mimesis – Forging Ploughshares

Apologetics According to Maximus, Hegel, and Lonergan

The apologetic proofs such as the ontological argument, the cosmological argument, the moral argument, or historical arguments, “proving” Christianity may have their place, but traditional apologetic arguments are also guilty of misconstruing the very nature of Christian truth. Christianity is the proof – the incarnation of meaning, the enactment of inner truth, and the realization of historical truth. Incarnational truth is the truth revealed. To imagine we must prove the incarnation, miracles, or resurrection, is to miss that this is the proof. Christianity contains meaning, otherwise lacking. This truth is the beginning of true philosophy, true speculation, and true experience. The notion that the resurrection, the life of Christ, the incarnation, and the existence of God, rest on proofs so as to know them, is to trivialize the Truth. This is to get the cart before the horse. These “proofs” rest on a foundation of sand in a propositional and tautologous logic (on the order of mathematics) which is itself lacking in the substance of truth. We might argue for the truth of Christ on the basis of logic, or we might enter an alternative Logos and logic, in which truth is the system, the presumption, the realization, and the end.

Christ as the truth means truth is embodied and thus experienced in mind, body, and spirit such that the experience of love, virtue, self-sacrifice, and even faith is an imitation of Christ in which the Christian embodies the truth, making truth part of experience and bodied forth in and for the experience of others. Christianity is a realization of the truth. Proofs for Christianity, while they may serve some function, by their very nature, fall short of the immediate first-order realization of truth. As John writes, “The one who believes in the Son of God has the testimony in himself” (I John 5:10, NASB). So too all that goes with believing, such as obedience, imitating Christ, agape love, the transformation of the mind, are entry into the truth.

This does not mean truth by-passes the mind, any more than it by-passes the body, the will or human intention. The truth of Christ residing in the heart must be accessed, uncovered, practiced, willed and intended. As Maximus puts it, “In Him we live and move and have our being for he comes to be ‘in’ God through attentiveness, since he has not falsified the logos of being that preexists in God.”[1] The truth shows itself for the Christian in being true to the logos of Christ. The incarnate meaning of Christ requires an imitative alignment with Christ, as the truth is personal and centered on this particular Person. One can be true to this word or one can falsify the truth in his life. Note that Maximus speaks of attentiveness to the truth. As in the work of Bernard Lonergan, this truth requires intelligent judgments, evaluative deliberations, decisions and actions, with the continual guidance, model, and goal of Christ drawing along the process. To fail in this attentiveness is a failure to embody the truth. This following, discipleship, and faith is not a blind search for meaning, nor is it an attempt to establish meaning or logic, but it is an entry into discovery, realization, and insight, which provides a phenomenological, fully embodied intellectual coherence (intelligibility).

But to undertake this entry into truth requires a willing deference, a conscious mimesis, or a faith whose pathway is prearranged by the interior structures of intelligibility (what Maximus calls the logoi) entailing the cosmic order. “In honoring these logoi and acting in accordance with them, he places himself wholly in God alone, forming and configuring God alone throughout his entire being, so that he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by His condescension is and is called man for the sake of man.. . .”[2] Maximus carries on the work of Origen, in describing apocatastasis or divinization as the point or goal of humanity, but also as the purpose of creation. In Maximus’ formula, “The Word of God, very God, wills that the mystery of his Incarnation be actualized always and in all things”[3] This is the path of discovery laid before humanity. All stand before Christ, faced with the question, “Who do you say that I am.”

As in all modes of discovery, the inquiry exceeds the understanding. The questioner has already begun to feel the force of meaning before the fulness of that meaning dawns. According to Maximus, the Christian “‘moves’ in God in accordance with the logos of well-being that preexists in God, since he is moved to action by the virtues; and he ‘lives’ in God in accordance with the logos of eternal being that also preexists in God.”[4] Jesus’ embodied meaning attracts through a mimetic force, which like every meaning exerts a pull, but this force is a divine gravity. The good, the true and the beautiful embodied in Christ is a perfect love, perfect friendship, perfect understanding of the Father, which brings peace, healing, and reconciliation, and this exerts a pull beyond acquisitive, rivalrous, jealous, mimetic desire, which in Maximus and Lonergan would amount to being inattentive or untrue.

