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Reading Selections from Critical Thinking for Christians by Peter Kreeft

February 9, 2010

Dr. Peter Kreeft is the author of nearly 50 books. Critical Thinking is a short essay he wrote for a Christian magazine. I’ve made selections, assigned topics and highlighted the important. I love his thought on reason being narrowed to calculation and the scientific method during the Enlightenment. This is a shot across the bow of our Atheist friends who sometimes don’t realize the roots of their Atheism.

What Is Critical Thinking
Critical thinking is more than just thinking critically in the sense of criticizing others’ thoughts, or our own, by finding one or more of the three things that can go wrong with thoughts: ambiguities, falsehoods, or fallacies. Critical thinking means judgment and evaluation but it does not mean only negative evaluation.

Another word for “critical thinking” is “logical thinking.” This is a high and holy thing, in fact a very Christian thing because the ultimate foundation of logic is the Logos, the eternal Mind or Reason or Inner Word of God, which John’s Gospel identifies as the pre-incarnate Christ. The human art and science of logic is the instrument that teaches us to rightly order and structure our thoughts, as a means to the end of thought, which is truth.

One of the most useful aspects of that ordering and structuring is the realization that all the things that can ever go wrong with any thoughts come under just these three headings: ambiguous terms, false premises, or logical fallacies. And this is a wonderful simplifying and clarifying of the process of criticizing any thoughts, written or spoken, by any person, yourself or another, about any topic, human or divine.

Three Standards Of Critical Thinking
“Critical thinking” is simply the currently fashionable term for what used to be called “human reason.” It means judging thoughts, negatively or positively, by these three standards, but it also includes at least four more things:

(1)     First, it includes generating thoughts, or creating thoughts. Man cannot create matter, like God, but he can create thoughts. What is usually called “creative thinking” in schools today is unjustifiably limited to creating new and original thoughts, which are usually shallow and foolish thoughts because most of us are shallow and foolish thinkers. In fact we are so shallow and foolish that we think that we are deep and wise, and we think that the new and original thoughts we have are better than the old and traditional thoughts of the past, which are the “tried and true” “cream of the crop” of thoughts from thousands of deeper and wiser minds than ours, thoughts that have been tested by time and by millions of other human beings, and which have survived the tsunami of forgetfulness that obliterates most of the memories of each generation, thoughts that have been judged precious and preserved by tradition. As Dorothy Sayers brilliantly pointed out long ago in Creed or Chaos, echoing G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, Christian orthodoxy is the most truly creative and dramatic thought in the world, while every heresy comes from a lack of creativity. Hell has a very limited imagination. Contrast the limited imagination of the demon who tempts you to tediously repeat your besetting sin with the creative imagination of the Creator of the Big Bang, the quark, the Venus flytrap, the ostrich, and Monty Python.
But all this is, alas, incomprehensible to the National Teachers Association, which is one of the two infallible magisteria we have on earth, and every Catholic educator should be grateful to God for them, for they have a 100% error rate, as Rome has a 100% truth rate.

(2)     The second thing that critical thinking also includes is continuing thoughts rightly once they are created, following a thought as you would follow a deer through a forest. It takes much more moral virtue to follow a thought, virtues like courage and patience and persistence, than merely to generate a thought in the first place, because generating a thought is largely passive, easy, and delightful while pursuing a thought is active, hard, and onerous. The first is inspiration, the second is perspiration.
Socrates was a great example of these virtues of courage, patience, and persistence in following a thought. He never abandoned his quest for the answer to the Delphic oracle’s impossible puzzle of “know thyself,” and even though he made some crucial errors in his solution to it, such as reincarnation, which he called “a likely story,” and the ignoring of the body. Yet his persistence on this quest was the primary origin of Western philosophy, which is perhaps the second most beautiful flower that has ever grown in the soil of Western civilization, after Christianity.
Great philosophers are persistent, or in plainer language, stubborn. Augustine was stubborn, and ruthlessly honest, and fanatically intolerant of logical and personal error, and therefore he succeeded in breaking through a thousand intellectual and moral obstacles to become the second most influential Christian of all time, after St. Paul. Aquinas was stubborn. At age 4 he asked his teacher “What is God?” and because his teacher could not answer him, he eventually wrote the Summa Theologica. If you want to read a good book, sometimes you first have to write it yourself.
Even good atheists and agnostics can be great philosophers if they are stubborn. Camus was stubbornly honest, and had he lived, he might have become another Dostoyevski or Tolstoi. Heidegger was stubborn. All his long life and throughout his long winding trail of thinking and writing, he thought about nothing except being – he would not let the question go – and that is why he became, not the best, but probably the most important, philosopher of the 20th century.

(3)     Third, critical thinking also includes insisting on thinking consistently, which means daring to think two premises together and draw the logically necessary conclusion. This is the fundamental form of logical thinking, the syllogism. There is nothing uncreative about a syllogism. It is so creative, in fact, that it is very much like sexual intercourse, in that it produces a product, a thought-child, if we do not artificially contracept it by erecting a barrier between the premises and their conclusion, which we usually do, especially when we fear that the conclusion, like a baby, would be inconvenient to us.
For instance, it is almost universally admitted that these two premises are true but the conclusion is usually resisted: first, that there is a psycho-somatic unity to the human essence and, secondly, that our bodies, which are half of our essence, are masculine or feminine innately, not just by social convention. But rarely is the conclusion drawn that the other half of our essence, our souls, are therefore also innately, and not just conventionally, masculine or feminine. But it is logical. If body and soul are related as matter and form, it is no more possible to change one without changing the other than it is to change the words of a book without changing the meaning, or to change the meaning without changing the words. For they are also related as matter and form.
Here is another, closely related example: if this conclusion about innate masculinity or femininity of souls, in turn, is joined with the additional premise that our whole human identity will be preserved rather than lost in Heaven, that grace perfects nature rather than bypassing it, then I think we will derive some very daring but interesting conclusions about sexuality in Heaven, or at least we will dare to ask the question, dare to think about our two greatest passions together – sex and sanctity – which is something few modern theologians do. (John Paul II is the shining exception with his “theology of the body.”). But to do this involves following the path of logical thinking to its end, not just beginning to follow it. It means letting the river of logic take the raft of your thoughts wherever it will take them rather than where you will take them (which is usually only where the Zeitgeist will take them, the social fashions and ideologies that have unconsciously formed your thoughts).
This aspect of critical thinking, drawing conclusions logically from your thoughts, involves not only seeing these logical consequences with the intellect but also acknowledging them with the will. And that requires moral as well as intellectual virtue, for it requires slaying the attractively disguised dragons of sloth which lurk next to each hard and unexpected turn taken by the path of thought. Sloth means not just any kind of laziness but the refusal to exert oneself when in the presence of a spiritual good; and it is a spiritual good to seek and find the truth, to follow the path of thinking, even when it is dark, to the light at the end of that tunnel; to think through a thought thoroughly; to do as good a job and build as sound a building with thoughts as we do with bricks or steel.

(4)     A fourth element of critical thinking is applying conclusions rightly in the practical order, letting our thought make a difference to our life, translating principles into practice. The single most crucial instance of this is one that is embarrassing to all of us, and worse than embarrassing. If we are Christians we all admit that the only way to true happiness is sanctity, not sin. We know this truth not only by faith but also by reason and by repeated experience. Everyone seeks deep, true, lasting happiness, and only the saints find it. Yet we are not saints. Every time we sin, we suffer, yet we keep sinning. Every time we overcome sin, we have deep joy, yet we keep refusing joy. God keeps offering us joy in His right hand and misery in His left, and we keep saying, “Duh, I think I’ll try the left hand.” We are, in other words, quite simply, insane. That’s one of the meanings of Original Sin. If we only lived logically, we would all be saints. Instead, we think illogically and uncritically. We keep uncritically falling for the Devil’s advertisements, eating the worms on his fish hooks. We desperately hope that there is some other way to happiness than God’s way, even though no one has ever found it. That is not critical thinking
For instance, every morning we are faced with our first choice of the day: do we give our first thoughts to God, do we take that first thought captive and bring it to the feet of our Lord, or do we claim it for ourselves and use it to gratify our own way to happiness, whatever we think that is? Do we yield our brain to the thousand tiny soldiers that run at it across the battlefields of waking consciousness, who threaten it with their tiny swords of worry thoughts and planning thoughts and “my will be done” thoughts? Or do we mercilessly murder those little bastards from Hell by the authority and power of the God who is a consuming fire, and trust ourselves and our day to Him? Do we think: I am going to be so busy today that I have no time to pray? Or do we think: I am going to be so busy today that I must begin my day with prayer, because if I do not give Christ the meager loaves and fishes of my time, they will not be multiplied and at the end of the day I will be frazzled and frizzled like hair in a hurricane? Usually, we selfishly eat these loaves and fishes ourselves, fearing any diminution of them if we give them to the One who alone can multiply them and always does, if we give them up – which we well know from repeated experience. We all know the results of these two experiments: every single day of our lives we have performed one or the other of them, and the results have never varied. Yet we insist on singing Sinatra’s song “I Did It My Way” instead of “God’s Way is the Best Way” day after day, even though Sinatra’s song is the song they all sing as they enter Hell, while the other one is the one they all sing on the way to Heaven.
This fourth aspect of critical thinking – its practical application – is of course the most important one of all because it makes the biggest difference to our lives. In fact “important” may fairly be defined as “making a difference to your life.” Buddha knew the life-changing importance of critical thinking better than most of us do. The very first and best known line of the best known and best loved Buddhist book, the Dhammapada, says:

“All that we are is determined by our thoughts;
it begins where our thoughts begin,
it moves where our thoughts move,
it ends where our thoughts end.”

This is even more crucial to a Christian, who knows that the end of the road is not just temporal but eternal happiness or misery. As one obscure writer has reminded us:

“Sow a thought, reap an act;
Sow an act, reap a habit;
Sow a habit, reap a character;
Sow a character, reap a destiny.”

Buddha was right: “all that we are is determined by our thoughts.”

So for a Christian, critical thinking means not only thinking that has been purged of illogic but also of sin; not only thinking that has been subjected to the honest judgment of the theoretical reason, but also to the honest judgment of the practical reason, or reason about practice, i.e. moral reason.

The judgment of the theoretical reason consists in these three logical questions:

(1)     what does it mean?
(2)     is it true? and
(3)     what is the evidence or proof?

In other words, are there any ambiguous terms, are there any false premises, and are there any logical fallacies? If not, the conclusion is true.

The judgment of the practical, moral reason consists in a single question: is this good or evil? A crucial difference between the judgment of the theoretical reason and the judgment of the practical reason is that the judgment of the practical reason is almost always clear, and immediate, and certain. We know what is good and what is evil far more clearly than we know what is true and false. Our conscience is louder than our logic. Most problems of discerning God’s will are moral, not intellectual. Jesus Himself said, when asked by the Pharisees how they could understand His teaching, “If your will were to do the will of my Father, you would understand my teaching.” That is the most important principle of critical thinking about morality.

Reason, Or Critical Thinking, Comes From God. It Is God’s Gift
But how can that be true if it is something we do and something we are responsible for? God does not do our critical thinking for us.

It is God’s gift for two reasons.

(1)     First, because it is the exercise of an essential part of the image of God in us. God does not think our thoughts for us, yet our minds are dependent on God’s mind just as totally as the existence of  the physical universe is dependent on God’s will to “let it be” and on God’s power to do all that He wills. Our minds are mirrors, and God is the sun, and all the light we generate is reflected light from Him; yet it is our choice to turn our mirrors to the sun or not, and to keep them clean or not, and to keep them unbroken or to break them into fragments. Every time we think wrongly, we misuse a divine gift, just as whenever we misuse our free will we misuse a divine gift. Both wrong thinking and wrong choosing are sacrileges, because they desecrate a holy thing. What we pervert in wrong thinking is the mirrored powers of God’s own mind that He gave us in giving us His own image. We pervert this image whenever we move our minds into the dark and away from the light, just as we pervert the mirrored powers of God’s will which He gave us in giving us free will as part of His image in us, whenever we move our wills to evil and away from good. God continues to uphold in existence His spiritual gifts, the two powers of His image in us, even when we pervert them, just as He continues to uphold the physical universe even when we misuse it. At the moment when He said “Be” in creating the universe, he said “continue to be” to Cain’s rock even as it split Abel’s head, and to the nails we used to pierce His own Son’s flesh on the Cross.

(2)     The second reason critical thinking is God’s gift is because grace perfects nature, and this is an essential part of human nature, the ability and the desire to think logically as a means to thinking truly. The fact that grace perfects nature means that the very same things that are truly ours, and come from our own human nature and activity, can be truly God’s, and from the actions of His grace. (This principle, by the way, is the central and simple key to reconciling free will and predestination: what is divinely predestined is precisely our truly free choices.)

My third, fourth, and fifth points will be very short because we all know the answer to them pretty well.

