"It is not up to us to believe in God, but only to not grant our love to false gods."
Prof. Donald L.
Carveth
York
University, Glendon College
Department of Sociology
2275 Bayview
Avenue
Toronto, Canada
M4N3M6
Telephone: (416) 736-2100 ext.
88378 Fax: (416) 487-6850
Freud Stands With Jesus: Assemblage by Jean Hantman
From Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution (2009)
The difference between science and theology ... is one over whether you see the world as a gift or not; and you cannot resolve this just by inspecting the thing, any more than you can deduce from examining a porcelain vase that it is a wedding present.
Given the twisted state of the world, self-fulfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment. That this is so is a tragedy in itself. It would be far more agreeable if we could achieve justice and fellowship spontaneously, without having to die, personally and politically, to our selfishness, violence, possessiveness and urge to dominate.
The biblical name for God as judge or accuser is Satan, which literally means 'adversary.' Satan is a way of seeing God as a great big bully .... Men and women are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledging the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith. In fact, Jesus has very little to say about sin at all, unlike a great many of his censorious followers. His mission is to accept men and women's frailty, not to rub their noses in it. It is this overturning of the Satanic or super-egoic image of God in Jesus that offers to unlock the lethal deadlock between Law and desire .... In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the Law. Which is to say that those who are faithful to God's law of justice and compassion will be done away with by the state. If you don't love you're dead, and if you do, they'll kill you. Here then is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety.
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Atheism/Agnosticism Because they know it is not possible to prove that God does not exist, anymore than to prove he does, today it is common for unbelievers to blur the distinction between atheism and agnosticism, as if the belief that God does not exist is somehow the same as admitting one doesn't know. Freud himself is an instructive case in this regard, In Future he defines religion as illusion, a belief not known to be either true or false but accepted as true because one wishes it so. Here he contrasts illusion with delusion, a scientifically false belief that is held despite this fact. At this point Freud is agnostic. But only three years later, in Civilization, he drops the distinction and calls religion delusion. In so claiming religion as delusion, Freud embraces atheism and, in so doing, himself falls victim to illusion, affirming as true a belief (that God does not exist) that cannot be empirically validated or invalidated, accepting this because he wishes it to be so. Of course, all this applies to belief or nonbelief in a supernatural god. In that regard, I am agnostic. But there is an entire other tradition in Christianity, variously known as "death of god" theology or "religionless Christianity"--and that is another kettle of fish altogether.
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Can a Rational Person, Let Alone a Trained Psychoanalyst, be "Religious"?
The answer depends on what one means by "religious." If by that term one means conventional religious beliefs and practices, an orthodox conception of God as an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent supernatural Creator, then I think the answer is no. Christians in the tradition of Deitrich Bonhoeffer consider themselves "religionless" precisely to distance themselves from such orthodoxy. On the other hand, if by "religious" one refers to a person's need to idealize and worship, then the answer could be yes, because rational people, even trained psychoanalysts, are human beings and it is in the nature of the human being to worship something or someone. Freud himself taught us that "in the last resort we must begin to love in order that we may not fall ill, and must fall ill if, in consequence of frustration, we cannot love" (Freud, On Narcissism, 1914). The need to love and the related need to worship constitutes what might be called a "religious" drive. This drive is an aspect of what Freud called Eros, the drive towards life, love, connection and integration, which is opposed by Thanatos, the drive toward death, hate, disconnection and disintegration. Since the drive to worship is an intrinsic aspect of the need to love, to ask how a rational person, let alone a trained psychoanalyst, can be religious is tantamount to asking how a rational person, let alone a trained analyst, can love. This, by the way, is a good question. Although I do not believe reason and psychoanalysis necessarily cripple the capacity to love, those who for whatever reason are unable or unwilling to love may well enlist reason and psychoanalysis in the struggle against it. According to Blaise Pascal, "The heart has reasons that reason does not know." If religion is essentially a matter of the heart, if it entails a type of falling in love, then certainly a rational person, even a trained analyst, can be religious, provided he or she has not used reason or psychoanalysis to cripple the capacity to love.
Since Eros is universal and powerful, the need to love and the related drive to worship are repressed only at great cost. Repression, by inhibiting the forces of love, strengthens the forces of hate, and results in various degrees of destructiveness and depression. Those who do not cripple Eros in this way will worship something or someone. So the important question is not whether or not to worship (for to repress the need to worship is to court illness), but rather toward what or whom will this worship be directed? The question is not, in other words, whether or not to be ":religious," but rather what form or type of religion one should or has embraced?
