Much of the theology and career of Martin Luther was driven by his obsession with notions of law and justice. He describes a “burning desire” to understand what Paul meant by the term “justice” in the book of Romans, not out of an idle curiosity, but because he was plagued and obsessed: “‘The justice of God is revealed in it.’ I hated that word, ‘justice of God,’ which, by the use and custom of all my teachers, I had been taught to understand philosophically as referring to formal or active justice, as they call it, i.e., that justice by which God is just and by which he punishes sinners and the unjust.” He describes, “that before God I was a sinner with an extremely troubled conscience.” There was no assurance, no peace, no satisfaction. “I did not love, no, rather I hated the just God who punishes sinners. In silence, if I did not blaspheme, then certainly I grumbled vehemently and got angry at God. I said, ‘Isn’t it enough that we miserable sinners, lost for all eternity because of original sin, are oppressed by every kind of calamity through the Ten Commandments?’”[1]
The Gospel did not relieve his obsession with justice, but aggravated it: “Why does God heap sorrow upon sorrow through the Gospel and through the Gospel threaten us with his justice and his wrath? This was how I was raging with wild and disturbed conscience. I constantly badgered St. Paul about that spot in Romans 1 and anxiously wanted to know what he meant.” The “righteousness revealed” in the Gospel did not help, until Luther discovers his understanding that Christ freely grants this righteousness through grace. He discovers that “faith” displaces works in achieving righteousness. In this new understanding, the justice of God is a “passive justice” in that faith accomplishes what works could not. He discovers, the just person lives by faith, and not by works. “All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates.” [2] He begins to read all of Scripture in a new light, recognizing that justice is God’s work throughout.
“Justification” as an Aggravation of Luther’s Struggle with the Law
Now this would make for a happy story, if on the other side of Luther’s discovery, he found peace, but though there may have been improvement, he cannot be said to have stilled his troubled conscience. His psychological and spiritual battles shifted from earning salvation to fighting depression, feelings of divine abandonment, and intense spiritual warfare against perceived demonic attacks. In his 95 Theses, he writes that self-hatred is something to be cultivated until entry into heaven: “The penalty of sin remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inner repentance), namely till our entrance into the kingdom of heaven” (Thesis 4). This self-hatred is posed from the perspective of the God of the law, that demands righteousness, and seems to have not changed in his attitude to sinners, in spite of grace. Even the cross is a sign of God’s hatred, but luckily Christ has born the penalty. However, God, in his hidden transcendence (Deus absconditus) continues to cause suffering and terror, and therefore it is refuge from God that is sought in God (Deus revelatus). “Thus, according to Luther, God reveals himself to sinners wearing a Janus face of both wrathful law and loving mercy. Consequently, believers should be ‘seeking refuge in God against God.’”[3] Luther needs to get rid of one half of God, but this angry transcendent God, the one behind the law, is primary in his thought.
At the same time, his struggle with the devil increased, as he felt the battle with evil was ongoing, within himself. “Christ and Satan wage a cosmic war for mastery over church and world. No one can evade involvement in this struggle. Even for the believer there is no refuge – neither monastery nor the seclusion of the wilderness offer him a chance for escape.”[4] Luther describes an ongoing campaign in which the victory is not yet secured, and he feels this in his mental and spiritual struggle. He describes still waiting on God’s righteousness, as he has yet to receive what is promised.[5] The irony of the shift from the early church’s belief in Christus Victor (defeat of sin, death, and the devil), to a legal righteousness, is that Luther may have solved one problem only to have it multiplied elsewhere. He continues to be tormented, concluding that it is not righteousness per se that is received in Christ, but the qualification for righteousness. We are made worthy to receive the gift, if not the fulness of the gift itself.
The weakness in Luther’s understanding of justification is that in pitting law against grace, he still pictures grace in terms of the foundation set forth in the law. Grace gives what the law demands, but the presumption is that grace still works according to the retributive justice and sacrifice of the law. Under grace, works of the law are accomplished by Christ, and his righteousness is legally imputed to believers. It did not occur to the reformers or to many of their Catholic forebears, that Christ sets aside sacrifice and retributive justice. He exposes and ends the working of sacrifice and the judicial system of righteousness built upon payment and retribution, and in fact the defeat of Satan is involved with, and can be equated with this overcoming of sacrifice. The absolutely transcendent God demands sacrifice under the law (God as a legislative authority), but Christ embodies the law of love and closes the gap between God and the world, posed by the law. According to Paul, “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4) as “He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross” (Col 2:14).
