Jacques Lacan – Forging Ploughshares

Redefining Luther’s “Justification” Through Žižek’s Extension of Girard’s Anti-Sacrificial Reading of Paul

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 perhaps 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.

Ethical Potency and Impotency: The Pleasure of the Spirit Versus Law

The tendency is to connect ethics to law and moral striving or doing, but the biblical pattern is to remove the ethical from under the power of the law and to locate it with the Spirit and being (as opposed to doing). The fruit of the Spirit is the New Testament ethic, and in Paul’s explanation, cannot be regulated by law, as nothing can be posed against this reality (Gal 5:23), as this is ultimate reality beyond and before the law. The tendency may be to stunt Paul’s point, as merely to say the law does not touch upon these non-transgressive issues, but it does not touch on ethics of the Spirit which goes beyond ethics as mere regulation. Ethics is usually connected with regulating, guiding, and perhaps more than anything, stifling, stopping or suppressing. In regulating the sensuous there is a turn against the senses and pleasure, as if these are not an adequate medium for truth and goodness. Biblical ethics returns to life and being as the pure ground of the good and the fruits of the Spirit are embodied realizations. The choice posed between the ethics of the Spirit and law, is not only a choice of life or death, but life as given from an overflowing and original goodness and love (the all-encompassing embodied ethic), and ethics as duty assigned to the will (the tendency toward the disincarnate). In the former there is no system, measure, or determinate understanding, and in the latter all is reduced to the imperative of a particular system or category. This “categorical imperative” demands exercise of the will or a doing, while the gift of the Spirit precedes ethics and enables an ethical life, empowering and compelling through empowering ethical gifts.

Overflowing Goodness as the Power of the Spirit

Before any ethical system, there is the impetus and resource driving and providing for ethics; a goodness, which any particular system may shape, stunt, or accentuate according, to its perceived parameters. This goodness is a power, which is felt (it is an affect, or an emotion), which is not to reduce it to this, but it is an embodied power that takes hold and is expressed through the senses and produces an ethical atmosphere. Being, creation, humanity, is endowed with a worthiness which is its ground, but before the realization or cognition of this ground, there is participation in this goodness, and the realization of morals and ethics, is simply an attempt to understand and shape this gift. Before the understanding and shaping though, there is the sensation, the feel, the taste, of the good. Its sweetness, joy, peace, and radiance are felt. It may be felt and perceived according to the shaping force of the person, the culture, the place, but prior to everything is the reception, or the endowment. We are gifted with being in the world, though we may need to be reawakened to this reality.

As William Desmond describes, “We are awakened to something inexhaustible about the good of being at all. There is something too much about this for us. We are secretly sustained by it, but being so intimate with it, participating in it, we cannot get a fix on it.”[1] It is manifest in and through us, but we are so intimate with it, so familiar and sustained by this reality, that astonishment and joy at this elemental goodness may be obscured. Clarity may fade or be brought back into focus, according to the shaping milieu of life and circumstance, but what is also to be noticed in this flux is the affect which gauges understanding or its absence.

Pleasure as the Power of the Spirit

There is pleasure, delight, or an aesthetic potency made manifest in the recognition or realization of the good. We experience this bodily, but this bodily satisfaction is not simply physical, but points to an ontological depth, the pure goodness of being. This goodness does not by-pass the senses, but in the biblical understanding (which Friedrich Nietzsche also came to understand), this truth is received through the senses. Incarnational truth, is by definition, embodied and passing through the body. Pleasure may fade, but it does not pass away, but conveys a reality. As Desmond describes, “There is passing to this pleasure: it passes into us, it passes through and beyond us, it passes away. There is no absolute fixing of it. But something of the good of the ‘to be’ passes in this ‘being pleased’ of pleasure.”[2] We feel and absorb the potency of being as a recurrent and ever-giving possibility. It is the possibility that transcends us but in which we recognize or experience the transcendent. It points to the One enabling this transcendental realization, which may be the distinction between happiness and joy. Happiness indicates the ephemeral moment of experience, but joy is a spiritual realization. Desmond relates it to the daimon of eudaimonia: “The daimon is a being between the mortal and the divine, at the limit of the mortal and on the threshold of the divine.”[3] The power of the Spirit is at work in this middle domain, divinizing the mortal, which is not a stunting of pleasure, but its fulfillment.

As in the Song of Solomon, the flame of Yahweh is burning in the erotic. It is not that the erotic in the Song of Solomon is a metaphor for divine love, but the erotic is directly joined to enjoyment of the divine. The rabbinic focus, and that of the early Christians, on the Song of Songs, recognized that the depth of love is lit by the flame of Yahweh’s presence (8:6). The one flesh relation between male and female is realized only in the presence of this binding, passionate, presence. Paul, likewise, pictures the act of marriage as completed in the body of Christ (Eph. 5:32). Even Plato describes eros as binding mortals and divinities in the whole. Ecstatic love and pleasure are the power of the ethical and not its diminishment, though focus on the pleasure per se may be distorted in imagining it as an end in itself. Spirituality does not oppose pleasure but traces it to its source and opens the possibility of its continual renewal. According to Rabbi Akiba: “All of time is not as worthy as the day on which the Song of Songs was given to Israel, for all of the songs are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holiest of holies.”[4] The pleasure of God mixed with the pleasure of life, and all of life as taking delight in divine pleasure, is the realization of the Spirit recognized in the Song.

The Deadly Impotency of the Law

We may be more familiar with life’s affect through the negative emotions, which Paul relates directly to the law. Fear and shame, both describe loss or shrinking engagement with the world, induced by the law (Rom 7:7ff). This affect is a somatic or bodily quality, though not this alone, but the inward turn of shame or the negative affects of jealousy, envy, or fear are written on the body. They are felt viscerally and experienced as a psychological pain. Paul describes his body being colonized by an alien force (Rom 7:9). As he describes in Galatians, the individual is subject to the flesh: “Now the deeds of the flesh are evident, which are: immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions, envying, drunkenness, carousing” (Gal 5:19-21). These deeds of the flesh are caught up in the law, and even inspired by the law in a covetous and deceived grasp for reality (Rom 7:7ff).

Though Immanuel Kant did not intend to, he illustrates how this is the case. He arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality” which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[5] The Kantian maxim does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[6] He pictures the law as regulating such things as sexual love, and presumes adultery would not be committed were gallows awaiting transgressors. He cannot recognize that the threat of death may heighten perverse pleasure (Paul says as much in Rom 1:32).

In the description of Alenka Zupančič, the “Freudian blow” to Kant’s philosophical ethics is to recognize that the moral law or what Kant calls the “categorical imperative” is in fact nothing other than the superego, or what Paul would call the law. Where Kant had sought to set ethics on a foundation of reason and will, Freud has hit upon the intertwining of the will, duty, and law as the deep pathological malady of the human race. As Zupančič concludes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honorable inclinations’ of the subject.”[7] The pleasure found in pain, either masochistic or sadistic, is the perverse pleasure of serving the bounded law of the will.[8] There is a manufactured reality enacted in the will which only touches upon the negation of reality in unpleasure. The Platonic forms or the absolutely transcendent good which Jacques Lacan will refer to this as the “imaginary,” evokes service of the unreal while abandoning reality. This means the greater the pain, the more heightened the punishing asceticism, the greater the suppression of this world, and thus the greater the pleasure (pure masochism).

The unspiritual is marked by descent rather than the transcendent, and in the Bible, is described as descent into the grave. The grave is personified, using the Hebrew term Sheol, to represent an insatiable, greedy monster with an unyielding desire to consume the living. The human appetite is like Sheol, and like death, never satisfied (Hab 2:5). “Sheol and Abaddon are never satisfied, and never satisfied are the eyes of man” (Prov 27:20). Sex and death, or erotic pleasure unto death, describe a kind of transdescedence, finding ultimate pleasure in near death experience. Autoerotic Asphyxiation or erotic choking, points directly to how death, rather than life, poses the only ecstatic possibility for some. Rather than an embrace of life, there is a direct pursuit or shutting off of life, but this illustrates how the wires of life and death can be crossed. As with Paul’s adulteress woman, it may be that pleasure is thought possible only when “consorting against the law” (Rom 7:3). Unlawful pleasure would exceed the law by breaking it.

The Pleasures of Life in the Spirit in Excess of the Law

Trust, the generosity of others, or love, are necessary for giving and sustaining life. We are weaned and determined by this good, which is neither within our capacity for measure or control, but we know and feel and experience the beauty as it irradiates and engulfs us. “There is an aesthetic givenness of the ethos of being to our senses and our bodies. . . . The incarnate good of the world is in rapport with our response to goodness and our being as good.”[9] Feelings of pleasure, gratitude, awe, convey the potency of this goodness.

The gifts of the Spirit fuse the power of life with pleasurable affects, such as love, joy, peace, patience, none of which can be reduced to an emotion but none of which are understood apart from the emotional affect. The good can be directly experienced and this shows itself in the pleasurable fruits of the Spirit. The Spirit insinuates herself into the concrete experience of life, drawing together in love (rather than separating by law). The gift of the Spirit is shared life, and all of the gifts of the Spirit are aimed at promoting this communion with life. We are given life in the community of family, but then pointed to a more expansive communion. “‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church” (Eph 5:31–32).

In Desmond’s description, “We are pointed to a community of the good beyond self-determination, a community already at work in the incognito of its surplus generosity, enabling the powers of self and other to be determining of themselves, giving them to be themselves, giving also the ethos of possibility wherein our immanent powers can be more truly realized.”[10] The gifts of the Spirit are the continuing work of the original gift of life. “This is not a moral value reflecting our self-determining powers, but an ontological worth with ethical radiations. It is an intimate goodness to being as given to be, given to be by God as the ultimate origin and end of all finite goods.”[11] The gift continues, working more intimately within than we can perceive, bringing the original gift to its goal of life, to a life more abundantly realized (John 10:10).

In summary, the “potencies of the ethical” attached to goodness show themselves in the power of the Spirit. Goodness is the source and the resource prior to or behind ethics; the potency or power, which any particular ethical understanding taps into but which it may also repress. These potencies enter differently into any particular ethical system, but what any system tends to do is lose contact with its originary source. We get stuck on the law or the ethical system and miss the goodness preceding and exceeding the system. We need awakening to “our constant ethical powers and abiding endowments.”[12] The awakening of the Spirit is nothing less than realization of this life giving ethical empowerment.

[1] William Desmond, Ethics and the Between (New York: State University of New York Press, 2001) 66. Chapter 6 is entitled “Potencies of the Ethical: On the Sources of Being Good.”

[2] Ethics and the Between, 67.

[3] Ethics and the Between, 69.

[4] Cited in Abraham Josua Heschel, The Sabbath: its meaning for modern man (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2005) 98.

[5] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392) 38.

[6] Metaphysics of Morals, 38.

[7] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 1.

[8] In the explanation of Maximus, the attachment to the sensory or the finite and passable, results in a masochistic play between pleasure and pain. “Wanting to escape the oppressive sensation of pain, we sought refuge in pleasure, attempting to console our nature when it was hard-pressed with pain’s torment.” Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in Sacred Scripture: The Responses to Thalassios, trans. Fr. Maximos Constas (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press) 61.6, p. 437.

[9] Ethics and the Between, 66.

[10] Ethics and the Between, 71

[11] Ethics and the Between, 73.

[12] Ethics and the Between, 63

Is There a Sabbath for Thought?

The seventh day on which God rested, and which holds out the possibility of resting in God (ceasing from laborious struggle), is definitive of salvation. Sabbath rest is a return to and acknowledgement of that which precedes tragic knowing (war, struggle, and violence). In Hebrews, Sabbath as salvation is described as a continuous and open possibility, an avenue of experience that by-passes the reign of death, the agonistic struggle in the wilderness, and which provides peace. “For the one who has entered His rest has himself also rested from his works, as God did from His” (Heb 4:10). Sabbath provides entry to all that follows in the commandments, for acquisitiveness of the neighbor’s stuff, fear of death with its murder and revenge, the worship of idols with its manipulation of death, are undermined, in recognizing God. “Therefore let us draw near with confidence to the throne of grace, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb 4:16).

This is not simply a delayed peace, awaiting the end of time, as the writer declares we must enter in today: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts” (Heb 4:7). This “today” stretches out to every moment of history as the continual and ever-present possibility. “So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for whoever has entered God’s rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Let us therefore strive to enter that rest, so that no one may fall by the same sort of disobedience” (Heb 4:9-11). This peace is continually available but the vessel must receive what is poured out.

Job describes the all-consuming nature of unrest and suffering, such that sleep offers no refuge, as even his dreams terrify him (Job 7:14). His inability to escape suffering, to turn off his mind, describes mental suffering, perhaps worse even than his physical suffering, as the mind becomes both victimizer and victim. Even death offers no refuge and so he cries out for God to obliterate him: “Oh that my request might come to pass, And that God would grant my longing! Would that God were willing to crush me, That He would loose His hand and cut me off!” (Job 6:8–9).

