Entering the Biblical Story -- Gil Baile

Entering the Biblical Story at the Eucharistic Table - by Gil Bailie
(My edited transcript of  the presentation: "Violence Unveiled: The Gospel at Work in Our World" Date Unknown)

We should ask more fundamental questions then we ask, and one of the fundamental questions that we should ask is, ‘why are we here?’

Starry sky over Grand Canyon from Mather Point.

Photo by: Tyler Nordgren, University of Redlands.

Why are we here?
The question itself is like looking at the “The Starry Night” or looking into the Grand Canyon. Why are we here? Even if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, and I think we Christians have some answers, but if we don’t have nice neat little answers for that, we can’t let go of that question and we must ask it explicitly, because that question will be answered. The world will provide an answer for it and the answer that the world provides will be a silly shallow one. And we will not even notice how silly and shallow it is, because we will not have even noticed that it is the answer to THAT question, because we won’t have heard the question.

The stock answer to that question that the world provides is that we are here to be as comfortable as we can be for as long as we can live. And that is the white-collar nihilism – that is to say it is a world-view that is not even as lively and entertaining as, eat, drink and be merry. It is a kind of terrible grim, make-the-best-of-it-till-you-die world-view. But we don’t even notice how terrible and grim and nihilistic it is because we did not ask the question explicitly and therefore the answer that we operate with is one that has never been brought to our attention, it is just the operating system.

Why are we here?
I have been talking in these presentations about ‘the story’ - reclaiming the story, as we are always forgetting the story and rediscovering it at new levels. Perhaps one of the impressive instances of this occurs in Luke’s Gospel after the crucifixion and resurrection, it is the ‘Road to Emmaus’ story. It is a marvelous story of disciples who had their messianic expectations shattered by the cross – it has all failed and what they see is failure and disillusionment, and for them their story has ended. There was a lot of hope, but the hope has died, the story is over. They are leaving Jerusalem because Jerusalem has become a hostile place. Jerusalem is where the drama of the story took place, and they have given up on it and they are going away. Jesus meets them on this journey. He begins talking with them and they say, ‘haven’t you heard about these things?’ Jesus says, ‘what things,’ to get them to talk. So they go on about what happened and how their hopes had been dashed by the cross. Then it says in Luke, he explained to them how all the scriptures had prophesied all these events.

There is a wonderful poem by William Stafford and it goes like this,

When God watches you walk, you are/
neither straight nor crooked. The journey stretches out, and all of its reasons/ beat like a heart. Coming back, no triumph, no regret, you fold into the curves,/
left, right, and arrive. You touch the door. The road straightens behind you./
It is now. It has all come true.

Our lives meander all over taking different turns, running into dead ends and reverses and suddenly, with God’s grace we arrive at where we are going. We touch the door and the path straightens out behind us. I have a friend who says that if I met myself back when I was 20, he would not recognize me, but I would recognize him. Well, the door for us is the Cross and the scriptures straighten behind us. When we touch that, then we go back and read it again. We read it for the second time and we see its destination, we see its final full revelation about God and about us and both of them are shocking. It is shocking what we do and it is shocking how merciful and all loving God is. Jesus explains this on the road to Emmaus in one verse and then they sit down in the village of Emmaus and break bread. When they break bread they recognize him. They don’t recognize him up to that moment.

Here now the story and the breaking of the bread come together. The disciples on the road to Emmaus are lost and they don’t have a story and Jesus intercepts them and with a few depth-strokes of his brush paints them the picture, tells them the story, which includes the cross, and therefore the story not only can go on, but now has a center. They returned to Jerusalem, which is the place of the promise and it is from Jerusalem that the mission must proceed out to the ends of the world. So they come back and become part of the story and they become part of Luke’s story in Acts, which is the story of the church going out to preach the Gospel to the world.

It brings together the story and the Eucharist in such a powerful way. I have a principle that is that the Biblical text should not be interpreted more than more than 30 feet from the Eucharistic table, or they should only be interpreted on the way to the Eucharistic table, keeping in-line with the Emmaus story. Can we take these texts out and bring them over and plop them on a seminar table at the university and get it? I don’t think so. Good work is done there, but the real understanding – the real truth of these inspired texts takes place in proximity of the Eucharistic table.

I want to talk about the Last Supper and then I want to talk about the Eucharist.

The disciples, as you know, are slow, no slower than we are. We look a little better than they do because we had the Gospel for 2000 years, but they are pretty slow. Another friend of mine refers to the disciples as being ‘25 watts and dimming’.  They never get it. Most of all they never get it when He talks about the cross. Before the cross, the reason why they don’t get it is because the cross destroys the blockage that keeps them from understanding. They are still living inside the world which the cross is going to explode. Jesus at some point realizes that they cannot get it until sometime after the cross. And at that point he begins to say things like this, ‘I am going to say these words, you are not going to get it, just remember them.’  Just remember them and at some point the nickel will drop. The only time they get it was when they once say to him, teach us how to pray, because at that moment they recognize that that is who he is and they want to be like that.

So Jesus has very little time. He gets to Jerusalem and it looks like the hour is approaching. There is no more time for sermons – there is no more time for explanations – there is time for very little, what is he going to do? It is very important to Jesus that he leaves them capable of receiving the truth, which will be available to them after the cross. So what does he do? He has a Passover meal. And the Passover meal is about getting out of Egypt. Some of what I am going to do below will be in a campy/Monty Python way…, but I think that there is something incredible here that we have not come to grips with.

I am going to reverse the order – let us start with the cup. He takes the cup and He says, “This is the cup of my blood which will be shed so that sin may be forgiven.” He is interpreting the cross. This is the cup of my blood, which will be shed so that sins may be forgiven. Now remember, when Jesus shows up, we humans have always had a way of taking away sins. We take away sins by putting it on the back of our scapegoat, getting rid of it and feeling righteous. Jesus is about to destroy that way by showing us the face of the innocent victim. What happens if he destroys that system and walks away and does nothing else? What happens, and in some extent is what is happening, which is, we begin to choke on our own unforgiven-ness, which is a synonym for resentment and virtually a synonym for sin. The world is filling up with unforgiven-ness. When we look out and read the morning paper and we see the 6 o’clock news we see this ignorance and sin and insensitivity and all of the rest of it. Sometimes we establish some sort of moral stance about it, but if we look at it as Christians what we see is this crying out of this massive unforgiven-ness. All the terrible things and we probably evoke Columbine High School perhaps too often at this point, but all the terrible things that are going to happen in the future are going to be committed by unforgiven people.

And Jesus has thrown everything off by destroying the system that used to take away the sins of the world on the cheap at the expense of the scapegoat. And so the unforgiven-ness festers, and festers. Jesus is now giving us another way of taking away sin. The Biblical God is not going to take away sin with a wave of the wand. Why? This has to do with the whole theodicy question, ‘why does God allow all the terrible things to happen in the world?’ God is not going to take away sins by the wave of the wand because that would rob us of our freedom and our dignity. God wants love and love has to be freely offered. And if you are going to create enough freedom so that love can be freely offered you are going to have to live in a world made perilous by what people do with that freedom. You cannot have it both ways. God has put all his bets on love, and therefore on freedom and therefore, what we do with that freedom can be a catastrophe, but God is not going to take away our sins by robbing us of our freedom because it would rob us of our covenantal love for our Creator.

How is He going to take it away then? He will take them away instantly if we ask that they be taken away. All we have to do is, first of all recognize our sinfulness, our complicity, that is to say, hear the cock crow and ask for forgiveness. The key is to ask for forgiveness. And we can’t ask for forgiveness until we recognize our sinfulness. And we can’t recognize our sinfulness until we go to the pit of that little machine that use to wash it away and we see what we have been doing. We hear the cock crow and we have that moment of conversion.

And so His blood is shed so that sins may be forgiven, not taken away on the cheap, but forgiven because we have recognized them and asked for forgiveness. And then Jesus says, “Take this and drink it. This is my blood.” He goes back to the question which Jesus asked about His own passion when people asked him, ‘who is going to sit at your right hand?’ He asks, “Can you drink the cup that I am going to drink?” That question is asked at the end of Mark’s Gospel – at the Eucharist in Mark’s Gospel it said He gave them this cup and they all drank of it, and they all died a martyr’s death. It is that kind of implication.

In the Eucharist we are offered that cup, why? It is because we are incorporated into the forgiving mission of Christ. When Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, you have the keys to the kingdom whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven and whose sin you retain, they are retained - we should understand how significant this statement is. It seems silly to introduce a baseball metaphor at this point, but if a pitcher lets a couple guys on base and the manager decides to put in another pitcher, and somebody gets a hit and those guys come in, they are on the ERA of the pitcher who got pulled out. When Jesus says, whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven, whose sins are retained; they are retained. He is saying, I think, all the unforgiven-ness that you could have solved and didn’t is on your ERA – it’s on your record. You are in charge of all the unforgiven-ness that you could forgive and don’t. Can you drink this cup? Can you drink this cup? What does it mean to drink this cup in order that sins might be forgiven?

All this means, I think, is that we must be able to step into that place, not that we are going to become martyrs, most of us do not have the courage for it, but martyrs in another way. The word means to witness. Simply to be the kind of person who when something begins to swirl, when the melodrama gets set in motion, when accusations are made we can, at the risk of our own reputation, our own standing in the community, our own livelihood whatever it happens to be, can we step into the breach and absorb some of that animosity and break up the little knot that is forming? Not by going in as John the Baptist would do and fighting it back in the other direction. But simply by stepping into that world and absorbing that tension (like the old Rolaids commercial, absorbs 47 times its own weight in access stomach acids…). Can we be the kind of people that can move into that place, and drink the cup and be part of Christ forgiveness? The world is going to choke on its own unforgiven-ness if we don’t. That is our role in the world. This is not cheap forgiveness. The forgiven one has to hear the cock crow, and we shouldn’t go around being lily-white liberals that we are forgiving easy and never being part of the cock crowing. People have to hear the cock crow - we have to hear it. Jesus, when He forgives people, He always says, “go, and sin no more.” It is not forgiveness on the cheap. So it is a subtle process, it requires character and dignity and courage and most of all it requires an enormous moral generosity. So Jesus is inducting us into service for history in a world which is going to now increasingly be deprived of its old mechanism for taking away its own sins on the cheap. He is bringing us into this mission of taking them away in such a way that not only honors our dignity and our freedom, but also rehabilitates us.

