Book Review of In the Middle of Things: Hyphenating life with Philosophy and Theology by Fr. Victor Ferrão.
– Clifford W. DeSilva
In the first place you all might be wondering what I am doing here in the middle of things. I’m wondering this myself.
You know, a lady once took a sip of her husband’s beer and made a face. ‘How can you drink such stuff?’ she asked. And her husband said, ‘See what sacrifices I make.’
The fact is that beer for the newcomer is not a pleasant taste. Beer is what is called an acquired taste. Once you get a liking for it you want to have more and more.
This book by Fr Ferrão is an acquired taste. It takes a little getting used to and after some time it becomes quite fascinating.
Fr Victor has taken everyday things like animals and profound matters like Christ’s crucifixion and God’s creation and everything in between and has given a beautiful meaning to these and makes us look at everything in a new light, from a new perspective.
In all of this, having done the proof reading and minor editing for this book I surmise that Fr Victor draws his inspiration from the French philosopher Jacques Derrida.
I finished Philosophy at JDV in 1975 and I thank my stars that Derrida was not yet introduced to us. It was hard enough to plough through Aristotle, Descartes, Aquinas and especially Hegel’s dialectic and Sartre’s pour soi and l’en soi. If Derrida too had been on the syllabus I might not have passed. But here is the thing: if you want a ‘Derrida-made-easy’ read In the Middle of Things.
The special quality of this book is how Fr Victor has blended philosophy and theology which is no easy task. The way he writes about animals showing how they are part of God’s creation made me rethink my attitude not only to animals but also my attitude to humans, and Christ and God and religion.
About the book: it has four sections with titles that are self-explanatory.
- Life and love
- Philosophy and Paradox
- God and Theology
- Loving and Ending: Hyphenating Animals and the Divine.
It is this last section that caught my especial attention and interest.
I’m given to understand it was originally not included in the book but Kuruvilla Pandikattu SJ who is Fr Victor’s mentor insisted these articles be included. It was an insightful suggestion as it becomes a fitting culmination to this unique body of work.
The first article in this section is called Following the Animal Other. Animals do not generally even feature on the radar of humans. So when the author asks, ‘In what way does out Biblical inheritance contribute to the thinking of animality?’ it might strike one as an unusual question. But coming as it does in the last section of this book it seems a perfectly natural and legitimate question to the reader who has , by now, gone through topics like, Thinking Fullness and Emptiness together, Putting our Belonging under Erasure, Between Martha and Mary – always the hyphenation, see? – Deconstructed by God and so on.
At his point the book has got the reader to question their way of thinking and look at things in a ‘deconstructed’ way. So, as Ferrão puts it, we have ‘the challenge to contest the animal/human hierarchical binary that colours our reading of the Bible’. Essentially we have seen how humans have sometimes behaved worse than animals, for example the guards in a Nazi concentration camp who saw the Jews as a ‘gang of apes’ whereas the dog in that same camp saw the Jews very much as humans and was excited to see them. The author mentions how dogs have been used in the Bible to ‘insult’ humans, for example Goliath asked David whether he was a dog that David came to him with sticks. Or Jesus telling the Syrophoenician woman it is not right to take food from children and feed it to the dogs. Fr Victor invites us to reinterpret what seems to be our dominion over animals (Gen 1:26) and have compassion for animals who have a ‘shareable unshareability’ with humans.
Fr Victor is truly broadminded and a world thinker and as Keith D’Souza SJ who will release this books says in his Foreword to it: Fr Victor ‘is a philosopher but also a theologian, an intellectual attempting the sayable, yet also a priest fundamentally open to the unsayable; a post-modern abstract thinker but pragmatic and involved in grassroot issues.’
To this I will add that Fr Victor can write a book of profound thinking like this and be practical enough to respond in the media to the recent attempt to create a communal divide on the heated Goemcho Saib controversy.
Allow me to quote from his newspaper article in response to the promised release of the Goa files. This quote serves as a sample of the kind of thinking you will find in his book:
When one takes a polemical approach which we can see in the approach of the media and politics our day, ne disturbs the peach of our society. Hence, this dialectical stance has to be abandoned. What we really need appears to be an ethic of dissensus. We do not have to wait for the consensus of all. Let us agree to disagree.
So you see, Fr Victor lives what he writes. After all, like Jacques Derrida he is all for ‘deconstruction’ and the removal of binaries and either-or thinking.
You will understand more when you read the concluding article in this book called Open Endings. I think this article should have come right at the beginning because it explains quite beautifully what this book does. Here Fr Victor makes a powerful plea to give up one-legged dialectical thinking (Goodbye Hegel) and open ourselves to two-legged dialogical thinking (Hello Martin Buber?). What he advocates is the reading-together and thinking-together (both hyphenated phrases) of so-called opposing concepts and placing them side-by-side: God and humans, humans and animals, Christian and non-Christian… In this way our thinking remains ever open and resists closure. Here is how we enter the impossible – the zone of the divine which will enable us to live by faith and not by sight.
This book is full of deep thinking –sometimes complicated – that takes the reader time to absorb. But at its core this profound thinking is really awfully simple. I believe that hyphenated as Fr Victor is he will surely convert this book for the layperson in the form of a Book of Prayers!
Thank you for the privilege of letting me introduce such an enchanting book. It is a specialist book and I’m sure will be required reading for every student and philosophy and theology in every seminary.
But it is also a book that all of us can read to get a new vision and live our Christianity.