Paul Tillich defined religion as one's ultimate concern. Some people are ultimately concerned with money. Others with power or fame. Still others with sex, alcohol, cocaine ... . I regard these as debased religions, forms of what the Bible calls idolatry. Idolatry is a religion that worships graven images rather than the living God. Today, in our "culture of narcissism," perhaps the most common form of idolatry is the worship of the self-image, the specular ego that Jacques Lacan distinguished from the living subject. For Lacan, it is only through the "acceptance of castration," the crucifying experience of decentering from the Imaginary ego, that the subject might be resurrected in and through the Symbolic through le nom du pere, the Name (Nom/Non) of the Father. Just as Lacan distinguishes the registers of the Imaginary and the Symbolic, which correspond roughly to Melanie Klein's paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, so we may distinguish two fundamentally different types of religion: fundamentalism with its dogmatism, splitting and projection, and its concrete and magical forms of thinking; and more highly symbolized, sublimated and demythologized forms of faith that seek precisely to transcend literalism and idolatry.
If "religion" is defined exclusively as the former, fundamentalist, literalist and magical form of faith, then adherents of a demythologizing, existentialist faith reject "religion" in favor of what they call "religionless Christianity." In this view, god--in the traditional supernatural sense of an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent Creator--is dead. But that in no way prevents one from being a follower of Jesus who was and is a radical critic of the religion of His time and ours.
Many of my atheistic psychoanalytic colleagues appear to me to have fallen in love with and worship Freud and the 23 volumes of his scriptures. They appear to embrace the religion of Freudianism. Some Kleinians appear to hold their Kleinianism in a similarly fundamentalist way, as do many of the followers of Heinz Kohut, to mention only a few of the current psychoanalytic "denominations." But not all Freudians, Kleinians and Kohutians hold their psychoanalytic theories in this idolatrous fashion. Some hold their theories as open rather than closed systems of thought, accepting some elements and rejecting others in accordance with rational principles of criticism, reason and evidence. That is usually not because these psychoanalysts have divested themselves of their religiosity (any more than they have divested themselves of their capacity to love), but rather because they have either sublimated it or invested it somewhere else. Perhaps they have taken it to the synagogue or to the church or the mosque, or managed to sublimate through the arts or through political concern and action, or found an outlet for it in their personal and familial relations.
If, on the other hand, they have repressed it, we will witness the disguised return of the repressed in the low-grade depression, usually rationalized as "the tragic sense of life," and the bitterness and anger that accompanies it, as well as in the narcissism in which, for want of worshipping another, they have fallen back on worshipping themselves.
But even if we grant that the essence of religion is love, in addition to differentiating fundamentalist from non-fundamentalist varieties of faith, should we not also distinguish religions in which love is directed toward God from religions in which love is directed toward other objects? In one sense, we have already done so in distinguishing idolatrous religions that worship objects from faith in the living God. But even this way of putting it tends to represent God as an object of a subject's faith and worship, whereas it can be argued that, on the contrary, God is the subject's act of loving: "Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love" (1 John 4: 7-8). It is in this sense, perhaps, that it can be said that the one who seeks God has already found Him. While, for the religionless Christian, the supernatural god of traditional theology is dead, the living God is manifested in the act of loving. We no longer conceive of a "god" who is loving, but of loving as God--that is, as our ultimate truth, value and concern.
But aren't adherents of a demythologized, "religionless" faith centered upon the capacity to love really humanists in disguise? The answer will depend on what we mean by "humanism." Whatever those who today call themselves humanists may mean by this term, for the humanism of the Enlightenment the measure of man is man: his glorious reason can easily substitute for the omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence formerly attributed to the deity. This humanism is an anthropocentric or man-centered philosophy. If it recognizes the universal moral law at all, as distinct from the variety of culturally relative ethics, it can only regard it as a human construction or inventiion. As a 20th century inheritor of this outlook, Jean-Paul Sartre claimed "existentialism is a humanism." Martin Heidegger responded that if by existentialism one means the sort of philosophy espoused by Sartre, then he, Heidegger, is no existentialist. That is because as a philosopher of Being, Heidegger understood that man (rather Dasein) is not self-creating or self-defining but, rather, a being called upon by and "response-able" to Being. Religionless Christianity regards the universal law not as a human construction but as the human discovery of a law humanity does not create but that places demands and constraints upon its actions. In this sense, humanity is not at the centre. For religionless Christianity humanity must open itself toward the otherness of the Law. As individuals, people must open themselves toward the otherness of others--that is, they must seek to transcend narcissism or self-centerdness and learn to love. Love Being with all your heart, all your mind, all your strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.
"Whoever loves God must also love love."
--St. Augustine, The Trinity 8.12
The "Protest"antism of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Religionless Christianity"
Excerpted from "Discussion" by D. Carveth
of "'Someday...' and 'If only...' Fantasies: Pathological Optimism and
Inordinate Nostalgia as Related Forms of Idealization." A paper by Salman
Akhtar, M.D. Presented at a scientific meeting of the Toronto Psychoanalytic
Society, February 17, 1996 and posted on the homepage of the Canadian
Psychoanalytic Society. Discussion
I
think it is instructive that psychoanalytic scholars who are circumspect in
regard to avoiding reductionism in other areas of psychoanalytic inquiry, still
feel free to indulge in it when it comes to religion. Such is the power of the
dominant ideology of secular humanism in our field that it is not even seen as
an ideology. When psychoanalysts express concern lest analysts inappropriately
indoctrinate their analysands in ideologies of various types, they seldom worry
that the ideology into which patients are most usually indoctrinated by their
analysts is that of secular humanism which, being taken for granted, is not even
seen as an ideology.
