Faith In Honesty: The Essential Nature Of Theology

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FAITH IN HONESTY ‘This is an exciting book, offering a theme and an approach that is fresh and invigorating. Clearly written and thought-provoking, this book represents an important contribution to the field not only in terms of the ways it rejuvenates systematic and philosophical discussions of Trinitarian theology, but of the way it seeks to reconstitute the very nature of theological discourse. It deserves a wide readership and would appeal especially to those impatient with the kind of academic theology which only seems to talk to itself.’ Professor Elaine Graham, University of Manchester, UK

How, if at all, is religious faith ‘true’? The starting point for this book is that traditional Christian theology overvalues the importance of ‘correctness’. What really counts far more is ‘Honesty’. Not just sincerity or frankness, but Honesty in the sense of a sheer openness to the Other. A set of skills, Andrew Shanks argues, which the church has very much still to learn. True faith in God is faith in Honesty. But theological Honesty has three faces. It stands equally opposed to banality, manipulation, the mere disowning of history. This book thus presents a whole new approach to the doctrine of the Trinity. A fresh stimulus to theological debate at academic, student and more popular levels.

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Faith in Honesty The Essential Nature of Theology

ANDREW SHANKS Manchester Cathedral, UK

© Andrew Shanks 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Andrew Shanks has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Shanks, Andrew, 1954Faith in honesty : the essential nature of theology I. Theology, Doctrinal 2. Trinity 3. Faith I. Title 230'.01 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shanks, Andrew, 1954Faith in honesty : the essential nature of theology / by Andrew Shanks. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7546-5320-X (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Philosophical theology. 2. Honesty. 3. Trinity. I. Title. BT50.S47 2005 230'.01—dc22

2004029546

ISBN 0 7546 5320 X Typeset by J.L. & G.A. Wheatley Design, Aldershot, Hampshire. Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG, Bodmin, Cornwall.

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction: Some Preliminary Definitions

1

Honesty/Frankness/Sincerity The Essential Vocation of Theology Theology versus Sacred Ideology Against Agnosticism The Proper Self-limitation of Metaphysics A Threefold Struggle Prospectus PART I

PHILOSOPHICAL PREAMBLE: CONTRIBUTION TO THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF HONESTY

1 The Intrinsic Three-in-Oneness of Radical Honesty, (a): Response to Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity as Being, By Nature, Dishonest The Significance of Epicurus Nietzsche in Agreement with Epicurus: the Criterion of Free-spiritedness Nietzsche contra Epicurus: the Criterion of Creative Intensity The Third Criterion 2 The Intrinsic Three-in-Oneness of Radical Honesty, (b): Building on Hannah Arendt’s Analysis of Totalitarianism The Forgetting of Isonomy The Vanishing of Auctoritas Critique PART II

1 2 4 6 7 10 12

17 18 18 22 25 29 31 37 40

TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY

3 Origins of the Dogma

45

The New Testament and Beyond ‘Religion’ Easter in the Earthly City v

45 50 52

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Bishops versus Gurus God in Three ‘Persons’ 4

Historical Evolution of Trinitarian Thought God of the Philosophers/God for the Common People Augustine: a Brilliant Detour The Joachimist Eruption Schleiermacher and Tholuck The Hegelian Eruption The Barthian Eruption Barth contra Hegel

5

The Context for First-Person Theology Today: ‘Primal Shakenness’ Directly Apprehended

‘Religion’, not ‘Religions’ Solidarity of the Shaken/Solidarity among Philosophers The Heideggerian Challenge Levinas’s Critique of Heidegger Heidegger’s Grand Narrative The Levinasian Alternative Beyond both Heidegger and Levinas Christ in Anonymity 6

The Context for Second-Person Theology Today: Clean Evangelism

Christians and Epicureans ‘Marana tha!’ The Inspiration of Bereavement Disciplinary Eschatology: the Old Platonist Error The True Meaning of ‘Original Sin’ Two Forms of Corporate Conceit Honesty as Fire 7

The Context for Third-Person Theology Today: Liturgical Proposals

Three Levels of Liturgy A Way Forward Objections The Kairos Now Moltmann/Hauerwas Healing, at Last A ‘Second-order’ Contrast-church? 8

Conclusion: An Empty Tomb

Notes

54 55 57 57 60 63 66 68 75 78 81 82 84 86 89 90 95 100 104 107 109 111 115 117 121 125 132 135 136 138 143 146 149 153 156 159 167

