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Gil Bailie Interprets René Girard

February 12, 2010

Gil Bailie’s definitive work on René Girard is Violence Unveiled. While many counsel “Read the original!” I have always been one who has preferred to read interpreters and then read the originals. It gives me a sense of knowing the lay of the land or landmarks to observe as I read the original source material. Bailie brings a wealth of anecdote and other observations to Girard’s work which brings it more alive to me.

Joseph Bottum felt the same: “Of the four books, Bailie’s Violence Unveiled is the best introduction to the Girardian topics of violence, culture, and sacrifice. It is an easily accessible and beautifully crafted analysis that moves freely from Greek literature to current news stories, from Aztec myths to Captain Cook’s experience in Tahiti, and finds in them all the grounds for a persuasive biblical and anti-violent Christian apologetics. Specialist and nonspecialist alike will find Bailie’s book rewarding; I recommend it highly.”

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Beginning from literary criticism and ending with a general theory of culture, through an explanation of the role of religion in primitive societies and a radical reinterpretation of Christianity, René Girard has completely modified the landscape in the social sciences. Ethnology, history of religion, philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychology and literary criticism are explicitly mobilized in this enterprise. Theology, economics and political sciences, history and sociology — in short, all the social sciences, and those that used to be called moral sciences — are influenced by it.
Paul Doumachel

The Revolutionary Tribunal went to work, and a steady slaughtering began. . . The invention of the guillotine was opportune to this mood. The queen was guillotined, and most of Robespierre’s antagonists were guillotined; atheists who argued that there was no Supreme Being were guillotined; Danton was guillotined because he thought there was too much guillotine; day by day, week by week, this infernal new machine chopped off heads and more heads and more. The reign of Robespierre lived, it seemed, on blood, and needed more and more, as an opium-taker needs more and more opium.
H. G. Wells

In the case of tens of millions killed and the lives of entire nations subverted, a catchword simply won’t do….” Communism” was the breakdown of humanity and not a political problem. It was a human problem, a problem of our species, and thus of a lingering nature… Why don’t we simply start by admitting that an extraordinary anthropological backslide has taken place in our century?
Joseph Brodsky

Will we actually allow Auschwitz to be the end point, the disruption which it really was, the catastrophe of our history, out of which we can find a way only through a radical change of direction achieved via new standards of action? Or will we see it only as a monstrous accident within this history but not affecting history’s course?
Johann Baptist Metz

Sacred Violence
No summary could convey the subtlety of the Girardian theory, and an oversimplified presentation of it would lead to misconceptions, defeating the very purpose of an introduction. Suffice it to say that Girard has uncovered the role violence plays in archaic religion and the role these religious systems play in human culture. Human history is the relentless chronicle of violence that it is because when cultures fall apart they fall into violence, and when they revive themselves they do so violently. Primitive religion is the institution that remembers the reviving violence mythologically and ritually reenacts its spellbinding climax. Primitive religion grants one form of violence a moral monopoly, endowing it with enough power and prestige to preempt other forms of violence and restore order. The famous distinction between “sacred” and “profane” is born as the culture glorifies the decisive violence (sacred) that brought an episode of chaotic violence (profane) to an end and made warriors into worshipers. Distinguishing these two forms of violence is always an extremely arbitrary affair, but that does not keep the distinction from having beneficial effects. Religion makes possible these benefits by bestowing sacred status on a socially tolerable form of violence to which the culture can resort as an alternative to greater and more catastrophic violence. “It is better that one man should die,” said Caiaphas of Jesus, “than that the whole nation be destroyed.”

Caiaphas was invoking a mechanism for preserving culture that is as old as culture itself. Whether it is the Assyro-Babylonian myth declaring that Marduk created the world by killing the monster Tiamat; or the Teutonic myth telling how Odin formed the world by raising the corpse of Ymir from the sea of Ymir’s own blood, or Pope Urban II declaring that God willed the first Crusade; or Thomas Jefferson saying that the tree of liberty must be periodically watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants; or Lenin saying you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs — cultures have forever commemorated some form of sacred violence at their origins and considered it a sacred duty to reenact it in times of crisis. The logic of sacred violence is nowhere expressed more succinctly nor repudiated more completely than in the New Testament, where the high priest solemnly announces its benefits and the crucifixion straightaway reveals its arbitrariness and horror. The New Testament account of the crucifixion reproduces the myths and mechanisms of primitive religion only to explode them, reveal their perversities, and declare allegiance to the Victim of them. As the theologian Robert Hamerton-Kelly, one of Girard’s most astute interpreters, puts it: “Christian theology provides a trenchant critique of religion.”

The Waning Of Scapegoating Violence
There was, however, something profoundly true about what Caiaphas said. Up to this very day, cultures rely on scapegoating violence to a far greater degree than we realize. The reason culture is now in such disarray, however, is that this ancient recipe for generating social solidarity has ceased to have its once reliable effects. It has been gradually shorn of its religious mystifications, and, as a result, its ability to promote cultural order has waned. By mystifying human violence and attributing it to the gods, archaic religion endowed a certain form of physical might — usually the most powerful form — with metaphysical significance. As long as the myths that mythologized certain human violence remained in effect, this sacralized violence was able to ward off other violence or crush it with religious conviction when it arose. As the myths that divinized the violence were weakened, the difference between order-destroying violence and order-restoring violence likewise began to break down.

Which brings me back to the hole in the parlor floor (a metaphor used by the poet Richard Wilbur whereby a carpenter’s work in progress allows the observer to see the foundation of the house). As Girard explained in his next book — Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World — the hole in the parlor floor into which he had peered in Violence and the Sacred was made by the Galilean Carpenter who was publicly executed outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago. As profoundly novel as Girard’s insights seem, he insists that they simply clarify and explicate a revelation of sacred violence that has its seeds in the Hebrew Scriptures and its stunning climax in the New Testament passion story. The Carpenter made a hole in the parlor floor and Girard simply looked into it and saw there things hidden since the foundation of the world. “Thus,” writes Robert Hamerton-Kelly, “Girard points us to a possible restatement of biblical faith that places it at the center of the struggle for a culture beyond violence.”

The Cross As An Hermeneutic Principle
According to the currently fashionable school of literary deconstruction, literary criticism is in a tailspin that is too momentous to be interrupted. There is nothing but the text. One reading is as good as another. Girard’s work, however, articulates the terms under which the critical work might be revived, grounded once again in historical reality’ and made both anthropologically and spiritually significant. As the criteria for assessing cultural arrangements generally, and literary traditions specifically, Girard has proposed the victim and the truth about the victim. He has suggested that the real task of literary criticism has just begun, and that at its center is the Cross. With the Cross as his hermeneutic principle, Girard’s work deconstructs literary deconstruction and replaces its purely literary vertigo with intellectual and moral vigor.

The.phrase “things hidden since the foundation of the world” is taken from the Gospel of Matthew. In the passage from which it is taken, Matthew says that Jesus’ use of parables was linked to his mission to reveal those things hidden since the foundation of the world. The implication is that the practical meaning of revolutionary and “counter-intuitive” truths is more likely to be conveyed by anecdotes than by an abstract statement of the truths themselves.

Historical Developments And The Worldwide Crisis Of Culture
“Every historical development,” wrote the historian John Lukacs, “is inseparable from its recognition.” Almost by definition, a truly historic development is one that cannot be adequately assessed by the conventional wisdom and intellectual presuppositions whose historical relevance it is bringing to an end. The worldwide crisis of culture in the midst of which we now find ourselves is just such a historical development. If historical developments are inseparable from their recognition, and if the one we’re living through is having some terrible consequences in part because we have failed to recognize its true significance, then it is our responsibility to try anew to recognize it. Those who come after us may be better able than we to recognize the nature of the present crisis, but they may not have a chance to do so unless we begin to recognize it better than we have so far.

Explaining Away Violence
It has been said that “the Nazi experience tests the limits of what history can explain.” Nor is the Nazi holocaust alone in defying explanation. Today, we are constantly confronted by news of horrendous acts of collective violence for which our familiar explanations seem inadequate. If we are no longer able to explain away the violence that is upon us, it is because almost all of the interpretive and explanatory tools with which we have tried to explain it are those bequeathed to us by the European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment came into being by expelling or marginalizing the religious perspective without which some of the oddest vagaries of the human drama become incomprehensible. For perfectly understandable reasons, the Enlightenment had hoped to rid the world of religious superstition and the religious passions that had proven so destructive. It proposed to do so by placing an empirical rationalism at the spiritual center of the West’s cultural undertaking — a place once occupied by Christian moral and intellectual sensibilities, whose source of clarity remained unclear and whose historical and cultural effects were, shall we say, not uniformly edifying. In truth, however, what the Enlightenment did was to secularize a wariness about religion that has its roots in the Old Testament prophets, the Gospels, and the letters of Paul. For both the secularizing and rationalizing impulses it espoused were products of the Judeo-Christian tradition that the Enlightenment came into existence by underestimating and repudiating.