And then, remember I am reversing the order, Jesus takes a loaf of bread and he says (now I am going to ham it up a little bit), ‘We all came here tonight to get out of Egypt - and you all want out of Egypt, we are all in some Egypt largely of our own making,’ Jesus says, ‘you want to get out of Egypt, let me tell you how to get out of Egypt.’ He takes a loaf of bread and says, “This is my life.” You have to remember we are talking about Jews here; we are not talking about philosophers. Body means life. This is a big difference between Jews and philosophers, and as I said before that with the disciples being ‘25 watts and dimming,’ it is amazing that Jesus didn’t throw up his hands half way through it all and leave them all and go the Alexandria and get some PhD’s. , but he didn’t and that’s very important…this is the faith of fishermen…this is the faith of Mary, the 15-year-old who said, ‘Let it be done unto me according to Thy Word.’ So her son having learned a good deal of this on her knee no doubt says, this is my life, you want to get out of Egypt, watch carefully. No more sermons, just this. Watch this – this is my life – you take it, give thanks for it, because it is not yours. Now take your life, receive it as a gift, give thanks because it is not yours – it’s a gift, and then you break it and give it away. And the ‘25 watts and dimming’ crowd are looking at each other asking, what did he say?

Jesus says, okay, I know you didn’t get it, I got a few more minutes here; let me go over this again. You see this? This is my life! This is what you people have been following me around for the last 3 years trying to get a piece of, now I am going to give you a piece of it. This is my life; this is what you want. If you want out of Egypt, this is how you do it. There is no other way out of Egypt. It is the most radical, the most costly, the most liberating thing there is. You receive your life as a gift – it does not belong to you – it’s on loan. And you give thanks for it. And the one who gave it to you wants it back, but he wants it back as a free gift. So you give thanks for it, then you break it, or let it be broken, and you give it away. And if you do these things you are inducted into this great mystery, we call the body of Christ. The incarnation is still happening. You and I have the privilege of being a tiny part of it. The major event of the incarnation is something we both celebrate and enter into at the Eucharist, over and over again. We receive the cup, we drink the cup that Jesus drank at his passion and we take upon ourselves this commitment to be the ones who stand into the breach so that sins might be forgiven. We learn that our life is not our own and that it can be broken and given away. In that we are set free and made happy in spite of whatever sufferings we might experience.

Flannery O’Connor was getting an award in New York one time and she had to get all gussied up from her farm in Georgia to go to this award banquet. It was all literary and religious people sitting around eating dinner, there was a conversation going on at her table about theological symbolism of the Eucharist, and Flannery O’Connor is just eating away not saying anything. After a while her silence became obvious and so one of the people who were particularly lively in the conversation turned to her and said to her, “Ms O’Connor, what do you think about the symbolism of the Eucharist?” She glared over the top of her glasses and said “If it is just a symbol, the hell with it.”

It is very important to remember Jesus didn’t say, ‘take this and figure it out.’ He said, ‘take it and eat it.’ There is a huge mystery in the Eucharist, but it is I think, the mystery of our induction into the body of Christ - into the communion of saints – into the work of Christ in history.

Altar at St Meinrad Archabbey

So Jesus says, ‘take this and eat it, this is my body. Take this and drink it, this is my blood.’ People thought that the early Christians were cannibals, but it is interesting, the first sacrifice in anthropological terms, was almost certainly cannibalistic. We don’t need to get into that at this time, but there is something amazing about the Eucharist in that it harks back, in some prime mortal way, to the most primitive human event, the founding of primitive religion in sacrifice and cannibalism. In addition, it prefigures the final culminating event of human history, which is the messianic banquet.

So we have this piece of furniture, and we don’t know quite what to call it anymore, we call it an altar and then sometimes we call it a table, what is it? It must always be both. It is a table that used to be an altar. It is an altar up until the veil of the temple is rent from top to bottom. But we must never forget that it is a sacrificial altar – that there is no alternative to sacrifice. The only question is what kind of sacrifice is it going to be? In Jesus’ re-interpretation of it all, it is the anticipation of the messianic banquet and the induction of us all into the body of Christ. So this piece of furniture and the ritual we celebrate around it is absolutely at the throbbing heart of the Christian mystery. This piece of furniture is like the wardrobe in Narnia – you Episcopalians will always know Narnia better than any other denomination – it’s the wardrobe in Narnia where you enter into the story – the real story – where the story becomes vivid.

There comes a time when we must enter into The Story

For much of my presentation so far I have talked about story, recovering the story in scriptural terms, and of course we have to do that. But there is this place where we actually enter the story. We don’t just learn the story, and say the story, but we become actors in the story; we begin to perform the story. And I don’t think we should be too self-conscious about that kind of language. Refer to the unbelievable central passage from Paul, “I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.” We have to take that at face value. One has to say about that what Flannery O’Connor said about the Eucharist, if it is just a symbol, the hell with it. It is not just a symbol. Christians are here to be incorporated into the work of Christ in history.

Jesus never claimed to be operating on his own. He even says in John’s Gospel, “If I had come in my own name you would believe me, but because I have come in the name of the one who has sent me you don’t believe.” We are asked to be like that. We are asked to re-present Christ to the world. To be actors in the great drama – like von Balthasar’s ‘Theo-drama’, a magnificent orchestration of the grandeur of the Christian drama in history - and so the language of drama is appropriate – and the language of re-presenting it to the world in however way, even though we are all clay vessels, we are all clumsy, we’re all fallen and sinful, we don’t do a very good job of it, despite our clumsiness God knows how to use leftovers and misfits – in fact our clumsiness is part of it, our failures to do it are part of it.

We are called; we are incorporated; we are deputized to receive into our lives - personally and with our communion with one another - the spirit of Christ, and to step into the world and absorb all the anxieties, uncertainty and the confusion and be part of the light of Christ in the world. Having had the rug pulled out from under us as Jesus has done, without our stepping up as Christ-links, the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket. And we see that happening in many parts of the world today.

Jesus says take this cup, which is the cup of suffering. We don’t have to be melodramatic about it; there is suffering in our lives. The suffering that I should understand as redemptive is my suffering. The sufferings that I see other people undergoing I should not think that I am going to take it away, I won’t be able to, but I can be present with them in that suffering so they can feel that they are not alone in that suffering and perhaps feel the truth of the situation which is always, always, always that Christ is in it with them. They may not be able to experience that unless they know that I am in it with them. That may be their only entrée to the discovery that Christ is in it with them. Being in that suffering with others, and of course, that sometimes means helping to relieve the suffering, is our responsibility. Mother Teresa once answered a journalist’s comment, “…but you’re not suffering.” She said, “I am not worthy.” So all of us in this room have suffered, and some of us a great deal, but those who have suffered the most are worthy of it. And those of us who have suffered less must have admiration for those, and we must try to be there so they can feel God’s present.

Created by aravir

We are called to bring forgiveness into the world, being there with people who are suffering from their own unforgiven-ness and being simply an agent in the presence of whom people can begin to feel forgiveness. Forgiveness is a great mystery; it is not some sanctimonious thing that somebody who has it gives to somebody else. It is a spirit that infects us – it always has an infecting agent. There is always somebody who brings it in and introduces it into a situation of unforgiven-ness, and it is our Eucharistic responsibility to be about that business. In order to be able to be about such business, we have to experience the kenosis (meaning: a self-emptying) of Christian discipleship. So we take our lives, and this is our supreme privilege, we must not see this as some kind of melodramatic act of renunciation, it is the source of our freedom, to take our lives, thank God for them because it is a gift to us, and break them or let them be broken and give them away. And then, Jesus says, “do THIS in memory of me.” Do what? Do this in memory of me. Not just the gesture, of course we do the gesture; of course the Real Presence, but when Jesus says, do THIS, He is talking of something much more vast then that. He means doing that which the gesture represents – being Christ in the world.

I will give you a treat; in my presentations to high school students I tell them a poem by Rumi, a 13th century Sufi. The poem goes like this:

Be like one, who when he walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it.
Be like one, who when she walks into the room, luck shifts to the one who needs it. I usually say it 10 times because it is easy to remember if you have heard it 10 times. Then I re-translate it.
Be like one, who when he walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

I think that is what drinking the cup is all about, so that sins might be forgiven; so that the knot might be broken; so that the animosity might be absorbed or dispersed; so that the healing and forgiveness might be brought into this situation where unforgiven-ness is about to get the upper hand. Be like one, who when she walks into the room, the one left out feels less lonely.

It is at the Eucharistic table that we receive this gift and are nourished for the journey to go back out into the world and be Eucharistic people, be Christ to the world, absorbing that unforgiven-ness and being people who are not there on their own, but rather people who are saying with Paul, I live now not I, but Christ lives in me.

Then there is a little passage of a book on Revelation by William Riley, Irish Biblical scholar who passed away a few years ago that I would like to leave you with. He has a wonderful way of helping understand our work in the church and it also comes out of our Eucharist mandate. He says that Christ often calls us to failure, not success just as He Himself was called to the Cross. “The marvelous religion teacher, the hard working bishop who manages his diocese well, the mother of a family strongly rooted in the faith have done no more works than the dedicated religion teacher whose classroom is like a drudgery, or the zealous and caring bishop whose administration is constantly criticized or the loving mother whose family, despite her efforts, have all abandoned the Church. In many ways the last three have received a higher calling.” Isn’t that amazing? We are called to move into that place of brokenness and to take up our cross. And to do it in such a way that the world hears the cock crow, and that the world feels the forgiveness of God. And that the world recognizes that we are not doing it on our own, or that we are not doing it because we are nice, or morally superior. We are doing it because Christ has laid His Hand on us.


This is the end of the talk.
The following are from the question and answer period after the talk.

Q: The difference between suffering and pain is a matter of choice. Pain is not choice; you are inflicted in some way. Suffering implies a choice. Can you elaborate on this?

Gil: Pain is something that happens to you and that suffering is a choice when you say yes to it. This is something on Christian redemptive suffering. We have so much to learn from so many people of different faiths. I was in dialogue a few months ago in Milwaukee with the Tibetan monk that taught the Dali Lama, it was a great privilege to be in this man’s presence. It was Christian – Buddhist dialogue, which is mostly an exercise in politeness, but we did have dinner together so we did get a little beyond it there. One of the things one has to realize is some of the essential differences we have. The Buddha was trying to avoid suffering by withdrawing desire by essentially, and I know this is a clumsy way to put it, by sequestering desire, by closing it down somehow. The Buddhist recognizes that the problem is desire that is very good, so do we Christians, or at least we should or we used to before we threw Augustine out. But for Christians it is not to shut down desire and it is not to avoid suffering. For Christians it is to awaken desire and turn it toward its proper object. Turn it away from all the fancy glitter things that distract us toward God. And because we humans need to see the face of God, we absolutely needed the incarnation. Jesus gives us that incarnation so that our desires, and we are not talking about the goofy kinds of raw desires, but our longing, like metal filings can be re-oriented in the right way, so that our desire is awakened. This is what Dante is all about, awakening that desires and turning it to all kinds of mediators: Beatrice, the Beloved, Sister Immaculate, John of the Cross, whoever it is, awakened by all kinds of mediators and directed back to its true source. Augustine starts the Confessions with the first paragraph he ends it with, “We are restless until we rest in Thy.” We take that restlessness which is our desire, we don’t try to shut it down, we turn it toward its proper object and we understand that suffering can be redemptive. That is really powerful. When you recognize that this can be redemptive, not just for me, because if it is for me than it goes back to this little project of me getting into heaven, elbowing my way in. But my suffering can be redemptive to somebody on the other side of the planet – to somebody in another age. And this is what prayer can do. We have to believe these things because they are true. We use to have as little Catholic children in the playground we would say prayers or we would offer up our suffering to the poor souls in purgatory, which now today everyone has a little condescending smirk, but it is absolutely true. Our suffering can be redemptive not just for us, but maybe not primarily for us, but for others. It is a great gift and once you recognize that, suddenly this pain has dignity and vocation.