Contents

Appendix I Appendix II Appendix III Appendix IV Index

Who’s Who A Brief Note on the Question of Gender Texts for a Christian Day of Atonement A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

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181 187 191 197 203

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Preface

This is a book about ‘the essential nature of theology’. One feature of that ‘essential nature’, which may sometimes tend to make the enterprise seem somewhat daunting, is that it ideally involves a wide-ranging conversation with the dead. Thus the art of the theologian largely consists in drawing together the most diverse voices from the past, speaking out of the most diverse contexts, and getting them, so far as possible, to connect with one another in creative new ways. But then the risk is that some readers, who might otherwise be interested in the substance of the argument, will be put off by the sheer array of names invoked! To those who might be daunted in this way: please note Appendix I: ‘Who’s Who’. I have added it because I do not want anyone to be unnecessarily deterred. A word more about the title: ‘Faith in Honesty’. In 1963 a little book appeared, by John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, also on the theme of theological ‘honesty’. Honest to God was of course a publishing sensation – over a million copies sold, more than any other religious book since John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. I am afraid my work will not do quite that well. But let me also draw attention to the rather different ambition here. Robinson’s book, I think one might say, was all about being honest in one’s faith; this book, by contrast, is precisely the other way round, about having faith in honesty. Honest to God is intended as a critique of intellectually dishonest faith, a pointer beyond merely conventional, unthinking, and in that sense dead, piety. All well and good. But Robinson’s primary critique is effectively confined to the corruption of unthinking church life – considered as it were in abstraction from other, more secular forms of corruption. To a theologian like the great Karl Barth, for instance, whose whole thinking had been shaped first by the struggle against the spirit of German imperialism at the time of the First World War and then by the struggle against Nazism, it was indeed quite exasperating that so abstracted an approach should prove so successful. At all events I certainly do not want to treat the problematics of theological honesty here in abstraction from the wider problematics of honesty in general. On the contrary, the whole point of the argument is to try to integrate the former, systematically, within the latter. I was living in North Yorkshire when I wrote this, working, very happily, as a ‘ministerial development officer’ in the Archdeaconry of Cleveland, and as ix

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priest in charge of the parish of Upper Ryedale. So I dedicate it, in gratitude, to my colleagues there, and to the people of those five little churches. Andrew Shanks Manchester

Introduction

Some Preliminary Definitions

Once, the most momentous theological divisions within Christendom were the conflicts between the various church denominations: Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant. But now, perhaps, no longer. More and more, the most elementary division is one which cuts across the old denominational boundaries, namely the split between theological ‘liberals’ and the more conservatively ‘orthodox’. Which of these two tendencies stands closest to the truth? I think that both are right. And, equally, that both are wrong. Both are right to have suspicions of the other; both are wrong, in so far as those suspicions harden into conversation-inhibiting prejudices. Beyond all more particular issues of biblical interpretation or ethical discernment, at the deepest level what we have here is a confrontation between two opposing principles of suspicion. Thus ‘liberals’ suspect their more conservatively ‘orthodox’ opponents, perhaps first and foremost, of tending, in practice, to mis-identify the saving element in true faith with the mere devout appropriation of a proper creed as such. This amounts to a certain form of confessional correctness. At the same time the conservative ‘orthodox’, most significantly, suspect the ‘liberals’ – with their tendencies towards ‘non-realist’ metaphysics and a ‘postmodern’ understanding of history – of, in effect, doing away with any real basis for religious authority, abandoning it just for the sake of modish liberal ‘political correctness’. Both, I would argue, are right. The ‘liberals’ are right, inasmuch as it is true that the saving element of true faith does not consist in any mere appropriation of propositional correctness as such, but much rather in the religious appropriation of the most radical honesty. And the ‘orthodox’ are right, inasmuch as the demands of deep honesty do indeed need to be accorded the most decisively absolute authority. However, let’s be clear about the meaning of this term ‘honesty’. Honesty/Frankness/Sincerity Very often, in common parlance, the word ‘honesty’ is used as a straightforward synonym for frankness, or for sincerity. However, what I mean here is, precisely, radical honesty, which is something far more. 1