There may be no more urgent task today than that of renouncing religious superstition and freeing ourselves from its grip, but we’re not likely to do so by abandoning the spiritual tradition that taught us to be wary of religious superstition in the first place. Things have changed. Today, one is more likely to find people who have renounced religious superstition in monasteries and in synagogues, in church-sponsored soup kitchens, and at morning Mass than at the shopping mall, the fitness gym, the stock exchange, or the faculty lounge. Those who think that disdain for religion is an antidote for religious superstition haven’t sufficiently pondered the French Revolution or Madam Mao’s cultural revolution or Pol Pot’s bloody attempt at social engineering. On the other hand, if we could dispense with both the credulous forms of piety and the gullible forms of skepticism that combine to insulate the modern world from the biblical tradition, we might finally realize that the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament represent the world’s mother lode of anti-superstition.

The End Of “History”
As Girard’s seminal work indicates, and as I will try to show, we are in the midst of perhaps the greatest anthropological challenge in history. It is a challenge that goes to the heart of culture itself. So much so, that in order to approximate its historical and anthropological significance, I, too, want to begin by referring to the epochal shift this challenge is precipitating as the end of “history.” Let me stress that by “history” (in quotes) I do not mean the human enterprise on this planet, but rather one particular phase of that enterprise. By “history” (in quotes) I mean the stage in human history (without quotes) during which collective and cathartic acts of violence could be counted on to bring a period of social chaos to an end and, in doing so, to convince its participants and sympathetic observers of the truth of the myth that justified the violence. Since such rituals of collective violence have played a key role in generating the social solidarity necessary for ordinary cultural life “since the foundation of the world,” the waning of their power confronts us with an anthropological dilemma of the first magnitude. And so I shall speak of it as the end of “history” in order to underscore its significance.

The irony, of course, is that this end of “history” is being brought about by the same moral force that gave rise to the specifically Western experience of history in the first place. In the West, due to the influence of the biblical tradition, the term “history” refers neither just to the recollection of events nor to the passage of time during which they occur. Rather it implies a journey toward truth. At its core, the Western sense of history assumes the gradual emergence of something that is both radically new and the fulfillment of what preceded it. Modernity’s now-defunct notions of inevitable social “evolution” or historical “progress” were shallow and insubstantial ones, but the principle they misconstrued and underestimated is at the heart of Western civilization, and its roots are biblical. For the West, history is the future as much as it is the past, but it is also the mental and spiritual atmosphere in which we think about our lives. “Western civilization has now spread all over the world,” wrote Lukacs “Neither the scientific method nor the professional study of history are any longer European and American intellectual monopolies. Yet historical consciousness is still something specifically ‘Western.’ As Lukacs and most other historians — both Western and non-Western — acknowledge, the West’s historical consciousness is inextricably bound up with the historicity of the Judeo-Christian tradition. “Christianity is not one of the great things of history,” wrote Henri de Lubac, “it is history that is one of the great things of Christianity.” The biblical sensibility that shaped Western cultures endowed them with a palpable sense that something new was happening in history and an insatiable curiosity for finding out what it was. Western historical consciousness is concerned not only with what actually happened in the past but also with trying to understand the direction history is taking and what forces are driving it. It is a worthy undertaking, and one which Girard’s work allows us to take up with new zest.

Apocalypse
“Man creates what he calls history as a screen to conceal the workings of the apocalypse from himself,” wrote the literary critic Northrop Frye. This is a stunning insight. It cries out to be paired with the observation that the Nazi experience tests the limits of what “history” can explain. It implies that “history” pays a price in return for its explanatory power. It suggests that “history” conceals something in order to illuminate everything else. It implies what Cesareo Bandera made explicit when he called attention to “what literal historical reality itself hides or disguises in order to constitute itself as such, as meaningful historical reality? In other words, what makes “meaningful historical reality” meaningful is the concealing of something that might rob it of its meaning were it not concealed. If “the Nazi experience tests the limits of what history can explain,” it is because the explanatory power of “history” begins and ends with its ability to explain away the victims and the violence vented against them.

Equally remarkable in Frye’s lapidary (vocab: characterized by an exactitude and extreme refinement that suggests gem cutting) statement is its implication that the end of “history” was inextricably bound up with the Bible, and that the biblical texts could not be fully comprehended if their apocalyptic features were neglected. Frye even went so far as to suggest that the “vision of the apocalypse is the vision of the total meaning of the Scriptures,” though he erred when he took the next step, asserting that apocalyptic destruction “is what the Scripture is intended to achieve.” On the contrary, what Scripture is intended to achieve is a conversion of the human heart that will allow humanity to dispense with organized violence without sliding into the abyss of uncontrollable violence, the apocalyptic abyss.

The word “apocalypse” means “unveiling.” ‘What, then, is veiled, the unveiling of which can have apocalyptic consequences? The answer is: violence. Veiled violence is violence whose religious or historical justifications still provide it with an aura of respectability and give it a moral and religious monopoly over any “unofficial” violence whose claim to “official” status it preempts. Unveiled violence is apocalyptic violence precisely because, once shorn of its religious and historical justifications, it cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from the counter-violence it opposes. Without benefit of religious and cultural privilege, violence simply does what unveiled violence always does: it incites more violence. In such situations, the scope of violence grows while the ability of its perpetrators to reclaim that religious and moral privilege diminishes. The reciprocities of violence and counter-violence threaten to spin completely out of control.

The weakness of Frye’s analysis was that he treated the apocalyptic phenomenon as though it were exclusively a literary or psychological one, and he ignored its historical and anthropological implications. The “vision of the apocalypse,” he wrote, “may break in on anyone at any time.” For Frye, the apocalypse was ultimately a vision forming in the mind or psyche of the reader. Of course, Frye was right to reject the notion of the apocalypse as a lurid prophesy of God’s final orgy of vengeance, but whether Frye’s alternative — a purely literary and psychological apocalypse — better accounts for either the biblical texts or the historical events is doubtful.

The other literary critic who has argued for the unique relevance of the biblical tradition for our troubled times is, of course, René Girard. Like Frye, Girard has insisted that the apocalyptic language of the Bible cannot and should not be dismissed. “Apocalyptic prophecy,” Girard argues, “means no more and no less than a rational anticipation of what men are likely to do to each other and to their environment, if they go on disregarding the Gospel’s warning against revenge in a desacralized and sacrificially unprotected world.” “The idea of ‘limitless’ violence, long scorned by sophisticated Westerners, suddenly looms up before us,” writes Girard. “For the first time,” he says, humanity faces “a perfectly straightforward and even scientifically calculable choice between total destruction and the total renunciation of violence.”

For Girard, however, it was not “history” that humanity created to screen the workings of the apocalypse from itself. It was religion — archaic religion — that came into being in the first instance, Girard has argued, with the sacralization of a spontaneous act of scapegoating violence. In other words, archaic religion is humanity’s astonishing instrument for turning murder and madness into a sacralized bulwark against madness and murder. More or less refined forms of this same recipe for generating social solidarity and lending it the requisite solemnity have played a part in cultural existence since the dawn of human culture. The social stability of these cultures was determined to a considerable degree by the success with which they were able to experience and interpret the violence which brought them into being as holy. And any given culture’s attempt to endow its scapegoating violence with religious sanction depends on the degree of unanimity the violence inspires, and unanimity requires that all empathy for the victim or victims of the violence be extinguished. To use Frye’s evocative imagery, the screen that we have used to conceal from ourselves the workings of the apocalypse is the screen that has kept us from recognizing the humanity of our victims and the truth about the violence inflicted on them.

The generic term for the systematic misrecognitions that have veiled the victim’s face and silenced the victim’s voice is “myth.” if we live at a moment in human history when “history” is no longer able to screen us from the apocalypse, no longer able to explain away the violence it documents, it is because in our day “history” is exhausting the last vestige of its mythological power. In the foreseeable future, neither religious mystification nor the solemn and quasi-religious causes of “history” will sufficiently veil our violence from our own eyes nor keep us from seeing the faces of our victims.

Disruptive Empathy
In those cultures under the gospel influence, moral misgivings about scapegoating or sacrificial violence gradually arose and almost imperceptibly became their driving cultural and historical thrust. These societies are conspicuous for the degree to which a demand for social reforms arose within them. This never-ending parade of social innovations and political correctives is the defining characteristic of Western civilization, and at its core lies the biblical sympathy for victims. The moral discomfort that led to such reforms is a symptom of the weakening of the sacrificial system and its justifying myths. No such moral misgivings arise when a culture’s sacrificial mechanisms are operating with their original mystifying power. On the other hand, the very act of undertaking moral reforms has the effect of further awakening the moral acuity that led to the demand for reforms in the first place. In other words, the social reforms to which the empathy for victims gives rise have a progressively destabilizing effect on culture, arousing an empathy for the culture’s victims, bringing the plight of victims and the fact of victimization into sharper focus, undermining the moral legitimacy of the culture’s sacrificial rituals for restoring social solidarity, and insuring that eventually the reformed system will arouse more moral misgivings in later generations than did the unreformed system in earlier periods. The result of this, of course, is that new reforms will be required, and their implementation will have the same effect. As the modern world is finding out to its dismay, the process is inexorable.

