[1] In the Contemporary English Version of the Bible, Luke 6:27-35 reads as follows:<\/p>\n
27 This is what I say to all who will listen to me \u2013 Love your enemies, and be good to everyone who hates you. 28 Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel [\u03c0\u03bf\u03bd\u03b7\u03c1\u03bf\u03cd\u03c2] to you. 31 Treat others just as you want to be treated. 32 If you love only someone who loves you, will God praise you for that? Even sinners love people who love them. 33 If you are kind only to someone who is kind to you, will God be pleased with you for that? Even sinners are kind to people who are kind to them. 35 But love your enemies and be good to them . . . . He is good even to people who are unthankful and cruel [\u03ad\u03c0\u03b7\u03c1\u03b5\u03b1\u03b6\u03cc\u03bd\u03c4\u03c9\u03bd].<\/em><\/p>\n Introduction<\/p>\n [2] The instances of human trespass or conflict abound in our history, and none of these trespasses are ever theoretical but are rather grounded in human experience. Consider historical episodes of Lutherans in the sixteenth century who drowned Anabaptists over disagreement on infant baptism, or ethno-religious conflicts in the Balkans, Ireland, and other areas on the globe. In short, religious violence and commensurate conflicts have lasting affects that become interwoven in the present, sometimes with deadly consequences. Where conflict transformation and reconciliation do take place and justice is restored from a broken past, we find human communities and constellations of individuals and institutions that have something to teach about the nature of forgiveness and healing in the present.<\/p>\n [3] Cruelty in the mind of God is a topic for our consideration. Cruelties attributed to the divine, are part and parcel to the protracted struggle within the human relation to divinity. The theodical inquiry of the lone voice \u2013 \u201cWhy me God?\u201d \u2013 is uttered each time with new import from the interiority of the Self, seeking to understand when life becomes a tempest and the furniture of our minds is scattered. Evident since the youth of religious intuition, up through the morally raucous divinities residing on Mt. Olympus, and into the heart of our sacred texts today: This struggle of whether God is cruel, or can be cruel, manifests in the human cry at the heart of injustice in the world, and question of theodicy itself.<\/p>\n [4] My topic title, Cruelty in the Mind of God, is in fact an adaptation of Mark Juergensmeyer\u2019s popular text, Terror in the Mind of God, a text I recommend to you if you haven\u2019t read it. Juergensmeyer\u2019s text assesses how patterns of terrorist behavior are constructed through a hermeneutic rubric of cosmic war, where the supposed metaphysical cosmic struggle is superimposed on the mundane nature of daily human life to tragic effect, and where human communities are infected with commensurate stigmatizations of the \u2018other.\u2019 The \u2018other\u2019 \u2013 as the axis of all \u201cevil\u201d to the prevailing cosmic plan \u2013 is perhaps best demonstrated in Rene Girard\u2019s human subject who finds him- or herself in the cross-hairs of a majority opinion. You wake up one day and your head is on the block; this is when the other becomes a stranger, infidel, or foreigner; in short, a scapegoat for all of society\u2019s woes. For Juergensmeyer, the metaphysical confused with the mundane, and the stigmatization of other human beings, are at their ground the result of human beings frenetically seeking to render life meaningful in a cloaked denial of meaningless death. This fear of death that distorts the world, Juergensmeyer believes, is closely approximated and indeed grounded upon Freud\u2019s interpretation of the thanatos or \u201cdeath\u201d instinct.<\/p>\n [5] A discussion on cruelty is in fact different than Juergensmeyer\u2019s, albeit not entirely. The project to understand the nature of the human trespass as cruelty is today part of an inter-disciplinary and international project that took flight though the auspices of the World Council of Churches in 2006 with a consultation in Switzerland on the phenomena of cruelty in conflict transformation. Thirty scholars from across the globe met together for a week to discuss cruelty in the world from Apartheid to the casteless Dalit \u2013 or broken \u2013 of the Indian caste system. This inter-disciplinary effort attempts to dive underneath Freud\u2019s thanatos or death instinct \u2013 where Juergensmeyer begins, in fact \u2013 to what Freud himself identified as the \u201cconvolutions of cruelty\u201d in the world. Noted psychologist, Thomas Parisi, argues that in fact Freud\u2019s thanatos instinct was a term used to cobble these \u201cconvolutions of cruelty,\u201d as he called them, that resisted any specific identification, somewhat like dark matter or until recently the terrain of the deepest bodies of water on this planet.