Category: theology

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ON THE NECESSITY OF A GENERAL RESURRECTION OF THE WORLD

In these grim and dangerous times the forces of darkness conspire to make us despair and write ourselves off.

The problem with a conservative, or should we even say mainstream Christian eschatology, is that it implies that whereas resurrection is understood as overcoming death, as the person coming back from the dead with new life and new existence, thereby defeating death, there is no such equivalent for the world as such. (By “world” here I mean the world God made, and which has been transformed or built upon by us in history for better or worse.)  That is, the commonly held eschatological attitudes seem to imply not that the world will die and be resurrected, but that it will die permanently, and be replaced by a new world.  Though this new Earth may be immortal, the one it replaced will be dead forever.  But in that sense and problematically, death’s victory over the world will be sealed as permanent.  The individual my rise from the grave triumphant, but the world he or she had lived in will have been condemned forever.

Religion thus often exhorts us to be better people, to give over this sin or that one, to be more loving, or faithful, or truthful, or whatever.  It does not claim that moral perfection is possible this side of the grave, but does say improvement is possible, and commanded by God.  But at the same time, any real improvement in the politics of the world, its economic or social structures, is usually rejected by religion as either being in vain, or even outright blasphemous: an attempt to force the coming of God’s kingdom before God’s own good time.

But are our deeds, great and small, in the course of human history of any consequence in the long run, or are they not?  Do we have ultimately no place in the creation as actual creators, or as J.R.R. Tolkien might have put it, sub-creators?  Or must we as a species be stripped clean of all history and reformatted with entirely new programs, rendering the previous ones not only forgotten but vanished without a trace?

I am not talking about “salvation by works,” but the salvation of works.  Do our works, our lives, our history as a species, have meaning or not?  Nor can this question be escaped by asserting our works have nothing to do with our salvation.  Might not works be important in the eyes of God without saving anybody?

If there is not some form of continuity between the dead person or world on the one hand, and the resurrected person or world on the other, there is no resurrection.  Parents having another child after the first one dies is no victory over death, and no salvation of the dead child.  Nor will it undo their grief, no matter how much they may be rejuvenated or rejoice in their new offspring.  The idea of healing the deep family wound simply by replacing the beloved is obscene.

Likewise, there is something profoundly nihilistic in believing in resurrection of the individual, but not of the world.  Individuals do not exist as such, detached from the world, any more than we find healthy rosebushes floating about in outer space.  What makes the rose what it is, is in part its connection to its world via soil, light, water and air, all the surrounding insects and microorganism that are a part of its life.  Likewise, if we are, as St. Paul says, organs in Christ’s body, then it is true as Donne says that “no man is an island, entire of itself.”  For the full salvation of the individual, the salvation or redemption—not mere replacement–of the world is needed.

If there is no new Earth, a resurrected Earth that is, a reborn Earth, then what we have is fertile ground for frustrated and vengeful fantasies of annihilation.  The Christian eschatologist writes for himself permission to look upon the destruction of the world with glee, as if he will be standing aside with hands on hips, nodding in approval as an ancient enemy gets its comeuppance.  (Christian eschatology is far too often a way of allowing a sickening misanthropy hide out in the open.)  We give ourselves permission to shit on the creation, even to destroy it, because, after all, it is doomed to eternal nonexistence in any case.

It is deeply revolting and an offense to reason to assert that while charity to the poor is smiled upon by the Lord, the improvement of economic systems such that such charity is not so much needed is seen as some kind of impiety.

God’s creation was and is good.  And it is to be saved.  And if we as individuals are to be saved, what we have made in this world, however much may have to be cast into the flames either for destruction or purification, was not given into our power to make only for us to make it in vain.

But in effect, with this mainstream eschatology, it is implied that we are to be like transplanted rosebushes.  In so far as we thought we saw God in the world around us, even though we were also conscious of its terrible corruption, we were apparently deluded.

If history is to be wiped out, then it was always and already meaningless.  Everything we have ever done is of no significance.  But if that is so, why the relentless nagging of scripture and conscience to do this thing and not do that thing?

A priority of being over doing I can understand and tend to agree with.  But the annihilation of the deed is nihilism.