Perhaps the first modern to sense the full significance of the empathy for victims the gospel revelation was awakening was Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who has had such an enormous impact on our time. He reacted with horror as he saw moral authority shifting from the powerful to the weak, the downtrodden, and the outcast. The West was becoming ambivalent about performing cultural routines that involved no moral dilemma for societies not under the influence of the gospel tradition. As Nietzsche saw so well, this cultural equivocation was a product of Christianity. “I condemn Christianity.” he declared, “I raise against the Christian church the most terrible of all accusations that any accuser ever uttered…The Christian church has left nothing untouched by its corruption…The “equality of souls before God,” this falsehood, this pretext for the rancor of all the base-minded, this explosive of a concept which eventually became revolution, modern idea, and the principle of decline of the whole order of society — is Christian dynamite.

In his characteristically truculent way, Nietzsche recognized how the Gospels were awakening an empathy for victims and outcasts, and he was appalled by what he felt that empathy was doing to the ancient heroic virtues. He condemned Christianity as a religion of pity. “Christianity has sided with all that is weak and base,” Nietzsche wrote in The Antichrist. “Pity stands opposed to the tonic emotions which heighten our vita1ity~” he inveighed. “We are deprived of strength when we feel pity. .. . Some have dared to call pity a virtue (in every noble ethic it is considered a weakness); and as if this were not enough, it has been made the virtue, the basis and source of all virtues.”~

Nietzsche’s contempt for the idea of the conscience and its moral pangs, on one hand, and his romance with “the will to power,” on the other, are two aspects of one of his most brilliant and sinister realizations. Nietzsche understood that violence and sacrificial bloodletting had always been a part of humanity’s cultural existence. It was his realization that the world no longer had myths capable of endowing these bloody rituals with moral respectability that led him to oppose the “conscience” that harbored the moral misgivings, and to castigate Christianity for bringing this “conscience” into being. He proposed to replace it with a will-to-power that would carry out its sacrificial duties, moral qualms notwithstanding.

It was both perfectly natural and poetically brilliant for Auden, in his Christmas oratorio, to place a variation of Nietzsche’s tirade on Christian pity into the mouth of Herod. Like Nietzsche, Auden’s Herod recoils from the thought of a world in which pity — for Nietzsche the Christian virtue — would replace Roman justice. “Pity” is hardly the Christian virtue, but at least in terms of its historical effects, empathy for victims is Christianity’s cardinal virtue. This is so, not because Christianity is solely or even primarily concerned with making social or political improvements, but because it carries to its conclusion the biblical aversion for idolatry, and because idolatry’s core illusion — humanity’s oldest and most tenacious illusion — is the one that makes victimizers proud of what they’ve done. All human delusions lead to, or flow from, that one. Biblical revelation, especially the New Testament story of the crucifixion, challenges that primary illusion. It invites those it confronts to see scapegoating violence for what it is and to recognize their own complicity in it. By acclaiming the victim as Lord, the Gospels slowly begin to awaken an empathy for victims everywhere.

Again, this does not mean the world became, or is becoming, suddenly more virtuous, or that we have been cured of our scapegoating predilections. Rather it means that increasingly we can only lustily vent our violence against victims whom we can confidently regard as victimizers. Today, what is often called the “culture wars” is a struggle over which political or ideological or intellectual or religious camp can best claim to have been victimized in the past, or to have championed the cause of victims and outcasts, or to be the rightful heirs of those who did. In his Time magazine essay, Hughes alluded to this contest when he discussed the controversy, typical of so many, between those who laud and those who scorn the landing of Columbus in the Americas. Was Columbus, Hughes asked, “Manifest Destiny in tights” or a “Hitler in a caravel, landing like a virus among the innocent people of the New World?” In a marvelous phrase, Hughes described the historians on either side of this debate standing “with tarbrush and gold leaf,” ready to vilify and valorize according to which myth they choose to champion.

Tarbrush and Gold Leaf
As I will try to show in more detail in a later chapter, human culture as we know it begins when an act of unanimous violence brings the violence that preceded it to an end in such a breathtaking way that it gives birth to primitive religion. Myth remembers this strange event and its dramatic resolution from the point of view of those who derived social benefits from it, namely, those who discovered their first social solidarity when they joined in the common cause of expelling or eliminating their scapegoat. Myth camouflages the violence and recalls it in ways that make it seem valiant and divinely ordained. Here, as hereafter, I use the term “myth,” neither as a synonym for fiction nor as the pure figment of the primitive imagination. Rather I use “myth” to refer to a special combination of fact and fantasy, one that tells of an actual to-lent event, but that tells of it from the perspective of the society which benefited from the violence and that therefore veils and vindicates the actual violence. All mythological pictures of the world are painted with tarbrush and gold leaf, but no one in a society where the mythological system is still functioning is aware that any such tampering with the facts has taken place. Primitive peoples were not hypocrites. Once the myth can no longer effectively veil the reality of the violence — as is the case in cultures that have fallen under biblical influence — then even the culture’s solemnly sanctioned violence becomes morally problematic, and the moral authority of the culture is undermined.

Myth is like a stone that has been tossed by innumerable waves of the sea and that now lies glistening in the surf. Those who live in cultures still under the sway of such myths know better than to pick it up and examine it. As we in the West are now realizing, if you pick the stone up, scrutinize it, and put it in your pocket, it loses its luster. It looks like so many other stones. To understand why it shimmers in the surf is to realize how circumstantial is its mesmerizing power. When that power begins to wane, as it has in our world, we turn almost instinctively to gold leaf and the tarbrush in an effort to restore luster to our myths and righteousness to our causes, extending thereby for a little while longer our “ceremony of innocence.” As skillfully as partisans and propagandists have often applied the tarbrush and gold leaf, however, their task has been profoundly complicated by the fact that as the moral valence has shifted in the victim’s favor, the social distinction the gold leaf is meant to bestow has tended to be reserved almost exclusively for the past victims of the tarbrush. To be sure, few are eager to be tarbrushed, but to have been tarbrushed is to enjoy a social status that buckets of gold leaf could not hope to bestow. All of this is part of what Lance Morrow called the surreal confusion of the world in which we now live. The quirkiness and perversity aside, what is underway is the most astonishing reversal of values in human history. Today the victim occupies the moral high ground everywhere in the Western world. The cultural and historical force that caused this reversal is the gospel. Nietzsche was right at least about that.

Posted in Book Recommendations, Understanding Violence | Tagged Apocalypse, Gil Bailie, Myth, Nietzsche, Northrop Frye, Rene Girard, Sacred Violence, Scapegoating Violence, the Crisis Of Culture, The Cross As An Hermeneutic Principle, The End Of “History”, Violence Unveiled | 1 Comment »

All Have Sinned: The Mystery of Impiety by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

February 11, 2010

The Anastasis of Christ, symbolizes the promise of resurrection in the Eastern Church. Christ, returning from the underworld, pulls Adam and Eve from their graves to their resurrection.

The following reflection on sin by Fr. Cantalamessa is drawn from the second chapter of his book Life In Christ which is about the spiritual messages contained in Paul’s letter to the Romans. In a series of homiletic meditations, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, explores the main themes of St. Paul’s famous epistle in a manner that draws us closer to a more mature relationship with Jesus Christ. The reading selection that follows will show you what I mean.

Only Divine Revelation Knows What Sin Is
Only divine revelation really knows what sin is and neither human ethics nor philosophy can tell us anything about it. No man can say by himself what sin is, for the simple reason that he himself is in sin. All that he says about sin can, in the end, only be a palliative and an understatement of sin. “To have a weak understanding of sin is part of our being sinners.” Scripture says: “Transgression speaks to the wicked deep in his heart. . . for he flatters himself in his own eyes that his iniquity cannot be found out and hated” (Psalms 36:2-3). Sin also “speaks” just as God does; it too delivers oracles and its place of teaching is man’s heart. Sin speaks in man’s heart and that is why it is absurd to expect man to speak “against” it. Although I am here writing about sin, I too am a sinner and I should therefore tell you not to rely too much on me and on what I write! Sin is a much more serious thing — infinitely more serious — than I shall ever be able to explain. At the most, man can reach an understanding of sin against himself or against other men, but not sin against God; the violation of human rights, but not the violation of divine rights. In fact, if we take a close look around us we can see that this is what is happening in present-day culture.