Suffice it to say that, after the important work of
Meissner (1984) on Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience, there is no
longer any excuse for repeating Freud's (1907, 1927, 1930) failure to adhere to
his own psychoanalytic principle of epigenesis in regard to the study of
religion and his consequent failure to distinguish mature from immature
varieties of faith. ... [I]n the context of a mature as opposed to an infantile
faith, the Judeo-Christian doctrine of the "Fall of Man" forms part of a more
general biblical critique of idolatry and idealization and amounts to a demand
for a kind of perpetual mourning of our lost (I would say, defensive)
omnipotence.
There is no intention here to deny the infantile, magical,
supernatural and other regressive forms of religious experience, but only to
insist that both sides of the story of religion be told. For just as
psychoanalytic theory may itself be held in a regressively ideological form that
functions as a defence against a range of anxieties (Hanly, 1993), or in a
mature and authentically scientific form that encourages the confrontation with
and working through of such anxieties, so, in addition to elements reflecting
the magical and illusory denial of separation and death, the biblical tradition
contains reminders such as the following (Psalm 103:15-16):
As
for man, his days are as grass; as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For
the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no
more.
Echoing the psalmist, the Christian liturgy for Ash Wednesday
reminds us that Of dust thou hast arisen and unto dust thou shalt return,
while in the Order For the Burial of the Dead (Book of Common
Prayer) we are told that In the midst of life we are in
death.
It is difficult to imagine how those who regard religion as
nostalgia for a lost symbiosis and as denial of the need to separate and
individuate would account for the following passage from The Gospel According
to St. Matthew (10:34-39):
Think not that I am come to send peace
on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at
variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the
daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his
own household. He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy
of me: and he that loveth son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And
he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me is not worthy of me. He
that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake
shall find it.
In addition to the resurrection hope celebrated on
Easter Sunday, there is also in the Christian tradition the dereliction,
crucifixion and mourning represented by Good Friday. Certainly, there are in
this tradition many instances of failure to maintain ambivalence or self and
object constancy and consequently of regression from the so-called depressive to
the paranoid-schizoid position. Much splitting is evident in those elements of
the tradition which either privilege the resurrection over the crucifixion (in a
manic defence), or vice versa (in paranoid-schizoid, depressive/masochistic
dynamics). However, both of these regressive manifestations are distinct from
more mature forms of the faith which struggle to maintain both elements of the
Christian dialectic--thus advancing beyond both mania and depression to what
Klein (1935, 1940, 1946) misleadingly termed the "depressive"
position.
Since Bultmann's (1960, 1961) theology of "demythologizing,"
the myth of crucifixion/resurrection has been widely interpreted, at least among
the theologically sophisticated, in highly metaphorical terms signifying such
things as, for example, the need to "die" to one's "inauthentic" or "false self"
in order to permit "resurrection" of one's "authentic" or "true self"
(Heidegger, 1927; Winnicott, 1960). Psychoanalysts need to be aware of these
facts in order to avoid reductionist applications of psychoanalytic
concepts.
Beyond this, however, psychoanalytic concepts need, in my view,
to be applied more frequently to the regressive, magical, defensive and
ideological elements to be found in psychoanalysis itself. It would be a
worthwhile project to explore the role of the "Someday..." and "If only..."
fantasies as they have infiltrated psychoanalytic theory and practice.
“It is easier than one thinks to hate oneself. … The ultimate blessing would be to be able to love oneself humbly,
just like any other suffering member of Christ.” --George Bernanos, Diary of a Country Priest.
What Does It Mean To Be Religious?
Religious folks believe there is a right path for them in life and that it is important to find it. An irreligious person thinks there is no such path, no true self that we are somehow required to find and develop or realize, all such paths and selves being merely human constructions. The agnostic doesn't know which of these perspectives is correct. Since being religious has nothing whatever to do with churches and conventional religious practices, many people who are religious do not realize it and often mistakenly consider themselves atheists. Those who think there is no right path for them to find, no true self they are obliged to discover and actualize, are lying to themselves about what, on a deeper level, they know to be true. And they are doing so to evade guilt. For if there is no right path, then there is no wrong path, and no need to feel guilty for having strayed. Those secular humanists who think they can reject social constructivism and cultural relativism and affirm the existence of a path created neither by God nor by human societies fail to understand that "God" signifies this path and is manifest both in our search for it and the guilt we feel for being off it.
"All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the LORD hath laid on him the iniquity of us all."--Isaiah 53:6
"No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realized how much right he has to all this talk about 'criminals,' as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of all the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skills; till he's squeezed out the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."