Q: Can you talk about the mechanism of violence and anthropology?

Gil: When the 19th century anthropologist went out, by the way I am talking anthropology – I have a definition of anthropology that I haven’t told you yet. Anthropology is the study of cultures by people who no longer have one.  And you will notice that it was invented by the west about 200 or rather 150 years ago. Somebody once said about poetry; don’t write a poem unless you have to and you could say the same thing about anthropology. Don’t invent the science of anthropology unless you have to. We had to about 150 years ago. And the first anthropologists went out and started studying these other cultures and they came back with all sorts of data and they sorted through it and they said ah-ha! All over the place, wherever you look we have these dying and rising gods. We have these stories that are very interesting. There is a crisis; and there is a death; and there is reconciliation or a resolution or some kind of resurrection. They were all Enlightenment people so that means they didn’t know squat about religion, so they had this insight – the insight was Christianity was just another myth. And that idea was so radical at first that only the academics talked about it. That was before academics became famous and had press conferences. Then it trickled out and people started studying these things and it comes into the modern times, and I don’t want to scapegoat because I have read these people and gleaned a lot from their work, but Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell and all those people for whom Christianity is just another dying and rising myth. Gradually that language seeps into the church. Only in the last 30 years have we Christians started talking that way; unbelievable that we would talk that way.

Okay, anthropologists said that Christianity is just another myth because it is exactly the same thing as what they discovered all over the world. And we Christians said, no, no, it is not the same thing - ours is different. Oh yea, the anthropologists asked, how is it different? Well,..., ah,…, ah,…, well, you see, nails hurt more or something like that. We tried to account for it in whatever way or we fled the scene. René Girard said, NO. You have to begin there. You have to say YES, you are right. If you want to recover Christianity’s universality, you don’t flee from that revelation you a firm it. Yes of course it is structurally identical to all of that. It had to be: it has it be, because all of that is a telling of the story that is false. All of that tells you the story from the point of view of the victimizing community. You get the crisis; you get the death; and you get reconciliation, but you never get the innocence of the victim, NEVER. Christianity presents something that is structurally identical and reverses the whole valence by creating a community of people who come together because they have heard the cock crow; they have seen the innocence of the victim; the scales have fallen from their eyes; they have seen the idolatry of the world and they have begun to see the face of the living God. So it has to be the same. And this is what I was trying to say earlier, when the world says no, we don’t counter that with some kind of over-against: yes, yes, yes – no, no, no like some chant in the school yard. We go deeper into the mystery until we can bring up an affirmation that brings in that negation that can affirm that negation itself, which is exactly what happened in this example of Girard saying yes, it is the same.

Banished from Eden - Raymund Schwager - Chapter 4

Banished from Eden
Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the Drama of Salvation
By Raymund Schwager, SJ

Chapter 4
Human Self-Reflection and Universal Responsibility

The doctrine of original sin must be based essentially on the Bible and church tradition. However, the reception and understanding of a Christian doctrine in a given period depends to a considerable degree on how it is related to the world view that is dominant during that period. Is the doctrine’s deeper structure compatible with that world view? Does it function as a constructive challenge, or does it merely appear as a vestige of an earlier, outmoded world view? In view of these problems we have attempted in the preceding chapters to engage in a thorough exploration of a new understanding of imitation (mimesis), of evolutionary theory and of questions associated with procreation. Already in the introduction, however, we saw that the essential difficulties with the doctrine of original sin, which began with the Enlightenment long before Darwin, originate in the ‘dogma’ of modernity (Latour) that holds that nature and freedom (history, social order) must be separated. Since this separation has again become problematic in light of the most recent research, we deliberately left the question open as to whether and how far we could follow that theory or ‘dogma’ of modernity. In the preceding chapters a clear answer has emerged, which I want to summarize and then proceed to make it more precise through an explicit series of reflections on the connection between evolutionary theory and the ‘dogma’ of modernity.

The Organism as Memory

The theory of evolution initially made accepting the idea of a first human couple being responsible for the whole history of human sin seem implausible for many. However, the same theory also indirectly had another and quite different effect, namely that the Enlightenment separation of the eternal truths of reason and the contingent truths of history was rendered problematic and out of date. According to evolutionary theory, accidental events may permanently imprint an organism and enter in to its structure or into its ‘essence’. Evolutionary theorists speak therefore of 'frozen accidents’. Out of this background every organism can be understood as a living memory, which preserves countless accidents, bifurcations or ‘decisions’ in the course of cosmic and biological evolution and passes them on. Accidents presuppose, of course, a common structure for which the contingent event is either meaningful or meaningless or harmful. Conversely, however, the accident can also change common structures and make a determinative imprint on them for the future. The universal or the structure on the one hand and the particular or the accidental on the other hand are therefore not separate realities, but both are bound together by a ‘tangled hierarchy’ (Dupuy).

Not only the body and its functions should be seen as a living memory but also the spontaneous reactions and forms of behavior of animals. Even normal dispositions of our conscious human behavior turn out to be ‘remembrances’ that were imprinted by earlier stages or accidental occurrences in the evolution of the organism. Of course, these traces of earlier occurrences are not stored up and transmitted in a conscious way, but in the gene pool. They show how particular events can enter into the nature of an individual.

If the organism is understood in light of the evolutionary theory as living memory, there are few objections against the Christian doctrine of original sin from this point of view. If it is part and parcel of evolution that individual events are preserved and transmitted, it is not implausible any more that negative decisions from the beginning of human life are being passed on until today. Certainly there is an essential difference between those many ‘decisions’ within evolution which directly affected the gene pool and moral decisions at the beginning of humanity. For this reason we have attempted to show, on the one hand, that moral decisions could have had at least a long-term effect on the gene pool; on the other hand, we have explicitly dealt with the question of freedom and the supernatural calling of all humans in connection with the theory of evolution. Thus the doctrine of original sin, in spite of its obvious peculiarity, enters into a positive resonance with the evolutionary world view, for it posits that events long past continue to have effects as an enduring heritage in us. Whether we are dealing with more than a resonance depends of course on whether the hereditary transmission that affects the gene pool can be brought into an inner connection with the imitation that influences behavior.

Propagation and Imitation

The Council of Trent says of original sin that it is transmitted through propagation (procreation) and not through imitation. The continued effect of negative behavior through imitation is easily accessible to modern thinking. Yet the inheritance of a moral quality is scarcely accepted. Due to the modern separation of freedom (sin) and nature (propagation), this idea could only be seen as a mythological amalgamation of categories that have nothing to do with one another. But this suspicion of mythology at work was gradually rendered questionable in the course of our investigations. According to Girard, deeper imitation precedes reflective knowledge and it absorbs the influence of models in 'quasi-osmotic immediacy'. This biological metaphor for the description of imitation or mimesis indicates that the latter is deeply rooted in nature and should not be seen in opposition to it. Tomatis shows further that imitation begins already in the mother’s womb. The influences the fetus absorbs from its mother affect its further growth and especially the development of its brain. This influence begins already at conception. Finally, genetics shows that conception is only possible because the male and female gametic cells create copies or imitations of themselves, which can then fuse, and also growth ensues through a continuous copying or imitation of information in the fertilized ovum.

From conception, through growth under absorption of sensuous impressions, to imitation of moral acts, there is thus a continuous process. Imitation is completely grounded in natural processes and nature proves to be a communicative development from the very beginning, a development which gradually opens up to freedom. Procreation and imitation should therefore no longer be played off against one another. Yet, the question of freedom requires further clarification.

Freedom and Preset Nature

Christian tradition has always understood man as a creature of freedom, even if the Augustinian doctrine of predestination made the Western understanding of freedom problematic in part. But the concrete possibilities of action were very limited because freedom was perceived in the context of an order which was preset by an unalterable human and extra-human nature, which was in its turn grounded in the free creative will of God. In accord with this view, one usually also regarded social institutions as previously given by nature and thus as directly or indirectly given by God.

Within western history the struggle between Caesar and pope in part brought the preset order into question. The long-standing crisis between Church and political authority made the Reformation possible, which caused a deep rift in western society. This opened new ways in which the natural sciences and Enlightenment thinking could originate and gradually develop. The theoretical separation between body and soul (Descartes), and somewhat later between nature and freedom, untied thought on freedom from the bonds of nature for the first time, and at the same time turned nature into an object that could be manipulated at will. This development initially had consequences primarily in the social realm. In place of trust in the political authorities established by God, the idea of self-determination by the peoples (democracy) appeared, and in the toil of work one saw no longer a punishment decreed by God for original sin (see Genesis 3:17-19), but the possibility for the self-realization of one’s own life and for the improvement of mankind’s future (Marx). Progress in science and technology finally led to the gradual substitution of machines for many forms of human labor and to new forms of worldwide communication. In this way expanded windows of opportunity and previously unknown possibilities of creative action were developed.

However, the devices humans produced (machines) exerted feedback effects on them in complex ways. People imitated these as new models in their thinking and began to conceive of the human body according to the model of machines. So humans were no longer simply conducting research but they became the object of investigation and manipulation. The effects of research on humans appear most clearly in the increasing possibilities for changing one’s nature through genetic manipulation. There is now a direct connection between theoretical insights into evolution and the practical possibility of altering one’s genetic inheritance.