Therefore only divine revelation knows what sin is. Jesus explains all this more closely by saying that only the Holy Spirit can “convince the world of sin” (cf. John 16:8). I have mentioned that God must be the one to talk to us of sin. When, in fact, God and not man talks against sin it is not easy to remain impassive; his voice is like thunder that “crushes the cedars of Lebanon” (cf. Psalms 29:5). Our meditation will have fulfilled its aim if it manages even to challenge our unshakable basic self-assurance and make us feel a wholesome fear in front of the terrible danger that not only sin but the very possibility of sinning holds for us. With the help of God we want to reach the point of being prepared to shed our blood in the struggle against sin (“In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.” Hebrews 12:4).

Sin, A Refusal To Acknowledge God
The basic sin and primary object of God’s wrath has been singled out by St. Paul as asebein, that is impiety or ungodliness. And he immediately explains what this impiety exactly consists of, saying that it is the refusal to g1orify and thank God. In other words, the refusal to acknowledge God as God and not rendering him the respect that is his. It consists, we could say, in “ignoring” God, not however in the sense of “not knowing he exists”, but, in the sense of “behaving as if he didn’t exist.” In the Old Testament Moses shouts to the people, “Know that the Lord your God is God!” (cf. Deuteronomy 7:9) and a psalmist takes up the same cry: “Know that the Lord is God! It is he that made us, and we are his” (Psalms 100:3). Sin is basically the denial of this “acknowledgement”; it is the attempt, on the part of the creature to cancel out on his own initiative and almost with arrogance, the infinite difference that exists between himself and God. Thus sin infects the very root of things; it is “a stifling of the truth,” an attempt to keep truth the prisoner of injustice. It is something much more sinister and terrible than can be imagined or expressed. If the world knew what sin really is, it would die of terror.

This refusal took shape in idolatry in which the creature is worshipped rather than the Creator (cf. Romans 1:25). In idolatry man doesn’t “accept” God but rather “makes” a god; it is he who decides about God and not God about him. The roles are reversed; man becomes the potter and God the clay which man moulds to his pleasure (cf. Romans 9:20 ff.).

The Moral Fruits Of A Fundamental Choice Against God
So far St. Paul has shown us the withdrawal that took place in man’s heart, his fundamental choice against God, Now he goes on to show the moral fruits of this withdrawal. All of this gave rise to a general dissolution in behavior, a real and true “torrent of perdition” dragging humanity unconsciously to ruin. At this point St. Paul outlines the appalling picture of the vices of the pagan society: male and female homosexuality, injustice, wickedness, covetousness, envy, deceit, malignity, haughtiness, arrogance, disobedience to parents, faithlessness. . . The list of vices is taken from the pagan moralists, but the whole picture that results from it is that of the “wicked one” so often spoken of in the Bible. The disconcerting thing at first glance is that St. Paul sees all this disorder as a consequence of divine wrath. In fact, he affirms this unequivocally three times: “God gave them up to impurity. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. . . And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind” (Romans 1:24, 26, 28). God certainly does not “want” these things, but he “permits” them to make man understand where his refusal of God leads. St. Augustine wrote that “these things, although they are punishments, are also sins because the punishment for iniquity is that of being, itself, iniquity. God intervenes to punish evil and from his punishment other sins come.” Sin is the punishment for sin. In fact Scripture says: “One is punished by the very things by which he sins “(Wisdom 11:16). God is “obliged” to abandon people to themselves so as not to have to uphold their injustice and in the hope that they will retrace their steps.

Refusal Of God In Modern Times
Let us listen to a few of those who expressed refusal of God in modern times, keeping in mind, however, that we are judging the words and not the intentions or moral responsibility of the individuals which are known only to God and which might be very different to what they seem to us. Karl Marx gave this reason for his refusal of the idea of a “creator”: “A person” – he wrote – “is an independent being only. insofar as he is his own master, and he is his own master only in so far as he is master of his existence. He who lives through the grace of another sees himself as a dependent being. . . But I would live entirely for the sake of another if he had created me, if he were the source of my life and my life was not my own creation”. “Man’s conscience” — he wrote in his youth — is “the highest divinity”; “the origin of man is man himself.” (K. Marx, Manuscript.of 1844) In this same spirit, J.P. Sartre had one of his characters say: “Today I accuse myself and only I, man, can absolve myself. If God exists man is nothing.. . God doesn’t exist! Happiness, tears of joy! Alleluia! No more heaven. No more hell! Nothing else but the earth.” (J.P. Sartre, The Devil and the Good God X, 4)

Another way of arrogantly eliminating the difference between Creator and creature, between God and the “self,” is to confuse them, which is the form that impiety sometimes takes on today in depth psychology. Paul’s reproach against the “wise men” of his times was not for exploring nature and admiring its beauty, but for not going beyond this. In the same way the word of God does not criticize certain trends in depth psychology for having discovered a new area of the human mind, the unconscious, and for trying to throw light on this, but for having made of this discovery yet another occasion for getting rid of God. Thus, the Word of God renders a service to psychology, purifying it of what threatens it, just as psychology in its turn, can be of use — and has effectively been so in many cases — in purifying our understanding of the Word of God.

The Suppression Of The Distinction Between Good And Evil.
The impiety harbored in some of the recent trends of this science is the suppression of the distinction between good and evil. Following a procedure that closely recalls that of ancient, heretical gnosis, the limits move dangerously: the limit of the divine lowers and the demonic limit rises to the point of meeting and even of, being superimposed. Then, in evil, nothing else is seen except “the other side of reality” and in the devil nothing else but the “shadow of God.” There are some who have even gone so far as to accuse Christianity of having introduced the “ill-omened opposition between good and evil” into the world. The following words of Isaiah could have been written today for just such a situation: “Woe to those who call what is bad, good, and what is good, bad, who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness” (Isaiah 5:20).

Psychologists of this trend give no importance to “saving the soul” (which is even considered ridiculous) or even to “analyzing the soul,” but to “helping the soul fulfill itself,” that is, to making it possible for the human soul — which is like saying natural man — to express itself in all ways, repressing nothing. Salvation lies in self-revelation, in man making himself and his psyche known for what they are; salvation lies in self-realization. Salvation — it is thought — is within, immanent in man. It does not come from history but from the archetype manifested in myth and symbol. In a certain sense, it comes from the unconscious. The unconscious, which at the beginning was considered to be the natural place of evil where neurosis and illusions are rooted (including the “illusion” of God) is now seen as the seat of good, as a mine of hidden treasures for man. One day, after reading some works full of the ideas just mentioned, shocked and quite terrified, I was wondering what God’s judgment on all this could possibly be when I happened to read what Jesus says in St. John’s Gospel: “Though the light has come into the world, people have preferred darkness to the light” (John 3:19).

An Extreme Form Of Sin
However, we have not yet reached the heart of the matter. Alongside the intellectual denial of God by people convinced that God does not exist, we have the voluntary denial of those who refuse God, even though they know that God exists. This extreme form of sin, which is hatred of God and blasphemy, is expressed in an open and threatening insult to God, in the loud proclamation of the superiority of evil over good, of darkness over light, of hatred over love, of Satan over God. This is all directly maneuvered by the evil one. Who else, in fact, would be able to harbor the thought that “good is a deviation of evil and, like all deviations, is of secondary importance and destined to disappear one day,” or that “evil, in fact, is nothing but good ill-interpreted”?

The most evident signs of this form of impiety are: the profanation of the Eucharist (the excessive and inhuman hatred towards the consecrated host is a terrible, negative proof of the “real presence” of Christ in the Eucharist); the obscene and sarcastic parody of the stories and words of the Bible; the staging of the figure of Jesus in films and spectacles which are willfully blasphemous and offensive. To send a soul to their infernal lord, these persons are capable of such constancy as only the holiest of missionaries would employ to lead a soul to Christ.

Magic
On the other hand, this situation is not as remote as many Christians might think; it is, rather, an open abyss only a stone’s throw away from the indifference and “neutrality” in which they live. One starts with abandoning all religious practice and ends up, one sad day, among the openly declared enemies of God either by adhering to organizations whose aim (mostly kept secret at the beginning) is to make war against God and cause an upheaval in moral values, or through sexual aberrations or use of pornography, or following contacts with magicians, spiritists, esoteric societies, occult practices or other such things. Magic is, in fact, another way and the most blatant, of succumbing to the old temptation of wanting to be “like God.” “The hidden force which guides magic — as is written in one of their manuals — is the thirst for power. The magicians’ aims are defined quite appropriately for the first time by the serpent in the garden of Eden. . . The eternal ambition of the follower of the black arts consists in gaining power over the whole universe and making a god of himself.” The fact that in most cases we are dealing with charlatans and nothing more is of no importance. The irreverent intention behind its practice or with which one turns to it is sufficient to place one in Satan’s power. Satan works through lies and bluffing but the effects are anything but imaginary. In the Bible God says: “There must never be anyone among you. . . who practices divination, who is soothsayer, augur or sorcerer, weaver of spells, consulter of ghosts or mediums, or necromancer. For anyone who does those things is detestable to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 18:10-12). In the prophet Isaiah we find this severe admonishment: The Lord will strike the country because it is “full of sorcerers from the East and of soothsayers” (cf. Isaiah 2:6).

