Robert Doran – Forging Ploughshares

The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of: Carl Jung Versus an Apocalyptic Psychology

Christ has changed up language and signs and the very ground of meaning, exposing a symbolism and language focused on absence and the grave, emptying religion focused on worship of the dead (ancestor worship), manipulation of death through sacrifice (pagan, Jewish, and Christian religion, focused on propitiation), or a Heraclitean and Heideggerian presumption of violence (the Greek logos) as origin, exposing the emptiness of the grave and defeating death as the reigning category and joining himself to a new order of language and meaning, binding together the sign and signified in himself. The Logos of Christ exposes the emptiness of human language, human symbol making, and human religion, as its own ground, and sets forth an alternative foundation and alternative sign system. The place this shift is realized is in the mind, the psyche, the conscious and unconscious self. Psychic conversion, a transformation of the mind, putting on the mind of Christ, means that the human conscious and unconscious, like human language and human symbol making (idolatry), are reordered or even recreated. The mental equivalent of the exposure of religion and language grounded in death, or a life revolving around absence, the grave, the abyss, is the exposure of the unconscious as a ground of meaning or a controlling factor in consciousness. Where pagan religion, in necromancy, calling upon the dead, consulting mediums, presumes upon absence and death as primary, so too the presumption that the conscious arises from the unconscious, gives primacy to absence. It is on the order of presuming death and violence are the origin of life. Absence is put in control of presence, death is made to reign over life, and the unconscious, the repressed, the forgotten, is given primacy over the mental life.

The New Testament pictures a reordering of the mind, which still pictures key roles for the conscious and unconscious mind, but both are given a very different role as they are filled with the Trinitarian presence, focused not on a natural and given ordering of the mind, but the mind made new. Theological systems can be divided as to whether they build upon the given order, natural theology, common sense, philosophical insight, or upon an apocalyptic reordering, and this applies as well to the theological intersection with psychology. Typically, theologies which presume the given order is adequate also presume something on the order proposed by Carl Jung, that the symbols and signs of pagan religion or evolutionary development, contain an inherent truth and reality. It is on the order of presuming the logos of man is on a continuum with the Logos of God, and that the hidden roots and meanings of human symbols contain the key to healthy consciousness. To over simplify, the issue is whether the unconscious contains a depth of reality (a resource for depth psychology) or is a part of a deceived construct, which needs to be exposed and transformed.

Jungian Psychology Versus an Apocalyptic Transformation of the Mind

The decisive divide in this theological moment is between apocalyptic theology and a vast assortment of others, including Robert Doran, Jonathan Pageau, John Milbank, and those Christians identifying along with Jordan Peterson with a Jungian understanding of the unconscious. For the Jungians the unconscious is a resource of archetypical symbols and reality that must be brought to consciousness to gain harmony with the conscious mind. While apocalyptic theology may not seem to align with any particular psychology, it fits, in part, the description of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, which would dismiss Jung’s psychology as pure idealism, and pictures the unconscious following the lead of Paul as consisting of a refusal of the truth (sin is the lie structuring the dynamics of personhood) and salvation is the reconstitution of the human Subject. As Paul puts it, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Paul exceeds Lacan and Žižek, providing for a fulsome role for the unconscious, in prayer, in relying on the Spirit, in communion with God, but also in suspending the permanent role they give to death (in the real and death drive), but prior to this possibility, the focus on death, alienation, the law or symbolic, points to the need for an apocalyptic remaking of the mind.

Jung and Lacan and Žižek, are all building on Freud, who began to explore the unconscious and dreams, but they arrive at opposite conclusions. Jung is continuing with Freud’s notion that biology is primary, but Freud revised this assumption in his turn to death drive and a sociology of interior relations, which Lacan and Žižek will locate in language rather than biology. For Lacan, the unconscious is structured like a language, but this language is grounded in a fundamental fantasy or a grounding lie. The stuff of this lie is the same substance which Jung takes as a deep instinctual reality. For Žižek Jung’s archetypes are a perfect example of a fundamental fantasy, as in Lacanian terms, a fantasy is not a dream world we escape into; it is the framework that structures how we perceive reality so that we can ignore a traumatic, chaotic lack. For Žižek, Jungian archetypes are an “ideological mystification”—a narrative cushion designed to hide the fact that human experience is inherently broken, structured as it is on the divide in the linguistic and symbolic order.[1]

Jung and His Theological Disciples

For Jung, the unconscious is not merely made up of repressed personal memories, but is structured by archetypes—primordial blueprints, motifs, and instincts common across all human history. Jung presumes that dreams are to be mined for a truth not available to the conscious mind: “One cannot afford to be naive in dealing with dreams. They originate in a spirit that is not quite human, but is rather a breath of nature—a spirit of the beautiful and generous as well as of the cruel goddess. If we want to characterize this spirit, we shall certainly get closer to it in the sphere of ancient mythologies, or the fables of the primeval forest, than in the consciousness of modern man.”[2] Dreams touch upon archetypical realities and trues which must be mined and understood to bring the conscious and unconscious into harmony. Jung pictures dreams as tapping into a world of spirit, which may not always be benevolent, but it must be heeded as they tap into the reality of the instincts: “For the sake of mental stability and even physiological health, the unconscious and the conscious must be integrally connected and thus move on parallel lines. If they are split apart or ‘dissociated,’ psychological disturbance follows. In this respect, dream symbols are the essential message carriers from the instinctive to the rational parts of the human mind, and their interpretation enriches the poverty of consciousness so that it learns to understand again the forgotten language of the instincts.”[3]

Perhaps the most academically prominent theologian to utilize Jungian psychology is Robert Doran, who deploys Jung to complete his picture of the project of Bernard Lonergan: “what Lonergan would regard as the fourth level of intentional consciousness, becomes an exigence for psychic self-appropriation, calling for the release of what C. G. Jung calls the transcendent function, the mediation of psyche with intentionality in an intrasubjective collaboration heading toward individuation.”[4] Doran is using Jungian structures and language throughout, such as “self-appropriation” and “individuation,” so as to describe psychic health. He pictures his work as filling out Lonergan’s conversions with a fourth conversion, beyond the religious, moral, and intellectual conversions specified by Lonergan. “I call it psychic conversion. It aids the sublation of intellectually self-appropriating consciousness by moral and religious subjectivity, and thus is an intrinsic dimension of the foundational reality whose objectification constitutes the foundations of theology.”[5] As he succinctly states: “At a given stage in the self-appropriation of intentional consciousness, the intention of value or of the human good must come to participate in an ongoing conspiracy with the psychosymbolic dimensions of human subjectivity. The attempt to objectify this conspiracy will result in a position complementary and compensatory to that of Lonergan and compensatory to that of Jung.”[6]

There is a presumption of a naturally given knowledge and insight, flowing from Lonergan to Jung, such that “dream interpretation” reveals what Jung calls “active imagination” which plays its role along with “waking consciousness” in “the totality of subjectivity.”[7] Doran uses Jungian depth psychology to bridge the gap between human intentionality (the drive to understand, judge, and act) and the non-intentional layers of the psyche (emotions, images, and archetypes). Symbols and archetypes within human consciousness are inherently reliable structural conduits for the divine, though potentially distorted by individual or group bias, they are healed through psychological integration. The question is if human archetypes are neutral blueprints to be integrated or are they, as in a Girardian understanding, remnants of historical violence and scapegoating. Rather than being integrated, don’t they need to be exposed, apocalyptically destabilized, and reconstituted by the Word of the cross?