What humans earlier thought most definitely to be preset, the environment and their own bodies, turns out to be a product of a construction process in which they themselves can intervene, at least subsequently, and they can do this ever more strenuously. The preset is thus no longer untouchable, but becomes something provisional that can be formed and changed. To be sure, this possibility does not hold for every individual person, for whom most things remain simply given, now and in future. Yet it certainly holds for human society as a whole, which created these modern possibilities and pushes them continually further. In earlier times there used to be a dialectic between individual and society, but in the meantime a third reality has appeared, technology, in which many already see the decisive subject of history. Through technology nature is more and more integrated into the realm of human action, while men are molded according to the demands of the technological world. Already in our day there is talk of a ‘third Copernican revolution’, whose aim is not to make nature serve man but rather to adapt the human organism to a changed environment and social order. ‘The human person who has turned into a subject and who, as subject, developed the natural sciences for the mastery of the world has now become the changeable object of technology.’ The separation of nature and freedom was thus from the very start only a theoretical separation, which in reality led to a previously unknown interpenetration and fusing of nature and history and set in motion a process whose outcome we cannot yet perceive. We are thus within a ‘tangled hierarchy’ that is becoming ever more universal: on the one hand, humans form society and create technologies so as to master the processes of nature, while on the other these processes and technologies form and master their human ‘masters’ more and more. What used to be nature, increasingly becomes the objectification and materialization of free decisions, which in their turn are subject to the increasing coercion of processes imposing their own more powerful order.

The philosophical tradition of the western world has always seen human freedom in connection with the human ability to return to oneself (reditio in seipsum). This capacity remained, however, very formal because of the limits preset by nature. Karl Rahner, referring to modern thought and Christian experience, has expressly emphasized that freedom is not simply an external human capacity by which man can choose between different possibilities. To the contrary, freedom concerns his entire existence and is a ‘total and finalizing self-mastery of the subject’. It is ‘first of all “freedom of being”. It is not merely the quality of an act and capacity exercised at some time, but a transcendental mark of human existence itself.’ ‘By the fact that man in his transcendence exists as open and in-determined, he is at the same time responsible for himself. He is left to himself and placed in his own hands not only in his knowledge, but also in his actions. It is in being consigned to himself that he experiences himself as responsible and free.’ Rahner holds that this transcendental freedom has to execute itself through concrete objectifications throughout the full length and width of the space-time of historical existence. This occurs above all through humans taking an evaluative stance toward their own history of freedom by interpreting it and thereby endowing it with its final meaning. ‘Freedom always concerns the person as such and as a whole. The object of freedom in its original sense is the subject himself, and all decisions about objects in his experience of the world around him are objects of freedom only insofar as they mediate this finite subject in time and space to himself.’

Rahner developed his doctrine of freedom chiefly in light of Christ’s total surrender of his life and in regard to the Christian task of deciding about one’s own salvation or damnation. However, he also referred to the modern possibilities of self-manipulation: ‘What is new in this issue is therefore not that man is faber sui ipsius [maker of himself], but that this fundamental constitution of man is manifested historically today in a totally new way. Today for the first time man’s possibility of transcendental self-manipulation irreversibly takes on a clear and historically categorical form.’

The word self-manipulation could suggest that these modern possibilities should on principle be judged negatively. But if freedom is the total and finalizing self-mastery of the subject, then this can hardly be true. In fact, the modern possibilities of self-manipulation provide the anthropology of total self-determination with an empirical meaning. As long as the environment, other people, and one’s own body were understood as fixed and preset by nature, a strange distance remained between transcendent freedom in its openness to the absolute and the self’s concrete acts of execution by means of very limited objectifications. Only when much of the preset material could be understood as objectifications of prior history and prior instances of freedom, did self-mediation become more comprehensive; a complete self-mediation could then become conceivable when humans become able to take a stand toward their entire earlier history. Biological research is at present occupied with fully decoding the human genome, and in a few years it will have attained this goal. When this occurs, human nature will not only become more transparent, but it will become possible for humans to engage in a new way with their entire past. Everything that has been built up in the process of life over hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of years is opened up to their access. With the possibility of changing our inheritance from the past, new dimensions for the future also open up. Thus an immanent possibility of total self-determination emerges. Even if immense dangers are bound up with this potential self-determination, nonetheless the new possibilities and tasks are commensurate with the Christian understanding of freedom as total and finalizing self-mastery.

The newly accessible ranges of freedom were obviously not available to humans before, yet they were already addressed in a historical-symbolic fashion in the Jewish-Christian history of revelation. This occurred not only in the narration of original sin, but also through the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment and through Jesus’ unique surrender of himself for all of us in an apocalyptic context. The intention of the history of the fall in paradise was to make clear that phenomena such as oppression, the hardship of labor, and death, which earlier must have seemed naturally or mythically determined, must be judged differently from a biblical point of view: the apparently natural is to be interpreted as the consequence of prior human failure. Likewise the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment intended to establish a connection between human sins and the entire course of history, which to most men and peoples appeared to be determined by nature of fate. In the context of its own time the Bible could of course speak to this question only in a form of historical-symbolic metaphor and only for faith could it be understandable in some fashion.

However, the transformation processes that were meanwhile awakened in the world by the Christian message led gradually and through complex stages to the point where today the issue in question has become a concrete object of knowledge. We can now establish empirically that freedom and the human potential of transformation extends into areas previously thought to be predetermined. From this standpoint the doctrine of original sin is thus anything but an outdated concept. In fact it proves to be a fundamental, though largely symbolic emergence of a problem which only now has taken on an immediate empirical dimension. The preset, human and extra-human nature, is the product of an earlier history and earlier bifurcations, and present decisions will become what is preset for coming generations.

At the same time this insight makes it evident that freedom cannot be completely understood either from the standpoint of the isolated subject nor from that of the I-Thou relation, but must be seen in the context of human society and history in their entirety. This way all objectifications of freedom become preconditions for other free acts, which in turn are the preconditions for future decisions. The long and complex process of the self-construction of human nature and human society, which hitherto has proceeded unconsciously for the most part, has now become self-reflective. Individual self-reflection, accessible to earlier human individuals within certain limits, has developed into a comprehensive process of self-reflection, which can only be fulfilled by humanity as a whole and in view of its final destination.

Since the end indicates something about the beginning, one may infer from the contemporary and imminently foreseeable possibility of free intervention in our genetic inheritance that already, in the self-construction of this inheritance, there were potentials for bifurcations (accidents), and that these potentials became, on the first level of self-reflection, authentic freedom. A retroactive freedom, which is possible from a standpoint anticipating the end of history, consequently suggests openness in all evolution and an analogous freedom in the beginning of humanity. In this regard it makes sense that freedom in its radical form as total self-determination cannot be a matter pertaining just to the individual or any group, but is a task of all mankind. All individual attempts toward self-reflection and freedom must complement one another toward an all-embracing self-reflection in which humanity intervenes in its own nature and determines itself with regard to its future and final destination. Viewed in this way, the doctrine of original sin no longer comes across as an odd curiosity in today’s world. Together with the eschatological-apocalyptic oracles of judgment and the doctrine of the universal redemptive death of Christ it proves in fact to be the first and decisive articulation of that universal process of self-reflection and self-determination moving toward finality which now has become an empirical challenge and task. But if freedom is a universal process, it also becomes clear that each individual subject is more determined by the free acts of others than by his or her own self-determination. Freedom turns out also to be an affliction, something that the traditional doctrine of original sin has always known.

We are clearly not in a position to evaluate more precisely how far the already foreseeable possibilities of transformation or manipulation will actually extend into the future and how they will be used. The historical-symbolic narratives of the Bible certainly intimate significant possibilities, which should at least arouse us in these days to thought experiments in order to prepare ourselves for developments that could occur. In the book of Revelation the time up to the end is seen predominantly negatively and is described as an anti-Christian reign by means of two beasts. The first beast embodies political power, while the description of the second is that it has the appearance of a lamb but speaks like a dragon. It thus resembles the Church, the creature of the lamb, but it represents something quite different. The second animal serves the first one, erects an image for it, and possesses quite extraordinary powers: ‘It was then permitted to breathe life into the beast’s image, so that the beast’s image could speak and could have anyone who did not worship it put to death’ (Revelation 13:15). In this prophecy it is striking that the second beast not only pretends to possess miraculous power and so leads men astray, but it is actually able to breathe the breath of life into the dead image. It therefore has at its disposal quite extraordinary powers and imitates precisely what God did in the creation of the first humans (Genesis 2:7). How the biblical writer could come to the point of ascribing such powers to an idolatrous force may remain open for now. In the modern context, however, his prophetic utterance at least gives rise to the question of whether the sciences, with their instinctive quest to imitate the Creator, could in fact succeed in becoming the ‘creator’ in his stead. Looking from the standpoint of the Revelation of John we cannot, in any case, exclude this possibility from the outset. In this prophetic thought experiment the sciences should by no means be associated unilaterally with an anti-Christian regime. In an earlier chapter I considered as a hypothesis and thought experiment the quite different possibility that modern genetics might succeed in removing negative elements that had entered the genome through sin in the course of human evolution. The sciences appear to be an extremely two-edged sword that can lead to utterly new forms of both good and evil.

According to Revelation the anti-Christian character of the second beast consisted particularly in the fact that it would lead all inhabitants of the earth to worship the image of the first beast, and it kills all who don’t comply. If the sciences should one day succeed in creating life, evil would lie in the pressure humans felt to worship the work of their hands. They would hardly be able to see any longer that the power of the second beast finally comes from God.

What the sciences will be able to achieve in the near or distant future, we do not know precisely or at all. But from a biblical standpoint we cannot exclude the possibility that humans, by means of their self-transformation, will become able to intervene and penetrate more deeply into nature, as we can realistically foresee at the present time. Even the idea that humanity might one day encompass even what was formerly simply given, nature and the cosmos, and at least change its direction, may no longer be rejected a priori. The ‘dogma’ of the modernity, which would separate nature and human history and which so deeply influenced modern theology, thus loses any profound basis.

‘Evil’ in Evolution

The question of how one should judge evil in an evolutionary view of world greatly occupied Teilhard de Chardin, and he became convinced that the doctrine of original sin should be construed out of the background of the laws of evolution. Since evolution, in this view, strives gropingly from multiplicity in pursuit of unity, there are tendencies toward backslides that inevitably occur. ‘In such a system, which advances by tentative gropings, the laws of large numbers make it absolutely inevitable that every step towards order is paid for by failures, by disintegrations, by discordances: the proportion of these depends upon certain cosmic constants which it is impossible to determine, but to which it would certainly be useless to claim to fix a priori an upper limit beyond which one could say that the world was corrupted or evil.’

Modern knowledge of genetics has led still a step beyond what was available to Teilhard in his time. It shows that relapses and disintegration are not simply unavoidable. Errors in the reproduction of the genetic programme now prove even to be necessary for progress to occur: ‘The most perfect capability of replication is, however, its “only-almost-perfection”. Without imprecision, i.e., without accidental errors, any development would be impossible. Errors of replication and subsequent selection of “fitting” changes are the motor of the growth of organic patterns.’ Besides errors in genetic replication great catastrophes, such as those that killed off about half of all living beings 250 million years ago or that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, prove also to be important steps on the way toward human beings. It was every unfortunate for those immediately affected, but it had a positive effect in evolution.