Claiming To Be Wise, They Became Fools
Man has only the two licit means of nature and grace for gaining power over himself, over sickness, over events and business. “Nature” indicates intelligence, the sciences, medicine, technology and all the resources that man has received from God in creation to dominate the earth in obedience to him. “Grace” indicates faith and prayer through which cures and miracles are sometimes obtained, but always from God, because “power belongs to God” (Psalms 62:12). When a third way is taken, that of the search for occult power, almost hiding from God, without needing his approval or indeed abusing his name and signs, then in one way or another the master and pioneer of this way comes on to the scene. I mean the devil who one day said all the power of the earth had been handed over to him, for him to give to anyone he chose if they would worship him (cf Luke 4:6). In these cases ruin is assured. The fly has been caught in the web of the “big spider” and will not easily manage to get out alive. Exactly what Paul pointed out is happening in our technological and secularized society: “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (Rornans 1:22): they have abandoned faith to embrace every kind of superstition, even the most childish.

The Wages Of Sin
But let us also examine the consequences of impiety, so that not even the slightest shadow of doubt remains in our minds that no one can prevail against God. In the prophet Jeremiah we read these words addressed to God: “All who abandon you will be put to shame” (Jeremiah 17:13). The abandonment of God leads to personal confusion and the feeling of having gone astray. “Lost” and “gone astray” are the words most frequently used in the Bible when sin is spoken of: the lost sheep, the lost son. – . The very word to translate the biblical concept of sin in Greek, hamartia, contains the idea of being lost and having failed. The same term was used when speaking of a river that flows away from its original course and is lost in the marshes, and of an arrow which misses its aim and is lost. Sin is therefore radical failure. A man can fail in many ways: as a husband, as a father or as a businessman. A woman can fail as a wife or as a mother; a priest can fail as a pastor, as a superior or as a spiritual director. But these are all relative failures; there is always the possibility of compensation; one may fail in all these ways and still be a most respectable person, even a saint. But it is not so with sin; through sin one fails as a creature, that is fundamentally, in what one “is” and not in what one “does.” This is the only case where the words of Jesus about Judas apply to a person: “It would have been better for that man if he had never been born” (Matthew 26:24). Man, in sinning, believes he is offending God, whereas, in fact, he is “offending” and mortifying only himself, to his own shame: “Is it really me they spite”, God says, “is it not in fact themselves, to their own confusion”? (Jeremiah 7:19). By refusing to glorify God, man himself becomes “deprived of the glory of God.” Sin offends God, that is, it saddens him greatly, but only in so far as it brings death to man whom he loves; it wounds his love.

The Existential Consequences Of Sin
But let us take a closer look at the existential consequences of sin. St. Paul affirms that “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). Sin leads to death; not so much to the “act” of dying – which lasts only a moment — as to the “state” of death, that is precisely to what has been called “mortal illness,” a state of chronic death. In this state the creature desperately tends to return to being nothing but without succeeding and lives therefore as if in an eternal agony. From this state comes damnation and the pains of hell; the creature is obliged by One stronger than himself to be what he does not consent to be, that is dependent on God, and his eternal torment is that he cannot get rid of either God or of himself. Kierkegaard rightly said that “the formula for all desperation is to desperately refuse to be what one is.” (S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death I, A)

Satan embodies this state. In him sin has run its entire course and is shown in its extreme consequences. He is the prototype of those “who do know God (and how he knew him!) but do not give him the glory and thanks that belong to God.” It is not necessary to fall back on the imagination or on theological speculation to learn Satan’s feelings on this point because he himself shouts them into the hearts of those whom God still allows him to tempt today, as Jesus was tempted in the wilderness: “We are not free”, he shouts, “we are not free! Even if you kill yourself, your soul lives on, you cannot kill it, we cannot say no. We are obliged to exist forever. It’s all deceit! It’s not true that God created us free!” Such thoughts make us shudder as it would seem that we are directly listening to the eternal argument between Satan and God. He, in fact, would wish to be left free to return to nothingness. Not because he doesn’t want to exist or to be God’s antagonist, but because he does not want to be what he is, dependent on God. He wants to exist, but not “through the grace of another.” As the Power above him is stronger than he is and obliges him to exist, this is the way to pure desperation

In choosing absolute autonomy from God, the creature is aware of the unhappiness and darkness involved but he is willing to pay this price. As St. Bernard said, “he prefers to he unhappy in his own sovereignty rather than be happy in submission.” The much talked about eternity of hell does not depend on God, who is always ready to forgive, but on the person who refuses to be forgiven and would accuse God of lacking respect for his freedom if God were to do so.

We have, today, the chance to actually verify through our own experience the results of sin by observing what is happening in our present society after the extreme consequences the refusal of God has led to in certain places. Nietzsche, for whom sin was nothing other than an ignoble “Jewish invention” and good and evil just simple “prejudices of God” (once again we are judging words and not intentions) said: “We have killed him; we are God’s assassins!” But then, having perceived or personally experienced the evil results of this, the philosopher added: “What have we done by unlinking this earth of ours from the chain that links it to its sun? Where is it going now? Where are we going? Isn’t ours an eternal descent? Backwards, sideways, forward, from all sides? Aren’t we perhaps wandering as if through an infinite nothingness?” (F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, nr. 125)To kill God is really the most horrific suicide. Death is really the wages of sin and the proof lies in present-day nihilism.

“You Are The Man!”
The Bible narrates this story. King David had committed adultery and to cover it up he had the woman’s husband killed in war. In this way, to make this woman his wife, could even have seemed an act of generosity on the king’s part towards the man who had died fighting for him — a real chain of sins. The Lord then sent the prophet Nathan to him who told him a parable, although the king did not know it was a parable. There were, he said, two men in a certain city, one rich and the other poor. The rich man had very many flocks and herds and the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb and it grew up with him and used to lie in his bosom. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and instead of taking one of his own flock, he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him. On hearing this story David’s anger was greatly kindled against the man and he said to Nathan: “The man who has done this deserves to die!” Then Nathan, pointing his finger, said to David: “You are the man!” (cf. 2 Samuel 12:1 ff.).

This is what the Apostle Paul is doing with us. After making us feel a righteous indignation and horror for the impiety of the world, as we pass from the first to the second chapter of his Letter, as if suddenly addressing us, he repeats: “You are the man!” “Therefore you have no excuse, Oh Man, whoever you are, when you judge another; for in passing judgment upon him you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things. We know that the judgment of God rightly falls upon those who do such things. Do you suppose, Oh Man, that when you judge those who do such things and yet do them yourself, you will escape the judgment of God?” (Romans 2:1-3). The recurrence, at this point, of the word “inexcusable”, which was used earlier for the pagans, leaves us in no doubt as to St. Paul’s intentions. While you were judging others, he says, you were bringing about your own condemnation. It is time now to turn the horror you feel for sin against yourself.

Safe From God’s Anger Just Because They Can Distinguish Between Good And Evil?
The “person judging” in the second chapter, turns out to be a Jew who, however, is seen here as a kind of stereotype. The “Jew” is a non-Greek, or a non-pagan; he is the pious believer who, with his strong principles and revealed morality, judges the rest of the world and feels safe in doing so. In this sense each one of us is the “Jew.” Origen actually said that in the Church the Apostle’s words were intended for bishops, presbyters and deacons, that is, for the guides and teachers. (Origen, Commentary on the Letter to the Romans II, 2; PG 14 873)Paul himself experienced it when, from being a Pharisee he became a Christian and can therefore confidently indicate to believers the way to abandon Pharisaism. He unmasks the strange and frequent illusions of pious and religious people who consider themselves safe from God’s anger just because they can clearly distinguish between good and evil. They know the law and, when necessary, they know how to apply it to others, whereas, as far as they themselves are concerned, they think that the privilege of being on God’s side or, at least, God’s goodness and patience with which they are very familiar, makes an exception for them.

“Or do you presume”, says the Apostle to us, “upon the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience? Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? But by your hard and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed” (Romans 2:4-5). What a shock it will be the day when you realize that these words of God are actually directed at you and that you are really the “you” mentioned! It’s like a jurist who is totally absorbed in analyzing a past sentence which is standard. On taking a Closer look he suddenly realizes that the sentence also applies to himself and is still effective. His state of mind undergoes a sudden change and he ceases to be so sure of himself. The Word of God is engaged here in a real and true “tour de force.” It must reverse the situation of the person dealing with it. There’s no escape. It’s necessary to surrender and repeat with David: “I have sinned!” (2 Samuel 12:13), otherwise the heart is hardened again and impenitence reinforced.

