Two quotes from John Gray’s March 13 review in the New Stateman of new books by Peter Watson—The age of nothing— and Terry Eagleton—Culture and the death of god:

If Yeshua (the Jewish prophet later known as Jesus) had died on the cross and stayed dead, that would have been a tragedy. In the Christian story, however, he was resurrected and came back into the world. Possibly this is why Dante’s great poem wasn’t called The Divine Tragedy. In the sense in which it was understood by the ancients, tragedy implies necessity and unalterable finality. According to Christianity, on the other hand, there is nothing that cannot be redeemed by divine grace and even death can be annulled.

Complete misreading of Christianity, to think of the resurrection as a trick, a deus ex machina of the kind featured at the end of some classical plays. One doesn’t need to believe in the resurrection and the messianic interpretation to see that Gray here is assuming a very old posture that was of course rejected by the gospels themselves. But to think Jesus’ death is not seen as a tragedy in Christianity: No need to know what tragos and victimization mean to consider that what is splashed everywhere from churches to house walls, not to mention paintings and scuptures, for centuries now, and perhaps coming to an end (but I wouldn’t bet on it) is the belief that Jesus is forever both on the cross and resurrected. The real problem Greeks had with the passion—many would have agreed with John Gray—cannot be evacuated so easily. As for redemption of everything by divine grace: Christianity struggled mightily with this notion. Surely there are things that are unforgiveable? And yet, no matter the terrible failures of Christianity (-ies), the invisible and sotto voce call for boundless forgiveness, that is what keeps sounding. As for Gray calling Jesus Yeshua, that is fake historicization, part of his unthinking attempt to evacuate the problem. By problem I mean a tragic vision of life that incomprehensibly hearkens to forgiveness and a transformation of life mechanics into another, barely imaginable life, here and now. And here is another quote showing Gray’s willful misunderstanding:

The anti-tragic character of Christianity poses something of a problem for Eagleton. As he understands it, the Christian message calls for the radical dissolution of established forms of life – a revolutionary demand, but also a tragic one, as the kingdom of God and that of man will always be at odds. The trouble is that the historical Jesus seems not to have believed anything like this. His disdain for order in society rested on his conviction that the world was about to come to an end, not metaphorically, as Augustine would later suggest, but literally. In contrast, revolutionaries must act in the basic belief that history will continue, and when they manage to seize power they display an intense interest in maintaining order. Those who make revolutions have little interest in being figures in a tragic spectacle. Perhaps Eagleton should read a little more Lenin.

… And John Gray the gospels. What this author calls Jesus’ disdain for order in society was a refusal of the disorder and anarchy parading as order.

The need to know the dates of birth of my parents made me discover the digitized archives of the Côtes d’Armor, a département in Brittany—one of 96 in France. I could not find my parents’ dates in these digitized archives because they cover the years from 1467 (the date of the earliest registry of births in the collection, in Latin at the time) to 1902, sometimes 1906. My parents were born in 1906 and 1913 and the record of their births probably has not been digitized. It is still in the mairies‘ registries of their villages of origin.

Why don’t I know their dates? The main reason is that when we were growing up in the fifties in traditional Catholic villages in Brittany (and I suppose this is true of the rest of the traditional Catholic world at the time) we didn’t celebrate birthdays, or at least not our parents’. Saints’ days were celebrated or kept in mind and advertized by collective celebrations (pardons), the imagined days of a glorious entrance or birth into heaven after the travails of life. Like that of Saint Gildas, a sixth-century Welsh saint whose traces are celebrated from northern to southern Brittany, such as at this island below, called l’île Saint Gildas in French. The photograph taken from heaven comes from the Henrard collection and was bought by the Archives départementales where I found it. Photo taken in the late fifties (dates given: 1948–72)?