The Sacramental Protocol of Hermeneutics.

johndbrey@gmail.com

With each step forward, with each problem we solve, we not only discover new and unsolved problems, but we also discover that where we believed that we were standing on firm and safe ground, all things are, in truth, insecure and in a state of flux.[i]

Sir Karl Popper.

When they had rowed three or three and a half miles, they saw Jesus approaching the boat, walking on the water; and they were terrified.

John 6:19

No illusion is so firmly grasp and so loving held as the fantasy surrounding the existence of a rock solid foundation upon which hermeneutics can be protected against the contradictions and paradoxes that arise in all thoughtful dialogue. Dialogue requires interpretation, and interpretation requires "disintegration" and "dissolution" of what's being said. The solution to a sentence is always present only in its dis-solution; a sentence must be dis-solved before it can be solved.[ii] --- This is the sacramental protocol of all legitimate hermeneutics. --- We must break words like bread, and douse them down with the blood such violence generates. In this breaking of the bread of discourse, the words of discourse are dissolved, so that in their dis-solution they become a solution within us.

In point of fact, Jesus' teaching became a proper solution only after His body was broken and His teaching temporarily dissolved. In the Gospel narrative we find the legitimate mechanism for all interpretation. All interpretation not seen in its kerygmatic light is an interpolation, or an interruption, of the Good News of salvation through faith in His blood, faith that his blood is flowing through us as a solution to sin, a solver (or solvent) washing away our sin.

Legitimate dialog always communicates the Gospel of Christ regardless of whether we're atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, Jews, or members of any other stereotypical group. On the Day of Judgment, any man who has had a conscious thought will be beholden to have rightly interpreted the sacramental protocol of hermeneutics. Any man who has partaken of the eucharist of conscious interpretation of symbols will have to answer to God for how they failed to recognize what God sent His Son to signify: how can one ignore the Eucharist of Christ when in fact they partake of a eucharist every time they open their eyes to see? The moment any person opens their eyes to dis-integrate and re-integrate the light of their room, they’ve broken the symbols of light, that the symbols might be dissolved, and then resolved, disintegrated, and then reintegrated, in the holy of holies called the human heart (Heb. 6:19).

Jesus said that in order to enter the Kingdom of God all men are obliged to acknowledge the oblation that is His flesh and blood. He taught that anyone who dis-solves any flesh whatsoever, and is still unable to "solve" the inherent kerygmatic equation [iii] . . . that person is blind, miserable and naked. They practice the eucharist every day and at every moment, and then, when the Holy Eucharist from which all conscious thought derives its possibility is presented to them . . . they feign ignorance, or else they reject what cannot be rejected, since even the “rejecting” is itself a Eucharistic operation synonymous with the Holy thing being denied. [iv]

* * *

Words are the veil between heaven and earth. Jesus is called the Word and His body is said to be the curtain, or partition, that separated the Holy Place in the temple from the Most Holy Place. ---- To truly experience God requires an understanding concerning the brokenness of the curtain, the veil, the body of Jesus, the tablets of the Law, even the stones of Abraham.[v] ---- We do violence to the purpose of any text when we fail to understand the sacramental protocol of hermeneutics. We can never engage God’s life so long as we are ignorant of the sacramental protocol of hermeneutics.

When text is approached (and no text is as important as the text of the Holy Scripture), the words must be torn --- like the curtain in the temple at Jerusalem (and like the body of Jesus). Otherwise it’s impossible to see the shekinah glory of a thought (the dwelling presence of the thought). --- The presence of God (that fill His words) can never be experienced so long as a person is separated from the life of the words by the intact nature of the words.[vi]

The sacramental protocol of hermeneutics requires us to acknowledge the kerygmatic violence that makes it possible for us to see beyond a word. Words must be torn, or shorn, before anyone can see the shekinah presence of the thought within them. The presence of a thought cannot be seen so long as it’s separated by the veil in the temple at Jerusalem (only what light seeps through the veil can be seen). The Most Holy Place must be entered in order to experience the presence of thought.

How ironic that in order to engage the presence of a word’s thought the word must first be broken: in order to release the covenant of the thought contained in the law of the word the word must be broken. --- Where a word is understood to be the testicular sheath protecting the seminal thought inside, how appropriate that father Abraham broke his stones to enter the covenant with God.