A Masked Form Of Idolatry
The specific accusation the Apostle makes against the “pious” is that “they themselves are doing the exact same things” they judge others for. But in what sense? Is it that they materially do the exact same things? This is also sometimes true (cf. Romans 2:21-24); but he is especially talking about the essence which is impiety and idolatry. There is a masked form of idolatry at work in our present world. If it is idolatry “to bow down to the work of our hands” (cf. Isaiah 2:8; Hosea 14:4), if it is idolatry “to put the creature in the place of the Creator,” then I am idolatrous whenever I put the creature — my creature, the work of my hands — in the Creator’s place. My creature could be the home or the church I have built, the family I have formed, the child I have given life to (how many mothers, even Christian mothers, unconsciously make a god out of their children, especially an only child!); it could be the work I do, the school I direct, the book I write. Then there is my “self,” the prince of idols. In fact, idolatry is always based on autolatry, self-worship, self-love, placing oneself first at the center of the world sacrificing everything else to this. The “substance” is always impiety, the non-glorification of God, but always and only one’s self. It is even making use of God for our own success and personal affirmation. The sin St. Paul denounced in the “Jews” throughout the whole Letter was that they sought self-justice and self-glory and they did this even in their observance of God’s law.

Perhaps, deep within myself, I am ready at this point to acknowledge the truth, to admit that so far I have lived “for myself,” that I am also involved in the mystery of impiety. The Holy Spirit has “convinced me of sin.” The ever-new miracle of conversion is beginning for me. What should I do in such a delicate situation? Let us open the Bible and intone the “De profundis”: “Out of the depths I cry to thee, Oh Lord” (Psalms 130). The “De Profundis” wasn’t written for the dead but for the living: the “depths” from which the psalmist cries is not a reference to Purgatory but to sin: “If thou, Oh Lord, shouldst mark iniquities, Lord who could stand”? It is written that Christ “in the Spirit went and preached to the spirits in prison” (cf. 1 Peter 3:19). Commenting on this, one of the Fathers of the Church said: “When you hear that Christ, going down to Hades, freed the souls who were prisoners there, do not think that these things are far removed from what is being done now. Believe me, the heart is a tomb.”(Macanus of Egypt, On the Freedom of Mind 116; PG 34, 936). We are now spiritually in the position of the “spirits in prison” in Hades, awaiting the coming of the Savior. The traditional icon of the Resurrection shows Adam and Eve desperately outstretching their hands to grasp the right hand of Christ who is coming with his cross to snatch them from prison. Let us also raise a cry from the deep prison of our sinful “self” in which we are kept prisoners. The psalm we are saying is full of confident trust and expectation: “In his word I hope. . . My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning . . . He will redeem Israel from all his iniquities.” We already know that help exists, that there is a remedy for our ills, because “God loves us.” So while we are shaken by God’s Word, let us confidently say to God: “For you do not give me up to sheol, or let your godly one see the pit” (Psalms 16:10).

Posted in Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Readings, Understanding Paul, Understanding Sin | Tagged “You Are The Man!”, Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, Idolatry, Life In Christ, Nietzsche and Sin, Sin, St. Paul and Sin | Leave a Comment »

The Question Of An Isolated Mind

February 10, 2010

Archbishop Kallistos Ware

A reader of this blog took a quote from one of my favorite essays here and asked someone else on a forum “Can this be true?” What does our orthodox faith have to say about this?

The quote in question was: “Wittgenstein taught us that language belongs to groups, not to isolated minds. Language reflects communal practices. Much of the reality that terms mark out is specific to the communities that use the terms. As any learner of a foreign language knows, reading a newspaper in that language requires learning about social and political realities specific to another culture. The abstract question “Does God exist?” is the question of an isolated mind. It tears God out of the context of communities who pray, celebrate, and serve, and it reduces the term to a cipher.”

And the reader’s query (who listed himself as Roman Catholic, oddly enough) was: “What would you make of this article in light of Orthodoxy? Is it totally off the mark?” I confess I was sort of holding my breath because, as many of you know, the things I read and pass on in the form of reading selections and such are nothing more than the vagaries of following my faith. I’m no expert on the topic of anything Catholic but simply follow my gut. The quote comes from Alan Mittleman’s essay Asking the Wrong Question. Mittleman is of course Jewish and the essay is based on a thought from the great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

So you can imagine I had breath held, imagining some crushing response (“No, this is totally misguided. Take care when reading those well intentioned but clueless Internet bloggers. Catholic in their minds only…”).

What came back was an Orthodox source that said (beautifully) pretty much the same thing. I offer it here as part of that pebble-thrown-into-a-pond phenomena. His Excellency, the Most Reverend Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware) of Diokleia (b. 1934, also known by his lay name, Timothy Ware) is a titular bishop of the Church of Constantinople in Great Britain. From 1966-2001, he was Spalding Lecturer of Eastern Orthodox Studies at Oxford University, and has authored numerous books and articles pertaining to the Orthodox Christianity. It was he whom the responder quoted.

Quote from The Orthodox Way By Kallistos Ware
Because faith is not logical certainty but a personal relationship and because this personal relationship is as yet very incomplete in each of us and needs continually to develop further, it is by no means impossible for faith to coexist with doubt. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Perhaps there are some who by God’s grace retain throughout their life the faith of a little child, enabling them to accept without question all that they have been taught. For most of those living in the West today, however, such an attitude is simply not possible. We have to make our own the cry, “Lord, I believe: help my unbelief.”(Mark 9:24). For very many of us this will remain our constant prayer right up to the very gates of death.

It may mean the opposite – that our faith is alive and growing. For faith implies not complacency but taking risks, not shutting ourselves off from the unknown but advancing boldly to meet it. Here an Orthodox Christian may readily make his own the words of Bishop J.A.T. Robinson: “The act of faith is a constant dialogue with doubt.” As Thomas Merton rightly says, “Faith is a principle of questioning, a struggle before it becomes a principle of certitude and peace.”

Faith then signifies a personal relationship with God; a relationship as yet incomplete and faltering, yet none the less real. It is to know God not as theory or an abstract principle, but as a person. To know a person is essentially to love him or her; there can be no true awareness of another person without mutual love. We do not have any genuine knowledge of those whom we hate.

Here then are the two least misleading ways of speaking about the God who surpasses our understanding: he is personal and he is love. And these are basically two ways of saying the same thing. Our way of entry into the mystery of God is through personal love. As The Cloud Of Unknowing says, “He may well be loved, but not thought. By love can he be caught and held, but by thinking never.”

Posted in Discussions | Tagged Alan Mittleman, Asking the Wrong Question, Faith, Kallistos Ware, Martin Buber, The Orthodox Way | Leave a Comment »

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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Readings On The Principle of Subsidiarity

February 8, 2010

One of the things I worried about when I converted was how my new found faith would impact my political convictions. For I had often thought of Catholics as being a breed of liberal Democrats. While when I was growing up that was a kind of truth, I discovered through the examples of Father Richard John Neuhaus that the politics of the sixties had moved many from the Democratic party and the liberal left into the conservative right. Ronald Reagan, it should be recalled was a Roosevelt Democrat all through the forties and early fifties. He proclaimed himself as so in “The Speech,” a national telecast he made on behalf of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
While most of my efforts to understand my faith have been directed towards the theological, I have not ignored learning Catholic Social Theory, which forms the basis of the thinking Catholics approach to the political. One of the core beliefs of the latter is “subsidiarity.” Catholics oppose ObamaCare on two fronts. The first, and perhaps most important, is its attempt to enshrine abortion as a core value of health care. The second is its violation of subsidiarity. What is that you say? Well here are some readings to illuminate this fundamental plank of Catholic Social Theory.

From The Catechism
1882 Certain societies, such as the family and the state, correspond more directly to the nature of man; they are necessary to him. To promote the participation of the greatest number in the life of a society, the creation of voluntary associations and institutions must be encouraged “on both national and international levels, which relate to economic and social goals, to cultural and recreational activities, to sport, to various professions, and to political affairs.” This “socialization” also expresses the natural tendency for human beings to associate with one another for the sake of attaining objectives that exceed individual capacities. It develops the qualities of the person, especially the sense of initiative and responsibility, and helps guarantee his rights.

1883 Socialization also presents dangers. Excessive intervention by the state can threaten personal freedom and initiative. The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co- ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good.”

From Seven Principles of Catholic Social Teaching by Christopher Kaczor, Ph.D.

V. Observe the Principle of Subsidiarity
Some Christian thinkers conceive of the state or government as being established simply to repress evil desires and evil people. In Catholic thought, the government also has a more positive role, namely to help secure common good. Pope John Paul II put the point as follows:

It is the task of the state to provide for the defense and preservation of common goods such as the natural and human environments, which cannot be safeguarded simply by market forces. Just as in the time of primitive capitalism the state had the duty of defending the basic rights of workers, so now, with the new capitalism, the state and all of society have the duty of defending those collective goods which, among others, constitute the essential framework for the legitimate pursuit of personal goals on the part of each individual. (Centesimus Annus 40)

The government has many necessary and indispensable functions to play, roles that cannot be accomplished by individuals acting alone or even by smaller groups in society.