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The difference is quite simple: to be frank is nothing more than truly to say what you think; and to be sincere is nothing more than truly to mean what you say. But what I would call ‘radical’ honesty means being truly open to what other people may have to say. It means being truly open even to people with very different viewpoints from your own, shaped by very different cultural traditions and contexts, and very different personal experiences of life – people with, as a result, often quite opposite opinions to your own. It means not lying to them – and not lying to yourself, either, in order to evade their critical judgement of you and of what you represent; in that sense, actually being quite suspicious of yourself. ‘I hear what you are saying’, people sometimes say, when what they really mean is ‘Please, like me!’ And, again, ‘I will hide nothing from you’ sometimes just means ‘Please, look at me!’ But radical honesty is neither of these. It is very simple: to be radically honest is to love the prospect of the moral lessons to be learnt from your encounter with other people more even than you love the prospect of receiving their love and attention. The Essential Vocation of Theology Radical honesty: in what follows I shall simply call it ‘Honesty’ with a capital ‘H’. Authentic theology, I would argue, is the science of faith, rightly understood as the theistic appropriation of the demands of Honesty, so defined. That is, it is, properly, the theistic branch of the science of the sacralization of perfect truth-as-Honesty, as Buddhology is, properly, the Buddhist branch of the same; and so forth. But it has always been liable to two basic corruptions, which are ‘basic’ in the sense of representing elementary distortions of the very will to truth, in this regard: on the one hand, corruption into what I would call ‘sacred ideology’; and, on the other hand, corruption by ‘intellectual conceit’. By ‘sacred ideology’, first, I mean very simply everything that springs from a fundamental impatience with the pursuit of truth. That great hero of the German Enlightenment, G.E. Lessing, captures the issue here, I think very precisely, in a little parable: As regards truth [Lessing writes], it is not the supposed or actual having of it that confers merit; but the honest pains one takes to get on its track. For it is the exercise of seeking out the truth, not the possessing of it, which develops those strengths on which one’s ongoing self-fulfilment basically depends. Possession makes one placid, idle and complacent. . . . If God held all truth shut up in his right hand, but in his left hand held the unalloyed, ever restless drive to truth, only with the proviso that I would be for ever going wrong, and if he then said, ‘Choose!’ I would in all humility fall upon his left, and answer, ‘Father! give me this! The pure truth is for you alone’.1

Introduction: Some Preliminary Definitions

3

In the terms of this parable, ‘sacred ideology’ may well be defined as whatever expresses the option Lessing refuses, that is, the outworking of a desire for the gift in God’s right hand; or any belief-system, in so far as it is shaped by such desire, for a ‘truth’ which finally puts an end to the need for real, open-minded thought; a lazy, or dogmatic, holding fast to the opinions of a certain tradition, understood as at least a partial satisfaction of such ambition. This, however – since it is the false option, and not really desirable at all – is a gift God never gives. And sacred ideology is ideo-logy as opposed to true theo-logy, in that it puts an idea (called ‘God’) in the place of God. But now let us also go a little further than Lessing does. In God’s left hand there are in fact, again, two gifts, both of them highly desirable – but one supremely so. The supremely desirable gift is the grace of perfect truth-asHonesty, whereas the other is the grace of an infinite appetite for truth-ascorrectness. And here we begin to approach the second of the two corruptions identified above, the problem of intellectual conceit. Truth-as-correctness is a quality of abstract doctrine. That is, it is something that may belong to a doctrine considered simply in itself, as a theme of testimony, or pedagogy, abstracted from any specific conversational context. Objectively, it inheres in well-informed and well-shaped propositions, or theories; subjectively, it inheres in the accuracy and sincerity with which one appropriates what is objectively correct, so as to present it to others. Yet the point is: this is still not truth-as-Honesty. For I repeat: truth-asHonesty is a quality of sheer conversational receptivity. Truth-as-Honesty may be a quality of conversation between individuals, or of whole politically organized conversation processes, or, indeed, of the interior conversation processes constituting the self-knowledge of each individual soul. It is a sheer love of openness towards other points of view, by which our own predominant point of view is challenged – a commitment to radical openness, in that sense – with regard both to ourselves and the world about us – completely unmixed by any other motive. It is truth as a hollowing out of our selves, by divine grace, a cultivation of perfect attentiveness, to fresh insight – the infinitely purgative truth of that quality of will. Theology, in my view, is ideally to be understood as the theistic branch of the science of the sacralization of perfect truth-as-Honesty. But now let us distinguish theology in that sense, as decisively as possible, from the very different enterprise of metaphysics. The distinction I want to make here corresponds directly to the distinction between truth-as-Honesty and truth-as-correctness. For by ‘metaphysics’ I mean, precisely, the most comprehensive celebration of the pursuit of truthas-correctness, a systematic meditation on the nature of that pursuit, in general, as it relates to ethical and religious tradition. Sacred ideology claims already to possess truth-as-correctness. Good metaphysics, essentially, serves to dissolve this claim. And its proper role, I would argue, in the Christian context is thereby to help clear the way for authentic theology.