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AN ABYSS OF SEEMING OPPOSITES

One might describe the relationship of the human race to God, in Christianity, as deeply neurotic.  But indeed, how could it be otherwise?

Consider how God must be, in effect, an abyss of apparently opposite extremes.  On the one hand, there is the intolerance of evil, the demand for perfection, the insistence that all shall be as it should be, according to his divine and infallible will.  There is the anger at sin and injustice, and so on. No one, at least, no one who is unrepentant, will get away with anything.  As the guilt-ridden Claudius says,

In the corrupted currents of this world

Offense’s gilded hand may shove by justice,

And oft ‘tis seen the wicked prize itself

Buys out the law.  But ‘tis not so above.

There is no shuffling; there the action lies

In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled,

Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults,

To give in evidence.                                        (Hamlet 3:3:57-64)

On the other side of the equation there is the infinite forgiveness of even the worst and least excusable of human offenses, the implacable insistence on forgiveness and salvation, mercy to those whom even the most merciful of us could not forgive, even though every pain, every injustice, every indignity ever inflicted on any human being—from the most to the least deserving of them—is always and also suffering for the Almighty who is doing that forgiving.

It is a commonplace that we cannot comprehend God, but what I have just outlined above is one of the infinite ways in which this is so.  Therefor, faced with a God who is implacably against us and will never overlook the least of our sins, but at the same time a God who takes our side passionately against the retribution we have set ourselves up for, how can we possibly perceive this God accurately?  It is as if we stand in the middle of a road which recedes from us infinitely in both directions.  For he is the fierce advocate of flaming sword, but also the one who bleeds and who feels more for the bleeding and for those who blood them than any of us can imagine.

So, we cannot imagine him.  And that means, according to our individual situations and temperaments, we are inclined either to see him as a monster of rage and punishment, one who can never be even a little happy with us, let alone satisfied, or some simpering milquetoast who can do nothing but groan impotently on a cross and offer excuses for our every failure, making no demands on anyone at all.  The first version presents himself to us as a terror, and the second version is powerless.

God is too big for us to perceive him–except perhaps in rare moments of illumination—in any way other than one of these two distorted ways.  The contradiction is not in God, but our smallness.  Nor is the truth, I think, a simple matter of finding a “happy middle,” though from the point of view of daily life, that approach may be useful.  But I think the truth in this matter is somewhat beyond us.

One must be careful of trying too hard to make sense of God.

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C.S. LEWIS’S PHILOSOPHY OF HELL AND A NEW WORLD

C.S. Lewis never wrote about politics very much, but in the eighteenth letter of The Screwtape Letters he has his devil, Screwtape, say the following:

The whole philosophy of Hell rests on recognition of the axiom that one thing is not another thing, and, specially, that one self is not another self. My good is my good and your good is yours. What one gains another loses. Even an inanimate object is what it is by excluding all other objects from the space it occupies; if it expands, it does so by thrusting other objects aside or by absorbing them. A self does the same. With beasts the absorption takes the form of eating; for us, it means the sucking of will and freedom out of a weaker self into a stronger. ‘To be’ means ‘ to be in competition’.  

This philosophy could be seen as what has always been the dominant politics of the world—or the sin of pride in its structural or corporate manifestation—whether the rulers were soldiers, priests, hereditary aristocrats, or business people.  Capitalism, with its “war of all against all,” its social Darwinism, is the locus of the Devil’s philosophy in the current age.

Many Christians simply accept Churchill’s dictum that history is “just one damned thing after another.”  Whatever he meant by that, they see it as an essentially meaningless and contemptible series of events and eagerly await the Christ to come back and wipe it all out, taking us to heaven.  They are disappointed in life, and want it to be punished.  And for what they imagine to be their admirable otherworldliness, they think they shall be rewarded with a new world that has no connection to and very little similarity to this one.

What is a resurrection?  It is a rebirth, a new person, but a person not entirely discontinuous with the old person.  It is the old person who has died but is transfigured and reborn.  Otherwise, there is no resurrection, but simply the death of one person followed by his or her replacement by another who is entirely someone else.

Thus it is, I believe, with the new Earth that is destined to be born.

The Christian’s approach to history should not be that of an unloving parent troubled by a chronically and seriously sick child, hopefully counting the days down to when that child shall die and the parent be presented with a healthy replacement.  The parent wants the child to be saved, not replaced, and this is what we should want for the world—not just for the individuals within it. 

