No longer I

Thanks to Zach Weiner for yet another high-quality piece of humouristic cleverness posted at his Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal site. I’m not quite sure how he comes up with one of these every day, unless he’s more than one person, which may, of course, be the case.

It was one particular Jewish atheist who made me think of this cartoon, namely the 20th century German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt, whose work I’m looking at these days. Like so many other atheists, Arendt has done me the favour of pointing out certain peculiarities of the particular theism I subscribe to, namely Christianity. Atheism often fulfills this function, because things tend to stand out more readily as peculiar when viewed from the outside.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)

I’m going to quote Arendt at length. The following is taken out of the context of a longer discourse, in her book The Human Condition, on the historical relationship between the public and the private. She looks at the Christian idea of goodness as an extreme example of something that does not belong in the public sphere.

The one activity taught by Jesus in word and deed is the activity of goodness, and goodness obviously harbors a tendency to hide from being seen or heard. Christian hostility toward the public realm, the tendency at least of early Christians to lead a life as far removed from the public realm as possible, can also be understood as a self-evident consequence of devotion to good works, independent of all beliefs and expectations. For it is manifest that the moment a good work becomes known and public, it loses its specific character of goodness, of being done for nothing but goodness’ sake.

When goodness appears openly, it is no longer goodness, though it may still be useful as organized charity or an act of solidarity. Therefore: “Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them”. Goodness can exist only when it is not percieved, not even by its author; whoever sees himself performing a good work is no longer good, but at best a useful member of society or a dutiful member of a church. Therefore: “Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.”

It may be this curious negative quality of goodness, the lack of outward phenomenal manifestation, that makes Jesus of Nazareth’s appearance in history such a profoundly paradoxical event; it certainly seems to be the reason why he thought and taught that no man can be good: “Why callest thou me good? none is good save one; that is, God.” [...T]he whole life story of Jesus seems to testify how love for goodness arises out of the insight that no man can be good. (The Human Condition, pp. 74-75)

One of my true teachers (as opposed to professors and supervisors and other such menaces), Andrew Fellows, says that the main characteristic of the fallen state of mankind is self-awareness. In the Genesis account, Adam and Eve, after disconnecting from goodness as flowing directly from divine intention, become aware that they are naked. They choose to make use of their capacity for independent action to gain knowledge of evil as well as of good, and thus their relationship to the good becomes complex. Why? Because it becomes also a relationship with themselves, or with the self. It becomes something they must face, as in a mirror, as opposed to simply working it out in blissful reliance on the pure intention of God Himself.

The biggest problem is that reflecting upon one’s own goodness is like looking at the back of one’s neck. It’s gone as soon as you look — by the very motion of turning to look. When looking for the realisation of goodness in our own behaviour, we are bound to either watch ourselves fail or start distorting the mirror. The range of distortions in human culture and history is beyond measure.

One of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's illustrations for 'The Little Prince'

In Christianity we are called to choosing the former option: that of watching ourselves fail. Last week, at my friend Simon’s ecumenical project, the “Desert Eucharist“, we read from the third chapter of the Gospel according to John. Here, Jesus explains the significance of his own death at Calvary by pointing back to the Old Testament story where God unleashes a great number of snakes on the Israelites as punishment for their disobedience. The people beg Moses to take the snakes away, and God instructs Moses to fashion a large image of a snake from copper and raise it up on a pole. Whoever looks upon the copper snake is not killed by the snakes’ venom.

After the reading, somebody pointed out that, according to this story, it is the very image of the self-inflicted troubles of mankind that becomes the means for our liberation. We must look squarely at our failures and shortcomings, and their consequences (the snakes we bring upon ourselves), and realise fully that we cannot overcome them. As Arendt says, the Christian may realise what is good, but he cannot be good.

One of the paradoxes of God becoming flesh is the fact that the clearest image of our sin, the image that was raised up for all the world to behold and despise, was also the One that was without sin. None is good save One, and only One makes it perfectly clear to us how perfectly incapable we are of being good.

Because self-awareness has made it impossible for us to be good, we have instead been given the opportunity to look away from ourselves, not at goodnes, but at evil. Instead of the vicious circle of wathcing ourselves failing to be good, and thus becoming more miserably self-absorbed, which in turn makes us fail even more thoroughly, the very image of our failures is raised up in full view, in the same motion that destroys them for good.

We must let ourselves be drawn to Him, the true image of our sin (Him who became sin for us) and follow him into death — that is, death to ourselves. We look at Him and see the evil that we must utterly be to our own eyes, and we watch it perish with him in His death. Thus, to our own eyes, we no longer live. Self-awareness is obsolete, because the self is dead to the self. And then He rises again, so that He may live in us. To our eyes, then, it is no longer us, but Him, the only one who is good, who lives.

Self-awareness, then, should become Christ-awareness, that is, awareness of sin, of death, and of resurrection.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here

 (INCEPTION  PLOT SPOILER ALERT)

http://xkcd.com/817/

No such thing as a sexual relation exists.

This is one of the statements for which Jacques Lacan, 20th century French psychoanalyst, became famous. What could he have meant by this?

Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)

It’s quite clear to most of us that sex and gender exist, isn’t it? At least they seem to come up fairly often in conversation and in the media.

Most of us still intuitively think of sex as something taking place between two people, a woman and a man. (You’ll notice that I say “most of us” and “intuitively”. That should be enough disclaimers for now). It’s something which most of us experience every day, to some extent – if not in action, then at least at some potential level (flirtation etc.) or in imagination. But does the fact that sex happens, and that it involves two and not one, necessarily imply that we are dealing with a relation?

Here’s what I think Lacan was getting at:

The modern sexual experience involves, generally speaking, two things. It involves

his perception of her

and

her perception of him.

It may seem more or less cold or detached to describe sex in these terms, but nonetheless, these are the two basic perspectives involved.

Now, these two perspectives remain separate. His perception of her can never include her perception of him, and vice versa. He can try to imagine “what it’s like for her”, but this imagined perception is not real, and he knows that it isn’t. And vice versa, naturally.

So the two lovers can make an infinite series of attempts at becoming one with the other’s experience. They can indefinitely keep on trying to break out of their respective sexual fantasies about the other, but all that each is really doing is getting more deeply entangled in a fantasy about a fantasy about a fantasy etc.

He imagines what it’s like for her. But, of course, that includes imagining what she imagines that it’s like for him – because her imagination is part of what it’s like for her. (Read that sentence over a few times )

Find that a little complicated? Well, it gets worse, because it goes on indefinitely.

He never meets with her real sexual experience; he just keeps opening the infinite chinese boxes of imagined experiences. And the same obviously goes for her, only the other way round.

Their experiences remain two; they never become one. There is no relation; only – in all vulgarity – two minds masturbating while fantasising about the other.

 

We actually see this phenomenon in Christopher Nolan’s film Inception.

It happens between Dominick Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose relationship history (which has taken place prior to the actual plot line of the film) involves an obsessive expedition further and further into “dreams within dreams”. Mal and Dominick work so hard on making a true common reality of their relationship, that they end up in Limbo, a dream world isolated from the rest of humanity. In Limbo they can build and rebuild the entire scenery exactly as they please, and they take care to make it a cooperative project. Thus they seem to have succeeded in breaking out of their separate existences and finding true relationship.

But Limbo, an idea borrowed from medieval cosmology, can never be a stable reality because it is, per definition, an in-between state (between Heaven and Hell, in fact). Mal continues to be haunted by the idea that their dream world is not (yet) real. So she has to keep on endlessly building and rebuilding, and thus cannot return to the real world and live out the relationship she and Dominick have built. In the end, in order to make her give up her obsession, Dominick has to plant in her mind the idea that nothing is real, and that, therefore, it doesn’t matter whether they are in Limbo or on earth as we know it.

Does all this seem a little over the top? Am I taking things too far, making something simple very complicated? Should I just relax and have fun, not worry so much?

Maybe I could do that. But why is it that sex takes up such a central position in the entire scheme of “relaxing and having fun”? Why is it that the ultimate experience, or trip, that I as a self can give to myself, is an experience that per definition involves another?

Is it so far-fetched to think that sex might be our attempt at breaking out of this one perspective from which each one of us experiences his entire life? And doesn’t it matter a great deal whether such a breaking out is real or only imaginary?

In the film, Mal comes to believe that it is just imaginary, and her ultimate reaction seems to me quite fitting.

Now, like many stories which have been told since the middle ages, the film Inception makes strong references to Dante Alighieri’s epic poem The Divine Comedy from the early 14th century. (Someone more perceptive than I had to point that out to me).

In the Comedy, Dante (who is himself a character in the narrative) descends through the various circles of Hell, which is echoed in Dominick’s descent though several levels of dreams. This will seem less far-fetched if we remember that the innermost circle of Hell is frozen – remember all that ridiculous skiing action towards the end of the film? (How boring was that, by the way?!).

Also, the fact that Dante, as well as Dominick, pays the world of Limbo a visit makes the parallel more clear. And then, last but not least, Dante’s story involves a relation between a man and a woman: namely Dante himself and his major(!!!) crush, Beatrice. Beatrice, the light of the poet’s life, becomes his guide as he ascends through the heavenly spheres towards the climax of the poem, when his love for Beatrice points him towards the even higher love:

the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.

The love between Dante and Beatrice unfolds within the larger context of the medieval cosmos, where all things, including human beings, were imagined to have their ordained positions in a universal hierarchy, decreed by the triune God of Christianity. In other words, it is a true sexual relation, because it does not merely involve two irreducibly separate perspectives. Both perspectives are swept up inside a third, greater perspective – the Gods-eye view that sustains the “great chain of being”, including the sexual relation, in its real existence. And ultimately, the interwoven double perspective of human love points towards that highest of loves, saying

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, world without end.

I think I’ll leave us with these two visions, the modern one of Mal taking Dominick into Limbo, and the medieval one of Beatrice taking Dante up to heaven. “Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to light”.

Oh, and a merry Christmas to all!