The snow in Romania
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 30, 2023
What are we faithful to? What does it mean to have faith? Believing in a code of opinions, in a system of ideas formulated in an ideology or in a religious or poltical “creed”? If that were the case, fidelity and faith would be a sad matter, nothing but the dark, smug duty to carry out prescriptions to which we, for some reason, feel bound and obligated. Such a faith would not be something alive, it would be a dead letter such as that which the judge or the cop assume to apply in the performance of their duties. The idea that the believer is a sort of official of his faith is so repugnant that a girl who had endured torture in order not to reveal the names of her companions, simply replied to those who praised her faithfulness to her own ideas: “I didn’t do it for that, I did it on a whim”.
What did the girl mean? What experience of fidelity did she want to express with her words? A reflection on the religious faith, which until a few decades ago was still considered as the faith par excellence, can provide us with clues and evidence for an answer. Especially since in this context, starting from the Nicene Creed (325 AD), the Church deemed it necessary to fix the content of the faith in a series of dogmas, i.e. true propositions, any discrepancies with respect to which it constituted a condemnable heresy. In the letter to the Romans Paul seems to tell us exactly the opposite. First of all he links faith to the word (“faith comes from hearing through the word of Christ”) and describes the experience of the word which is in question in faith as an immediate proximity of mouth and heart: “The word is near (εγγύς, literally at the ready) to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith... For with the heart one believes for righteousness, and with the mouth one confesses for salvation”. Here Paul takes up a passage of Deuteronomy which asserted this same proximity: “the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it”.
The experience of the word which is in question in faith does not refer to its denotative character, to its correspondence to facts and exterior things: it is, rather, experience of a closeness that takes place in the intimate correspondence between mouth and heart. Bearing witness to one’s faith does not mean making factually true (or false) statements as is done in a trial. We are not faithful, as in creed or oath, to a series of statements that correspond or do not correspond to facts. We are faithful to an experience of the word that we feel so close that there is no space to separate it from what it says. In other words, faith is first and foremost another experience of the word than the one we believe we use to communicate messages and meanings external to it. We are faithful to this word because, to the extent that we cannot separate the mouth from the heart, we live in it and it lives in us. It is such an experience that must have prompted a Berber girl to whom one day I asked what tied her so strongly to a man she said she loved, and with whom she lived for a year in a hut in the Romanian mountains, to reply: “I’m not faithful to him, I’m faithful to the snow in Romania”.
Giorgio Agamben, Quodlibet, August 30, 2023
What are we faithful to? What does it mean to have faith? Believing in a code of opinions, in a system of ideas formulated in an ideology or in a religious or poltical “creed”? If that were the case, fidelity and faith would be a sad matter, nothing but the dark, smug duty to carry out prescriptions to which we, for some reason, feel bound and obligated. Such a faith would not be something alive, it would be a dead letter such as that which the judge or the cop assume to apply in the performance of their duties. The idea that the believer is a sort of official of his faith is so repugnant that a girl who had endured torture in order not to reveal the names of her companions, simply replied to those who praised her faithfulness to her own ideas: “I didn’t do it for that, I did it on a whim”.
What did the girl mean? What experience of fidelity did she want to express with her words? A reflection on the religious faith, which until a few decades ago was still considered as the faith par excellence, can provide us with clues and evidence for an answer. Especially since in this context, starting from the Nicene Creed (325 AD), the Church deemed it necessary to fix the content of the faith in a series of dogmas, i.e. true propositions, any discrepancies with respect to which it constituted a condemnable heresy. In the letter to the Romans Paul seems to tell us exactly the opposite. First of all he links faith to the word (“faith comes from hearing through the word of Christ”) and describes the experience of the word which is in question in faith as an immediate proximity of mouth and heart: “The word is near (εγγύς, literally at the ready) to you, in your mouth and in your heart, that is, the word of faith... For with the heart one believes for righteousness, and with the mouth one confesses for salvation”. Here Paul takes up a passage of Deuteronomy which asserted this same proximity: “the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it”.
The experience of the word which is in question in faith does not refer to its denotative character, to its correspondence to facts and exterior things: it is, rather, experience of a closeness that takes place in the intimate correspondence between mouth and heart. Bearing witness to one’s faith does not mean making factually true (or false) statements as is done in a trial. We are not faithful, as in creed or oath, to a series of statements that correspond or do not correspond to facts. We are faithful to an experience of the word that we feel so close that there is no space to separate it from what it says. In other words, faith is first and foremost another experience of the word than the one we believe we use to communicate messages and meanings external to it. We are faithful to this word because, to the extent that we cannot separate the mouth from the heart, we live in it and it lives in us. It is such an experience that must have prompted a Berber girl to whom one day I asked what tied her so strongly to a man she said she loved, and with whom she lived for a year in a hut in the Romanian mountains, to reply: “I’m not faithful to him, I’m faithful to the snow in Romania”.
(English translation by I, Robot)
Mikhail Aleksandrovich Vrubel, The Snow Maiden, ca. 1895. Courtesy of WikiArt. |
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