Mending

Didn’t Cicero insist that the divine fire – lightning – reveals itself as love. As the love of the neighbour?

Cicero didn’t seem very loving to me.

Hate is a mode of love, she always insisted. Hate evil, love good, right?

How does she get from like lightning to love? It’s confusing.

 

There’s a … messianic energy that is at work … a way of bringing the lightning to the ground and putting it to work. That's what she used to say. Letting it become effective. 

As what?

As love.

 

It’s not about destroying the world, destroying reality, but shaking it out of its contentment, its automatism: that’s what Cicero used to say. Out of its closed, mechanistic system.

 

You have to use apocalyptic energy – that’s what Cicero thought. It wasn’t about the preservation of the created world, nor its destruction, but the redemption of the world – the transformation of creaturely reality.

We have to shape and transform reality. Can we do that? Aren’t we too impatient?

To use the negative energy of desire, of despair. To use it to transform the world. A kind of work – to transform the creaturely realm. Our realm. Is that what we are? Are we creatures?, we asked her, like idiots.

 

The mission – to liberate everything from the bondage of the world. From what we’re tied to. From the natural order.

 

Divine energy. Revelatory energy. The flash of revelation. The madness of anarchy and amorphy. The destruction of all forms.

 

Divine violence needs a mediator. And that’s what the philosophy dept was to be. Where the flame of love was to be mediated, shared out. Where it transformed from violence to love.

That was the mission of Cicero.

 

A messianism that would belong to us – not an imitation of God, not a destruction, but part of the process of redemption.

Not creation, not destruction, but modest work – the mending, fixing and repeating of the world, lifting it from the lower realms.