Jordan Peterson describes his self-discovery in conjunction with his first encounter with Jung and his concern to come to understand his dreams and nightmares. “I knew, vaguely, that Jung had developed specialized knowledge of myth and religion, so I started through his writings.”[8] It is here he hits upon Jung’s archetypes: “It must be admitted that the archetypal contents of the collective unconscious can often assume grotesque and horrible forms in dreams and fantasies, so that even the most hard-boiled rationalist is not immune from shattering nightmares and haunting fears.”[9] This was precisely Peterson’s problem. This led him to explore religious phenomenology.

In Peterson’s understanding, the Bible offers viable moral guidance because it distils a large human sample over a long span of time represented in Jung’s archetypes. In Marc Champagne’s description, Peterson blends the ideas of Jean Piaget and Jung to elucidate interplay between personal psychology and collective archetypes aiming to unearth reliable interpretative patterns that range over all conceivable cases, thereby providing a meta-solution to whatever problem(s) humans might encounter. Thus, “The archetypes of Carl Jung help Peterson classify the various narrative patterns that govern our fundamental understanding of ourselves and the world.”[10] The content of faith, captured in religious narratives “selected by evolutionary pressures” must be a mode of becoming informed.[11]”Jung “believed that the mind was not a blank slate but prepared before birth to cognitively and emotionally guide the individual in dealing with certain life situations that are pan-human” and Peterson takes this and adapts it.[12] For Peterson the personal and personhood are subsequent to language, symbols, and culture and one orients themself according to these givens. He does not hesitate to include the Bible and Christianity as supports of his view that truth evolves through human interaction, hierarchy, and organization. Moses did not receive the ten commandments from above, but inductively arrived at them from below and Christ is not the Truth but he “embodies the ideal of ‘speaking the truth.’”[13]

As Champagne summarizes, “In his writings and lectures, Peterson presents an ambitious re-reading of the Bible that locates this text in humanity’s evolutionary history, as it were. On his telling, the Biblical stories are a collectively authored attempt to depict the ideal person.”[14] Peterson gives primacy to both the inductive method, and the laws at which the method arrives. Christ’s claim to be the son of God is itself aimed at displacing divine authority with inductive generalization. Every son can perform the inductive trick. Peterson has no room for revelation (whether in Christ or otherwise) rather, “different folks observed the conduct of many moral persons, abstracted out the common denominator in their actions, and then reified the resultant abstraction in a narrative format.”[15]

The question is if a faith that can celebrate our “Common Stories, the participation in our common rituals” and which looks to the hierarchy of culture, politics, or as Peterson puts it, the unified attention which has evolved through time through myths, stories, and the development of social order as the truth, can be equated with the Truth of Christ.[16]

An Apocalyptic Psychology

Is Jung’s or Žižek’s picture of the unconscious correct? There may be no way to empirically decide, but the biblical picture, while more complicated than either would allow, fits the initial picture provided by Lacan and Žižek (even in their estimate). They both point to Paul’s picture of the human psyche as the ground of their theory. The Bible with Lacan and Žižek, pictures the unconscious, not as filled with archetypical symbols, but with a deceived orientation, which by definition defines the function of the unconscious. The Subject is ultimately a repressed/unconscious Subject deceived primarily about the Self (the fundamental fantasy) as his own basic dispositional frame is one that obscures the “place” from which he sees.

This obstacle within the Subject, which Žižek finds in Paul’s description of sin in Romans 7:7ff but which his theory as a whole illustrates, is the necessary kernel of the “real” around which the Subject is constituted. It is in and through fantasy or deception (the stuff of the real) that the Subject arises, and this largely accounts for Žižek’s dialogue with theology.[17] This is not to affirm all of Lacanian psychology (with which Žižek identifies) or to suggest there are curative powers in this form of therapy, but his theory aids in showing that salvation (as pictured in Romans 6-8) reconstitutes the Subject in such a way that being “in Christ” overcomes the deception and alienation inherent in, and necessary to, the Lacanian registers.

Even in Žižek’s account of Christianity there is an overcoming of the perverse relation to the law, or an overcoming of metaphysics, as Christ’s death suspends the punishing effects of the symbolic order and institutes the religion of love. As Žižek puts it, “In Lacanian terms, we are dealing with the suspension of the big Other, which guarantees the subject’s access to reality: in the experience of the death of God, we stumble upon the fact that “the big Other doesn’t exist”’ (Metastases of Enjoyment, 42). For Žižek the Jungian categories are not a hidden reality undergirding conscious reality, they are a deception posited with the fiction of the perverse Superego (the big Other). For Jung and his followers, the order of reality is captured in symbols, signs, or the law, and the best one can do is read the symbols, follow the signposts of the law, while for Paul one is freed from the punishing constraints of the law. Christ suspends this circular logic in which the Subject is attempting to ground himself and exposes the fantasy of this supposed substantial ground – a ground that exacts the payment of a living death” (Did somebody Say Totalitarianism, 49-50).

Beyond Jung and Žižek to Paul

The Jungian notion is something on the order of investing more heavily in what Žižek, building upon Paul, considers a fantasy or a lie. Baptism into Christ displaces the primordial deception (connected with the lure of desire and the Law – death) with the ontological reality of the death and resurrection of Christ, but this complete putting away of the lie exceeds the possibilities of Žižek’s focus on the reality of death and death drive. Baptism is an ontological alternative to the “body of death” as there is a joining to his body as a new Subject. The “Subject” of death has joined herself to death while the Subject of Christ has been joined to the ontological reality of God in Christ. The psychological realization builds on this ontological ground it presumes: “We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing” (Rom. 6.6). The voiding or suspension (“brought to nothing”) that takes place in v. 6 (katargέw) and which is repeated in 7:2 and 6 speaks of a transferal from one sort of Subject to another. In this, Paul exceeds Žižek, in that he pictures the suspension of death (the death drive) which is not a possibility in the Lacanian system. But this points to the apocalyptic realization of a new person, a new cosmic order, realized in Christ.