Job’s description resembles the desperation of case histories presented by Sigmund Freud, describing individuals driven to hysteria or self-harm due to their torturous thoughts. The Wolf Man, the Rat Man, and the case of Dr. Schreber, describe the workings of the obsessive-compulsive disorder and Freud’s attempts to find a cure. He assumed that these extreme cases offered archetypical insights into the universal human condition, which he would eventually link to the death-drive (or Thanatos). Jacques Lacan, extends Freud’s conclusions, presuming that the death-drive or the drive to self-destruction is the worst sort of solipsism, in that the drive to escape the death-drive is the death-drive. The human sickness drives one to a Job-like conclusion that the only cure is annihilation. Annihilation as cure, explains Lacan’s rather sad diagnosis, that the sickness is driven by pursuit of a cure, when in reality the best compromise is to relinquish this notion.

On a larger scale, but following the same logic, is Heraclitus understanding that “War is the father of all things.” Just as death-drive is the impetus undergirding the ego and superego (in Lacan these structures, constituting the human subject, arise from the death-drive), so too, war is the impetus to formation of the city, and the various social and political structures of corporate human personality. Even Plato called for a permanent military class, since the threat of war is constant and peace is never permanent. Though the scale is larger the subject has not changed; killing and being killed in war must trace its etiology to the same dynamic, found both in the individual and corporate personality. The drive to obliterate, projected inward or outward, has the same result.

Thus, the Rat Man, will find a final cure in being slaughtered in WWI. As the Japanese author, Yukio Mishima recognized, war was a missed opportunity in which he could have ceased being, and thus have been relieved of his torturous thoughts (making up the corpus of his work). Peace enters into the equation only as the end-result of death and war. As with the Lacanian therapeutic conclusion, the drive to peace may be seen as the core of the sickness, as it is this pursuit, continually illusive, that sets the world on fire. Peace through war, either implicitly or explicitly, privileges war as original. It is the means and end of the death-drive. The drive to escape the death-drive is the death-drive, or the drive to escape war through war, is only a difference in scale. This is the human sickness, and it describes the masochistic and sadistic snare which entraps the world.

This dark description may function at an unconscious level but the same dynamic unfolds in consciousness. The conscious desire for life, the sex drive or the drive for acquisition (covetousness), speaks of the same death dealing consequences, in that life is to be acquired, extracted (from the other), and spent. Will to power, will to life, springs from a desire in which life is lacking and must be obtained. As Arthur Schopenhauer describes, “All willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied.”[1] The process is infinite, in that satisfaction is only “apparent” and not real and an attained object is by definition not a desired object, it is “merely a fleeting gratification; it is like the alms thrown to the beggar, that keeps him alive to-day that his misery may be prolonged till the morrow.”[2] Desire is bottomless and its demands infinite, calling for final resolution or ultimate satisfaction. Freud hit upon the death-drive, finding it behind Schopenhauer’s will.

For most of his career Freud attempted to link the basic drive to sex or biology or to a more positive and life-giving desire, but he realized desire functions at two levels, and underneath desire was drive, in which life and death are confused. He concluded sadism was a projection of masochism, or the internal dynamic turned outward. The superego (father) which would punish the ego (child) makes oppression and dominance, or acquisition from the self (self-consumption) the means to life. The price for life is death (self-punishment). Consciously or unconsciously, the grave is the final immortalization, as here there is no mortality. The drive for life, in other words, is death-drive hidden beneath the layer of conscious desire. Security is achieved through acquisition (of wealth, power, and sex), which means the race is driven by a deadly acquisitive aggression. As a result, eternal life is through unlimited resources and acquisition, so that peace and security arise through mutually assured destruction. As William Desmond notes, “If this is our primary relation to the world, war inevitably defines human existence relative to what is other to us.”[3] He raises the question (and answers it) as to whether we can give it a rest, and find peace.

God’s resting and his declaration that creation is not only “good” but “very good” contains the goodness released from God into creation, realized in Sabbath. This primordial goodness contains no hint of violence nor is this a self-satisfied and selfish goodness: “this is not the erotic self-satisfaction of an autistic god, but an agapeic release of the otherness of creation into the goodness of its own being for itself.”[4] The otherness of creation to God informs recognition of goodness, which does not require acquisition or consumption. “When we behold something, something of the otherness of the thing beheld is communicated to us: beholding is not a self-projection. Every anthropomorphism —call this our own self projection on the other —is made possible by this “yes,” as first giving creation to be for itself, endowing it with the promise of its own being for itself.”[5] We can enjoy creation, not because it is “good for us” but simply because it is good. “It is given for the other as other, and the good as for us comes to us from a giver that is beyond any enclosure of ‘for self.’”[6] This is a knowing, a mindfulness, which is given, perhaps reflected in the activity of bestowing names; recognizing what is given, and not struggling to determine thought, or to attain being through thought, but enjoying what is.

In contrast, the tragic knowing of the fall is centered on the self, and aimed at attaining through knowing (“You shall be like gods”). The falling apart and shame impose a new sort of work, in which the self is at stake in the struggle. Antagonism, disputation, agonistic struggle, argument, conflict, murder, become the means to life and wisdom. This human failure is reflected in all the areas constituting humanity (religion, psychology, philosophy, and culture).

In religious myth, war and violence are the primal reality behind wisdom and existence. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is the goddess of war, springing from the head of Zeus, brandishing her spear. Heraclitus’ “War is the father of all,” accords with religious myth, in which out of violence and war the world is created. The celestial gods war among themselves, and often it is out of the cadaver of the deity that creation commences, thus death is divine (e.g., Thanatos, Hades, Hel, Yama, Anubis, Mictlan). The gods of war promise salvation through destruction. Odin leads warriors to Valhalla through death, while Horus, the Egyptian god of the sky swoops like a falcon, and Kali transforms through destruction.

So too modern philosophy focuses on the creativity of death: Kant presumes war produces the sublime, Schelling pictures God arising though being opposed to himself; Hegel pictures dialectical strife and contradiction, or spirit at war with itself as the avenue to synthesis; Marx translates the Hegelian dialectic into a creative class warfare as the engine of history; and according to Lenin, “The unity of opposites is temporary; antagonistic struggle is absolute,” which Mao liked to quote in conjunction with his idea that “power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”[7] Desmond goes on to describe Socrates, Nietzsche, Blake, Schopenhauer, and Spinoza as given over to an originary violence. In this nightmare, work, war, and struggle are primary. Nature, red in tooth and claw, power through the barrel of a gun, ceaseless struggle over limited resources, is the Hobbesian reality with which we are most familiar. Life is no rose garden, and at best peace is the temporary cessation of war. It is derived from war, from preparation for war, and from threat of war. Machiavelli would advise a pretense of peace and religion, while recognizing the cruel realities necessary to exercise power. Even thought and the possibility of thinking are relinquished, in a form of thought which must first attain the self (e.g., the Cartesian grasp for self). Lost thought, the lost self, the absence of life, is the ground of originary violence (religious and philosophical).

Sabbath is a return to an original possibility upon which everything else depends, “The Lord God is One.” Here there is rest and peace, and the painful labor produced by human rebellion is resolved before it occurs. “God is good” and his goodness is overflowing, and grace is simply given. Desmond appeals to the poetry of Yeats to capture the imagery: “peace ‘in the bee-loud glade,’ peace that ‘comes dropping slow, dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.’”[8] It is “dropping slow” like honey from the comb. It descends like the evening, when night falls, as it is a gift from above.

It is not that a certain effort is not involved: “strive to enter that rest” (Heb 4:11), or strive to bring about the conditions ripe for receiving. According to Desmond, “When peace descends on us, we do not sleep but are overtaken and transformed, though if we were asked to give a definition of that peace it would be like the intimate universal —impossible to fix completely.”[9] It is a “God send” which awakens us to a peace beyond finite possibility, opening to a “love of being,” a gift which we mostly fall asleep to. Perhaps like Job, we are awakened from our nightmares to a more primordial possibility: “If it is true that it is polemos (war or conflict) that is second-born, then polemos is the fugue state, and born of falling asleep to the first peace of being.”[10]

The promise of Sabbath is to remind us that there is more than exile, more than the fall, more than the sweat of the brow, and the pain of labor. Though this darkness has penetrated to our bones, there is the possibility of exposing this lie through the word of God (“penetrating joint and marrow”) and the power of Sabbath (Heb 4:12-13). “I would say that the Sabbath is not the first, but it follows from the first. God is the First. Hence the first and most hyperbolic commandment: I am God, and there is none other; God is God and nothing but God is God.”[11] This God is not equivocal or in opposition to himself. He is a singularity in which there is the possibility of Sabbath harmony. Our tendency is to create divine false doubles (requiring equivocity), the myths of war between the gods, so that inevitably the “harbingers of war are hidden in the false names of God.”[12]

The Sabbath is made for recognizing God and to rid ourselves of idols (the derivatives, the seconds, the counterfeit reality). “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me” (Ex 20:2–3). In false realities, God’s otherness is made to seem an infinite distance and his peace an otherworldly impossibility. God draws near in the Sabbath. Love of God is renewed so that we might once again recognize his image in our neighbor and in ourselves. “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Ex 20:4).

The turn to worship of the creaturely is to forget the God of Sabbath peace. To attach the name of God to death is to transgress the third commandment (Ex 20:7). The resolution: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God” (Ex 20:8–10). The peace of the Sabbath is more primordial than death, and the unified God of the Sabbath precedes the deities of division. “It is a reminder: against the counterfeit doubles we produce, the substitute seconds we secrete, against the war hinted in the equivocal, there is a recall to the First, a recall to a peace more primordial than war.”[13]

We are at stake in realizing the primordial peace of Sabbath; our own well-being, our mindfulness, our salvation, from out of violence and war, into participation in the primordial peace of God. This touches on what is deepest and most intimate to us, as we are involved in this remembrance or forgetting (it is not merely an objective problem). It is the realization of the overflowing love of God – what Desmond calls, “agapeic astonishment.” We are awakened to the love of God and the sheer wonder of the world in its plenitude, a “too-muchness.” “Astonishment has the bite of happening in it: an otherness is shown or communicated to us, and a celebrating wonder at its sheer being there as given awakens us to it, and indeed awakens mind to itself.”[14] Sabbath is a time of grateful reception, peace with self, others, and God are communicated (we receive ourselves back).

As Desmond explains, there is a “de-weaponizing.” There is a disarming, a dropping of all weapons, a ceasing of weaponized work (futile striving) so as to take up the work of love. It is not so much working as grateful enjoyment and gratitude. “Work becomes prayer. Prayer is not now the impotence of work, that is, impotence for which nothing anymore works. Prayer is the empowering apotheosis of powerlessness.”[15] It is on the order of Paul’s weakness, in which he discovers God’s grace. This disempowerment frees for a saturation in grace. Like Job, who endures the extremity of suffering and the acceptance of his nakedness, which is the entry point of blessing. “Naked I came into being, naked I go out; the Lord gives, the Lord takes; blessed be God forever. This is a sabbatical prayer —a faith in sabbatical being beyond the night of exposure.”[16]

Yes, there is a Sabbath for thought, in which the war of words, the inner struggle, and its outward form cease. It is not an end of thinking, but a new form of received thought, in which we are awakened to mindfulness, to love, to “It is good,” and we become participants in God’s recreation. Lack, absence, and deprivation describe the violent struggle which is all consuming in the annihilation of war or the all-consuming “neurosis” of death-drive but the work of remembrance, of receiving, of participating, is on the order of prayer. The grace of Sabbath peace is the overflow granted to being in creation. This life is not gained through struggle but remembered as the good gift. War springs from a love of life that must be gained, protected, and preserved, but this life is not one that is missing but which is freely given.

(Sign up for “Do Not Let Your Hearts Be Troubled: Perspectives on Peace” Starting April 8th and running through May 27th. This class, with Ethan Vander Leek, examines “peace” from various perspectives: Biblical, theological, philosophical, and inter-religious. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings.)

[1] Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea, Translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. 1909) 260.

[2] Ibid.

[3] William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? Between Religion and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 317

[4] Desmond, 325.

[5] Desmond, 326.

[6] Desmond, 326.

[7] Philip Short, Mao: A Iife (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1999), 459; on power out of the barrel of a gun, see 203, 368. Cited in Desmond, 328.

[8] Desmond, 322. Citing Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.”

[9] Desmond, 322-323.

[10] Desmond, 323.

[11] Desmond, 324.

[12] Desmond, 325.

[13] Desmond, 325.

[14] Desmond, 332

[15] Desmond, 347.

[16] Desmond, 347.

The Letter Versus the Logoi

Derrida, Freud, and Lacan make the philosophical and psychological case for Paul’s argument that the letter kills (2 Cor 3:6), while also leaving open the implication that the Spirit gives life. What they demonstrate, and what is implicit in Paul’s point, is not simply that there is a distinction to be made between speech and writing but that speech contains the problems of graphic communication in that it too is reducible to the material, the finite, the repetitive, and that there is an enslaving aspect to language. There is an orientation to language and law, identifying it with access to God or the fulness of reality, in which the material, cultural, and finite form of language shuts off from the freedom and fulness of the Spirit. Paul is not making some Platonic argument, privileging speech over writing, but he is making a broader point about two ways in which language can order reality. The letter or Scripture, or the law engraved on stones, is inherently deadly, not because it falls short of the spoken word (after-all it was spoken by God’s messengers and then written), but because, by its very nature, it obstructs and hides the Spirit. In Paul’s depiction the letter obscures, as it creates duplicity, hiding, and shame, due to its fading reality (2 Cor 3:4-18; Php 3:19) and those put to shame by this circumstance would equate the letter with access to God. The letter made absolute is not simply the Jewish problem, but is universal and attached to the organs of speech and to language (Rom 3:10-20), which gives rise to division and violence, and Freud, Derrida, and Lacan show why this is the case.

