It is not simply that Christ offers a new meaning, built on the same foundation as human religion, philosophy, or culture. There is the exposure of the violent origins of human language (e.g., as in the history of the Greek logos) and the setting forth of a peaceable alternative (Christ as Logos). The thinker who brings this out most concretely is René Girard, but the contemporary thinker who has completed the work of Girard, in his philosophical implications and expression, is Anthony Bartlett. Bartlett (who is now teaching a class with Ploughshares Bible Institute) tells the story of presenting his findings in a seminar, in which Girard was in attendance. Girard responded after the presentation, “Very impressive,” but immediately left. His singular genius in textual hermeneutics, seemingly left him uncomfortable to engage in discussion of its philosophical implications.[1] Bartlett however, through a close reading of Martin Heidegger (who plays the role of summing up the Western philosophical tradition and who fails in his attempt to escape metaphysics and violence) picks up where Girard left off.
Why Heidegger Fails to Discern the Johannine Logos
Girard notes both Heidegger’s tracing of the Greek logos into an originary violence and its contrast with the Johannine Logos, but Heidegger does not draw out this difference as violence opposed to nonviolence but as a difference of violence. According to Girard, “Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. He sees the former as a violence committed by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.”[2] It is not a matter of violence versus nonviolence but a subordinating of Christian thought to Greek thought, with Christianity playing a subservient role (“the violence visited upon slaves”) to the Greek Logos. What is to be noted in Heidegger, is that Greek “Logos brings together entities that are opposites, and it does not do so without violence.”[3] In the end, according to Girard’s reading of Heidegger, there is no difference between the Johannine and the Heraclitean tradition (the original development of the Greek logos).
There is an incapacity to distinguish, and thus the Christian understanding is relegated to a continuation of Greek thought, but Girard considers the contrast between the Greek and Christian Logos as definitive. Christ “interrupts” the Greek logos, it interrupts the grounding in mythology (the scapegoated and deified victim), and it displaces the grounding in violence, but for this very reason the Logos of Christ is cast out of human culture and religion: “The Johannine Logos is foreign to any kind of violence; it is therefore forever expelled, an absent Logos that never has had any direct, determining influence over human cultures.”[4] The incapacity to discern and apply the peace of Christ, as shown in Heidegger and the Western tradition, is pervasive.
Part of this incapacity is explained by Heidegger’s starting point in Being and Time, which is a philosophical articulation of the sense that things are the way they are, and this reality is the necessity within which we work. The primary thing is that man speaks or dwells in language, which does not mean Heidegger’s goal is an intellectual or propositional explanation. “Being there” (Dasein) is the given presupposition and determination, such that one can “take a look” at the meaning of Being, but the point is not to arrive at some “axiom from which a sequence of propositions is deductively derived. It is quite impossible for there to be any ‘circular argument’ in formulating the question about the meaning of Being; for in answering this question, the issue is not one of grounding something by such a derivation; it is rather one of laying bare the grounds for it and exhibiting them.”[5]
As Heidegger puts it elsewhere, “Language speaks”[6] and so too the ground of Being reveals, but there is no penetrating this fact. Rather, what is shown in language is a “relatedness backward or forward”[7] and the question is to spell out the nature of this relatedness. “The speech of mortals rests in its relation to the speaking of language.”[8] The capacity for difference is drawn together in language. “Man speaks in that he responds to language. This responding is a hearing.”[9] He finds himself in language, and this is the primary fact about him, which cannot be penetrated but must be allowed to make itself manifest. (Thus poetry is the truest and highest art form, in that it allows language to speak.) Human speech locates Dasein not so much in what is said but in the speaking, in the relatedness to language. Heidegger reifies language as the essential relation shaping human reality and he does not presume to go beneath or above this speaking.
Thus, Heidegger presumes Heraclitus, the pre-Socratic Greek thinker who first develops the history of logos, in his view that “war is the father of all,” has hit upon the origin of logos. Referencing Heraclitus he concludes, violence (German, Gewalt) or war (Polemos) is synonymous with the logos; it is the transformative and creative center. “Confrontation” is the “sire” of all that comes to presence. The gods, humans, slaves and free, arise through “strife” (polemos), as this opposition is what first allows hierarchy, status, discreteness, intervals, and distances. “Confrontation does not divide unity, much less destroy it. It builds unity; it is the gathering (logos). Polemos and logos are the same.”[10] As he says later, “Who the human being is, according to the word of Heraclitus, first comes forth (edeixe, shows itself) in the polemos, in the disjunction of gods and human beings, in the happening of the irruption of Being itself.”[11] Heidegger locates entry into Dasein with “deinon,” designating one who is “violence-doing, insofar as using violence is the basic trait not just of his doing but of his Dasein.”[12] Heidegger, who fully embraced and never repudiated the Nazi project, sees violence as the creative center from which meaning arises.
In short, humans come into being (Dasein) through the violence of logos. Heidegger locates essential being (phusis) in logos, and raises the question as to how this unfolds into being. “Humanity is violence-doing not in addition to and aside from other qualities but solely in the sense that from the ground up and in its doing violence, it uses violence against the over-whelming.”[13] The human comes into being as what is distinguishable (out of the indistinguishable) through the emergence of opposition in logos, which brings one thing into presence against the other.[14] Logos is this gathering together, the original differentiating, which marks Dasein.