* * *

In the act of perception we break or "dissolve" the thing we perceive by infecting the thing with entropy. --- The moment some thing is called into its "being" (its state of "existing") by our perception of it, there it becomes subject to entropy. Nothing is ever seen in the same way by two persons. Time and tide (entropic digestion and dissolution) are the ever-present danger to whatever would otherwise remain infinite and eternal. No thing is the same from moment to moment; rising entropy dissolves every-thing in time. Therefore, in an absolute sense, anything that’s perceived is in the process of being dis-solved by entropy. In their absolute state (where the illusion of time asymmetry is removed), all things have died to the very existence they acquired by means of the perception that brought them into being.

If God were to be perceived, He too would need to die. The act of perceiving Him would call Him out of the infinite and eternal realm and into the world of time, tide, and entropy. If we were to perceive God, then we would have to be willing to "dis-solve" God. And to "dis-solve" God is synonymous with "un-solving" God, i.e., we realize that the moment we think we've solved God, "perceived" Him, seen Him, all we've really done is un-solved God, or dis-solved God. To make God exist is to dis-solve God. To leave God alone in His infinity (accepting His non-existent transcendence) is to respect God, to worship God, and to ab-solve God . . . of the need to be solved.[vii]

* * *

All words are set in stone -- so to speak – so we can’t share in their truth by making idols of them as though we were their slaves (John 15:15; Gal. 4:7); we must break them. And since we must break words in the proper act of interpreting them, no "interpretation" can be literally true. All interpretations must break words like bread and swallow them down with the help of a flask of wine. ---- And better that the wineskin is broken, so that we don't ingest too much of a word’s meaning before refilling the flask with new wine.

No interpretation of a word can be literal since the word must be dissolved in the act of interpretation; we must digest a word before we can hope to comprehend it. --- Digestion requires catabolism and anabolism. The word can't even be comprehended unless it’s broken down into molecules simple enough to be absorbed into the mind, i.e., the molecules must release their energy; and to do that, they must be dis-solved (even in the sense of dis-regarding the idiocy of thinking we've "solved" the meaning of the word). A word must be dissolved into the bloodstream of the person attempting to digest the word.

As such, all words are the “body” of living thought. --- They aren't the myopic, or static, entity they appear when first we see them immobilized on a page. Their immobility is related to the fact that they're the female aspect of the thought from whose rib they were parthenogenetically torn. The word itself possesses the ovum of any meaning that might come from it once it's put into a context, or once a context is put into it (John 14:20). The context is the masculine element that tears and then impregnates the word to release a meaning born from the two elements of a properly gendered hermeneutic.

* * *

A properly gendered hermeneutic possesses its own erotic. The erotic of the gendered approach to hermeneutics is based on the fact that the veil, or hymen (i.e., the dictionary definition), protecting a virgin word must be torn (a word's dictionary definition must be broken) before the word can really give birth to something based on the sexual fusion required for any living thing to re-produce. For this reason no person can ever be fruitful about an interpretation of text so long as the person is a celibate concerning hermeneutics. Text cannot produce legitimate meaning without sexual fusion. The sacerdotal celibacy practiced by most exegetes circumcises (in the sense of emasculation) that particular exegete from ever engaging legitimate interpretation.

Rather than watching the context impregnate the text (standing by to help deliver the child) --- the Pharisaical exegete turns a blind eye from what he considers pornographic, and thereby of a necessity, he makes the offspring of his interpretation "bastard" (illegitimate) rather than virgin-produced (as he would have it). Without a gendered approach to hermeneutics every interpretation is bastard, since it never knows the father of the meaning produced by the word. In point of fact, the antecedent of a word’s “meaning” is always patrilineal. Its descent is always drawn from the context that fathers the meaning. The spiritually minded expositor never starts from what a word says (as does the hyper-exegete). He allows the linguistic context of the whole to impregnate the part; he always allows the context of the passage to have its way with the word. ---- In contradistinction, the hyper-exegete’s religious celibacy is a self-enforced form of spiritual abstinence, a padded brass mechanism designed to lock up the “word” of God with a combination known only to the exegete.

* * *

A gendered hermeneutic is obviously going to appear pornographic to anyone who rejects the absolute authority of 1 Timothy 2:11-15.[viii] And it’s a necessary evil of taking the chastity belt off dialogue that we will often appear half-cocked in whatever we say. But being half-cocked is better than being totally limp when it comes to communicative intercourse. We're totally limp when the lexicographer, or the exegete, or even personal self-control . . . so dictates the way we have intercourse with text that the intercourse is too lack-luster to be worth the bother.