This view is compatible with the Christian doctrine of creation and has great resonance with the doctrine of redemption. That is to say, if a free creature (human being) is to become possible, the world must fulfill a double condition. There must be great regularity in it so that the free creature can find its way and orient itself through the recurrence of similar or like experiences. The laws of the world must, however, have simultaneously a certain openness and indeterminacy. Though this may lead easily into accidents and catastrophes, it in turn makes possible real, free decisions on the part of the creature without a suspension of the laws of nature.

Modern insights which can be summarized by the catchword symbiogenesis furthermore show that not only accident was a motor of progress. Evolution also required a process of ‘unification’. Precursors of cells completely coalesced and so enabled genuine leaps in evolution, even if many unsolved problems still remain for us with regard to macro-evolution. Also, sexuality was quite significant, since through it distinctive genetic material was repeatedly fused and combined anew. Alongside accident, which tended in a destructive direction, there were consequently strong forces of unification at work in evolution. This does not simply refer to physical and chemical forces. Animals that mated, struggled for food or defended their territories always did this without thinking of their genes or the corresponding chemical reactions. They reacted in this way because they were governed by corresponding drives. Drives were thus a decisive force in evolution. If animals were only physical-chemical machines, it would have been all the same to them whether they were dismembered (became extinct) or not. An evolution of life can only exist where there is also a drive to live, as seen in the behavior of animals that fight for their existence and survival. Where, however, self-assertive drives are at work, interaction necessarily comes about: cooperation, competition, and fighting. Life in the animal realm offers precisely this picture: besides forms of complex cooperation there is a continual struggle for survival. This is especially clear among those animals that are closest to us humans. So it is that among certain species of apes sexuality serves not merely for reproduction, but also for lessening of conflict, indeed for ‘reconciliation’. In the same vein we find here precursors of human battle which means that fighting not only a matter of momentary self-defense but of long-term ‘planned’ destructive action against enemy groups.

For our immediate sensitivity, the natural struggle for life can seem brutal and totally ‘evil’. But against this negative impression one has to consider first of all, that the struggle for life itself has a goal and serves the function of self-control. Moreover, besides the struggle there are likewise forms of cooperation which are even more numerous. Above all, however, the problem appears in a completely different light if we look again at nature from the standpoint of human freedom. Freedom – understood as possibility of choice – presupposes, as we have already seen a dimension of openness and accident in pre-human nature, and thus also the possibility of negative developments. Self-determination (freedom of being) belongs also to freedom in a deeper sense, and in nature this corresponds to (evolutionary) self-development. The concrete expression of this self-development is the life-drive with its manifold forms of cooperation and struggle. If the image of the watchmaker does not dominate our understanding of creation, but rather the image of a true creator who through continuous influence confers on the creature the ability to own his own being and engage in his own actions and self-development, then the deeper meaning of the life-drive becomes clear. It turns out then to be the necessary precondition and the root out of which freedom may develop.

We have already mentioned that Teilhard wanted to understand original sin in light of an evolution that proceeded groping and struggling. In dependence on ecclesial tradition he designated relapses within evolution as ‘the tinder of sin’ (fomes peccati) or as the provocation to sin, and in this connection he interpreted original sin as the actualization of the sparking of this tinder: ‘The specifically human Fall is no more than the (broadly speaking, collective and eternal) actualizing of this ‘fomes peccati’ which was infused, long before us, into the whole of the universe, from the lowest zones of matter to the angelic spheres.’

Now if the actual sparking of this tinder of sin had been ‘absolutely inevitable’ in the human realm, as a quotation of Teilhard we referred to earlier could suggest, speaking of true freedom, and thus also of sin, would be invalid. Yet since it is this very freedom that endows the life-struggle in nature with a deeper meaning, such a conclusion would destroy any explanation for the hardship within evolution. If, on the contrary, the destructive tendencies within evolution are understood only as a stimulus of sin, and if original sin is interpreted in this frame of reference, then both the specific character of sin is preserved and its rootage in pre-human evolution is clearly seen. From this point of view we also realize that the concept of original sin is anything but an exotic idea. It, in fact, enables us to conjoin antithetical aspects of our contemporary world view and experience. On the one hand it maintains the concern for freedom and just in that way lends deeper meaning to the evolutionary world view. On the other hand it explains why forms of behavior we feel are evil in the animal realm can reappear among us humans in sharpened form: in the animal realm they are actually natural, but in the human realm they are evil precisely because they have their origin in freedom as well. They may not be minimized or excused because of our animal past.


Universal Responsibility and Redemption

The concept of solidarity is a central element in modern humanistic and ethical thought. This concern already took a particularly radical and universal turn in The Brothers Karamazov by F.M. Dostoevsky. In this work the seventeen-year-old, severely ill Markel, brother of the Elder Zosima, finds life to be like paradise in spite of a burning fever. He says to his mother, ‘Mother darling … there must be servants and masters, but if so I will be the servant of my servants, the same as they are to me. And another thing, mother, every one of us is guilty toward all men, and I more than any.’ His mother asks how he could have sinned against all men. Markel answers, ‘Mother, little heart of mine … my joy, believe me, every one is responsible to all men for all men and for everything. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but I feel it is so, painfully even. And how is it we went on living, getting angry and not knowing?’ E. Levinas has often cited the sentence, ‘Every one is guilty toward all men, and I more than any’, and he sees in it a central element of his own ethical philosophy. Starting from a radical personalist thinking, Levinas advocates an ‘ethics of heteronomy that is not a servitude, but the service of God through responsibility for the neighbor, in which I am irreplaceable’. The true I is ‘the one who, before all decision, is elected to bear all the responsibility for the world’.

This view is relevant to our reflections on original sin and redemption insofar as it poses the question of freedom. Here we are not dealing with an isolated and so-called ‘autonomous’ subject, but one understood in the framework of all humanity and thus in the context of universal responsibility. However, a perspective such as this is not at all self-evident today, and the concept of a universal partaking in guilt and responsibility must face up to a massive challenge. The largely dominant thought about system thinking and the naturalistic positions that wish to interpret life solely as a matter of physical and chemical processes scarcely allow a place for true solidarity. Moreover the multifaceted experiences of the autonomous workings of the modern world give rise to the impression tat human society has become transformed into a huge machine. It is no longer free decisions that seem to determine the world, but constraints of the system.

Against this tendency of thought and feeling, it may be objected of course that it is precisely a new development within the ‘world-machine’ which again raises the question of responsibility. Modern society has – in multiple ways – created the possibility of self-destruction and thus has placed the most urgently vital alternative before mankind. In view of this overwhelming fact that is evident to everybody who wants to be well informed, human beings can scarcely assert with conviction that they have no responsibility. Rather the question must be raised in the opposite way: is the responsibility facing them not too great, so that it demands too much of them? Levinas’ ethical philosophy brings up exactly the same question. How can the human being actually bear responsibility for the whole world without breaking down under an unbearable burden?

H. M. Enzensberger grants a central place to this question in his study Aussichten auf den Burgerkrieg (Views on Civil War). He describes how modern mass media confront us daily with so much misery, injustice, and violence in the world that we are no longer able to truly expose ourselves to all these impressions but must protect ourselves inwardly. He therefore draws the conclusion that there is no longer any infinity universal claim upon us. The idea of a universal responsibility would only make sense if conjoined with the idea of being all-powerful like God. But this would be pathological arrogance. For him it is therefore time ‘to take leave of moralistic fantasies of omnipotence’ and to familiarize ourselves with the concept of limited responsibility.

Enzensberger’s enquiry should be taken seriously, for the narrative of the fall in paradise shows that the attempt to be like God actually belongs to the core of the story of sin. Since this attempt, as we saw in the previous chapter, does not have to appear directly at the forefront, it can easily be concealed behind a pious or high ethical demand. Isn’t the idea of universal responsibility just such a deception? Isn’t this the appearance of a high ethic that covertly claims the status of being like God?

Before we proceed further into this question, we must briefly consider whether the same temptation occurs today in other ways. Nietzsche posed this question in his usually brilliant and simultaneously naive manner with brutal frankness. In Thus Spole Zarathustra he has his hero speak to his friends: ‘But to reveal my heart entirely to you, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods.’ It would be unbearable not to be the highest or greatest. There must be nothing beyond man. Instead, the latter becomes the new creator, and so he must have the heart to create the ‘Overman’: ‘Once you said “God” when you gazed upon distant seas; but now I have taught you to say Overman. / God is a supposition; but I want your supposing to reach no further than your creating will. / Could you create a god?- So be silent about all gods! But you could surely create the Overman. / Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers! But you could transform yourselves into forefathers and ancestors of the Overman: and let this be your finest creating.’

The departure of God led in Nietzsche’s poetic fantasy to the human being who is creative creator. Doesn’t an actual feature of our social order today correspond to this dream from the nineteenth century? Though the social order will hardly attempt to create the Overman in a straightforward fashion, it certainly intends more and more to improve man, as he has been so far, through conscious interventions. We have already seen that modern society is self-reflective. It more and more stamps and forms its own members and not merely on the cultural place, for it even interferes in their very organisms. Admittedly people today – to use again Nietzsche’s language – are certainly only the ‘parents and forebears’ of man to come. If, however, science should succeed in creating artificial life, which on the basis of the Bible cannot be excluded a priori – as we have seen – wouldn’t men understand themselves as the true alternative to the creative divine will? Would the creative will of the humankind that had become the Overman not take the place of the former Creator God?

The most profound problem is that we don’t stand before coarse alternatives, but before distinct possibilities which – on the surface – are very close to one another, yet in actuality lie worlds apart and thus call for a very subtle and spiritual gift of discernment. In the light of evolution, especially in the light of the radical mandate of freedom contained in the Christian message, one cannot reject out of hand the tendency of humans to re-make themselves and to assume a new attitude toward evolution and cannot judge it as sheer mimicry of the creative work of God and as satanic. But at the same time we cannot overlook the fact that the self-reflective process of modern society imitates man in particular, insofar as he is a physical-chemical organism. So this tendency inclines more and more toward substituting the living person, this feeling, suffering, rejoicing, and therefore incalculable creature, for another that is more controllable and thus more predictable. This being would perhaps blend in even better with the (ant colony) state, but this means it would have largely lost its spiritual dimension. So today we face not only the possibility that humanity is brutally annihilating itself, but we also see a tendency emerging that humans would do away with themselves in a much more subtle and ‘peaceful’ manner: by transforming themselves and worshipping this process as a divine creation.

