Job describes the all-consuming nature of 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, which he saw lurking 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] The question arises as to whether we can give it a rest, and find peace.
This explains the centrality of Sabbath in the Bible. This 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.
God’s resting and his declaration that creation is not only “good” but “very good” contains the goodness released from God into creation. This primordial goodness contains no hint of the war characteristic of religious myth, 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 self is at stake in the struggle. Antagonism, disputation, agonistic struggle, argument, conflict, murder, become the means to life and wisdom. 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 a plurality, 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 a striving as a taking joy in the gift of being and an offering of 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.