All dialogue is sexual in nature. And the same rules that apply in the bedroom apply on the written page. --- Persons who turn out the lights to have physical intercourse with their partner rarely reveal any light with the text they put on a page. They use text to cover their naked thoughts rather than as a light to expose them. ----The same people, who schedule when and where they'll get naked, are prone to castigate anyone too ready and willing at a moments notice and in the oddest places.

When persons feel the need to wait until they’re fully upright in what it is they intend to say, they will always say too little, and the littleness of their "saying" will tend to cause laughter rather than engagement. The pathology that develops out of this situation will often cause persons to become self-righteous censors who consider naked dialogue, in the light of day, pornographic rather than productive. . . . These self-righteous censors are always overeager to interrupt naked thoughts . . . while still only half-cocked . . . so that no one gets offended by “sayings” which are rapidly becoming too straightforward.

* * *

"Words" are deceptive when they come all butched-up bearing the fruit of knowledge. Those persons born anew in the second Adam should have the intellectual and spiritual wherewithal to say no to the "word". We should all put words in their proper place and not think of God's legitimate gendered structure as somehow beneath us: unless by beneath us we mean putting the word on the bottom end of the missionary position?

Words are the first death wrought to our thoughts. As such, they really are like Eve. --- It's through words that we allow our thoughts to deceive us; Wittgenstein was constantly going on about freeing himself from the seduction of words: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." A likeminded Schopenhauer said:

The actual life of a thought lasts only until it reaches the point of speech: there it petrifies and is henceforth dead but indestructible, like the petrified plants and animals of prehistory. As soon as our thinking has found words it ceases to be sincere or at bottom serious. When it begins to exist for others it ceases to live in us, just as the child severs itself from its mother when it enters into its own existence.

Life petrifies in Eve (dying you shall die). And thus, the law of sin and death, which comes through the word, must be overcome through the word: "But she shall be saved through sexual reproduction . . .." And we come full circle with Genesis 3:15.

As Adam's body is the soil into which God breathed thought life (and Eve is the parthenogenesis of that soil), so too a word is the soil into which man, who is created in the image of God, breaths thought life in order to animate the soil, to give it life. Language is the soil where thought life replicates. ---- And to till the soil requires it to be broken. To put context into the word, the word must be broken. . . . but it “shall be saved through sexual reproduction.” In other words, despite the fact that the lexicographer locks the word away from the world by means of a gilded cage placed around the word, i.e., his dictionary definition, nevertheless, we can never know a woman in the biblical sense until we've broken the soil of her body.

Any man who claims to have carnal knowledge of a woman without having broken the veil of her body is a liar. Likewise, any man who believes he’s rightly handling the word of God apart from tilling the soil (even tearing the veil) of every word with a pre-textual organ is lying to himself:

The Hindu who, embracing his wife, declares that she is Earth and he Heaven is at the same time fully conscious of his humanity and hers. The Austroasiatic cultivator who uses the same word, "lak," to designate phallus and spade . . . knows perfectly well that his spade is an instrument . . . and that in tilling his field he performs agricultural work . . ..

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 166-167.

* * *

The demonic technique of the reductionistic textual critic is opposed to the holism of the man of God. The man who fancies himself sharing his authority with his bride, or his wife, is imposing an unforgivable violence and criminality on the sexual dialogue through which his seed will be planted, watered, and made to grow. --- He is -- of his own freewill-- allowing the female aspect of all intellectual intercourse to impose her will on the greater power of the masculine mind. He carries this criminal violence over to what it is he does with his mind, interpreting words. He tells the word to role over in the missioning of his mind - the word is topside of the missionary position - and a word can never get pregnant that way.

The exegetical expositor who claims authority for a word over her contextual husband, the exegetical expositor who would allow a woman to mount a pulpit, or, the expositor who is always too ready to role over in the missionary position . . . this person is an enemy of the cross of Christ. For the cross of Christ is precisely the victory of the man of God (the God/"man") over the Pagan goddess religions of antiquity. These Pagan goddess religions are the abyss over which Christianity is erected, and for that reason the Pagan mind dreads nothing so deeply as the Christian who allows Christ the prone position in the missioning of his mind.