Since we now recognize such tendencies, they summon us to a correspondingly great responsibility. With that we have, however, arrived where our reflections already were. The problem has only got worse through the new sphere of questions. Humans are, on one hand, challenged to a universal responsibility for themselves and the future, while on the other hand they seem completely overwhelmed by this responsibility. We face a dilemma, though not a hopeless one. The new dilemma corresponds precisely to the one that Anselm of Canterbury already pointed out nearly a thousand years ago in his doctrine of redemption (Cur dues homo). Starting from cultural and religious concepts of his time, he advanced through different stages of deepening thought to a radical concept of freedom in which he emphasized human dignity and defined freedom as the mandate ‘to act out of oneself’. This resulted in the conclusion that humans themselves must rectify the evil that they perpetrated through sin, but at the same time they are unable to do so. However, Anselm did not stop at the dilemma, but he drove his conclusions relentlessly further. Regarding this impossible obligation human beings must either despair or there must be a God-Man who as human does what humans must do and also, as God, is able to do it. We are compelled to an analogous conclusion today. If we do not intend to despair and become inwardly resigned because of the magnitude of the problem, we have to hope for deliverance.

Already in the preceding chapter theological arguments led us to the conclusion that the problem of sin can only be adequately comprehended by looking back on it from the salvation in Chris, the overcoming of sin. Now the secular problem of modern society has led us to a similar result. As long as we approach the problem of evil solely from our human perspective we get lost in a world of contradictions. Problems and challenges appear before our eyes, and we immediately see that we will never be equal to them. The orientation and trust in the meaningfulness of our lives can be sustained only if we are allowed to place our hope in redemption.

But how is redemption to be understood with respect to the problem as sketched? Since modern society has become self-reflective to a radical extent and since the most pressing problems appear in this context, redemption too must be understood as self-reflective in some manner or the other. Only in this way will it have healing effect in the ‘wounds’ of modern society. A dramatic soteriology would probably do justice to this challenge. It would highlight first of all that the biblical history of salvation began with an orientation toward those fruits of salvation that were likewise important in an analogous fashion in the animal realm. Just as territory and progeny largely determine behavior there, so the covenant of God with Abraham begins with the promise of land and descendants. From this point of departure a dramatic history proceeds gradually through ever new experiences and disappointments to a radical transformation of the original idea of God and so also to a new understanding of the original promise. From a later standpoint the beginning takes on a completely new meaning. Within this process of transformation and self-reference Jesus himself initiated a self-reflective process with his proclamation of the nearness of God’s reign. What he initiated through his message was soon out of his hands. It developed effects on its own power and soon its reverse effects hit him with their full weight. But this reaction did not throw Jesus off his course. He used this very massive and violent backlash to live out the ultimate consequences of his own message. He gave himself nonviolently for those he sought to win, though they collectively expelled him. The only means still at his disposal was that in dying he entrusted his case to the heavenly Father and Judge in whom he had placed his hope from the beginning. The Father did not, in spite of Jesus’ experience of abandonment, leave him to his fate, but awakened him to new life and elevated him to his right hand. Together they sent that Spirit who continued to the work begun on earth and who at the same time retroactively clarified that Jesus’ entire work of salvation, indeed the whole creation, had begun in the power of this Spirit.

Faith in a redemption understood in this way liberates us first of all from desperate attempts, bound up with fantasies of omnipotence, to find a simple recipe enabling us to get a better grip on the enormous problem of modern society. Living out of this faith, it suffices to build our trust – in the discipleship of Jesus – on the nearness of the true God, to keep track of the world process with spiritual discernment, and in doing so to trust that faith itself will initiate its own process affecting the world. It may well be that something important might get out of control, have a contagious effect, backfire on us, and once more destroy positive beginnings. But if the beginning is actually the result of faith in the God who is near, we may hope that this God will awaken new life out of the collapse of our efforts and through his Spirit establish once again beginnings that we cannot foresee. So on the one hand, much of the world process can be integrated anew into the community of faith thanks to the profound guidance of the divine Spirit, and the negative autonomy of the world can at least be broken up piecemeal. If anti-Christian tendencies nevertheless dominate the world and the apocalyptic beasts still largely prevail, which is quite possible, then there is still the hope that godless regimes will destroy themselves in the long run. Above all, however, we know in faith that true and complete salvation is promised to us only through death, as Jesus’ way shows us, as eternal life with God. Salvation in a Christian sense can only be expected in passing through mortal conflicts.

The ‘we’ of which I have just spoken is the community of believers in Christ, the Church (and the churches). It is called to understand itself as an alternative community, and as such it must not be conformed to the autonomy of this world. The community of Christ only remains true to its vocation and meaning as long as it publicly presents a clear alternative, and at the same time avoids false conflicts. Since the self-reflective process of modern society, which reaches deeply into nature and the human organism, may not be judged negatively by the Christian doctrines of creation and redemption, we can no longer deduce ultimate norms for those trusting in the God who is near from a Nature which is preset and ostensibly eternally the same.

Natural justice has not become questionable simply due to social changes. Nature itself has been drawn into the comprehensive process of creative self-construction, as God intended regarding his free creatures, and so it is subjected to change. The norms of the alternative community can consequently be only those given us in the biblical revelation. The directives of the Sermon on the Mount seem to be crucial, for they sketch the new life in the imminent reign of God and thus in the alternative community. This goal, however, is always by far, indeed decisively, ahead of the way of life that the concrete ecclesial community is able to live out. The Sermon on the Mount is both goal and critique of what is actually lived and can be lived out in a Christian way of life. Therefore it spurs on the church community, not to fall back on past experiences so as to set itself against the forward-pushing, self-reflective process of human society, but to lay hold of the forward-looking possibilities of the kingdom of God so as to engage in critical discussion with ever new experiences in world society.

In the reciprocal process by which the community of believers builds itself up we have t discover the basic tenets of the Sermon on the Mount ever anew, understand them more precisely, and experience them as enhancing our life. Only out of such experience can we evaluate in each case what is reasonable for the faithful in a given situation and what exceeds their powers. The experience of powerlessness is and remains essential to Christian life. It alone preserves the community of believers from pride and enables them to know existentially that they are dependent of God’s guidance in all things. It gives them clear knowledge that they themselves, as long as they live on the earth, continue to need redemption.

To surrender means to offer him my free will, my reason, my own life in pure faith.

tip to Doctors of the Catholic Church and Magnificat


I want you all to fill your hearts with great love. Don’t imagine that love, to be true and burning , must be extraordinary. No; what we need in our love is the continuous desire to love the One we love. To possess God we must allow him to possess our souls. How poor we would be if God had not given us the power of giving ourselves to him; how rich we are now!

How easy it is to conquer God! If we give ourselves to him, then God is ours, and there can be nothing more ours than God. The money with which God repays our surrender is himself. We become worthy of possessing him when we abandon ourselves completely to him.

Total surrender consists in giving ourselves completely to God. We must give ourselves fully to God because God has given himself to us. If God owes nothing to us and is ready to impart to us no less than himself, shall we answer with just a fraction of ourselves? Should we not rather give ourselves fully to God as a means of receiving: God himself? I for God and God for me. I live for God and give up my own self, and in this way God lives for me.

To surrender means to offer him my free will, my reason, my own life in pure faith. My soul may be in darkness. Trial and suffering are the surest test of my blind surrender. Surrender is also true love. The more we surrender, the more we love God and souls. If we really love souls, we must be ready to take their place, to take their sins upon us and expiate them in us by penance and continual mortification. We must be living holocausts, for the souls need us as such.

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta (+ 1997 ) won the Nobel Peace Prize and founded the Missionaries of Charity.

St. Maximilian Kolbe, Martyr of Charity

Feast Day - August 14th.



Click here to see more on St. Maximilian Kolbe

The Gift of Self - Gil Bailie -- tape 4 excerpts

The Gift of Self by Gil Bailie tape 4

For more than 500 years, Western culture has been wrestling with how to retain the moral, social, cultural, scientific and intellectual by-products of the biblical tradition while sidestepping the 2 earth-shaking revelations that are at the heart of the New Testament and that are ultimately responsible for all the beneficial side-products. These 2 revelations are:

1) the sacrificial nature of all human institutions, culture and religion and
2) the mimetic nature of human subjectivity.

To the extent that these 2 revelations surface almost everything that is familiar to us socially and psychologically is called into question and is destabilized. The remarkable thing is that the New Testament writers had very strong intuitions in this respect. They saw that the Gospel was going to have an amazingly destabilizing effect and it was going to unleash forces toward which we would have to exercise an enormous responsibility if we were to avoid catastrophe.

So we are in the mist of a cultural crisis – a cultural crisis not just another cultural crisis but a crisis of culture itself. This crisis is irreversible because our way of concluding this crisis has vanished – we have been unable to arrest it by invoking the traditional methods for conclude it – namely, a sacrificial event in which all of our social and psychological confusions would be alleviated as we join unanimously in our violent expulsion of the victim. We have done that many, many times in the modern era – the modern era, in a way, began with these convulsions in which we tried to do that and it hasn’t worked and so the crisis continues to spread and cause social and psychological instability.

There are 2 things that I have tried to track as 2 separate things here: the cultural breakdown and the psychological repercussions of it. There are 2 biblical revelations that are coming to the surface, they are:

1) The sacrificial nature of all human institutions, culture and religion and
2) The mimetic nature of human subjectivity.

So much of what goes on in our world is an effort to thwart the recognition of these 2 things. And that is partly because all of our social and psychological reflexes are formed on the bases of the myths that the biblical revelation deconstructing. It is not as though we are being hypocritical. It is because there is a deeper kind of resistance to these 2 revelations. The questions raised by these 2 revelations are the 2 oldest questions in the biblical tradition namely; how to live without sacrifice and secondly, whom to imitate? These are the 2 fundamental biblical questions:
1) How to live without sacrifice, and
2) Whom to imitate?

The biblical tradition says; we are made in the image and likeness of God: which means to be truly human we have to, as closely as we can, approximate the model, in whose image and likeness we have been made; and secondly, the biblical tradition, at the heart is the prophetic utterance, is that we must live without sacrifice. We must do what Abraham did; we must renounce the morally unacceptable forms of sacrifice, and if need be in the interim, which is to say, in history as we progress away from the most morally troubling forms of sacrifice, to rely on forms of sacrifice that are not morally troubling for us at that time. They will become morally troubling for those who come after us so that we are always coming on to the historical scene at a moment when we recognize the moral problem of the forms of sacrifice that our ancestors used and for which they felt no moral misgiving. In history, we are having to live with less and less sacrifice and that is as it should be because as the biblical tradition has its cultural affects we are forced to live with less and less sacrifice.