--G. K. Chesterton, The Secret of Father Brown
In his essay "On Revenge" (The 2004 Freud Lecture of the New York Psychoanalytic Society, presented to the Toronto Psychoanalytic Society, April 1st, 2005), Milton H. Horowitz writes with reference to practices of child-sacrifice and child-mutilation:
The fear of an angry, vengeful and jealous deity was related to the sacrifice of the 'first fruits' including children as appeasements. Some of these ideas are memorialized in stone in the sculptural program of the great Gothic cathedral at Chartres. On the north, darkened porch is a poignant representation of Abraham about to slit the throat of Isaac, a prefiguration of the sacrifice of Christ, God's only begotten son, on the south porch. Bathed in sunlight is the crucified Christ representing the new 'enlightened' dispensation. Isaac's rescue is effected through the partial sacrifice of the foreskin, and by the substitution of a ram chosen for death; a sublimation which is life-saving. The new dispensation centers on torture and murder, now revived in Mel Gibson's Passion.
But before reversing Christian one-upmanship and celebrating the old dispensation as superior to the new, one ought to consider that, in the latter, according to its doctrine of the Incarnation--"foolishness to the Greeks and a scandal to the Jews" (St. Paul)--Christ is God Incarnate. Hence, the sacrifice of Jesus is a self-sacrifice on the part of the Almighty. Not a foreskin. Not a ram. A sacrifice of and by God Himself. And while this idea of God's self-sacrifice certainly has a potential for masochistic exploitation, before concluding reductively that that is all it entails, one ought to consider the role played by the capacity for self-sacrifice in maturity and health: the sacrifice of infantile narcissism, illusions and wishful thinking in accommodation to the reality principle; of narcissism in favor of object love; of self-centeredness in the development of the capacity for concern for others.
See: (1) Carveth, D. (2005). The Passion of the Christ: Psychoanalytic and Christian Existentialist Perspectives. In Passionate Dialogues: Critical Perspectives on Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. D. Burston & R. Denova, Eds. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: MISE Publications, pp. 171-178.
(2) Forster, S. & D. Carveth. Christianity: A Kleinian Perspective. Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue Canadienne de Psychanalyse 7, 2 (Fall,1999): 187-218.
"Though Augustine is called a pessimist and G. K. Chesterton an optimist, it was Chesterton who said the reality of original sin can be observed at that point in a lovely summer afternoon when bored children start torturing the cat. A Jewish scholar tells me he thinks original sin the most self-evident concept in the whole world of thought. And Cardinal Newman said that the whole mess of human society suggests it underwent 'some primordial shipwreck.'"
--Gary Wills, Saint Augustine, p.131.
You can run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time,
Sooner, or later, God'll cut you down.
Sooner, or later, God'll cut you down.
Go and tell that long tongue liar,
Go and tell that midnight rider,
Tell the rambiler, the gambler, the back biter,
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down.
Well my goodness gracious,
Let me tell you the news.
My heads been wet with the midnight dew.
I've been down on bended knee,
Talkin to the man from Galilee.
He spoke to me in a voice so sweet,
I thought I heard the shuffle of angels feet.
He called my name and my heart stood still,
When He said "John, go do my will."
Go and tell that long tongue liar,
Go and tell that midnight rider,
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter,
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down.
You can run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time,
Sooner, or later, God'll cut you down.
Sooner, or later, God'll cut you down.
You can throw your rock, hide your hand,
Workin in the dark against your fellow man.
But as sure as God made black and white,
What's done in the dark,
Will be brought to the light.
You can run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time,
Run on for a long time,
Sooner, or later, God'll cut you down.
Sooner, or later, God'll cut you down.
Go and tell that long tongue liar,
Go and tell that midnight rider,
Tell the rambler, the gambler, the back biter,
Tell 'em that God's gonna cut 'em down.
On the God of the Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
Freud tells the story of the godless insurance salesman visited on his deathbed by a rabbi sent by the man’s pious relatives in the hope of a last-minute conversion. After a lengthy dialogue, the salesman dies unredeemed, but the rabbi leaves well-insured.
For me, the moral of this story is that when opposing belief systems are brought into dialogue, the possibility of conversion is enhanced, but it is hard to predict in which direction it may occur.
Cultural anthropologists have long been alert to the possibility that instead of interpreting a target culture within the conceptual framework of social science, researchers may occasionally “go native” and abandon science for the world-view of the culture they set out to study.
If secular concepts, such as existentialist or psychoanalytic theories, are used to interpret the New Testament, the resulting understanding may well result in secularized versions of Christianity, reducing the latter to existential and/or psychoanalytic categories. On the other hand, it may result in the conversion of the existentialist or the psychoanalyst to Christianity. Opening up a border makes both emigration and immigration possible. Just as making an electrical contact permits power to flow in either direction, so opening a connection between conceptual polarities or antitheses allows new meanings to emerge, but it is not always easy to predict what shape the resulting synthesis may take.