Yet states and governments often exceed their legitimate role and infringe upon individuals and groups in society so as to dominate rather than to serve them. To combat this tendency, Catholic social thought emphasizes the principle of subsidiarity. Non-Catholics also have discovered this principle. Abraham Lincoln wrote: “The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all or cannot so well do, for themselves — in their separate and individual capacities.” Government should be as small as possible, but as big as necessary to accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished that cannot be accomplished in any other way. National defense, interstate cooperation, and treaties with other nations are obvious examples of matters properly undertaken by the federal government. Administration of the criminal justice system is another example of a matter that properly pertains to government.

On the other hand, the government should not intervene to attempt to alleviate all problems. A welfare or “nanny” state, offering cradle-to-grave security and attempting to provide for all human needs, expands the state beyond its proper scope and violates the principle of subsidiarity. Pope John Paul II explained:

Malfunctions and defects in the social assistance state [or welfare state] are the result of an inadequate understanding of the tasks proper to the state. Here again the principle of subsidiarity must be respected: A community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to coordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. (Centesimus Annus 48)

This overreaching by the state leads to situations that are both inefficient and detrimental to human welfare:

By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the social assistance state leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending. In fact, it would appear that needs are best understood and satisfied by people who are closest to them and who act as neighbors to those in need. (Centesimus Annus 48)

When should the state intervene and when should governmental authority refrain? Such questions are difficult to answer outside of the concrete situation, for they depend upon prudential judgments about particular situations. People of good will, including Catholics who are attempting to put into action Catholic social teaching, may legitimately disagree about whether a given piece of legislation or governmental intervention is warranted to alleviate a social problem. Many social questions, such as, “Should this welfare benefit be offered to people in this particular situation?” do not admit of an answer that would be binding upon all Catholics. Nevertheless, all Catholics are obliged to work to find solutions to contemporary social problems in light of the Gospel and their best practical wisdom.

Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church: Chapter Four by Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace

IV. THE PRINCIPLE OF SUBSIDIARITY

a. Origin and meaning
185. Subsidiarity is among the most constant and characteristic directives of the Church’s social doctrine and has been present since the first great social encyclical. It is impossible to promote the dignity of the person without showing concern for the family, groups, associations, local territorial realities; in short, for that aggregate of economic, social, cultural, sports-oriented, recreational, professional and political expressions to which people spontaneously give life and which make it possible for them to achieve effective social growth. This is the realm of civil society, understood as the sum of the relationships between individuals and intermediate social groupings, which are the first relationships to arise and which come about thanks to “the creative subjectivity of the citizen”[397]. This network of relationships strengthens the social fabric and constitutes the basis of a true community of persons, making possible the recognition of higher forms of social activity.

186. The necessity of defending and promoting the original expressions of social life is emphasized by the Church in the Encyclical ‘Quadragesimo Anno’, in which the principle of subsidiarity is indicated as a most important principle of “social philosophy”. “Just as it is gravely wrong to take from individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do. For every social activity ought of its very nature to furnish help to the members of the body social, and never destroy and absorb them”.

On the basis of this principle, all societies of a superior order must adopt attitudes of help (“subsidium“) – therefore of support, promotion, development – with respect to lower-order societies. In this way, intermediate social entities can properly perform the functions that fall to them without being required to hand them over unjustly to other social entities of a higher level, by which they would end up being absorbed and substituted, in the end seeing themselves denied their dignity and essential place.

Subsidiarity, understood in the positive sense as economic, institutional or juridical assistance offered to lesser social entities, entails a corresponding series of negative implications that require the State to refrain from anything that would de facto restrict the existential space of the smaller essential cells of society. Their initiative, freedom and responsibility must not be supplanted.

b. Concrete indications
187. The principle of subsidiarity protects people from abuses by higher-level social authority and calls on these same authorities to help individuals and intermediate groups to fulfil their duties. This principle is imperative because every person, family and intermediate group has something original to offer to the community. Experience shows that the denial of subsidiarity, or its limitation in the name of an alleged democratization or equality of all members of society, limits and sometimes even destroys the spirit of freedom and initiative.

The principle of subsidiarity is opposed to certain forms of centralization, bureaucratization, and welfare assistance and to the unjustified and excessive presence of the State in public mechanisms. “By intervening directly and depriving society of its responsibility, the Social Assistance State leads to a loss of human energies and an inordinate increase of public agencies, which are dominated more by bureaucratic ways of thinking than by concern for serving their clients, and which are accompanied by an enormous increase in spending”. An absent or insufficient recognition of private initiative – in economic matters also – and the failure to recognize its public function, contribute to the undermining of the principle of subsidiarity, as monopolies do as well.

In order for the principle of subsidiarity to be put into practice there is a corresponding need for: respect and effective promotion of the human person and the family; ever greater appreciation of associations and intermediate organizations in their fundamental choices and in those that cannot be delegated to or exercised by others; the encouragement of private initiative so that every social entity remains at the service of the common good, each with its own distinctive characteristics; the presence of pluralism in society and due representation of its vital components; safeguarding human rights and the rights of minorities; bringing about bureaucratic and administrative decentralization; striking a balance between the public and private spheres, with the resulting recognition of the social function of the private sphere; appropriate methods for making citizens more responsible in actively “being a part” of the political and social reality of their country.

188. Various circumstances may make it advisable that the State step in to supply certain functions[401]. One may think, for example, of situations in which it is necessary for the State itself to stimulate the economy because it is impossible for civil society to support initiatives on its own. One may also envision the reality of serious social imbalance or injustice where only the intervention of the public authority can create conditions of greater equality, justice and peace. In light of the principle of subsidiarity, however, this institutional substitution must not continue any longer than is absolutely necessary, since justification for such intervention is found only in the exceptional nature of the situation. In any case, the common good correctly understood, the demands of which will never in any way be contrary to the defence and promotion of the primacy of the person and the way this is expressed in society, must remain the criteria for making decisions concerning the application of the principle of subsidiarity.

From “The Principle of Subsidiarity and The Governance of Schools” by Bernard Cullen

An Example Of Subsidiarity
It is not often that a piece of legislation, let alone an international treaty, gives particular prominence to a philosophical principle. This was the case, however, with the Maastricht Treaty (1992), which attributed special importance to the principle of subsidiarity. In the Preamble to the Treaty on European Union, the signatories resolved ‘to continue the process of creating an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as closely as possible to the citizen in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity’. As this constitutional aspiration indicates, the principle of subsidiarity is a philosophical principle concerned with the mechanisms of democratic decision-making. It was much emphasized by the supporters of the Treaty (principal among them its chief architect, the French President of the European Commission Jacques Delors), as they combated the widespread resistance to ratification of the Treaty, which resistance was itself based on a popular feeling that the European Union was becoming a centralizing super-state. “Save our pint” and much concern about the shape of bananas were some of the popular expressions of resistance (then as now) to ‘interference from Brussels’. In this paper, I shall examine the principle of subsidiarity, including something of the history of the principle and how it has been applied to constitutional theory and practice within the European Union in recent years. Finally, I shall argue for the application of some of its insights to the issue of the governance of schools, with particular reference to Northern Ireland.

Subsidiarity Has A Long History In Catholic Social Philosophy
So what exactly is the principle of subsidiarity? Although it first came to the widespread attention of the public around the time of the Maastricht Treaty, it has a long history in Catholic social philosophy, with its lineage commonly traced back to the social teaching of Thomas Aquinas. While it is almost universally acknowledged that the principle is an ambiguous one, it is broadly concerned with the limits of the right and the duty of the public authority (however understood) to intervene in the social and economic affairs of individual citizens or groups of citizens.

Quadragesimo Anno
In the last century, against the background of bolshevism in the Soviet Union and fascism in Italy, the principle was taken up again and defined by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical letter Quadragesimo Anno (1931):

It is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order, for a larger and higher association to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower societies. This is a fundamental principle of social philosophy, unshaken and unchangeable. Of its very nature the true aim of all social activity should be to help members of the social body, but never to destroy or absorb them … Let those in power, therefore, be convinced that the more faithfully this principle of subsidiary function be followed, and a graded hierarchical order exist between various associations, the greater will be both social authority and social efficiency, and the happier and more prosperous the condition of the commonwealth (paras 79-80, pp 34-5)

A Particular View Of The Nature Of The Human Person
The principle of subsidiarity is based upon a particular view of the nature of the human person, the nature of the state and society and the relation between them, and the role of the individual citizen within the state. It addresses fundamental issues of democracy, and in the way in which I wish later to apply it, interesting issues of local democracy. In the philosophical tradition established by Aristotle, the human being is essentially a social person (zoon politikon), who achieves his or her perfection only in being enmeshed in a society. In the modern industrialized world, individuals all live within states. But in its mode of being, the state is accidental, not substantial. The state has no primary role in human existence; it exists only to help the persons who live within the territory to realize their potential as human beings. This is the meaning of the Latin word subsidium: aid, help or support. Normally, this aid is indirect: the state enables human flourishing by tending to the complex of conditions that enable the subordinate societies and the individuals to care for themselves. This complex of conditions is what has been traditionally referred to in Catholic social teaching as ‘the common good’.