How Should Critical Thinking Order Our Thoughts?
The third question is: How should critical thinking order our thoughts? And my answer is: Unconscious  time but by conscious decision sometimes, especially those times when it is hardest and we are most tempted to laziness.

There are many other good ways of thinking than thinking logically –thinking intuitively or mystically or imaginatively or romantically or even sometimes randomly – and there are many occasions when we should think non-logically, but there are never times when we should think illogically, except when we are deliberately making a joke, laughing at laughable follies. But our lives should not be laughable follies.

Thus the answer to this third question, how critical thinking should order our thoughts, is also the answer to the fourth question, how it should order our actions. For “Sow a thought, reap an act.” It takes the will, not the mind, to carry out the thought into the act, and between the thought and the act lies many a shadow. But that is a topic for another day, when we talk about moral vices and virtues.

We should “live according to reason,” said the ancient Greeks, meaning not that we should be computers rather than human beings, but that we should be human beings rather than animals. Reason is not limited to logic, though logic is one of the things that sharply distinguish human reason from animal consciousness. The meaning of that great old word “Reason” was arbitrarily narrowed to “calculation” beginning with Descartes and the Enlightenment (which I prefer to call the Endarkenment) and with the restriction of all approved thinking to what can be proved by the scientific method – which, of course, is self-contradictory since that very principle cannot be proved by the scientific method! Confusing life with a laboratory is not what it means to live according to reason. Moral conscience, aesthetic appreciation, intelligent, responsible religious faith, intuitive wisdom, and even mystical experience are all part of the powers of human reason in the broad old honorable Greek sense of the word. Sometimes I think half the world’s problems would be solved if the whole world had to speak ancient Greek. It would be like Pentecost: an undoing of the Tower of Babel.

How Should Critical Thinking Order Our Individual Lives and Secular World
And the fifth question, how critical thinking should order our secular world, is simply an extension of the fourth question, how it should order our individual lives, for the life of the world is simply the coming together of all our individual lives.

Just think for a moment what a radical revolution it would be if the whole world practiced just one basic virtue of thought, the virtue of honesty – not just honesty with each other but honesty with yourself and with the truth.

The world does not lack the knowledge of solutions to its problems; almost any one of the basic virtues –justice, charity, gratitude, compassion, wisdom, honesty – if practiced, would transform the world from a vale of tears to a palace of joys. How to attain this Utopian dream? There is a very simple way: one person at a time. You have only an appallingly tiny control over whether others join this radical revolution, but you have an appallingly large control, and responsibility, over whether you do. Start working for world peace and justice and understanding. Start inside the walls of your house.

How Should Critical Thinking Order Our Spiritual Warfare
The sixth question is: How should critical thinking order our jihad, our spiritual warfare? We are soldiers of the King, and the purpose of our life on earth is to work and fight for His kingdom. We are at war with the enemies of peace, because He is. He told us that: “I came not to bring peace but a sword.” His kingdom is a Kingdom of peace. He wants us to make peace with the three parties we are at war with: neighbor and self and God; and therefore His Kingdom is at war with the world, the flesh, and the devil, who are at war with neighbor, self, and God. If we are Christians, we fight; but if we are Christians we fight with weapons like poverty and chastity and obedience, for we fight against enemies like greed and lust and pride. Now how is critical thinking a weapon in this war?

The enemy in this war is Satan and his fallen angels, of course – unless our Lord, His Church, and His Book are all fools or liars. As you know if you have read C.S. Lewis’s masterful expose of the enemy’s strategy called The Screwtape Letters, the enemy’s two strongest strategies are: Dim the Lights and Divide and Conquer. “Dim the Lights” means “Don’t let them think clearly and honestly.” “Divide and Conquer” means “Make them hate and resent and mistrust each other and wrestle against each other rather than against the principalities and powers of darkness in high places.” Thus “Divide and conquer” also depends on “Dim the lights” for it means “Confuse them about who their enemy really is.” No medical operation can be carried out without light, and no military operation can either. No matter how powerful an army is, if it is blind, it will lose. A blind Cyclops will lose to a clever Ulysses. A blind Christian will lose to a clever devil.

One form of blindness that is very hard for us to detect in ourselves is a skewered perspective, majoring in minors, missing forests for trees. A shining example of a man who is trying to restore a right perspective today is Pope Benedict, especially in his recent Regensburg address, which from the perspective of the destiny of Western civilization is perhaps the most important speech since Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement Address. Benedict does not see Islamic terrorists as the primary problem in today’s world. They are only a symptom of a deeper issue in the Islamic world: is Allah a God of reason or of force? Is He to be worshipped because He is powerful or because He is good? Christianity gave a sharp and unmistakable answer to that question, on Calvary. If Islam gives the same answer, or something like the same answer, something close to the same answer, then we invite them to join us in an ecumenical jihad, a common spiritual warfare in the name of our common God against our common enemy, which is modern Western atheism, secularism, and relativism, the apostasy and rebellion against that God on the part of the nations of the West that made up the civilization that used to be called Christendom.

To have that kind of clear perspective is like being a lookout on the “Titanic,” or the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” It certainly deserves the title “critical thinking” because it is thinking rightly about crisis.

Many more things could be said, but I will end soon, with my last point, the eschatological or Heavenly dimension of critical thinking, because I want to give you time to digest this. For it seems to me that that is the highest purpose of communication: to stimulate thought, which naturally expresses itself in questions and dialog. Talks are monologs. Dialogs are better. In fact, monologs exist for the sake of dialogs. The nature of ultimate reality is not monolog but dialog: it is called the Trinity. I have always thought of talks as something like diving boards and dialog afterward as something like swimming pools, and I am impatient with speakers who act like they have squatter’s rights on diving boards. As you are probably now impatient with this article that is taking many minutes to end, rather than just ending!

What will critical thinking be in Heaven? Will it be part of the Beatific Vision? Or will it be a kind of comic relief from the Beatific Vision? I really don’t know, but here is my guess. I think the Beatific Vision is much more ordinary-looking than we think. I think Jesus had it all the time, until it was taken away in that moment of Hell on the Cross when He said, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” I think the saints in Heaven have the Beatific Vision all the time yet nevertheless can converse with us without haloes, without fits of distraction, and without losing the ability to make a joke. I think that, because that’s what Jesus was like. He was fully human, remember, as well as fully divine at the same time: “like us in all things save sin.” Jesus was not a mystic; or, if He was, He was a mystic and a perfectly ordinary man at the same time, so ordinary that most men missed His divinity. The greatest saint of the worst century in history, Mother Teresa, was totally ordinary: earthy as the earth, humble as humus, grounded as a grandmother. And her mind was like a small, sharp kitchen knife. It cut instantly through layers of baloney.

Do you want to see what critical thinking looks like? Read everything Mother Teresa ever said. And read John Paul the Great. And Augustine, and Aquinas. Complete, Heavenly critical thinking, the thing we are training for here, has all four of those dimensions at once, Like Jesus Himself. It is as profoundly logical as Aquinas, and as profoundly practical as Mother Teresa, and as profoundly visionary as John Paul II. I suggest these four models for your imitation and as your training for critical thinking on earth and in Heaven.

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Is Christianity Indistinguishable From Other “Pagan Myths?”

February 5, 2010

Have you ever dealt with those atheists who claim Christianity is indistinguishable from other “pagan myths?” Chesterton wrote the following about Christianity’s complex relationship to the mythological:

The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all. It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilizations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalize them, and even then only by trying to allegorize them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion.

The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers. Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty, in the sense in which beauty includes much of the most grotesque ugliness.

But the imagination has its own laws and therefore its own triumphs, which neither logicians nor men of science can understand. It remained true to that imaginative instinct through a thousand extravagances, through every crude cosmic pantomime of a pig eating the moon or the world being cut out of a cow, through all the dizzy convolutions and mystic malformations of Asiatic art, through all the stark and staring rigidity of Egyptian and Assyrian portraiture, through every kind of cracked mirror of mad art that seemed to deform the world and displace the sky, it remained true to something about which there can be no argument; something that makes it possible for some artist of some school to stand suddenly still before that particular deformity and say, ‘My dream has come true.’

Therefore do we all in fact feel that pagan or primitive myths are infinitely suggestive, so long as we are wise enough not to inquire what they suggest. Therefore we all feel what is meant by Prometheus stealing fire from heaven, until some prig of a pessimist or progressive person explains what it means. Therefore we all know the meaning of Jack and the Beanstalk, until we are told. In this sense it is true that it is the ignorant who accept myths, but only because it is the ignorant who appreciate poems. Imagination has its own laws and triumphs; and a tremendous power began to clothe its images, whether images in the mind or in the mud, whether in the bamboo of the South Sea Islands or the marble of the mountains of Hellas.

The following are reading selections from an article Rene Girard wrote called “Are the Gospels Mythical?” Professor Girard is the Andrew B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of French Language, Literature, and Civilization at Stanford University. His many books include Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.  An introduction to Professor Girard and his work is featured in the previous post.  Many of the concepts introduced there are discussed  in the following.

The Notion Of Christianity As A Myth
From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels’ resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith. When pagan apologists for the official pantheism of the Roman empire denied that the death-and-resurrection myth of Jesus differed in any significant way from the myths of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, etc., they failed to stem the rising Christian tide. In the last two hundred years, however, as anthropologists have discovered all over the world foundational myths that similarly resemble Jesus’ Passion and Resurrection, the notion of Christianity as a myth seems at last to have taken hold — even among Christian believers.

Beginning with some violent cosmic or social crisis, and culminating in the suffering of a mysterious victim (often at the hands of a furious mob), all these myths conclude with the triumphal return of the sufferer, thereby revealed as a divinity. The kind of anthropological research undertaken before World War II — in which theorists struggled to account for resemblances among myths — is regarded as a hopeless “metaphysical” failure by most anthropologists nowadays. Its failure seems, however, not to have weakened anthropology’s skeptical scientific spirit, but only to have weakened further, in some mysterious way, the plausibility of the dogmatic claims of religion that the earlier theorists had hoped to supersede: if science itself cannot formulate universal truths of human nature, then religion — as manifestly inferior to science — must be even more devalued than we had supposed.

This is the contemporary intellectual situation Christian thinkers face as they read the Scriptures. The Cross is incomparable insofar as its victim is the Son of God, but in every other respect it is a human event. An analysis of that event — exploring the anthropological aspects of the Passion that we cannot neglect if we take the dogma of the Incarnation seriously — not only reveals the falsity of contemporary anthropology’s skepticism about human nature. It also utterly discredits the notion that Christianity is in any sense mythological. The world’s myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

What the Lord Said
Jesus does, of course, compare his own story to certain others when he says that his death will be like the death of the prophets: “The blood of all the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be required of this generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah” (Luke 11:50-51). What, we must ask, does the word like really mean here? In the death most strikingly similar to the Passion — that of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, chapters 52–53 — a crowd unites against a single victim, just as similar crowds unite against Jeremiah, Job, the narrators of the penitential psalms, etc. In Genesis, Joseph is cast out by the envious crowd of his brothers. All these episodes of violence have the same all-against-one structure.

Since John the Baptist is a prophet, we may expect his violent death in the New Testament to be similar, and indeed John dies because Herod’s guests turn into a murderous crowd. Herod himself is as inclined to spare John’s life as Pilate is to spare Jesus’ — but leaders who do not stand up to violent crowds are bound to join them, and join them both Herod and Pilate do. Ancient people typically regarded ritual dancing as the most mimetic of all arts, solidifying the participants of a sacrifice against the soon to be immolated victim. The hostile polarization against John results from Salome’s dancing — a result foreseen and cleverly engineered by Herodias for exactly that purpose.

There is no equivalent of Salome’s dancing in Jesus’ Passion, but a mimetic or imitative dimension is obviously present. The crowd that gathers against Jesus is the same that had enthusiastically welcomed him into Jerusalem a few days earlier. The sudden reversal is typical of unstable crowds everywhere: rather than a deep-seated hatred for the victim, it suggests a wave of contagious violence.

Skandalon And Satan
Peter spectacularly illustrates this mimetic contagion. When surrounded by people hostile to Jesus, he imitates their hostility. He obeys the same mimetic force, ultimately, as Pilate and Herod. Even the thieves crucified with Jesus obey that force and feel compelled to join the crowd. And yet, I think, the Gospels do not seek to stigmatize Peter, or the thieves, or the crowd as a whole, or the Jews as a people, but to reveal the enormous power of mimetic contagion — a revelation valid for the entire chain of murders stretching from the Passion back to “the foundation of the world.” The Gospels have an immensely powerful reason for their constant reference to these murders, and it concerns two essential and yet strangely neglected words, skandalon and Satan.

