2023-04-30 09:50:59
Work and creativity. From Biblical Times to the Present
by André Lacocque
Translated by Jean-Marc Degrève (text) and Marie-Christine Corbeil (notes)
Coll. “Read the Bible”
Cerf, 240 p., 24 €
André Lacocque, who died on January 28, 2022 at the age of 94, was a long-time professor of the Hebrew Bible at Chicago Theological Seminary. His work testifies to his desire to re-root Christian thought in its Jewish soil. In this work written when he was 90 years old, and which crowns in a way an exceptional career, he is interested in the question of work.
Dialectical method of interpretation
While intellectual production on this theme is abundant, can the Bible contribute to reflection? Yes, answers the author. Despite the civilizational gap between the ancient Near East and the modern world, the early chapters of the Bible have much to tell us. And to draw lessons for today, he develops a “dialectical method of interpretation”, which brings the biblical text into dialogue with the human sciences.
“The biblical kerygma is not intended for Israelites alone but also for humans of all kinds and of all times and places, not only to faith but to reason. We are therefore justified in examining what universal philosophy – but particularly Western philosophy which owes so much to Aufklärung (Enlightenment in Germany, Editor’s note) – has to say about human beings and their work” and whether or not this agrees with what the Bible says, justifies André Lacocque.
In addition, the question of work, because it touches on anthropology, seems to him well suited to testing this method – an extended intertextuality – which stands out from the more common approaches to interpretation that the author quickly reviews in a “postscript”.
“Work is part of the very being of the human being”
André Lacocque therefore “imports” within the framework of the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis the reflections of authors such as Hegel, Freud, Weber, Levinas who were, each in his own way, readers and interpreters of the biblical text. “Every tradition lives by the grace of interpretation: it is at this price that it lasts, that is to say remains alive”, he argues, quoting Paul Ricœur with whom he published Thinking the Bible (Threshold, 1998). The dialogue with these different authors leads in particular to situating the work in relation to various questions to which it refers: language, property, space, time, death, consumption, otherness, evil…
« Homo faber »
From these rich analyses, we note in particular that they lead to rejecting a fairly widespread interpretation that makes work a “negative notion”. However, the biblical text tells a different story: “Before what has been called ‘the Fall’, work is co-creation with God; it is part of the very being of the human being. » A power is conferred on him over things: to bring them to their perfection. And it is by bringing Creation to its fullness that the human being himself reaches his own perfection. “The insight of Genesis 2:15 on human labor is impressive: it is indeed striking that the text includes labor in the very act of Adam’s creation, which is thus a homo faber (the human as a worker)”, writes André Lacocoque.
At the same time, the biblical text bears witness to the “a sharp contrast between prelapsal labor and postlapsal condition, which becomes the universal condition that we know”. The “distortion of the Edenic order” has disastrous consequences: “Work becomes drudgery. As hard work, the work is self-destructive and marked by negativity, unlike the work in Genesis 2 which, as a divine gift, guarantees peace and fulfillment. » This does not prevent that, “Even in its dimension of hard work, work dialectically continues to have a constructive side: productivity, procreation, culture”.
The Bible, but also the humanities, teaches us that work carries its own contradiction. Which provides a yardstick for judging the quality of any reflection on work: does it honor this tension, this paradox about work being both good and bad? If it does not, it sinks into simplicity.
The subject is dense, sometimes a little elliptical, but nonetheless stimulating to help think about work today and its challenges.
#Adam #work #Fall