<\/p>\n [6] In this paper I will: first, suggest that cruelty is a new topos for theological consideration. This suggestion arises from what western theologians and philosophers have both written and concealed in their writing about cruelty in the history of theological discourse. Next, I will assess one exegetical consideration of what may be termed \u201coriginal cruelty,\u201d located in the complaint of Job that there is cruelty in the mind of God that is subsequently directed by God on Job. Third, I will clarify how cruelty has an aesthetic quality of ugliness that repels human thought, as an excess in human life and relation. Finally, I will consider how cruelty is manifest through what is identified as a \u2018death zone\u2019 in human society.<\/p>\n A New Topos for Theological Consideration and a Brief History of Talking Around Cruelty:<\/p>\n [7] If Cruelty is a new theological topos for consideration, then by topos is not meant a topic for reflection. Rather, I mean topos from the Greek etymological sense of \u201ccleared ground\u201d for thought, where theological endeavors engage human experience and language. Why must cruelty be a topic of consideration for theologians? After all, isn\u2019t it the case that sin and evil suffice for understanding cruelty? Not quite. From classic western philosophical, theological and etymological resource material, cruelty is a concept theologians have been referring to for millennia, without clarification. Philosophers, theologians, and writers of poetry and prose have noted cruelty as a kind of anomalous, excessive and raw barbarism, and then briskly turned away from further clarification in a pattern of disgust. Here is the rub: In the long arch of three millennia as human beings we have not defined our experience of cruelty. The trail would end here, and there would be no surprise, if it were not the case that we keep talking and writing about it. In fact, follow the etymological trail and conceptually cruelty has been conceived in a strikingly similar pattern up to our present time: \u201cHe was cruel, she was cruel, what a cold thing to do to them, that was particularly ugly behavior.\u201d From the Greeks to the contemporary world, the concept remains.<\/p>\n [8] The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, was the first to shed light on this puzzle around cruelty. Nietzsche believed that the \u201cactual and decisive eras of history which determined the character of humankind\u201d \u2013 as he writes \u2013 were flush with cruelty.[1] For Nietzsche, cruelty is a saturated aspect of human trespass, the evidence of which is emblazoned in the manifoldness of human history, literature, politics, and daily human experience. But cruelty is unpredictable and imprudent to the vitality of human communities, or to civilization itself. Rather whimsically, Nietzsche believes that the Ideals of civilization serve to buffer against uncontrolled cruelty. What civilization could not portend is how these Ideals can also be conduits for cruel human conduct. So, for instance, for Nietzsche cruelty becomes concealed under the constructed calculability and prudence of human civilization, where the Ideal of the day \u2013 such as ambiguous freedom, unquestioned loyalty and uncritical patriotism \u2013 has enabled the perpetration of untold cruelties. For Nietzsche, the instinct to turn from an awareness of the visage of cruelty takes place precisely where the \u201cprecision, calm, and purity of the lines [of the Ideal] raise us above the mere contents\u201d of the narrative and inform us of a less threatening interpretation of human nature. According to Nietzsche, civilization is analogous to the clean marble columns and portico represented in the Delphic Apollo in Greece. Delphi calls those who enter to \u201cKnow Themselves\u201d through self-actualization; for Nietzsche, cruelty is evident in human beings just like the small fractures and protruding veins of that polished Delphic marble, an unmistakable part of the frame even where we choose not to recognize this as such.[2]<\/p>\n [9] Nietzsche is intentionally given to hyperbole, but his point is well made. We conceal cruelty in terms like \u201cjustice\u201d sometimes where we indeed seek \u201csanctioned revenge,\u201d or we face a history of entitlements through a rhetoric of inclusion that follows a policy of exclusion. Which is to say \u2013 cruelty is not only cold and raw, but deceptive. We are deceived when we seek revenge but call it justice, or in short rationalize behavior in the veil of prudence where human communities are simultaneously devastated.<\/p>\n [10] If we could take a moment to assess some references to cruelty, and adjoin the contributions toward understanding cruelty given to us in the long arch of classic texts to meaning and truth, then how would cruelty appear for us? The Proverbs (11:17) assert that \u201cthe merciful man does himself good, but the cruel man does himself harm.