(Gil reviews material covered so far in this series.) The culture is destabilizing and coming apart because of the revelation of the Cross has made the scapegoating and sacrificial apparatus of conventional culture and religion morally problematic in those cultures that have been influenced by it and therefore their cultural confidence and the certainty and the moral righteousness with which other cultures at other times might have set in motion some kind of sacrificial or scapegoating scenario that would have reconvened culture and redefined its mores and taboos and its hierarchies and so on that we can’t do anymore – so we are operating with a wounded system for keeping culture together. And that is having not only social but psychological effects.
Looking at the psychological crisis – Psychological matters tend to be thought of, in more or less, medical terms. It’s a medical model that we use for understanding psychological issues… we moderns have tried to come to grips with this problem using these psychological approaches which have been tinged largely by a medical model and to some lesser extent by philosophical and literary things… We would be more apt to shed light on all our psychological issues if we see it historical, anthropologically and religiously. The other draw back to seeing it through a medical model is that until recently they focused on the individual and individual psycho-dynamics.
Approaching the problem from a historical, anthropologically and religiously is what Girard has done…
So what I tried to say is that the Cross, because it exposes something that cannot function while exposed (it can only function if it is misrecognized and occluded) the sacrificial mechanism and it evokes an empathy for its victim and a suspicion about crowd activity. The Cross removes the lynchpin of conventional culture – where (this is only a slight over-statement) the ‘business’ of conventional culture and religion is to erect enough barriers against ‘desire’ to keep the social system civil and sane. ‘Desire’ here is Girardian and not Freudian – meaning compulsive preoccupation with the other. When the lynchpin is pulled out by the Cross the culture can no longer, with great confidence, form the procedures that caused these constraints on desire to stay in place.
Therefore these constraints begin to fall apart and like what is happening in the modern world, so we have an epidemic of ‘desire’ (compulsive preoccupation with the other). Important part of this is that in the sacrificial act has the effect of transcendentalizing desire – turning it into a false transcendence – it creates a religious awe – it turns social unanimity into religious awe – and that religious awe into religious reverence and therefore deflects the compulsive pre-occupation with the other from the social arena to the realm of the gods, and so ultimate concern now is with the gods and not with each other. How do we placate the gods? Etc. So a society which is pre-occupied with that is a society that will be considerably less pre-occupied with how they are going to check-mate their neighbor in terms of some kind of social competition. So the transcendentalizing of desire is what conventional culture and religion does and in the process it erects these taboos and structures, commandments, prohibitions, mores that keep desire from running amok – to keep conventional culture from becoming a modern culture.
Girard says,
“Desire is what happens to human relationships when there is no longer anyIn other words, we can’t have old fashion religious culturally re-generative resolution of the modern crisis, because that would require over-riding the revelation of the Cross in a way that is now impossible to do. Amazingly, the authors of the New Testament already knew that the Cross will have its effect in ways that will render that culture incapable of living, what St Paul called, the old anthropos – the old humanity. The move from the old humanity to the new humanity is the cultural, spiritual, and psychological transition that we are in the mist of.
resolution through the victim.” ... "There can be no ritualistic or victimary
resolution to the modern crisis. The crisis can be stabilized at different
levels according to the individual’s concern, but it always lacks the resources
of catharsis and expulsion.”
Notice that Girard says that we can stabilize the situation; we can’t resolve it, according to each individual concern. Each individual can, to one degree or another muster the self-discipline, the insight, the wisdom, the groundedness, etc., etc., to keep from being swept up into this contagion of desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other). But that now is going to be an individual undertaking, as there is no longer a collective solution to this problem... not that cultural processes cannot be mustered that would help the situation, we can’t just abandon the social order because if culture really goes to seed then the chances of an individual being able to hold his or her ground is very, very small. So we have to be about the business of fashioning a culture environment that will be in the service of the individual who is trying to maintain some poise in the mist of this scandal that is going on all around him or her.
Jean-Michel Oughourlian says that,
“desire now flourishes within the society whose cathartic resources are
vanishing, a society where the only mechanism that could renew these resources
functions less and less effective.”