Paul’s redemption is passage from a mind out of control to one in which the Trinity is the ordering reality, up to and including a harmonious continuum between the conscious and unconscious. No longer is there the disjointed alienation, but a depth of communion within oneself characteristic of the Trinity. The unconscious structured like a language in Lacan contains only a deception or an empty word, but for Paul the Christian unconscious is not constituted through repression or deception but through a depth of communion. Where chapter 7 of Romans and Žižek picture the dialectic of human interiority as an antagonistic failure to communicate, in chapter 8 Paul depicts the unconscious workings of the Christian heart and mind as an open prayer in which “He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (8.27).

The tacit knowledge structuring the restoration of the mind, participates in a prayerful dialectic within the Trinity as “we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us” (8.26). Just as Jesus prayer in Gethsemane is the means by which he faces the suffering of the cross and remains true to his vocation, so too the believer obediently endures suffering by entry into this inter-Trinitarian communication between the Spirit and the Father. “In the same way the Spirit also helps our weakness” (8.26) as incapacity (ἀsqέneia) is the precise point at which the capacity of the Spirit intercedes. This is not a reliance upon naturally given signs and symbols but upon the presence of God.

[1] See the video https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/ha9ych/why_zizek_rejects_jung/

[2] Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols (London: Aldus Books, 1964), 52.

[3] Jung, 52.

[4] Robert Doran, Psychic Conversion (https://www.lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/books/14/119_D0207_Psychic_Conversion_(offprint).pdf) 201.

[5] Doran, 201.

[6] Doran, 202.

[7] Doran, 205.

[8] Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning : The Architecture of Belief (Routledge, 1999) 12.

[9] 13

[10] Champagne, Marc. Myth, Meaning, and Antifragile Individualism: On the Ideas of Jordan Peterson (Societas Book 69) . Societas. Kindle Edition.

[11] Peterson, 92.

[12] Champagne, Location 647.

[13] Champagne, 92.

[14] Champagne, 92.

[15] Champagne, 100.

[16] Jonathan Pageau and Jordan Peterson, “Identity: Individual and the State versus the Subsidiary Hierarchy of Heaven” (ARC Research, October 2023) 21. (Hereafter, “Identity”).

[17] Axton, 10.

Transcending the Self Through Conversion: Bernard Lonergan and Sin and Salvation

In teaching theology the problem is where to begin, as both a nonviolent and apocalyptic theology require a reconception of reality inclusive of the entire theological catalogue (from the doctrine of God and Trinity to the doctrine of atonement and revelation). Beyond the practical problem of the classroom, it could be argued conversion marks the lived entry point, but defining conversion poses the same problem, as it is only adequately defined and realized in connection to theology as a whole. Conversion cannot be separated from the reconceptualization of God, self, and the world (the reworking of the moral and religious imagination), so conversion itself must be rightly realized (making every beginning an ongoing task). The entry point into theology through conversion, illustrates the predicament that no singular beginning is adequate, but the beginning and end are necessarily tied together.

Conversion is first of all conversion from something; it is dynamic in its movement (from one thing to something else). Conversion describes a turn; the turn from out of a self-enclosed world in which stasis and permanence are experienced as synonymous with the self. To convert means, at the most basic level, an abandonment of the human project conceived at an infantile, and narcissistic stage. The construct of the ego, the experience of the superego (the law), the drive for being, all speak of basic and immediate experience and it is this most immediate reality that is rendered false in conversion.

The theological problem, there is a fortress of religion protecting and substantiating this false experience. Conceptions of God as law-giver and punisher, conceptions of humanity as continually given over to guilt and struggle, are supported by economies of salvation in penal substitution and divine satisfaction which reduplicate the human disease as an economy of salvation. Whether or not the sickness is the root of this theology, nonetheless the entire theological catalog poses a potential obstacle to the cure (attached to conversion). Bad theology and failed Christianity, more than simple atheism or paganism, pose an obstacle to a nonviolent, apocalyptic, transformative faith. This is the case, as human notions of righteousness replaces divine rightness (in absolutizing the law), masochistic self-punishment is given divine status (in notions of conscience and guilt), the human word (in a depth psychology) is reified and deified (in doctrines of the logos), love and forgiveness are confused with anger satisfied, and this shows forth in contractual theology and in various theological dualisms (in the Trinity, between heaven and earth, between nature and grace, etc.). So religious conversion must include, not simply conversion from one religion to another, but conversion from particular religious sensibilities and this entails conversion from inadequate conceptions of self and the world (which may sound like a restatement of the problem).

Bernard Lonergan describes conversion as an ongoing, lifelong process, or an unending dynamism.[1] There is no clear place to start, other than the place we each individually begin, so perhaps every conversion is adequate to the task of the continuing journey, with the caveat that conversion pertains to everything and intersects with everything. The problem then is perhaps not with where to begin but with the danger of ceasing to begin in a stunted conversion. Everything must be incorporated into this beginning, but this beginning cannot cease. Conversion must continue, and all things must be reconceptualized and reworked in light of the person and work of Christ. Conversion is a life-long turning, which may be stunted by pietistic notions focused on guilt and repentance, or any notion that sees conversion as a one-off experience in the past.

Conversion and repentance must be expanded and reconceived (Lonergan again), and Lonergan recognizes that there is a reciprocal process between conversion, self-transcendence, and authenticity. In the description of Robert Doran, “Authenticity is achieved in self-transcendence, and consistent self-transcendence is reached only by conversion.”[2] Doran goes on to describe the ever-spiraling relationship between these three poles: “what makes a person an authentic human being is that he or she is consistently self-transcending, and consistent self-transcendence requires that one undergo a multiple and ongoing process of conversion. The process moves causally, if you wish, from conversion to self-transcendence, and from self-transcendence to authenticity.”[3] To be an authentic self, there has to be movement beyond the strictures of infantile egotism, which may be necessary to survival and the developing sense of self, but taken as an end this egotism is a lie. The passage is from out of “self-absorption or self-enclosure to self-transcendence,” which may occur apart from awareness of the details of its happening, but entails moving beyond the “self-referential” or loveless horizon to the realm of love.

This conversion is religious, moral, intellectual, and (Doran adds) psychic; in other words, it pertains to everything about the self. It is notable that the intellectual is last in this sequence, coming at the end of one’s life course.[4] Self-transcendence is religious conversion, as one awakens to the divine realm and to the realm of love; it is moral, not in the sense of moral perfection, but in taking account of others in one’s decisions; it is intellectual in that certain questions are raised and there is pursuit of intellectual truth and integrity in understanding and judgment; and it is psychic in that the above connections are linked to “affective and imaginal components” such that empirical consciousness synthesizes the religious, moral, and intellectual into experience.[5] This synthesis of love gets at the ever renewed dynamism in conversion.