\u201d Aquinas wrote that cruelty is bloody and \u201craw, like uncooked meat\u201d; Seneca took cruelty for rationalized \u201cinsanity\u201d; Spinoza wrote provocatively that cruelty is \u201cwhat we do to those we love\u201d; Hannah Arendt said that without mutual respect, \u201cconflicts between groups . . . take on terribly cruel forms\u201d;[3] Richard Rorty, the popular philosopher, wrote a book on cruelty without delineating the term; and Annette Baier, in her essay with cruelty in the title proper, Moralism and Cruelty, writes that she will leave aside \u201cthe tricky question of just what should count as cruelty.\u201d[4]<\/p>\n [11] Current scholarly efforts and other nods to the vague but recurring concept of cruelty are not a recent occurrence. For instance, Todorov recalls the conquest of Tenochtitlan by Spanish conquistadors where 70 million Native Americans lost their lives between 1500 and 1600 as a constellation of events that can be considered \u201ccruel.\u201d In a separate work, he reflects upon those marked for death in Auschwitz who refrained from telling the new arrivals about the gas chambers: \u201cThe inmates agree not to reveal the truth,\u201d he writes, \u201cit would only have made their deaths more cruel;\u201d what makes these diverse accounts of death, and potential death, \u201ccruel?\u201d[5] Pierre de Senarclen writes that \u201ctoward the mid-1990s, we count more than fifty new armed conflicts, essentially civil wars. Certain of these conflicts \u2013 in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, or Algeria \u2013 astonish by their violence and cruelty, by the extent of the destruction . . . .\u201d[6] What about their astonishing nature makes these events so cruel? In her book, The Reproduction of Evil, Sue Grand writes that \u201cwith or without the conscious intent to destroy, generation after generation, mankind has turned against itself in cruelty.\u201d We can learn from this parade of authors that cruelty is subtle, raw or uncooked, tricky or deceptive, excessive, harmful, and can even be what we do to those who are closest to us. What we may discern further from these writers is how we identify cruelty and then allows its visage to pass us by without further clarification.<\/p>\n [12] Job did not flinch when facing the visage of cruelty. The well-known narrative of Job represents for readers the human subject par excellance caught up in the tempest of cruelty. No other narrative \u2013 apart from the fratricide of the first-born boys of Adam and Eve \u2013 identifies cruelty in the force of an accusation aimed directly at God in Job 30:21. Job says to God, \u201cYou have become cruel to me.\u201d[7] What is Job experiencing that he identifies as cruelty? When we unlock responses to this question, we will be able to respond to the inquiry of \u2018What cruelty is.\u2019<\/p>\n Understanding Cruelty and Job:<\/p>\n [13] In the Narrative of Job, above all Job values justice. In particular, Job values divine justice, where God punishes wickedness and blesses the good (4:1-14:22), and whereafter the wicked suffer and perish because they are against God (15:1-21:34). Here is the thrust of the Job narrative: Job is righteous (1:1-5), but through a divine test Job loses the symbols of his righteousness. His family and possessions are annihilated in a single day (1:13-22), he is afflicted bodily with disease (2:7b-10), his friends question his character, and he is turned into an object \u2013 and we will talk about objectification in a moment \u2013 into an object of scorn (30:9-13). Whereas elders, chiefs, and princes once revered and envied Job (29:8-10). Even Job\u2019s spouse determines that it is better if he simply, \u201cCurse God and die\u201d (2:9). Not a good way to start the day.<\/p>\n [14] Job valued the balance of divine justice, even throughout the whirlwind of calamity that enveloped his life. So, it is not surprising for us as readers that Job turns to God for an accounting of divine injustice. His question is not imprecise \u2013 \u201cGod, what have you done to me?\u201d His inquiry is surgical \u2013 \u201cWhy have you become cruel to me?\u201d The Hebrew transliteration for cruelty here is Akzar, and the phraseology means that God has not merely \u2018become\u2019 cruel; rather, the entire relationship of divine justice between Job and God has been \u2018fiercely turned-around\u2019 through a concentration of focused neglect by the one in power.[8] We may assert that Job\u2019s original value of divine justice is \u2018fiercely turned-around,\u2019 but in truth everything else in his life has also been spun around \u2013 in the German connotation of spinning toward madness, or zu spinnen \u2013 the spinning of Job is devastating his own intra-personal interiority.