Of course, one can fail in the task of truth, which in Maximus explanation is to abandon one’s own origin and is to be swept away toward nonbeing, and in this state one experiences instability and suffers from fearful disorders as he has traded truth for what is inferior and nonexistent.[5] The untruth is a form of suffering as it entails a loss of meaning, a loss of agape love, and a failure to be fully human, in falling short of the interpersonal truth of love. It would seem that to prove this on some other basis is already a loss of love and meaning.

In short, as Maximus describes, this meaning carries the weight of divinity. He “draws near to us in his humanity” while bearing the fulness of his divinity, and “having given the whole of Himself, and assuming the whole of man” he witnesses to perfection of humanity and deity “bearing witness within His whole self—by the perfection of the two natures in which He truly exists—to the unchangeable and unalterable condition of both.”[6] For Hegel, “God becomes man generically, universally, essentially.”[7] In Hegel’s explanation, the hypostatic union lies at the base of all human religion and all seeking after truth. As James Yerkes explains, for Hegel “the reconciliation of God and man universally longed for in all religious traditions and only implicitly understood by thought, is now in Christianity concretely fulfilled and made explicit to and for thought.”[8] According to Hegel, “It was Christianity, by its doctrine of the Incarnation and of the presence of the Holy Spirit in the community of believers, that first gave to human consciousness a perfectly free relationship to the infinite and thereby made possible the comprehensive knowledge of mind [Geist] in its absolute infinitude.”[9] Incarnational truth, is the truth revealed. “Hegel is arguing that the entire event of Jesus of Nazareth is a religiously central paradigmatic event by which the truth of what ultimately is and the truth of the meaning of human existence are disclosed to human consciousness.”[10] To imagine we must prove the incarnation, miracles, resurrection, is to miss that this is the proof. Hegel describes this knowing as the most concrete reality.[11]

Likewise, in Matthew Hale’s explanation of Maximus, the Christian embodiment is dependent upon the incarnation of Christ (two concrete realities): “First, Jesus Christ is the content of what is revealed by the embodiment of the Word in the Christian. Second, Jesus’s own way of revealing the divine Word to humankind has a normative, exemplary force for the way in which the Word is revealed in the Christian.”[12] The virtue and knowledge of Christ embodied in the Christian is the Word in bodily form. Christ is the content revealed in and through the Christian. Hale argues that for Maximus, the embodiment of the Word in the Christian aligns with what Lonergan calls the “incarnate meaning” of Jesus Christ, so that the Christian bears the meaning of Christ in her life. The hypostatic union of Christ (fully divine and fully human) is one that occurs through the Word for the Christian. Christ initiates what Maximus calls “the beautiful exchange,” which renders God man by reason of the divinization of man, and man God by reason of the Incarnation of God. For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment. Such a one is a “‘portion of God’ insofar as he is God, owing to the logos of his eternal being that is in God.” According to Yerkes, “Religion is the existential starting point of philosophical reflection in dealing with the truth of reconciliation as an accomplished fact, and not as a mere yearning which is forever unrealizable. And this is why Hegel constantly can insist philosophy is the truth of ‘what is.’”[13] Truth or the “notion” is consummated in Christianity as Christ is the incarnation of the divine idea or notion. Here the mind of God is enfleshed. “In Christianity the nature of the religious consciousness itself is central, and thus the Hegelian conviction that Christianity is the “revealed” religion also implies that the form and content of human religious consciousness in the Christian religion for the first time adequately mirrors the form and content of God’s consciousness of himself as living Spirit.”[14]