It is easy enough for the immature to live and experience the religious, moral, and intellectual, as separate realms, none of which necessarily impinge upon shaping emotions and imagination. The content of morality, intellect, and religion, often pertain almost completely to the self.

Morality may be nothing more than loveless self-interest, and moral decisions may be nothing more than utilitarian (which describes entire moral systems). “My delight in eating is for the sake of me. My studies are for the sake of me. My good works are for the sake of merit, and merit is for the sake of rewards, and rewards are for the sake of me. If it is for the sake of me, there is no need to inquire further. I have a sufficient and efficacious motive for acting.”[6] The immediate experience of desire is the driving force in this morality, and there is no questioning of the end of moral pursuit, and there is no doubting the self which it serves. The fact that this experience and conception of self is false (dead, in Christ’s description) is not up for consideration. This self may be the Girardian self, guided by imitation of the group, it may be the ethnocentric self in which one’s group is an extension of the self, or it may be one’s tribe, family, or religious cohort. That is the self-enclosure may be constricted or more expansive, but it is self-enclosure nonetheless. “Greed is good,” “knowledge is power,” “self-interest is corporate interest,” are all ways of maintaining self-enclosure on a more expansive scale. But so too I would argue, is a contractual religion focused on “my” moral transgression, “my” forgiveness, “my” going to heaven, etc.

As long as one is egotistically self-enclosed, intellect is also self-absorbed and stunted. The intellectual world of the egotist, is the world that refers to the self so that desire, drive, self-interest, commonsense, and the God that supports this world are left undisturbed. Intellectual conversion may be the most difficult to measure, but it would seem its cosmic scope, as opposed to micro-scope, focused on the individual, is its measure. The theological equivalent of the Copernican revolution is a Christocentric revolution, in which not only this world but eternity revolves around this person. The New Testament, the work of Origen, the Cappadocian Fathers, the work of Maximus, and Sergius Bulgakov, point to this all-embracing possibility, in which the intellect along with morality is opened to deification.

Psychic conversion may occur in small increments and the overall effect/affect may be slow in coming, yet all of the other elements of conversion depend upon this psychic aspect. It is psychic conversion that establishes connection between the other elements of conversion. “And the reason for establishing or re-establishing that connection, in terms of authenticity, is that affective self-transcendence is frequently required if we are going to be self-transcendent in the intellectual, moral, and religious dimensions of our living.”[7] Conversion begins to bear fruit in our emotions and imagination, so that peace and love pervade all things. As we experience this psychic reality along with the reconceptualization of all things, the experience brings forth renewed understanding. The mind is transformed and with it all things are understood from a new perspective or horizon.

The summation of this conversion is love: religious conversion is lit up by love through faith. God realized as love is a rescue from the lovelessness of the self enclosed in the world conceived from a loveless horizon. Whoever abides in love abides in God and this love pervades the intellect, the morals, and the human psyche, in a dynamism of participation. Love is participation in God, synonymous with participation in a community of love. This community of participation, of course, poses its own hazards; just as there is a loveless theology, there are loveless communities brought together by fear and coercion. As Doran warns, “profound religious inauthenticity can also be mediated by participation in a religious community.”[8] So while being part of a community is no guarantee, it may be that small communities of friends formed out of the spontaneity of love, best serve purposes of self-transcendent love. The unconditional love of God received, and the response of loving unconditionally, realized in community, is the ever-renewed end of conversion.

The unconditional love through which one transcends the self, entails then, a shift in faith (religious conversion) and this comes with a shift in values (moral conversion from primarily valuing the self), and an opening up of the intellect to the cosmic and eternal, and all of this arises in an ongoing psychic conversion of all-embracing, unconditional love and peace. This is where one begins and ends the theological project.

(Sign up for the upcoming class, “Lonergan & the Problem of Theological Method.” The course will run from the weeks of February 16th to April 11th. Also sign up for Sin and Salvation: An in-depth study of the meaning of sin and a description of the atonement as a defeat of sin and the basis of an alternative community in Christ. This course will run through the beginning of February to the end of March. Register here https://pbi.forgingploughshares.org/offerings)

[1] It is appropriate that for the first time Ploughshares Bible Institute is holding two classes simultaneously, Sin and Salvation and Lonergan and the Problem of Theological Method.

[2] Robert Doran, “What Does Bernard Lonergan Mean by ‘Conversion’?” (2011) accessed on 1/22/2025 at https://lonerganresource.com/media/pdf/lectures/What%20Does%20Bernard%20Lonergan%20Mean%20by%20Conversion.pdf p. 2.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid, 4.

[5] Ibid, 5.

[6] Ibid, 14.

[7] Ibid, 6.

[8] Ibid, 7.

The Trivialization of Christianity and Its Cure in Speculative Theology and Romans

When the queen of the sciences, theology, reigned the falsehood of this rule was bound to be exposed but with her abdication the wasteland she left is obvious. The church, Protestant and Catholic, has abdicated moral authority; classicism with its notion of a mono-cultural imperialism has crumbled; scientism and the pursuit of absolute and certain knowledge has succumbed to relativity. Institutionalism, cultural imperialism, scientism, or most simply, foundationalism, were never adequate ground for Truth, leaving out of the equation, as they do, the centrality of human subjectivity. However, each of these “failures” has made the turn to the human Subject inevitable. Could it be that this is the moment theology might find her proper place? This is the argument of the brilliant book by Ryan Hemmer,[1] in which he makes the case that it may be that speculative theology (the theological engagement of the present) perished only to give way to new life in an altered form. While Ryan is tracing the macro movements of theology in history (and I am only referencing a small part of his major work), the seed form of this understanding – its proleptic micro-form – is evident in Paul’s movement in Romans – or at least that is the case I want to make.

In Romans Paul is trying to deepen the Romans’ understanding of the faith, or to state it the other way round, they may have a trivial notion of the faith inasmuch as it is tied to the law, and Paul would dispossess them of this obstacle to a deeper understanding. The law as focus reduces to signs, scruples, morays, such that the letter is reified and the Spirit is by-passed and as a result, death reigns (part 1 below). Where the law is set aside there is entry into personhood – the Personhood of God and human personhood as they encounter one another in experience and human intelligence (part 2, below).

The Letter Kills

The focus on the law is what killed Christ, but so too priestly celibacy gives rise to a culture of child abuse, purity culture and male dominance in the church have given rise to a culture of sexual abuse and criminality. Where kissing dating goodbye was the focus, sex crimes have flourished. The cultural imperialism that gave rise to genocide of Native Americans, continued with Catholic and Anglican Indian schools which finalized the systematic destruction (hundreds of graves of children have been recently discovered in Canada and the United States at these “Christian” schools). Where the attempt to “Christianize” means living according to a particular cultural standard, speaking a certain language, living up to the scruples of an imagined set culture, law reigns.

