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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7681 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025

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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.

More precisely, in the Scriptures there are four terms for love: eros (sexual love), storge (parental/familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship), and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause). At the level of agape, feelings (sexual or not) no longer matter; what remains is just the Holy Spirit, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a Cause. Terry Eagleton, a Catholic Marxist, was right: agape should be translated as political love. As a comrade, I can involve myself sexually with another comrade, I can become his or her friend, but this doesn’t really matter: if the situation of a struggle demands it, I should be ready to betray him or her, because only the Cause matters. And if my comrade is a true comrade, he or she will fully understand me and even despise me if I allow any weakness for him or her to overcome my fidelity to the shared cause and am not ready to betray him or her. My position here is that of Louis Althusser, who in 1980 gave an interview to Italian TV in Rome, where he said:

“I became a Communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church, but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church today. I remained a Catholic, that is to say, an internationalist universalist. I thought that inside the Communist Party there were more adequate means to realize universal fraternity.”

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?

[...] That’s why love should be paradoxically commanded. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). The key resides in the last words: “as I have loved you”—here the vanishing mediator is located. Padre Nogaro is right to emphasize that true love is not mediated, that it links us directly to a neighbor. I would only add that this is why Christ is a vanishing mediator: only through Christ as a vanishing mediator can we love our neighbor directly, without mediation. At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling (which, of course, cannot be commanded); it is a practice of how I deal with others. True love is cold, not sentimental. To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving all of humanity directly is not enough—Christ has to be here. Why? Because we are fallen.

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.)

Christianity is, quite explicitly, not egalitarian. There’s the inequality between God and man and the angels, obviously. But then the New Testament describes an early church which is profoundly class based- there are different types of clerics, men are the head of women, and slaves are expected to obey their masters. These classes might differ in some regards from secular social classes but it isn’t the classless, property less, stateless society which is communism’s raizon detre. In fact Christian theology has from early days been very skeptical of hostility to the state.

I'd just add that the New Testament is actually very skeptical of wealth (there's a strong connection made at points between the wealthy and the oppressors) and the church is condemned for showing partiality to those who are wealthy. So it's interesting because it's not really proto-communist-egalitarian-paradise but neither does it succumb to a sort of "will-to-power" fantasy where strength or power are to be privileged. Really what's elevated is moral goodness and wisdom.

I have often conceived of Christianity as a belief system that replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness. "My status hierarchy is not of this world." But there still is a status hierarchy. (Just like there's still a kingdom -- just one that God rules personally.)

Of course, that's what Nietzsche said -- instead of badness, inferiority, Christianity criticizes evil, moral turpitude. But unlike Nietzche I believe this is both a positive development and a necessary one.

replaces the hierarchy based on strength with a hierarchy based on moral goodness

The thing is that goodness applies to many things, including how you use said position. Companies typically have a hierarchy, but high positions in that hierarchy are not really "status" in the conventional sense. The higher salary they bring might be status, but the position itself is largely-exhausted in what you have to do to keep it - managers authority as opposed to owners authority. Of course its not always like this, and sometimes positions do lean more towards feudal fief, but you get the idea. The kind of status you describe christianity as bestowing is managers authority, and it often seems to be opposed to anything but its particular management authority, and that is what creates a quasi-communist impression.

The kind of status you describe christianity as bestowing is managers authority, and it often seems to be opposed to anything but its particular management authority

I’m not actually talking about the formal hierarchy of the Church here — which I agree is a manager’s authority — but about the hierarchy of the saints. The hierarchy it’s replacing isn’t the hierarchy of government, but the more nebulous, albeit extremely real, hierarchy of informal status that drives people to compete for praise, attention, and mates.

Im also not talking about the church hierarchy. Those are officially managerial positions. What I mean is that general christian virtue ends up being a "jealous god" about the use of your status to an extent that becomes effectively managerial. Youre not supposed to derive worldly rewards from it. Matthew 6 goes in that direction relatively explicitly.

Of course this has mostly not been actual practice, but its been there, and radical/restorationist people keep hitting upon it, and... I see their point.

Youre not supposed to derive worldly rewards from it.

Correct. You’re supposed to derive heavenly rewards from it. Which is why I’m talking about a hierarchy that is not of this world!

I see what you're saying, and I agree it is a serious problem people often have with Christianity, but the supernatural and cosmic justice elements are load-bearing. There are elements of Christian moral teaching that I believed before I converted to Christianity and would doubtless still believe even if I apostasized, but the whole scope of the Christian doctrine about holiness, martyrdom, charity, and asceticism is founded on the principle that Heaven exists and there's treasure there.

The hierarchy it’s replacing isn’t the hierarchy of government, but the more nebulous, albeit extremely real, hierarchy of informal status that drives people to compete for praise, attention, and mates.

I thought this was you saying "People still compete for praise, attention, and mates, but now the game is different" - because that would sound like worldy rewards. If you mean something people do instead of competing for those, then... it seems your prescription on earth actually is communism. Youre saying its not communist only because your reasons are different, where originally I thought your defense was along the lines of "Some christian beliefs in isolation would prescribe communism, but if you consider the supernatural principles as well, it no longer prescribes communism even on earth.".

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