For Hegel, as for Maximus, the incarnation of Christ is the reality upon which human thought and philosophy depend. “The content, it is then said, commends itself to me for its own sake, and the witness of the Spirit teaches me to recognise it as truth, as my essential determination.”[15] Apart from “eternal reconciliation” there would be no concrete or lived experience of the truth. Apart from the “incarnational principle” human experience flies apart between the finite and infinite or between the divine and human. The recognition of these poles is necessary but inadequate apart from the one who incarnates their synthesis. Reconciliation or synthesis is actualized in Christ and made available to the Christian. “The antithesis of subjective and objective” of infinite and finite is a realized redemption in the fact that God is “known as love.”[16] As Hegel states succinctly, “the truth exists as actually present truth.” It is, through the Holy Spirit, an appropriated truth: “the Holy Spirit comes to be in them as real, actual, and present, and has its abode in them; it means that the truth is in them, and that they are in a condition to enjoy and give active expression to the truth or Spirit, that they as individuals are those who give active expression to the Spirit.”[17]

In Maximus and Hegel, the truth is known and experienced directly in Jesus Christ. According to Hegel, “this is the inward, the true, the substantial element of this history, and it is just this that is the object of reason.”[18] This is not an object obtained according to reasonable proofs, or human reason, but is the object of reason, the ground and experience of meaning, which is its own proof. The New Testament, Maximus and Hegel, speak of a certainty grounded in Christ, and not in the biblical text, not in the authority of tradition, and not in rational proofs. There is a direct and immediate certainty realized in the Spirit, bearing witness to Christ, that God is revealed in the God/man.

(Sign up for the next PBI class, Imaginative Apologetics which will run through the first week of July to the week of August 23rd. Go to https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings to sign up.)

[1] Maximus 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, paragraph 22.

[2] Ambigua 7:22.

[3] Ambigua, 7.22.

[4] Ambigua 7:22.

[5] Ambigua 7:23.

[6] Maximus, On Difficulties in the Church Fathers: The Ambigua, trans. Maximos Constas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2014), vol. 2: Ambigua 31: paragraph 8.

[7] James Yerkes, The Christology of Hegel (State University of New York Press, 1983) 120.

[8] Yerkes, 112.

[9] G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind: Being Part Three of the”Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences” (1830). Translatedby William Wallace, together with the Zusdtze in Boumann’s Text(1845) translated by A. V. Miller, with a Foreword by J. N. Findlay. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 2. Quoted in Yerkes, 112.

[10] Yerkes, 123.

[11] Philosophy of Mind, B 2.

[12] Matthew Hale, “Knowledge, Virtue, and Meaning: A Lonerganian Interpretation of Maximus the Confessor on the Embodiment of the Word in the Christian” (PhD Faculty of the School of Theology and Religious Studies Of The Catholic University of America, 2022) 310.

[13] Ambigua 7:24.

[14] Yerkes, 119.

[15] G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion: Together With a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 1, Trans. By E. B. Speirs, and J. Burdon Sanderson, (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co. Ltd., 1895) 151.

[16] Yerkes, 116-117.

[17] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion Together with a Work on the Proofs of the Existence of God vol. 3, Translated by E. B. Spiers and J. B. Sanderson (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1968) 124.

[18] Lectures On the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 1, 146.

Imitation as Salvation

A central motif of Scripture, obscured by Martin Luther’s reaction to works righteousness, is the focus on imitating Christ. As Adam Koontz points out, “Luther’s confrontations with Anabaptists in the 1520s and 1530s caused him to react strongly against their urging a very literal imitation of Christ that excluded the just war tradition of Christian political thinking.”[1] The way I experienced this obscuring of imitation may be typical. It was not that the idea was ever directly dismissed, but in my seminary education the focus was on harmonizing the Gospels; rather than studying the life and teaching of Christ as a model to be imitated, the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain were relegated to the old covenant of works. In turn, “taking up the cross and following Jesus” was displaced by the notion of Jesus final payment for sin; that is, “Jesus died so that I do not have to.” Faith alone may not completely exclude the notion of imitating Christ but it is made secondary, as Luther demonstrated in his preference for the term conformitas Christi to imitatio Christi as a way of deemphasizing the Anabaptist focus.