The New Yorker, this week recounts the decades long reign of terror of the “Child-Observation Station” at the Sonnenstrasse villa, aimed at eliminating masturbation, bed-wetting and sexual excitement in children. The children were injected with a regimen of drugs, including epiphysan, an extract derived from the pineal glands of cattle which veterinarians used to suppress estrus in mares and cows. Their beds and underwear, containing censors, were monitored 24 hours a day, with any infraction resulting in various punishments and beatings. Dr. Maria Nowak-Vogl, a devout Catholic, was the founder and head of the institute who spent her life and career trying to eradicate masturbation and bed wetting, which she considered the sure signs of decadence.[2]

The modern attachment to law or trivialization of the faith is not trivial in its evil consequences, but in its majoring in minors and thus giving rise to a destructive bondage, it misses the depth of salvation.

Understood in this way, there is a parallel between Paul’s depiction of the law as the trivializing captivity to signs (circumcision and the significations of Judaism), to the surface of texts (the letter of the Old Testament apart from its center to be found in Christ), or to the cultural imperatives of Judaism or Gentilism, and to the obstacles posed by modern reason, classicism, foundationalism or justification theory. That is, the unfolding of Christian history and theology repeat the failures and must rediscover the insights, in parallel terms, the obstacles and insights Paul is tracing in the course of Romans. They are parallel as there is a universal problem – true for all time and in every place and culture – but the theological task is to realize once again, in the present, in what these barriers consist and how they are overcome. The barrier of the law poses the universal bondage from which salvation delivers.

Salvation for Paul, is not deliverance from hell, but the transformation of humans from being subjects of the law to Subjects participating in divine love.

The Spirit Gives Life to the Mind

The impetus behind Paul’s writing and the work of theology is the conversion of the mind, the transformation of the Subject, the rise of a new form of consciousness including self-consciousness. God, the essence of reality, is not passively intuited or grasped by sight or images – which by definition remain objects – but God in Christ presents himself for the understanding, to be actively apprehended as part of human decision and judgment.

Theology is not a matter of mere logic, though in “the hands of Duns Scotus and William of Ockham it quickly became very purely logical, and while logic is a valid systematic ideal, its atmosphere is too thin to support life.”[3] This passage is movement from a life driven by eros, in which one is left desirous of life that is lacking, to one filled with divine life and love: “God effects the redemption of humanity from every consequence of sin by making the divine life the innermost constitutive element of human life.”[4] Ryan applies this realization as the answer to the failure of classicism, but recognizes this is always the movement of salvation:

it is God’s gift of God’s self to the psyche that both completes the psyche’s native transcendental erotic orientation, and elevates the psyche itself . . . Divine constitutive meaning rejects the normative claims of classicism, and liberates the psyche from the narrowness of its vision to a historically minded perspective, capable of bearing witness to the soteriological vector operative in the law of the cross at work in every culture and every age.[5]

The “historically minded perspective” taking in “every culture and age” does not seek to escape history through some immutable form (e.g., classicism), and in this, it pertains to what it means to be human. The kenotic gift of God’s self on the cross is a gift of the Divine Subject to the human Subject and psyche, God sharing himself and thus completing the human Subject (as in Romans 8).

Salvation, for Paul is not about missing punishment and going to heaven, but it is about life, having life more abundantly. Between Romans 7, where he is describing a form of damnable oppression, and chapter 8 where he is describing full participation in the life and love of the Trinity, we see the movement from despair, oppression, and death, into peace, joy, life and participation in the Trinity as God gifts Gods-self.

This gift is what theologians call the grace of charity, “and it is offered by the divine ground to the eros of the psyche.” Through the divine initiative, the transcendent measure is given to the psyche and, through the psyche, to the community. The concrete form of agapic integrity, “the revelation of attunement with the divine ground,” is “a visitation of humanity by soteriological truth.” In Christian theology, the truth of agapic attunement is revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of the Son of God incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. The psychic integrity that measures the integrity of the community is, accordingly, the just and mysterious law of the cross, the love that returns good for evil, that transforms evil into good, that would lay its life down not only for one’s friends but also for one’s enemies.[6]

The gift of salvation through faith is nothing less than the gift of God Himself, given to the individual. God is Abba, through identifying with the faithfulness of the Son, communicated through the Spirit. The measure of this gift is not according to law, culture, or living up to certain scruples, but is measured and recognized by “the love that returns good for evil, that transforms evil into good, that would lay its life down not only for one’s friends but also for one’s enemies.” Salvation is a “‘twofold agapic invitation,’ in which one is invited both ‘to receive the divine agape’ and to embody it in one’s own existence.”[7]

The “problem” with agape is it is pure personhood, in both the Giver and its recipient, and it does not and cannot rely on impersonal law, static doctrine, or immutable institutions.[8] The human tendency is to pass “beyond” the personal to that which is static and subject to control, however this “postmodern” moment calls for the suspension of any imagined impersonal essence: “As the divine ground of world-transcendent meaning is communicated to the various matrices of human culture through the incarnate proclamation of the law of the cross, all forms of cultural pretention, universality, normativity, and permanence are invalidated and undone.”[9] Relativity, even as Einstein understood, is not the relinquishing of stable truth, but it is the recognition this truth resides in personhood – or for the theologian, in Divine Personhood. Metaphysics no longer serves as the sure and certain ground, rather “cognitional theory overturns metaphysics as first philosophy, as the critical ground for epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and philosophy of God.”[10] Meaning is not to be found in some objective, stable structure, but within persons, in their understanding and intelligence.

Science is no longer the “sure knowledge of things through their causes” but is a heuristic or method which takes into account both the scientist and his observations. So too, theology can no longer presume some singular point, or stable cultural foundation. “The notion of culture as the social objectification of human nature, an immutable and universal achievement crumbles with the discovery of the multiplicity of cultures. The theological task must broaden to be able to effect a mediation of revealed meaning within this multiplicity.”[11] The mediation of meaning is not institutional, structural, doctrinal, or propositional but personal. “Between the experience that elicits philosophical wonder and the certitude that follows upon true judgments of fact is the act of understanding, the operation of organizing intelligence that grasps from within data an intelligible form, a quiddity, an essence.”[12] As Bernard Lonergan puts it:

the root of the problem, I believe, its really baffling element, lies within the subject, within each one of us. For the problem is not solved merely by assenting to the propositions that are true and by rejecting the propositions that are false. It is a matter of intellectual conversion, of appropriating one’s own rational self-consciousness, of finding one’s way behind the natura naturata, the pensée pensée, of words and books, of propositions and proofs, of concepts and judgments, to their origin and their source, to the natura naturans, the pensée pensante, that is oneself as intelligent and as reasonable.[13]

The encounter with and participation in Divine Life is simultaneously the discovery of oneself in intelligence and meaning. Conversion is a transformation of the mind, “an intellectual conversion,” which penetrates behind nature, taking into account the nature of nature (natura naturans), the thought of thought (pensée pensée), as these reside, not in books, propositions and proofs, but within the mind. It is not that all of God is grasped, but the encounter with God begins within human understanding and experience. [14] Pursuit of the experience and meaning of God is an endless growth into His likeness which is initiated within human thought, intelligence, and experience.