Jacques Lacan develops Freuds picture of the working of the unconscious as following the system of signs, claiming “the unconscious is structured like a language.”[1] He argues that the psyche develops along the material or concrete structures of language, necessarily working through difference in sounds and meaning, and always driven to an end it cannot achieve. Just as language naturally divides and gains meaning through different phonemes, letters, or words (over and against others), so too the structure of consciousness (largely in the unconscious) takes on this material function. One meaning is against another, just as one letter and sound gains its meaning over-and-against another, so there is no origin to be found in language, but only an ever-receding meaning.

The parallel argument of Jacques Derrida is that there really is no difference between speech and writing, inasmuch as both share the characteristics of language in marking differentiation.[2] The drive to privilege speech over writing is due to the notion that speech or the phonic sign has no structure of difference (which demonstrates the drive to synthesis); and then the presumption that in this perfect accord there is immediate access to the signified. This desired access is first an access to myself, or my self-presence, as I would have myself in my thought life. The presumption is that I am in or behind the silent speaking, and this inner voice not only provides access to myself but access to the world and to God. The obvious characteristics of writing (its material form, its exterior and conventional nature, its rule based iterability), in this argument, are absent in speech. Writing is presumed to be a parasite on speech, with speech not being completely reducible to marks in stone or ink but is a future possibility or outworking derived from speech.

The linguistic counter-point is that the phonic sign employs the same conventions as the graphic sign, and writing is not imposed upon speech but oral language “already belongs to this writing.”[3] “Original” or “natural” language shows signs of always having been touched and shaped by writing, and the notion that there is a living speech as opposed to a dead letter, misses that breath, the clicking of the tongue, aspiration, etc., are as material as ink and stone. “Living speech,” due to its existence in human interiority may more successfully hide the objective, material, and chain-like necessity, of language made explicit in writing. There is only the continual unfolding of signs which endlessly refer to other signs to gain meaning. Whether the medium is ink or a stream of air, the substance is built upon a chain of differences. No one, however, has thought to examine the chemical content of ink to get at the substance of language, though a certain deceptive magical quality is sometimes assigned to air, but in both, what Derrida calls arche-writing, is at work.[4] Both create meaning through the play of differences, or what Derrida calls “différance,” in that meaning is never fully present. Movement, temporality, and iterability, may give the appearance of some stable substance, a presence or ego, behind the movement producing difference.

The psychological point is that the letter shapes the psyche in its pursuit of presence through this illusive absence. This is evident in Freud’s focus on symbols and signs in dreams, fantasies, and everyday discourse, and it is stated in the title of one of Lacan’s articles “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious.”[5] This is a “literal” or material work which can be traced in the structure of the psyche: “By ‘letter’ we designate that material support which concrete speech borrows from language.”[6] The “unconscious structured like a language” posits the meaning of the conscious and unconscious as following the structure of contrasting binary pairs. The unconscious is not a deep structure obscured from view but is simply the obverse side of the signs of language or the place of the signifiers. Lacan links this directly to what Freud calls the “death instinct” as the pursuit of self, or the insistence to be through language is bent on obtaining being through non-being, or on obtaining presence through absence. In Paul’s explanation, the letter kills because it does not contain life, and yet it is presumed to be the source of life. One who is coming to identity in and through language is subject to the fate of language. There is the dynamic of language in the chain of signifiers, but meaning (the self) is not found in any singular signifier or any moment in time.

In the description of both Paul and Slavoj Žižek, the realization of the impossibility of law or language to produce life, creates a feeling of alienation or of being “out of joint.” According to Žižek, “Modern subjectivity has nothing to do with the notion of man as the highest creature in the ‘great chain of being,’ as the final point of the evolution of the universe: modern subjectivity emerges when the subject perceives himself as ‘out of joint,’ as excluded from the ‘order of the things,’ from the positive order of entities.”[7] Paul describes his realization that all he counted as most important is now so much excrement (Php 3:8). Locating the self in language or the law is a frustrating impossibility which points to a further need and realization. No longer does Paul find comfort in his identity as a Jew, though he at one time had total “confidence in the flesh.” The fleshly sign of circumcision, the national sign of Israel, the genetic sign of being of the tribe of Benjamin, and the legal sign of being a Pharisee, he now counts as loss. But for Paul, this loss is embraced as part of an alternative identity: “But whatever things were gain to me, those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Php 3:7).

Paul relinquishes his striving to find identity and life in his Jewishness in his turn to Christ, though he makes it clear that this is not something to be grasped, in the way he grasped after being a Jew. “Not that I have already obtained it or have already become perfect, but I press on so that I may lay hold of that for which also I was laid hold of by Christ Jesus” (Php 3:12). Desire and its attainment, the role of the logos or language, and the understanding of the self, undergo a shift in this new understanding. Paul refers to it as the freedom of the Spirit, which is the alternative to the deadly letter. “Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Co 3:17). It is not that Paul has lost confidence in speech or language, but he now recognizes the working of the Spirit, which gives him a new confidence in speech (2 Cor 3:12) and in which he can identify Christians as “the letters of Christ” (3:3). This letter is not material, it is not formed in opposition, it is not fading, it is not mortal, it is not finite. This is the sort of letter that provides adequacy.

Maximus the Confessor’s picture of this realization, which ironically gets confused with Platonism (and thus falls back into reification of language), focuses on the absolute difference between God and world, bridged by the Logos. That is, there is no natural speech, natural origin, or human logos that can attain the divine Logos. There is no supposed natural synthesis between sign and signified or of God and the world. The theological and philosophical tendency is to follow the human sickness (identity through difference), by either identifying God with the world (e.g., in various forms of pantheism) or by making God absolutely transcendent and unattainable (e.g., nominalism). The tendency is to erase difference or to accentuate it, or in biblical terms, to keep the law or attempt to be the law. Maximus point is that in Christ, God is both absolutely different from creation while identified with creation as incarnate Word: “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[8] Creation does not account for itself “naturally” but calls for the supernatural as both its logic and end.

The way in which this Christo-logic or the Logos is deployed in the world is through what Maximus calls logoi. In creation as incarnation, the Logos is spread out in the logoi, the particulars of creation which are part of Christ’s becoming “all in all” (Col 3:11; Eph 1:22-23). In Jordan Woods description, Maximus’s logoi are the “One Logos’s hypostatic, kenotic procession into becoming the natural power of every individual creature to be, and that such a procession secures the metaphysical ground of an inevitable, identical, unnecessary creation.”[9] There is simultaneously no confusion between Creator and creation, and yet direct identity in the Logos and logoi. The hypostatic identity of Christ grounds the world in a deeper identity than a Spinoza-line pantheism (which leaves out subjectivity) and a wider difference and logic than the actual non-difference embraced in linguistic and psychological difference. “Only this sort of “both-and” – both similarity-dissimilarity and identity – can claim rights to a truly Christo-logical God-world relation.”[10] According to Maximus, “if we wish to have a complete knowledge of things, it is not enough to enumerate the multitude of characteristics,” that is, “whatever is around the subject,” but it is “absolutely necessary that we also indicate what is the subject of these characteristics, which is the foundation, as it were, upon which they stand.”[11] The foundation or subject which Paul says, “fills all things” (Eph 1:23)

Identity and difference are not naturally resolved, language is not its own end, and according to Maximus no creature simply “coincides in its essence with what is and is called the assemblage of characteristics that are recognized and predicated of it.” The grounding identity of the individual creature “is something different from these characteristics, which holds them all together, but is in no way held together by them” and so “is not derived from” or “identical with them.”[12] This Word found in creation is not structured like the letter, the law, or the order of language. Things do not otherwise hold together, and this psychological, linguistic, and theological reality, is directly addressed in the God/man who is the beginning and end of creation. In the language of Paul, “He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Col 1:17). According to Maximus, from the viewpoint of God taken up by the virtuous person “by conforming to this beginning,” a beginning in which “he received being and participation in what is naturally good,” “he hastens to the end, diligently.”[13] This end is deification of all things: “In this way, the grace that divinizes all things will manifestly appear to have been realized.”[14] There is an overcoming of the law, of the human sickness bound to the letter that kills, through the freedom of Christ’s Spirit, filling all things.

[1] Jacques Lacan, “The Insistence of the Letter in the Unconscious” (Yale French Studies, 1966, No. 36/37, Structuralism (1966), pp. 112-147) 113.

[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) xvi-xvii; 54, 74.

[3] Derrida, 55.

[4] Derrida,60

[5] Lacan, Ibid.

[6] Lacan, 114.

[7] Slavoj Žižek, cogtto and the unconscious, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998) 4.

[8] Maximos the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1, Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) Ambigua 7:22.

[9] Jordan Wood, “Creation is Incarnation: The Metaphysical Peculiarity of the Logoi in Maximus Confessor” (Modern Theology 00:00 Month 2017 ISSN 0266-7177 (Print) ISSN 1468-0025 (Online) 4.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] Amb 17.5, cited in Wood, 6.

[12] Amb 17.6, cited in Wood, 6.

[13]Amb. 7.21.

[14] QThal. 2.2.

Understanding McGilchrist Through Paul, Hegel, and Lacan

Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary, in his approach to left brain/right brain theory, presumes “each hemisphere is involved in everything” but nonetheless he argues there is a predominant form of thought attached to the different spheres of the brain.[1] It is not that there are absolute differences or that the two spheres of the brain are not continually interdependent, but this does not mean that there are not necessary differences. Afterall, as he points out, “every known creature with a neuronal system, however far down the evolutionary tree one goes, and however far back in time, has a system that is asymmetrical.” This raises the question of his research, “Why on earth would that be, given that the world they are interacting with is not asymmetrical?”[2] This asymmetrical world shows up continually in “subject versus object, alienation versus engagement, abstraction versus incarnation, the categorical versus the unique, the general versus the particular, the part versus the whole,” with either the objective and impersonal or the subjective and personal, tending to win out.[3] What I demonstrate throughout is that the categories in which McGilchrist sets his dichotomies (between the two hemispheres) easily convert to the Pauline differentiation between law and Christ with the “incarnation” overcoming “alienation” in the “particular life” of a “singular” man in which the antinomies posed by the two hemispheres, or simply by life, are overcome. I also make the case that the completion of McGilchrist’s theory, the ultimate right-brain synthesis, lies in a particular theological understanding toward which his theory points. Throughout the second half of the book he describes two forms of thought or two ways of “being” reflected in the brain and the mind, one of which I argue, culminates in Hegel’s notion of “absolute knowledge” in and through Christ.

The “master” is supposed to be the brain’s right hemisphere, which is the side most connected with the holism of personhood, as it relates vitally, and humanly to the world, taking in what is “new” without concern for objective closure. The left hemisphere is focused on detail and analysis, and rather than connecting to living things, tends to focus on the static and lifeless, on machines, numbers, and abstractions, and while both sides of the brain are involved in language, the left brain tends to reify the word. Rather than recognizing the metaphorical, emotional, and integrating role of language (connected to the right hemisphere), in the left hemisphere there is rejection of the metaphorical for the literal, and a rejection of the personal for the impersonal. The left brain is the organizing bureaucrat which is all about procedure, organization, predictability, abstraction (decontextualization), and which has no room for uniqueness. Justice, in this realm, is not a sense of making things right so much as making everything equal. In this realm, “Increasingly the living would be modelled on the mechanical.”[4] Production, speed, scale, and quantity are the focus, and not quality. Those “with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to, and be deemed especially suitable for, employment in the areas of science, technology, and administration” which have become the shaping forces of our time.[5]

Ideally the master or the right side of the brain is served by the left side of the brain, but there is a tendency in history and in the individual to cut short this integrating holism and to become focused on dissecting the details as an end in itself. Modernity, with its focus on scientism, industrialization, mechanics, materialism, information processing, or perhaps a neuro link in which the machinery is inserted directly in the brain, demonstrates how the servant can usurp the role assigned by the master.

As with illness or brain damage, there is a general trend for the left brain to close in on itself and to shut out the world beyond its own projections:

But what if the left hemisphere were able to externalise and make concrete its own workings—so that the realm of the actually existing things apart from the mind consisted to a large extent of its own projections? Then the ontological primacy of right-hemisphere experience would be outflanked, since it would be delivering, not ‘the Other’, but what was already the world as processed by the left hemisphere. It would make it hard, and perhaps in time impossible, for the right hemisphere to escape from the hall of mirrors, to reach out to something that truly was ‘Other’ than, beyond, the human mind. In essence this was the achievement of the Industrial Revolution.[6]

The mirror stage in Lacanian psychoanalysis can become terminal, in its focus on the self, to the exclusion of all else. Rene Descartes is a key example of one who turns to focus on his own thought, attempting to get at the “thinking thing” behind the thought, dissecting, isolating, refusing the body, and focused completely on interior thought. His philosophical focus follows the pattern of modernity, and betrays the same characteristics of (new) forms of mental illness which would arise in this period. In Pauline terms one is enclosed and isolated in the sinful orientation to the law.