Though imitation is central in Paul’s theology, Pauline theology (which in the Reformation is taken as the central theology of the New Testament) as interpreted through Luther and Calvin, makes very little (theologically) of the life and teaching of Christ. Focus on Christ as a sacrificial payment displaces the theological significance of the historical Jesus. It is not so much that Paul trumps Jesus, but Luther’s and Calvin’s Paul trumps the Paul focused upon the historical Jesus. “Faith alone,” penal substitution, anti-works, renders imitation of the historical Jesus secondary. For example, Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament is focused on Paul’s theology and within Paul’s theology imitation is all but dismissed.[2] In this understanding, the historical Jesus is more of a problem to be solved than a model to be followed. After all, Paul had no link with the historical Jesus and the Gospels are inconsistent and need to be harmonized in order to recover the historical Jesus.

At a popular level, something like imitation of Jesus resurfaced in bracelets (WWJD which played off the 19^th century novel by Charles Sheldon, In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do?). But it may have been that this reduced to a religious fad, as it was focused on an ethical decisionism (a questionable sort of ethical foundation), rather than taking the life of Christ as key to theological understanding. So too, the Anabaptist notion of a literal imitation of Christ did not set imitation within a larger theological understanding.[3] Anabaptists could read the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ other ethical teaching quite literally but Anabaptists would fall short, for example, of someone such as Thomas à Kempis whose theology is one in which imitation is the very fabric of salvation (see below).

There are the specific passages that command imitation but much of the vocabulary and theology of the New Testament presumes imitation. Walking as Christ walked, putting on the faith of Christ, taking up the cross, being in Christ, being a disciple of Christ or being part of the family of Christ is premised on imitation. The central significance of imitation is lost if Christ is primarily a payment for sin or a legal remedy obtaining imputed righteousness. But what if imitation of Christ is in fact the primary means of salvation, a salvation not merely of a future estate, but a present tense realization of “putting on Christ” and a putting off of evil? Could it be that imitating Christ is salvation, is atonement, is an ethic, is a theology?

The purpose behind the writing of the New Testament beginning with the Gospels, is that the life of Christ is a model around which his teaching and Christian teaching coheres. The incarnation, the life and death and resurrection of Christ is not primarily a doctrine, a set of propositions, or an institution, but it is a life which in its opening message calls out “follow me.” The reason for recording this life, the reason for prompting a particular ethic, or a particular understanding and doctrine, is to bring about reduplication of the life of Christ in his followers. It is his life that is being shared in the gospel message, so that imitation and participation are the very substance of salvation.

Paul’s Gospel coheres around the understanding that imitation is the mode of salvation. His suffering, his imprisonment, and his manner of life are part and parcel of the gospel he is modeling so as to be imitated: “Yet for this reason I found mercy, so that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might demonstrate His perfect patience as an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life” (I Tim. 1:16). Bad models and rivalrous imitation looms in many of Paul’s letters. As I previously described it (here), to the rivalry prone lovers of hierarchy and false power in Corinth, Paul has a singular recommendation and resolution: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). The danger is that they would create a scandal of imitation gone bad: “Give no offense [do not become a scandal] to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 10:31-11:1). To be saved, is to imitate Christ.

Where Paul has been present, he can simply appeal to himself as the model, but as in Ephesians the model is God revealed in Christ: “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Eph 5:1–2). This appeal to imitate God comes after specific descriptions of what imitation will entail: “Be kind to one another, tender-hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ also has forgiven you” (Eph 4:32). The appeal throughout Ephesians is that being members of one another in Christ entails adapting his form of life: “if indeed you have heard Him and have been taught in Him, just as truth is in Jesus, that, in reference to your former manner of life, you lay aside the old self” (Eph. 4:21-22). Even and especially the most intimate of relationships is to be carried out in imitation of Christ: “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself up for her” (Eph 5:25).