Conclusion: The Movement in Romans is the Continual Movement of Theology

Romans begins with an argument about the law and the extent of its application, concluding in chapter 7 that the law itself is bound up with the problem. This problem is described in terms of an alienated subjectivity, an agonized intellect, and a futility of mind, in which death reigns. There is a marked Trinitarian absence, with the law of the mind serving in place of God, the ego serving the subjective position (taken by Christ in chapter 8) and the law of sin and death reigning in place of the Spirit. Romans 8 pictures the result of being in Christ rather than in the law; “For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death” (Rom. 8:2).

The picture (in Rom. 8) is of a transformed mind and experience, the life of the mind in participation with the Trinity: “the mind set on the Spirit is life and peace . . . For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, “Abba! Father!” (8:6, 15). Adopted as brothers and sisters of Christ, the children take the same attitude as Christ in suffering and adoption: “The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also, heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him” (8:16–17). Here is the fulness of Paul’s transformation of the mind: Participation through the Son, by the Spirit, in the love of the Father is salvation. Anything short of this is law.

Inasmuch as modern Christians look to the law, much of Romans might be read as an indictment of Christianity as we have it: an indictment of retributive justice, of foundationalism (or the notion law is the foundation), an indictment of salvation as missing punishment (hell) and receiving rewards (heaven), an indictment of the notion that God is primarily known through law (and all this entails in classicism and the history of theology), an indictment of the trivialization of Christianity.

[1] Ryan Hemmer, The Death and Life of Speculative Theology: A Lonergan Idea (Lanham: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2023).

[2] Margaret Talbot, “The Villa Where a Doctor Experimented on Children,” The New Yorker (September 25, 2023) 30-43.

[3] Hemmer, 41.

[4] Robert Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990) 488. Quoted in Hemmer, 72.

[5] Hemmer, 72.

[6] Hemmer, 71-72. The quotes are from Doran, Ibid, 486 and 486-487 respectively.

[7] Hemmer, 72.

[8] Eros, in the depiction of Paul and the tradition, may have no natural fulfillment. “In receiving divine agape, one receives that which eros can only desire.” Ibid.

[9] Hemmer, 81.

[10] Hemmer, 45.

[11] Hemmer, 45.

[12] Hemmer, 38.

[13] Bernard Lonergan, “Method in Catholic Theology,” In Philosophical and Theological Papers, 1958-1964, 29–53. Edited by Robert C. Croken, Frederick Crowe, and Robert M. Doran. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 6. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) 6, 38. Quoted in Hemmer, 40.

[14] The “unification it attains cannot be explanatory in its entirety; the mind attains a symmetry, but its apex, the ultimate moment and the basis of its intelligibility, stands beyond the human intellect.” The reference is from Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran. Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 1. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000) 166. Hemmer 27-28

Apocalyptic Apologetics

As covid-19 deaths continue to mount, as fires burn in the western half of the States, as injustices against immigrants are compounded, as the jobless numbers accumulate and the economy falters, one might conclude things are not working. Things are not working for the environment, for the poor, for immigrants, for the jobless, for those who are sick and dying, or for anyone. I suppose things are working fine for Jeff Bezos and his kin. Some will thrive on the chaos and destruction but clearly there is a limit, even for those who are benefitting from the destruction. There is a limit to consumption, a limit to pollution, a limit to the “acceptable” number of deaths, a limit to a system which appears to be breaking down. The desired outcome of the present crisis would be recognition of this limit so as to see beyond it. The crisis calls for a conversion of the imagination, for doing things differently, for a different life-style and a different system of values. There will always be those who double down on destruction but the case, an apologetic, has to be made that things are bad because the roots are rotten and there needs to be a holistic conversion.

This is always the conversion an apocalyptic Christianity calls for, as the mode of this apologetic is not reliance on the system, on common sense, or reason alone. This apologetic points to the dystopia, the violence, the failure, the evil, the lie, not in order to justify it or use it, but to transcend it. The old order of apologetics (the one in which I was trained), ontotheology (an idolatrous foundational argument), theodicy (a justification of evil in place of its defeat), moral arguments (which actually point to universal immorality) are, by definition, a grounded vision (grounded in the way things are), but the small points of light, of grace and peace, always stand in contradistinction to the way things are and indicate there is a better way. To transcend the system is to recognize its inherent limits; it is to recognize the evil it entails and the destruction upon which it relies. There has been a rejection of traditional apologetics in many quarters (I believe, rightly so), but this simply follows from the rejection of a limited notion of Christianity. An apocalyptic re-conception of Christianity calls for an apocalyptic sort of apologetics. If this apocalyptic apologetic is correct (correct about the apocalyptic nature of Christianity (a breaking in with a new Kingdom and new system) and correct about the necessity of demythologizing and deconstructing so as to apprehend the alternative order), then it would seem the Christian apologetic is only beginning.

The holistic critique and demythologizing on the order of the theory of René Girard, demonstrates the sort of movement I have in mind. War and violence were once thought to fit within a rational political frame (“war is politics by other means”). War was once between warriors, knights, samurai, the aristocrats, in the same way sacrifice was once tied to religion. Christianity, according to Girard, removes the safety valve of the scapegoating mechanism (the third way), as the truth of Christ exposes the lie behind the mechanism of sacrificial violence (which once delimited and controlled violence) and the unfolding of this demythologized history gave rise to the total war of the previous century. As a result, a stark choice presents itself. The choice is to either double down on commitment to inevitable progress, on the possibility of political containment of global destruction, on the consumption and destruction of the environment, or one can become a Christian (of the apocalyptic sort). Girard’s theory might be termed the first holistic apologetic in its demonstration of how violence (in religious myth in ancient society and in “containment” etc. in modern society) is the structuring mechanism of society to which Christianity offers an alternative. Recognizing the destructive apocalyptic reality of the age is the first step in accepting an apocalyptic answer.