Paul’s Justification in Žižek and Girard as the End of Sacrifice
In Paul’s understanding, justification is making the world right, not through the law, but through Christ. Christ suspends the punishing work of the law, and brings an end to sacrifice. It is not a top-down legislation, but a bottom-up reformation of understanding of God and humanity. If one insists on the terminology of payment, Christ did not pay the price demanded by the law, Christ paid off the entire system, and defeated sin, death, and the devil in the process. Christ would end violence, including the violence of retribution and sacrifice, but also the violence of a masochistic conscience. As René Girard puts it, “The real meaning and function of the Passion” is “one of subverting sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the open, writing it down in the text of all the Gospels.”[6] For Slavoj Žižek, Anselm’s doctrine of “divine satisfaction,” the legal basis of the atonement for much of Catholicism and the basis of Luther’s doctrine, serves this false economy of sacrifice and fails to penetrate the delusion of the fundamental fantasy (the lie) which grips the human subject. With the end of sacrificial religion (the end of the God of sacrifice and law), Luther’s Deus absconditus is exposed as a lie. The God behind the law of sacrifice, behind onto-theology, behind a metaphysical transcendent/immanent dualism is exposed as an idol, and so too the God presumed to be behind the plague of conscience is dethroned. The punishing, transcendent God of the law, is undone by the full revelation of God in the flesh. Paul addresses the anthropological, religious, and psychological nature of this displacement, but it may be that only the combination of Girard with psychoanalysis, can fully appreciate the apocalyptic nature of Paul’s theology.
Žižek’s Extension of Girardian Sacrifice into Psychoanalysis
Girard traces this work of exposure primarily in the realms of religion and religious sacrifice, and though he depends upon a psychoanalytic account of mimetic desire, he sees his work as demythologizing Freud and Lacan or psychoanalysis (in its focus on sex), along with religion. For Girard, the “other” is another person who acts first as model, then as rival, in the obstacle cause of desire, which is desire for life itself. The other person mediates desire and may be Other or divine-like, depending upon the “distance” between self and Other. He speaks of the passage from “external mediation” to “internal mediation” but he is referring to the felt proximity of the other. The external mediator remains distant and undisturbed by the desire he invokes, but in internal mediation the model is brought into the radius of the one following him, and is thus subject to mimetic desire and rivalry.[7] In Girard’s reading, by focusing on biology and sex, Freud missed the primary role of mimetic theory. Freud was too focused on the object of desire, the mother, and missed that primal desire was for being or life. Girard revises and rejects Freud, but as a result, his theory of mimetic desire seems to miss that sacrifice is not simply historically behind the rise of language and signs, but language continues, in the Lacanian portrayal, to exact a sacrifice. According to Marcus Pound, Girard “leaves little room” for “the practice of psychoanalysis, having eliminated “the conscious patricide-incest desire,” he does away with “the cumbersome necessity of the desire’s subsequent repression,” and along with it, “does away with the unconscious.”[8]
As Pound points out, it is Žižek, who “establishes the link between Girard’s thesis and Lacan precisely at the level of sacrifice.”[9] Žižek, building on Freud and Lacan, demonstrates how the sacrificial relation to language is not simply historical, religious, or cultural, but is the abiding reality in the human psyche. What Girard may not have appreciated about Lacanian psychoanalysis, especially as developed by Žižek, is that the Lacanian registers explain the psychoanalytic role of sacrifice. Freud laid out the basic parameters of this self-punishing system, which Luther gives every indication of being subject to all of his life, and Lacan explains the dynamic between the ego and the superego (or the law of the mind and the law of the flesh in Paul) as a relation within language (and not in biology or sex).
According to Lacan, following Freud, the other is not simply an outward model, but in Freud’s language, the image of the father is “cathected” or subsumed into one’s own image. As Freud describes, the “masochism in him creates a temptation to ‘sinful acts’ which must be expiated by the reproaches of the sadistic conscience” (The Economic Problem in Masochism, 266). Lacan pictures this punishing conscience as arising in the mirror stage, in which both the image in the mirror (the imaginary ego) and apprehension of this image through the language of the father (the symbolic or the law) constitute these others (the symbolic and the imaginary registers) as two sides of the self. That is, the external mediator, which is nearly identical for Girard and Lacan, becomes a constituent part of what is internal to the Subject, in the psychoanalytic understanding. The original sacrificial relation is established within the Subject (with passage through the mirror stage) between the imaginary (the ego or “I”) and the symbolic (the superego) which establishes the alienated distance from the real of the body.