Much of Christian eschatology, unfortunately, is simply a disguised desire for genocide, geocide, even.

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HELL IS POLITICAL

Many of the early Christians were very cheerful, very good, very fearless.  There was a real danger they might have no fear of death; and this would never do.  Christ came to defeat sin and death, and death is a much reduced master if he is not feared.  Fortunately, there was an answer: the Christians’ faith in the resurrection could not be easily shaken; but it could be more easily twisted.

Enter hell.  The solution was simple.  If people do not fear anything in this life because their deepest faith is in the life to come, make that life to come uncertain: not by denying its reality, but by making that reality potentially terrifying.  Tell them that they very well will live forever after they die, but that they must step very carefully in this life or end up in perpetual torment.

And so death, the retreating ancien regime, poisoned the wells for the advancing revolutionaries who were overthrowing him; he re-established his foothold on Earth in the very midst of a church that was to lead the revolution against him.  For now, Christians again lived in fear.  And their fear of the next world gave them all the vices and weaknesses people experience when their fears are only of this one.

The pagan world of the Middle East had believed in a dark and shadowy afterlife, a world of shades and shadows, of ghostly spirits who had forgotten their Earthly lives and wandered forever in gloom.  This miserable fate had been thought to await all but a few privileged ones favoured by the gods for whatever reason.  But now, after the victory of Christ, this shadowy underworld was superseded in its misery and terror by the Christian hell.

Thus it is that in wars and revolutions, the enemy puts up such resistance that one looks back longingly, like the Hebrews in the desert after leaving Pharoah, upon a time that was miserable, but less miserable than now.  Would it not have been better to make bricks without straw under a tyrant than be where we are now?   Would it not have been better to submit to death, its power and propaganda, to be “realistic” and bow to his “natural” reign, than rebel and find ourselves cast into the flames?

But not so fast.  For death never had power to make a hell, only the fear of it.  Death never cast us into the flames but only into the fear of them.  Death has enlisted us against ourselves in his war against us, and we need not commit this self-betrayal.  Nor need we believe that the rise of hell as a propaganda pinion of the Church was ever inevitable, or, even if inevitable, need we see it as anything other than a tremendous bluff, which itself is doomed inevitably to fall.

Hell is decidedly political.

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DAVID GRAEBER AND CAPITALIST HOPELESSNESS

Coming close to the end of David Graeber’s marvellous Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) I encountered the following:

How did we get here?  My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself.  In fact, it could well be said that the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures.  At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world—in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s—with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish, or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win.  To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police, various forms of private security firms and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy.  Maintaining this apparatus seems even more important to exponents of the “free market,” even than maintaining any sort of viable market economy.  How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union?  One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and the rebuilding of the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around.  This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere.  Economically, the apparatus is just a drag on the system; all those guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and don’t really produce anything, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down—along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with.  Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons, lest speculation, predictably, go haywire.  Once it did, and the whole machine imploded, [Graeber seems to be referring to the 2008 financial meltdown here] we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged.  About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.

But what has brought this situation about?  Let me assert that in the West at least, the two great systems of hope, as we may call them, have been Christianity and socialism—perhaps most specifically, Marxism.  Socialism has been betrayed by many of its so-called friends and alleged proponents in the form of party dictatorships, while being ruthlessly stamped out in hearts, minds, and the world by its enemy, capital.  Christianity has been co-opted by worldly power largely into two camps:  an ostensibly apolitical religion concerned solely with private faith and individual salvation on the one hand, and on the other hand a grotesque corruption of the Word of God into an aggressively and absurdly pro-capitalist, even fascist direction.  This perverse politics is not even a parody of Christianity, but an outright contradiction.  American Christian fundamentalism is as much a contradiction of Christianity as the Soviet Union was of Socialism (see Noam Chomsky, “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism”).

We are accustomed to looking at politics in terms of “Right” and “Left.”  This is useful.  (Of course, these useful labels are also routinely abused out of dishonesty or ignorance, as when the corporate media and those who use it as their only source of information refer to Democrats or liberals as “the Left”—cavalierly waiving socialism, communism, anarchism and anyone who actually is a leftist out of existence, or perhaps pretending that Hilary Clinton’s views are but a hairsbreadth to the right of Karl Marx’s).  However, we might also look at politics in terms of hope versus despair.