The job of Christian apologists is not to refine Enlightenment style rational arguments but it is to demonstrate that the fires, metaphorical and literal, consuming our world were lit, not by some external force, but by the logic inherent to the arguments which would claim to save us. That is, our salvation system (inclusive of the modern sensibility, including modern religion and modern fundamentalism which reads violence as divine will) is destroying our world. Girard’s depiction of religious violence (the scapegoating mechanism, religious myth) turned into secular violence (the “idea of progress,” nuclear containment), locates the human problem in humanity – humans are responsible for their destruction and violence. An apocalyptic apologetic makes the case, first, that we are bringing on damnation, and second, that this fate is not inevitable. There is a vision, a faith, or imagination, which holds out hope. But as Girard puts it, “hope is only possible if we dare to think the perils of our time” (Girard, 2007: 16).[1]

A true Christian apologetic must begin then, with thinking and recognizing the deep perils of our time. This accords with the Greek meaning of Apolegein, which means “to tell fully.” John Milbank imagines the “apo” of the word might be connected to apophatic or a sort of objectivity, but it fits better with the notion that this narrating apologetic pertains, at least in its initial move to “standing apart,” “away from,” the peril of our world.[2] It is not a simple objective detachment. The apology is not an attempt to hold one’s ground in the city, being objective, by the logic of its system. Milbank’s, mainly harmonious, comparison of the death of Socrates and Jesus seems to miss the stark difference of the Greek apologetic (offered by Plato on behalf of Socrates) and the Christian apologetic. Jesus stands in judgment of the logic of the city (of Pilate and Herod, of Rome and Jerusalem), at the same time he witnesses to a truth beyond the city. The failure and peril of the one, points to the other. Socrates clung to the city, the very reason for his suicide, and could not imagine a world beyond this corporate identity. Jesus literally and metaphorically died outside the city. Not, as Milbank would have it, according to the laws of the city, but beyond their purview as his was a death of banishment from the city, beyond its walls, beyond its laws, beyond its protection. Socrates died secure in his citizenship. The difference is important in recognizing the wall the Christian apologetic cannot accommodate. The wall of hostility which would separate the inner workings of the Temple, the inner workings of Jew versus Gentile in the city, constitute the law or wall or logic that is undone in Christ.

Millions of innocent victims have been sacrificed on behalf of this barrier, first on the sacred altar and then, more dramatically and destructively, on the secular altar. Christian revelation demystified the role of sacred violence, and according to Girard, if the lie of archaic religious sacrifice had continued, the holocaust of secular violence would have remained bottled up. The truth of violence is exposed, however, and as Girard puts it, “We are not Christian enough.” Half Christian has turned out to be more dangerous than totally deluded, and thus, according to Girard, Christianity may have unleashed the very apocalypse which would ensure its failure. Now there is scapegoating without the myth (which would contain the violence), and so the Jews must be completely destroyed as in Nazi Germany, the demonization leading to lynching in the American South continues unabated, the “total wars” of the previous century are the new norm, and mutually assured destruction (MAD) is the reigning logic. War and violence are limitless where the minimal exposure, the half Christian, is not completed by an apocalyptic vision displacing this world’s order.

In terms of my own work, traversing the fantasy, recognizing the lie, is not itself adequate. One can question the law or manipulate the law but there really is no alternative to the law of sin and death (the mode of redemptive violence), apart from its displacement. Exposure of this primordial order, as in Marxism, or its manipulation, as in fascism and capitalism, unleashes an untold and unlimited violence. There may be a recognition that the victim is innocent (as Robert Doran points out, “the very calculated nature of Nazi propaganda shows that its inventors did not completely believe it”), that the object or the lure of our desire will not satisfy, but in the hands of capitalist marketers this exponential desire can be unleashed for total consumption (absolute capitalism). The minimal recognition of the dystopia of consumptive desire and violence is only the beginning. Insight (the real insight of Hegel, Marx, Freud, and psychoanalysis) may be deployed to control desire and violence or simply to unleash it but it cannot cure it. Without an apocalyptic displacing of the law of the father (the conscience, the punishing superego) with the Father (Abba), without displacing death with life in the Spirit, without ridding ourselves of the image in the mirror with the image of Christ, we are doomed to repetitive violence and death drive. As Doran sums it up, “A minimal recognition that the victim is innocent inflames the passions of the persecutors who thereby seek to validate themselves by seeking out more and more victims.”[3]

Of course, the apocalyptic vision is not limited to rightly viewing the destruction but refers to the breaking in of an alternative apocalyptic kingdom. As in Paul’s demonstration of an apologetic (in Acts 26), the two apocalyptic orders (the dystopic and salvific) have to be simultaneously envisioned. In his defense before King Agrippa, Paul depicts his own religion and belief system, when he was simply a Pharisee, as driven by destructive violence:

“So then, I thought to myself that I had to do many things hostile to the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And this is just what I did in Jerusalem; not only did I lock up many of the saints in prisons, having received authority from the chief priests, but also when they were being put to death I cast my vote against them. And as I punished them often in all the synagogues, I tried to force them to blaspheme; and being furiously enraged at them, I kept pursuing them even to foreign cities”
(Acts 26:9-11).

This pursuit of violence and the death of Christians is not simply Paul’s story; it is the culmination of the story of what it means to be a true Pharisee. He is not apologizing for his Pharisaical commitments (as Milbank would have it), he is demonstrating to Agrippa that he once would have stood with those, like Agrippa, who would arrest, judge, and kill. Paul’s Pharisaical world was not a platform he would save and accommodate but it was a world that needed exposure and repudiation, as it was a singular manifestation of the self-destructive world order. Everyone walked according to the course of Paul’s previous world, thinking they served God while subject to the subversive powers of this world (Eph. 2:2). This is not simply Paul’s personal problem. His story contains the universal passage from out of violent darkness into the light:

“While so engaged as I was journeying to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, at midday, O King, I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining all around me and those who were journeying with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew dialect, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’ And I said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And the Lord said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting”
(Acts 26:12-15)

The drama of Paul’s conversion is one we tend to locate in inward personal conversion, but Paul is relinquishing one world order for another. Sticking to his former identity, the system of his world, constitutes “kicking against the goads” of truth. To stick to this failing order would amount to a commitment to blindness, to violence, to causing blasphemy. It is the same sort of persecution which killed Christ (and every innocent victim). The light of Christ breaks into this darkness so that Paul’s former world is undone and this is the passage he pictures every Christian as undergoing – passing beyond darkness to light.

He prays that all may develop a sanctified imagination, with eyes which can envision a different world order: “I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints” (Eph. 1:18). The vision which interrupts his journey is the apocalyptic revelation which interrupts, deconstructs, and reconstitutes all who share in his Gospel vision. Paul’s apologetic is apocalyptic in its depiction of this passage through perilous violence to a liberated, transcendent vision. It is an apologetic, as this story and the worlds it entails, both dystopic and salvific, is universal.

(To learn more, plan to join our upcoming PBI class “Imaginative Apologetics.”)

[1] This is quoted from Robert Doran’s reading of Achever Clausewitz (literally: Completing Clausewitz) in his article, “René Girard’s apocalyptic modernity,” in Comunicação & Cultura, n. 11, 2011, pp. 37‑52, which I am following here.