The traditional English translation of stumbling block is far superior to timid recent translations, for the Greek skandalon designates an unavoidable obstacle that somehow becomes more attractive (as well as repulsive) each time we stumble against it. The first time Jesus predicts his violent death (Matthew 16:21-23), his resignation appalls Peter, who tries to instill some worldly ambition in his master: Instead of imitating Jesus, Peter wants Jesus to imitate him. If two friends imitate each other’s desire, they both desire the same object. And if they cannot share this object, they will compete for it, each becoming simultaneously a model and an obstacle to the other. The competing desires intensify as model and obstacle reinforce each other, and an escalation of mimetic rivalry follows; admiration gives way to indignation, jealousy, envy, hatred, and, at last, violence and vengeance.  Had Jesus imitated Peter’s ambition, the two thereby would have begun competing for the leadership of some politicized “Jesus movement.” Sensing the danger, Jesus vehemently interrupts Peter: “Get behind me, Satan, you are a skandalon to me.”

The more our models impede our desires, the more fascinating they become as models. Scandals can be sexual, no doubt, but they are not primarily a matter of sex any more than of worldly ambition. They must be defined in terms not of their objects but of their obstacle/model escalation — their mimetic rivalry that is the sinful dynamics of human conflict and its psychic misery. If the problem of mimetic rivalry escapes us, we may mistake Jesus’ prescriptions for some social utopia. The truth is rather that scandals are such a threat that nothing should be spared to avoid them.  At the first hint, we should abandon the disputed object to our rivals and accede even to their most outrageous demands; we should “turn the other cheek.”

If we choose Jesus as our model, we simultaneously choose his own model, God the Father. Having no appropriative desire, Jesus proclaims the possibility of freedom from scandal. But if we choose possessive models we find ourselves in endless scandals, for our real model is Satan. A seductive tempter who suggests to us the desires most likely to generate rivalries, Satan prevents us from reaching whatever he simultaneously incites us to desire. He turns into a diabolos (another word that designates the obstacle/model of mimetic rivalry). Satan is skandalon personified, as Jesus makes explicit in his rebuke of Peter.

Since most human beings do not follow Jesus, scandals must happen (Matthew 18:7), proliferating in ways that ought to endanger the collective survival of the human race — for once we understand the terrifying power of escalating mimetic desire, no society seems capable of standing against it. And yet, though many societies perish, new societies manage to be born, and quite a few established societies manage to find ways to survive or regenerate. Some counterforce must be at work, not powerful enough to terminate scandals once and for all, and yet sufficient to moderate their impact and keep them under some control.

The Mythological Scapegoat
This counterforce is, I believe, the mythological scapegoat — the sacrificial victim of myth. When scandals proliferate, human beings become so obsessed with their rivals that they lose sight of the objects for which they compete and begin to focus angrily on one another. As the borrowing of the model’s object shifts to the borrowing of the rival’s hatred, acquisitive mimesis turns into a mimesis of antagonists. More and more individuals polarize against fewer and fewer enemies until, in the end, only one is left. Because everyone believes in the guilt of the last victim, they all turn against him — and since that victim is now isolated and helpless, they can do so with no danger of retaliation. As a result, no enemy remains for anybody in the community. Scandals evaporate and peace returns — for a while.

Society’s preservation against the unlimited violence of scandals lies in the mimetic coalition against the single victim and its ensuing limited violence. The violent death of Jesus is, humanly speaking, an example of this strange process. Before it begins, Jesus warns his disciples (and especially Peter) that they will be “scandalized” by him (Mark 14:27). This use of skandalizein suggests that the mimetic force at work in the all-against-one violence is the same violence at work in mimetic rivalries between individuals. In preventing a riot and dispersing a crowd, the Crucifixion is an example of cathartic victimization.  A fascinating detail in the gospel makes clear the cathartic effects of the mimetic murder — and allows us to distinguish them from the Crucifixion’s Christian effects.

At the end of his Passion account, Luke writes, “And Herod and Pilate became friends with each other that very day, for before this they had been at enmity with each other” (23:12). This reconciliation outwardly resembles Christian communion — since it originates in Jesus’ death — and yet it has nothing to do with it. It is a cathartic effect rooted in the mimetic contagion.

Jesus’ persecutors do not realize that they influence one another mimetically. Their ignorance does not cancel their responsibility, but it does lessen it: “Father, forgive them,” Jesus cries, “for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). A parallel statement in Acts 3:17 shows that this must be interpreted literally. Peter ascribes to ignorance the behavior of the crowd and its leaders. His personal experience of the mimetic compulsion that possesses crowds prevents him from regarding himself immune to the violent contagion of victimization.

The Mimetic Conception Of The Gospels
The role of Satan, the personification of scandals, helps us to understand the mimetic conception of the Gospels. To the question How can Satan cast out Satan? (Mark 3:23), the answer is unanimous victimization.

On the one hand, Satan is the instigator of scandal, the force that disintegrates communities; on the other hand, he is the resolution of scandal in unanimous victimization. This trick of last resort enables the prince of this world to rescue his possessions in extremis, when they are too badly threatened by his own disorder. Being both a principle of disorder and a principle of order, Satan is truly divided against himself.

The famous portrayal of the mimetic murder of John the Baptist occurs — in both Mark and Matthew — as a curious flashback. By beginning with an account of Herod’s eager seizing hold of the rumor of John’s resurrection, and only then going back in time to narrate John’s death, Mark and Matthew reveal the origin of Herod’s compulsive belief in his own decisive participation in the murder. The evangelists give a fleeting but precious example of mythic genesis — of the ordering power of violence, of its ability to found culture. Herod’s belief is vestigial, to be sure, but the fact that two Gospels mention it confirms, I think, the evangelical authenticity of the doctrine that grounds mythology in mimetic victimization.

Violence In The Bible And Myths
Modern Christians are often made uncomfortable by this false resurrection that seems to resemble the true one, but Mark and Matthew obviously do not share their embarrassment. Far from downplaying the similarities, they attract our attention to them, much as Luke attracts our attention to the resemblance between Christian communion and the unholy reconciliation of Herod and Pilate as a result of Jesus’ death. The evangelists see something very simple and fundamental that we ourselves should see.  As soon as we become reconciled to the similarities between violence in the Bible and myths, we can understand how the Bible is not mythical — how the reaction to violence recorded in the Bible radically differs from the reaction recorded in myth.

Beginning with the story of Cain and Abel, the Bible proclaims the innocence of mythical victims and the guilt of their victimizers. Living after the widespread promulgation of the gospel, we find this natural and never pause to think that in classical myths the opposite is true: the persecutors always seem to have a valid cause to persecute their victims. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the Bacchae is legitimately slain by his mother and sisters, for his contempt of the god Dionysus is a fault serious enough to warrant his death. Oedipus, too, deserves his fate. According to the myth, he has truly killed his father and married his mother, and is thus truly responsible for the plague that ravages Thebes. To cast him out is not merely a permissible action, but a religious duty.

Even if they are not accused of any crime, mythical victims are still supposed to die for a good cause, and their innocence makes their deaths no less legitimate. In the Vedic myth of Purusha, for instance, no wrongdoing is mentioned — but the tearing apart of the victim is nonetheless a holy deed. The pieces of Purusha’s body are needed to create the three great castes, the mainstay of Indian society. In myth, violent death is always justified.

If the violence of myths is purely mimetic — if it is like the Passion, as Jesus says — all these justifications are false. And yet, since they systematically reverse the true distribution of innocence and guilt, such myths cannot be purely fictional. They are lies, certainly, but the specific kind of lie called for by mimetic contagion — the false accusation that spreads mimetically throughout a disturbed human community at the climax when scandals polarize against the single scapegoat whose death reunites the community. The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.

There is nothing secret about the justifications espoused by myths; the stereotypical accusations of mob violence are always available when the search for scapegoats is on. In the Gospels, however, the scapegoating machinery is fully visible because it encounters opposition and no longer operates efficiently. The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.

This interpretation is reinforced by the optimistic endings of myths. The conjunction of the guilty victim and the reconciled community is too frequent to be fortuitous. The only possible explanation is the distorted representation of unanimous victimization. The violent process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder.

The Two Reactions To Mimetic Contagion
We hear nowadays that, behind every text and every event, there are an infinite number of interpretations, all more or less equivalent. Mimetic victimization makes the absurdity of this view manifest. Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference. Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self- deception we call mythology.

The second way is the road to the truth followed by the Bible.

Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals.

This difference is not merely “moralistic” (as Nietzsche believed) or a matter of subjective choice; it is a question of truth. When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely “take pity” on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.

When we examine myths in the light of the Gospels, even their most enigmatic features become intelligible. Consider, for example, the disabilities and abnormalities that seem always to plague mythical heroes. Oedipus limps, as do quite a few of his fellow heroes and divinities. Others have only one leg, or one arm, or one eye, or are blind, hunchbacked, etc. Others still are unusually tall or unusually short. Some have a disgusting skin disease, or a body odor so strong that it plagues their neighbors. In a crowd, even minor disabilities and singularities will arouse discomfort and, should trouble erupt, their possessors are likely to be selected as victims. The preponderance of cripples and freaks among mythical heroes must be a statistical consequence of the type of victimization that generates mythology. So too the preponderance of “strangers”: in all isolated groups, outsiders arouse a curiosity that may quickly turn to hostility during a panic. Mimetic violence is essentially disoriented; deprived of valid causes, it selects its victims according to minuscule signs and pseudo-causes that we may identify as preferential signs of victimization.

In the Bible, the false or insignificant causes of mythical violence are effectively dismissed in the simple and sweeping statement, They hated me without a cause (John 15:25), in which Jesus quotes and virtually summarizes Psalm 35 — one of the “scapegoat psalms” that literally turns the mob’s mythical justifications inside out. Instead of the mob speaking to justify violence with causes that it perceives as legitimate, the victim speaks to denounce the causes as nonexistent.

To explicate archaic myths, we need only follow the method Jesus recommends and substitute this without cause for the false mythical causes.

The Danger Of Reducing The Gospels To Ordinary Myth
In the Byzantine Empire, I understand, the Oedipus tragedy was read as an analogue of the Christian Passion. If true, those early anthropologists were approaching the right problem from the wrong end. Their reduction of the Gospels to an ordinary myth snuffed the evangelical light with mythology.

In order to succeed, one must illuminate the obscurity of myth with the intelligence of the Gospels.

If unanimous victimization reconciles and reorders societies in direct proportion to its concealment, then it must lose its effectiveness in direct proportion to its revelation. When the mythical lie is publicly denounced, the polarization of scandals is no longer unanimous and the social catharsis weakens and disappears. Instead of reconciling the community, the victimization must intensify divisions and dissensions.

These disruptive consequences should be felt in the Gospels and, indeed, they are. In the Gospel of John, for instance, everything Jesus does and says has a divisive effect. Far from downplaying this fact, the author repeatedly draws our attention to it. Similarly, in Matthew 10:34, Jesus says, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” If the only peace humanity has ever enjoyed depends on unconscious victimization, the consciousness that the Gospels bring into the world can only destroy it.

The image of Satan-“a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44) — also expresses this opposition between the mythical obscuring and the evangelical revealing of victimization. The Crucifixion as a defeat for Satan, Jesus’ prediction that Satan “is coming to an end” (Mark 3:26), implies less an orderly world than one in which Satan is on the loose. Instead of concluding with the reassuring harmony of myths, the New Testament opens up apocalyptic perspectives, in the synoptic Gospels equally with the Book of Revelation. To reach “the peace that surpasseth all understanding,” humanity must give up its old, partial peace founded on victimization — and a great deal of turmoil can be expected. The apocalyptic dimension is not an alien element that should be purged from the New Testament in order to “improve” Christianity, it is an integral part of revelation.

Satan tries to silence Jesus through the very process that Jesus subverts. He has good reasons to believe that his old mimetic trick should still produce, with Jesus as victim, what it has always produced in the past: one more myth of the usual type, a closed system of mythical lies. He has good reasons to believe that the mimetic contagion against Jesus will prove irresistible once again and that the revelation will be squelched.

Satan’s expectations are disappointed. The Gospels do everything that the Bible had done before, rehabilitating a victimized prophet, a wrongly accused victim. But they also universalize this rehabilitation. They show that, since the foundation of the world, the victims of all Passion-like murders have been victims of the same mimetic contagion as Jesus. The Gospels make the revelation complete. They give to the biblical denunciation of idolatry a concrete demonstration of how false gods and their violent cultural systems are generated. This is the truth missing from mythology, the truth that subverts the violent system of this world. If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

Christianity, however, is not reducible to a logical scheme. The revelation of unanimous victimization cannot involve an entire community — else there would be no one to reveal it. It can only be the achievement of a dissenting minority bold enough to challenge the official truth, and yet too small to prevent a near-unanimous episode of victimization from occurring. Such a minority, however, is extremely vulnerable and ought normally to be swallowed up in the mimetic contagion. Humanly speaking, the revelation is an impossibility.

In most biblical texts, the dissenting minority remains invisible, but in the Gospels it coincides with the group of the first Christians. The Gospels dramatize the human impossibility by insisting on the disciples’ inability to resist the crowd during the Passion (especially Peter, who denies Jesus three times in the High Priest’s courtyard). And yet, after the Crucifixion — which should have made matters worse than ever — this pathetic handful of weaklings suddenly succeeds in doing what they had been unable to do when Jesus was still there to help them: boldly proclaim the innocence of the victim in open defiance of the victimizers, become the fearless apostles and missionaries of the early Church.