For it is only the Left, whether secular or religious, that has offered us any hope.  The Right is another matter.  Whereas the Left says that we can change things fundamentally, and for the better, such hopes tend to bring sneers of contempt to the faces of the Right, which proudly invokes “realism,” or perhaps “human nature,” or “the will of God” as in Luther’s conviction that the Almighty had given power and authority to the princes and so on.  On a theological level, the religious wing of the Left sees God as working not only in some otherworldly heaven, but has plans for this world, that may well include upheaval and revolution, but do not include writing the world off.

On the specifically religious plane, Left and Right are literally worlds apart.  The religious Left takes seriously the Biblical claim that “God so loved the world…” but the religious Right can’t wait to see him turn it into a fire pit.  Paradoxically, while the Right is therefor very otherworldly (in a most unhealthy sense) it preaches what is in fact a worldly gospel that absolutely loses sight of the poor and oppressed, handing over power and authority to the rich: the very people scripture most often castigates. 

Despair is a choice, and it is political.

For what “liberals,” the “woke” or “politically correct,” for all their faults–real, imagined or exaggerated–have in common is a belief that we can and therefor should improve things in major ways, that merely tinkering with the status quo is not enough.  The endless tirades since the late 80s or early 90s about “PC” and how everyone, apparently, is held in holy terror of its hysterical dictates mask what is in fact a deeper fear: that we can and therefor must change the world.

Hope can be frightening.

What really pains the Right is the possibility that that liberal/leftist realm is actually pointing out our real responsibilities, and our real powers, if we but use them.  And this call to action, if correct, alleviates us all from our excuses to do nothing.

That is the real terror: responsibility.

But in fact, the problem runs deeper, and is more interesting than that.  A politics of mere responsibility, though it would be an immense improvement over the slash and burn mentality of capital, has the same weakness as religion does when it loses its heart and degenerates into phariseeism.  “Thou shalt not,” in the long run, or “thou shalt” does not have the staying power in public or personal life that is needed for real change.  A genuine sense of ethical responsibility easily degenerates into a prim and censorious temperament, and lacks the power needed to overcome the darker elements of individuals or systems.

And what the Left and Right have often had in common is this phariseeism.

What is the answer?  Perhaps I should leave that discussion for a later post.

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THE ODDS OF SALVATION

They say that humans must have free will to be important, to love and be loved.  Therefor, it is inevitable some will choose to reject God.  And choosing to reject God is to put oneself in hell.

Therefor, they say, hell is justified.

But is it actually inevitable, given the free wills of billions of souls, that some will reject God?  What is this “inevitable” mathematically speaking?  What percentage of the total number of souls should we expect will be saved given this inevitability?  50%?  25%?  1%?  Even given billions of souls, is a 25% salvation rate more likely than 100%?  If one flips a coin 100 times one can predict mathematically what the odds are it will be heads every time.  The odds that it will be heads 50 times are presumably much greater.  But a coin is a known quantity.  Its result is random (the random is not predictable, except in a broad statistical sense) not freely chosen.  The odds against it turning up heads 100 times out of 100 are extremely low.  If we treat free souls like flipped coins, it seems impossible that all shall be saved. But are we not, in assuming a significant number of lost souls, making a mistake in treating them like flipped coins?  Must freedom be unpredictable?  Random?  Arbitrary?

Does freedom operate according to the laws of chance?  And if not, why should all being saved be less likely than, say, half?

Why could not the perfect freedom of all guarantee the salvation of all?  What is the more likely result, and how do we know?

POSTED JULY 31, 2023

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ECKHART TOLLE AND CHRISTIAN SALVATION

What if Christian soteriology, in its concern with how to get God’s grace and be saved, has been little more than an unwitting attempt to resist that grace?

What if our strategy, unbeknownst to ourselves, has been to keep salvation somewhere beyond planet Earth and eternally in the future?  If we take the position that universal salvation is the truth, then soteriology might be, on the psychological level at least, a grandiose and perverse attempt to keep that inevitable salvation at arm’s length for as long as possible.