Since Freud and Klein we recognize that the mind works on at least two distinct levels (unconscious/conscious, paranoid-schizoid position/depressive position) and thinking occurs in two distinct modes (primary and secondary process). Hence, on the level of the conscious, secondary process, rational thinking that characterizes the depressive position, I may “demythologize” the Gospel, viewing it as “a tissue of metaphors from beginning to end” (Frye in Cayley, 1999) and interpreting such metaphors in existential and psychoanalytic terms. But at the same time, or at other times, I may “regress” psychologically and emotionally (as viewed from the standpoint of D) and, to all intents and purposes, surrender such rationalism in favor of a paranoid-schizoid (PS), magical, primary process understanding.
Whereas the early Kleinians viewed psychological development as a linear movement (PS ---> D), transcending the splitting and part-object functioning of PS in favour of the ambivalence and whole-object functioning of D, more recently we recognize that this formula itself reflects splitting: PS all-bad, D all-good. Hence, today, development and health are conceived dialectically (PS <---> D), for just as there is good in PS (passion, intensity, resolute commitment), so there is bad in D (the paralysis that may come from seeing all sides of every question and attempting to “hold a candle for both St. George and the dragon”). Paralleling the mad passions is a mad, dispassionate rationality: both can result in dehumanization.
Hence, today, we conceive mental health as the capacity to oscillate between PS and D in a way that precludes both types of madness and that maximizes creative living. Such creativity will sometimes enhance adaptation. At other times and in other circumstances it may refuse it for, as Bertrand Russell reminded us, there are some societies in which the only place a decent person can be is in jail. Despite his pacifist sensibility, Dietrich Bonhoeffer joined the plot to assassinate Hitler.
So when existentialist and psychoanalytic categories are employed to work out a secular understanding of the Gospel, the resulting psychology, philosophy and therapy makes marvelous sense on the level of the depressive position. Here God is clearly the internal good object of Kleinian theory and the loving and beloved superego of Freud’s structural theory, and the Devil is the internal bad object and the sadistic, punitive and persecutory superego. The sense of God as an all-seeing, all-knowing presence is understood in these terms: no one gets away with anything in the long run. The superego knows and will exact its pound of flesh unless the ego faces and bears its guilt, repents and makes reparation and, in this way, escapes the provenance of the persecutory superego. Only in this way can it come to accept and enjoy, like a prodigal son, the gracious, forgiving love of the father (the loving and beloved superego, originally the good breast, later extended to the good father imago). Hell is the persecutory state, while Heaven is the blessed condition of reconciliation with one’s conscience and the “peace that passeth understanding” that this can, at least momentarily, produce.
On the level of D I am agnostic: I don't know whether a supernatural God exists. Although I doubt it, I am not an atheist, for I do not know that such a God does not exist. For me, the term "God" refers to nothing supernatural; it refers only to what I take to be ultimate truth, goodness and love. As a religionless Christian I seek to be a follower of Jesus who was a radical critic of the religion of his time and ours. What mattered to Jesus was love. It doesn't matter whether one is a theist, or an atheist, or a non-theist, or a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Buddhist, or a believer in the spiritual powers of crystals. "By their fruits ye shall know them" (Mt. 7:20). What matters is how one lives one's life: lovingly, or not. That's on the level of D. PS is another matter altogether. Man does not live by D alone. Sometimes the current flows the other way: the psycho-existential interpretation will appear as so much intellectualized defensiveness, as evasion of an overwhelming metaphysical reality in the face of which one can only fall on one’s knees. At such times one will sympathize with Freud’s reprimand to the demythologizers when, quoting Pascal, he wrote “Not the God of the philosophers, but the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob!”—despite his personal incapacity to believe in the latter, much to his father’s despair. But that is PS thinking. Time to pick up and carry the cross of living in D.
Recently I was on a TV panel as a part of a series of programs on religion in the week preceding Holy Week, 2007. An Imam, a Jesuit priest, an Orthodox rabbi, a psychologist, a spiritual director and I were asked the question "Why does God need us, and why do we need God?" None of the others seemed to have much difficulty coping with questions formulated in such literalistic terms. When I pointed out that I recently entered a synagogue and heard a Reform rabbi pronounce that he did not believe in an omnipotent God, the Orthodox rabbi on the panel quipped that he didn't think God thought that guy was a rabbi. Well, like that Reform rabbi, I do not believe in an omnipotent God. The Imam argued that God is omnipotent but at the same time must work within the laws of the universe he created--which means God is not omnipotent. Either he is or he isn't. If he is, where was he when Paul Bernardo was murdering Leslie Mahafee and Christine French? Where was he during Auschwitz? We are asked to believe that God has some larger plan we cannot conceive. We are told it is arrogant, even sinful, for us to press such questions. We are told that you can't have the ups without the downs. Sorry. I'm not interested in the idea that the smoke rising over Auschwitz is in any way justified by God's larger plan. I'm not interested in any "ups" requiring such "downs." Any God whose larger plan entails such suffering is a God who is a lousy planner. His inability to plan more compassionately is evidence of his utter indifference, or his incompetence, or (as I prefer to think) his lack of omnipotence. Unless God was and is helpless--i.e., not omnipotent--and suffers and dies along with us, he can only be a cosmic narcissist and sadist. I think the surrender of God's omnipotence is what Christianity has implicitly been demanding for over 2000 years in the doctrine of the Incarnation. God became the man Jesus who suffered and died helplessly on a Cross. No, he could not come down. As God surrendered His omnipotence, so we are called upon to surrender ours.