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But let us nevertheless be very clear about the radical difference between theology and metaphysics. They are centrally concerned with two quite different species of truth, requiring two quite different modes of cultivation. Truth-as-correctness is, in general, what we pursue through academic education; the more education, the closer we come to it. And the pursuit of such truth is, therefore, pre-eminently the business of an educated elite. But, considered purely and simply in itself, truth-as-Honesty is, on the contrary, equally open to all, quite regardless of educational attainment. Thus one cultivates it not through schooling, but, in a broad sense, through prayer. Theology differs from metaphysics in that it is a form of thinking which, whilst of course it operates within the domain of truth-as-correctness, nevertheless essentially celebrates what transcends that domain. It is a quest for public strategies to promote true prayerfulness. Only, the trouble is that intellectual conceit then intervenes, that is, the conceit of theologians as intellectuals, concerned to uphold their own special prestige deriving from educational privilege. And this results in a tacit, yet systematic, blurring of the distinction. Theology gets mixed with metaphysics. (Both, after all, talk about God.) It fails adequately to assert its true radical otherness, and existential primacy. Theology versus Sacred Ideology Far worse than the mixing of theology with metaphysics, however, is its entanglement with sacred ideology, which, let us frankly admit, goes very deep within church tradition, more or less everywhere. Ideology is an impatient claim already to be in actual possession of correct opinion. Of course, Christian theologians have always recognized that the truth of true faith is something far more than just the holding of correct opinion, as conveyed by abstracted propositions, considered purely in themselves. ‘You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe – and shudder’: this is already said in the New Testament (James 2:19). And Thomas Aquinas, for instance, distinguishes between ‘formed’ and ‘unformed’ faith. What the demons are said to have – a not yet saving, because exclusively theoretical, correctness of understanding about God – is ‘unformed’ faith. In order that ‘unformed’ faith should become true and saving, for Aquinas, it has first got to be ‘formed’ – by love. Very well. Only then the question is: how? What does love need with which to inform correct opinion, in order that true faith may result? All too often, it seems to me, where the question is not explicitly posed, the implicit answer is just a frank sincerity. Nor does Aquinas himself, by any means, rule this interpretation out. Right opinion about God, informed by love in the guise of a frank sincerity: that, if you like, is the essential formula for ideologized faith. No very radical affirmation of Honesty here. But instead: a claim to propositional correctness,

Introduction: Some Preliminary Definitions

5

correctly appropriated, according to the rules of some particular party line. The party line may be conservatively ‘orthodox’, or it may be ‘liberal’. It makes no odds; the basic corruption is the same in either case. The difference between authentic theology and its corruption into sacred ideology, I would argue, directly mirrors the way in which Honesty transcends simple frankness and sincerity. Sacred ideology is just a polemical strategy, which works best when its adherents really believe in it. But authentic theology, by contrast, is always a quest for ideal conversational give-and-take. Or one might perhaps put it like this: there are, here, two diametrically opposed attitudes to propaganda, by which, to be precise, I mean any strategy of persuasion aiming, straight away, to shift the behaviour of whole social masses as such. It is not, therefore, designed to stir people into deeper thoughtfulness (which with masses is impossible), but, rather, to stimulate and redirect already existent instincts, through flattery and menace. Ideologized theology tends to function as legitimative back-up to the propaganda of its own host community, whether confessional or secular. But post-ideological theology – on the contrary – seeks to cultivate forms of spirituality which are a therapy against propaganda of all kinds. Sometimes, of course, propaganda may serve a good cause. The early church, for instance, survived under persecution and grew, very largely thanks to its highly effective use of something like propaganda: celebrating the heroic memory of its martyrs, demonizing its enemies, invoking post-mortem threats and promises in quasi-propaganda fashion. Without such practices, the gospel would in all probability never have been successfully handed down to us. None the less, it still seems clear to me that the best Christian theology is that which most explicitly insists upon the absolute otherness of the actual gospel, in itself, in relation to any sort of propaganda vehicle. The God of ideological theology is, in effect, a God who accepts unthinking propaganda-led obedience. Thoughtful obedience is of course preferred but, if need be, unthinking obedience will do. (And the more ideological one’s attitude, the quicker one will be to allow such necessity.) By contrast, the God of post-ideological theology cannot accept unthinking obedience. It is inconceivable, since to obey this God, the true God, is nothing other than to be thoughtful. Not necessarily with any great articulacy: by thoughtfulness here I do not mean articulate cleverness – which may well, indeed, just be a mask for thoughtlessness. But I mean a sober awareness, at least, of how we tend to fool ourselves; an intense concern; a genuine prayerful openness, in short, to new insight. Ideological theology is preoccupied with the intellectual border conflicts between distinct confessional (religious or anti-religious) traditions and subtraditions. Whether it accentuates such conflicts, or seeks to do away with them, either way they are its whole concern. But post-ideological theology, on the contrary, is not – in the first instance – interested in that sort of conflict at all. Instead, it is preoccupied by the conflict between Honesty and dishonesty: a conflict by which every