One might extend McGilchrist’s theory to suggest a left-brain theology and atonement as well, in which Christ is made to serve the law and his death makes up for any lack or failure in regard to the law, with the law defining and determining Christ. The sickness of the left brain, the bureaucratic disease that would achieve perfection and power seem perfectly illustrated by Pharisaical Paul: one can be a perfect Jew and keep the law blamelessly (Philippians 3:6), which Christian Paul explains, was what made him the chief of sinners (I Tim. 1:15). Power through language or law presents the possibility of a limited whole which can be manipulated, but to maintain this realm it is necessary that it be complete in itself. The tendency is to see all of reality, even God and Christ, as constituted in a closed space, so that there must be an obstacle, warding off the right brain or warding off the limited nature of language and law. In McGilchrist’s description this gives rise to violence and in the case of Paul it accounts for his arresting and killing Christians. The letter, or primary attachment to Scripture and law, functions as an obstacle, killing off the unlimited vagaries of the spirit, in the Pauline sense (2 Cor. 3:6).

Rather than an embodied and social language (as in Wittgenstein) the tendency is toward a disembodied Platonism, Cartesianism, or legalism. In a Lacanian sense the symbolic order becomes a realm unto itself, with language taking the predominant role over the imagination, reducing the ego to an object. The symbolic register is the organizing center – the possibility of a subject. The “obstacle cause of desire” is the impossible desire of a desiring self. That is, one is blocked from achieving the desired object and this creates the frustrated agon, that for Lacan is the very definition of the human subject. In Paul’s picture, one serves the law, and imagines law is an end in itself, and there is a basic confusion between God and the law, which is inherently alienating. Paul describes an irresolvable split within himself (Rom. 7:15). This Pauline bilateralism within the ego is reflected in McGilchrist’s picture of how it is that we become an obstacle to ourselves. The left brain cuts off the integrating powers of the right brain in the same way the law cuts off from the person of God or the absolute personal reality of Christ.

The work of Christ, is to suspend the law, sublating or suspending while also preserving and fulfilling. Through Christ Paul escaped the delimited world of the law as in Christ the law is delimited (pointing beyond itself), and human brokenness is not a failure in regard to the law, but the failure, and incompleteness of the law as a guide. Christ does not complete human obligations in regard to the law, but suspends the punishing effects of a defective orientation to the law.

The fact that McGilchrist uses the Pauline word describing the suspension of the law in Christ (aufgehoben) indicates that imposing a Christian or Pauline understanding is not foreign to his project. He uses the word in the context of the Hegelian synthesis, in which Hegel deploys Luther’s translation of Paul’s καταργηθῇ, which is a suspension of the punishing effects of the law and its simultaneous preservation. The right brain cannot function apart from the left brain but at the same time it tends to pose an obstacle to its integrating powers. Christ is recognized through the law, through Judaism, through the Scriptures, but taken as their own end these are an obstacle to Christ. The ill effects of sin are when the emissary is thought to be the master. The sin condition, which is a misorientation to the law or a reification of the law, amounts to something like the obstacle the left brain often poses to the right brain. One cannot get rid of the law, any more than function with half a brain, but the ill effects of the law can be suspended in Christ (while the law and Judaism are preserved).

By the same token, it is not that a more holistic (right brain) Romanticism abolishes the Enlightenment or that any particular age is a complete departure from the one that preceded. McGilchrist specifically sights the Hegelian synthesis to express the full integrating power of the right brain. “The movement from Enlightenment to Romanticism therefore is not from A to not-A, but from a world where ‘A and not-A cannot both be true’ is necessarily true to one where ‘A and not-A can both hold’ hold (in philosophical terms this becomes Hegel’s thesis, antithesis – synthesis).”[7] Elements of the Enlightenment are found in Romanticism, just as elements of the Hebrew Scriptures frame understanding of Christ. This synthesis found in Christ is precisely not supersessionist or anti-nominalist, though in the thought world of the left brain and the law this must necessarily be the case.

As Jordan Wood notes, Hegel distinguishes two kinds of thinking: there is finite thinking in which antinomies such as subject/object (along with all of the Kantian antinomies) hold as the one always implies and depends upon its opposite and this “permanent opposition” is definitive of the terms.[8] In Lacan and Žižek’s Hegel, this antagonism and ultimate negativity (death drive) is what gives the appearance of truth and a human Subject. Truth inheres in a lie and the subject arises as a result of this power of negation. In McGilchrist’s definition, this would be the ultimate left-brain materialism and sickness (which Žižek would acknowledge in his notion that the best we can do is “enjoy our symptom”).

Jordan provides a more orthodox reading of Hegel: “Infinite or “rational” thinking is thinking in itself—or better, thinking thinking itself—since here the thinking subject and the object thought are one, and are directed to an inward identity that brooks no definite term.”[9] Hegel has in mind the divine Subject and his thought, shared in Christ, in which there is a move from finite to infinite thinking. As Jordan describes, the theological picture of Hegel’s “knowing” is not the finite but an infinite ground, both subjective and objective. In the subjective, “human reason ‘from below’ is in truth God’s self-knowing “from above” as the Spirit in us.” The objective ground is “God’s Incarnation as a single human individual establishes the conditions for intuitive certainty that the divine nature is such that it can communicate its entire identity as the concrete oneness of abstract opposites, of the infinite and the finite, subject and object, etc.—and this communication is also the form of speculative logic.”[10] This integrating unity of the knower and the known is Hegel’s “absolute knowing,” the goal and means of his “speculative thinking.” That is, this absolute is not closed but open to continual speculation, incorporation, and synthesis.

McGilchrist describes a left-brain failure in theology – reification of the word, focus on the book or the letter as opposed to the integrating factors of the right brain. He argues, the Reformation is a refusal of the metaphorical, and in this the Reformation preserves the Enlightenment rejection of the mysterious and a turning of the imagination to the word. “In their search for the one truth, both movements attempted to do away with the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere, particularly in its mythical and metaphoric function, in favour of the word, the stronghold of the left hemisphere, in pursuit of unambiguous certainty.”[11] There is a loss of a sense of the “real presence” of Christ in “an endlessly repeated and deferred” symbolism, devoid of its signified. Though he does not explicitly connect the fulness of the right brain with the person of Christ, he does note the “real presence is displaced by a sign, “re-presentations not presentations.”[12]

Where the Greek and Hebrew logos or the law is an entity apart from God, the incarnation enfleshes the Word – which seems unthinkable in the left-brain world. The incarnation of the Word is the ultimate synthesis which personalizes all things and which demands an infinite openness to the new, the unique, and the different. The Word is not that which reduces to sameness but it preserves difference. As long as the left brain, the law, or the symbolic order is predominant, subject-object opposition, bilateralism, dichotomy, dualism, or what Hegel refers to as finite knowing, are clearly in place. Synthesis, integration, or participation in the Word does not obliterate difference but it passes beyond, not through sameness or obliteration of difference, but through recognition that God has made himself available to thought. This Hegelian picture of the role of Christ seems to be the natural implication toward which McGilchrist’s theory points.

For McGilchrist, perhaps in the spirit of Maximus or Origen, we are cocreators, in many senses, of the world we inhabit, as our understanding or perception is shaped by our perspective, our theory, our hypothesis, or even the apparatus of the brain through which we apprehend but this this means of apprehending is not neutral but is itself shaped by our thought. That is there is continual feedback between the mind and brain, and it may be impossible to separate the interplay between the two. McGilchrist recognizes that his theory may serve only as a metaphor, which floats free of cerebral hemispheres, and point to two ways of being in the world. As he puts it,

If it could eventually be shown…that the two major ways, not just of thinking, but of being in the world, are not related to the two cerebral hemispheres, I would be surprised, but not unhappy. Ultimately what I have tried to point to is that the apparently separate ‘functions’ in each hemisphere fit together intelligently to form in each case a single coherent entity; that there are, not just currents here and there in the history of ideas, but consistent ways of being that persist across the history of the Western world, that are fundamentally opposed, though complementary, in what they reveal to us; and that the hemispheres of the brain can be seen as, at the very least, a metaphor for these.[13]

His work is pointing to the primacy of metaphor, connectedness, and synthesis, so he is content if his work serves this purpose. The Christological conclusion, which he does not name but which seems a natural extension of his work, is the Personalism of Hegelian Christology.

Afterall, it is the refusal of the primacy of the personal, of narrative, of metaphor, of openness, that describes the human disease. Only in brain damaged patients, or those who suffer mental illness, can it be said the physical brain is controlling thought but what can be seen in these instances (such as autism or schizophrenia) is the trend which McGilchrist sees as characteristic trends of modernity; narrow focus, reification of language, and depersonalization, but these are precisely the symptoms Paul describes as entrapment to the law. In Christian terms, the disease is addressed and cured in the Person of Christ, as the personal depth of creation, and participation in personhood open up the left-brain to infinite knowledge and synthesis of the right-brain.

[1] Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Modern World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019) Thank you to Jim for acquiring this book for me.

[2] Ibid, 2.

[3] Ibid, 462.

[4] Ibid, 430.

[5] Ibid, 408.

[6] Ibid, 386.

[7] Ibid, 353.

[8] Jordan Wood, “Hegel as Alexandrian Christian: Or, Against False Piety,” from his Substack: Words in Flesh, Sep. 3^rd,2025. This wonderful piece just appeared as I was writing.

[9] Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline [Enc hereafter], Part I: Science of Logic. Translated and Edited by Klaus Brinkmann and Dnaiel O. Dahlstrom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 [1817]), 28. Cited in Wood.

[10] Ibid, Wood.

[11] McGilchrist, 315.

[12] Ibid, 317.

[13] Ibid, 461.

Paul with Kant, Sade and Lacan, on the Source of Evil

Paul warns in 2 Corinthians that “scripture slays” (2 Cor. 3:6) in that it is not grounded in Spirit. This could be stated as the law, the symbolic order, principle, letter, or language, slays if it is taken as an end in itself. The problem Paul is addressing is the relationship between the written word, whether in the form of letters of recommendation, the Scriptures, or Torah, and the reality of embodied humans. Paul does not need letters written with ink, as he has the Corinthian believers as living letters bearing the living Word in their heart. Words or laws inscribed on stone, even if put there by the finger of God, by angels, or by the highest law giver, cannot possibly compare to the Spirit of the living God written on the heart. The former is a “ministry of death” in that it does not pertain to flesh and blood and spiritual reality. Paul refers to it as a “ministry of condemnation” or a “ministry of death” which is “from death to death” in that it is a fading reality which “veils” its own transitory nature. This ministry of death obscures or veils its own reality but it also veils the truth or the true glory which comes from the Spirit.

The thinker who unwittingly stumbled over Paul’s equation of death, emptiness and deception, with the law, was Immanuel Kant. Kant arrives at what he calls “the supreme principle of morality”[1] which he captures in his categorical imperative: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”[2] The beauty of the Kantian maxim, in his own estimate, is that it does not depend upon anything residing outside of the maxim or outside of the rational will of the one following the maxim. Kant equates the will, not with “a presupposed condition” or “any inclination” but he connects this maxim directly and only with the power of the will.[3] The problem Kant stumbles upon, is that if his maxim is completely enclosed in the will, then there is no determinate content to it, and it may give rise, not to the supreme principle of morality, but to what Kant calls radical evil. This radical evil, like its counterpart in the good, is completely enclosed in human will. “So we can call this a natural propensity to evil, and because we must always accept the guilt for it we can call it a radical innate evil in human nature, though one we have brought upon ourselves.”[4]

This radical evil is a necessary possible result of Kant’s anthropology as reason and freedom are not dependent upon anything outside of the self: “Now the human being actually finds in himself a faculty through which he distinguishes himself from all other things, and even from himself insofar as he is affected by objects, and this is reason.”[5] The faculty of reason provides simultaneous access to absolute freedom and to the choice of evil, for no reason (outside of the will). As Alenka Zupančič explains: “Evil, radical evil, is something that can be defined only in paradoxical terms as the ‘free choice of unfreedom’. In other words, here, too, a genuine negation of freedom proves impossible. The subject is free whether she wants to be or not; she is free in both freedom and unfreedom; she is free in good and in evil; she is free even where she follows nothing but the trajectory of natural necessity.”[6] Reason, the law, the categorical imperative, all arrive at a pure form or pure idea, which does not depend upon anything but itself.

Paul exposes the inherent fault or evil in this orientation to the law, locating it in the drive or desire which stands behind it. As he describes in Romans 7:7, the law gives rise to desire or covetousness: for I would not have known about coveting if the Law had not said, ‘YOU SHALL NOT COVET’” (Rom. 7:7). In Paul’s description, the law generates the desire it forbids.

The Freudian explanation or the ‘Freudian blow’ to philosophical ethics, which accords with Paul’s description, is that “what philosophy calls the moral law – and, more precisely, what Kant calls the categorical imperative – is in fact nothing other than the superego.”[7] The superego is not God, the will, or a rational moral imperative, but is the individual’s attempt to be a law unto themself. Rather than the law being inscribed on the heart, the transgressor of the law, would inscribe themselves into the position of the law, thus obtaining what the law obstructs or forbids. In his drive to freedom (from the law of the father) he enslaves himself to this law (the law of the father or superego taken up into his own identity). The moral imperative, as Freud recognized, is a “moral masochism” in which the individual subjects himself to his own “cathected” father image – which gives rise to the worst forms of evil.

The superego serves in place of the law, and proves itself in relation to the ego. Thus, Freud pictures the superego as the seat or medium of the death drive; the law or the letter kills in giving rise to a dynamic of death. As Zupančič describes, “In so far as it has its origins in the constitution of the superego, ethics becomes nothing more than a convenient tool for any ideology which may try to pass off its own commandments as the truly authentic, spontaneous and ‘honourable’ inclinations of the subject.”[8] The superego is, in Freudian terms, the attempt to be one’s own father. In Pauline terms, this orientation to the law is a displacement of the true Father.

