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Notes -
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.)
Agape and philia do not indicate different forms of love in this context. I know CS Lewis says this, but it ain’t so. It’s not something that Origen talks about when he distinguishes between agape and eros, and he definitely would have mentioned it. It isn’t mentioned in the earlier church fathers. Rather, in the context Zizek mentions, the words are used interchangeably. Imagine your girlfriend wants assurance that she is beautiful. “Am I beautiful? … I mean, you think I’m very pretty right? … Tell me I’m gorgeous again.” These are interchangeable within the context, even though there may be slight variations in the usage in colloquial speech.
Just going to quote from some papers on this. In speaking of love, Origen doesn’t even bring up philia, but compares Agape and Eros and concludes that even these two loves are interchangeable in scripture:
And from elsewhere:
As for wealth equality: Christ clearly abhors the “very rich”. Being “very rich” and ungiving damns a person, from my reading. God cares more about this than blasphemy. But we also have very clear and specific anti-equality statements. Someone tells Christ that his brother isn’t sharing the inheritance, and that he should make him share; Christ says that life is not about possessions and that he isn’t the Lord of that. Christ is the Lord of the Moral, not the lord of the specific cultural and legal rules that appear prudent to specific leaders to secure political wellbeing. He is the Lord of “help the poor”, not “no one should ever be poorer”. Or consider:
Zacchaeus was rich; he definitely had more than twice the average wage; yet he is only required to give half of his wages to the poor and to give reparation to anyone defrauded. Then he has full approval of God and is saved.
More importantly: the very context of the love statements makes a universal love impossible. Christ is telling his disciple to direct all of his love to the sheep. “Do you love me? Tend my sheep!” The sheep are the brothers, or in this case the younger novice Christian brothers, not random strangers. The strangers are those who do not matter at all. For instance, “If [a brother sins against you and] refuses to listen even to the church [telling him to repent in front of you], let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” You see Christ’s treatment of strangers with the Canaanite woman. It shouldn’t surprise us that these rules make sense in light of utility and game theory and psychology, if you believe in both God and science. Casting your love, a precious pearl, to random strangers, is the quickest way to waste your life and your love and to make the world worse. Consider —
This is when he tells his followers that they are being sent out “as lambs among wolves”. Now, if the Lord is the shepherd who lays down his life protecting his sheep from the wolves, then who are the wolves? The wolves aren’t sheep; the wolves are in the world; loving the world would be loving “wolves in sheep clothing”, and we have fairytales about that involving grandmas and the hood.
This is Christian love: judge whether someone is worthy if they receive you kindly or hear your wisdom; publicly shake dust off your feet as a statement against them if not; and then remember what your Lord says: their fate is worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. I do not know what happened in Christianity that the clear words and obvious meaning of the gospels are ignored. Does this sound like a hippy or something? Does this sound like spiritual William’s Syndrome? Does God want you to pollute your heart by throwing it at the feet of every evil person? Christianity is not a “text-first” religion but tradition first, true, but the tradition itself attests to the primacy and accuracy of the words. There are some ridiculous zero-day bugs that have infiltrated Christianity and made it “fake and gay”. But if you’re Christian you really do have to believe these words. God is love and He defines love in the teachings of His Son, so forget what you know about love and study the Son who knows more.
Further: as Origen and tradition attests, Christ is the bridegroom of our soul. In antiquity, if the bride is found to be spending her love on random men, she would be beaten, if not by her father then by her bridegroom; she may even be divorced on the grounds of adultery. When Origen wrote on Eros and Agape, it was when studying the Song of Songs, which is a sublimated erotic love poem about our soul longing for God. What does the Bride warn in the song? “O daughters of Jerusalem, I adjure you by the gazelles and does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until the time is right.” Otherwise: “The watchmen find me as they went about in the city; they beat me, they bruised me, they take away my veil, those watchmen of the walls.” To be more clear: if the Christian wastes the love reserved for “Christ and whom Christ wills” (your Christian community ie sheep), wouldn’t he discipline you? Just like He whipped those who abused and profaned the temple. Because now, your body is His temple; it belongs to Him; and in your body is your heart where the heavenly treasure resides. Okay, this was an allegorical aside, but whatever.
Now I agree that for a Christian, the “love for the cause” must be triumphant over everything. This is seen in Christ: he calls Peter satan when Peter warns Him against going to Jerusalem; he speaks up against elders; he disregards His relatives, and His own family becomes “those who hear the word and obey it”. But Zizek is wrong that the cause is universal love. It’s just not. “Universal love” is taking an idyllic stream and polluting it with Chernobyllic radioactive waste. We don’t love universally, but in accordance with the Love of the Universal Man.