So these are related questions: how to live without sacrifice and whom to imitate? And they are related for ultimately whether one can live without sacrifice or not depends on whether the model one is imitating is a human idol whose divine status is the result of the religious transfiguration of human violence on one hand; or on the other hand, truly divine. It is funny that this question seems almost amusing to us – Is the God we worship really the God or is it some kind of myth? In a way we never ask that question anymore.

George Steiner defines modernism as “the sum of impulses and psychological intellectual configurations in which the enormity of the question of the actual existence of God is experienced only fitfully or in metaphors gone pale.” In other words, we don’t think of it as a major issue – some people believe, some people don’t, some people of this or that god in their head, and so on… Everybody is entitled to their own belief which of course they are, but we never confront the significance of the question anymore. Steiner defines modernity as that age in which it is not regarded as a primary question. You could say that modernity is the age in which the significance of these 2 revelations has begun to be felt and which has tried to interpret the crisis which is upon us because of these 2 revelations in ways that keep us from really seeing what is happening.

It is over-simplistic, but as this is a kind of review so maybe over-simplistic can be allowed. There is one very subtle maneuver that made it possible for us to avoid both the revelation about the sacrificial nature of culture and religion on one hand; and the revelation about the mimetic nature of subjectivity on the other. By substituting the “individual” for the victim at the heart of western culture’s moral and social experience we were able to veer ever so slightly out of the direct path of the biblical revelation. Protecting the “individual” was a kind of Enlightenment project – a Western project. It is a very good thing and we are very happy it happened. Protecting the “individual’ became our primary moral imperative and unleashing the social and psychological power of the “individual” became our main source of cultural energy.

Now the biblical tradition is concerned with the victim and the victim is always the one left out and in Western cultural history the “individual” is always the one who is distinct from the crowd – that is the definition of the “individuality” in the West – is someone distinct from the crowd. There is an inherent connection between the victim and the “individual” but by shifting our primary cultural attention away from the victim which is where it is in the biblical tradition toward the “individual” which is where it is in the Western tradition we move slightly away from the heart of the revelation. This move was of great benefit to the modern world in a way. All of the great moral accomplishments of Western culture in the last several hundred years have to do with defending the rights of the “individual.” So it is very significant – we are pleased that it happened. But it just means you can slightly distort the biblical revelation and still get a whole lot of cultural progress out of it. So there is a genuine liberation going on.

The problem is that the “individual” as envisioned by Western humanism is psychologically implausible, sociological problematic and morally ambiguous. This is partly what is surfacing in our time.

The point I (Gil) want to make is that when we first began to realize the radical nature of the biblical revelation and how fundamentally they challenge our conventional notion of culture and our own subjectivity we tried to capture the emancipating power of the biblical revelation in terms which were secular and generic. That unleashed a tremendous moral force in the Western world – a very positive thing for the most part, at least in its early stages, however it avoids the secularized and generic version of the biblical moral imperative – it has an emancipating power, but it avoids the moral, spiritual and religious challenge that the biblical tradition embodies.

A New Testament example from the Gospel of John where Jesus talking to the Jews who believe in him and he says, ‘you think your father is Abraham, but really your father is a liar, the father of lies and a murderer from the beginning.’ In essence He goes on to say that He has renounced that father in obedience to My Heavenly Father. Right there He defines the issue: the issue is this cluster of social and psychological reflexes, which are basic this world whose structure is based on violence and mythology – the mythologization of human violence. Your god, He says, is a liar, a father of lies and a murderer from the beginning, meaning that they are inhabiting a conventional cultural arrangement that the father, in the metaphor here, goes coherence to that whole system. And Jesus says, I’m standing outside that system – completely outside that system – and I am able to stand outside that system because I am standing in identification with and obedience to the True God and not the transfigured god of human violence. The god generated by all archaic religions is the god of transfigured human violence. Jesus is saying, I am standing in fidelity to the True God and therefore I can see what you cannot see because you are still caught up in it. The people to whom Jesus is speaking then say, now we know you must be possessed. As soon as He talks about His Heavenly Father they said, aah, you’re possessed because you are talking about this other god… I (Gil) would say that we moderns are in something like that same situation vis-à-vis the biblical revelation. And we don’t realize how apropos the New Testament tradition is to the crisis that we are in. We try to ward off the revelation that it contains.


Conversation between primarily Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Rene Girard in, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World…

Last week I said that the modern crisis resembles the first stage of either an ancient cultural crisis which would end in scapegoating or the ritual re-enactment of such a thing which would end in a blood-letting sacrifice (usually with an animal victim). In other words, the modern crisis looks to those who have been doing their homework like the preliminary stage of a sacrificial crisis. So what Girard and Oughourlian noticed was that the modern crisis looks a lot like that – the difference is that we have no sacrificial way of bringing it to a conclusion. We have had sacrifices aplenty – scapegoating episodes aplenty in our world, matter of fact, that is what our world is, nothing but that – but they never resolve the crisis. So, water, water everywhere – not a drop to drink – sacrifices everywhere and no resolution to the crisis – that is the world we live in.

As the crisis proceeds however it causes more and more social and psychological undifferentiation. The nature of the crisis is that it dissolves structures – so social structures; taboos, prohibitions, institutions, hierarchies, etc – and psychological structures; that have to do with what is me and what is you and what is conscious and unconscious, the thing that gives coherence to the “individual” the person – those too get dissolved.

Oughourlian says, “Psychologically the processes of mimesis (mimetic desire) involve modifications in the state of consciousness. In the process that leads from the sacrificial crisis to its paroxysm (its final sacrificial conclusion) the participants’ state of consciousness is deconstructed (destabilized). It would be unthinkable for example for the scapegoat to be assassinated if everyone kept full awareness.” So that the early stages of the crisis dissolves the social and psychological structures that prevent the later stages of the crisis from happening. We know that when a mob phenomenon happens somebody can walk into it and being perfectly lucid, more or less, and the next moment get caught up with the frenzy of the crowd. The mimetic phenomenon has a dissolving effect on our psychological structure.

So Oughourlian says that it would be unthinkable, for example, for a crowd to kill a scapegoat unless people had their consciousness dissolve by the mimetic processes of the crowd. He goes on, “This point is confirmed by various rituals that attempts to reproduce changes in the state of awareness for those taking part, so that the end result will be violent unanimity.” He says if you look at the rituals of archaic societies you realize that they do this, they have a crisis and in that crisis the psychological and social resistance to the blood-letting that the crisis leads to, these resistances are broken down. You could say that this is for good reason in the sense how the old order held itself together – for as Oughourlian says, the murder of the victim calms everything down. So the murder of the victim calms everything down – it brings back full consciousness and lucidity – so it founds or re-founds culture. By the death of the victim it establishes difference – the victim delivers the crowd, who killed him, from the psychotic structure, and by this act restructures their consciousness. In other words, the victim makes it possible for all the madness to suddenly to become meaning and for culture to begin again with a new or renewed set of cultural distinctions and prohibitions and social differentiations. So the lamb slain since the foundation of the world makes culture possible and makes it possible for culture to rejuvenate itself.

Girard says that the mimetic process does not in our world unfold in the light of day, in crisis that involves the whole community and attains a level of paroxysm in near frenzy so that the victimage mechanism can be unleashed.

In other words, the victimage mechanism not only, do not work, but for the most part, desire (the compulsive preoccupation with the other) operates at a slightly lower level, so that they are not triggered. Every once in a while they are triggered, but they don’t work even when they are triggered. It is like a slow burn as opposed to a forest fire – something smoldering away are the effects of mimetic desire on our culture are ravenous in a way but they are below the threshold of what we would call ordinarily crisis. Occasionally when they cross the threshold and it is perfectly obvious that what we have on our hands is a crisis, but for the most part it happens below that threshold. But even below that threshold, especially since we don’t reckon with it at all, it is having a terribly pernicious effect on our social and psychological life.

Girard continues, “On the contrary, in the modern world the mimetic process dominates relationships between individuals in a subterranean fashion employing forms that possess sufficient permanence to appear to both partners in the guise of well differentiated and individualized traits of what was first called character and later reinterpreted as symptom.”

What he means by that is that relationships are suffering from the mimetic crisis. This comes as no surprise – How many marriages survive? – social destruction that we see out there just below the threshold at which we would call it a crisis. The threshold may have been raised because if we were to go from 1955 to 1994, like that (snap of the fingers) everybody would call it a crisis. But because we have come here gradually we don’t notice it much. It still flares up once in a while but we label it a managed crisis. So the mimetic crisis is now a managed crisis – it is managed by Wall Street by and large because mimetic desire is the engine of our civilization, so we are managing this crisis and it is producing all kinds of economic miracles, and so on. But it is having a tremendous effect on our social and psychological lives. This is the price we are paying for what is going on.

Girard says that at first the people involved in this crisis are able to manifest something that is well differentiated and individualized enough to be regarded as character and only much later in the crisis is it re-interpreted at symptom. We used to talk about a person having character. And then after that we talk about a person being a character. And then after that we talk about a person having a characteristic. And then where does it go from here?

In the early stages it seems like these traits are so inherently part of the person that we refer to them as the person’s character. In other words, we don’t see the other-ness of the subject at all. We don’t see the other who is in the background of that subjectivity. If you are Paul, Jeremiah or Jesus the other, that is in the background of your subjectivity is right there and acknowledged, you know it and everybody else knows it, it is not hidden at all. But in the early stages of the modern crisis there is a subjectivity whose other-ness, whose constituting other is somewhere else – not visible at all and therefore we can regard that person’s subjectivity as being his or her character. Later it becomes more obvious that there is something of a theatrical nature to character. That is to say, it seems to be concerned with the others – it looses its original ‘essence’ and becomes preoccupied with others. So then we talk about someone who “is” a character. And someone who “is” a character, as opposed to someone who has one, is somebody who is already aware of his or her effect on others – others are looking at him or her. And then you get to the question of developing characteristics in the sense of Don Quixote reads the chivalrous romances of Amadis de Gaula and he decides to be like Amadis de Gaul and to imitate his characteristics. And finally you get to the symptom of the breakdown of psychological subjectivity itself.

Personality, in the modern/popular sense of the term, which is like somebody who “is” a character – who has personality, is a mild version of the psychological distress, the later stages of which we call hysteria. One of the things that happened in the modern world is an explosion of personality. This is like the economic miracle – the economic miracle that is generated by mimetic desire in our world is powerful and the parallel to that is the emergence of “interesting personality” and the interest IN such “interesting personality.” Suddenly we have a world filled with “interesting personalities” – whether they are really interesting is another question, but the fact that we have personalities is to be noted. What Gil is suggesting in that personality in that popular sense is simply an early manifestation of the psychological distress, the later stages of which we call hysteria – which is the destabilization of the human subject.