So at the cultural level, Gil has said, that the collapse of the sacrificial apparatus of conventional culture throws culture into crisis. But at the same time, if we analysis it and see the particulars of what is going on, it underscores the absolute relevance of the social and ethical message of the Christian Gospel – which is the Sermon of the Mount. So if you say, isn’t it terrible that the Christian Gospel is destroying all culture? Well the culture it is destroying is sacrificial – the culture defined by Caiphus: 'It is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to be destroyed.” It is a culture built on that premise, over and over again. So you say, is Christianity a pernicious thing? Is it destroying everything like Nietzsche said it is? It is destroying something, no doubt. But it is doing it gradually – mercifully. It destroys the culture as we develop the capacity to live without it. But the capacity to live without it is defined by the Sermon on the Mount. So as the Christian Gospel under-minds conventional culture it provides the guidelines and inspiration for living without such thing. And psychologically and spiritually the instability that results from; a) the collapse of those social reinforcements that contribute to our stability, and b) the spread of the mimetic contagion that scandalizes everybody – destroys the poise of all but the heartiest: that process destabilizes us psychologically, making us as Jung said, “a shuttlecock for every wind that blows.”
As that happens, then just as we look from the cultural crisis to the Sermon on the Mount; we look to that psychological destabilization that is already described somewhat in the Gospel with conversion, it is being reborn. It is the dissolution of the existing personality and a metanoia to bring into being a new mind – anew personality on different premises. The psychological instability that is resulting from the biblical revelation has its corollaries in Christian conversion.
Faith is a gift and a mystery – Christian conversion is the beginning of a life in faith. No acts of analytical insights can cause faith to come about. Knowledge never leads to faith. Faith leads to knowledge. Not by understanding the process are we going to have a great renascence or explosion of faith and conversion. Nevertheless it is not useless to try to understand the process. Christian conversion can be made intelligible. This is not to say that people who find it intelligible will therefore have faith of become converter. But at least we can make it intelligible the same way we can make the mimetic crisis or the crisis of modernity intelligible, we can make conversion intelligible.
One of the things that conversion provides is a form of stability that is not the static-stability of the stasis of culture and selfhood, but a form of stability that is much more supple, enduring, much more able to move in and out of various structures of reality without being disoriented by them. So a new form of psychological stability that it not just ridged stability but a kind of supple stability; a new poise; a new grounding – not a grounding in ethnicity or gender or nationality or tribal or religion in the conventional sense, but a grounding in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – a grounding in Christ, whose death reveals the true face of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – a grounding in such a reality that then is not in a fixed reality, but is a ‘way’.
Another comment of Girard’s:
“Desire (compulsive, preoccupation of the other) leads to madness and death if there is no victimage mechanism to guide it back to 'reason' and to engender this 'reason'. The mysterious link between madness and reason takes on a concrete form.”The mysterious link between madness and reason is that “reason” is gemmed up out of the sacrificial (scapegoat) scenario. Reason always needs differences and the sacrificial crisis or the crisis of the contagion of desire destroys all differences and therefore makes reason impossible. There can be no reasoning going on in a world where there are no differences. Reason always needs distinction and the dissolution of all those distinctions is what occurs in crisis of undifferentiation – the crisis of desire – or what is brought about by an avalanche of mimetic desire.
And when Girard says, madness and death will be the result if the victimage mechanism does not lead it back to “reason” he clearly has a mind of Heraclitus logos: strife or violence is the father of all things. It gives rise both to chaos and to order – to destruction and to peace. The way it gives rise to that is that it produces this madness which goes supremely mad for one glistening moment; and in that moment it creates social unanimity at the expense of the victim. And that supreme madness then becomes sanity because the victim dies and the cultural esprit de corps is generated and the victimization is then rationalized in a sense of what happened before and what happened afterwards – the whole structure of rationality is then generated by this victimage scenario. A rationality that did not exists two minutes before, but builds up afterwards and religion and culture is the elaboration of that fundamental difference between the mob and its victim – between the living and the corpse. Reason is restored. Reason has something to work with – differences. It has two primary distinctions that sort of overlap like cross-hairs on a scope; 1) is the distinction between the victim and the mob; and 2) the distinction between time before the victimization and the time after. Something new has happened.