[2] From the Forward of Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition . Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[3] Doran, Ibid.

Progress in Conversion: From Charles Manson’s Brainwashing to Cultivating Discernment

In my last blog (here) I made the point that peaceful non-violence was the goal, but not yet an established or fully worked out ethic in the patristic period. Tertullian could imagine delighting in watching his enemies suffer in hell from his perspective in paradise, though he was adamant that one should not even be associated with violence by accepting a military honor. Origen failed to see that beating slaves was a form of violence unworthy of his explanation of God’s discipline; a form of violence which he otherwise abhorred. This does not mean that for the first 400 years nonviolent peace was not the goal, it simply indicates obvious blind spots. The point is not that the fathers willfully tolerated and accepted certain forms of violence; rather they could not fully discern what constitutes violence. What we can readily identify as unworthy of Christian thought and behavior, they were somehow blind to.

This entails several implications for how we are to go about the Christian life. First of all, there is no golden age in which the Christian tradition is adequate, in which the kingdom of God on earth is a fully worked out reality. Clearly the Constantinian compromise is one in which we are still enmeshed but it is not enough to “get beyond” Constantine. Restoration or return to the practices and understanding of the first Christians is an inadequate goal and a passive notion of salvation (salvation as return, as simply ridding ourselves of innovations, of passively entrusting our mind to the culture of the church) is sub-Christian. Conversion is not a singular moment but a process to be cultivated and applied as part of an expanding reality. Progress in conversion, in passage from being blind to seeing and to continued exposure of blind spots, must consist in cultivating capacities for discernment. This discernment must consist of several layers, objective and subjective, such that our understanding of God and objective reality will be a coordinate working in tandem with subjective experience. In other words, putting on the mind of Christ through the work of the Spirit is not an abandonment of reasoned effort or of concentrated self-reflection.

Certainly, there is a model to be had in Christ, there is the supposition of guidance through the Spirit, and there is corporate molding in the Church, such that cultivation of dawning insight is not simply given over to rational thought, the power of dialectic, or the phenomenology of mood and emotion. There is also the original awareness in conversion of an enabling capacity to see. What is it precisely though, that one sees subsequent to having been blind? Beginning with the constituent pillars of blindness, its inevitable convergence with violence, its dependence on oppression, I believe it is possible to identify the dynamic of darkness (to name the violence) and to cultivate discernment of the light (to expand upon peace).

Paul’s conversion from belief in a God who prompted him to kill, to belief in the Father of Christ which prompted him to lay down his life, contains the prototypical elements of every conversion. The sinful orientation to the law posits a punishing authority (call it god, father, the nation, Charles Manson (see below), or simply the superego) which holds out the possibility of life (presence, being, authentic existence, safety) at the expense of masochistic sacrifice (formal religious sacrifice, oppressive self-sacrifice, or sadistic sacrifice of others). Life is to be had in death and the structure of this dynamic of death consists of a perfect absence or a full darkness. The Pharisaical religion but any human religion, any human salvation system or neurosis, contains the same structure.

For example, Charles Manson, nearly illiterate and almost completely unschooled, might be confused with a gnostic high priest or new age guru: “Time does not exist. There is no good and evil. Death is not real. All human beings are God and the Devil at the same time, and all are part of the other. The universe is one and all that is.” In this world, according to Tex Watson (one of Manson’s “family” members), it is fine to kill because human life is worthless. To kill someone is the equivalent of “breaking off a minute piece of some cosmic cookie,” Watson explained. Death is to be embraced because it exposes the soul to the oneness of the universe. How Manson learned to manipulate people is not exactly clear. Some say it was through reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. Tom O’Neill suggests that Charlie was trained by the CIA (a seemingly conspiratorial claim that he partially backs up). We know he was introduced to Scientology in prison. The mixture of his manipulative powers, LSD, sexual humiliation, reduced Tex and his friends to obedient automatons who killed 9 people at Manson’s arbitrary bidding. Cult, nation state, or run of the mill neurosis, will serve up the necessity of violent sacrifice, an oppressive depiction of god or reality, and a fundamental incapacity for discerning life.

There is an inverse relationship between what Paul (or anyone) is converted from to what he is converted to in Christ. The difference is that the refinements of death and the emptying out of evil blandly converge on violence (a limited prospect by definition) – there is no art, no refinement of sensibilities, no cultivation of discernment, as one simply learns, in Manson’s phrase, to be a “mechanical boy.” The swami on his bed of nails, the monk emptied of self and transformed into a statue, the soldier trained to stifle his humanity, the neurotic compulsively bound by repetition, or the Pharisee set to destroy his enemies, describes those hemmed in by death. Though this death like experience might be confused with self-transcendence, the isolating fixation within the self and the circumstance is definitive.

It is a more difficult task to describe how one subscribes to life and cultivates love and peace, not because these are less tangible but because here there is an infinite breadth of transcendent possibility. Knowing and loving others and the capacity to appreciate their value is the inverse sign of a developing capacity to judge the self and to escape the confines (the law) of a “given” circumstance. The New Testament links conversion with a refocusing of values as one’s sense of worth is shifted. The pearl of great price or the treasure hidden in a field brings about an exchange, costing all that one has. The discerning pearl merchant, those well trained in the value of things, perceive what the undiscerning and untrained fail to perceive. One must undergo a “training in righteousness,” not merely to instill a new ethic but to be shaped by a new value and valuation system. To perceive God’s Kingdom, to be shaped by its values, will mean shedding the oppressive top down power of the law for a “power-under” or “bottom-up” perspective in which the subtleties of fine pearls and hidden treasures are exposed.

A primary difference is that there is a substantive reality to be obtained as this treasure is precisely not an unobtainable object (as with the image of the idol or the ego) but is prime reality. There are substantial realities of love, peace, goodness and beauty, that do not depend upon nor are they ultimately overcome by insubstantial evil. As Robert Doran has put it, “this world is intelligible, things do hold together, we can make sense of the universe and of our lives, we can overcome the fragmentation of knowledge, we can make true judgments, we can make good decisions, we can transcend ourselves to what is and to what is good.”[1] The contrast with blindness gives no substantive or necessary role to evil or darkness but it does demonstrate that perception, sensibilities, discernment, and progress are the entry way into an alternative understanding which we must cultivate.

Maybe it is with this moral sensibility that one might appreciate Quentin Tarantino’s reworked ending for the Manson killers in “Once Upon a Time In Hollywood.” Instead of wiping out the innocent goodness of the world, represented by Sharon Tate, a true believer might reimagine a universe in which the good turns out to be the more enduring reality.

[1] Quoted from Byrne, Patrick H. The Ethics of Discernment: Lonergan’s Foundations for Ethics (Lonergan Studies) (p. 29). University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division. Kindle Edition.