The True Resurrection
The Resurrection is responsible for this change, of course, but even this most amazing miracle would not have sufficed to transform these men so completely if it had been an isolated wonder rather than the first manifestation of the redemptive power of the Cross. An anthropological analysis enables us to say that, just as the revelation of the Christian victim differs from mythical revelations because it is not rooted in the illusion of the guilty scapegoat, so the Christian Resurrection differs from mythical ones because its witnesses are the people who ultimately overcome the contagion of victimization (such as Peter and Paul), and not the people who surrender to it (such as Herod and Pilate). The Christian Resurrection is indispensable to the purely anthropological revelation of unanimous victimization and to the demythologizing of mythical resurrections.

Jesus’ death is a source of grace not because the Father is “avenged” by it, but because Jesus lived and died in the manner that, if adopted by all, would do away with scandals and the victimization that follows from scandals. Jesus lived as all men should live in order to be united with a God Whose true nature he reveals.

Obeying perfectly the anti-mimetic prescriptions he recommends, Jesus has not the slightest tendency toward mimetic rivalry and victimization. And he dies, paradoxically, because of this perfect innocence. He becomes a victim of the process from which he will liberate mankind. When one man alone follows the prescriptions of the kingdom of God it seems an intolerable provocation to all those who do not, and this man automatically designates himself as the victim of all men. This paradox fully reveals “the sin of the world,” the inability of man to free himself from his violent ways.

During Jesus’ life, the dissenting minority of those who resist the mimetic contagion is really limited to one man, Jesus himself — who is simultaneously the most arbitrary victim (because he deserves his violent death less than anyone else) and the least arbitrary victim (because his perfection is an unforgivable insult to the violent world). He is the scapegoat of choice, the lamb of God whom we all choose unconsciously even when not aware of choosing any victim.

When Jesus dies alone, abandoned by his apostles, the persecutors are unanimous once again. Were the Gospels trying to tell a myth, the truth Jesus had tried to reveal would then be buried once and for all and the stage would be set for the triumphal revelation of the mythological victim as the divine source of the reordering of society through the “good” scapegoating violence that puts an end to the bad mimetic violence that had threatened the society.

If such a death-and-resurrection myth is not what happens this time — if Satan in the end is foiled — the immediate cause is a sudden burst of courage in the disciples. But the strength for that did not come from themselves. It visibly flows from the innocent death of Jesus. Divine grace makes the disciples more like Jesus, who had announced before his death that they would be helped by the Holy Spirit of truth. This is one reason, I believe, the Gospel of John calls the Spirit of God the Paraclete, a Greek word that simply means the lawyer for the defense, the defender of the accused before a tribunal. The Paraclete is, among other things, the counterpart of the Accuser: the Spirit of Truth who gives the definitive refutation of the satanic lie. That is why Paul writes, in 1 Corinthians 2:7-8: “We impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God. . . . None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”

The true Resurrection is based not on the mythical lie of the guilty victim who deserves to die, but on the rectification of that lie, which comes from the true God and which reopens channels of communication mankind itself had closed through self-imprisonment in its own violent cultures. Divine grace alone can explain why, after the Resurrection, the disciples could become a dissenting minority in an ocean of victimization — could understand then what they had misunderstood earlier: the innocence not of Jesus alone but of all victims of all Passion-like murders since the foundation of the world.

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Rene Girard

February 4, 2010

Here’s a new word for you: hominization. It refers to the process of becoming human and is part of the language of cultural anthropology and archaeology. One of the 20th century giants of this world is Rene Girard, a French thinker and devout Roman Catholic who has contributed numerous books and articles to a wide range of disciplines: history, philosophy, literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics and cultural studies. Girard received his Ph.D. in history from Indiana University and has lived and taught for most of his life in America.

What makes him fun is that while he combines a “deconstructionist” and “debunking” analysis of the origins and bases of human culture he uses it to affirm his Catholic faith and Christianity. Most in academia would belong to a secular or atheist bent but Girard is unapologetically Catholic. His thought, while at times complex and demanding is rooted in a simple phenomena called mimesis, the imitation or representation of aspects of the sensible world, especially human actions, in literature and art. Brian MacDonald, whose interview with Girard is here, gives this explanation of Girard’s thought in his introduction:

“Picture two young children playing happily on their porch, a pile of toys beside them. The older child pulls a G.I. Joe from the pile and immediately, his younger brother cries out, “No, my toy,” pushes him out of the way, and grabs it. The older child, who was not very interested in the toy when he picked it up, now conceives a passionate need for it and attempts to wrest it back. Soon a full fight ensues, with the toy forgotten and the two boys busy pummeling each other.

As the fight intensifies, the overweight child next door wanders into their yard and comes up to them, looking for someone to play with. At that point, one of the two rivals looks up and says, “Oh, there’s old fat butt!” “Yeah,” says his brother. “Big fat butt!” The two, having forgotten the toy, now forget their fight and run the child back home. Harmony has been restored between the two brothers, though the neighbor is now indoors crying.”

McDonald continues: “It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Girard builds his whole theory of human nature and human culture through a close analysis of the dynamics operating in this story. Most human desires are not “original” or spontaneous, he argues, but are created by imitating another whom he calls the “model.” When the model claims an object, that tells another that it is desirable — and that he must have it instead of him. Girard calls this “mimetic” (or imitative) desire. In the subsequent rivalry, the two parties will come to forget the object and will come to desire the conflict for itself. Harmony will only be restored if the conflicting parties can vent their anger on a common enemy or ‘scapegoat.’…Girard shows, throughout the body of his work, how his theory of “mimetic” desire can illuminate and unify an extraordinarily disparate set of human phenomena. It can explain everything from sacrifice to conflict, from mythology to Christianity.

Most of the Christian anthropology I have introduced on this site has come from John Randall Sachs and his wonderful little book called “The Christian Vision of Humanity: Basic Christian Anthropology” (a selection here).  Essentially what Sachs does is reason from the gospels to an understanding of man and his anthropology. Well Girard is doing the same thing using his theories of mimetic desire and scapegoating. His theories are easy enough to confirm from your own experience.

The gospels thus become a kind of reversal of scapegoating, where the shift shows that scapegoating comes from a cultural mechanism. In the Gospels we have the revelation of the generative principle of scapegoating that dominates culture and society unconsciously and is not approved by God. There are several examples of this throughout the Old Testament that Professor Girard uses, from Job to the Psalms and Joseph and his brothers.

We ordinarily like to believe that scapegoating stems from rulers or leaders hatching a plot, but it is much more complex than that. As Peter says in Acts, “And now brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer, he thus fulfilled. So repent, and turn again…” (Acts 3:17-19a).

Everyone, as you see there, is guilty, yet not completely responsible, even the rulers. One of our favorite ways of dealing with scapegoating is to see it as a plot of government leaders, whereas the rest of us have not participated in it. But scapegoating, according to Girard, is a collective phenomenon. It would not work if it were not. Of course, leaders can manipulate it, but there must be something to manipulate – it is not created by the leaders but is derived from the belief of the crowd. It seems to function as a sort of original sin.

In the Gospels, for example, the priests plot to scapegoat Jesus, but they cannot accomplish this without stirring up the crowd. The crowd takes over the most significant role in the narrative. Mark, above all, makes this clear. To anyone who has read the role of the crowd at Mass on Good Friday, it becomes apparent how profound the role of the crowd is.

Aside from any other details about Pilate, we see that his main fear is that a riot will occur. Pilate is presented as knowing it is a scapegoat situation. If the situation is still fluid, a substitute for the designated scapegoat could be offered (Barabbas), but things have gone too far, so Jesus is put to death.

It is a crowd that has called for his death, it was a crowd that welcomed him as he entered Jerusalem. There is nothing, by the way, anti-Semitic about this; Girard sees it is the Gospels’ comment on the mimetic behavior of crowds.

Another excellent example of such behavior is found in the book of Job. The people treated him as an idol one day, but turned against him the next. Girard uses a number of examples from the Old Testament, this quote here makes illustration of Girard’s concept of mimetic desire found within the story of Joseph and his brothers.

“The biblical tendency to “side with the victims” is obvious, but modern students of the Bible tend to limit its consequences to ethical and purely “religious” considerations. If the preceding is true, this tendency must have epistemological consequences as well. Even in the most archaic texts, the collective violence that constitutes the hidden infrastructure of all mythology begins to emerge, and it emerges as unjustified or arbitrary. Behind the story told by the eleven brothers to their father Jacob, after they violently expel from their midst their twelfth brother, Joseph, there is the vengeful consensus of this violent group.

Unlike mythology, the biblical text rejects that perspective and sees Joseph as an innocent scapegoat, a victim of his brothers’ jealousy, the biblical formulation of our mimetic desire. Later on, in Egypt, the same mimetic consensus reappears when Joseph is imprisoned. Everybody believes Joseph has betrayed his adoptive father, Potiphar, and committed with the latter’s wife an action analogous to the incest of Oedipus. The biblical text, unlike the Oedipus myth, disbelieves this accusation, recognizing in it the kind of story that can be expected from a community that, for a number of possible reasons, happens to be disturbed and is mimetically, i.e., unconsciously, looking for scapegoat relief.

The scapegoat in that story is the main subject under investigation, as in countless other stories, as in the book of Job, as in many of the psalms, and a profound reflection is at work, everywhere in the Bible, regarding the ethical demands that a revelation of victimage and its refusal places upon human beings. In the Joseph story, again, this time in the last episode, we see the hero himself engineer a scapegoat mise en scène (arrangement of scenery and properties to represent the place where a play or movie is enacted. stage setting, setting ) in order to test the possibility of a change of heart in his brothers.

They had come a first time to beg for grain, and Joseph, now the most powerful man in Egypt, had warned them that they would not be supplied with it a second time unless they brought with them their youngest brother, Benjamin. Besides Joseph, Benjamin is the only other son of Jacob by his most cherished wife, Rachel.

The famine becomes so serious that the brothers come back, this time with Benjamin. On Joseph’s orders a precious cup that belongs to him is placed in Benjamin’s bag. When the eleven brothers are searched on their way back to Palestine, the youngest appears guilty of theft and Joseph announces he will be detained. At this point, Judah, one of the ten brothers, offers to take Benjamin’s place as a prisoner of Joseph, for fear, he says, that his father might die of grief. This dedication of Judah stands in symmetrical opposition to the original deed of collective violence which it cancels out and reveals. As he hears Judah, Joseph is moved to tears and identifies himself.

Unique in many of its features, of course, this story is nevertheless typical of the Bible in the sense that it exemplifies its counter-mythical thrust in the treatment of victimage. This thrust is also present not only in other similar stories, but in countless other texts that espouse the perspective of the victim rather than the mythical perspective of the persecutors, such as the penitential psalms or the book of Job.

Prophetic inspiration focuses on the revelation of victimage and the famous songs of the Servant in Second Isaiah constitute its summit; they provide a complete revelation of collective victimage as the founding mechanism of human culture. The responsibility for the victim’s death is placed squarely upon the community even though in other parts of the same text God is presented as responsible. The same ambiguity or even contradiction remains in Christian theology but not in the text of the Gospels, which replaces the violent God of the past with a nonviolent one whose demand is for nonviolence rather than sacrifice. The Christ of the Gospels dies against sacrifice, and through his death, he reveals its nature and origin by making sacrifice unworkable, at least in the long run, and bringing sacrificial culture to an end. The word “sacrifice” is not important in itself, but the singularity of the Passion is obscured if the same word is used for the Passion and for what takes place in sacrificial rituals. Can we use the same word for the deed that is committed at the beginning of Joseph’s story, when the eleven brothers expel their own brother, and for Judah’s willingness to die, if necessary, in order to prevent the sacrifice of his brother?

The sacrificial misreading common to Christians and non-Christians alike has obscured the non-sacrificial significance of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures but not entirely suppressed its impact. Thus, our society could result from a complex interaction between the Judeo-Christian and the sacrificial. Acting upon the latter as a force of disruption — as new wine in old wine-skins — the former would be responsible for our constantly increased awareness of victimage and for the decadence of mythology in our world.”

The following is part of an interview titled The Anthropology of the Cross that James Williams did with Professor Girard:

James Williams: As you look back over your career, what has been the most satisfying thing to you in your work?

René Girard: The most satisfying thing has been the actual experience of discovery. I would say that there have been three great moments in the process of my thinking and writing.

First was mimetic desire and rivalry, when I realized that it accounted for so much. The second was the discovery of the scapegoat mechanism. This basically completed the mimetic theory. I felt it gave a highly plausible interpretation of myth and ritual in archaic cultures. From that time on I was convinced that archaic cultures, far from being simply lost in superstition or having no constancy or stability, represented a great human achievement.

The third great moment of discovery for me was when I began to see the uniqueness of the Bible, especially the Christian text, from the standpoint of the scapegoat theory. The mimetic representation of scapegoating in the Passion was the solution to the relationship of the Gospels and archaic cultures. In the Gospels we have the revelation of the mechanism that dominates culture unconsciously.