For psychoanalysis, sacrifice not only controls external violence but it creates “control” over the inward threat of violence. In Freud’s depiction, the ego/superego split, evolves to channel the death instinct, or the energetics arising around the fear of death. Freud refers to the “id” as the origin of the death drive, which is then concentrated in the punishing superego (synonymous in Lacan with the acquisition of language). Passage through the castration complex is the resolution to what, in Girardian terms, would be the result of mimetic rivalry with the model. “The ritual background provides a stable imaginary/symbolic framework by which to answer the question of the desires of the real.”[10] The inner child (the ego) relinquishes the power of the father (the phallus) to the superego, or in Pauline terms takes up servitude to the law. According to Pound, the castration complex describes the inner dimension of Mosaic circumcision, ceding a part for the whole. “For example, in The Book of Exodus, God is about to kill Moses but is only dissuaded through his abrupt circumcision by his wife (Ex 4:24). His sacrificial act of circumcision, ceding his foreskin, serves to ensure the persistence of his being whilst at the same time giving presence to the terrifying God.”[11] Likewise, the sign of circumcision is the original mark of the sign, in Abraham by which life is preserved in the face of death. “The cut of Abraham’s knife amounts to the cut induced by the signifier, which determines the subject and brings the differential system of signification into play.”[12] In the castration complex this passage is universal.
The imaginary stage, prior to differentiation, resolves into the ego/superego split, which can be directly laid over the Girardian picture of the sign arising over the body of the scapegoat. The Subject bears the mark of the original sign either literally in their body, which reflects submission to the letter of the law in the castration complex. Prior to the slain victim in Girard, or passage through the mirror stage in Lacan, there is a lack of social order or order in the Subject, respectively. In Girard, hominization and civilization arise around the body of the slain victim, and in Lacan the biological body plays the same role. [13]
In the explanation of Žižek, the passage is from being a body to establishing a symbolic distance from the body (and having a body): “The body exists in the order of having – I am not my body, I have it” (Organs without Bodies, 121). Self-consciousness arises simultaneously with the realization and refusal of the body and its mortal contingencies (sexuality/castration) so that the Subject arises over and against the real of the body. The symbolic or the soul “has to be paid for by the death, murder even, of its empirical bearer” (The Žižek Reader, vii). Where Paul speaks of being split, Žižek describes two bodies, the physical body and the body under the sign (or the soul). That body which one might think can be reduced to the biological dimension is refused: the “subject turns away from her biological body in disgust, unable to accept that she ‘is’ her body” (Organs without Bodies, 93).[14] The price for entry into language, separation from the mother (passage beyond the mirror stage), is an ongoing alienation. The Subject arises from the self-negating activity of sacrifice (castration) and sacrifice guarantees that “the Other exists: that there is an Other who can be appeased by means of the sacrifice” (Enjoy Your Symptom, 56). This is felt as an all-pervasive inadequacy or guilt. From within the economy of the law (the law of sin and death), the excessive superego injunctions (giving rise to perverse questions such as, “Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound” (Rom. 6:1)) “no longer imposes specific, determinate, prohibitions and/or injunctions . . . but just reverberates as an empty tautological Prohibition: don’t” (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 104).[15] There is no satisfying this all desiring and all-consuming law.
The Sacrifice of Christ as Confirmation of the Obscene Law
In Paul’s description of his first encounter with the law, in Romans 7, the law gives rise to what it forbids, and creates a life filled with death. This absolute law requires infinite payment, in Anselm’s estimate, and even this infinite payment does not satisfy the continual pressure of the law’s demands. There is the sense, as attested by Luther’s digression into depression, that Christ’s payment simply confirms the omnipotence of the big Other behind the law. “Christ’s death cannot but appear as the ultimate assertion of the Law, as the elevation of the Law into an unconditional superego agency which burdens us, its subjects, and with a debt we will never be able to repay’ (The Puppet and the Dwarf, 103).
Giving in to the obscene superego demand of the law gives rise to an interior sacrificial economy continually aimed at meeting the all-consuming desire of the law, which is taken up within the self in the split between the ego and superego. It is this perverse superego pressure, equated with the law, which Žižek describes as connected to the reversal of the law’s commands into acts of disobedience (equating the law with sin and sinning that grace may abound).[16] To read the sacrifice of Christ within this economy, with Luther and much of the Christian tradition (reaching back to Anselm), is to reinforce the punishing law in the sinful Subject rather than relieve from subjection the punishing law.