<\/p>\n [15] Friendships, family, spouse, possessions, the world, his body \u2013 this cruelty (as Job identifies it) has also fiercely turned-around his value of justice and thereby impacted his entire life. Along with his understanding of God, the three intra-personal, inter-personal, and socio-institutional spheres of Job\u2019s life are affected by cruelty. Cruelty encounters Job\u2019s house as a whirlwind, where the furniture of his life is upended. Consider the heurism of fracture that Nietzsche saw in the Delphic columns once more \u2013 in the Narrative of Cain and Abel \u2013 where God forcefully tells Cain after the latter\u2019s deception and murder of his brother that Abel\u2019s \u201cblood is crying to me from the ground.\u201d But in the Job Narrative (16:18), Job implores the earth, \u201cDo not cover my blood,\u201d where the memory of the cruelty that spins his life will become an outcry of injustice \u201cthat finds no resting place.\u201d<\/p>\n [16] Thus far, from Job\u2019s account, cruelty includes neglect, the misuse of power, an indiscriminate fierce turning-around of human value and human life, and the fact that cruelty encounters all spheres of his life from intra-personal and inter-personal, to the socio-institutional spheres.<\/p>\n [17] But these aspects of cruelty are already clear in Job\u2019s statement to God \u2013 \u201cYou have become cruel to me.\u201d Job in fact draws this conclusion about cruelty based on particular recurring central themes that run up and through the previous thirty chapters of his life. We can locate a few of these central themes evident throughout the course of the narrative, which also affect all three spheres of intra-personal, inter-personal, and socio-institutional existence.<\/p>\n [18] These central themes are: a) first, Job undergoes repetitive traumas. He is traumatized (6:1-7:21), \u2013 \u201cAh, could my anguish but be measured and my calamity laid with it in the scales, they would outweigh the sands of the sea!\u201d; b) the narrative likewise consistently employs the images of excision, such as cutting, tearing, and piercing \u2013 \u201cThe arrows of the Almighty pierce me\u201d (6:4), and his friend rebukes Job \u2013 \u201cYou are tearing yourself in anger\u201d (18:4). It is interesting to note that in many texts and experiences the images of excision, when speaking and writing about cruelty, are usually evident in tearing, piercing, cutting, shredding, or biting, from the bitten apple to the pierced side of Jesus. Along with trauma and excision, c) a third theme emerges, which is that Job has consistently become an enigma. He has not become an enemy to himself, but rather \u2018other\u2019 to both himself, his familial and social relationships, and his former public responsibilities and offices. The tempestuel turning-around of Job to the enigmatic, where \u201cnow they sing of me in mockery [where] I am become a byword\u201d encounters his whole life. Finally, d) it goes almost without saying that this turning-around in Job\u2019s life, and at the core of his values, leaves him in a perpetual state of internal struggle without a means of release. It is in this perpetual nature, that struggle and trauma often coincide, bodily and socially evident in the narrative through boils and destruction to Job\u2019s body.[9]<\/p>\n [19] From Job we receive a succinct interpretation of cruelty in this narrative. Cruelty is an excess that involves neglect, the misuse of power, an indiscriminate fierce turning-around of deeply held human value and human life through deception. Cruelty in this narrative likewise involves central themes of trauma, excision, the enigmatic, and perpetual struggle without a means of release. All of these central themes impinge upon Job, and the constellation of these draw him to the conclusion that God has become cruel to him.<\/p>\n [20] Now, why have we not read and interpreted cruelty through this narrative, even though it is clearly before us? For that matter, why have theologians and philosophers repeatedly glazed over cruelty, and why do we hear this word even today without much thought to clarification? I want to offer two possible responses to these questions.<\/p>\n Cruelty as an Encounter with Ugliness:<\/p>\n [21] A first response is that cruelty, as rawness, or an excess, is normatively repulsive; it is aesthetically repelling; it is ugly. It is difficult to look at. Both perpetrator and victim are encountered by cruelty where the common integrity of human life, and life itself, are affected. Media stories that sensationalize human suffering in the name of newsworthiness, The Dutch Reformed Church\u2019s theological justification for Apartheid, the sexual exploitation of women in the Philippines that is cloistered in a rationale of permissibility, child abuse, patriarchal entitlements, the supposed beloved ideals of yesterday \u2013 these can be implicated by cruelty as an excess, and an excess that affects humanity in widely divergent ways. The excess of cruelty is typified under the crust of the rationalized \u201cideal,\u201d such as the ideal for Freedom, or Patriarchy, or Obedience.