"GOD"
To me it seems essential in any discussion of "God" to first define our terms. "God" means different things to different people. It is my impression that your standard unbeliever assumes that by "God" believers refer to some supernatural being. While this is true of many believers it is not true of all. For some, such as yours truly, "God" refers to an ultimate principle of order in the universe and in human experience. But this order, while including that component of it that is revealed in natural science, transcends this insofar as it is also a moral order that is not created or constructed by human beings but, rather, discovered or encountered by them. Such discovery resembles yet differs from discovery in natural science in that it is discovery not grounded exclusively in empirical observation but in lived, existential experience. (It is notable, however, that both natural science and religion require human beings to transcend narcissism in favour of the recognition of otherness: the otherness of empirical facts in the one case, and the otherness of "God" in the other. Some have argued that empirical science could only develop in a cultural context in which this bowing to a reality other than the self was accepted.) For example, in virtually all known religions and philosophies there is something approximating the principle of behaving toward others as we would like them to behave toward us. Across cultures this principle seems to have been "discovered": there is an order to the human condition that is recognized over and over in different cultural traditions. Humans do not arbitrarily construct this principle; they derive it from lived experience. Thus, for some, "God" refers to realities not constructed by human beings, as the culturally relativistic social scientists would have us believe, but discovered or derived from universal dimensions of the human situation. For some, "God" refers to the ways in which we humans are not the creators of ourselves: we do not create the universal moral order, for example. Any discussion of "God" should begin by clarifying what participants mean by this term.
As for guilt, I don't think we need to speak about alleged "falls" or primal crimes in the historical (or pseudo-historical) sense: we need only follow Kierkegaard who viewed the Genesis myth as referring allegorically to the fall that occurs in the second year of life in every human being--the fall into self-awareness, freedom and anxiety which, arising in and through language, brings with it the capacity for deception and self-deception, and for evading the anxiety that comes from freedom and the awareness of death through a range of projective and other mechanisms leading to the scapegoating, destructiveness and self-destructiveness characteristic of humanity. Given all this I don't think our guilt is very mysterious. What interests me is what enables some people to bear it constructively while others refuse it and instead visit it on self and others in destructive ways.
Responses to an Inquiring Friend (March 2009)
A. What is meant by the concept of heaven? Eternal life? Is this to be understood metaphorically? Is there life after death? In what sense?
No literal life after death. Heaven is the state we experience when we love and forgive others and ourselves. Hell is the state we are in when our hearts are full of hate, not love, for others and ourselves. "The sting of death is sin" (1 Corinth. 15:56). The notion of eternal life refers not to any literal conquest of biological death, but to the overcoming of persecutory death anxiety that is achievable to a considerable degree by people who manage to conquer their hate with love and to achieve what Erikson called basic trust in the fundamental goodness of life, despite suffering and death. "O death, where is thy sting?" (1 Corinth 15:55).
B. If God is not omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, then why do people pray? What is it they are hoping to achieve/receive, if He/She/It is not in a position to give it?
In a deliteralized, demythologized, non-supernatural, secular Christianity, prayer is meditation. The childish notion of asking God to, say, cure cancer in 30 minutes or free is given up, along with the notion of God as a supernatural parent in the sky. We meditate on our core values as embodied in the New Testament narratives of the birth, life, teachings, death and "resurrection" of Jesus. Prayer as meditation seeks to quiet the chattering mind deflecting us from present being into preoccupations with past and future. Enhanced openness to present being entails openness to the fundamental mystery of life, to the gift of life, which generates a sense of gratitude for this gracious gift. As Melanie Klein explained, gratitude is really the only therapy for envy.
Notice I do not say we meditate on our core values as embodied in the birth, etc., of Jesus, but rather as embodied in the narratives of the birth, etc. Whether or to what extent these narratives correspond to historical actuality is of little importance. What is important is the deep wisdom contained in the narratives. The attempts by scientific historians, the Jesus seminar, etc., to clarify what is known objectively about Jesus is of little interest to the secular Christian. The Jesus we seek to know is present in the narratives whether or not He was ever present in history.
C. What is the God/Jesus connection? If Jesus was God’s only son, then is it that Jesus is the one who is not omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, and God is?
No, Jesus IS God. Emmanuel. God with us. This is the doctrine of the Incarnation. God takes a human form in order to show us the Way. Jesus is the WORD of God. The birth, life, teachings, death and "resurrection" of Jesus are a revelation, a communication to us, of the nature of God, which is ... love. God has given us a great light. He has enLIGHTened us as to His nature and who we are and who we are called to be.