Reading Eckhart Tolle, one encounters repeatedly the idea that the ego, which is a false self, constantly tries to create various situations and narratives which sustain its existence.  This leads to a great deal of unnecessary drama and pain.  We are accustomed, in the religious or spiritual world, to look at ego moralistically.  But this is something Tolle does not do.  He seems to see the ego as a persistent force that causes us problems constantly, sucking the life out of us, but he views this more as a problem than a sin.

For Tolle, the ego lives on time, thrives on time, and needs some kind of narrative (and not even necessarily a self-praising one.  It can even be the opposite) to keep itself alive.  To be fully present in the now is the death of the ego, and something it militates against constantly.  The reason we spend most of our lives in the past or the future, and in ways that are not necessary or beneficial, is because the ego cannot live in the present, and must keep us distracted from it.

What would a deep-seated conviction of God’s eternal, unconditional, and irrevocable love for us mean to the ego?  It would mean the ego’s death.

Where would one find such a deep-seated conviction?  Where would one experience God’s love?  In the present, and the present only.  But to avoid this conviction of divine love (such avoidance being what the ego wants) we must limit our soteriology to the level of eschatology: the last things, some future events.  Salvation must be of the future (an uncertain future at that) and of the future only.

We look to the second coming of Christ in the future because we don’t know how to find him in the present.

We become lawyers of the Bible because we see the Bible as a book of the past and we do not know how to live now.

Take none of this to mean that the Bible is “outdated” or needs to be “made relevant”; please also note that I do assert a literal second coming of Christ, entailing a radical rebirth of the world and eventually of all people.  But if Christians spend much of their time trying to parse the book of Revelation to know exactly how and when he is coming, or if they ignore and despise the world around them because it is not ancient scripture, it may well be because they deny the Christ of the present, of the here and now.

Christ yesterday, Christ tomorrow, never Christ today.  The Christ of the Now is too frightening.  “Seek and ye shall find,” he said, but we only think we are seeking.

If only we do such-and-such then Christ, truly, will love us (in the future).  Conversely: oh look at the dear Bible and see how Christ loved us (in the past).  No Christian would deny that Christ loves us now of course, but it is one thing to assert this as a doctrine and quite another to embrace it in one’s attitudes or spiritual practice.  Alas!  Jesus loves us, but Jesus is elsewhere, waiting to come back.  We fold our hands piously and sit with woebegone faces staring at the heavens, waiting for the love to come.  Christ is always elsewhere, be it time or space.

Theologians, who have egos as much as the rest of us, must find some clever way around universalism if God’s love is to be rendered an uncertain thing and the ego left with a good toehold, at the very least, in our lives.  Hence, the torment of soteriology: is he saved?  Is she saved?  Am I saved?  How do we know?  What do we do?  Have we done it enough yet?  For if universalism is not true, or if it is only a pious “hope” that some patronizing doctrine allows us (condemning us for “dogmatism” or “presumption” if we insist that universalism is true) the ego can thrive: especially on its plans, constructions, narratives on how it will get into heaven and even how, perhaps, others will not.

It is my contention that if there is something we must do to be saved, we shall do it, somehow, sooner or later, both freely and inevitably.

The good news of our inevitable salvation in Christ is bad news for the ego.  The dramatic narrative is ruined if there is an inevitable happy ending for everyone.  How does the ego feed off the prospect of eternal bliss if everyone gets it?        

It can’t.

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REVENGE IS THEOLOGICAL

Revenge is theological.  To be abased or abused by another causes one to see one has lost value in the eyes of that other.  But who is that other?  Why does he or she have authority?  If the other is the other and no more than that there is no especial reason to elevate the other’s opinion of oneself to a higher status than one’s own opinion of oneself.  Suppose I think myself a worthy fellow.  Then someone treats me as if I am unworthy.  Why should I believe him rather than myself?  But it happens that we do tend to respect the other’s opinion not simply as a judgment on us, whether an accurate judgement or not; the other’s abuse of us is not simply an expression of a judgement.  The abuse is experienced as a making of that judgement the truth.  To pronounce guilty, in this sense, is to make the object of that pronouncement guilty.  This is no case of “guilty as charged,” but “charged, therefore guilty.”  Just as God’s “fiat lux” does not express a wish for light or the expression of a truth that light would be a good thing, but does in fact cause the existence of light, so the abuse we receive makes us deserving of it.  This perception or feeling, however irrational, is the experience of abuse (leading to desire for revenge) no matter how truly we may argue the abuse was undeserved and does not pay due respect to our true self.