<\/p>\n [22] With regard to the Ideal of Obedience and cruelty, and to explicate this point about the rationalized Ideal, consider the narrative of Abraham and Isaac, expertly illustrated in Rembrandt\u2019s famous painting. Abraham faces a monstrous imperative from God \u2013 He can either obey God and sacrifice Isaac, or disobey God and not sacrifice Isaac: Either way, Abraham will lose the promise of his progeny. Rembrandt recognizes the effect this monstrous imperative has not only on Abraham\u2019s intra-personal life, but certainly upon the interpersonal and social spheres that include Isaac and future progeny.<\/p>\n [23] Rembrandt depicts Isaac as the sacrificial lamb, whose chest is exposed and vulnerable to his father\u2019s knife. Abraham\u2019s enormous left hand covers his son\u2019s face as a shield that serves to distance both father and son from their intimate relation and from the oncoming excessive trespass or act of excision, which also conceals from the spectator a fundamental element of the human drama unfolding; Isaac\u2019s response, his thoughts and feelings of either betrayal, struggle or traumatized silence, the forthcoming excision, his identity evaporating into the enigmatic \u2013 all of this is concealed under the heavy brush strokes of Abraham\u2019s palm. And yet, it is in Abraham\u2019s eyes and the turn of his shoulders where Rembrandt directs the spectator: there is no doubt, left unchecked the father is going to slaughter the son. The determined, furrowed stare that renders Isaac\u2019s flesh opaque coupled with the forward twisting thrust of his massive torso bears witness to the fact that Abraham is indeed already plunging the knife downward toward his son\u2019s neck when the angel grabs his wrist and abruptly halts him. What Rembrandt freezes on canvas is obedience exceeding into the cruel loss of human relation, of promise altogether. Abraham is obedient, but obedience can be cruel. These conflicting qualities drive the spectator to the limit of both obedience and paternal cruelty.<\/p>\n [24] Ideals become harbingers for cruelty when they rationalize human irrationality, and thereby render excess somehow normative. And these normative and rationalized excesses are integral to many of our core narratives to meaning and truth.<\/p>\n [25] Consider the ethno-religious ideal of winning righteousness from the divine creator at the price of killing fellow human beings, or the pursuit of the contemporary ideal of divinely inspired ambiguous freedom at the price of death and war, or the ideal of institutional justice and mercy that serves as a foil for state-sanctioned revenge. Or, return once more and consider the ideal of Job as the Faithful Servant. The long-held and popularized ideal of Job as Faithful Servant has concealed \u2013 as Nietzsche said we have a penchant for doing \u2013 the Job who queries after cruelty in his life and the world. The ideal itself concealed the very item Nietzsche warned us about: The Ideal of Faithful Servant conceals not Job\u2019s complaint, but his accusation of God \u2013 \u201cYou have become cruel to me.\u201d How have we missed the centrality of this accusation within the Job narrative? Because the implications of such accusations for divine justice, for theodicy itself, make the quest for understanding cruelty repulsive to us. The accusation of God\u2019s cruelty has gone unseen because it offers ugly implications, such as the projection of cruelty in the mind of God, and thus remains buried under the aesthetically triumphant crust of the ideal for millennia \u2013 thus, enter Job, the exemplar of the Ideal of Faithful Servitude. But didn\u2019t God nearly destroy Job? And what did Job think of God for doing that? Job\u2019s ability to identify what is happening to him is one of the fundamental lessons of this narrative, but cruelty is difficult to face, and is subsequently buried under the crust of the Ideal.<\/p>\n [26] The second response why we have perhaps not read cruelty clearly into the Job narrative has larger implications, and has directly to do with which ending of this narrative we like best. The fact is, two eschatologies are at work in the narrative of Job, representative respectively at the first shorter redacted ending of Job, and likewise the second longer redacted ending of Job.<\/p>\n [27] In the second redacted ending of Job, the reader learns that Job is a faithful servant. What was irrational is made rational, and the narrative bears this out for the reader. Job receives his life back in unspoiled form \u2013 his friends, family, belongings, social and economic status, his bodily vigor, all return. This second ending is not aesthetically displeasing (that is., ugly) and offers an eschatological perspective on the nature of hope. Despite all former excess, Job is ultimately restored.