yourself and God with all your heart, soul and mind. What these have to do with Michaela's "without knowing it you will approach if you have the blessing"? It is characteristic the very grammatical form, the imperative mood, in which the former phrases are expressed. Michaela just describes an unconscious situation and progress, transmuting the way to truth into a slide. This, maybe, explains also why the author emphasises his concept of death as a biological given and simultaneously a gate to heaven. [Don't forget: talking about death the author means his or anyone's physical death, not death as missing a friend]. The result is that a centuries long agony must now be replaced with indifference or even expectation! "Too much tendency to bless people and get rid of them", said Chesterton commenting on David Copperfield's ending chapters. The tendency of the White Thinking, it seems to me, is to reduce the very getting rid of people into a blessing. Let your friend slide to death and pray that God may bless him! This maybe also explains why Michaela is not really attentive and gentle, but only weightless and useless. The author knows, that where love is absent there is a need of ethics - only not just that: there is a need of sentimentalism and ethics. More specifically: there is a need of philanthropy. And while you tried to close the door in his face, Dickens did not leave. Not at all!
More by Nat Gerrs: Why Europe? * Gibson - MacRury, The Man Without a Face