As additional evidence for this, consider the Eucharist. You have to enjoy the Eucharist to have a part in Christ, to be a brother, to be saved perhaps. Only confirmed Christians in good standing could participate, and they had 2-3 years of training and catechesis before being confirmed, involving fasting and repentance and reading. We know this from Justin Martyr, some of the earliest Christian writings we have. This ritual is the only time a Christian sees the living Christ: the intimate shared brotherly meal becomes the real body and blood of Christ; it’s the real living Christ there, and being consumed. This tells you a lot. It’s not radically inclusive love, it’s radically exclusionary and private. At a time when anyone could participate in a Pagan feast, and when the Jews believed in national salvation, this was profoundly exclusionary and private. This was the dominant mode of Christian activity until the 300s which, in my opinion, should never have been altered.
Zizek says
This is not quite it. Christ did not love “humanity”: there are many who will see Christ and Christ will tell them He never knew them. Not “I have forgotten you”, not “you never knew me”. No; “I never knew you”. These are the “vessels of wrath tailored for destruction”. For a Christian, true love is this: a man laying down his life for his friends. Not only is this literally what Jesus says, but He literally does it on the Cross. How this happens, is actually never said by Christ; it is compared to Moses lifting up a serpent staff, that those who are bit by those sin-symbolic serpents may not die but live. That it magically absolves your sins upon belief is a satanic thought. But there are at least some things that are sure: Christ loved God that He spent his life learning from His youth. He spent his adulthood healing and teaching others despite guaranteeing His death. He is wrongfully charged for disobedience for misrepresenting scripture, and obediently assents to the sentence. He continues professing truth and love. As He suffered, He sung to Himself some of His favorite songs. He wants His tormentors forgiven by God before He dies. In very mysterious appearances, He returns again. He appears to Thomas in the upper room, like the upper room of the Eucharist, where Thomas touches His side, the same side from whence blood and water flowed. Did Thomas touch the bread turned body? Did Christ’s side flow out in wine turned blood, mixed with water as all wine was had in antiquity? I don’t know. It’s a mystery. I agree with Zizek that the material is immaterial.
Christ’s love is, essentially, conditional. It really is. There are some people He never even knew, let alone loved. Christ issues warnings, firm warnings, shocking warnings. He is filled with warnings. Before He sends sinners to an eternal fire, He curses them. If you do not believe this, you are not a Christian, and you’re something worse than an atheist, because you have seen His words and dispute that He said it or meant it. Why does Christ tell us these warnings if not to warn us? A better Christian movie is the Whale. It’s deeply, deeply Christian. The protagonist is saved by warnings to His soul and health, and also primarily due to love for His daughter. (“not giving thanks, nor seeking forgiveness for the sins of my soul, nor for all the souls numb, joyless and desolate on earth. But for her alone, whom I wholly give you.”)
Do you know who else was saved like this? Jonah! You know, with the whale. Is Jonah the sign of unconditional love? Did the Ninevites enjoy God’s unconditional love when they fasted (cattle and man alike) in sackcloth and ashes with only the hopeful possibility that God will have mercy on them? And who “comes in the sign of Jonah”? Who is it that says the sign of Jonah is the only sign He will provide “a wicked and adulterous generation”? It is the One who, “in the days of his flesh, offered up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears, to God who was able to save him from death, and who was heard because of his fearful reverence — He was a son and learned obedience through what he suffered.”
A decent example: if every drug user could be saved by unconditional love, very few white people with loving mothers would be drug addicts. Do you know what would save them? If every time they did the drug, I beat the shit out of them to the point of death and told them I hated them. Sadly this is illegal. But it’s what God does to those whom He loves the most, like Job and Jonah. I have no doubt that if Christ saw the disciple whom He loved drinking too much poppy tea, that He would beat that wicked servant or at least kidnap Him into the desert for an extended 40 day retreat. And this would be love. True love are the true words “given by one Shepherd”, which are “like goads and like nails firmly fixed”. Thank God the yoke is easy.
I do not believe that God wants us to love God “in Himself”, for no contingent reason. I do not believe that there is such a thing as loving a thing outside of what the thing means to us. Love is biological and God designed biology. We love our fathers if they are fatherly, and you have no obligation to love them if they are not. Yet, we have no father on earth! We have a father in heaven who is perfectly fatherly, who “disciplines us for our good that we may share in sanctity”. And “we love because God first loved us”. Similarly, Jesus tells us to love our enemies not because they are human, but because we will be rewarded by God. Because He wants our love perfect, like our father’s love is perfect. Loving enemies is our spartan practice for perfection, and has nothing to do with any obligation that emanates from our enemy.
I’d say this is complicated. If we love Christ, even just as a “character”, and celebrate Him in social environments, and are evaluate by our peers with His law, then we will behave like Him. Which is probably the best way we can love like Christ. We can only understand more than this mysteriously, through statements like —
Notice, again, the focus on brothers. Indeed, the first name of the religion was the Brotherhood.
Incredible post, thanks for taking the time to write it all out. Do you write anywhere besides here?
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