<\/p>\n [28] And yet, the first and earlier redacted ending of the Job narrative challenges the reader to interpret eschatological hope anew. In the first redacted ending, none of the tangible restorative elements take place. Job is left destitute. The end of the narrative reads like a closing veil, where Job is left alone with God, repenting in dust and ashes. The curtain closes, where the interiority of Job and the quiet dynamics of reconciliation are obscured in an eternally recurring checkmate. What does this relationship mean? How does the reader interpret an eschatological moment of hope therein? How shall humanity respond to excessive ugliness in our communities and in the world? What news will public theology bring to bear on cruelty in a world grown impatient with theological platitudes on reconciliation? In the second redacted ending of Job, the irrational is made rational through the Ideal of the Faithful Servant. In the first redacted ending, the irrational remains. Which ending is more representative of how we experience life? As a good friend of mine in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church told me recently, in a conversation about the first redacted ending \u201cThat\u2019ll preach!\u201d he said. It will preach because there is a kernel of truth for us in the integrity of Job to identify his life and the cruelty taking place in and through him, without letting the visage slip by.<\/p>\n Institutional Cruelty as a \u201cDeath Zone\u201d<\/p>\n [29] Finally, I want to tell you something more of this international and inter-disciplinary consultation through the World Council of Churches on the phenomenology of cruelty and conflict transformation. Drawing from their own experiences, contexts, and fields, members of the consultation wrote a few items about the apparent uniform effects of cruelty on societies around the world, worth noting here:<\/p>\n [30] First, cruelty \u201ccauses suffering and pain beyond that associated with ordinary evil, even when such evil is itself an ordinary experience (e.g., slaves revolting against their masters became commonplace). Typically, the pain and the related suffering \u2013 both of which can be physical, psychological and\/or spiritual \u2013 are inflicted upon the victim and are extremely intense (e.g., torture), frequent (e.g., occupation), prolonged (e.g., colonialist exploitation) and destructive (e.g., genocide).<\/p>\n [31] Second, the infliction of pain is often intentional, calculated, indifferent, and may even be a means of delight. Cruelty can be hidden in rationalizations, cultural myths and justifications that betray truth and a common humanity (e.g., the theological rationalizations of Apartheid by the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa).<\/p>\n [32] Third, cruelty in society reveals a disparity of power that exists between the perpetrator and the victim. The perpetrator seeks for and gathers as great a power as possible over the victim. In this way, cruelty can become a systemic means for the institutionalization of the maximal disparity of power between the perpetrator and the victim (e.g., such as the conflict that has abated in Northern Ireland).<\/p>\n [33] Fourth, cruelty leads to dehumanization. The perpetrator denies the humanity of the victim, so that the victim may become unable to perceive his or her own humanity. The victim is subjected to a process of objectification that allows the perpetrator to take possession of the victim, to fully objectify the otherness of the victim. (such as sex trafficking in the Philippines or Porto Alegre of young girls).<\/p>\n [34] It is in light of this last identification of objectification that I want to make some closing remarks on interpreting cruelty. Cruelty has everything to do with the objectification of the other. In fact, Job\u2019s exclamation that God has become cruel swings on the fulcrum of a statement directly beforehand \u2013 Job says that God is standing back and only looking at him, without the arm extended in assistance. Objectification, when it is institutionalized, leads to what Etienne Balibar, in his essay Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty, calls a \u201cdeath zone.\u201d In a radically globalizing world, this phrase \u201cdeath zone\u201d gains some traction in our understanding of cruelty today. Balibar writes that \u201cwhat some Latin American sociologists provocatively call poblaci\u00f3n chatarra, [or] \u2018garbage humans,\u2019 [are those human beings who are] \u2018thrown\u2019 away, out of the global city,\u201d from this-side-of-the-border to across-the-border.[10] Those humans who are abstracted and externalized from this-side of peace, discover themselves, as Balibar continues, \u201cin the face of a cumulative effect of different forms of extreme violence or cruelty which are displayed in what I call the \u2018death zones\u2019 of humanity . . . .