AUGUST 2005 - ISSUE 5 - ISSN 1448 - 632

	THE CHRISTOLOGICAL TRUTH ABOUT HISTORY THE PASCHAL TRUTH ABOUT HUMAN CULTURE THE EUCHARISTIC TRUTH ABOUT THE HUMAN PERSON   GIL BAILIE

 

Below are the introductory remarks Gil Bailie made prior to the workshop he gave at the Australian Catholic University on January 21, 2005.   For more information, contact the Cornerstone Forum: www.cornerstone-forum.org.

“What is frightening is the conjunction of massive technical power and the spiritual surrender to nihilism. A panic-stricken refusal to glance, even furtively, in the only direction where meaning could still be found dominates our intellectual life.” – Rene Girard “Whole centuries felt no need to think about precisely those questions which agitate us most today . . . questions that the few generations separating us from Christ had not found the time yet to see and think about. . . . The new historical situation offers the theology of the Church new access-roads which lead unexpectedly into the deepest areas.” – Hans Urs von Balthasar “Christ posed the foundation of the new ethos with words which for their part demand a thorough grounding in anthropology.” – John Paul II

Both the Holy Spirit and I prefer an extemporaneous presentation.  I prefer it because it allows me to share in the audience’s curiosity as to what I’m about to say, and the Holy Spirit prefers it because the cracks and fissures in an informal presentation gives the One-who-will-lead-us-to-the-whole-truth a chance to hijack my best laid plans and surprise us all.  Be that as it may, one often has to earn the right to speak extemporaneously by beginning with the fine print.  So here it is:

The View Through Another Prism

“How could Paul ever have been able adequately to make known the ‘majesty of the divine meaning,’” asks Henri de Lubac, “if all the while he had been concerned about respecting Greek forms of discourse?”  Paul was hardly the last Christian to face the challenge of accounting for the incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ with linguistic tools fashioned in the forge of human self-understandings that were subverted by the Christ event.  De Lubac appeals to W. W. Warfield’s observation that the linguistic revolution Christian thinkers were obliged to effect is “the most eloquent witness to the spiritual revolution effected by Christianity in the ancient world.”  It was a revolution that came to articulation and found its voice thanks in large part to the adoption of a Greek philosophical vocabulary, which was opportune to the challenge because of its suppleness.  During the patristic age and for centuries afterward, Christian thought worked largely within the alliance between the biblical and philosophical conceptual frameworks.  Arguably, philosophy benefited more from this collaboration than did Christian theology, but it was nevertheless a theologically useful one for centuries. 

In recent times, however, the alliance has been less helpful for many reasons, some of which I explored in one of the chapters of Violence Unveiled.   At the beginning of the 21st century, another alliance is possible, and the work of René Girard is indispensable to its fruitfulness, namely, an alliance between anthropology – enriched as it is by Girard’s seminal contribution to the discipline – and Christology of the sort that Vatican II called for in Gaudium et spes, where the council fathers insist that that Jesus Christ “reveals man to himself and brings to light his most high calling.”

Were a physicist to lecture on Quantum Theory to a gathering of, say, economists or engineers or flight attendants, he might be expected to begin by trying to disabuse his audience of an ensemble of Newtonian reflexes which would otherwise prevent them from thinking in the counter-intuitive ways required by Quantum Theory.

One wanting to speak anthropologically faces a similar situation.  We are heirs of centuries of thinking dominated by a set of erroneous anthropological presuppositions that continue to hamper our ability to understand what is happening in our world.  When we think about the human predicament today, we tend to think in terms of politics, economics, sociology, or psychology – those disciplines born of the Enlightenment determination to slander the intellectual seriousness of religious thought, and infected by residual prejudices and their attendant epistemological handicaps. 

Engineers, flight attendants, and those of us in this room tend, therefore, to think as classical liberals.  That is to say, we are heirs of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill.  We are – in our unguarded moments – social contact liberals, who unthinkingly assume that social life originates with conscious and voluntary acts on the part of pre-existing autonomous individuals. 

The Apostle Paul urges us not to be conformed to the spirit of the age, and given the current intellectual and moral climate this admonition is especially pertinent to those who want to understand the unique cultural and spiritual crisis in the midst of which we are now living.