The Faith Of Christ as an Overcoming of a Law-like Faith In Christ
Perhaps the contrast is succinctly captured in the notion of faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice or the faith of Christ in which disciples participate. Faith in Christ is supposed to replace works of the law, but then the problem for Luther and for his Calvinist heirs, is if their faith is adequate, or an authentic faith. Faith in Christ has to do with faith in the propitiating power of Christ’s payment for sin (we can trust in Christ who has paid the penalty), but how much faith is required and how much can we muster? Faith initially seems to relieve the suffering of works, but then there is the same agonizing over the degrees of faith that might be necessary. Luther sees faith as simultaneously positing wrath and love, and he sees suffering very much like the friends of Job, as caused by God’s wrath. Job, and the widow of Nain, in his sermons, are examples of God causing suffering, and faith acknowledges this and is saving, only if it does not give in to despair.[17] Given these requirements, faith seems to induce a doubtful suffering, picturing God as randomly causing suffering and demanding a steady un-despairing faith.
In contrast, the faith of Christ calls for participating in Christ’s faith (walking as he walked and living as he lived) and this constitutes a deliverance, as people are freed from sin, not by Christ’s death as such (as a sacrifice), but by sharing in Christ’s death, by dying to sin, to the way of the flesh (and sacrifice). There is the faith that claims, Christ died and we do not have to, or the faith that would take up the cross and follow Christ. Propitiating the works of the law through dying is only something Christ can accomplish, and the believer is reduced to a spectral witness and belief, very much as on the order of the spectral relation to the law (being outside the law and being outside of Christ).
The alternative is to take up the subject position of Christ and “die to” the identity found in Adam (the subject of the superego) – having the faith of Christ (ridding one’s self of the superego supplement to the Law and sacrifice) or one can have faith in Christ’s propitiating sacrifice. It is a choice of understanding the death of Christ as a sacrifice, under the law, with Luther, or recognizing that the law is not the basis for understanding Christ.[18] In this second, apocalyptic understanding, the Subject is so drastically reoriented through identifying with the death of Christ that this constitutes a new form of the Subject. “Here enters the ‘good news’ of Christianity: the miracle of faith is that it IS possible to traverse the fantasy, to undo the founding decision, to start one’s life all over again, from the zero point – in short to change eternity itself” (On Belief,148). This making right is not by the scale imposed by the law, but it is a new cosmic order (as in Girard’s ending of sacrificial religion) and a new sort of Subject (as in Žižek’s non-sacrificial Subject).
[1] Martin Luther, Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Works (1545) Translated by Andrew Thornton (https://www.bluffton.edu/courses/humanities/2/ml-1545.htm).
[2] Preface to Luther’s Works.
[3] Sasja Emilie Mathiasen Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God”: The Hidden God in Lutheran Theology and the Postmodern Weakening of God (Open Theology 2018; 4: 658–674) 659. Citing Luther, “Operationes”, WA 5, 204, 26-27: “… ad deum contra deum confugere.”
[4] Heiko A. Oberman, “Luther Against the Devil,” Christian Century 107 no. 3 (1990): 75-76 Cited in Tenzan Eaghll, Martin Luther and the God Who Acts: Finding Common Ground in the Current Debates on Justification, (University of Calgary, MA, 2010) 23.
[5] “The world is a house… but I am outside the house, on the roof, not yet in heaven, but also not in the world. I have the world beneath me, and the heavens above me, and so I am suspended in faith, alone, between life in the world and eternal life” (WA 1. 199, 3.) Gordon Rupp, The Righteousness of God (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1953), 223. Cited in Eaghll, 42.
[6] René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005) 181.
[7] Benoît Chantre, The Time Has Grown Short: René Girard, or the Last Law (p. 64). Michigan State University Press. Kindle Edition.
[8] Marcus Pound, Lacan and Girard: Sex and Non-violence (Psychoanalytische Perspectieven, 2003, 21, 1:///), 6.
[9] Pound, 6.
[10] Pound, 7.
[11] Pound, 7.
[12] Pound, 8.
[13] Pound fuses the Girardian and Lacanian passage: The mirror image is the monstrous double, the surrogate victim who promises to bring wholeness by standing in for the community as a whole. It is thus synonymous with the imaginary phallus, which is nothing but the imaginary “I” whose sacrifice gives birth to the ego ideal.”Pound, 8.
[14] See my book, The Psychotheology of Sin and Salvation: An Analysis of the Meaning of the Death of Christ in Light of the Psychoanalytical Reading of Paul (London: T&T Clark, 2015), 119.
[15] Psychotheology Sin, 118.
[16] Psychotheology, 118.
[17] Stopa, “Seeking Refuge in God against God.”
[18] Psychothelogy, 122-123.
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