In what is considered to be one of his earliest letters, Paul explains that the Thessalonians have come to have hope in Christ through imitation and that they are spreading the Gospel as others imitate them: “You also became imitators of us and of the Lord, having received the word in much tribulation with the joy of the Holy Spirit, so that you became an example to all the believers in Macedonia and in Achaia” (I Thess. 1:6). The imitation of the Lord, and of Paul, and then of the Thessalonians is the way one enters into the “power” of the Holy Spirit and the “conviction” of the gospel (1:5). Imitation is the way the gospel spreads as becoming imitators of Christ and the apostles is the way one receives the gospel – it could hardly be otherwise. Imitation is a sign of election and is the way the Gospel works “not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit” (1:5). Imitation takes up the suffering of Christ but also the joy this entails (1:6). Paul describes his imparting of the gospel as a giving of his own life: “Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives” (2:8). The life of Christ in the life of Paul is the very means of providing sustenance, just as a “nursing mother” imparts sustenance and her own life to her children (2:7).

The way the gospel is taken up and the way that discipleship continues is through imitation of a model: “For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example, because we did not act in an undisciplined manner among you . . . but in order to offer ourselves as a model for you, so that you would follow our example” (2 Thess. 3:7-9). This is what it means to “hold to the traditions” and this is the point of being taught, whether verbally or in writing. It coheres as a model to be imitated, resulting in “good work” (2 Th 2:15–3:1). Tradition and gospel and rule of faith contain a living model, a life that is to be shared through imitation. Apart from imitating the life thus conveyed, there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith.

Each of Paul’s letters is premised on imitation, but perhaps none more so than Philippians. The irony is that in interpreting Philippians, if it is not understood that both Paul and Christ are models to be imitated then the very substance of what Christ has done is obscured. That is the entire movement of Christ is not a one-off payment but is meant to be a manner of life: “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Php. 2:5–8).

If we imagine Paul is describing Christ’s movement from his preincarnate state to the incarnation, this is hardly something we can imitate. As James McClendon describes it, “Hence, the dominant feature of 2:5-11 has never been a heavenly-descent myth, for it is not a passage about the pre-incarnate acts of God, but one that juxtaposes Messiah Jesus’ earthly vicissitudes with the vast claim of his Lordship – on earth, but also in heaven and over the nether world.”[4] Jesus’ refusal to grasp equality with God must refer to the temptation in his incarnation, a temptation we experience and resist through imitating Christ. Paul’s premise throughout is to encourage imitation as a means of discipleship: “Brethren, join in following my example, and observe those who walk according to the pattern you have in us” (Php. 3:17). Jesus is the primary model, the pattern which Paul has also modeled.

Christ’s Lordship is established through his suffering and death on the cross and this is the pattern that is to be imitated. His manner of life, his humility, his suffering, and his death, is the archetypical pattern and not simply a one-off payment which cannot be replicated. The “image of God” which he models and which the first pair and their progeny failed to live up to is not some “designated state but a task set, not an ontic level enjoyed but an ideal to be realized.”[5] The path of servitude and suffering is the model of the divine image Christ modeled and which his disciples imitate.

The conclusion: it is his life that is being shared in the gospel message, so that imitation and participation are the very substance of salvation. Apart from imitating the life thus conveyed, there is no gospel, no tradition and no faith. On this basis, Thomas à Kempis opens his book The Imitation of Christ, urging a focus on the study of the life of Christ as the means to imitate his life and attain to his understanding: “’HE WHO follows Me, walks not in darkness,’ says the Lord. By these words of Christ we are advised to imitate His life and habits, if we wish to be truly enlightened and free from all blindness of heart. Let our chief effort; therefore, be to study the life of Jesus Christ.”[6]

[1] Adam C. Koontz, The Imitation of Paul in the Greco-Roman World (Unpublished Dissertation, Temple University, 2020) 10.