So, in the spirit of this new collaboration between anthropological and Christological thought, let us begin by acknowledging that what we know by faith is real knowledge.  There is abundant empirical, historical and logical corroboration for that knowledge, but it cannot be accounted for by reference to these things.  It seems to be in keeping with Christ’s remark to Thomas – “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believed.” – that the fully appropriate way for Christians to proclaim the truth they have by faith is not to convince by rational or logical argument, but rather to witness to it with their lives. 

Be that as it may, we are obliged to grow in faith, to deepen our appreciation for the knowledge we have by faith, and to give an intelligible account of it to a skeptical world.  To be apologetically adequate and doctrinally respectable such an accounting must, in the words of Cistercian scholar Fr. Denis Farkasfalvy, O.Cist., tie together “our understanding of the Bible and humankind’s universal religious history, both in the pre-historic age and in the history of human cultures.”  Its theological value will depend both on its anthropological scope and its Christological depth.  We might well begin to tackle this apologetic task by stating bedrock beliefs: If we have been saved from sin and death by the incarnation, the crucifixion and the resurrection, why did it take these things? 

Why did it take the Incarnation?

The word “person” entered into the vocabulary of Western culture only after Christian theologians, in speaking of the three Persons of the Trinity, gave the word persona a philosophical profundity never before associated with it.  In bringing about this theological revolution, the theologians of the fourth and fifth centuries laid the groundwork for a revolution in human self-understanding which has yet to be fully appreciated, and which it may be the special privilege of 21st century Christianity to rediscover.

It is hardly a coincidence that the mystery of the person was discovered by those who were trying to understand the mystery of Christ — the mystery-of-the-person in-Person.  This mystery was largely lost on the key pioneers of modern psychology, however, for they regarded biblical anthropology as intellectually passé.  Faced with a rising tide of psychological distress, they theorized about the modern self, mistakenly assuming it to be a synonym for the person. 

As the Orthodox theologian Paul Evdokimov insists, “the revelation of the person is the event of Christianity.”  At the heart of Christianity, writes the theologian J. B. Metz, is a “revolutionary formation process for a new subjectivity,” a “new subjectivity” that it is especially important to understand today as the spiritually bereft post-modern self turns to increasingly desperate and despairing antics of self-redemption.  The time has surely come to take a fresh look at the biblical understanding of the mystery of the person. 

The work of René Girard now makes it possible for us to realize that what Karl Rahner said about non-biblical religions, namely that they are “christologies in search of a subject,” is true as well of the increasingly de-centered secular self.  Like the Christian mysteries generally, the mystery of the person is deeply paradoxical.  While it is unquestionably true that the sacramental understanding of the person is born of Christian experience and rooted in Christian scripture, Girard’s insights into the mimetic nature of human subjectivity now make it possible for us to recognize how anthropologically astute was Tertullian's second century intuition that “the soul is naturally Christian.”  That is to say, Christian anthropology – properly grounded in Trinitarian theology – accurately portrays the universal human dilemma.  The Gospel knows us better than we know ourselves.

Why did it take the Crucifixion?

As useful as the Quantum Theory metaphor might be, there is another analogue in the physical sciences that is perhaps even more apropos to the task at hand, namely: Chaos Theory. (I can only ask any physicists in the room to forgive me for poaching so shamelessly on territory about which I know so little.)

What Chaos Theory suggests – as far as I can tell – is that random and chaotic phenomena – if allowed to run their course – will eventually produce an ordered pattern – in short, that the disorder that so easily overwhelms order carries within itself an inner disposition toward order, and that the disorder itself can be seen in retrospect as order in its larval stage.  For those interested, this deep, dark secret was exposed by the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus 500 years before the High Priest Caiaphas unwittingly provided us with the supreme biblical articulation of it. 

What’s interesting, therefore, is the disorder that slowly succumbs to a subtle organizing principle intrinsic to the disorder itself and that works like a magnet on metal fillings – fashioning an order out of the very passions that produced the disorder in the first place. 