* * *

None of this is neo-mysticism, unless it’s taken as a static presentation of truth. ---- But taken as one thrust of the blood plasma of truth being pumped through the heart of human consciousness, these simple statements can strengthen the circulatory process called human dialogue. When that process is strengthened it leads to a more rapid development of the Living Body.

So what’s being divulged in what is here being addressed? ---- Nothing (precisely). Nothing is being said so long as to "say" requires static presence rather than a dialogical living within the "saying". . . .But if nothing we say has static presence, then how can it have meaning a moment after it’s been said or read? --- Only as it seeds the reproductive act of dialogue. ---Dialogue gets the blood of thought as far as the lip. From there, drinking would appear to be a simple thing --notwithstanding the frequent slip . . .. And here we’re speaking of the “cup and the lip” in a Eucharistic sense. Words are the “cup” through which the blood of thought must be consumed; and so much better if the cup is broken so that one doesn’t sip too deeply before refilling it with new blood fresh from the vein.

* * *

What we’re engaging here is of extreme importance. --- Expressed with the utmost pregnancy, we might even say that we’re consummating our vows to Christ every time we realize that "truth" (His blood) flows through us, rather than puddling on us as a pool of hemoglobic presence. --- Instead of requesting that His blood be "on" us (which leads to a sort of Pharisaical belief in actual static presence), the Christian should understand that His blood flows “through” us, or “in” us . . . it must circulate or stagnate. ---- This dialogue (and it must keep moving) requires that we ingest and metabolize the signs that generate the mental pictures, which attract us to the groom of truth. But the moment we stop digesting the truth, as though its presence is static and “real,” there we’ve begun the divorcement from truth that annuls our spiritual life.[ix]

* * *

Truth exists only in dialogue. It gives up the ghost the moment it’s nailed-down to wood, chiseled in stone, or even written down on paper. The moment it’s chiseled in stone, the stone tablets where it’s chiseled must be broken to pieces; the rock must be struck and made to bleed; for the blood of truth must be on the lips (not the hand or forehead) of those who would gain sustenance from it (Ex. 17:6).

In marked opposition to every attempt to “present” truth --- truth “makes itself felt” in the truism that truth has no presence. --- It doesn't exist. --- To exist it has to become static and dead; and then it’s no longer truth. Therefore, truth doesn't exit in words; it’s not present in words; but only in dialogue. Truth keeps moving forward in dialogue. It can't stop long enough to exist, otherwise its time will come, and in that moment, it’ll find itself trapped between various cross-currents . . . or even cross-members (Matt. 27:38).[x]

To paraphrase Sartre: The truth that exists in conscious dialogue, “continually experiences itself as the nihilation of its past being.”[xi] Truth can’t be found in a place or time. Therefore, the concept of “finding truth” is an abortion of it. --- The process of “finding truth” represents asphyxiation through induction. Induction is the placenta that chokes truth to death in that abortion called “finding truth” (Ezekiel 16:6). Nailing truth down (in speech or text) makes truth immanent. --- Yet those who try to nail truth down with words and concepts have simply exchanged iron for icons; the goal hasn't changed a bit. ---- The sound of a hammer striking a nail is indistinguishable from the sound of every statement presented as “truth.”

* * *

How many ways must the illusion of static “presence” be negated before the spiritually disenfranchised buffoon relinquishes his grip on his phallic idol? --- The simpleton might just as well keep stroking since to all outward appearances he’s already blind.

Admittedly, to bring a legitimate abstraction – away from “static presence” -- into the play of words makes words slippery. And yet it’s just this slipperiness that causes words - in their non-masculine essence - to have a certain power over us. In abstracting words we’re emancipating them to express themselves more freely. ---The more we free words from the lexicographer's chastity belt the more we desire their company. . . . And yet the more we desire their company the greater the danger of porno-graphe.

The word "pornography" is from the Greek "porno" (prostitute) and "graphos"-- the "writing" of stories about the prostitute (who is objectified as the play toy that can be purchased as an object to look at, and down on). Anyone who has ever purchased a book, who has ever looked down on the words in a book, thinking they know what the words in the book signify . . . this person has engaged in a form of “porno-graphe” since to think he knows what the words signify is to objectify the words in the same way the pervert objectifies the symbol of woman in his girly magazines. [xii] The pervert sees the body of the woman (exposed in his magazine) as the functional "presence" of the entity he experiences through onanistic intercourse with the photo.