It seemed to me, as I experienced these moments, that a great deal of evidence was piling up, an avalanche, to support them. I naively thought that everyone would agree with my theory immediately, because I saw it as so obvious and overpowering.

J.W.:    Concerning the relation of the New Testament to the full development of the mimetic scapegoat theory, already in your first book, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, you recognize the importance of the Gospels. But are you saying it took a number of years for the full extent of the Passion as revelation of the scapegoat mechanism to occur to you?

R.G.:    Sure. I recognized the importance of the Gospels in the individual experiences of the novelists who came to grips with mimetic desire and came to a knowledge of mimetic desire. In fact, they have a kind of conversion experience, and this conversion is of the same nature as the shift from mythology to the Gospels. Of course, I didn’t fully understand that at the time.

This is the most difficult thing for people to understand about my theory — that scapegoating does not play an essential role in the Gospels, whereas it has an enormous role in myths since it generates them, Many observers think that because scapegoating becomes more and more visible in them, the Gospels must approve of it, they must advocate some kind of scapegoat religion. But to use a modem analogy from the history of France, this would be like saying the pro-Dreyfus people were really the scapegoaters of Dreyfus. This is the mistake so many theologians and biblical scholars have made regarding the mimetic scapegoat theory. They simply do not understand the enormous difference that the representation of scapegoating makes. They think only in terms of themes rather than a hidden, generative mechanism which cannot appear in what it generates.

J.W.:      If the Gospels could be understood by analogy to the pro-Dreyfus party, give another similar historical instance of scapegoating.

R.G.:       An example which I have been working on a little bit is Joan of Arc. The people who put her on trial divinized her, or “demonized” her, in the sense of regarding her as a witch. She was avowed to have supernatural powers and turned into a witch, whereas her canonization by the church acknowledges another form of relationship to the supernatural which is different from the demonized-divinized scapegoat. Now there is a form of divinization reported in the Gospels, which is magical and mythical, for instance Herod Antipas’ belief in the resurrection of John the Baptist, and the divinization of Christ, which is just the opposite. The Gospels seem so close to myth in a way, and yet they are poles apart.

This is a difficult problem because certain forms of monotheism move God so far away from any involvement in the scapegoat mechanism that they view with suspicion any contact with it in religious thought and symbolism. But I think the power and truth of Christianity is that it completes the great forms of monotheism, as in Judaism and Islam, by witnessing to the God who reveals himself to be the arch-scapegoat in order to liberate humankind.

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J.W.:      Does the analogy of Joan of Arc imply that the scapegoating of Jesus may have occurred even among his own followers?

R.G.:       Yes, and the conception of Jesus as some kind of primitive God. You find a recognition of that in Mark and Matthew especially. Peter, James, and John expect him to be a kind of divine potentate when he comes into his full honor and glory. Herod Antipas believes that Jesus is John the Baptist resurrected. This divinizing of John is a kind of mythical genesis. I think this is why there is a fairly long description of the murder, which is an analog of the Passion. But not only an analog of the Passion, for there were many such murders — mythical, non-mythical, prophetic—in which a crowd united against a victim.

In the Herod story the dancing of Herod’s stepdaughter was important in the ritual aspects of the action of the crowd.

J.W.:      The dancing is a textual signal of scapegoating?

R.G.:       Yes. The story of the beheading of John is one of the reasons why the synoptic Gospels are so incredibly valuable for understanding the anthropology of revelation.

J.W.:      The Gospel of Luke omits the banquet and dancing episode.

R.G.:       Yes, but Luke has another scene in which Herod and Pilate become friends when Pilate sends Jesus to Herod for questioning after he is arrested. This shows that Luke is aware of the pacifying effect of scapegoating. This is the communion of the scapegoaters as opposed to the Christian communion. So if you put this scene with the beheading of John in Mark and Matthew, you can see how the Gospels complement each other in dealing with the mythical tendencies of scapegoating.

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J.W.:      What is the most disappointing aspect of your career?

R.G.:       I think that I have not expressed the relation of the Gospel to mythology in a way that makes it clear to everybody. It should be possible to find more metaphors from different areas of experience which are familiar to everyone. Also, I would like to do a better job of showing that the Gospels etmble one to read and decipher myth.

Until now the order of discovery for me has been mimetic desire, archaic religion and culture, and finally the Christian text. It should be possible, especially for a Christian scholar, to reverse this order and analyze myth and culture from the standpoint of the Gospels.

J.W.:      The Gospels themselves have come under attack as sources of scapegoating and demonization. To take the Gospels seriously in the way you do is extremely difficult.

R.G.:       It is difficult because it is also too simple. Everything that happened to Jesus is happening to the texts of revelation themselves. This scapegoating of the Gospel texts is probably a necessary — but not excusable — phase that we are going through. It is a form of ingratitude toward God, and one should say so, boldly. J.W.:    So to discern the relation of the Gospels to myth and misunderstanding in our culture, where do you look? Do you find signs in our time?

R.G.:       Well, I look first to the Gospels themselves, and particularly to certain key passages. Of course, the Gospels must look not like a tour de force but another myth to many readers now because they are centered on Jesus, and how could this reveal mythology? But in my view the whole theory of Satan, for example, is completely rational; the Gospels unveil Satan as the principle of destructive mimesis in the world. Or to take another example, Herod murders John, divinizes him, but he never repents. Peter denies his association with Jesus and later recognizes him as his risen lord, and Paul persecutes the followers of Christ before his own revelatory experience. But both Peter and Paul repent. This is the main difference made by the resurrection, as contrasted to human divinization or apotheosis: repentance.

J.W.:      Do you want to say any more about the use of metaphor and analogy to understand the Gospel texts?

R.G.:       Well, I was talking about Joan of Arc. The sources about her are pretty reliable. This is a perfect example of persecution and ascription of supernatural powers to someone considered a witch and disrupter of public order. An instance like this should be of great interest to the Jews because of what they have suffered in history.

J.W.:      Aren’t all these topics, such as the fate of Joan of Arc, encumbered with the “political correctness” and obsession with victims of those who study them?

R.G.:       Political correctness is good to the degree that we now have an awareness of victimization and victimary mechanisms. But now this awareness supports attacks on Christianity and its texts, which are the very inspiration of our modern concern for the victim.

J.W.:      This brings me back to what has been disappointing for you in your career. When you speak of attacks on the Bible, particularly the Gospel texts, I take it you are talking about your critics, at least in part.

R.G.:       Yes, I am talking about my critics in part. But you know, I think the attacks on the Gospel are necessary; they are part of an apocalyptic situation.

J.W.:      You mean these attacks are part of a sorting or refining process in history?

R.G.:       It’s part of a process that is revealing the truth of the Gospel.

But I know I am primarily responsible for what I write and how I bring my subject to expression. Anthropologists and theologians, many of them, have not understood what I was about, and I should be able to say it better. I would like to begin at the stage of Things Hidden, where the Gospels seem to be explained by the mimetic theory rather than explaining it. It should be possible to move in reverse to myth and mimetic desire. The sequence leading up to Things Hidden, which is true, in part, to my own creative experience, gives the erroneous view of a theoretical movement from mimesis to myth, then to the Gospels, whereas in faa, a more fundamental understanding goes in the opposite direction.

J.W.:       Do you see signs that reception of your work is beginning to occur?

R.G.:        There are some signs, but I’m not sure that at this time there could be a really good reception, especially among academics. It would be such a change in regard to Christianity that it is most unlikely. One can always hope for a good reception of the Gospels which would be closer and truer to them as they really are. If the mimetic theory became fashionable, I would be really worried.

But it is difficult; there are so many tendencies toward politicization, or toward wandering off into irrelevant individualistic spiritualities. Of course, one could go back and see politicization throughout the whole history of Christianity. These attempts at politicization, which take various forms, are part of the progress and regress of revelation in history.

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J.W.:      What would you say is the most important aspect of your thinking to grasp? If the most important is the most difficult, please comment on that.

JG.:        The most important thing is too simple, I repeat, not to be difficult. It is the reversal of scapegoating, or the shift that shows that scapegoating comes from a cultural mechanism and is not approved by God. We ordinarily like to believe that scapegoating stems from rulers or leaders hatching a plot, but it is much more complex than that. When I use the term “mechanism,” as in “scapegoat mechanism,” I mean basically and simply a generative principle which works unconsciously in culture and society. As Peter says in Acts, “And now brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God announced beforehand by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ should suffer, he thus fulfilled. So repent, and turn again…” (Acts 3:17-19a). Everyone is guilty, yet not completely responsible. I find the mention of the rulers especially interesting. One of our favorite ways of dealing with scapegoating is to see it as a plot of government leaden, whereas the rest of us have not participated in it. But scapegoating is a collective phenomenon. It would not work if it were not. Of course, leaders can manipulate it, but there must be something to manipulate, which is the belief of the crowd, our own belief.

In the Gospels, for example, the priests plot to scapegoat Jesus, but they cannot accomplish this without stirring up the crowd. The crowd takes over the most significant role in the narrative. Mark, above all, makes this clear. Aside from any other details about Pilate, his main fear is that a riot will occur. Pilate is presented as knowing it is a scapegoat situation. If the situation is still fluid, a substitute for the designated scapegoat could be offered (Barabbas). But things have gone too far, so Jesus is put to death. It is a crowd that has called for his death, it was a crowd that welcomed him as he entered Jerusalem. There is nothing, by the way, anti-Semitic about this; it is the Gospels’ comment on the mimetic behavior of crowds. Another excellent example of such behavior is found in the book of Job. The people treated him as an idol one day, but turned against him the next.

J.W.:      I wonder whether the crowd behavior is even clearer in the book of Job (Job 29:1-30:15).

R.G.:       Yes, this is made clear by the metaphor of the mountain torrent (6:15). It does not have a drop of water when you need it, but turns into a deluge when you don’t need it. It is a wonderful, mimetic metaphor of the crowd.

J.W.:      But back to the reversal of the scapegoating phenomenon in the Gospel texts — do you really think this is the most difficult aspect of your model? Conceptually it is not so difficult, but perhaps psychologically…

Let’s face it, readers; including academic ones, usually read texts pretty simplistically. They look for themes, and since they -find a scapegoat theme in the Gospels, for instance, they conclude that the Gospels are built on scapegoating. Myths, they would say, are not about scapegoating because they don’t talk about it. But that’s just the point: they don’t talk about it; they disguise their generative center. It is the most difficult thing to make people conscious of this generative center. It is the sort of thing you either see or do not see. It’s like a flash of lightning; you either get it or you don’t get it. Ordinary reasoning just loops back on to its own premises.

But there should be a way of expressing this insight which is better than I have done so far. I keep trying and trying. That is why I turn to such historical scapegoats as Joan of Are or Dreyfus. The people who condemned Dreyfus are the ones who never called him a scapegoat because they turned him into one. To me the Oedipus myth is a still undeciphered Dreyfus case.

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J.W.:      Let’s turn to a part of your theory that maybe conceptually difficult for many people who encounter your work: mimetic desire. Don’t you think that many people have misunderstood mimetic desire or mimesis?  Also it would be helpful if you would say something about its pre-representational character.

R.G.:       There are many who would prefer to say that the real problem is the wish to kill one’s own father or mother, and they ignore or resist the possibility that the most common problem — our predicament — is that of trying to beat one’s rival at his own game. So there is a resistance to shedding light on the role of rivalry in our own lives.

J.W.:      So the difficulty with the concept of mimesis is practically the same as the resistance to the recognition of scapegoating. Just as we ignore or evade knowing ourselves as scapegoaters, so also we ignore or evade our penchant for mimetic rivalry.

R.G.:       Yes, a deeper knowledge and self-examination are required. The knowledge of mimesis is really tied to conversion. That is why the matter of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is so important. A personal knowledge, fully rational and yet not always accessible to reason, is needed.

J.W.:      René, isn’t part of the problem just what you are touching on, that mimesis is really pre-rational and pre-representational? This is important, and is not included in any of the selections for the Reader. You seem to be saying at times that to break away from the mimetic predicament…

R.G.:       You must change your personality.

J.W.:      But that also requires mimesis, does it not? A mimesis that is good, a mimesis of love.

R.G.:       Sure. Part of the problem is with the phrase “mimetic desire.” And because of Freud the word “desire” connotes the sexual or erotic. I said recently that we should be able to substitute some other term — I don’t know, perhaps “drive,” or élan vital, or even Sartre’s “project.” Almost any word that could express the dynamism, the dynamics of the entire personality.

J.W.:      Here you seem to be distinguishing different kinds of mimesis. But you don’t want to say that, do you? In other words, mimesis is always along a continuum.

R.G.:       That’s right. It is something that involves the whole personality. Sartre’s idea of the “project” is appropriate in a way, although resorting to Sartre too exclusively would be misleading. Maybe the idea of Kierkegaard, the idea of subjectivity as passionate inwardness and choice, would be helpful…I don’t know; whatever the term, something bigger and other than “desire” should be used. “Desire” has, necessarily, that narrow libidinal connotation.

