More on the whole Jesus-theme today. Over the past few months I’ve read a couple of books dealing with the Jesus thing – Slavoj Zizek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf and Terry Eagleton’s Reason, Faith and Revolution: two books coming out of radical secular political traditions that grapple with the meat and potatoes of faith in general and Christian faith in particular, and do so with insight and with respect, both of which are all too rare in leftist treatments of religion. I also picked up Eagleton’s critical annotation of the Gospels – his contributions being an introduction and notes of interpretation and commentary appended to the biblical text. And I’d highly recommend all of these, though for different folks and different reasons.
Terry Eagleton‘s Reason, Faith and Revolution should be read by everyone on the left, and particularly those of the explicitly athiest left. Not a defense of Christianity, per se, it is a defense of spiritual practice and even religiosity, and makes a strong argument that such practice has always been and continues to be important to us as humans, that contempt for religion demonstrates both an ignorance of what it really is about and often masks a contempt for people in general, and that the left – in particular – has suffered for its all-too-common spurning of religious communities and religious knowledge and insight.
Eagleton isn’t trying to convert anyone to anything; indeed, though raised with Christianity he is not “a believer” himself. And a good portion of the book is devote to a harsh critique of institutional Christianity. But he is concerned about the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and their profoundly weak understanding of the religious values and human motivations they critique., which esentially leads them to mis-name the target of their criticism and miss, in the process, what religion is really about at its core. And so the book alternates between critique of their work and more general commentary on the place of spirituality in our lives and the need for the left to learn to understand and appreciate spirituality.
Slavoj Zizek‘s The Puppet and the Dwarf is something entirely different, and both more significant and less universal in its value. It’s a short but dense little book, with a tremendously important core and a whole lot of psychoanalytic filler that really doesn’t add anything to the central thesis that I can see. So, if you have any interest in theology, read it, but you’d be advised to skim over large sections of hyper-academic musings.
The argument, in a nutshell:
1) Historically, religions evolve – in their earliest incarnations they seek to explain a scary world full of phenomena we don’t understand; later, they serve to bind communities together along lines of common ritual and common myth to protect the community and maintain its identity vis a vis others; monotheism develops to draw together as one a singular explanation for existence and an increasingly-universal code of ethics – or, at least, the articulation of an ethics that ought to be universal.
2) The evolution of religion is the evolution of our understanding of the relationships between humanity and the universe, humanity and history, the individual and society. a) God/s begins as simple, unexplainable magic – entirely outside of and beyond human experience. b) God becomes an ethic, the all-powerful to which everyone is accountable equally – God is expressed as a broken relationship between humanity and the universal, a gap that cannot be bridged. c) God becomes a promise of some future redemption and immortality – there will come a time that gap will be bridged, but its realization is well beyond us and the promise is sustained through periodic prophets. And then, d) Christianity.
3) Christianity is the closing of the God-humanity gap, and effectively the first universal and the first ultimately-athiestic religion. Jesus represents God on earth, God is human form. Jesus suffers, and calls on the greater-than-human God for salvation – “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God does not answer, does not intervene. The external God is powerless, and dies with Jesus on the cross. Jesus rises, appears to his disciples and announces that God continues to live, but only in human community – “where two or three of you are gathered, so I am there”. The gap is closed. There is a spiritual core. There is a universal ethic. There is a promise of salvation. But that promise is not external, the law is not a command from above, redemption is not beyond this world, but in it. God is where community is, full stop.
It’s an incredible argument, and well worth the read if you have any interest in such matters. And speaks, too, to the transition from ethics to politics courtesy of Saint Paul, drawing lessons for the left today. The drag is that, to get there, you’ve got to wade through pages and pages of Lacanian psychoanalysis – not because it matters to the core argument but just because it’s what turns Zizek on so it’s what he writes about. Zizek is great in thirty-second bursts; he’s impossible to follow over hours, though, those moments of brilliance that punctuate his work being only that – brief moments in an endless stream of psycho-babble. Kind of drag for those of us who are not up on our Lacanian psychoanalysis, and not interested in getting up to date.
But despite that, again, a super important book if you are interested in theology at all, and Christian theology in particular. Zizek is a smart dude. Annoying as all hell, yes. But smart, no question.
These books aren’t liberation theology. They are not attempts to read Christian theology subversively. Both Zizek and Eagleton are attentive to the real contradictions in the Jesus thing, and neither is interested in spreading religion. What they are both grappling with is the spiritual poverty of leftist political traditions and the spiritual drive of human beings, and trying to make sense of why what we call religion matters so much and what lessons we on the left need to learn from it. What they both grapple with is Christianity as central and enduring for a reason, and the need to look more closely, with a critical but respectful eye, at why that is so. What they both grapple with is Christianity as an attempt to make an ethics into a politics, and the urgent need for the left to rediscover the importance of having an ethical core to its politics.