Interestingly, Kant’s critique of the biblical notion of evil aligns with Paul’s universalizing of the problem of the law. This is not simply a historical problem which humanity inherited from its progenitors, but is the problem which every individual faces. The problem of evil is not a historical but a logical problem, though Genesis seems to present the problem as one residing at the beginning of history. For Kant, evil presents itself as part of his understanding of freedom. “The propensity to birth evil is not only the formal ground of all unlawful action, but is also itself an act (of freedom).”[9] Kant posits an original freedom at the heart of every human, but if the original innocent pair were irresistibly seduced or tricked, then this is not true freedom. For God to punish what they could not and did not have the power to resist means God is unfair.

According to Kant, humans are not subject to determinations beyond their control, yet they do evil, which demands an explanation. “Kant’s solution to this problem is that one has to recognize the propensity to evil in the very subjective ground of freedom. This ground itself has to be considered as an act of freedom [Aktus der Freiheit]. In this inaugural act, I can choose myself as evil.”[10] There is the possibility, in Kant’s own estimate, that the categorical imperative may be grounded in a perverse will, in which the service of the seeming good is actually pure evil: “It may also be called the perversity [perversitas] of the human heart, for it reverses the ethical order [of priority] among the incentives of a free will; and although conduct which is lawfully good (i.e. legal) may be found with it, yet the cast of mind is thereby corrupted at its root (so far as the moral disposition is concerned), and the man is hence designated as evil.”[11] But by Kant’s own criteria, it is not clear how the individual might sort out radical evil and the good.

Jacques Lacan adds a problematic layer onto this Kantian/Freudian dilemma, with his own categorical imperative: “Don’t compromise, don’t give way on your desire as it is fidelity to one’s desire itself that is elevated to the level of ethical duty.”[12] As Dylan Evan’s notes, “The very centre of Lacan’s thought … is the concept of desire.” Lacan argues that “desire is the essence of man” (Seminar XI, 275), and the goal of therapy is to articulate and recognize the nature of desire (Seminar I,183). Lacan’s three registers (the real, the symbolic and the imaginary) intersect with and emerge from his symbol for desire – objet petit a (Seminar XX, 87) and the conscious and unconscious dialectic occurs in and around the medium of desire (Seminar II, 228).[13] Lacan links desire with the life force and “the moral law, looked at more closely, is simply desire in its pure state.”[14] To give way on desire is to give up on life and subjectivity as the structure and dynamic which gives rise to the desire for the self is precisely the dynamic necessary for subjectivity to occur. The impossibility of desire is the necessary structuring principle against which desire (jouissance) forms.

Likewise, in Žižek’s understanding, apart from desire for self or the compulsion to obtain the self there is no self. He uses Paul’s terms for sin to describe the rise of the Subject. The “hermeneutical” procedure of isolating the letter of the law creates a frontier or “coast-like” condition between the real (with the obscene superego) and the symbolic and out of this tension jouissance or forbidden desire arises. The letter and jouissance describe the form and substance of life under the compulsion to repeat – the letter being that which “returns and repeats itself” in the life force of desire.[15] The problem is now double layered, in that the moral law, the will, duty, or reason, taken as an end in and of themselves, are without any recourse to circumstance – the world. In turn, Lacan’s jouissance (or evil desire) is indistinguishable from that desire necessary for life.

We are surrounded by examples of those who perform the most evil deeds, due to their form of the categorical imperative. Paul counts himself blameless in regard to the law as a Pharisee, and for the same reason he persecuted and killed Christians, and thus considers himself the chief of sinners. Adolph Eichmann appeals to the Kantian categorical imperative (doing his duty, obeying the law) while on trial in Jerusalem, as reason enough for killing Jews. The Marquis de Sade appeals to the categorical imperative as a call to universal sadism – each one is duty bound to pleasure himself through his neighbor. He has one of his novelistic characters propose as his maxim to murder anyone who gets in his way: “With regard to the crime of destroying one’s fellow, be persuaded it is purely hallucinatory; man has not been accorded the power to destroy; he has at best the capacity to alter forms . . . what difference does it make to her creative hand if this mass of flesh today is reproduced tomorrow in the guise of a handful of centipedes.” This is the law of universal metamorphosis, and murder is simply part of this universal principle.

Both Kant and Sade need an eternity to pose the possibility that the highest good (the holy will, or the diabolical will), though not now attainable, might be attained in an eternal future. In Sade, this clearly translates into the worst form of evil (eternal sado-masochistic torture chambers), but the point is Kant is aligned with Sade in putting into place the machine of compulsive repetition. Desire, the good will, the categorical imperative must be pursued and it must be pursued endlessly into eternity. “This then necessarily leads to the exclusion of (the possibility of) this object (the highest good or ‘diabolical evil’), an exclusion which, in turn, supports the fantasy of its realization (the immortality of the soul).”[16] The categorical imperative requires a bad infinity (no longer simply desire but drive), giving rise to the depth of the human sickness, the compulsion to repeat. Here we no longer have to do with life, but the pure form of the death drive. Kant cannot imagine that someone would want their own destruction, but Lacan pictures this, not as an extreme, but the human situation; “on a certain level every subject, average as he may be, wants his destruction, whether he wants it or not.”[17]

My point is not to refute either Sade or Kant, but to indicate how the worst forms of evil might be associated with the law. To call this “radical evil” is obviously as mistaken as to imagine that there is a highest moral principle obtainable through the will. Both are mistaken, but the lie of this mistake is the universal deception which Paul equates with the sinful orientation to law.

[1] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Edited and translated by Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 8 (Ak 4:392).

[2] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:421).

[3] Ibid, 38 (Ak 4:420).

[4] Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (Jonathan Bennett, 2017 )15. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1793.pdf

[5] Metaphysics of Morals, 68 (Ak 4:452).

[6] Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000) 39.

[7] Ibid, 1.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, 88.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, 25. Cited in Zupančič, 89.

[12] Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999) 153.

[13] Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996) 36.

[14] Zupančič, 2.

[15] Evans, 100.

[16] Zupančič, 100.

[17] Ibid.

Is The Secular Another Form of the Symbolic?: Charles Taylor and Paul’s Gospel

Charles Taylor, in A Secular Age, provides three possible meanings for secularity: (1.) a divorce between religion and politics, as public spaces have mostly been emptied of God. (2.) religious belief and practice are no longer the norm. (3.) belief in God is one option among many, and may not be the easiest option.[1] While his is the most authoritative work on the secular, and at some level is an irrefutable recounting of the emergence of the peculiarities of modernity, nonetheless each of these meanings have been challenged. As Jon Butler bluntly states it, “All three of Taylor’s “secularities” are problematic and probably wrong.”[2]

In regard to thesis (1.), Butler argues that in most of the world, including the United States, many if not all parts of Europe, most of the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and Latin America, it is hard to discern the divorce between religion and politics. In regard to thesis (2.) he argues, it is not at all clear that decline in belief typifies the United States, Latin America, the Middle East, or South Asia. Butler acknowledges there have been shifts with such things as the rise of conservative Protestantism, Pentecostalism (in Latin America) and decline in mainline denominations and “irritation” of traditional Catholicism.

Butler’s main argument is in regard to thesis (3.). He argues that Taylor has not made it clear for whom “conditions of belief” have changed, not accounting for the experience of ordinary people. In Butler’s critique, Taylor tends to slide unnoticeably between the realm of ideas (the realm of intellectuals) and experience (a shared imagination), blurring the difference. He suggests a category between or beyond belief and unbelief, namely “religious indifference.” At a time when public disbelief might result in punishment or death, of course, most everyone is going to profess belief, but this may hide indifference. “After the formal Christianization of the Roman Empire and well into the early modern period, unbelief and behaviors seemingly supportive of unbelief became criminal. Paganism and heresy; not just atheism, brought gruesome punishment and death. Long before Luther or Calvin, Church and government tortured, burned, and executed critics and reformers.”[3] The Church and its political backers had to resort to force and authority to sustain Christian belief long before the 1500’s, as belief did not seem to be nearly as irresistible as Taylor imagines. Apparently, it was not “virtually impossible not to believe.”

A wide variety of literature demonstrates, in Butler’s account, that “the Church needed the support of secular authorities to sustain even a tentative, if also powerful, hold on the religious commitment of ordinary people before 1500. Rather than belief being axiomatic, as Taylor argues, it was contingent and threatened from inside as well as outside.”[4] Belief, however, was not primarily challenged by unbelief, according to Butler, as unbelief speaks of actually caring about religion. Isn’t it as Max Weber argued, that just as some are not musically inclined most may not be religiously inclined, one way or another? “In highly different ways, Taylor misses something important about ordinary religious practice—that indifference, born of many different causes, may be more important to difficulties faced by religion in many ages, including the ages Taylor insists were axiomatic for religion in the West, than unbelief and the formal expressions of irreligion that attract great thinkers.”[5]

Taylor’s project may accurately trace the history of ideas and the thoughts of intellectuals and those working within a philosophical tradition, but this does not necessarily capture the experience of the majority.

Of course, belief; unbelief; and skepticism have been the stuff of philosophical argument for centuries. But at best, indifference receives little attention and even less analysis. It shows up mainly in accounts of ordinary beliefs, attitudes, and behavior and usually in brief discussions of lay absence from religious observance, whether formal, as in church or synagogue or mosque services, or informal, as in discussion of popular leisure or otherwise ‘secular’ culture. Typically, absence, and certainly indifference, are noted, often with some alarm, but little dissected.[6]

Part of what is at stake in the reading of secularity, is what to make of the supposed post-secular. If the secular was equated with a detached rationalism, mind/body dualism, individualism, the privatization of religion (connected to individualism), and these modern categories are now collapsing in the post-modern age, does this mean there is an opening for religion and God? Or in fact, is the indication (with Butler and others) that there was always something else, perhaps something deeper at work, which secularism and its critique only touch upon? If this is the case, then the emergence of the religious in this post-secular age, raises questions about what this might mean.

In a Pauline critique of the human predicament, the shared human problem is not irreligion, levels of religious belief, or the possibility of believing otherwise (Taylor’s secularization thesis). In spite of the Protestant notion that belief or unbelief is fundamental, which in turn has given rise to conceptions of the secular (with its notions of various dualisms and private religion), Paul does not locate the fundamental human problem with religion/irreligion or belief and unbelief. For Paul the fundamental human problem is bondage to deception due to the orientation to the law. Whether the law is from God, from nature, or from the angels, is not Paul’s concern, but the problem is this symbolic order, taken as primary, creates a gap, alienating humans from God and enslaving them to a lie. The law is not itself the problem, but the primacy given to the law. This law, or symbolic order, might be connected to the Jewish law, though Paul is specifically arguing this is not simply a Jewish problem but the human problem. In turn, the divisions and dualisms that mark every human (Jew/Gentile, slave/free, male/female) due to their entanglement with various symbolic orders, are addressed by Jesus Christ.

Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan are among those who recognize that Paul is engaging a universal and fundamental predicament, in which the human Subject is structured by this orientation. Lacanian theory is committed to the “reality” of Paul’s description of the problem, eschewing Paul’s picture of the solution in Jesus Christ. The result of this orientation, in Paul’s description, is not unlike the isolated individualism, the evacuation of the reality of God, and the creation of a polity (the city of man, this dark world, the principalities and powers) described in Taylor’s version of the secular. None of which is to deny the value of Taylor’s project, and is even an affirmation of several of the fundamental trues he has hit upon. It is simply to qualify and set this understanding in a larger frame, along with Butler, to suggest that the impetus behind the modern shares a genealogy that is universal.

The danger is that to isolate the secular as a peculiar epoch in human history, is to pit the secular against the religious in a dialectic that is not only factually wrong, but misses the manner in which the symbolic, be it sacred or secular, displaces the divine reality. That is, the conception of secularism may be the peculiar thing about the secular, and not the underlying reality called secularism. This concept is lent a force that characterizes the human tendency to assign primacy to the law or the symbolic. The danger is in reifying the secular as if it has the power claimed on its behalf, as if it is the law ordering human reality.

This shows itself in the slowly evolving undermining of Paul’s radical gospel. Where Paul pictured the Christian believer as entering a new society in the church, where the old reigning socio-cultural order does not pertain, the rise of the “secular” is simultaneous with a caving in to the primacy of this order. For the first Christians, Christ was Lord, and it was understood that professing and acting on this faith may mean death at the hands of the state. Then in a Constantinian Christianity there was a divide, with “the religious” referring to monks, friars and nuns, devoted full time to the religious life, as opposed to the “secular clergy,” who would have to occupy two distinct realms. [7]

Skipping forward 1000 years, Henry VIII becomes head of the state church “with the power of the national state embodied in the king (the state-church). It was to the King’s ‘laws and decrees’ that the subjects made absolute submission, not to the Bishop of Rome.” This in turn led to a direct contradiction of Paul’s picture of freedom from the law. Obedience to the king was equated with obedience to God, and was thus an acting out of holiness. No longer is there a departure from the reigning social order but subsumption of the church into this order. “Obedience of a servant to a master, of a wife to a husband, of a pupil to a teacher, of a subject to a prince, of lower degree to higher degree, was analogous to the obedience of a Christian to God. The whole deferential social order was wrapped in divinity and teleologically determined by God’s scheme of redemption.”[8] This church/state order is, after all, “ordained by God” (in this understanding).