In monogamy, the man weds himself not to the letteral presence of the woman (her outer signification, i.e., her photo, or her body), but instead to her life, and for life; which is the only true intercourse that’s not porno-graphic. – The righteous groom fashions a whip and thrashes anyone who would exchange currency for, in, or concerning, the presence, of a bride.

Monogamous communication is the wedding of oneself to the lifetime of communication that refuses to stop long enough to make objective the entity "objectified" in her wedding gown. The entity in the wedding gown cannot be made objective. Monogamy is the antithesis of objectification; it’s the destroying of the concept of the object in space and time; it’s the wedding of the thought process to the concept of a lifetime of engagement with the signs that signify the life enclosed in the Ark of the marital Covenant.

[i] David Miller’s, Popper Selections, (Princeton University Press, 1985), epigraph.

[ii] Schwaller de Lubicz, Esoterism & Symbolism (Dervy-Livre, 1977), “In the process of generation, which demands an active impulse in a medium homogenous with this activity . . . there is always, before all else, decomposition (putrefaction) of this material into a chaotic, mucilaginous form.”

[iii] Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Door in the Sky, p. 98, 99, “For one who has completely realized the sacrificial implications of every action, one who is leading not a life of his own in this world but a transubstantiated life . . . acts of all kinds are reduced to their paradigms and archetypes, and so referred to Him from whom all action stems . . . our very breathing in and out . . . `are two endless ambrosial oblations that whether waking or sleeping one offers up continuously and without a break . . ..’”

[iv] Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, (Routledge, 2002), p. 50, suggests that Kant’s categorical imperative, if universally applicable, would in fact justify what is here being called the Sacramental Protocol of Hermeneutics -- the case that proper communication is in itself a kerygmatic event: “The moral law inscribes itself at the bottom of our hearts like a memory of the Passion. When it addresses us, it either speaks the idiom of the Christian or is silent.”

[v] Deut. 23:1.

[vi] John 16:7.

[vii] Martin Buber makes this point well in, Eclipse of God (Humanities Press International, Inc. 1988) p. 45, 46, where he says: “Symbols of God come into being, some of which allow themselves to be fixed in lasting visibility even in earthly material and some which tolerate no other sanctuary than that of the soul. Symbols supplement one another, they merge, they are set before the community of believers in plastic or theological forms. And God, so we may surmise, does not despise all these similarly and necessarily untrue images, but rather suffers that one look at Him through them. Yet they always quickly desire to be more than they are, more than signs and pointers toward Him. It finally happens ever again that they swell themselves up and obstruct the way to Him, and he removes Himself from them.” Jean-Luc Marion says the same thing differently in God Without Being (University of Chicago Press, 1991) p. 32, 33, when he says: “Every proof, in fact, demonstrative as it may appear, can lead only to the concept; it remains for it then to go beyond itself, so to speak, and to identify this concept with God himself. . . Proof uses positively what conceptual atheism uses negatively: in both cases, equivalence to a concept transforms God into “God,” into one of the infinitely repeatable “so called gods.” In both cases, human discourse determines God. The opposition of the determinations, the one demonstrating, the other denying, does not distinguish them as much as their common presupposition identifies them: That the human Dasein might, conceptually, reach God, hence might construct conceptually something that it would take upon itself to name “God,” either to admit or dismiss. The idol works universally, as much for denegation as for proof.”

[viii] 1 Timothy 2:11-15 is not just a commentary on physical gender; it's instead a very real literary kerygma; it's Paul's direction concerning exegesis and Christian midrash. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission." --- Strong's Lexicon of the Greek says of the word translated "quietness": A "description of the life of one who stays at home doing his own work, and does not officiously meddle with the affairs of others." ---- Since the "word" is the female aspect of any sentence, it must do its own work and not meddle with the affairs of the other words in the sentence. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

A word is never (regardless of whether a lexicographically minded exegete has cut her hair in opposition to 1 Cor. Chapter 11) allowed to have authority over a sentence. The word must "not meddle in the affairs of other words." She must remain silent and wait for the sentence to court her and even make her enceinte. "For Adam was formed first, then Eve." No word is ever the basis for a sentence. A sentence is the basis for a word. Every serious philosopher of language concedes that a functioning language is the basis for words; words are the blood of language and language didn't arise from words but words from language. Language was formed first, and then words were pulled from the rib of language in order that language might have its way with words. "And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner." Listening to the desires of a word within a sentence is tantamount to taking the fruit of knowledge from the word, rather than putting a word in its rightful place. The spiritually minded expositor never starts from what a word says (as does the hyper-exegete). He allows the linguistic context of the whole to impregnate the part; he always allows the context of the passage to have its way with the word. --- Yes . . . this hermeneutic is pornographic to everyone who rejects the absolute authority of 1 Timothy 2:11-15.