The “rationality” that this system is able to generate begins at that moment and from that primary distinction all cultural distinction are born. This “rationality” could all be fiction, of the mob’s imagination, or they may have some grounding in fact… So that this desire (compulsive, preoccupation of the other) leads to madness and death if there is no victimage mechanism to restore reason; and now there is no victimage mechanism to restore reason; so the old logos – the old forms of knowledge (epistemology) is dying – it cannot function because the apparatus for generating its necessary distinctions out of the undifferentiated chaos of an avalanche of desire – it doesn’t work anymore. So less and less are we able to put-to-work the old epistemological strategies.
Eliot says that we know too much and are convinced of too little. Knowledge, itself doesn’t do any good because it is knowledge of a kind that can’t respond to the crisis and it is becoming spiritually impotent.
So we have to have another logos – there has to be another principle of knowledge. The logos that leaps out at us from the Prologue to the Gospel of John is a logos of the lamb slain since the foundation of the world – logos of the One Who comes into His Own and they do not accept Him – the logos of the One Who is raised up on The Cross and thereby draws all man to Himself.
The new logos, in not just about thinking in a strict sense of the word, but it has its own epistemological base – it does not just come along and share the epistemological base of the old logos because the old logos of Heraclitus is finished. In a way, another thing that is happening in our world is that we are moving from one logo to another which brings us back to the passage:
"There is no unique subject: no personality without otherness; no consciousness
turned in upon itself; no real being without intersubjectivity; no real
knowledge nor ontological density without mystery. And no man without God." -
Henri de Lubac
For us studying these thoughts as we are: No real knowledge without mystery or better yet: no real knowledge without genuine transcendence. The old logos, the old religions which gemmed up their gods out of the sacrificial scenario, and created a false transcendence (like I said before suddenly instead of being preoccupied with each other and then there is this crisis and then they are preoccupied with the gods), the pagan realm gems up this false transcendence. This is not what de Lubac is talking about. When he talks about mystery, he is talking about Real Transcendence. Just because the world is filled with false ones does not mean there isn’t a real one. It just means we are hungry for it and we will fall for anything that simulates it.
Again: no real knowledge without Real Transcendence. The opposite can be said of the Heraclitus logos: no real knowledge (behind which stands violence) without some kind of false transcendence.
Secondly: No ontological density without Real Transcendence. What does the word transcendence mean? Doesn’t it mean god? One could also say transcendence is the same as prayer. Or another way you could say, abiding. Can we abide in the God revealed by Christ on the Cross? If we can abide in God reveal by Christ on the Cross we are free – there is nothing that can happen to us that won’t become an opportunity for more love; for more meaning; for more truth.
Real knowledge requires transcendence now, because the other kind of knowledge was based on a false transcendence or else it has no transcendence at all and then it becomes mechanical. Enlightenment knowledge is basically mechanical knowledge, it appeals to no transcendence and therefore can work in a mundane order of things, but it cannot deal with the fundamental problem, which is our fallenness. We can take Enlightenment knowledge and crank it up as much as we can and it will create all kinds of breakthroughs, many advances in medicine and technologies, etc., etc., but it won’t do a thing about the fall because it has renounced any aspiration in that regard. But the knowledge that has something to do with the fall is going to be transcendence and it is going to require that we abide.
Then we come into the modern world where we increasingly say, ‘I cannot abide’ him or her, leaving more and more of us scandalized by the compulsive preoccupation with the other.
We want to track the epistemological (how we know things) and ontological (the nature of our being) implication of the Christian revelation.
We live in a world that we generate all kinds of knowledge, but it doesn’t do us any good, at one level – the important spiritual level it doesn’t seem to be doing us any good. Whatever knowledge or technological breakthroughs based on that knowledge that we generate from an Enlightenment perspective will generate exactly the same proportion of good and evil in every case and in every generation. In other words there is nothing historically progressive about that kind of knowledge. All it does is raise the ante in a game where the ante is already pretty high because now we can destroy the whole planet.
Girard says,
“Desire is always using for its own ends the knowledge it has acquired from
itself. It places the truth in the service of its own untruth.”