The American experiment attempted to separate what Henry and history had welded together, but this separation was based on the dualism between body and soul, the same dualism which had coopted Paul’s gospel. William Penn formulated the difference in his separation of church and state:

Religion and Policy, or Christianity and Magistracy, are two distinct things, have two different ends, and may be fully prosecuted without respect one to the other; the one is for purifying, and cleaning the soul, and fitting it for a future state; the other is for Maintenance and Preserving of Civil Society, in order to the outward conveniency and accommodation of men in this World. A Magistrate is a true and real Magistrate, though not a Christian; as well as a man is a true and real Christian, without being a Magistrate.[9]

Serving God is an inward affair, and obeying the magistrate or being a magistrate in no way impinges on this inward reality. According to John Locke, “The care of Souls cannot belong to the Civil Magistrate because his power consists only in outward force: But true and saving Religion consists in the inward persuasion of the Mind, without which nothing can be acceptable to God.”[10]

Thus in the American experiment the state controlled the body, and religion was concerned with the inward self, and the two realms do not overlap. What this meant in practice is that the church was consigned to a “spiritual realm” which was thought not to pertain to the political. “People make an ‘inward judgement’ about truth and salvation, and on such matters one cannot be compelled to believe by outward force. There is this assumption of the inner mind as distinct from the outer body, religion being aligned with the inner working of the mind, and civil society with the outer, with the body. The magistrate has nothing to do with religion in this sense, because it is harmless to the state.”[11] It works in a way similar to State Shinto in Japan, in which one Christian described being forcibly convinced that Shintoism and honoring the Emperor were non-religious, and then he says, we were all forced to bow to the Emperor as part of Christian worship. So too in a Christianity which concedes the realm of the body to the state, obeying the laws of the state is at once non-religious and bodily, and a means of coercing obedience to “God’s ordained order.”

Though the Americans attempted to throw off the domination of the state over religion, they did so in part, by conceding to the state the bodily, outward, and coercive (violent) realms. Certainly, there was a focus on the centrality of the individual, her rights, and access to the natural law of rationality, and this along with the role of religion is a continuing tension. This might be a peculiarity of the secular, but it is a peculiarity based upon the lie of absolute individualism (an isolated, self-determined autonomy), accompanied by notions that inward and outward, body and soul, mind and body, church and state, inhabit separate realms. It is the lie the gospel would expose, but more than that it is the unreality from which it delivers.

[1] My summary of the list from Jon Butler, “Disquieted History in A Secular Age” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Michael Warner, Jonathan VanAntwerpen, Craig Calhoun, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) 195.

[2] Butler, 195.

[3] Butler, 200.

[4] Butler, 204.

[5] Butler, 209.

[6] Butler, 209.

[7] Timothy Fitzgerald, “Encompassing Religion, privatized religions and the invention of modern politics” in Religion and the Secular: Historical and Colonial Formation, Timothy Fitzgerald ed. (London: Equinox Publishing, 2007) 220.

[8] Fitzgerald, 224.

[9] Penn, William. 1680. The Great Question to be Considered by the King, and this approaching Parliament, briefly proposed. and modestly discussed: (to wit) How far Religion is concerned in Policy or Civil Government, and Policy in Religion? With an Essay rightly to distinguish these great interests, upon the Disquisition of which a sufficient Basis is proposed for the firm Settlement of these Nations, to the Most probable satisfaction of the Several Interests and Parties therein. (By one who desires to give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. and to God the things that are God’s.] (microfiche). Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland. Quoted in Fitzgerald, 211.

[10] John Locke, 1689. A Letter Concerning Toleration, (2nd edn. London) 11. Quoted in Fitzgerald, 214.

[11] Fitzgerald, 214.

Escaping the Meaning that Kills

“For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep.” (1 Cor. 11:30).

We normally think of meaning in positive terms, as that which gives a narrative whole and goal to our lives, but what if the story that shapes our lives is killing us. A punishing, angry God, like a father who can never be pleased, a system of acquisition and consumption which can never satisfy, an isolated sense of self focused on autonomy and choice, may provide a religious, capitalistic, individualistic system of values but the system itself may be diseased. Meaning systems are necessary for survival, but they are also that which create the environment of life, potentially producing stresses and traumas as part of the system, which science is more and more linking with the increase of disease.

The first step in recognizing the role of culture, meaning, religion, and belief in physical health is mind/body holism, in which we instinctively and practically recognize that the body and mind cannot be split. What we believe, think, and experience, leave an imprint on our physical health. Physicians, such as Dr. Gabor Maté, are beginning to explore the relationship between trauma and repression and the increase of a variety of diseases. Rather than simply treating the physical symptoms (the physical disease) he began to recognize that the root cause of disease can be linked to stress or trauma. Maté realized, as coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver Hospital, that patients with chronic illness often shared an emotional history. “Similar dynamics and ways of coping were present in the people who came to us for palliation with cancers or degenerative neurological processes like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.” In his private practice the same pattern appeared in patients with “multiple sclerosis, inflammatory ailments of the bowel such as ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease, chronic fatigue syndrome, autoimmune disorders, bromyalgia, migraine, skin disorders, endometriosis and many other conditions.”[1]

There is even a new field of medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, tracing the link between the brain and the immune system. Emotional makeup and stress have been linked to diseases such as scleroderma, and the vast majority of rheumatic disorders, the inflammatory bowel disorders, diabetes, and multiple sclerosis.[2] Maté cites a study of medical students under the pressure of examination, demonstrating that their immune system was suppressed. He notes that loneliness has been shown to have similar results in psychiatric inpatients, concluding: “Even if no further research evidence existed—though there is plenty —one would have to consider the long-term effects of chronic stress. The pressure of examinations is obvious and short term, but many people unwittingly spend their entire lives as if under the gaze of a powerful and judgmental examiner whom they must please at all costs.”[3] His description verges on the theological, with certain forms of Christianity and other religions, projecting onto God the role of examiner, making all of life a final exam. If the problem is not religion per se, it may be we do not have emotionally satisfying relationships which “recognize or honour our deepest needs.”[4] At the deepest level, the level of experience and meaning, we may not recognize that we are filtering the world through an understanding which is spiritually, psychologically and physically, sickening.

As has been widely noted, our culture is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness. An article in JAMA journal of psychiatry refers to this epidemic of loneliness as responsible for the death of 1 American every 5.5 minutes due to suicide and opioid overdose. An annual mortality of 162,000 Americans is attributable to loneliness (exceeding the number of deaths from cancer or stroke), which is a term that, according to the British historian Fay Bound Alberti, did not exist in the English language until 1800.[5] It is not simply that people are not connecting with others, but the very notion of self is disconnected. As Charles Taylor describes it, “We are ‘buffered’ selves.” We conceive and experience the self, not as in traditional societies as porous and interconnected, but in an inner mental space.[6] This self-conception creates the condition for developing acute loneliness. The very concept of self, pits the self against others, and even within the self our mind is divided, with the inner self in conflict with the outer self or the “body.”

Meanwhile, theologically inclined psychologists have developed the new field called Neurotheology, which recognizes, not only does our understanding of God shape our mental health, it shapes our brain as well. Recent studies in this new field show that the view that God is angry, punishing, or loving, directly impacts the growth and shape of the brain. Andrew Newberg, a leading researcher in the new field, has scanned the brains of praying nuns, chanting Sikhs and meditating Buddhists so as to demonstrate the relationship between the brain and religious experience.[7] Timothy R. Jennings, a medical doctor, in The God Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life,compares the impact on the brain of an angry or loving concept of God.[8] As he notes, “Brain-imaging studies have demonstrated that the more time a person spends in communion with the God of love, the more developed the ACC (the anterior cingulate cortex) becomes. Not only that, the person experiences decreases in stress hormones, blood pressure, heart rate and risk of untimely death. Even in our mortal and defective bodies, love is healing. Conversely, the more time spent contemplating an angry, wrathful, fear-inducing deity, the more damage to the brain and the more rapidly one’s health declines, leading to early death.”[9] Not only does this demonstrate a mind/body connection, but implicitly, a God/human connection of expansive proportions (a point I return to below).

It is not simply one’s view of God, as religion may or may not enter in to our understanding and experience of reality. The tendency may be to project an image onto God, as an extension of the superego – the punishing father figure who personifies a retributive legal order, such that it is not doctrine or belief about God, but an inner bent or pattern which takes precedent. Getting rid of a punishing God, for example, through atheism may (and in my experience, often does) simply unleash an obscene superego figure which is beyond religious control. Ex-believers may continue to feel the punishing effects of the God they do not believe in. The law or father-figure of the conscience, is not subject to denial. The real issue is not so much God, but how to get rid of an oppressive experience of self and the world, which may or may not be experienced as religion.

Psychotheology, as I have developed the term, fuses Lacanian psychology with a (fuller) reading of Paul, so that psychoanalysis finds the completion of its categories and the resolution of the human predicament in theology. The Lacanian understanding develops what Paul calls “the body of death” which is the isolated, interior notion of the self, but Lacan does not counter this understanding in the way that Paul does, with being joined to “the body of Christ.” As a result, for Lacan, death drive or the superego is a constant factor in a person’s life. The only possibility is to manipulate this force for death, but there is no deliverance. As a result, the isolated sense of self, the inner dialectic between ego and superego, or between the law of the mind and the law of the body, is a permanent condition.

In Pauline terms, the “body of death” pits “the members of my body” against “the law of my mind” and this makes “me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members” (7.23-24). The body of death does its work as the body itself, with its members, stands outside the law of the mind or the symbolic and this constitutes the work of death (the death drive, in Lacanian terminology). Meaning systems, as we have them, take effect within this system (translated into religion or economics or personal striving) between the ego and superego (or the law). One scores points, gets ahead, establishes themselves, according to the zero-sum game of the score-keeper (God, the superego, the cultural imperative). The symbolic of this body of death is the very substance of meaning, and to escape this system is to escape meaning as our world constitutes it.

As Paul Hessert has described, the encounter with Christ brings an end, or should, to meaning as we know it.[10] But of course, the opposite is also often the case, as Christ is made to support our meaning systems (be they legal atonement theories, nationalism, capitalism, or some other measure of success). These systems are “meaningful” according to the point or end toward which they take us. For example, education is only judged meaningful, if at graduation a job is secured – otherwise it may be judged meaningless. Christianity may be meaningful in this context, as it serves to bolster the goals of society – a good education, a good job, a happy family. What possible purpose for a faith that does not serve, or perhaps interrupts, the accepted pattern of meaning.

As Hessert notes though, the New Testament describes culture has having an “endemic flaw” summed up in the term covetousness. The greed or desire of culture is its shaping force and value system, which according to the New Testament is definitive: ”I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people; I did not at all mean with the immoral people of this world, or with the covetous and swindlers, or with idolaters, for then you would have to go out of the world” (1 Cor. 5:9–10). The world is constituted by covetousness, and to be shaped by the world is to partake of this meaning system (see Eph. 5:3, 5; Col. 3:5; 1 Thess. 2:5, Heb. 13:5, 2 Pet. 2:3). This is what belief embraces and what unbelief cannot begin to fathom, as unbelief is founded in the meaning system immediately available. As Hessert puts it, “Covetousness names the dynamic of the meaningful life of self-realization, self-development.”[11] In Paul’s terms, covetousness (as in Romans 7:7) constitutes an “ethos” or orientation to the law, in which the I is ever striving and never achieving. The demands for attaining and improving are constant, as there is no achieving the illusive object behind the law. Paul calls it “the body of death” as the alienated individual in relationship to self is involved in a deadly struggle. The body or self is objectified, something one has, rather than what one is. The body is a means to fulfillment (or not). “There is no choice within the culture-body between self-fulfillment and non-self-fulfillment.” The choice is only “how self-fulfillment is to be –achieved and expressed” and the body provides the instrumentation. “In the ‘body of death,’ . . . the life of the body is only ancillary to its parts (‘members’).”[12] Modern medicine has taken this understanding to the extreme, picturing the body in terms of a mechanical apparatus (e.g., the heart as a pump, the brain as a computer, etc.,) and like much of theology, it does not address the root of sickness.

Paul’s other usage of “body” pictures not the individual, but the corporate body of the church, or the body of Christ. “For even as the body is one and yet has many members, and all the members of the body, though they are many, are one body, so also is Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12). This resurrection body exceeds the possibility of meaning provided in the body of death – “resurrection is not a possibility of the body of death, as though that body destined for death might have an entirely different order of life hidden within it. While from the standpoint of the body of death there may be renewed life, there is no resurrection, no other life. Even imagination, bound to meaning, fails at this point.” Paul (in Romans 6) pictures resurrection life as death. There is a dying to meaning. “This death is not the transition to another ‘life’ within the body of death, another set of possibilities (‘life beyond the grave’). It is not the death that meaning is able to encompass and transcend. The death associated with resurrection is total and final death.”[13] In this ultimate relinquishment of meaning, resurrection occurs.

