Dear Marion,

Thank you very, very much for your thoughtful letter
about Chapter 7. I will think about it and reply in 
detail probably tomorrow - i.e. later today. My very
preliminary thoughts are:
1) I too am dissatisfied with Albert's sermon.
2) Stylistically it's not necessary that Albert's speech
be canonically valid. All that is required that it 
set forth a consistent point of view, even if that
view is (ultimately) indefensible.
3) The faultiness of Albert's reasoning becomes clear
when he is killed by one of the bears whom he has fed
and befriended.
4) The name Albert, I borrowed from Albert Schweitzer
who, as you probably know was also a musician - he
had a piano in his apartment in Equatorial Africa,
and who espoused a philosophy which he referred to
as reverence for life (Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben).
Albert's sermon is an exploration of the implications
of that notion, the ultimate in animal liberation.
5) It was not Caiphas and Pilate who sacrificed Jesus.
Jesus sacrificed himself imitating the prescription
of Isaiah 53. Again, I'm not proselytizing, when I 
point out that the crux of that religious revolution
was the substitution with inwardness (individuality)
with logos, with the word (of God) of the outwardness
(public nature) of the Mosaic legal corpus.
Note the contrast of language as a focus of individual
meditation with language as public prescription.
(I propose to translate theology into theory of literature.)
As I pointed out early on - and it made you laugh, -
the "I am that I am" at the burning bush,
and the prohibition against naming deity
constitute an analogous, parallel transformation
of religious experience.
The name is by its nature public and objective;
the prohibition against uttering the name makes
that which had previously been objective, public
and outward into something subjective, private
and inward.

That is why I consider Christianity, - which unavoidably
becomes public and objective, - to be forever in need of
recursion to its Mosaic roots. - I hear you laughing.

=================

I'm quite calm, not agitated at all. It's all literature.
I get carried away by the drama and the rhetoric.

Jochen