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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2023
Abstract
The fourteenth canon of the Sixth Council of Toledo (638) declares it inhuman (inhumanum) not to reward fidelity. This reveals that the council had a concept of ‘human nature’ and that it was ready to use it to discipline and punish. This chapter works to uncover that seventh-century Visigothic ontology and its relationship to faith, and, in the process, reveals how by this ontological discourse an ontotheology that excluded Jews from human society emerged.
Keywords: Visigothic ontology, ideology, theology, Judaism, Catholicism, Isidore of Seville
‘I know that I am a human being.’ In order to see how unclear the sense of this proposition is, consider its negation.
– Wittgenstein, On CertaintyThe role of fear in the ordering of Visigothic society: Reason speaking to Man: ‘Let the destruction of godless people draw you back from sin; […] let the extinction of the condemned pull you aside.’
– Isidore, Synonyms, 1.51Well then, my perfect historian must start with two indispensable qualifications: the one is political insight, the other the faculty of expression.
– Lucian, The Way to Write History, 34The following research represents the early findings of my current monograph project in which I propose that Visigothic Catholicism – and perhaps Catholicism more broadly in Late Antiquity – functioned, or intended to function, as secular ideology and not as religion. Instead of reflecting the History-shattering Truth Event that was the Christ Event and the alternative truths that Jesus demanded of his faithful subjects – such as the full renunciation of wealth – Visigothic Catholicism advocated and performed as a false commitment to the Christ Event, as a commitment, instead, to other prevailing truths of Late Antiquity but with the appearance of being Christian (i.e. faithful to the radical Christian Truth). As such, this means two things:
1. Visigothic Catholicism operated as secular ideology that used the identifier ‘Christian’ as an Imaginary Subjectivity to prevent the encounter with the Real, with the genuine Christian Truth.
2. It is in this gap between conservative, ideological operation and professed commitment to a radical, anti-historical (i.e. anti-ideological) Event that we can see the essence of Visigothic Catholicism, its real intentions, the meaning of its acting-out, and its anti-Christian, non-transformative discourse.
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