As morally troubling and intellectually perplexing as the Heraclitean cum Chaos Theory phenomenon is, these perplexities would be considerably magnified were its disordering potential were to remain undiminished while its ordering potential were to go into irreversible decline: which is the situation we now face.

Chaos Theory operates in the rarified field of subatomic physics.  But there is a correlate in the human sciences, except that in the human world we can say – and I want to show – that the organizing principle that is secretly embedded in the disorder is not a “principle” but a “principal” – namely what the New Testament calls “the prince of this world,” the sower of discord, the Mephistophelean alchemist who turns the prima materia of social chaos into yet another of the gold-gilded kingdoms of this world – the mastermind whose power was broken by Christ on the Cross. 

Christ, it is worth noting, had only very sobering things to say about the world into which he was sending his disciples.  One is hard pressed to find much worldly optimism in his forewarnings.  As the author of the Book of Revelation put it:

. . . the Devil has landed in a furious rage;
he knows his time is up.  (Revelation 12:12)

And as Hans Urs von Balthasar has written:  “… since, as a result of Christ’s victory, the anti-Christian powers have become really alert and ready for combat, his victory ushers in the most decidedly dramatic period of world history.”  Christ would be with the worshipping community until the end of the ages, and the gates of hell would not prevail against the kingdom and the ecclesial community proclaiming it, but in the MEANTIME things would very likely grow more perilous, as the choices facing each person and humanity itself would be ever more consequential. 

No amount of sociological, political, economic or psychological analysis can substitute for a deeper anthropological understanding of the resurgence of religious violence in our time.  Since the discipline of anthropology is as infected with the spirit of the age as are its sister social sciences, however, for adequate comprehension of the situation one needs to turn to the mother lode of anthropological insight: the Bible, and especially the Christian New Testament.  Here again, René Girard has found the cogent anthropological key for unlocking this treasure trove of historical intelligibility and religious revelation.

The single most decisive element in the historical decline of sacred violence, against which its contemporary resuscitators are struggling to immunize themselves, is the moral concern for victims aroused by the exposé of sacred violence that occurs at the center of the Christian New Testament.  From the unforgettable image of the Innocent Victim at the heart of the Gospel, an empathy for victims – subtly fostered by centuries of Christian iconography and Christian ethics – ripples out, sooner or later infecting each and every culture with which it comes into sustained contact. 

Inasmuch as the “scapegoating” rituals exposed by the Gospel provided culture from its inception with its single most reliable mechanism for curing social crises and restoring order, the Christian revelation would inevitably throw conventional culture as such into a crisis, the latest episode of which is being played out today.  A better understanding of today’s cultural and historical situation requires a better appreciation of the unique and subtle ways in which the revelation of the Cross has altered, and continues to alter, the historical landscape.

Why did it take the Resurrection?

We are religious beings with religious hungers.  Cultures which allow religious pluralism to degenerate into ideological secularism cease to foster sanctifying and civilizing forms of religious experience.  In the absence of more edifying expressions, the hunger for transcendence grows desperate and eventually takes crude and primitive forms. 

Since death is the one thing that cannot be fully secularized, those desperate for religious meaning eventually turn to death, as fallen humanity always has, siding with death against death, turning death into a cure for death, eluding death by exploiting its mystique and becoming its pious accomplices.  In a post-religious world, both those who are desperate for meaning and those who have despaired of it will find in death an unspoken organizing principle.  Whether fleeing from it or flirting with it, whether bound to it by fear or fascination, death eventually becomes the default preoccupation, the chief obsession, of those who come to regard it as the final, incontrovertible fact. 

At the resurrection, “the power of death” was broken.  Only by living in the light of that victory can we keep from slipping back into the old religious swamp out which we were dredged at Easter.  Post-Christian culture, bereft of religious vigor, is becoming such a swamp, a “culture of death.”  Threatened from without by a resurgence of pre-modern forms of sacred violence, it is inwardly imperiled by postmodern forms of nihilistic resignation, dickering with death – in a world “distracted from distraction by distraction,” death being the only distraction weighty enough to distract.  Naïve irreligious secularism is powerless to meet this challenge.  Christianity is not.

 

 

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