Lazarus and the Sickness Unto Death: An Allegory of Despair

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 486-519 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon D. Podmore
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
Religious Symbolism ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Raising Of Lazarus

AbstractThis article explores the religious symbolism of death and resurrection in works by Dostoevsky, Holbein, Kazantzakis, and Kierkegaard, examining the imaginative correlation between the death of God and the sickness of the soul. Exploring the symbolic analogy between the death of the self and the death of God evoked by these works, I offer an existential reading of the death and raising of Lazarus as an allegory of despair over the possibility of salvation. I illustrate this existential dis-ease via a symbolic reading of two artistic depictions of death and resurrection. Beginning with reference to Nikos Kazantzakis’s account of the death of Lazarus in The Last Temptation, and proceeding to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s famous description in The Idiot of Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1521), I endeavor to articulate a constructive existential and psychological analogy between the death of the self and despair over the death of God (interpreted as an expression of the loss of hope in salvation). Finally, by reading such despair with imaginative-symbolic reference to Lazarus, I return to Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death in search of hope in the “impossible possibility of salvation.”

scholarly journals Christian Platonism and the Debate about Afterlife

Scrinium ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 242-260
Author(s):  
Dirk Krausmuller
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Christian Platonism ◽  
Maximus The Confessor ◽  
Pseudo Dionysius

In the sixth and seventh centuries the belief in an active afterlife and its corollaries, the cult of the saints and the care of the dead, came under attack by a group of people who claimed that the souls could not function without their bodies. Some defenders of the traditional point of view sought to rebut this argument through recourse to the Platonic concept of the self-moved soul, which is not in need of the body. However, the fit between Platonism and traditional notions of the afterlife was not as complete as might first be thought. This article focuses on two Christian thinkers, John of Scythopolis and Maximus the Confessor, who were deeply influenced by Platonic ideas. In his Scholia on the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius John states clearly that after death the souls of ordinary human beings are inactive whereas the souls of the spiritual elite have entered the realm of eternal realities, which is entirely separate from this world. The case of Maximus is more complex. One of his letters is a spirited defence of the posthumous activity of the soul. However, in his spiritual writings he outlines a conceptual framework that shows a marked resemblance to the position of John of Scythopolis.


The Nietzschean Body and the Death of God

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21
Author(s):  
Nibras Chehayed
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Moral Concept ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract “God is dead!” This is one of the most famous claims in Nietzsche’s philosophy, difficult to fully affirm. While the higher men fail to overcome the ghost of God, Zarathustra joyfully affirms God’s death. This affirmation deconstructs the metaphysical and moral concept of “divinity,” turning it into a metaphor. The new metaphor of the divine, mainly developed through the figure of Dionysius, expresses the capacity of affirming life beyond the old values, related to the dead God. It also involves the creation of a higher body beyond the body of despair, associated with these values. The purpose of this paper is to study the relationship between the death of God and the body in Nietzsche’s account by analyzing the meanings of this death for the higher men, the question of the divine in Zarathustra’s account, and the status of the Dionysian body.

‘A pinch of unseen, unguarded dust’: The World and Self in Thomas Hardy's Poems

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Phenomenological Philosophy ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Recurrent Theme ◽  
Body Subject

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.

Pèlerinages barrésiens

2013 ◽  
pp. 116-123
Author(s):  
Claire Bompaire-Evesque
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
The Self ◽  
Joan Of Arc ◽  
The Third ◽  
National Importance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
The Dead

This article is a inquiry about how Barrès (1862-1923) handles the religious rite of pilgrimage. Barrès stages in his writings three successive forms of pilgrimage, revealing what is sacred to him at different times. The pilgrimage to a museum or to the birthplace of an artist is typical for the egotism and the humanism of the young Barrès, expressed in the Cult of the Self (1888-1891). After his conversion to nationalism, Barrès tries to unite the sons of France and to instill in them a solemn reverence for “the earth and the dead” ; for that purpose he encourages in French Amities (1903) pilgrimages to historical places of national importance (battlefields; birthplace of Joan of Arc), building what Nora later called the Realms of Memory. The third stage of Barrès’ intellectual evolution is exemplified by The Sacred Hill (1913). In this book the writer celebrates the places where “the Spirit blows”, and proves open to a large scale of spiritual forces, reaching back to paganism and forward to integrative syncretism, which aims at unifying “the entire realm of the sacred”.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The book’s epilogue explores the place of musical portraiture in the context of posthumous depictions of the deceased, and in relation to the so-called posthuman condition, which describes contemporary changes in the relationship of the individual with such aspects of life as technology and the body. It first examines Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to view how Bernard Herrmann’s score relates to issues of portraiture and the depiction of the identity of the deceased. It then considers the work of cyborg composer-artist Neil Harbisson, who has aimed, through the use of new capabilities of hybridity between the body and technology, to convey something akin to visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. The epilogue shows how an examination of contemporary views of posthumous and posthuman identities helps to illuminate the ways music represents the self throughout the genre of musical portraiture.

Writing and the Tomb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Suriano
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Multiple Levels ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Funerary Inscriptions

Hebrew funerary inscriptions began to appear in Judah during late Iron IIB. These inscriptions are relatively unique in that they are written on, or inside, tombs. But they also include amulets that adorned the body during burial. The funerary inscriptions emerged at a stage when the bench tomb had fully developed, and their writings reveal multiple concerns regarding the dead. The Hebrew inscriptions stress the imperative of safeguarding the dead inside the tomb on multiple levels. The interred are identified by name, and their place inside the tomb is described. All of these concerns relate to the existence of the dead and the preservation of their memory. These concerns are also consistent with blessings and curses that are often inscribed on the tomb, which indicate that Yahweh’s power could extend over the dead as well as the living.

Unqualified Pleasure

2018 ◽  
pp. 791-808
Author(s):  
Branka Arsić
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Dead

Everything that Poe wrote is touched by the question of life. Most notably, dead women come back to life, the living switch personhoods with the dead, and hearts dismembered from the body keep on beating. Such existential shifts were typically interpreted as Poe’s take on the Gothic, his engagement with the supernatural, or, as political allegories. Declining to follow any of those directions, this chapter will take Poe’s ideas about life literally and nontrivially. Closely discussing such texts as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Mesmeric Revelation,” and Eureka, the essay will investigate Poe’s continuous insistence that nothing is inanimate and immaterial, as well as his claim that life can’t be understood according to an anthropomorphic model. Reading his literature against the backdrop of the scientific treatises on life and vitalism that influenced him, this chapter will seek to explain what is at stake in Poe’s statement that even “unorganized matter” is alive and sensuous, endowed with capacity for pain and joy.

Celebrating the Self, Remembering the Body: Desire, Identity, and the Confessional Narrative in Autofictional Verse

2019 ◽  
Vol 45 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 85-111
Author(s):  
Michael Skafidas
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self
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