D. What about other religions? Does Christianity have it right, whereas the others have it wrong?
No, other religions and philosophies, including psychoanalysis, also contain revelations of ultimate truth and reality, as does Christianity. A Christian is someone who believes that while Freud and the Buddha got many things right, the New Testament contains a more fundamental and centrally important revelation, containing truths that are missed in other revelations (though other revelations contain insights missed by the New Testament). As one definition of God is as ultimate reality (Paul Tillich), a Christian is interested in arriving at as complete a knowledge of God as possible and therefore is interested in science, other religions, etc., but he remains focused on the New Testament for here, he believes, is something entirely unique and out of sync with the way the world thinks: God in a manger? Kings kneeling before an infant? The first shall be last and the last shall be first? Unless you lose your life you shall not gain it? ... where else do we find stuff like this? "Credo quia absurdum." A classical scholar informs me that this, seemingly radically anti-rational statement by the Church Father Tertullian, has been widely mistranslated as "I believe because it is absurd." A better translation is: "I believe because it doesn't fit with the way the world thinks." Look around to see the results of the way the world thinks. We need another way of thinking in which, as I once read on a sign outside a local church, "Finders weepers, losers keepers."
E. Have you anything you could recommend re readings about contemporary/liberal Christianity that is very readable?
Bishop John Robinson, Honest to God. Any recent book by Bishop John Shelby Spong.
The God Debate: Terry Eagleton's Rejoinder to "Ditchkins"
In Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (2009), the distinguished Marxist literary theorist , Prof. Terry Eagleton, not only demolishes the ill-informed and arrogant diatribes against religion promulgated by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens (to whom he refers collectively as "Ditchkins") but, in the course of doing so, expounds his own variant of liberation theology revealing himself as a species of "Christo-Marxist," a position that, to me at least, makes enormous sense. Although it has universal truth and value, this is a perspective that is particularly relevant and much needed in our current condition. Here are a few selections to give the flavor of Eagleton's outlook:A
"Life for Dawkins would seem to divide neatly down the middle between things you can prove beyond all doubt, and blind faith. He fails to see that all the most interesting stuff goes on in neither of these places. Christopher Hitchens makes much the same crass error, claiming in God is Not Great that 'thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.' But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov. ... God for Christian theology is not a mega-manufacturer. He is rather what sustains all things in being by his love, and would still be this even if the world had no beginning. Creation is not about getting things off the ground. Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever. Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things, any more than my envy and my left foot constitute a pair of objects. God and the universe do not make two" (pp. 6-8).
"There is a document that records God's endless, dispiriting struggle with organized religion, known as the Bible" (p. 8).
"Jesus, unlike most responsible American citizens, appears to do no work, and is accused of being a glutton and a drunkard. He is presented as homeless, propertyless, celibate, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinsfolk, without a trade, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for his own safety, careless about purity regulations, critical of traditional authority, a thorn in the side of the Establishment, and a scourge of the rich and powerful. Though he was no revolutionary in the modern sense of the term, he has something of the lifestyle of one. He sounds like a cross between a hippie and a guerilla fighter. He respects the Sabbath not because it means going to church but because it represents a temporary escape from the burden of labor. The Sabbath is about resting, not religion. One of the best reasons for being a Christian, as for being a socialist, is that you don't like having to work, and reject the fearful idolatry of it so rife in countries like the United States. Truly civilized societies do not hold predawn power breakfasts" (pp. 10-11).
"For theology, science does not start far back enough--not in the sense that it fails to posit a Creator, but in the sense that it does not ask questions such as why there is anything in the first place, or why what we do have is actually intelligible to us" (p. 11).
"The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents: forgive your enemies, give away your cloak as well as your coat, turn the other cheek, love those who insult you, walk the extra mile, take no thought for tomorrow" (p. 14).
"Saint Augustine observes that created things should not presume to create--not as a rebuke to artists, but to what we might now call the great bourgeois myth of self-origination. Self-authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence. Denying that our freedom thrives only within the context of a more fundamental dependency lies at the root of a good deal of historical disaster. It is certainly one of the driving forces of Western neo-imperialism today. For orthodox Christian doctrine, it is our dependence on God that allows us to be self-determining, as it is our dependence on language or history or culture which allows us to come into our own as persons. God for Thomas Aquinas is the power that allows us to be ourselves, rather as the love of our parents allows us to be ourselves" (pp. 16-17).
"The non-God or anti-God of Scripture, who hates burnt offerings and acts of smug self-righteousness, is the enemy of idols, fetishes, and graven images of all kinds--gods, churches, ritual sacrifice, the Stars and Stripes, nations, sex, success, ideologies, and the like. You shall know him for who he is when you see the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent empty away. Salvation, rather bathetically, turns out not to be a matter of cult, law, and ritual, of special observances and conformity to a moral code, or slaughtering animals for sacrifice or even of being splendidly virtuous. It is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants, visiting the sick, and protecting the poor, orphaned and widowed from the violence of the rich. Astonishingly, we are saved not by a special apparatus known as religion, but by the quality of our everyday relations with one another" (pp, 18-19).