There is a parallel of what Girard has laid out – going from character to symptom and that is the concern for victims aroused by the biblical tradition became the source of Western cultures’ moral energy and it is on the basis on that moral energy, even though we have re-defined it in non-biblical terms, it is on the basis of that moral energy that all the important accomplishments of Western culture have been achieved. However it becomes confused the further we get away from the biblical revelation that aroused our concern for victims in the first place. Likewise, this thing we call character, in the positive sense of the term, is based on a fidelity to something transcendent and it was the key to the psychological pose and reliability that we call character and it is lost or obscured when we renounce that source. So as soon as we become interested in “character” as character then we are interested in the surface and not the essence of the reality.

If I look at Jeremiah and I say, WOW, he had character and I try to emulate that character without any relationship to how he got it then what I will create is a caricature of him and that caricature will become more and more implausible the further it recedes from the truth or fidelity that Jeremiah embodied or lived out in his life. Character comes from fidelity and not some kind of array of moral or psychological qualities.

So we have to locate the ‘individual’ somewhere in that process of moving from character to symptom. If Jesus represents the supreme example of ontological density when He said, I and the Father are One, we moderns have tended to shirk the challenge to approximate that ontological density and instead have bartered it away for a shabby facsimile of it, namely desire. And that is why we cling so tenaciously to desire – why we think it is the key to everything – why we would be so reluctantly to voice any criticisms of it. Desire passes for theological orthodoxy in our world. Among believers and non-believers, everybody in the modern world, (the modern world is the Western world in crisis) desire is how we define ourselves. (Remember: desire = compulsive preoccupation with the other.)

The ontological density that Jesus incarnated is the true source of subjectivity. What the modern world has is a shabby facsimile based on desire. That is to say that desire is a powerful force, it can generate a lot of energy, and that energy can give the appearance of something psychologically formidable but finally it dissolves real subjectivity, because it does not imitate the God in whose image and likeness it was made. It imitates all others, any others, this or that other, and it does it for the most part surreptitiously.

The modern world has made a gamble, you could say that it has gambled on the proposition that its possible to generate a substantive psychological reality based on desire – one that is capable of taking the place of the kind of ontological density represented by Jeremiah, Jesus and Paul (as examples). Desire is so psychologically animating that it gives rise to what appears to be a new and exciting personality and the cultural circumstances surrounding the emergence of this new personality are such that the person defines this new feeling of social independence as individuality.

In fact, however, desire diminishes ontological density. And it does so the more it generates all the hoopla of modern personality. Real ontological density is being destroyed in the background of all the pyrotechnics of modern personality.

In cultural history generally, one always has to look at those who are on the edge, sort of speak, in order to see where the rest of us are heading. A lot of these examples we just have to notice; in the 20th century hundreds of millions of people have died violently it should give us pause and say something is going on here. Likewise if we say, humanity, more or less, got along without psychology for a long time, but then in the 19th century they had to invent it. Why? The question is, did what we invented deal with the real crisis or, like so much else in the modern world, was it an attempt to toy with the revelation without facing its religious significance?

So what we have to do is see, take another look at this invention of ours, which is modern social sciences.

Henri de Lubac: We do not know what man is, or rather, we forget. The farther we go in studying him, the greater our loss of knowledge of him. We study him like an animal or like a machine. We see in him merely an object, odder than all the others. We are bewitched by physiology, psychology, sociology, and all their appendages. Are we wrong, then, to pursue these branches of learning? Certainly not. Are the results bogus, then, or negligible? No. The fault lies not with them, but with ourselves, who know neither how to assign them their place nor how to judge them. We believe, without thinking, that the ‘scientific’ study of man can, at least by right, be universal and exhaustive. So it [the knowledge we acquire] has the same deceptive – and deadly – result as the mania for introspection or the search for a static sincerity. The farther it goes, the more fearful it becomes. It eats into man, disintegrates and destroys him.” – Paradoxes of Faith

This is the search for the “real me” – the entitative self. Where is the real me? That is what the disciples who come to Jesus at the beginning of John’s Gospel were talking about, they said to him, “where do you abide?” And he said, “Come and see.” And later in the Gospel he says, “I abide in the Father.” And then when he prayed just before his death in John’s Gospel he prayed that these friends of mine will abide in me as I abide in you. The question is where do you abide? That is a radically different from the question, where is the real me? And the search for the real me – the entitative self – the individual self – with no reference to a constitutive other is what modern psychology is all about. It is tying itself in knots trying to come up with some final answer to the question.

“…the mania for introspection and the search for a static sincerity.” It is the modern day struggle… if I could discover real sincerity then the ‘real me’ must be there – and it is the same thing for the introspection we all are told to strive for. This is a symptom of what? Using another de Lubac phrase – it is a lack of ‘ontological density’ and the search for it. This is what is happening in our world today. There is less and less of it and a more and more frenzied search for it.

de Lubac says that neither the mania for introspection (nor our) search for a static sincerity can achieve their true goal – the true goal is to arrest the process of psychological disintegration and to reach bedrock. He continues, “It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us. Now it only frees us because it transforms us. It tears us away from our inmost slavery – to seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed. It is to cling to yourself – to have a morbid love of yourself – just as you are, that is to say, false. It is to refuse release.”

In other words, the search for sincerity is evasion. It is an attempt to find something in the entity ‘me’ which will substantiate me. It can’t happen. That is the problem – the flaw of the modern psychological process. That is to say that it does not recognize the other-ness of the self. It does not recognize that the self is always constituted by the other. Now there are those practicing modern psychology that are using this, but we still are operating under many of the premises that Freud, Jung and others laid down early in this century in terms of how to approach the psychological crisis.

Oughourlian says that the psychological and cultural crisis cannot be separated. He says that you have to understand the psychological crisis against the backdrop of the cultural and historical one which he describes as, “…the gradual withdraw of the victimage mechanism and the protection that they offer.” In other words, the victimage mechanism makes it possible for us to terminate this crisis and rejuvenate culture and without that the crisis just continues as a slow burn. And this breakdown continues to have its effect on human relationships – causing rancor and division.

Oughourlian says, “The development of the psychopathological symptom and the place it holds in psychiatry has kept place closely with the stages of desacralization that governs our culture as a whole. Desacralization is the destruction of all the sacrificial structures of the primitive sacred that have made it possible to resolve all cultural crises. So Oughourlian is saying that the psychopathological symptom and the psychiatry that treats it need to be seen as something related to the desacralization of the world. We had to invent psychiatry because the desacralization had reached a certain stage where the psychological affects of it where too pronounced for us to ignore it any longer.

Primary psychological distress that early psychiatrist and psychologist addressed was clinical hysteria. What they found, as well as Freud and Brewer did a study on, was that the symptoms of hysteria could be cured or alleviated by hypnosis. So at the very beginning of modern psychiatry you have hysteria and hypnosis as the disease and the cure.

Girard says, “Hypnotic phenomenons were at the center of all pre-psychoanalytic and psychoanalytic controversies at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.”

Oughourlian summaries the literature and adds, “I would suggest that the most important point is that the concept of the unconscious in Freud, as well as in Jena, originates with hypnosis and therefore with the inter-dividual relations (the mimetic realization).”

When one is dealing with psychological stress one is dealing with emotions – every emotion involves another. The question is does one give sufficient weight to the presence of the other in that emotion? When these emotions arose we had to locate them coming from somewhere: either we could locate them in the inter-dividual relation – in other words you could say that this subject exists vis-à-vis the other whereas to try to regard this subject as not involved in that relation as an entity that could be studied without reference to that relation would be implausible; or one could say that these emotions are arising from somewhere…where is this somewhere? The somewhere is between the self and the other. The pathology is the problem of the self and the other. But what Freud did is that he invented this place he called the unconscious, which is inside of us, and he put all the problems there. And that completely wipes out the mimetic facts, however the mimetic facts are perfectly clear because the hysteric is one who is being influenced by another who is resents and rebels against the influence. And the hysteric has two archways of warding off this influence: one is to become autistic in a sense – an emotional disassociation – so the hysteric goes blank as a way to ward off the influence; and the other is histrionics – to act out in an effort to exorcise the other and to demonstrate that the hysteric is in fact the real subject.

Hysteria clearly is the self psycho-pathologically entangled with another. And what is hypnosis? It is the self submitting passively and willingly to another. In other words, the cure and the disease are very similar. The question is – Is there another in whom I can live, move and have my being which will ground in the truth as opposed to the others that I might be entangled with which rob me of my identity?

Hysteria is the disease par excellent of the mimetic crisis. And hypnosis is a glimpse of the cure. Think of hypnosis and think of Paul saying, “I live now not I but Christ lives in me.” Think of Jesus saying, “I only do what the Father bids me to do.” “I and the Father are One.” In other words, these two things roughly approximate the crisis and the cure. Now the problem with hypnosis is the hypnotist is not transcendent. The reason the subject is not rebelling against the hypnotist is because the hypnosis last a short while and the suggestions that the hypnotists makes are banal ones, nothing big… so that there is no reason to reject, but already you have the idea. In primitive cultures there are two forms of possession; a bad one and a good one. And the good one is the cure for the bad one. So if somebody is possessed they have a dispossession ritual, which is essentially designed to re-identify the person with the tutelary spirit who will bring him back to sanity. It is never a question of dispossessing in some radical sense. Like the story in the Gospel of Matthew 12:43-45 "Now when the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. "Then it says, 'I will return to my house from which I came'; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. "Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation."

This is a tremendous metaphor for the modern crisis. That is it, now the subject is haunted by the others because there is no transcendent other. If there is a transcendent other than all the relationships with the others can be entered into in great intimacy with no destabilizing effect on the subject. But as soon as there is no transcendent then we turn each other into gods and demons and create all the pathologies and become hysteric. So I say that this thing we call personality in the modern popular sense of the word is the early stage of hysteria. What happens if we say, somebody has a very lively personality and we think that is very nice. And it is also very nice that because we are manipulating mimetic desire we are generating a great GNP. Those are very nice things. The economy is booming and we have lots of nice personalities, but what if we look up one fine day and realize, oh, my gosh, the fuel we are using to drive these two miracles is a poison. And it will destroy social and psychological stability.

Henri de Lubac: “If man could enter inside of himself and have a vision of himself both penetrating and sincere, simple and straightforward, he would no longer dare to take refuge in all the alibis of psychological and sociological analysis. He would no longer dare to imagine that anything, which is not the changing of his heart by a Stronger than he, can ever free him.” Pg 136-137 Paradoxes of Faith

Concludes with the word, abide. Where do you abide? For the most part we do not know how to abide. We give it all the best names, we call it mobility, we call it energy, we call it dynamism, and it creates some great things, we cannot complain, but the question is, where do we abide?