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2 - The Logic of Control: Postulating a Visigothic Ontology of Human Being

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 October 2023

Dolores Castro
Affiliation:
Universidad de General Sarmiento, Argentina
Fernando Ruchesi
Affiliation:
Universitat de Lleida
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Summary

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 Certainty

The 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, 1.51

Well 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, 34

The 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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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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