J.W.:      Okay, let’s move on to another part of the question, the relation of mimesis and representation.

R.G.:       Well, mimesis is rooted deep in our biology, I’m sure of that. I agree with those who hold that there is a biological basis for holding that the human brain is a kind of mimetic machine. Even ritual, in its earliest stages, is more like a reflexive mimetic repetition than anything that could be called precisely an institution founded on a correct representation of a founding murder. Much like a child’s earliest reactions as it begins to learn…

J.W.:      You’re referring specifically to an originary murder…

R.G.:       Yes. Then at a certain stage, the scapegoat phenomenon and its ritual repetition create the possibility of representation, which requires some degree of reflection, and not simply reflexive imitation. So it is that mimesis is “undecidable,” in the sense that it is decided in common with the model. Continuity ultimately produced discontinuity. A good model will make our mimesis good (Christ); a bad model will make our mimesis rivalrous.

J.W.:      So in beginning stages of what we know as human there was basically reflexive imitation.

R.G.:       Yes, that was the primary thing. Representation as such is a late development. It may have taken hundreds of thousands of years, or longer, to reach the representational capacity of “humanity.”

From a theological point of view which is compatible, I hope, with my mimetic anthropology, I would say that the Word or Christ is at work in this whole long process toward humanity and representation. Representation is still distorted, of course, in that it distorts or disguises the violence stemming from originary mimesis. This is what I have called méconnaissance, misrecognition, or even “misprision,” as Shakespeare and Harold Bloom would say (misprision: noun: MF mesprison: error, wrongdoing; a misunderstanding in which one thing is taken for another. “A term used by Harold Bloom to describe the process by which strong writers misread or misinterpret their literary predecessors so as to clear imaginative space for themselves. According to Bloom, every poem is a misprision or misconstrual of a hypothetical parent poem.”) I think Gil Bailie has expressed this well in his recent paper on the vine and the branches: the Word was the light accompanying the “mythic darkness of the sacred violence that accompanied Hominization.  Humanity generated its own crude forms of illumination precisely by periodically expelling this light.”

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The Divine Scandal — Emil Brunner

February 3, 2010

Heinrich Emil Brunner (December 23, 1889 – April 6, 1966) was a Swiss Protestant (Reformed) theologian. Along with Karl Barth, he is commonly associated with neo-orthodoxy or the dialectical theology movement.

But we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to the Gentiles.
I CORINTHIANS 1:23

WHY IS IT THAT PAUL describes the gospel as a folly and a scandal and that worldly wisdom feels so repelled by it?

The wisdom of this world gives us occasion to be proud of our own achievement. Even the Jewish religion with its piety holds that it is still we who must do the decisive thing in order to win the good pleasure of God. This applies still more to oriental and mystical religions. The latter do not mortify human nature nor expose human sin, but bypass it. But the message of the cross proclaims to each one of us, even the best and most pious: You are a sinner, you are in a wrong relationship with God and hence with your neighbor also. You are seeking yourself. You wish to appear clever, and to attain the highest by means of your own intrinsic powers.

But why, you may ask, must we make so much ado about human sin? It is because in our inmost being we have each gone astray: I am godless, loveless, self-seeking, God-escaping. This is not manifested merely in those obvious weaknesses and vices that everyone condemns and with which, to a very large extent, we ourselves can deal. No, sin — the corruption of our nature — lies much deeper and is manifest even when we are occupied with the highest and holiest things.

The message of the cross goes to the root of our ills, and it alone can cure them radically. Just for that reason it spells folly and scandal. How? In the Bible it is not we who find a way to God; it is God who comes to us. It says nothing about practicing mystical introspection, of otherworldliness, of cultivating the interior life, with a view to reaching ultimately the divine ground of the soul. It is not a question of our own performances and exercises as a result of which we might hope to become pious and well-pleasing to God. That, in the last analysis, is self-praise. The central point of scripture is that God has mercy on us who are stuck so fast in the mire — if I maybe pardoned the expression — that we cannot help ourselves.

We know why so many refuse to hear this message and why they can make neither head nor tail of it. The person for whom his reasoning power furnishes the supreme criterion of truth cannot believe that truth exists which does not flow from his own intellectual activity; truth which we cannot, by our own powers of recognition, apprehend, or by our powers of reason demonstrate; truth which does not dovetail into our own systems of thought and which lies entirely beyond the reach of our capacities. All this clashes greatly with our pride.

Still more serious than its folly is the offensiveness of the gospel’s message. The Greeks sought after wisdom; the Jews desired by their good works to merit favor with God, Has not the thought come to you: Well, what then remains for us to do? What room is there for our own exertions, our own sense of responsibility?

Look once again at the revolt of our natural pride, this time not the pride of reason, but pride in our moral powers and in our determination to get things done for ourselves. Consider once more what it is that God bestows upon us. He imparts to us his love, communion with himself, and the fact that sin, which causes the deepest, most inward separation from him, is done away. How could the person who truly appropriates that gift become frivolous and irresponsible? Can one really receive the love of God without henceforth living in the strength of that love?

ALL MAN-MADE RELIGION stands in opposition to the gospel. It is an ascent toward the eternal, perfect God. Up, up — that is its call. God is high above, we are down below; and now we shall soar by means of our moral, spiritual, and religious endeavors out of the earthly, human depths into the divine heights.

God is too high and the evil in us too deep for us to teach the goal this way. Our souls become crippled and cramped by trying to rise to the highest height. The end is despair, or a self-righteousness that leaves room neither for love of God nor for love of others.

So if we are honest, we have to say that we cannot reach the goal. We cannot become what we ought to become, true men and women. Many let the matter rest there; they confess it, but take no action. They make themselves satisfied with half because they cannot have the whole. God demands all, not just half. And this “all” we are not capable of giving. What is impossible for us is what God wants — all love to him and to our fellow humans. If this is true, it would seem that we can have no good conscience, no trusting relationship with God, no inner peace, and no freedom of the soul.

But God has in his mercy shown us a different way. “You cannot come up to me, so I will come down to you.” And God descends to us human beings. This act of becoming one of us begins at Christmas and ends on Good Friday.

God goes to the end. He reaches the goal. To be sure, this end is exactly the opposite of what we fix as our goal. We wish to climb up to heaven; God, however, descends — down to where? To death on the cross. This is why Jesus Christ had to descend into hell. He had to go the way to its very end. Our rightful end is hell, that is, banishment from God — godforsakenness. Only there has God completely come to us, there where he has taken upon himself everything, even the cursed end of our way. Jesus Christ has gone into hell in order to get us out of there. For with everything he does, that is his goal, that he may get us out, reconcile us with God, and fill us with God’s Spirit. He had to despair of God for us (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”) so that we do not have to despair of God. He has taken this upon himself so that we may become free of it.

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Shared Hells — Peter Kreeft

February 2, 2010

Dr. Peter Kreeft

I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as “God on the Cross.” in the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away.

And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in Godforsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us.
JOHN STOTT

Calvary is judo. The enemy’s own power is used to defeat him. Satan’s craftily orchestrated plot, rolled along according to plan by his agents Judas, Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas, culminated in the death of God. And this very event, Satan’s conclusion, was God’s premise. Satan’s end was God’s means. God won Satan’s captives — us — back to himself by freely dying in our place.

It is, of course, the most familiar, the most often-told story in the world. Yet it is also the strangest, and it has never lost its strangeness, its awe, and will not even in eternity, where angels tremble to gaze at things we yawn at. And however strange, it is the only key that fits the lock of our tortured lives and needs. We needed a surgeon, he came and reached into our wounds with bloody hands. He didn’t give us a placebo or a pill or good advice. He gave us himself.

He came. He entered space and time and suffering. He came, like a lover. He did the most important thing and he gave the most important gift: himself. It is a lover’s gift. Out of our tears, our waiting, our dark­ness, our agonized aloneness, out of our weeping and wondering, out of our cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” he came, all the way, right into that cry.

He sits beside us in the lowest places of our lives, like water. Are we broken? He is broken with us. Are we rejected? Do people despise us not for our evil but for our good, or attempted good? He was “despised and rejected of men.” Do we weep? Is grief our familiar spirit, our horrifyingly familiar ghost? Do we ever say, “Oh, no, not again! I can’t take it any more!”? Do people misunderstand us, turn away from us? They hid their faces from him as from an outcast, a leper. Is our love betrayed? Are our tenderest relationships broken? He too loved and was betrayed by the ones he loved. “He came unto his own and his own received him not.”

Does it seem sometimes as if life has passed us by or cast us out, as if we are sinking into uselessness and oblivion? He sinks with us. He too is passed over by the world, His way of suffering love is rejected, his own followers often the most guilty of all; they have made his name a scandal, especially among his own chosen people. What Jew finds the road to him free from the broken weapons of bloody prejudice? We have made it nearly impossible for his own people to love him, to see him as he is, free from the smoke of battle and holocaust,

How does he look upon us now? With continual sorrow, but never with scorn. We add to his wounds. There are two thousand nails in his cross. We, his beloved and longed for and passionately desired, are constantly cold and correct and distant to him. And still he keeps brooding over the world like a hen over an egg, like a mother who has had all of her beloved children turn against her. “Could a mother desert her young? Even so I could not desert you.” He sits beside us not only in our sufferings but even in our sins. He does not turn his face from us, however much we turn our face from him.

Does he descend into all our hells? Yes. In the unforgettable line of Corrie ten Boom from the depths of a Nazi death camp, “No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.” Does he descend into violence? Yes, by suffering it and leaving us the solution that to this day only a few brave souls have dared to try, the most notable in our memory not even a Christian hut a Hindu. Does he descend into insanity? Yes, into that darkness too. Even into the insanity of suicide? Can he be there too? Yes, he can. “Even the darkness is not dark to him.” He finds or makes light even there, in the darkness of the mind — though perhaps not until the next world, until death’s release.

Love is why he came. It’s all love. The buzzing flies around the cross, the stroke of the Roman hammer as the nails tear into his screamingly soft flesh, the infinitely harder stroke of his own people’s hammering hatred, hammering at his heart — why? For love. God is love, as the sun is fire and light, and he can no more stop loving than the sun can stop shining.

Henceforth, when we feel the hammers of life beating on our heads or on our hearts, we can know — we must know that he is here with us, taking our blows. Every tear we shed becomes his tear. He may not yet wipe them away, but he makes them his. Would we rather have our own dry eyes, or his tear-filled ones? He came. He is here. That is the salient fact. If he does not heal all out broken bones and loves and lives now, he comes into them and is broken, like bread, and we are nourished.

And he shows us that we can henceforth use our very brokenness as nourishment for those we love. Since we are his body, we too are the bread that is broken for others. Our very failures help heal other lives; our very tears help wipe away tears; our being hated helps those we love. When those we love hang up on us, he keeps the lines open.

God’s answer to the problem of suffering not only really happened two thousand years ago, but it is still happening in our own lives. The solution to our suffering is our suffering! All our suffering can become part of his work, the greatest work ever done, the work of salvation, of helping to win for those we love eternal joy.

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God the Rebel — G. K. Chesterton

February 1, 2010

Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose it must be at an end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way that no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.
H. J. Iwand

THAT A GOOD MAN may have his back to the wall is no more than we knew already; but that God could have his back to the wall is a boast for all insurgents for ever. Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence made God incomplete. Christianity alone has felt that God, to be wholly God, must have been a rebel as well as a king. Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator, For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point — and does not break.

In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologize in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the Lord thy God may tempt himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane.

In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.

And now let the revolutionists of this age choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

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A Lenten Path

January 29, 2010

The grinding power of the plain words of the Gospel story is Like the power of millstones; and those who can read them simply enough will feel as if rocks had been rolled upon them.
G.K. CHESTERTON

A Look Inside by Edna Hong

“DID YOU EVER LOOK inside yourself and see what you are not?” the crippled daughter in one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories shouts at her spiritually crippled mother. Few of us have looked long enough into ourselves to see that what seems to us and to others as normally attractive is actually as graceless as a scarecrow and even repulsive. It is an easy matter for the physical eye to spot physical deformity and blemishes in others and in oneself. It is not so easy for the eye of the spirit to spot a spiritual dwarf, hunchback, or cripple, although it is easier to see these spiritual deformities in others than in oneself

This X-ray look at others is called “naked truth,” “unvarnished truth.” In literature and art it is called realism. But to spot it in one’s self is not only difficult but painful, and no one wants to take the descending path to that naked, unvarnished truth, with all its unacceptable humiliations, It is much more comfortable to stay on the level of the plain and ordinary, to go on being just plain and ordinary. Yet it is to this path that Lent invites us.

The reason Lent is so long is that this path to the truth of oneself is long and snagged with thorns, and at the very end one stands alone before the broken body crowned with thorns upon the cross. All alone — with not one illusion or self-delusion to prop one up. Yet not alone, for the Spirit of Holiness, who is also the Spirit of Helpfulness, is beside you and me. Indeed, this Spirit has helped to maneuver you and me down that dark, steep path to this crucial spot.

