The Counterbook of Christianity (continued)
From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 149-153:
A similar clash of narratives is at the very core of Christianity. One of the few remaining truly progressive U.S. publications, the Weekly World News, reported on a recent breathtaking discovery: archaeologists discovered an additional ten commandments, as well as seven "warnings" from Jehovah to his people; they are suppressed by the Jewish and Christian establishment because they clearly give a boost to today's progressive struggle, demonstrating beyond doubt that God took a side in our political struggles. Commandment 11 is: "Thou shalt tolerate the faith of others as you would have them do unto you." (Originally, this commandment was directed at the Jews who objected to the Egyptian slaves joining them in their exodus to continue to practice their religion.) Commandment 14 ("Thou shalt not inhale burning leaves in a house of manna where it may affect the breathing of others") clearly supports the prohibition of smoking in public places; commandment 18 ("Thou shalt not erect a temple of gaming in the desert, where all will become wanton") warns of Las Vegas, although it originally referred to individuals who organized gambling in the desert close to the camp of wandering Jews; commandment 19 ("Thy body is sacred and thou shalt not permanently alter thy face or bosom. If thy nose offends thee, leave it alone") points toward the vanity of plastic surgery, while the target of commandment 16 ("Thou shalt not elect a fool to lead thee. If twice elected, thy punishment shall be death by stoning") is clearly the reelection of President Bush. Even more telling are some of the warnings: the second warning ("Seek ye not war in My Holy Lands, for they shall multiply and afflict all of civilization") presciently warns of the global dangers of the Middle East conflict, and the third warning ("Avoid dependence upon the thick black oils of the soil, for they come from the realm of Satan") is a plea for new sources of clean energy. Are we ready to hear and obey God's word?
There is a basic question to be raised here, above the ironic satisfaction provided by such jokes: Is the search for supplementary commandments not another search for the counterbook without which the principal book remains incomplete? And insofar as this book-to-be-supplemented is ultimately the Old Testament itself, is the counterbook not simply the New Testament itself? This would be the way to account for the strange coexistence of two sacred books in Christianity: the Old Testament, the book shared by all three "religions of the book," and the New Testament, the counterbook that defines Christianity and (within its perspective, of course) completes the book, so that we can effectively say that "the construction itself of the Bible is supported by the junction between the two Testaments." This ambiguous supplementation-completion is best encapsulated in the lines on the fulfillment of the law from Jesus' Sermon on the Mountain, in which he radicalizes the commandments:
You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, "Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment." But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.... You have heard that it was said, "Do not commit adultery." But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.... You have heard that it was said, "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth." But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28, 38-42 NIV)
The official Catholic way to interpret this series of supplements is the so-called double-standard view, which divides the teachings of the Sermon into general precepts and specific counsels: obedience to the general precepts is essential for salvation, but obedience to the counsels is necessary only for perfection, or, as Saint Thomas Aquinas put it (paraphrasing Didache 6.2): "For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able to do this, do what you are able." In short, law is for everyone, while its supplement is for the perfect only. Martin Luther rejected this Catholic approach and proposed a different two-level system, the so-called two-realms view, which divides the world into the religious and secular realms, claiming that the Sermon applies only to the spiritual: in the temporal world, obligations to family, employers, and country force believers to compromise; thus a judge should follow his secular obligations to sentence a criminal, but inwardly he should mourn for the fate of the criminal.
Clearly, both these versions resolve the tension by introducing a split between the two domains and constraining the more severe injunctions to the second domain. As expected, in Catholicism this split is externalized into two kinds of people, the ordinary ones and the perfect (saints, monks, etc.), while Protestantism internalizes the split between how I interact with others in the secular sphere and how I inwardly relate to others. Are these, however, the only way to read this operation? A (perhaps surprising) reference to Richard Wagner might be of some help here: to his draft of the play Jesus of Nazareth, written between late 1848 and early 1849. What Wagner attributes here to Jesus is a series of alternate supplementations of the commandments:
The commandment saith: Thou shalt not commit adultery! But I say unto you: Ye shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into, and who so hath wooed without love, already hath broken the wedding. If ye follow my commandment, how can ye ever break it, since it bids you to do what your own heart and soul desire?--But where ye marry without love, ye bind yourselves at variance with God's love, and in your wedding ye sin against God; and this sin avengeth itself by your striving next aginst the law of man, in that ye break the marriage-vow.
The shift from Jesus' actual words is crucial here: Jesus "internalizes" the prohibition, rendering it much more severe (the law says no actual adultery, while I say that if you only covet the other's wife in your mind, it is the same as if you had already committed adultery; etc.); Wagner also internalizes it, but in a different way--the inner dimension he evokes is not that of intention to do it, but that of love that should accompany the law (marriage). The true adultery is not to copulate outside of marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love: the simple adultery just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht yet again: what is a simple adultery compared to (the adultery that is a loveless) marriage! It is not by chance that Wagner's underlying formula "marriage is adultery" recalls Proudhon's "property is theft"--in the stormy 1848 events, Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary demanding the abolition of private property; so no wonder that, later on the same page, Wagner attributes to Jesus a Proudhonian supplement to "Thou shalt not steal!": "This also is a good law: Thou shalt not steal, nor covet another man's goods. Who goeth against it, sinneth: but I preserve you from that sin, inasmuch as I teach you: Love thy neighbor as thyself; which also meanest: Lay not up for thyself treasures, whereby thou stealest from thy neighbor and makest him to starve: for when thou hast thy goods safeguarded by the law of man, thou provokest thy neighbor to sin against the law." This is how the Christian "supplement" to the Book should be conceived: as a properly Hegelian "negation of negation," which resides in the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion, i.e., to this notion as a distortion-in-itself. Recall again Proudhon's old dialectical motto "property is theft": the "negation of negation" is here the shift from theft as a distortion ("negation," violation) of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property (nobody has the right to fully own means of production; their nature is inherently collective, so every claim "this is mine" is illegitimate). The same goes for crime and law, for the passage from crime as the distortion ("negation") of the law to crime as sustaining law itself; i.e., to the idea of the law itself as universalized crime. One should note that, in this notion of the "negation of negation," the encompassing unity of the two opposed terms is the "lowest," "transgressive," one: it is not crime that is a moment of law's self-mediation (or theft that is a moment of property's self-mediation); the opposition of crime and law is inherent to crime, law is a subspecies crime, crime's self-relating negation (in the same way that property is theft's self-relating negation). And does ultimately the same not go for nature itself? Here, "negation of negation" is the shift from the idea that we are violating some natural balanced order to the idea that imposing on the Real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation...which is why the premise, the first axiom even, of every radical ecology is "there is no Nature."
No comments:
Post a Comment