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Recently from Slavoj Zizek: THE POPE IS DEAD, ANTI-CHRIST IS ALIVE AND KICKING
I'm curious what the actual (theistic) Christians here think of Zizek's "Christian atheism" and his conception of Christian love.
I don't expect Christians today to be lining up to join the local Communist Party. It is my view that, more often than not, actually-existing communist movements have been little more than a thin veneer of respectability over the ambitions of power-hungry sociopaths. But isn't there still a kernel of truth here? Isn't there something, as was articulated in last week's discussion, "quasi-communist" about Christianity? Is not the doctrinal communist ideal -- the universal fraternity of man, sacrifice for those who are in need, "the last shall be first" -- ultimately just an expression of universal Christian love? Should Christians not view communists as fellow travelers who are correct about certain fundamental principles, but misguided on method?
There is a certain basic paradox that presents itself when one begins to interrogate the concept of love: do you love me for who I am, substantially, in essentia, or do you love me for my qualities and properties? You say that you love me because I'm smart, because I'm funny, because I'm beautiful; but suppose that I were not smart, nor funny, nor beautiful. Would you still love me then?
Either horn of the dilemma presents an issue. If your love for your beloved is contingent on them possessing some particular quality, then you are liable to the charge that you don't really love the person: what you really love is that quality. You are a lover of intelligence, or humor, or beauty, but not of that particular person. But if you say that you would continue to love the person regardless of any qualities they possess whatsoever, even if they were stripped of all qualities and left only as a "bare particular", then it would seem that your choice is entirely arbitrary and without justification; for what could be motivating your choice if it is made in the absence of all qualities? And a baseless arbitrary choice cannot constitute love either. The conclusion we draw is that, if there is such a thing as "love" at all, it belongs to the domain of the unsayable.
Thus Zizek suggests that true love should be "cold" rather than "sentimental". Powerful sentiments suggest that one is fixated too strongly on the secondary qualities of the object, rather than the obligation of love proper. Love is seen to have an almost Kantian character: the bloom of pleasure is a stain on the perfect austerity of duty. Christ is then interpreted as the formal condition of possibility that both binds us to this duty and makes its realization conceivable; Christ must not be "made into a direct object of love who can compete with other objects", for otherwise "things can go terribly wrong". (In particular, it opens the door to transactional thinking; if He Himself told you that all of humanity was saved, but you alone were damned; would you still love him? Would you still love him even if he wasn't living up to "his end of the bargain"? An authentic conception of Christian love has to confront this possibility.)
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” is the second greatest commandment. The greatest is, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.” The two commandments are not the same, and the order is important. You can’t just swap out the gospel for any old cause, not even one that preaches love.
If you remove the supernatural bits from Christianity, you are not left with a new kind of Christianity; you have a new movement wearing Christianity as a skin suit. There have been plenty of these. Off the top of my head, liberation theology, the social gospel movement, and the preaching of John Ball seem to be pretty straightforward parallels.
The command to love your neighbor does not imply that you are to love everyone to the same degree and in the same way. Christians disagree among ourselves about the details. I personally find the first epistle of John to be helpful here, but I also consider it one of the most difficult books of the New Testament. A lot of people read John talking about love, have fuzzy feelings, and ignore the things he says that make it complicated.
I don’t know enough Aristotelian (I assume) philosophy to speak fittingly in terms of essences, properties, and qualities. But I can point out that in Christian belief all men possess the image of God, which gives them value in itself and may resolve your dilemma.
But if Man is made in the Image of God, is not 'loving our neighbor as ourself' how we 'love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our, &c., &c.'?
It means that love of neighbor follows from love of God, but the former doesn’t subsume the latter.
Let me give an example that I read a zillion years ago in the New Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. I may get the details wrong, and I haven’t confirmed the thoroughness of the book’s sources, but it works just as well as a thought experiment anyway:
A woman was in the custody of the Soviet secret police. These sometimes took a perverse joy in breaking people they weren’t going to let leave alive anyway, and they had decided to break her faith. When maiming her legs didn’t do it, they brought in her children and threatened to shoot them if she did not deny Christ. She refused, and the secret police shot her children in front of her.
If love of God is the higher good, she did the right thing. It’s not that she didn’t love her children enough; it’s that she loved God more than that.
To digress to another religion, this kind of thing is what taqiyya was originally for.
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