The abuser, therefore, is treated as being the manifestation of God’s power and authority.

God, therefore, has proclaimed us into unworthiness via his messenger.  What are we to do?  We cannot “prove” our innocence as one might do in a trial, or in the appeal of a faulty verdict.  Or rather, on a rational and evidential basis we might indeed prove our innocence, but such proof is rendered null and void by the idolatry that treats the abuser as a manifestation of God.

Therefore, we must abuse, even kill the messenger.  If we can do this, we can show to ourselves that he or she was not God’s messenger to begin with.  If his power to hurt us indicates God’s authority, our power to hurt this messenger negates him as God’s messenger.  The authority of the abuse against us is vitiated.  To get revenge is to say to the abuser “no, you are not the voice and power of God.”

But perhaps, at the darkest level, to get revenge is to unseat the offender from being the voice and power of God, as if the offender really had been that.  Note that this is not a case of proving the abuser to be a false prophet.  Prophets are not killed because they are false but because they are true (or seen as such).  Likewise, the abuser is believed (at some deep level at least) to be the true power and authority of God.  However, the avenger aspires to change this state by the injury or destruction of said abuser.

Convicted by The Truth (regardless of the fact this “truth” may be a blatant falsehood) one therefor assaults The Truth, assaults God through assaulting his “prophet.”  One therefore treats God like a puppet who can be forced; this action is tragic.

Perhaps, therefore, when God says, “revenge is mine” he may well be not only delineating the difference between human and divine responsibilities but saying that he shall not be our puppet.

Revenge, therefore, is unfaithful and idolatrous.  But it also reflects a belief in God, a passionate need not to be rejected by him.  Perhaps it is the case, therefore, that those who can be greatly provoked without experiencing the desire for revenge are either people of great faith (whether or not it is linked to a specific religion or set of doctrines) or very thoroughgoing atheists.  Revenge, in effect, is for believers who lack faith.

So, revenge is not a matter of “tit for tat” as it is usually conceived: a spiritual or moral Newtonian motion where an action demands an opposite and equal reaction.  If you hurt me and I therefore want to hurt you, that is not the same as the firing of a gun causing recoil.

Revenge is not a matter of justice, not even retributive justice, but an attempt at the justification of the self.  This justification is attempted through an assault on God, the source of all justification.

Indeed, if there is any truth to what I have said here, it might illustrate in some way the Christian belief that we cannot justify ourselves.  Only God can do that for us.  “Revenge is mine,” he says in Romans and Deuteronomy.

Revenge is inspired when one first commits the idolatry of taking another person’s judgement of oneself as coming from God, and ends up assaulting God himself to achieve the justification ruined by this very idolatry.

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THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOOD AND EVIL

What is meant in the Genesis story about the “tree of the knowledge of good and evil?”

Let us take a look first at this passage, from Alain Badiou discussing Jacques Lacan in “The Other,” which is the first part of I Know There Are So Many of You (2019):

“We are making progress here on a very important point, which is that the question of the individual, from the point of view of otherness, is clearly a question of identity, except that this identity contains the Other within it.  In other words, no identity can do without otherness.  The very important lesson we learn from this is that it is always a fantasy, and sometimes a criminal one, to think that there can be identity without otherness.  The thesis of the elimination of otherness may lead, and has historically led, to bloodshed, from the moment that, instead of understanding that since all desire is the desire of the Other, the Other is internal to my own desire, I instead assume the Other to be external, to be a border at which my desire is forever rejected, and so I attempt to destroy them.”  (20-21)

(Elsewhere in this chapter, Badiou explains that “desire of the Other” seems to mean not simply “desire for the Other” but also “desire to be desired by the Other.”)

Let us make a bit of a leap here and assert that from observations such as this one, one might conclude that good and evil are complementary, that the one cannot exist without the other.  Evil, therefor, in some fundamental sense is not so much evil as necessary.  But another way of looking at things is that in theory, at least, evil could be eliminated, leaving only good.