The Differentiation Proposed by Girard
Heidegger recognized and commended the inherent violence of the logos and of Western thought,while for Girard human meaning has violent, irrational, origins in the scapegoat mechanism but Christ poses an alternative meaning system escaping violent origins. Girard agrees with Heidegger in his focus on myth, his picture of an originary human violence, and the presumption that language, writing, or the oracular contains a hidden truth. Heidegger is right about something concealed in language but the “un-concealing” is only possible through the revelation of Christ: “I propose that if today we are capable of breaking down and analyzing cultural mechanisms, it is because of the indirect and unperceived but formidably constraining influence of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures.”[15]
The Logos of the Prologue to John, and the whole Bible must be re-read “in a genuinely Christological light, we must recognize the Word of truth to be the true knowledge of the victim, continually eluded and rejected by mankind.”[16] Genesis portrays God expelling the first couple from his presence, and then Cain slays Abel and establishes the first city, while “in the Prologue to John it is mankind who expels God.” The God who inflicts violence is replaced with “the God that only suffers violence, the Logos that is expelled.”[17] This Logos that has been cast out by his own and by the world, is the rejected truth (with the rejection signaling the nature of this truth). “Pascal writes somewhere that it is permissible to correct the Bible, but only in invoking the Bible’s help. That is exactly what we are doing when we re-read Genesis and the whole of the Old Testament, and the whole of culture, in the light of these few lines from the Prologue.”[18] The truth of the Bible is summed up in the new beginning proclaimed by John, in which all truth and meaning is “ready and waiting.”
Bartlett’s Completion of Girard
As Bartlett notes, the gospel consists of transformative news delivered in simile and figures of speech: “Christian faith depends on the popular use of words, with their built-in potential for metonym, allusion and suggestion, rather than strict conceptual-propositional agreement.”[19] According to John “these [signs] are written in order that you may believe” (John 20:30–31), suggesting “it is the overall writing of Jesus’ deeds and teaching that makes the effective gospel.”[20] There is an immediate identity of signs and mental activity (appreciated in Western or Latin study of signs), but what is missed is the identity of Christ as Logos, completely differentiated from the Greek logos.
Jesus Christ, not the slain scapegoat, is the “true transcendental signifier,” the generator of a peaceable order of meaning. In the Logos of Christ there is a defeat of the violence structuring the world, and this involves a “semiotic struggle, comprising stories, law, prophecy, poetry and, last of all, the singular fact and figure of the cross.”[21] This one rejected by men “must always have itself expelled from a world that cannot be its own.”[22] This is the error on which Jewish thought and the whole of Western thought is founded: Jews who believed “they could keep Yahweh in the Temple” or capture Him in the Law, or Christians who imagine there must be sacrifice and at least one scapegoat (necessary violence).
In Bartlett’s summary, “Another way of saying this is that the logos of Christianity is non-violent, is non-violence itself, and will never retaliate. It is precisely by being ‘driven out’ that it reveals itself: a paradoxical, subversive, world-overturning revelation amounting not to the continually misrecognized double valence of the human good, but to a generative new human meaning.”[23] The Christian Logos not only overturns myth but subverts the ground of Western metaphysics and thought. Christian truth is not to be set along side other truth systems but is singular and overturns the tables of human religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. (In this the project of the poststructuralists, such as Heidegger and Derrida, is brought to completion in the exposure and overturning of the violent metaphysic at the root of human meaning.)
The deep existential choice, posed by Heidegger (summing up the Greek religious and philosophical tradition) and Girard (summing up the Christian exposure of this tradition and offering an alternative) is between a violent and a non-violent (peaceable) organizing center for human existence. As Bartlett emphasized in his lecture, this shift requires total commitment: “You have to go to the heart of it – this is the idea of going to the desert, of changing your life the way Paul changed his, of really taking this thing to heart, because everything is at stake.” Violence is the organizing principle of human civilization, and the empty tomb is a “cataclysmic shock” that provides “no real resolution yet” – “just the radical deconstruction of all familiar structures.” Heidegger retreated into Naziism and Girard did not arrive at total nonviolence, toward which his work pointed. The legacy of the Christian logos is hard to take, hard to assimilate as a way of being human. The vast majority of people, including great thinkers, shrink back from the radical implications of choosing the non-violent path, because it requires nothing less than a complete transformation of how we understand human existence and meaning-making.24
[1] This is too brief and inadequate of a summing up but this is my feeble attempt to capture some of the profound significance Anthony Bartlett is setting forth. His work deserves a wide exposure and I hope this class is the beginning of a wider and much deserved recognition.
[2]René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans., Stephen Bann & Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 266.
[3] Things Hidden, 265.
[4] Things Hidden, 271.
[5] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) 28
[6] Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans., Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1971), 207
[7] Being and Time, 28.
[8] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 206.
[9] Poetry, Language, and Thought, 207.
[10] Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 65.
[11] Metaphysics, 149.
[12] Metaphysics, 160
[13] Metaphysics, 160.
[14] Metaphysics, 132.
[15] Things Hidden, 138.
[16] Things Hidden, 275.
[17] Things Hidden, 275.
[18] Things Hidden, 276.
[19] Anthony Bartlett, “Theology and Catastrophe A (Girardian) Semiotics of Re-Humanization,” (Forum Philosophicum 23 (2018) no. 2, 171–188 ISSN 1426-1898) 178.
[20] Theology and Catastrophe, 178
[21] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.
[22] Things Hidden, 272.
[23] Theology and Catastrophe, 179.
[24] Thank you Jim for the notes.
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