“But I’ve been to that place before,” the born-again Christian may protest. “Of course, the non-Christian and perhaps the brought-up Christian need to be brought to that crucial spot, but of all people, we who are born again should not. Is it not a kind of heresy to say that we need to go there again and again and again? Is it not to doubt our salvation, the power of our Savior to deliver us from the dominion of darkness?”

Lent would indeed be a futile liturgical farce if the redeemed were henceforth sinless and if the tides of human nature were not always moving even the twice-born, who have not shed their human nature, in the direction of complacency and taking it all for granted. The tides of God always move in exactly the opposite direction — toward an ever deeper skepticism about ourselves (that we may have all the more confidence in God), toward an ever deeper self-distrust (that we may trust in God all the more). The high tides of human nature, even of the twice-born, move to drown the conscience. As long as the consciences of the born-again are housed in human flesh and bone, they are prone to the sleep of death and need continual rescuing.

Our self-indulgent and self-flattering age looks upon the self-maltreating and self-hating practices of the monastic and desert ascetics as pathetic and futile. We shiver to think of Suso making himself a cross with thirty protruding nails and wearing it on his hack like a porcupine skin day and night. We laugh to think of him never taking a bath in order to mortify his comfort-seeking body. But for us who feel the need for daily showers (because soap has not broken dirt’s dominion), it most certainly is not spiritual self-mortification and asceticism that convince us we no longer need spiritual shower baths. It is rather our comfort-seeking spirits.

But the spirit of truth does not seek comfort. The purpose of Lent is not to escape the conscience, but to create a healthy hatred for evil, a heartfelt contrition for sin, and a passionately felt need for grace. This continuous movement of faith from a sense of sin to grace and forgiveness ends only when the spirit is ultimately released.

ROBERT HERRICK, a 17th-century poet, wrote these striking lines in “To Keep a True Lent,”

Is this a Fast, to keep
the larder lean?
And clean

From fat of veals and sheep?
Is it to quit the dish
of flesh, yet still
To fill

The p’atter high with fish?
Is it to fast an hour,
Or ragg’d to go,
Or show

A down-cast look and sour?
No: ‘tis a Fast to dole
Thy sheat of wheat
And meat

With the hungry soul.
It is to fast from strife
And old debate,
And hate;

To circumcise thy life.
To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not bin;
And that’s to keep thy Lent.

Robert Herrick was moving the keeping of Lent in the right direction, away from mortifications of the flesh — fasting, hair shirts, pebbles in the shoes, burrs next to the skin, dour faces, and all that, But he stopped somewhat short of the true purpose of Lent, which is not to starve one’s sin but to get rid of it. And then then comes the spiritual energy, spiritual activity, spiritual eloquence…

These do not come from ecstasy but from a humbly grateful heart. Forgiveness of sins is what the gospel is all about. Forgiveness of sins is what Christ’s death upon the cross is all about. The purpose of Lent is to arouse. To arouse the sense of sin. To arouse a sense of guilt for sin. To arouse the humble contrition for the guilt of sin that makes forgiveness possible. To arouse the sense of gratitude for the forgiveness of sins. To arouse or to motivate the works of love and the work for justice that one does out of gratitude for the forgiveness of one’s sins.

To say it again — this time, backward: There is no motivation for works of love without a sense of gratitude, no sense of gratitude without forgiveness, no forgiveness without contrition, no contrition without a sense of guilt, no sense of guilt without a sense of sin.

In other words, a guilty suffering spirit is more open to grace than an apathetic or smug soul. Therefore, an age without a sense of sin, in which people are not even sorry for not being sorry for their sins, is in rather a serious predicament. Likewise an age with a Christianity so eager to forgive that it denies the need for forgiveness. For such an age, therefore, Lent can scarcely be too long!

“I have found only one religion that dares to go down with me into the depth of myself,” wrote G. K. Chesterton. And it is true. No other religion dares to take me down to the new beginning. Hence Lent is not a tediously long brooding over sin. Lent is a journey that could be called an upward descent, but I prefer to call it a downward ascent. lt ends before the cross, where we stand in the white light of a new beginning. So fresh and new, says Chesterton, waxing lyrical, “that one can be grey and gouty — but only five minutes old!” The spirit that shuns this downward ascent all its livelong days eventually ends up an aged fetus. There is an infinite difference between being brand-new and five minutes old and being an aged fetus!

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SEVEN STANZAS AT EASTER — John Updike

January 28, 2010

John Updike

Norman D. Kretzmann remembers John Updike as a young Harvard graduate who sought out Clifton Lutheran Church in Marblehead, Mass., because it “nurtured the roots of faith he had grown up with in Pennsylvania.” 

Kretzmann, pastor of Marblehead at the time, proudly recalls that Updike was among the 96 adults who entered the congregation’s Religious Arts Festival in 1960 — and that his poem, Seven Stanzas at Easter, won $100 for “Best of Show.”

“People in the parishes I served became quite accustomed to my quoting his poem in my Easter sermons at least every few years,” says Kretzmann, who lives in a Minneapolis retirement center and regularly contributes to the Metro Lutheran newspaper.

Kretzmann closely follows Updike’s work, which includes more than 50 novels and books of poems. In a Metro Lutheran review of John Updike and Religion (Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000) he wrote: “I was John Updike’s pastor during the time which the writer later described as his ‘angst-besmogged period.’ Who was the rabbi and who was the disciple of our years together is hard to say.”

The pastor still has Updike’s 41-year-old typed copy of Seven Stanzas — “marked up with all sorts of irrelevant notes by me, instructions to me for homiletical purposes or for various secretaries,” he said. And Kretzmann has one more fond memory from the festival: Updike gave the $100 prize back to the congregation.
Kathleen Kastilahn

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Make no mistake; if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
     reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was nor as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
     eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
     regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
     faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
     grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
     opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
     embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

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Sloth

January 27, 2010

When it comes to the deadly sins, there is something more to the one called sloth than meets the eye. It is more than just simple inactivity or even laziness. The ancients called it “accidia” and the observations on this post belong to Kathleen Norris, whose book, Acedia & Me, explores the topic brilliantly. If the sin of pride involves man placing himself above God or rejecting God, then Sloth works at a much more insidious level: the “capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don’t care.” Of all the things we advocate paying attention to, this is the singularly most modern of all the sins and Ms. Norris observations are right on the mark.

In Good Times or In Bad
One thing that was familiar was my acedia. It was the same as it had been the year before , and the year before that. Acedia, it seems, is my companion in good times and bad. No matter what happens in my life, or how I am feeling, it is my primary temptation. The desert monks would recognize in my annual Advent blahs a textbook case of the struggle with acedia, when prayer seems not only a useless activity but also an impediment to freedom. This is truth as the devil tells it, using the lure of being free to be myself to enslave me in a sterile narcissism. For acedia is not merely a personal vice. Left unchecked, it can unravel the great commandment: as I cease to practice my love of God, I am also less likely to observe a proper love of my neighbor or myself.

The Original Sin Of Sloth?
If the Church has made too much of the sin of pride, which seduces us into thinking too highly of ourselves, it has not made enough of the sin of sloth, which allows us to settle for being less than we can be, both as individuals and as a society. The Presbyterian pastor John Buchanan believes that passivity and indifference that make us less able to engage in vital occupations and concerns are as problematic today as intentional evil. But they are also an ancient curse. The Judeo-Christian story places it in Eden, where the primal sin involves refusing to take responsibility. Put on the spot, Adam tries to excuse himself by blaming Eve, and Eve then blames the serpent. Neither cares where the buck stops, as long as it rests with someone else. God responds to this display of sloth by sending the first people, who had been intended for the holy leisure of paradise, into a land where they must labor for their sustenance.

Religious vocabulary is demanding, and words such as sin and repentance carry so much baggage that even many Christians are reluctant to employ them. In a culture marked by theological illiteracy it is tempting to censor terms that are so often misconstrued and misused. Many people who would not dream of relying on the understanding of literature or the sciences they acquired as children are content to leave their juvenile theological convictions largely unexamined. If they resented religion when they were young, as adults they are perplexed and dismayed by its stubborn persistence in the human race. But religions endure because they concern themselves with our deepest questions about good and evil, about the suffering that life brings to each of us, and about what it means to be fully human in the face of death.

The Concept Of Sin
We are right to distrust the idea of sin as it is often presented, but are foolish indeed if we throw out the living baby with the old church bathwater. The concept of sin does not exist so that people who may need therapy more than theology can be convinced that they are evil and beyond hope. It is meant to encourage people to believe that they are made in the image of God and to act accordingly. Hope is the heart of it, and the ever-present possibility of transformation. The doctrine would not have remained a living tradition for such a long time if it had not been, as the theologian Linda Mercadante describes it in her book Victims and Sinners, “a rich, holistic way of conceptualizing the human dilemma – one that functioned to steady and inform thousands of generations.” Were I to deny this, and discount the wisdom of my ancestors, I would grow not wise but overconfident in my estimation of myself and in what passes for progress.

Were I to listen with an open ear, I might come away from a Lenten sermon on fasting better able to spurn the tempting feast of malicious gossip and the satisfying art of maligning others in order to feel good about myself. When the church speaks in this way we do well to pay attention. Or when a master preacher such as Fred Craddock defines the sin of sloth so clearly that it stings like a slap in the face: “What we casually dismiss as mere laziness, he says, is “the ability to look at a starving child. . . with a swollen stomach and say, ‘Well, it’s not my kid.’.. . Or to see an old man sitting alone among the pigeons in the park and say, ‘Well…that’s not my dad.’ It is that capacity of the human spirit to look out upon the world and everything God made and say, I don’t care.”

Priggishness
The sin of sloth in this sense is all too recognizable in the United States, where the term “granny dumping” is used to define the practice of anonymously depositing our elderly on the doorsteps of nursing homes and where urban hospitals have been known to abandon indigent patients on skid row, some still in their hospital gowns and with IVs in their arms. But even as such outrages are exposed, we are beset by a curious silence: the more that society’s ills surface in such evil ways, the less able we are, it seems, to detect any evil within ourselves, let alone work effectively together to fix what is wrong. The philosopher Alasdair Macintyre finds that while our “present age is perhaps no more evil than a number of preceding periods…it is evil in one special way at least, namely the extent to which we have obliterated…the consciousness of evil. This…becomes strikingly apparent in the contemporary modes of instant indignation and denunciation. “It is marvelous,” he adds, to observe “how often the self-proclaimed defenders of the right and the good do not seem to have noticed [in themselves] the vices of pomposity. . . exaggeration, and self-righteousness.” Such behavior is not new to human history, Macintyre concludes; but “it was left to our time for what had been an eccentric vice . . . to become a dominant social mode.” Acedia, which is known to foster excessive self-justification, as well as a casual yet implacable judgmentalism toward others, readily lends itself to this process.

Though we may think ourselves far too liberated to be considered prigs, the writer Marilynne Robinson insists that this is exactly what we have become. She points out that the polarized tenor of our social discourse epitomizes the dictionary definition of priggishness, as “marked by overvaluing oneself or one’s ideas, habits, notions, by precise…adherence to them, and by small disparagement of others.”

It may be easy to profess not to believe in sin, but it is hard not to believe in sinners, so we embrace the comfortable notion that at least they are other people. “I’m a good person, but God hates homosexuals.” “I’m a good person, but God condemns homophobes.” “I’m a good person, but the homeless are irresponsible bums.” “I’m a good person, but those who denigrate the homeless are evil.” “Good people like me support our president.” “Good people like me oppose the president.” The loud litany of self-aggrandizement that reverberates through our culture convinces me that, for all of our presumed psychological sophistication, we remain at a primitive stage in our capacity to understand the reality of sin. It’s as if we believe that if we just don’t talk about it, it will go away, and we’ll all be nicer to one another. As a Christian, I beg to differ. Our bad thoughts are real, and they lead to bad acts. Check any newspaper.

In the fourteenth century, Chaucer warned that “a great heart is needed against acedia, lest it swallow up the soul.” But in a priggish culture such as ours, this magnanimity of spirit is precisely what we lack, and if we persist in denying any truth but our own, the danger to society is that our perspective will remain so narrow and self-serving that we lose the ability to effect meaningful change. Robinson wonders, in fact, whether we have made such a fetish of social concern and criticism that we have eroded our belief that genuine reform is possible. Anger over injustice may inflame us, but that’s a double-edged sword. If our indignation feels too good, it will attach to our arrogance and pride and leave us ranting in a void. And if we develop full-blown acedia, we won’t even care about that.

Paying Attention
At bottom, to dismiss sin as negative is to demonstrate a failure of imagination. As the writer Garret Keizer asserts in Help: The Original Human Dilemma: “Everyone believes in sin, the people who charge their peers with political incorrectness and the people who regard political correctness as the bogey of a little mind.” He adds, “What everyone does not believe in, as nearly as I can tell, is forgiveness.” It requires creativity to recognize our faults, and to discern virtues in those we would rather disdain.