As Christ describes it, this is a completely different environment: “Make your home in me, as I make mine in you. As a branch cannot bear fruit all by itself, but must remain part of the vine, neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me, with me in him, bears fruit in plenty; for cut off from me you can do nothing” (John 15:1-5, JB). This different environing does not depend on its members, on the body, or on the branches, for life. In the body of death, the body borrows its life from its members. The members of the physical body or other members of the cultural body provide life, and delivers it to others. In Paul’s imagery, it is only through being incorporated into the body of Christ, that the eye, the hand, the foot, or a particular individual has access to life. “Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27).

Thus, in the celebration and realization of being incorporated into this body, to turn to consumptive desire is a return to the body of death – which is quite literally, in Paul’s estimate, deadly: “Therefore when you meet together, it is not to eat the Lord’s Supper, for in your eating each one takes his own supper first; and one is hungry and another is drunk” (1 Cor. 11:20–21). They have turned to a covetous biting and devouring one another. “For he who eats and drinks, eats and drinks judgment to himself if he does not judge the body rightly. For this reason many among you are weak and sick, and a number sleep” (1 Cor. 11:29–30). They have traded life for death, and this impacts them bodily/spiritually/physically.

[1]Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress (Alfred a Knopf, 2003) 57-58.

[2] Maté, 47.

[3] Maté, 54-55.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Dilip V Jeste, Ellen E Lee, Stephanie Cacioppo, “Battling the Modern Behavioral Epidemic of Loneliness: Suggestions for Research and Interventions,” JAMA psychiatry, 77(6) https://escholarship.org/content/qt47n6790s/qt47n6790s.pdf?t=q7c0kj

[6] Charles Taylor, “Buffered and porous selves” https://tif.ssrc.org/2008/09/02/buffered-and-porous-selves/

[7] Andrew Newberg, https://scienceofmind.com/5-steps-enlightenment/

[8] Timothy R. Jennings, The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life (InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition).

[9] Jennings, 42.

[10] Paul Hessert, Christ and the End of Meaning: The Theology of Passion (Rockport, Massachusetts: Element Inc., 1993).

[11] Hessert, 190.

[12] Hessert, 194.

[13] Hessert, 197.

Bulgakov’s “The Tragedy of Philosophy” as Entry into Sophiology

MAN WAS CREATED IN THE IMAGE AND LIKENESS OF God. This means that the image of the Holy Trinity is imprinted upon every part of his spiritual nature. Let us make man in our image, after our likeness (Gen. 1:26). So says the word of God, precisely pointing, by means of this plural number, to the trihypostaticity of the Divinity and the triunity of the image of God – which after all, is also the human image.”[1] Sergius Bulgakov

To attempt to describe the atmosphere or texture of Sergius[2] Bulgakov’s theology in doctrinal terms is in danger of missing the warmth and spiritual excitement of his theological project, and yet the attempt to simply restate or summarize his theology without reference to its doctrinal significance also falls short, as he is demonstrating a revolutionary shift in the very tenor of his writing. Rather than writing analogously about God (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) he presumes to speak directly of divine love (Sophia). There is no presumed gap or distance between creator and creation as Jesus Christ brings together the divine and human (Bulgakov sees Maximus as central to this development).[3] He is doing theology in a different key, and this shows up even (or especially) in his early work laying out his Trinitarian Sophiology in contrast to the philosophical project. Even as he describes the particular failings of philosophy, the failures illustrate the necessity of the Trinitarian Personhood reflected in the human image. His philosophical critique is so interwoven with his personalism and Sophiology, that this may be the place (his The Tragedy of Philosophy) to start with Bulgakov. Rather than beginning with being (or with presumptions of the economic and immanent Trinity, his description of the western failure characterized by Thomas Aquinas) or with reason, Bulgakov’s starting premise is the Trinity or a trinitarian holism necessary for reason, which cannot be subjected or reduced to reason but apart from which reason fails.

Presumed throughout is the eternality of the humanity of Christ, so that the truth of the intra-Trinitarian relationship is the truth of God and humans, and there are not two realms of truth (the presumption not only of philosophy – e.g., noumena/phenomena, act/being, – but of western theology, e.g., economic and immanent Trinity, Creator and creation, as a divide). There is one necessary realm of truth which reveals itself in human personhood, pointing to the Divine Person. What gets obscured, according to Bulgakov, and what he aims to recover is the focus on personhood (the person of God revealed in Christ and taken up in the human image) and the manner in which the person of Jesus Christ, in particular, bridges or brings together the antinomies of creator and creation (as developed in his Sophiology).[4] He presumes to develop a Chalcedonian orthodoxy (on the order of Maximus) but to more completely illustrate and define its parameters.

His Sophiology develops as an overcoming of the antinomies of reason as expressed in philosophy, which provides a platform or insight (negative though it is), as spelled out in The Tragedy of Philosophy. The book traces the three characteristic mistakes found in philosophy, against the background of a Trinitarian theology and dogma, which in the description sounds fairly dry, but in the execution traces psychoanalytic and experiential reality such that human thought, perception, and experience, correctly perceived, is integrated directly with the reality of the Trinity. Philosophy is a tragedy but it is a tragedy awaiting and pointing toward the particulars of a Trinitarian solution.

Bulgakov applies Trinitarian theology, very much in the pattern of Paul in Romans 7, in that the tripartite reality of human experience and the human subject, absent the Trinity, does not hold together, but chapter 7 of Romans may be the necessary prologue to the heights of chapter 8, and so too Bulgakov’s philosophical engagement opens the path to his Sophiology. Throughout Bulgakov’s tracing of the problem, the light of the answer (the equivalent of Rom. 8) shines through. As Paul depicts in Romans, one might begin with the law, with the ego, or with the body of death, but what is specifically missing, as detailed in Romans 8, is the Trinity. The negative moment points to its singular resolution in Christ. Paul fills in the functioning of the human subject as a participation in Christ, by which we realize God as Father, and thus have life and being in the Spirit. Bulgakov carries out the same project in his depiction of the three-fold mistake of philosophy, and of course this Threeness is that of the Trinity absent this acknowledgement.

The philosophical project (and the human project) is always striving to bring together that which, outside of God in Christ through the Holy Spirit, cannot be made to cohere. Philosophy begins with a basic mistake, the premise of his book, in its focus on human choice (Greek hairesis), so that philosophy is by definition a heresy. All philosophy bears the singular characteristic of “arbitrary election, the choice, of some single thing or part instead of the whole: that is precisely a one sidedness.”[5] Rather than beginning with the reality of God in Christ, philosophy begins with choices or perspectives or an elected portion of this reality. Rather than beginning with the reality of God and extrapolating reasonably from this reality, philosophy begins with reason and attempts to describe reality (inductively or deductively). As a result, there is a philosophical drive to reduce plurality (all things) to a singular thing (monothematism).

He raises the question as to why this should be, and answers, “It is the spirit of system and the pathos of system; and a system is nothing other than the reduction of many and all into one, and conversely, the deduction of all and many out of one.”[6] He describes the drive as the human sickness or a manifestation of original sin. As the title of this chapter indicates, “The Nature of Thought,” this chapter and the first portion of the book is about fallen human thought as evinced in philosophy, but philosophy is simply a case in point of the human predicament. The philosopher “has desired a system. In other words, he has wished to create a (logical) world out of himself, out of his own principle – ‘you shall be as gods’ – but such a logical deduction of the world is not possible for a human being.”[7] The philosopher, like every human, has taken up the appeal of the serpent, to make of the dialectic of knowledge a replacement for living reality. Reason or philosophy as its own origin and end betrays signs of the human malaise: “Sickness, corruption, the perversion of all human existence which presented itself in original sin, also, in other words, afflicts reason, and makes it impossible for reason to gain access to the tree of heavenly knowledge, since access is denied by the fiery sword of the cherubim – the antinomies.”[8] Philosophy puts on display, not a personal pride, but the objective role of hubris, in that the philosopher, like the legalist, has no sense of the limits of the system. This then gives rise to the contradictions or antinomies of the system.

In Pauline terms, this starting point reduces God to the system of the law. In psychoanalytic terms (which is to say the same thing in different terms), the human sickness is to interpolate the self (and with the self, all of reality) into the symbolic order. The law, the logos, the symbolic, or philosophy, would serve as its own end, displacing the divine Logos with a human word. Bulgakov traces the philosophical impetus, but he has in mind the general human orientation toward deception, violence and sin: “Logical continuity, or, what amounts to the same thing, the continuous logical deduction of all from one, making the whole system circle around a single centre which can be passed through in any direction, and which admits of no hiatus or discontinuity of any kind: this is the task which human thought naturally and inevitably strives to complete, not stopping short of violence, and self-deception, of evasions and illusions.”[9]

Logical monism, or the attempt to bridge subject and object, subject and predicate, noumena and phenomena, or to create a synthesis out of the antinomies, demands a full investment of faith (a violent bringing down of reality to fit it into the system). Every philosophy “dimly or distinctly, instinctively or consciously, timidly or militantly” claims “to be the absolute philosophy, and each of which regards its own sketch of what is as the system of the world.”[10] Hegel’s system is the characteristic illustration of overcoming the antinomies: “Hegel – and in his person, all philosophy” supposes it can bind reality into a system.[11] It presupposes what is impossible – to begin from itself, or generate from itself what can only come from what truly exists. The impossibility shows itself in the characteristic failure of philosophy, of taking one arm of tripartite reality as an end in itself.

As Bulgakov describes, philosophy will choose either “(1) hypostasis, or personhood; (2) the latter’s idea or ideal form, logos, thought; (3) substantial being as the unity of all moments or states of being, as the self-actualizing whole.” These three philosophical moments can be summed up in the formula, “I am Something (potentially everything).”[12] This is a true enough statement, but philosophy “incessantly” cuts apart this indisseverable statement. “Philosophizing thought produces heresies through the arbitrariness of these disseverations, and through its choices of discrete beginnings; and the style of philosophizing is determined by the way in which this dissection is made.”[13] Philosophy takes what exists and that which is a necessary component of human consciousness and attempts to enter into this reality by segmenting and privileging a particular component.

The classic example is Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” The thinking thing is privileged over being. Being is subject to question and doubt, and is presumed to be determinate only through the predicate of thought, the second I. The first I and the second, (the thinking thing and that which exists as the predicate) are only conjoined in thought. This presumption cuts off the subject from its predicate and copula, as if the subject precedes predication and existence. Descartes is using his formula as a foundation to arrive at the certain proof of his existence and the existence of God, performing a dissection of thought in order to reduce it to the parameters of reason.

In one form or another, this dissection of subject, predicate, and being indicates the history of philosophy. “Every philosophical system . . . is governed by an attempt of this kind: the subject, or the copula, or the predicate is announced as the single beginning, and everything is made to derive from it or to lead towards it. Such a ‘deduction,’ whether of the subject from the predicate, of the predicate from the subject, or of both from the copula, in fact presents philosophy with its principal task, and, thereby presents an insoluble difficulty to philosophical thought, which strives toward monism, strives to reduce everything to a first unity, no matter what.”[14] Bulgakov’s book is mostly dedicated to proving this point in three philosophical moments or movements, through engaging a wide range of philosophical thought, but focused most intensely on Immanuel Kant, Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Johann Gottlieb Fichte. (I will return, in future posts, to the specifics of his proofs).

Though Bulgakov is focused on philosophy’s denial or dissection of a triadic unity and the tragedy which results, the same story could be told in the register of psychoanalysis or theology. The psyche strives to unify the self, experienced as mind and body, or as the objective I in the mirror and the I of experience. For Jacques Lacan, the Cartesian dilemma is the human dilemma, in that every subject is split by language. The enunciating subject is split from the subject of the statement (the enunciated) and thus the subject is inescapably split or castrated by language. By taking up and defining the self through language, there occurs a three-way split between the symbolic (language), the ego or imaginary, and the dissonance of nonbeing or death drive created in the relation between the two. Here, the tragedy is not a philosophical or metaphysical mistake, but the human sickness and neurosis which arises from trying to make the self a synthesis out of an antithesis. The compulsion to repeat, the death drive, human violence toward the other and self-destructiveness, can be traced to the psychoanalytic sickness.

The point is universalized in Paul’s use of the law, which pits the subject against itself. “For what I am doing, I do not understand; for I am not practicing what I would like to do, but I am doing the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). The philosophical and psychoanalytical is captured in Paul’s depiction of the I split by the law, but Paul includes the religious, the legal, the sexual and the social, or every aspect of the human predicament. What Bulgakov claims about philosophical systems seems to be a particular instance of Paul’s point, that could be described as the drive to a legal monism, in which the law is the system of the world, and the split between the two ‘I’s (Jew/Gentile, male/female, slave/free, mind/flesh, body/spirit) caused by the law would also be resolved through the law.

