The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

"In this dramatic opening to his triptych on Christ's passion, Emmanuel Falque demonstrates-once again-his complete refusal to rest with easy answers. Christ, he argues, experiences anxiety and suffering that are just as real and confusing as that of any ordinary person. The result is that God does not suffer at some comfortable distance but right here in our midst. One can hardly read this book without being deeply moved."-Bruce Ellis Benson, author of Liturgy as a Way of Life

Anxiety, suffering and death are not simply the "ills" of our society, nor are they uniquely the product of a sick and sinful humanity. We must all some day confront them, and we continually face their implications long before we do. In that sense, the Garden of Gethsemane is not merely a garden "outside the walls" of Jerusalem but also the essential horizon for all of us, whether we are believers or not.

Doubtful of Heidegger's famous statement that the notion of salvation renders Christians unable authentically to experience anxiety in the face of death, Falque explores the Passion with a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ's suffering and death, and on continuities with the mortality of our bodies. Written in the wake of the death of a close friend, Falques's study is both theologically rigorous and marked by deeply human concerns.

Falque is at pains to elaborate the question of death in terms not of faith, but of a "credible Christianity" that remains meaningful to nonbelievers. His account is therefore as much a work of philosophy as of theology-and of philosophy explicated not through abstractions but through familiar and ordinary experience. Theology's task, for Falque, is to understand that human problems of the meaning of existence apply even to Christ, at least insofar as he lives in and shares our finitude. In Falque's remarkable account, Christ takes upon himself the burden of suffering finitude, so that he can undertake a passage through it, or a transformation of it.

Emmanuel Falque is Honorary Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris.

George Hughes has served as Professor in the Faculty of Letters at the University of Tokyo.