The Kingdom and the Garden (The Italian List)

This is one of Agamben's theological treatises in which he plumbs the history of theological reasoning, which most philosophers ignore, to glean insights into the human condition. The kind of theology he likes is fairly intense. And he is scrupulous, almost legalistic, in teasing out implications of general propositions and following up on them.In this one, the issue is the 'garden of earthly delights'. You will believe this is a physical place featuring natural human qualities if you follow either a) the Greek tradition of natural law (Aristotle says it is natural for humans to be sociable), or b) you are a 'heretic', like Pelagius, Eriugena, and Dante. Both types believe that humans have their salvation potentially within human attributes.Against, this is ranged 'the Church' and its doctrine of 'original sin', whereby Adam's sin corrupts nature (including human nature), introducing death, sin, and oppression. In such a broken state man has no potential for self-salvation and must depend upon grace. Agamben shows this idea appearing in Tertullian, being accepted for the Church by Eusebius and defined and articulated by St Augustine.I think it is fairly clear that Agamben prefers the first type (Aristotle, Eriugena, Dante, and Hiernoymus Bosch's front cover image), but his position is really that both accounts are mutually constitutive - we can't have one without the other being its evil twin. What his study has found is that human nature is essentially twofold and contradictory. The attempts to push for either nature or grace simply summon the opposite case.The last few pages explain why this might be. St Paul speaks of the Kingdom to come, using the term 'parousia'. This actually means 'presence' in Greek, not something to come. He outlines that the Kingdom is already here, but it is in the form of a kind of doctor's waiting room: it is both here, and yet the rewards are to come. He slips into a bit of Heidegger-talk (without mentioning him) when he concludes that making is in a state of 'emergingness' - which I guess means something like 'becoming' (open to the 'other' and temporally dislocated). So, in a way the 'waiting room' idea is just it - not a temporary state, but something essential? He doesn't really make this point very clear. He seems to explain it (at some length) in his book The Time That Remains.I liked the intense textual examinations, but I don't understand why he is so coy about the bigger picture. Anyway, if you think the idea of an earthly paradise is interesting, but want a less dense and more cultural tourist approach, then Rita Brock and Rebecca Parker's Saving Paradise (2012) is a pleasant read and explore artistic depictions of paradise for clues. They are more decided than Agamben that humans are naturally capable of salvation and (they believe) that the Church might do well to drop its resistance to this. Alessandro's Mapping Paradise (2006) is amazing, but amazingly expensive.

The book is a discussion of how we should consider the idea of the garden of Eden, as laid out in Genesis: is it something we as humans can return to and strive towards? Or is it something we’re doomed to be excluded from forever. Canonical catholicism claims the latter, but this began with some questionable reasoning from Augustine (which Agamben discusses in great detail), and the idea of Eden has been considered differently by other equally brilliant minds such as Eriugena and Dante.Agamben wants to conclude that Augustine is a bit full of it, Eriugena and Dante are much more interesting, and that the Eden idea is something we can strive towards. And probably the idea of original sin is not really worth its salt (unless you’re trying to justify the necessity of baptism and the institution of the church).I particularly enjoyed the first part of the book with its discussion of Augustine’s interpretation of the early bible and other works in order to make an argument for original sin— a feature of catholic christianity which (I wasn’t aware) didn’t exist prior to Augustine, and whose origins and motivations are deemed pretty suspect by Agamben.Specifically, Agamben accuses Augustine of engaging in motivated reasoning, coming up with the necessity of original sin to justify the necessity of the institution of the Church and of the scrament of baptism. At some point Augustine flat out says that if there’s no original sin then Jesus died in vain. Augustine also begins to consider the story of the garden of Eden as a *literal place* rather than allegorical (as he did earlier in life). All this reads to me as pretty suspicious reasoning on Augustine’s part.I’d also never heard of Eriugena prior (perhaps more out of my own lack of education than his actual obscurity), and was thoroughly fascinated to learn more about him.I skimmed most of the parts on Dante since I haven’t read the Divine Comedy, sadly. Maybe I’ll get to that next.