Bulgakov, like Paul, will not so much resolve the dilemma of the split as address it through the reality of the Trinity. His presumption is that humans are created in the image of God and it is only on the basis of the divine image that the human image can be approached (if not comprehended). Like the Divine Person, the human person cannot be defined. “The essence of the hypostasis consists precisely in the fact that it is indefinable and indescribable; it stands beyond the limits of the world and of the concept, even though it continually reveals itself in them.”[15] It is not that the self cannot be named, but the I is not merely the subject of thought and reason, but thought and reason arise from the subject. The subject, transcendent as it may be, is revealed through the immanence of its predicates. “The subject, the hypostasis, is always revealed, always expresses itself, in the predicate. It goes without saying that the hypostasis in this sense is not the psychological I, psychological subjectivity, which already defines the hypostasis as a predicate, not as a subject.”[16]

The life force or spirit of the human subject is no more definable than the divine Spirit. Just as the Son bears the image of the Father, so too every child of God is defined in this relationship: “Eternity belongs to the hypostasis; it is eternal in the same sense as eternal God, who Himself breathed His own Spirit into humanity at the latter’s creation. The human being is the son of God and a created god; the image of eternity is an inalienable and indelible part of him.”[17] Humankind bears eternity in the image, and Bulgakov suggests that even suicide is not actually aimed at annihilating or extinguishing the I (“suicide attempts represent a kind of philosophical misunderstanding, and are directed not at the I itself, but only at the way in which it exists, directed not at the subject, but at the predicate”). As Bulgakov sums up, “The hypostatic I is the philosophical and grammatical Subject of all predicates; its life is this predicate, endless in its breadth and depth.”[18] The Father, Son, and Spirit, are the reality of subject, predicate, and copula of being. The Father is revealed through the Son, and this lived out realization is the work of the Spirit. This participation in the divine is the reality behind human thought and experience, and even a failure of thought points to its completion in this reality.

[1] Sergij Bulgakov, The Tragedy of Philosophy (Philosophy & Dogma), trans. by Stephen Churchyard (Brooklyn: Angelico Press, 2020) 91. Many thanks Jim, for the gift of this book. It is a key into Bulgakov.

[2] Or Sergij, or Sergei, among some 9 possible variants.

[3] See Jonathan R. Seiling, From Antinomy to Sophiology: Modern Russian Religious Consciousness and Sergei Bulgakov’s Critical Appropriation of German Idealism (PhD Dissertation, Toronto School of Theology, 2008) 229-233.

[4] Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Mysterium Paschale, (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990), 35. Cited in Katy Leamy, “A Comparison of the Kenotic Trinitarian Theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Sergei Bulgakov” (2012). (Dissertations (2009 -). Paper 211. http://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/211), 36.

[5] Bulgakov, 3.

[6] Ibid. To miss this point will not only amount to missing the thesis of the book, but is the characteristic theological mistake. The issue is on the order of that of Jordan Wood in his departure from David Bentley Hart, or the tradition through Origen to Maximus, taken up by Bulgakov. The antinomies of heaven and earth, God and human, subject and object, are only resolved in the concrete case of the God/Man Jesus Christ. Reason cannot overcome these antinomies but Christ (in reality), in who he is, brings them together. Thus, reason begins with Jesus Christ as ground. Otherwise, it is not clear what a subject or reason might be.

[7] Ibid., 5.

[8] Ibid, 7.

[9] Ibid, 3.

[10] Ibid, 3-4. Bulgakov has passed through commitment to Marxist Hegelianism, then with his conversion and the Russian Revolution, at this writing, he is without a job or a library in Crimea.

[11] Ibid, 6.

[12] Ibid, 9.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid, 10.

[15] Ibid, 11.

[16] Ibid, 12.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Ibid.

Embodied Souls, Ensouled Bodies: Karl Barth as Resolution to Sexual and Body/Soul Dualism

I presume sin impacts humans not only in the experience of alienation but in conceiving all things in an alienated manner. That is, the failure of humanity becomes the singular truth, the only kind of humanity we know, and it is presumed there is no alternative to antagonism and dualism. Soul/body, male/female, or heaven and earth are taken to be, not only the historical understanding, but the singular reality. In psychoanalysis this shows itself in Lacanian psychoanalysis in that the antagonism structuring the Subject is presumed to be a necessity. Alienation and antagonism produce the Subject without possibility of qualification. One might manipulate this antagonism (death drive), but best of all, perhaps through therapy, one will be resolved to living with it. The insight of psychoanalysis, is that the various historical dualisms, centered on soul and body or male and female (but including every aspect of what it means to be human including life and death, language and meaning, heaven and earth) arise from a singular structure within the human psyche.

Psychoanalysis locates the antagonism within the individual in interpenetrating categories such as ego and superego, but most dualisms have as their goal the presumed capacity to rid oneself of the negative, as is illustrated with male/female. Male is associated with the soulish, the rational, or the spiritual, while female is equated with the body, the natural, and the passions. As the church father Jerome describes it, “As long as woman is for birth and children, she is different from man as body is from soul. But if she wishes to serve Christ more than the world, then she will cease to be a woman and will be called man.”[1] Every human must strive for the masculine and the Christ-like and aim to shed the fleshly-feminine, but clearly the female sex starts with a disadvantage. As Ambrose writes: “She who does not believe is a woman and should be designated by the name of her bodily sex, whereas she who believes progresses to complete manhood, to the measure of the adulthood of Christ. She then does without wordly name, gender of body, youthful seductiveness, and garrulousness of old age.”[2] What is at play, in even Christian texts, is the notion that the masculine is abstract, spiritual, soulish, and universal, and the feminine is bound by the body. As Daniel Boyarin lays out the opposed pairs, man is to woman as substance is to accident, form to matter, univocity to division and difference, soul to body, meaning to language, signified to signifier, natural to artificial, and essential to ornamental.[3]

The psychoanalytic insight is to assign what Boyarin and others have concluded is universal to the human sickness. The details and historical permutations of the sickness may vary (Neo-Platonism, Adam and Eve, Judaism, or Christianity, have been blamed) but what Lacanian psychoanalysis attempts is a diagnosis of the human disease which explains how humans are traumatized by death. Death resistance as castration, the Oedipus complex, the focus on human sexuality, the entry and orientation within law and language, may or may not be right in the details, but what it incorporates within its explanation is the shape of male/female or soul/body antagonism and how this constitutes the human Subject and her world. What it does not do is provide any path beyond the problem.

Karl Barth provides a different (simpler?) approach to assessing both the universal human disease and its resolution, in that Christ serves as definition of what it means to be human. Barth does not start with the phenomena of the human as it may present itself to the anthropologist or the psychologist, as this will only lead to one going astray, “especially as they always arouse at this point the burning interest which powerful inner contradictions always bring to light.”[4] What Barth might be referring to specifically is not clear, but he has hit upon the truth of the development of modern psychoanalysis in its focus on contradiction (life versus death, male versus female, body versus soul, or the imaginary against the symbolic) as the primary focus of study and interest. The turn to Jesus Christ as model is simultaneously a turn from the supposed normativity of this antagonism.

Barth is also departing from traditional Christian dogma, which begins with man’s existence in the abstract and then applies this understanding to Christ. As he points out, this has resulted in a “certain one-sidedness,” referring perhaps, to the sort of reflection found in Ambrose and Jerome. The downgrading and oppression of women and the privileging of the soul, represents a majority position in the history of the church. Barth, by making Christ definitive of what it means to be human, is setting theology on a different foundation than the “older dogmatics.” The body/soul, male/female, and mind/body dualism can now be approached and potentially resolved in Jesus Christ. At a minimum, Barth provides a largely untapped point of departure.

The ontological determination of humanity is grounded in the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. So long as we select any other starting point for our study, we shall reach only the phenomena of the human. We are condemned to abstractions so long as our attention is riveted as it were on other men, or rather on man in general, as if we could learn about real man from a study of man in general, and in abstraction from the fact that one man among all others is the man Jesus. In this case we miss the one Archimedean point given us beyond humanity, and therefore the one possibility of discovering the ontological determination of man. Theological anthropology has no choice in this matter. It is not yet or no longer theological anthropology if it tries to pose and answer the question of the true being of man from any other angle.[5]

Barth derives his concept of what it means to be human from the singular man, Jesus Christ. In his volume on the doctrine of creation, Christ is the “Archimedean point” for understanding not only humanity but all of creation. Barth, through a more circuitous route, lands close to the Maximian formula, “creation is incarnation.” Or, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things.”[6] Barth’s doctrine of creation, like his doctrine of anthropology, presumes creation by itself is a mere abstraction. The incarnate Christ provides the concrete center and revelation concerning creation: “Because man, living under heaven and on earth, is the creature whose relation to God is revealed to us in the Word of God, he is the central object of the theological doctrine of creation.” Which leads to Barth’s anthropological focus: “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[7] Anthropology is not a subset of the study of creation but is its center, and true anthropology is approached only through the truly human one. “As the man Jesus is Himself the revealing Word of God, He is the source of our knowledge of the nature of man as created by God.”[8] Barth concludes: “But this point of departure means nothing more nor less than the founding of anthropology on Christology.”[9]

Barth builds upon this foundation (in section 46) with his opening thesis in which he sets forth the primary terms of body, soul, and Spirit: “Through the Spirit of God, man is the subject, form and life of a substantial organism, the soul of his body – wholly and simultaneously both, in ineffaceable difference, inseparable unity, and indestructible order.”[10] Humans are both body and soul – simultaneously and inseparably. “Man’s being exists, and is therefore soul; and it exists in a certain form, and is therefore body.”[11] In Christ these are not constituent parts. “He is one whole man, embodied soul and besouled body: the one in the other and never merely beside it; the one never without the other but only with it, and in it present, active and significant; the one with all its attributes always to be taken as seriously as the other.”[12]

The death and resurrection of Christ do not alter this order: “The whole man, soul and body, He rises as he died, and sits at the right hand of God and will come again.”[13] This soul and body wholeness is an eternal fact about who he is. “He does not fulfil His office and His work from His miraculous annunciation to His fulfilment in such a way that we can separate His outer from His inner or His inner from His outer.”[14] Everything is simultaneously inner, invisible, and spiritual, and outer, visible, and bodily.

Barth illustrates the point through a series of biblical verses which refer alternatively to Christ “giving himself” (Gal. 1:4), giving his soul (Matt. 20:28), or giving his body (Luke 22:19). “Jesus, He Himself, is His soul, and His body, and it is the one whole man who died on the cross and thus made our sin inoperative and completed our reconciliation.”[15] In turn it is the whole man, body and soul, that is raised. Body and soul are not parallels or two parts or two lines. Their union in him permits no choice but to consider them together. “They cannot be considered independently. In and with one another they are the oneness and wholeness of this life.”[16] Which is not to deny that there is a higher and a lower or a dominating and dominated, but Jesus is both. Barth does not mention a male and female principle, but inasmuch as these might represent the body and soul, or the sensuous and the rational, it can only be said that Jesus is both. “His life of soul and body is really His life. He has full authority over it.”[17]

It is important that Christ accomplished this in his flesh. Flesh may be a neutral term referring to human existence, but it also has an evil connotation. “It indicates the condition of man in contradiction, in disorder and in consequent sickness, man after Adam’s fall, the man who lives a fleeting life in the neighbourhood of death and corruption.”[18] Christ has come in the flesh to condemn sin in sinful flesh (Rom. 8:3). He suffered in the flesh (I Pet. 4:1). He reconciled us “in the body of his flesh” (Col. 1:22). He “abolished in his flesh the enmity” (Eph. 2:15). In his flesh he parted the veil in the Temple and provided entry into God’s presence (Heb. 10:20). Even in his resurrection body he is still in the flesh, and is not pure spirit (Luke 24:39). He provides true food and true drink continually through his flesh (Jn. 6:51). Flesh, which in itself speaks of death, disorder and disobedience, through his flesh takes on life, order and obedience. “The flesh, which in itself profits nothing, becomes a purposeful instrument. The flesh, which in itself is lost, attains a determination and a hope. The flesh, which in itself is illogical and irrational, becomes logical and rational. As the Logos becomes flesh and Jesus is flesh, it is shown that this man has and is spirit and life, and the flesh itself becomes quickening and living and meaningful.”[19]

Barth equates the work of Christ in the flesh with creation itself – with the ordering of chaos into a cosmos. The reconciliation, ordering, rationalizing, of Christ in the flesh “is the triumph of the meaning of the human existence of Jesus.”[20] Chaos in itself offers no explanation no rationale, nor order, but through the ordering of the flesh in Christ the world and humankind are an ordered creation and cosmos. This establishes a new basis for understanding humanity, creation, and the human relationship to God.

The Christian response to dualism is to recognize that most every form of human subjectivity is built upon an antagonistic dualism (between body and soul, between male and female, between the ego and the law, or between life and death) but there is one human to whom this does not apply; namely Jesus Christ. Jesus is the alternative to alienation, antagonism, and dualism and this alternative applies to all and grounds a holistic Christian understanding.

[1][1] Jerome, Commentary on the Letter to the Ephesians, Patrologia cursus completus, series latina, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris, 1841–66), 26:533; translation from Vern Bullough, “Medieval Medical and Scientific Views of Women,” Viator 4 (1973): 499. Cited in Daniel Boyarin, “On the History of the Early Phallus,” in Gender and Difference in the Middle Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8.

[2] Ambrose, “Exposition of the Gospel of Luke,” in PL 15:1844. Boyarin, Ibid.

[3] Boyarin, 12-13.

[4] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: The Doctrine of Creation III.2 (Hendrickson Publishers, 1956) 325. All quotes are from III.2 unless otherwise indicated.

[5] Barth, 132.

[6] Maximus the Confessor, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua Vol. 1; Edited and Translated by Nicholas Constas (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014) 7.22.

[7] Barth, 3.

[8] Barth, 41.

[9] Barth, 44.

[10] Barth, 325.

[11] Barth, 325.

[13] Barth, 327.

[14] Barth, 327.

[15] Barth, 328.

[16] Barth, 331.

[17] Barth, 332.

[18] Barth, 335.

[19] Barth, 336.

[20] Barth, 336