So at the level of desire, which is at the level of original sin, we need knowledge that will help us. If desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other) is still running the show it has a way of taking advantage of all knowledge and turning it into a further scheme for keeping desire in the drivers’ seat. Even though the knowledge may be knowledge that reveals the perversity of desire it won’t do anything without transcendence – without conversion.
Girard is saying that desire uses the knowledge of itself to further sconce itself in the life of the person or the society. So that is why people can and have studied this thing and they can’t come up with a solution.
Girard goes on he says that the idea of the demon who bears light is more far reaching than any notion of psychoanalysis. Desire bears light, but puts that light in the service of its own darkness. The role played by desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other) in all the great cultural creations of the modern world – art & literature – is explained by this feature which it shares with Lucifer. Lucifer is the bringer of light who uses the light to continue to generate darkness.
Dante – “they lost the good of intellect.” How do we loss the good of intellect? We have there terms: compulsion and obsession. What do these words, compulsion and obsession mean? It means that you do something even though you know that it is wrong or stupid. You have lost the good of intellect. What is at the root of all of our compulsions and obsessions? Desire – Girardian desire (compulsive preoccupation with the other) and not Freudian desire.
We have an epistemological base from which to work – it’s a structure that we always operate on. If you are running a computer, your computer has an operating system, and you may be running some program, but the operating system is in the background and if it goes haywire it will have serious consequences on the program you are using. We are operating in an epistemological base that goes back to the dawn of human culture and it is beginning to malfunction and it has important consequences for us – it can still gem out an enormous amount of information, but it is just turned into the service of the same system (the system of desire and victimage) that gemmed it out in the first place. And once that system begins to come apart then we have serious problems.
This is amazing – the epistemological mechanism for knowing things is changing and that is why faith is never able to explain itself (to the old epistemological system); and also it is why the old epistemological system cannot destroy faith – they are based on 2 epistemological foundations. One of them is solid and the other one is conditional – it is dependent on certain conditions (conditions which produced myth, religion and primitive culture no longer exist.
Just as the cultural and historical crisis cannot be distinguished from the psychological and spiritual crisis: taking de Lubac’s aphorism about no real knowledge without transcendence (mystery) and its companion observation, no ontological density without transcendence, you can say those are related realities. So our epistemological confusion is part and parcel of a psychological instability.
Ontological density is a synonym of what we call the self except that when you say ‘the self’ you always think of an entity, we rarely think of an interdividual self. We must always remind ourselves that the self is constituted by the other in one way or another. It may be a human other or it may be a transcendent other, but the self is always constituted by another or others and if it is fundamentally constituted by others plural, then the self is going to necessarily be unstable (a James Hillman term psychological polytheism).
Ontological density (or more probably the lack of ontological density) helps out talking about the real problem instead of using terms like the self or psychological problems, emotionality, and even the social drama.
Lack of ontological density means a self that is insubstantial and it is seeking in self-defeating ways some way of substantiating itself. There are 2 ways of substantiating the self: 1) that way that perfectly parallels the cultural system that generates false transcendence; and 2) the experience of true transcendence. The false transcendence is generated out of the sacrificial scenario and true transcendence corresponds with prayer and the God revealed by Christ on the Cross – which can never be the false transcendence because it is the God of the victim and not the victimizers. The god of the victimizer is the false transcendence.
There is a psychological parallel to this: real ontological density is what the prophets experienced; it is what Jesus extremely experiences when he said, I do nothing but what the Father bids me to do and the Father and I are One. This is supreme ontological density. Prophets, mystics, saints, the humble faithful, etc, etc have partaken of that ontological density, to one degree or another, at the heart of it is real transcendence. The simulated form of ontological density is the desire of others – if I can get enough others to desire me or to admire me – even to hate me – I can feel that I exist. A simulation of ontological density is generated socially by somebody putting herself or himself in the eyes of others.
False ontological density is created socially and mimetically like that and when we see attempts to generate this kind of false ontological density we should recognize and not point an arresting finger at them – we should say they are suffering from the same disease we are suffering from – they just may be more prone to its effects.
-- transcript from The Gift of Self by Gil Bailie
No comments:
Post a Comment