Pope John XXIII
This theme was taken up again by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical letter Mater et Magistra (1961): the common good embraces: -. all those social conditions which favour the full development of human personality” (para 65). The encyclical Pacem in Terris (1963) explains more explicitly and concretely what is involved in the total of these conditions: it is agreed that in our time the common good is chiefly guaranteed when personal rights and duties are maintained. The chief concern of civil authorities must therefore be to ensure that these rights are acknowledged, respected, co-ordinated with other rights, defended and promoted, so that in this way each one may more easily carry out his duties” (para 60).

Positive And Negative Emphases
The Catholic tradition recognizes that the principle of subsidiarity can have a positive as well as a negative emphasis. To emphasize the negative side, it enjoins the public authority not to intervene in the ‘private’ affairs of citizens unless it is necessary in order to safeguard the common good, however that is understood. On the other hand, the principle recognizes (especially as the twentieth century progressed) that in many instances in which good and conscientious citizens (for whatever reason) are unable to fend for themselves, the public authority has an obligation to assist human flourishing by the establishment of an appropriate infrastructure that will enable everyone to thrive. The encyclical Pacem in Terris offers (para 64, perhaps with one eye on the spreading attractions of communism in the Third World in the 1960s) an extensive list of physical and social benefits to be guaranteed by the state and to which every citizen is entitled: the list includes roads, transportation, communications networks, water supply, housing, health and education services, facilitation of the practice of religion, recreational facilities, social insurance schemes, and participation in cultural life. It can be seen that this list of benefits mirrors quite closely the United Nations International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966). However, it should be emphasized that the role of the state is seen as a strictly enabling one, supplementing and complementing private endeavour and providing the infrastructure upon which individuals can attain their full development. In principle, any individual or social good that can be attained by individuals or groups of individuals (so-called lesser societies) should be left outside the sphere of state intervention or control.

The principle has clear applicability to a wide range of issues of social organization. For example, a centrally planned (or so-called command) economy determining prices, wages, production and investment quotas and the like, violates the principle of subsidiarity, for the public authority would thus be making decisions that should more properly be the concern of individuals or private groups. On the other hand, a regime of central economic planning that determines monetary and fiscal policy, complete with anti-monopoly regulations and the like, which undoubtedly determines the general economic environment within which individuals and groups can flourish, is clearly consistent with subsidiarity.

The Tension Between The Individual And The Community
The principle of subsidiarity addresses the age-old issue of the tension between the freedom of the private individual and the public demands of the wider community. In the modern constitutional state, individual citizens use their own free initiative to form themselves into social, cultural, economic, educational, religious or other kinds of associations, large and small. The proper role of these associations is distinguished from that of the state authority by application of the principle of subsidiarity, according to which the state should not control or regulate all aspects of individual and social life, but is obliged to enable groups at levels below the state to achieve their democratically expressed ambitions.

The lesser groups should be assisted to achieve their legitimate objectives in their own fashion, rather than have one single straitjacket imposed on all. This presumption in favour of non-intervention is based upon a fundamental respect for the dignity or the worth of each individual citizen, very much along the lines of human rights theory. But it is easily recognized that an individual acting alone can in most cases do little: in the realms of health, education, transport infrastructure, etc., substantial achievements are only possible when individuals band together. In this process of banding together, there are inevitable compromises between the wishes of individuals and what become the collective wishes or aspirations of groups.

The wishes of some groups, and the impact of acting on those wishes, will be purely local. Some group decisions will impact upon many others who are not local. In thinking about the application of the principle of subsidiarity in this way, it can be used to determine which decisions are most fruitfully to be made by the mechanisms of local democracy and which are rather to be made by a more widely based collective (be it a state or a trans-national body). In the United States, for example, there is a strong tradition of very local democracy. The citizens of a township will typically vote on whether they wish to raise a specific local tax for the precise purpose of repairing the potholes in a local road. They sometimes vote not to. If the state of those local roads has little or no impact on others living outside the locality, this seems an appropriate level of decision-making: as close as possible to the citizens affected by the decision. Such a very local approach makes much less sense when the roads in question are used by a lot of travellers just passing through. And for this reason, interstate freeways, designed to facilitate travel through many localities and across great distances, are federally planned and financed out of federal taxes.

The appropriate level of democratic decision-making depends on the issue in question and specifically the way in which the issue impacts upon people. For example, it was agreed a long time ago by the member states of the European Community that environmental pollution recognizes no state boundaries, and that therefore environmental legislation should be a decision of the entire Community, binding on all Community citizens. But the principle of subsidiarity recognizes that many issues of policy should be matters for decision by each ‘sovereign’ member state, so as to reflect as accurately as possible the wishes of the citizens of that state. By extension, the issue in question could be for each region within states to decide, or for each local council area; or it could reasonably be decided (and most accurately reflect the democratic wishes of the citizens affected) by testing the preferences of a quite small locality, however that locality is to be delineated. Apart from the US example quoted above, France, for example, has a tradition of elected assemblies for local communes; while England has a tradition of parish councils.

The Most Appropriate Level Of Sovereignty And Democratic Decision-Making Can Be Challenging
It can be seen that the debate within the EU, and specifically at this time within the United Kingdom, about adoption of the euro as a common currency superseding national currencies, is a debate about the most appropriate application to the issue of monetary policy of the principle of subsidiarity. This debate is a good illustration of the fact that the principle in itself cannot solve all disputes about the most appropriate level of sovereignty and democratic decision-making. In this regard it is no different from other philosophical principles. What it can do is establish a principled context within which the policy issue can be discussed and the dispute resolved. The debate on the adoption of the euro or the retention of sterling also illustrates well that such disputes about the application of subsidiarity very often involve an emotional attachment to the exercise of power, whether that exercise is real or illusory, rather than the dispassionate and rational weighing up of the balance of advantages and disadvantages for the generality of citizens affected.

The principle of subsidiarity is based on the principle (or assumption) that individual citizens prima facie (i.e. unless the contrary can be demonstrated) know best what is good for them. There are, of course, many uncontroversial exceptions to the principle of the primacy of individual choice: everything from the legal requirement to drive round Belfast City Hall in one direction only to the whole panoply of planning laws and regulations. In each such case, Parliament has agreed on behalf of the citizens that there are indeed good reasons for overriding the wishes of the individual.

The area of education is a special category of decision-making by citizens, insofar as parents conventionally decide on behalf of their children (in the case of primary and secondary schooling). Notwithstanding the emerging acknowledgement of children’s rights in recent years, the principle of the primacy of parental choice is well embedded in European culture and is fairly uncontroversial. The principle is frequently overridden by representatives of the state (i.e., the citizenry as a collective). For example, children are commonly removed from their neglectful or cruel parents and taken into state care’ by statutorily authorized social workers. There was also the recent case in which the conscientious wish of the parents to allow their Siamese twin children to die was overridden by the High Court, which ordered surgery to separate them. But the fact that this case prompted such widespread moral head-scratching only goes to demonstrate the strength of the general presumption in favor of parental choice in the disposition of their children.

Posted in Readings | Tagged Bernard Cullen, Catholic Social Theory, Centesimus Annus 48, Christopher Kaczor, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Mater et Magistra, Pacem in Terris, Ph.D., Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Pope John Paul II, Pope John XXIII, Quadragesimo Anno, Seven Principles of Catholic Social Teaching, subsidiarity, The Principle of Subsidiarity and The Governance of Schools | Leave a Comment »

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.

Posted in Apologetics, Understanding Violence | Tagged Christianity As Myth, G. K. Chesterton, mimetic rivalry, mimetic violence, Rene Girard, scapegoating, Skandalon And Satan, The Mimetic Conception Of The Gospels, The Resurrection, Violence and Sin, Violence In The Bible And Myths | 1 Comment »

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.”

Posted in Readings, Understanding Violence | Tagged James Williams, Joseph and his brothers, mimesis, mimetic desire, Rene Girard, scapegoating | 1 Comment »

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.

Posted in Reflections | Tagged Emil Brunner, I CORINTHIANS 1:23 | Leave a Comment »

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.

Posted in Apologetics, Peter Kreeft | Tagged Peter Kreeft | 2 Comments »

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.

Posted in G. K. Chesterton, Reflections | Tagged Gethsemane, God Tempting God | Leave a Comment »

Paying Attention To The Sky

Archive for February, 2010

Gil Bailie Interprets René Girard

All Have Sinned: The Mystery of Impiety by Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa

The Question Of An Isolated Mind

Reading Selections from Critical Thinking for Christians by Peter Kreeft

Is Christianity Indistinguishable From Other “Pagan Myths?”

Rene Girard

The Divine Scandal — Emil Brunner

Shared Hells — Peter Kreeft

God the Rebel — G. K. Chesterton

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