Forgiveness demands close attention, flexibility, and stringent self-assessment, faculties that are hard to come by as we career blindly into the twenty-first century, and are increasingly asked to choose information over knowledge, theory over experience, and certainty over ambiguity. This mentality may be of some use in business, but in a family, including the family of faith, it is a disaster. It permits us to treat our churches as if they were political parties instead of the body of Christ, making them vulnerable to crass manipulation by ideologues. It allows Christian seminarians to give the psalms short shrift, and to assume an attitude of superiority toward these ancient poems, as relics of a more primitive time, when people still had enemies, and still wished them ill. “I can’t pray that.” I have heard pastors say of the cursing psalms, or the confessional ones, which admit to loving lies more than truth, to resenting others or desiring revenge. We’re not like that. We’re good people, or good enough, having willed away the prejudice, tribalism, and violence in our hearts. We are at a loss to explain their presence in the world around us.

Yet if we pay attention to what is going on, we may come to the uneasy realization that the root meaning of acedia, as ‘lack of care,’ could serve to define our present state. We grow inured to the horrendous violence engendered by suicide bombings and genocidal “little wars” around the world, and sigh when we hear of road-rage fatalities at home, or of the murder of a teenager for the trendy jacket or athletic shoes he is wearing. A refusal to care about the needs of others marks the unapologetic incompetence of a government worker or call-center operator, and also the disregard of corporate executives for the pain caused by a move to a place where cheaper labor might be exploited and more dangerous working conditions accepted. In the elderly, acedia expresses itself as a resigned withdrawal in a society indifferent to the ravages of aging, while in the young, it is a studied boredom with all that the world has to offer.

In April 1999, two teenage boys in a Denver suburb slaughtered thirteen people at their high school before killing themselves. The numerous homemade bombs they placed in the building convinced police that their intent was to destroy the school and kill everyone in it, well over a thousand people. Whatever disaffection these young men had felt among their peers, they were in the throes of a lack of caring so severe as to be pathological. A student who had considered himself a friend of the pair said in an interview that as awful as their action was, he couldn’t help feeling that “they finally did something.”

An astute observation, in a time of acedia, when murder on a large scale may be counted as something to break up the everyday routine and grant notoriety to teenage outcasts. In a culture crazy for celebrity and careless of basic needs, it should come as no surprise that a pair of teenage “losers” might come to value “doing something,” even something unspeakably violent, over life itself. The actions of the Columbine duo confirm what the criminologist S. Giora Shoham says of acedia, that it is more than a “breakdown in meaningful interaction among human beings, it is a thorough disengagement.” “The accidie,” he writes, “is an ‘outsider’ who is completely detached from both the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ sides of the value continuum.”

They “finally did something.” In some ways the two teens at Columbine were only taking their culture’s excessive attachment to irony to its logical and deadly extreme. The essayist Benjamin Barber reminds us that, “like sentiment, which has been called unearned emotion, the new irony is a form of unearned skepticism.” The theologian Henri de Lubac puts it another way: “Cynicism is the reverse side of hypocrisy. It does not give us the truth about ourselves.” But the jaded adolescent, confusing cynicism with maturity, may ask, “What is truth, anyway? And why should I care, if no one cares about me?”

Slavery From Within
As a viable sense of sin has eroded in modern times, acedia has become more acceptable. In his pithy essay on the subject, Aldous Huxley explores why, although boredom, hopelessness, and despair have always existed, in his own time “something has happened to make these emotions respectable and avowable; they are no longer sinful, no longer regarded as the mere symptoms of disease.” It may be that after two world wars people could not presume that the great technological advances of the industrial age would lead to cultural and moral advancement as well. Chemical weapons, forced-labor camps, gas chambers, death marches, the firebombing of civilian populations in Spain, England, Japan, and Germany, and nuclear attacks on two Japanese cities revealed that while human beings had become more efficient at genocidal violence, it was not easy for us to consider ourselves civilized, let alone “good.” Leszek Kolakowski, once Poland’s top Marxist philosopher, and now, according to the theologian Martin Marty, “a friend to faith;’ notes that “the absence of God became the ever more open wound of the European spirit when it became clear that “the new shining order of anthropomorphism” — which, it was hoped, would take the place of “the fallen God” — never arrived.

The German Jesuit Karl Rahner, writing in a devastated Munich shortly after the end of World War II reflected that “it has gone strangely with [us] in the recent decades of European intellectual history.” While many felt that, having “struggled passionately against the tutelage of Church, state, society, convention, morals,” they could now claim true autonomy, they often found it an empty freedom. What had originated as “a great, honest struggle” devolved for many into “a foolish protest that mistook licentiousness and unrestraint, the freedom of error and ruin, for true freedom.” Far from finding release, Rahner concluded, modern people fell into “a very odd slavery…slavery from within.”

Slavery from within, in all of its manifestations, was exactly what the early Christian monks were contending with, and Rahner mines a vein well-known to these ancients. His contemporaries, he writes, seem more helpless than ever in struggling with “the powers of desire, the powers of egotism, the hunger for power, the powers of sexuality and pleasure and simultaneously the impotence caused by worry which undermines….from within, by insecurity, by loss of life’s meaning, by anxiety and disappointment.” Not exactly the eight bad thoughts, but close enough. Having lost the sense of a useful religious tradition, and with the insights of the early monks obscured over time, Rahner’s self-proclaimed “free” person was ill equipped to take note of what Aldous Huxley, who was decidedly not a Christian, warned was the noonday demon emerging as the primary sin of the age. “It is a very curious phenomenon:’ Huxley observed, “this progress of accidie from the position of being a deadly sin…to the position first of a disease and finally of an essentially lyrical emotion, fruitful in the inspiration of much of the most characteristic modern literature.”

In the nineteenth century, Baudelaire could write, coolly, of a young, urban man as monarch of his own small kingdom: “Bored to nausea with his dogs and other creatures, nothing amuses him: not chase, nor falconry, nor people dying opposite his balcony.” More than a century later Andrei Voznesensky speaks of the heart itself as an Achilles, and comments, “In these days of unheard-of suffering, one is lucky indeed to have no heart.”

Human Capital
The effects of “eroding the spirit” can’t be quantified and are therefore not significant. Neither are individuals. Our diminishing value can be traced through corporate jargon; businesses that once referred to employees as “personnel” rechristened them “human resources” and have now adopted an even chillier term, “human capital.” People who are “capital” are readily disposable, and in recent years corporations have been emboldened to regard full-time employees as liabilities, and thus limit or altogether eliminate health care, pensions, and other once common benefits. But these same corporations do need consumers, and they spend prodigious amounts on advertising campaigns (the military terminology is no accident) intended to seduce us into thinking that freedom is the ability to purchase what Sears once promised as “The good life. At a good price. Guaranteed.” As the concepts of good and freedom, for centuries the province of theology, become small arms in the ever-expanding arsenal of marketing tools, the purpose of life itself can change. One Internet multi-billionaire recently stated that his goal is to die with more toys than the next guy. He may do just that. Thomas Merton said it starkly and prophetically in the 1960s: that in a society focused and “organized for profit and for marketing . . . there’s no real freedom. You’re free to choose gimmicks, your brand of TM your make of new car. But you’re not free not to have a car.”

Once considered suitable only for marking animals and slaves as property, branding is now a social norm, and for a price, some Americans have agreed to have brand names tattooed on their foreheads, necks, and pregnant bellies. One man was looking to replace the family car; a woman wanted the $10,000 for private school tuition for her son, another was paying medical bills. And how readily we have relinquished the sanctity of our own names, in order to walk down the street as Calvin, Tommy, or DKNY, willing to be free advertisements, if only our choice of clothing and shoes might impress others as to our superior character and worth.

Resentment Leading To Avarice
The sixth-century theologian Gregory the Great would recognize our condition as an outgrowth of acedia, which can foster deep resentment that leads to avarice. If the psychological connections that were obvious to Gregory remain obscure to us, we might recognize ourselves in the observation of the contemporary Benedictine Hugh Feiss that “the confused heart, having lost joy within itself, seeks…consolation outside itself. The more it seeks exterior goods, the more it lacks interior joy to which it can return.”

It is indeed acedia’s world when we have so many choices that we grow indifferent to them even as we hunger for still more novelty. As luxury goods and pornographic images permeate the culture, no longer the province of a select few, we discard real relationships in favor of virtual ones and scarcely notice that being overly concerned with the thread count of cotton sheets and the exotic ingredients of gourmet meals can render us less able to care about those who scrounge for food and have no bed but the streets. Now more than ever we need contrarians like Thomas Merton, who once told a Louisville store clerk who had asked what brand of toothpaste he preferred, “I don’t care.” Merton was intrigued by the man’s response. “He almost dropped dead:’ he wrote. “I was supposed to feel strongly about Colgate or Pepsodent or Crest or something with five colors. And they all have a secret ingredient. But I didn’t care about the secret ingredient.” Merton concluded that “the worst thing you can do now is not care about these things.”

We should care that as the public sphere becomes increasingly chaotic and threatening, what we think of as freedom consists of retreat and insularity. Marketers welcome this development, but a consumerist mentality allows us to turn spiritual practices, which traditionally have been aimed at making us more responsive to the legitimate needs of the wider world, into self-indulgence. We can pay good money to seek advice, which is plentiful, about finding the prayer method that best suits us and deciding where best to position our meditation space: in a custom-made gazebo, or over the three-car garage.

One glossy advertisement I have seen shows a woman facing the ocean in a yoga position; off to the side is a beachfront high-rise with condominium apartments costing from $1 to. $5 million, and a sales pitch: “The outer world is frenzied. The inner world needn’t be.” When people pray over finding the color scheme, carpet, candles, images, and incense that will best enhance their spiritual life, they would do well to recall the literal meaning of the third commandment, against blasphemy. In Hebrew, it is an admonition against offering nothingness to God. As Graham Greene observes in the novel A Burnt-Out Case, “[People] have prayed in prisons…in slums and concentration camps. It’s only the middle-classes who demand to pray in suitable surroundings.”

In England, the television show Spirituality Shopper offers a variety of religious experiences in a sense that William James could not have imagined. One woman, when asked to select something from the spiritual superstore — among the choices were an introduction to Buddhist meditation, a Jewish Sabbath-eve meal, and a Christian Lenten charity — chose Sufi whirling. Missing, of course, was any sense that religious traditions build up meaning only over time and in a communal context. They can’t be purchased like a burger or a pair of shoes.

As we grow more reluctant to care about anything past our perceived needs, acedia asserts itself as a primary characteristic of our time. “Given the state of our world,” Alasdair Macintyre writes (and, I would add, not just the state of our inner “wellness”), we might ask whether it is time to “restore the concept of evil that it once had in Western culture. It is clear that we lack an adequate concept of evil, because we lack any adequate concept of good.” The danger for us and our society, he points out, is that “inadequate thought and speech always translate into inadequate action.” If sloth means, as the pastor John Buchanan contends, “not living up to the full potential of our humanity, playing it safe, investing nothing, being cautious, prudent, digging a hole and burying our treasure, it is critical that we take into account what this means for society at large.

Totalitarianism
Historians, Buchanan writes, “observe that whenever totalitarianism of any kind rears its ugly head, it’s because ordinary people have stopped caring about the life of the community and the nation.” He cites Simone Weil, who declared that Hitler’s rise to power would be inconceivable without “the existence of millions of uprooted people” who could not be roused to care about anything except their immediate circumstances. It is all the more appalling that these were often people who believed that human progress had made them more advanced and free than any who had come before. This common fallacy allows us to complacently measure the world by the scope of our own limited outlook; but as the Carmelite Constance Fitzgerald reminds us, our failure to acknowledge our inner blockages can make us incapable of recognizing the blockages we have created in the culture. “We see cold reason, devoid of imagination;’ she writes, “heading with deadly logic toward violence, hardness in the face of misery, a sense of inevitability, war, and death.” Even worse, we come to assume that these conditions — injustice, poverty, perpetual conflict — are inevitable, the only possible reality, and lose our ability to imagine that there are other ways of being, other courses of action.

One such blockage — I’ll call it acedia — seems to me to be at the heart of the question of what we will tolerate as a society. The problem of homelessness in this country now seems intractable, but it scarcely existed, apart from skid row alcoholics, only decades ago. For many people, the problems of homeless families whose children go to bed hungry every night, or the at least 40 million Americans who do not have medical insurance and adequate health care, are just “the way things are” beneath the radar of their concern, The writer Wendell Berry laments the extent to which economics has been elevated to a position that God once held, as “ultimate justifier.” We have come to “treat economic laws of supply and demand” as though they were “the laws of the universe.” If there is a religion that encompasses all the world, it is the pursuit of wealth. But Christians must recognize that in slothfully acquiescing to its petty gods, we deny Christ a place on earth even more effectively than do the loud atheists and antitheists of our time.

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