[2] Ibid, 3.

[3] There was a move toward a Christus Victor reading of the atonement but this did not displace penal substitution among Anabaptists.

[4] James McClendon, Doctrine: Systematic Theology Vol. 2 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994) 267.

[5] McClendon, 268.

[6] Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ (The Catholic Primer, 2004).

Love, Power and Violence in Hannah Arendt and Paul

Hannah Arendt arrives at a Christian insight that many Christians might find more believable or even recognizable from a political scientist and social theorist. A central teaching of the Bible, that the greatest power is the power of community, of communication, or of love, is easily passed over as a religious pablum which has to be acknowledged but without any real consequence. We all “know” that those who have the most weapons or the most material resources, are the real power brokers in society. Afterall, what is power except power over other people, the power of exploitation, the power of the master over his employees or slaves.

“Power,” said Voltaire, “consists in making others act as I choose.” According to Max Weber, power is present wherever I have the chance “to assert my own will against the resistance” of others. He defines the power of war as “an act of violence to compel the opponent to do as we wish.” Robert Strausz-Hupe claims bluntly, power signifies “the power of man over man.” C. Wright Mills equates violence, politics and power: “All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence.” Mao Tse-tung maintained, “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” Marx noted that power is “the organization of violence.” Bertrand de Jouvenel claims that the power of death or the power to make war is the very essence of the power of the state: “To him who contemplates the unfolding of the ages war presents itself as an activity of States which pertains to their essence.” As he describes it, “a man feels himself more of a man when he is imposing himself and making others the instruments of his will,” and this gives him “incomparable pleasure.” Elsewhere he says, “To command and to be obeyed: without that, there is no Power – with it no other attribute is needed for it to be …. The thing without which it cannot be: that essence is command.” Arendt concludes, that if the essence of power is the effectiveness of command, then there is no greater power than that which grows out of the barrel of a gun, and it would be difficult to say in “which way the order given by a policeman is different from that given by a gunman.”[1]

In short, power is the power of death and the one who controls and can mete out coercion and violent death, in this understanding, is the one with power. War and the capacity to make war is a primary ordering structure such that “war itself is the basic social system, within which other secondary modes of social organization conflict or conspire,” such that “economic systems, political philosophies, and corpora juris serve and extend the war system, not vice versa.” In this understanding, it is not just diplomacy and politics that are war by other means, but peace itself is war by other means.[2] The peace of the cold war reckons with the reality that deterrence, larger and more powerful weapons of war ensure the peace, such that mutually assured destruction, or the constant threat of total war and annihilation is the only realistic peace.

It is not just the violence of war which ensures peace, but at a personal level there is a similar sort of subjection to the inevitable nature of struggle, chaos, and coercion. Humans seem to be born with an instinct of domination and aggressiveness. According to John Stuart Mill, there are two competing forces in the individual, “the desire to exercise power over others” and the “disinclination to have power exercised over themselves.” As Arendt, points out though, the will to power and the will to submission seem to be interconnected.[3] The security of slavery in Egypt is a very real temptation, certainly present in my experience in Japan, but present to some degree in every society. But perhaps the lengths to which the tyrant will go to maintain rule is the clearest marker of the limits of violence.