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confessional tradition, every confessional sub-tradition, every subtlest subdivision of a confessional sub-tradition, is, in different ways and at different levels, internally riven. Its whole aim is to draw that conflict to the surface. Of most theology one would have to say that it is a more or less ambiguous mixture of the ideological and the trans-ideological. But it seems to me that, in the end, everything depends on making clear the absolute difference between the two. Against Agnosticism ‘The fool has said in his heart, there is no God’ (Psalm 14:1). As in the days of the psalmist, so also today. But why is the ‘folly’ of this not universally obvious, as it should be? I would suggest: essentially because of our continuing trappedness, both ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers’ alike, within the limitations of a still all too ideologized theology. Yet, in the Christian context, it is only true theology which properly overcomes sacred ideology. Such ideology may indeed be countered by a rival, irreligious form of ideology, which, however, is no real answer. Or it may be countered by a resort to systematic agnosticism – as Kant, for instance, advocated – or, still more aggressively, the Positivist tradition. But agnosticism is, essentially, just a withdrawal from conversation. It is the closing down of certain sorts of quite seriously offered conversation, with nothing more than a dismissive shrug of the shoulders; an impatient, dogmatically repeated ‘We cannot know’, without any serious attempt to enter into the alien world-view for which such conversation makes sense. And how can a withdrawal from conversation advance the cause of that altogether conversational phenomenon, pure truth-as-Honesty? The trouble with agnosticism is that it still leaves bigotry in possession of religious tradition. It fails to confront sacred ideology where sacred ideology is in fact at its most vulnerable, that is, on its own chosen terrain, where its intrinsic thoughtlessness overlays traditions with often quite profoundly thoughtful origins. ‘This world is God’s creation.’ So faith affirms. For ideologized theology that affirmation is the supreme self-assertion of a particular culture. In effect, it amounts to the cultural–imperialistic claim that what we, in our tradition, correctly worship is also the ultimate source of all truth and goodness, everywhere and always. But for post-ideological theology, by contrast, it says something quite different. Here, the same proposition becomes a definitive recognition of the sometimes tormenting, sometimes inspirational impulse to Honesty as, in fact, the ultimate source of all real meaning in life. This impulse is divine. In other words, it is an impulse of infinite authority; one which therefore requires maximum imaginative reinforcement in its struggles, through narrative and illustration; and, beyond empty lip-service, the most skilful possible political promotion. Can that legitimately be doubted?

Introduction: Some Preliminary Definitions

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There can never be any honest certainty in ideologized faith. However passionately frank the sincerity with which it is held, it is still only an opinion. True faith, on the other hand, is not an opinion. It is the registering of a challenge: a commitment to better conversation, at every level of both public and private life. In itself, it is at any rate one version, the theistic version, of a truth which – if and when it is at last unwrapped from its ideological coverings – no thoughtful person can honestly doubt. For who can honestly doubt that the demands of Honesty are, in principle, of infinite authority? Who would deny that they therefore require maximum imaginative reinforcement? Or who can fail to see the need for effective campaigning communities, dedicated to their political application? And how then is one more specifically (for example) to assess the particular truth or falsehood of Christian faith? First and foremost, surely, it has to be assessed, in quite pragmatic terms, as a (God-given?) set of strategies for the confessional articulation, and working through, of this trans-confessional challenge. In which case, the real question is not so much whether one can sincerely assent to the various propositions of the church’s creed as a formulation of correct opinion, but, rather, whether, or to what extent, and how, one can in all Honesty be part of the church as it actually is: so rich in potential resources for amplifying the demands of Honesty; and yet so often, in the event, corrupted by ideology? The Proper Self-limitation of Metaphysics The true answer to the corruption of theology into sacred ideology does not, I think, therefore lie in Kantian, or Positivist, agnosticism, which merely forecloses this sort of issue. Instead, I would argue, it lies in what Hegel called ‘speculative’ thinking. Granted, the old Hegelian terminology sounds odd to us today. And yet it seems to me that Hegel is a key pioneer here, in two basic regards: both by virtue of his Logic and by virtue of his Phenomenology of Spirit. In the first place, what constitutes good metaphysics? The core vocation of metaphysics, I have suggested, is to help dissolve sacred ideology. But I would argue that, in order to do so, it ought not to interfere, in any way, with what properly belongs to theology. Metaphysics may, from this point of view, ‘interfere’ with theology just as much in friendly, as in unfriendly, ways. Obvious examples of unfriendly interference are: deistic or atheistic metaphysical doctrines; Spinozist ‘pantheism’; or, again, Kantian agnosticism. But by ‘friendly’ interference, on the other hand, I mean the importing especially of pre-Christian, Platonist or Aristotelian, metaphysics into theology for apologetic purposes, on the supposed grounds that these doctrines to some extent anticipate, and moreover help clarify, the ultimate truth-as-correctness of divine revelation as such.

