Losing, Finding & the Messianic
Some time back, I wrote a couple of posts that reflected on my rewatch of the 1987 Danish movie Babette’s Feast. I looked at how both Babette Hersant and Lorens Loewenhielm played roles that, theologically speaking, are akin to the roles that priests properly fulfill.
I also mentioned earlier this year that the University of Notre Dame Australia will be holding a conference on eschatology, the call for papers for which is still open till October.
These two are linked because, as I go on in thinking of what to present for this conference, I keep finding myself going back to the move. More interestingly, I keep finding myself gravitating towards Lorens rather than Babette as the pivotal character in the move.
To take a step back, one of the points that I am wrestling with is the link between what traditional Christian theology calls “the Last Things” (I made a mention of this briefly in a previous post), and what early critical theorists in the tradition of Walter Benjamin call “the messianic”.
What distinguishes the critical form of messianism and more traditional Jewish counterparts is that, while both share an emphasis on the redemption of the way things are, the former does not share the latter’s need for a particular person to play the role of redeemer.
Needless to say, I think the Jewish notion of the messiah has more explanatory power than the critical, precisely because of its need for a personal redeemer. That being said, I am fascinated by what the critical theorists’ take on the messianic. In particular, I am fascinated by Giorgio Agamben’s definition of the messianic (this is in his In the Time that Remains) as the moment in which “orgin and end [are] in a tension with each other” (136).
To bring this back to Babette’s Feast, one of the threads of argumentation that seems to be firming up in my mind is the way in which Loewenhielm seems to embody this messianic moment, particularly in his famous toast in the middle of the titular banquet.
I will be elaborating on this in an upcoming essay, soon to be published. But the crux of it is that Loewenhielm before the feast is a person who has experienced tragic loss in his life - the loss of the love of his life. It is a loss that consumed virtually all of his time on earth, buried under a thin veneer of careerism.
In the feast, however - which incidentally, is held in the same house of his lost love - Loewenhielm makes a toast to mercy. Lowenhielm begins with a passage from Psalm 85, in which “Mercy and Truth have met together; Righteousness and Bliss shall kiss one another”.
The line can be regarded as a vague homage to the Christian faith, until one reads this passage in the context of the whole psalm, which speaks of the day of God’s salvation to his people. Lowenhielm, therefore, in giving praise to Mercy in his speech, is also speaking from the viewpoint of this day of salvation.
We know this because, as Lowenhielm progresses in his praise of Mercy, he speaks about “the things we have rejected” - a reference to the things he has lost - in his toast in praise to Mercy. “Mercy”, Lowenhielm says, “imposes no conditions”. Because of this, the general exclaims:
And Lo! Everything that we have chosen has been granted to us! And everything we have rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected.
This last clause is said while he is turned to the woman whose love he lost and, in my mind, this clause encapsulates that messianic moment in which beginning and end come together.
To Lowenhielm, the vast ocean of mercy is not a space of linear processes, a space of beginning and ending, granting and rejecting, gaining and losing. Instead, the standpoint of mercy embodies what the standpoint of redemption desires to attain, the tension of beginning and end together. More than a tension, mercy brings those seeming opposites together into a convergence, between that which is lost, and that which is returned.
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