What is Hospitality? (Part 1)

I have often asked this question of late, and it came back into my mind recently when we hosted some out of town guests a couple weeks ago for a big philosophy conference here at Duquesne. I hope to write more about our interactions with our guests and what a joy it was to have them here in due time, but I wanted to get this question off my chest because of its timeliness.

So what is hospitality? In Christian circles, particularly, we throw this word around a lot, using it haphazardly and without contemplation. Oftentimes, we say someone is really hospitable if they’re really good at throwing parties, make good food for large groups, or their house is typically the place for people to hang out. These are all good things, but this is not at all what the word means.

The word “hospitality” comes directly from Latin, “hospitalitas.” In Latin, “hospitas” means hostess or friend. The Greek word in the Bible translated hospitality is “philoxenia” (eg, Rom 12:13) literally “the love of strangers,” or “strange love,” as I like to say (because to the world, loving strangers is really strange!). This nuance is carried over into the Latin word “hospitus” which can mean either “hospitable” or “strange, foreign.”

Thus, inviting friends over to one’s house is not philoxenia but more akin to philadelphia (“brotherly love”), or fraternity (Latin from “frater” = brother), or perhaps even cronyism at times. Why is this nuance important? Because when we invite our friends over, we expect reciprocity. If I have a friend over at my place, I expect them to do the same. I scratch your back, you scratch mine, right? But hospitality is supposed to be a gift – and gifts are freely given, no strings attached.

Jacques Derrida, a well-known contemporary philosopher (who is usually misunderstood and der-ided by Christians [Get it – Der-rida, der-ided? Derrida often did this kind of things with words which makes it all the more interesting!), wrote often about hospitality later in his life as it related to the notions of justice, nations, and democracy. He was very critical of fraternity because of its reciprocal nature and called for a democracy that involves unconditional hospitality, a welcoming of the stranger – a nation without borders, that welcomed the immigrant rather than drawing lines of superiority and inferiority based on nationality. Our understanding of nations, or of our community, ought to involve hospitality, a welcoming of the Other, the stranger, the orphan, the widow, and immigrant. But in order for this to be the case, some nuances of the word “community” must be removed. Thus, Derrida would often speak of a “community without community,” with the point being of trying to conceptualize the notion of community without the linguistic implication of essential sameness as well as the us/them or in-group/out-group notion that is inherent within the word. We might describe it as a call for solidarity without assimilation, perhaps.

In Latin, for instance, “communio” means both “communion, mutual participation” but it can also mean “to fortify on all sides, to secure.” Thus, when we say “community” we are often saying, “Yeah, come and join us, but you have to become just like us if you want to and we’re committed to keep out everyone who is different from us” – as is often the case for church membership or how many people understand American citizenship. Likewise, in Latin “communis” means common, united, or universal,” and we can see the detriment of this aspect of community in some forms of communism in which the unity of the group forces a complete eradication of all individuality, creativity, and difference. Too often when people say, “we need to be united” they really mean, “we all need to agree and believe the exact same thing.”

There is something else going on in our notion of hospitality that makes it a paradox, for when I welcome someone into my home, I am situating myself as the powerbroker, the owner of the house, the one who is the master and sovereign of the place. They are a visitor to my abode, a guest inside my possession. In other words, the notion of hospitality is supposed to be one of graciousness and love and welcoming, but it is simultaneously annulled by these binary positions of power and non-power. As John Caputo summarizes, “There is an essential ‘self-limitation’ built right into the idea of hospitality, which preserves the distance between one’s own and the stranger… So there is always a little hostility in all hosting and hospitality, constituting a certain ‘hostil/pitality.’”

In this sense, hospitality is a contradiction, an “impossibility.” Caputo continues, “[H]ow can I graciously welcome the other while still retaining my sovereignty, my master of the house? How can I limit my gift? … Hospitality really starts to happen when I push against this limit, this threshold, this paralysis, inviting hospitality to cross its own threshold and limit, its own self-limitation, to become a gift beyond hospitality… That requires that the host must, in a moment of madness, tear up the understanding between him and the guest, act with ‘excess,’ make an absolute gift of his property, which is of course impossible. But that is the only way the guest can go away feeling as if he was really made at home.” In other words, hospitality begins when the lines between host and guest become blurred, when my notion of community is rid of its desire to fortify and secure.

A wonderful example of this is the scene in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables in which the convict, Jean Valjean, stays at Bishop Monseigneur Bienvenu’s house. In the middle of the night, Jean Valjean steals away with the Bishop’s silver, pewter plates, and so forth. The next day, soldiers come to Bienvenu’s house (the maids all in a tizzy about the missing possessions), Jean Valjean in hand to inquire about the silver found in the convict’s knapsack. At the appearance of the convict, the old priest hurries up to him and exclaims, “Ah, there you are! I am glad to see you. But! I gave you the candlesticks also, which are silver like the rest, and would bring two hundred francs. Why did you not take them along with your plates?... My friend, before you go away, here are your candlesticks, take them… Now, go in peace. By the way, my friend, when you come again, you need not come through the garden. You can always come in and go out by the front door. It is closed only with a latch, day or night.”

Now that is hospitality!

Jesus said similar things. Jesus was once invited to a party by a wealthy religious ruler. At the party, he looked at the man who had invited him and said, “When you give a dinner or a banquet, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you” (Luke 14:12-14). Jesus and Derrida agree: Hospitality is not about reciprocity and is too often confused with other things.

[To be Continued...]