EMPIRE OF SADNESS
This essay has FOUR parts AND A POSTSCRIPT. Click here for the FIRST part, “UNDER THE INFLUENCE”. Click here for the third part, “SUSPICION”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “A POET REMEMBERS”. CLICK HERE FOR THE POSTSCRIPT.
ThIS ESSAY IS THE SECOND IN the ENCOUNTERS WITH CHRISTIANITY series. CLICK HERE FOR THE FIRST ESSAY, “ASCETICISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EVIL”.
10. “But if the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away [καταργουμένην], how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious? For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness exceeds much more in glory. For even what was made glorious had no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels. For if what is passing away [καταργούμενον] was glorious, what remains is much more glorious.” For an interesting discussion of these verses, see G. B. Caird, Principalities and Powers: A Study in Pauline Theology (1956; Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2003), pp. 85–6.
11. Saint Chrysostom: Homilies, p. 513.
12. See the young Hegel’s Enlightenment reinterpretation of Christianity, for example in “The Positivity of the Christian Religion” (1795–6), in On Christianity: Early Theological Writings, tr. T. M. Knox and Richard Kroner (New York: 1961), p. 69: “Jesus […] undertook to raise religion and virtue to morality and to restore to morality the freedom which is its essence.”
13. V. G. Belinsky, “Letter to N. V. Gogol” (1847), in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov: Selected Criticism—Essential Writings by the Founders of Russian Literary and Social Criticism, ed. Ralph E. Matlaw, n. tr. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962), p. 86 (italics in the original). See Nikolai Gogol, Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, tr. Jesse Zeldin (1847; Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1969).
14. Auerbach, Erich, “Figura” (1944), trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature: Six Essays (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), p. 47.
15. Contrast the perspective of a Jewish scholar such as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 93–4: “[Christian] guilt, repressed and denied, is a fratricidal one, the guilt of having usurped the birthright of which Christianity is never completely secure.” See also George Steiner, “Through That Glass Darkly”, Salmagundi no. 93, Winter 1992, 32–50.
16. Auerbach, “Figura”, p. 51.
17. Saint Chrysostom: Homilies, pp. 511, 512.
18. Ibid., p. 515.
II
HISTORY AND PROPHECY
HISTORY AND PROPHECY
“Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities” (Rom. 13:1), wrote Saint Paul; for the tarnished Old Covenant was passing away (2 Cor. 3:7–1110) and the New Covenant promised a much greater, celestial glory to the faithful. It was the task of evangelists and ministers to encourage believers to fix their minds on this magnificent horizon: “For there are a duller sort, whom things to come have not such a hold upon as things present,” Chrysostom said in his twenty-third homily on Romans, probably delivered at Antioch, concerning Paul’s political teaching.11 In theological terms, however, it was not simply a question of present and future. Enigmatically the past, which Christianity considered malleable, was also at stake in such a way that, for example, the ancient man of sorrows (Isa. 53:3) could be looked back upon with prophetic insight—and so not just betoken but become, in the temporally complex sense of being understood to now always have been—the forerunner of the victorious Christ (Col. 2:15). History was by this transcendent reasoning something more than itself.
Events occurred to cast a new light on this intricate theory. Perhaps the establishment under Constantine of a Christian empire on earth would not have surprised the apostle, but perhaps too the same cannot be said of the fact that this imperium would eventually break up and in its own turn pass away, first overrun by crusaders then conquered by Islamic armies, so that passing away now had a new and Christian meaning. In the aftermath of the defeat of Byzantium—and given moreover the longer process of disenchantment and the accompanying rise of new ideologies—it became a matter of debate whether Christianity was just another system of government designed to oppress people. Was Christian eschatology and its promise anything more than the famous opium for the masses?
The dominant modern, western theme of freedom—the ideology of liberalism—makes it difficult to understand religious eras in which the topic was marginal. From the renaissance on, the ideological bias gained strength unstoppably. It is easy to show how an Enlightenment political–philosophical project began to be imposed on Christianity by leading thinkers to such a degree that Christianity became a mere cover for the modern ideology, a mask.12 In his influential “Letter to N. V. Gogol”, the Russian socialist Belinsky condemned the Orthodox Church as “the prop of the knout and the servant of despotism” but insisted that Christ Himself taught “freedom, equality and brotherhood”: “And this teaching was men’s salvation only until it became organized in the Church”, which had always been “a hierarchy, consequently a champion of equality, a flatterer of authority, an enemy and persecutor of brotherhood of men”.13 No longer the bridge to the divine realm beyond this world, salvation became in Belinsky’s view nothing other than the collective work of social transformation. In this way, as Belinsky’s onetime friend Dostoevsky often said, in line with late nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox thought, the God-man was turned into a man-god. Belinsky’s diatribe, which made Christianity an alibi for materialism, led directly to the unmasked atheism and revolutionary anarchism of Bakunin. Once the religious sense of a world and a life beyond faded away, the field was left open to a purely secular and deterministic view of history quite unlike the Christian understanding.
History is only one layer in the prophetic–messianic understanding of time and text. In his essay “Figura”, Erich Auerbach surveyed the correlation of three linked concepts in the patristic reading of the Old Testament: historia (or littera), figura and veritas.14 History was understood as the mere raw material of messianic truth, and the old scripture was understood as standing not in its own right but, much less autonomously, as prefiguration of the Christian truth.15 The effect of such prophetic understanding is that it “both fulfills and annuls” its pretext, and it was with good reason that Auerbach wrote of Paul’s “creative poetic faith”.16 The scholar cited a passage which epitomised the boldness of the apostle’s innovation: “So let no one judge you in food or in drink, or regarding a festival or a new moon or sabbaths, which are a shadow of things to come, but the substance is of Christ” (Col. 2:16–17). Paul’s method, half poetry and half dialectic, was concerned above all to define the teleology of deliverance, which the Incarnation makes so far-reaching that it alters the past in the process of opening the way to eternal life. It is a tremendous hope and a philosophically startling proposition, but in another sense the idea of a shadow appearing chronologically before its source is just eerie, no matter that Paul was able to resolve the paradox theologically.
The separate questions of political order and prophetic revisionism can be seen working in tandem in Chrysostom’s homily which I have already mentioned. It is perfectly true that the Church denied equality and approved hierarchy. “For since equality of honor does many times lead to fightings, He hath made many governments and forms of subjection,” Chrysostom preached. “He hath made one less and another greater, and some of the limbs hath He made to rule and some to be ruled. And among the unreasoning creatures one may notice this same principle, as amongst bees, amongst cranes, amongst herds of wild cattle. And even the sea itself is not without this goodly subordination.”17 He recognised, however, that many would naturally bridle at being subservient to secular governors. To caution but also to soothe the unwilling, he used the pastoral not the philosophical method, weaving together different citations and pieces of advice to form a sort of edifying music rather than a syllogism. Then, in the prophetic manner of Paul, he returned to the Old Testament example of God’s treatment of Cain, in order to find a new and more peaceful meaning in it: “as a devoted mother, so doth God do and plan everything to keep one from being torn from another.”18 What justified the Christian’s attitude of obedience to every authority, Chrysostom said, was the parental love and friendship of God in His overarching dominion, who guides and forgives, eschewing punishment. Of course, for someone like Belinsky this teaching was nothing but a coercive fiction.
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