\u201d[11]<\/p>\n [35] Consider what we said before about cruelty appearing in the crust of the rational. In \u201cdeath zones\u201d of violence and cruelty, Balibar writes that what we encounter appears to be \u201can absolute triumph of irrationality.\u201d[12] Of course, the irrationality of \u201cdeath zones\u201d in human life and relation can be traced prior to their macro-cosmic and geopolitical manifestations. Balibar\u2019s insightful location of \u201ccruelty\u201d in the global and geopolitical environs also suggests that \u201cdeath zones\u201d begin deeper-down in the local or regional narratives that form injustices; these injustices turn rationality upside-down after which \u201cirrationality\u201d does appear to triumph. ((We encounter the irrationality of \u201cdeath zones\u201d in our narratives to meaning and truth. Consider Cain who kills Abel to win God\u2019s favor, only to lose God\u2019s favor because he killed Abel)).<\/p>\n [36] We have considered in this paper the topos of cruelty, its historically denied and ill-defined yet constant status through the history of western thought, the aesthetics of cruelty as ugly and repelling to thought, and exegetical considerations of cruelty from Job who sees cruelty in the mind of God. These led us to final comments about cruelty as a \u201cdeath zone\u201d in the socio-institutional sphere. The labors of reconciliation through, in and after an exploration of cruelty stand as a separate assessment. However, our first task is to understand how cruelty \u2013 from intra-personal to institutional forms \u2013 influences human life and relation in manifold contexts.<\/p>\n Endnotes<\/p>\n [1] Friedrich Nietzsche, Morgenr\u00f6the I: 18:<\/p>\n [2] Friedrich Nietzsche, \u201cHomer\u2019s Wettkampf,\u201d F\u00fcnf Vorreden zu f\u00fcnf ungeschriebene B\u00fcchern, Werke Historische-Kritische Ausgabe III:2 (Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1994). See also Daniel Breazeale, trans. & ed., Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early 1870’s.<\/p>\n [3] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), 13.<\/p>\n [4] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 2.2.159. See also 2.2.30, \u201cProperly speaking, a man does not pity himself, but suffers in himself, as when we suffer cruel treatment in ourselves.\u201d; Seneca, De Clementia ii, See Calvin\u2019s Commentary on Seneca\u2019s De Clementia, ed. Ford Lewis Battles and Andr\u00e9 Malan Hugo, (Leiden, Netherlands: E.J. Brill, 1969); Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 8, 14-17; Annette C. Baier, \u201cMoralism and Cruelty: Reflections on Hume and Kant,\u201d Ethics: An International Journal of Social, Political, and Legal Philosophy, v. 103, Gerald Dworkin, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 437.<\/p>\n [5] Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of the Americas, (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 133, 143, 171, and Facing the Extreme, (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999), 214.<\/p>\n [6] Etienne Balibar, University of Lausanne, \u201cOutlines of a Topography of Cruelty,\u201d L\u2019humanitaire en catastrophe (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 1999), 20.<\/p>\n [7] Job 30: 21.<\/p>\n [8] The phraseology of Proverbs 27:4 likewise utilizes the image of turning, or the transmogrification of a former relation.<\/p>\n [9] 6:1-7:21 \u2013 Trauma is as an \u201canguish\u201d that is immeasurable; 6:4, 18:4 \u2013 Pierced by the \u201carrows of the almighty,\u201d and Job \u201ctearing at himself in anger\u201d; 30: 9-13 \u2013 Enigma, or what Job becomes when he is made a \u201cmockery\u201d or a \u201cbyword\u201d by those he once loved; Objectification \u2013 Once respected, Job becomes a site of scorn; 30:20, \u201cI cry to you but you do not answer me; you stand off and look at me.\u201d<\/p>\n [10] Etienne Balibar, \u201cOutlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,\u201d Constellations Volume 8, No 1, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001), 15-29.<\/p>\n [11] Balibar, \u201cOutlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,\u201d 24. \u201cThis [geopolitics], among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of \u2018topography, by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective.\u201d [Italics mine].<\/p>\n [12] Balibar, \u201cOutlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence,\u201d 24-5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [1] In the Contemporary English Version of the Bible, Luke 6:27-35 reads as follows: 27 This is what I say to all who will listen to me \u2013 Love your enemies, and be good to everyone who hates you. 28 Ask God to bless anyone who curses you, and pray for everyone who is cruel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-living"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n