"Any devout Jew of Jesus's time would have known that the things that are God's include working for justice, welcoming the immigrants, and humbling the high and mighty. The whole cumbersome paraphernalia of religion is to be replaced by another kind of temple, that of the murdered, transfigured body of Jesus. To the outrage of the Zealots, Pharisees, and right-wing rednecks of all ages, this body is dedicated in particular to all those losers, deadbeats, riffraff, and colonial collaborators who are not righteous but flamboyantly unrighteous--who either live in chronic transgression of the Mosaic law or, like the Gentiles, fall outside its sway altogether. These men and women are not being asked to bargain their way into God's favor by sacrificing beasts, fussing about their diet, or being impeccably well-behaved. Instead, the good news is that God loves them anyway, in all their moral squalor. Jesus's message is that he is on their side despite their viciousness--that the source of inexhaustibly self delighting life he calls his Father is neither judge, patriarch, accuser, nor superego, but lover, friend, fellow-accused, and counsel for the defense. The biblical name for God as judge or accuser is Satan, which literally means 'adversary.' Satan is a way of seeing God as a great big bully .... Men and women are called upon to do nothing apart from acknowledging the fact that God is on their side no matter what, in the act of loving assent which is known as faith. In fact, Jesus has very little to say about sin at all, unlike a great many of his censorious followers. His mission is to accept men and women's frailty, not to rub their noses in it. It is this overturning of the Satanic or super-egoic image of God in Jesus that offers to unlock the lethal deadlock between Law and desire .... In Jesus, the law is revealed to be the law of love and mercy, and God not some Blakean Nobodaddy but a helpless, vulnerable animal. It is the flayed and bloody scapegoat of Calvary that is now the true signifier of the Law. Which is to say that those who are faithful to God's law of justice and compassion will be done away with by the state. If you don't love you're dead, and if you do, they'll kill you. Here then is your pie in the sky or opium of the people, your soft-eyed consolation and pale-cheeked piety" (pp. 19-22).
"The only authentic image of this violently loving God is a tortured and executed political criminal, who dies in an act of solidarity with what the Bible calls the anawim, meaning the destitute and dispossessed. ... The anawim, in Pauline phrase, are the shit of the earth--the scum and refuse of society who constitute the cornerstone of the new form of human life known as the kingdom of God. Jesus himself is consistently presented as their representative. His death and descent into hell is a voyage into madness, terror, absurdity, and self-dispossession, since only a revolution that cuts that deep can answer to our dismal condition. What is at stake here is not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles, but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new--of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is even now striking into this bankrupt, dépassé, washed-up world. No middle ground is permitted here: the choice between justice and the powers of this world is stark and absolute, a matter of fundamental conflict and antithesis. What is at issue is a slashing sword, not peace, consensus, and negotiation. Jesus does not seem to be any sort of liberal, which is no doubt one grudge Ditchkins holds against him. He would not make a good committee man. Neither would he go down well on Wall Street, just as he did not go down well among the money changers of the Jerusalem temple" (pp. 23-24).
"The coming of the kingdom involves not a change of government, but a turbulent passage through death, nothingness, madness, loss, and futility. It is this passage which in Christian mythology is signified among other things by Christ's descent into hell after his death. There is no possibility of a smooth evolution here. Given the twisted state of the world, self-fulfillment can ultimately come about only through self-divestment. That this is so is a tragedy in itself. It would be far more agreeable if we could achieve justice and fellowship spontaneously, without having to die, personally and politically, to our selfishness, violence, possessiveness and urge to dominate. But at least this death is in the name of a more abundant life, not some masochistic self-violence" (pp. 24-25)
"Only by a readiness to abandon our dished-up world can we live in the hope of a more authentic existence in the future. This doctrine is known not as pessimism but as realism. Because we cannot know for sure that such an existence is possible, in the sense that we can know the speed of light or the price of onions, this self-dispossession requires faith. We need to have faith tht, against all appearances to the contrary, the powerless can come to power. Only by preserving a steadfast fidelity to failure, one scandalous to nations that despise a loser, can any human power prove fertile and durable" (p. 27).
"The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body. Those who do not see this dreadful image of a tortured innocent as the truth of history are likely to adopt some bright-eyed superstition such as the dream of untrammeled human progress, for which ... Ditchkins is a full-blooded apologist" (pp. 27-28).
"It is worth adding that Jesus's attitude to the family is one of implacable hostility. He has come to break up these cozy little conservative settlements so beloved of American advertisers in the name of his mission, setting their members at each other's throats; and he seems to have precious little time for his own family in particular. ... Justice is thicker than blood" (p. 31).
Terry Eagleton, "Christianity: Fair or Foul"
Terry Eagleton, "Faith and Reason"
And now it is to be expected that the other of the two 'Heavenly Powers,' eternal Eros,
will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary.
--Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents.
Cover of Freud's Christian Unconscious by Paul Vitz
"It is not for nothing that in saying grace before meals, Christians use the words,
'For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful.'
The words imply that one asks for the one quality--gratitude--
which will make one free from resentment and envy."
-- Melanie Klein, Our Adult World and Its Roots in Infancy, 1959
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--Anon.