The Stalinist regime demonstrated that total domination based on terror cannot afford support, as the supporters and friends of totalitarianism threaten through the most subtle form of power; namely support and friendship. In the end it was the friends and supporters of Stalin who he saw as posing the greatest threat. “The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday’s executioner becomes today’s victim. And this is also the moment when power disappears entirely.”[4] Thus Arendt reaches her conclusion:

To sum up: politically speaking, it is insufficient to say that power and violence are not the same. Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance. This implies that it is not correct to think of the opposite of violence as nonviolence; to speak of nonviolent power is actually redundant. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.[5]

Nonviolence or the capacity for peace as means and end, is the very definition of power. The power of community, the power of communion, the power of consensus, the power of love, the power of democracy, all stand over and against the notion that violence is power. Violence contains no possibility of communion, other than the communion of the scapegoat, or the contradictory notion that the common enemy is the means of cohesion. Rene Girard’s depiction of the lie surrounding the scapegoat, or Peter Berger’s depiction of the social construction of reality, illustrates Arendt’s and the biblical point, that the deception surrounding death is the universal lie. The fear of death, or the imagined capacity to manipulate and control death is the singular lie exposed by Christ.

Paul names this lie directly, and counters it with the truth of community: “Therefore, shedding the lie, let each one of you speak the truth to his neighbor, because we are one another’s corporal members” (Eph. 4:25, DBH). Dispelling the lie with the truth gets at the prime reality that we are “corporal members” of one another. This is the missing fact in the notion of equating power and violence. True power builds on the reality of mutual interdependence. Violence may gain a certain control but at the cost of this prime reality. The lie here is singular and seemingly universal in its import so that all of the darkness and deception may be tied to this singular deception. Paul ties it to the hostility or enmity unleashed by the Jewish law as expressed, first in Jewish and Gentile hostility, but then in a “futility” of mind which he equates with a hardened heart and darkened understanding (Eph. 4:17-19).

As a result of the Gospel, “we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ” (Eph 4:14–15). The cure points to the heart of the problem: “speaking the truth in love” displaces the lie (the deceitful scheming and the trickery of men) which serves dis-communion, hostility, and enmity. Paul continually links deception and alienation while also linking truth and love: “Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another” (Eph. 4:25). Being members of another is a truth, that by definition should result in the putting away of violent falsehood.

Another way of getting at this same truth is in Girard’s and Paul’s deployment of mimesis. Girard inadvertently displaces the primacy of mutual membership in one another (mimetic desire), and pictures it first of all as built upon a necessary violence and rivalry. If one person imitates another person’s desire, then their desire for the same thing results in rivalry and violence. Girard comes to his theory of the scapegoat beginning with violence, rivalry and sacrifice, and it is only later that he realizes in Christ there is a positive mimesis, and even in the development of his theory he explains mimesis in the context of rivalry and violence. Much like political theorists or social scientists who begin with the presumption of an original chaos and violence, here too the presumption on an individual level is that rivalry and violence are originary. But what if we were to reverse engineer what Girard is doing and put mimesis front and center not simply as a negative force, but as the shaping force in our lives.

Paul has his own theory of imitation and community which locates reality, not in violent rivalry but in the necessity of relationship and love. “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children; and walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma” (Eph. 5:1-2). To the rivalry prone lovers of hierarchy and false power in Corinth, Paul has a singular recommendation and resolution: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (I Cor. 11:1). The passage in full reads: “Give no offense [do not become a scandal] to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God, just as I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage, but that of many, so that they may be saved. Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ (1 Cor. 10:31-11:1). Paul understands the scandal and violence of mimetic rivalry, but this mechanism is undone in his recommendation: “I try to please everyone in everything I do, not seeking my own advantage.” Domination and coercion are set aside and with it the violence producing rivalry that is damnation itself. To be saved, is to imitate and commune in love.

Paul warns against a “whoring acquisitiveness” (5:3) and likens the acquisitive man to an idolater (5:5), as one who has been deceived by “empty words” (5:5) and who lives in darkness (5:8). These things that are “hidden” are exposed by the light of Christ and now life reigns in place of death (5:14).

The conclusion of the chapter is a displacement of the mystery of sins alienating violence through a mutual submission to one another in one body: “’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” (5:31-32). This communion and participation in a singular body is the power of peace that counters the lie of violence as power.

[1] Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1969) 35-37.

[2] Arendt, 9.

[3] Arendt, 39-40.

[4] Arendt, 55.

[5] Arendt, 56.