In R.B. Thieme, Jr.'s, Grace Apparatus Perception, (p. 28-29) he says: "When doctrine has been transferred by faith to the human spirit, you begin to be a `doer' of the Word; you are in the area of divine production. Through EPIGNOSIS, you possess what James calls `the engrafted word' (Jas. 1:21). In the Greek, this word actually means `impregnated.' In other words, GNOSIS cannot produce; `pregnancy' can result only from EPIGNOSIS. The human spirit is comparable to the womb, and cohabitation is the illustration. Once doctrine is in the human spirit, conception takes place; and when pregnancy occurs, there are `children.'"

Elliot R. Wolfson, in Pathwings, p.192, quotes the Gaon of Vilna, "The arousal of a person to sexual intercourse is in thought, and the semen is displaced from the brain, which is in the thought that is concealed from everything. Afterwards is the sexual intercourse, which corresponds to speech that is between man and his colleague. Thus the union is in the covenant of the tongue and the covenant of the foreskin. They are parallel in all matters."

[ix] Walter Benjamin, Letter to Martin Buber, “Every salutary effect of literature, every effect that is not deeply pernicious, comes from its mystery (of word, of language). However various the forms in which language operates, its power lies not in the communication of content, but in the pure manifestation of its dignity and its nature. . . .Taken as an instrument, it merely proliferates.”

[x] Ernst Cassirer, in The Philosophy of Symbolic Form, vol. 1 (Yale University Press, 1955), p. 120-121, states similar ideas in relation to Heraclitus’ view of language: “If we consider the logos of language only in the form in which it is represented and crystallized in the particular word – we find that every word limits the object it is meant to designate and by this limitation falsifies it. Through fixation in the word, the content is lifted out of the continuous stream of becoming in which it stands; hence it is not apprehended according to its totality but only according to a onesided determination. . . Heraclitus situates the particular object in the constant stream of becoming, in which it is both preserved and destroyed; and for him the particular word is related to “speech” as a whole in the same way. Consequently, even the ambiguity inherent in the word is not a mere deficiency of of language, but is an essential and positive factor in its power of expression. For in this ambiguity it is manifested that the limits of language, as of reality itself, are not rigid but fluid. Only in the mobile and multiform word, which seems to be constantly bursting its own limits, does the fullness of the world-forming logos find its counterpart. Language itself must recognize all the distinctions which it necessarily effects as provisional and relative distinctions which it will withdraw when it considers the object in a new perspective. . . He who would speak with intelligence must not permit himself to be misled by the diversity of words but must penetrate behind them to that which is common to all . . . Every particular content of language both reveals and conceals the truth of reality; it is at the same time both pure definition and mere indication. In this view of the world, language is like the sybil who, as Heraclitus said, utters unadorned, unlicensed words with raving mouth, but who nevertheless "reaches out over a thousand years with her voice, through the (inspiration of the) god" (Fragment 92a). It contains a meaning which is hidden from it, which it can only surmise in image and metaphor.” ----- Martin Buber says the same thing when he states, “"From this it follows that it is not the unambiguity of a word but its ambiguity that constitutes living language. The ambiguity creates the problematic of speech, and it creates its overcoming in an understanding that is not an assimilation but a fruitfulness." (Also . . . see Walter Benjamin’s letter to Buber in the preceeding note.)

[xi] Quoted from Robert Denoon Cumming’s, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (Random House, Inc., 1965), p.116. In his book, An Introduction to Metaphysics, p.86, Heidegger speaks in a similar spirit when he asks, "Is being the last cloudy streak of evaporating reality; is the only possible attitude for us to let it evaporate into complete indifference?"

[xii] Abraham ibn Ezra: “Know: Words are like bodies and meanings are like souls, and the body is like a vessel for the soul. Accordingly, as a rule all scholars of language will attend to the general sense without concerning themselves with variations in words, since they are equivalent in meaning.”