Here is where the tree comes in.  The eating of the fruit is called a “loss of innocence,” (a cringeworthy and patronizing phrase if ever there was one).  “Loss of innocence” implies not simply a plunge into moral guilt (or a feeling of guilt) but a loss of ignorance.  That is, the gaining of knowledge: in this case, one learns about good and evil that already existed, but it would have been best not to know the difference between them.

This would imply that paradise was not paradise, even before Adam and Eve ate the apple, but a kind of “fugitive and cloistered” paradise, a diminished existence which owes (perhaps shamefully) its bliss to the avoidance of certain realities.

But this is false from a Christian point of view, which does not see evil as an inherently necessary element in what would amount to a cosmic dualism.  Even though it indeed seems the case that evil is necessary to good, and that we cannot even imagine (let alone make) a world where this is not so, we must keep in mind that the eating of the fruit, the “knowledge,” results in the eviction from paradise.  The “knowledge” that evil is necessary is post-lapsarian, and therefor must be suspect.  The fact is, we post-lapsarians cannot imagine how two people in perfection could fall.  So we must see all tales of this unfallen world as tales of a foreign country whose language is so incomprehensible to us the story must be told in our own language, and therefor falsified.  The “loss of innocence” is perhaps some acquisition of knowledge to the fallen world, but in absolute, that is, true terms, this loss of innocence is the gaining of ignorance.  The “knowledge of good and evil” is a lie.  It is a lie we cannot see beyond to the truth it obfuscates.  We cannot even imagine this truth.  We can know only that the “knowledge” is a lie.

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TWO WAYS WITH GOD

Christianity seems to present us with God’s good books and his bad books.  How do you tell which one you are in?  Christianity seems to present us with either a great thundering about how sinful we are because we are disobedient, unloving, too unconcerned with the poor, etc.–in other words, we are faced with God’s justice–or Christianity presents us with a God saying never mind, I love all my broken children, and I know you can be nowhere near what I want you to be on your own efforts.  Relax.  I always love you no matter what.

The young rich man is told he must give all he has to enter the kingdom of heaven–an apparently impossible task.  Later in that tale we hear that with God all things are possible.  I always wonder what, exactly, is it that is possible?  Is it possible for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of God without having given his riches to the poor?  Or is the meaning instead that God will help the rich man to give up his riches in order to enter the Kingdom?

Which one is it?  How does God look upon me right now?  Can one be in the good books and the bad books both at the same time?  How do we get into God’s good books and know we are there?  It is very well to say here are the commandments, or here are the two great commandments upon which all the law hangs (love God with all you’ve got and your neighbor as yourself) but we know we are going to fall short here.  How close to the mark must we get before we are in the good books as opposed to the bad ones?  Or are our efforts here irrelevant?

Christianity has tormented us for two thousand years with such questions, and with no answer that I can see, except for those who have been given one on some mystical level.

When we say that God welcomes sinners, do we really mean it, or do we just mean “sinners” in an ironic way.  It seems to be the conservative way to be highly censorious of those society already treats as garbage, putting temptation before them and then blaming them when they fall.  The liberal way, on the other hand, is to treat “sinner” ironically and dishonestly.  All too often what is meant here is simply a person who is a sinner in a conservative’s eyes but not in a liberal’s.  Let’s get over a sentimental idea of “sinner.”  It is easy enough for liberals to castigate conservatives for being harsh on prostitutes, for example, or drug users, the poor, and other underdogs.  When the liberal says “sinner” he doesn’t mean literally “sinner,” but actually “those whom conservatives falsely label as guilty.”

Well, if God welcomes those people, it’s not such a big deal, is it?  Why would he reject helpless innocents, if that’s what they are, just because conservatives do?

When Mary Magdalene wept and washed Jesus’ feet with her own hair, she presented us with the quintessential image of the repentant sinner.  Personally, I am not inclined to judge prostitutes harshly.  The chief cause of their situation, as far as I am concerned, is poverty caused by economic injustice.  I’m not even sure that prostitution, as such, is always and inherently immoral.  But if the whole message of this Biblical incident is taken to be that prostitutes are not such bad people as the world makes them out to be, I think we have missed something.

And for the pharisee who said “I thank you that I am not like other men” there is always another pharisee thanking God he is not like the first pharisee, and another pharisee after that one . . .