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The trouble is, such a procedure makes it seem as though the whole truth of the gospel might in fact quite accurately be summed up in Nietzsche’s phrase as ‘Platonism for the masses’,2 or as though the gospel is truer than Platonism only inasmuch as it is able to take the essential truth-as-correctness of Platonist metaphysics, and popularize it, with unique effectiveness. There have indeed always been vigorous objections to such a view, along the lines of Tertullian’s famous cry: ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ And there is, I think, often a sound theological instinct at work here. Yet such protest so easily then just merges into a crude fideism. That is, it becomes confused with a mere defiant refusal of rational argument – as though faith, rather than being an opening up to honest rationality, were on the contrary somehow ‘beyond’ reason. Again, this is a fundamental closing down of conversation, which is, to that extent, essentially dishonest. Let us be quite clear: the true difference between metaphysics and theology is not the difference suggested by fideism, between a thinking faithful to reason and a thinking which purports to be somehow ‘beyond’ reason. No, it is a difference which only becomes clear, for the first time, when, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a Christian philosopher appears who sets out systematically to develop a brand new form of metaphysics, characterized, as a matter of principle, by the very utmost theological reticence. Thus there could not be a less fideistic defender of the faith than Hegel. He is a quite uncompromising rationalist, who sees philosophy and religion, in the very fullest possible sense, as partners, two complementary ‘forms’ for one and the same ultimate ‘content’. And yet, the point is that this shared ‘content’ is by no means, as he sees it, a metaphysical theory. On the contrary, what he means by his formula of two ‘forms’ for one ‘content’ is precisely the complementarity of two modes of (what I would call) true theology, both of them decisively transcendent of metaphysics. Hegel develops his doctrine of metaphysics in his Logic. But this metaphysics is quite extraordinarily modest in its relationship to religious faith. As with any metaphysics, Hegel’s Logic is a systematic study of the pursuit of truth-as-correctness, considered in the most general terms. Now, of course, the God of Christian faith is the God of all truth, both truth-as-Honesty and truth-as-correctness; and therefore, from the point of view of Christian faith, any metaphysical doctrine is necessarily also a doctrine about God. Yet Hegel draws a sharp distinction: his doctrine in the Logic is, as he puts it, ‘the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind’.3 In other words, it simply does not impinge on theology, since theology is the study of God as revealed in and through the actual phenomena of creation. And in actual fact the central doctrine of the Logic does not directly address any of the primary themes of theology at all. But, on the contrary, it would, in itself, be equally compatible with all sorts of different religious, or irreligious, belief-systems. It would be quite compatible even with a non-theistic religious belief-system, such as that of Buddhism, or

Introduction: Some Preliminary Definitions

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even with the most irreligious sort of atheism. In so far as ‘metaphysics’ is understood as a body of argument for or against religious faith, then Hegel’s is, in short, just the very purest sort of anti-‘metaphysical’ metaphysics! The Logic does not prescribe any particular onto-theological belief-system, either orthodox or heterodox. In this respect, Hegel systematically refuses to accommodate himself to the demands of sacred ideology. The devotees of sacred ideology want metaphysics to serve their purposes. This produces what Hegel calls ‘reflective’ thought. He, however, is not a ‘reflective’ philosopher; but, in his terms, a ‘speculative’ one instead. ‘Reflective’ metaphysics aims at clear-cut onto-theological results: purporting to demonstrate the exclusive truthas-correctness of a particular brand of theism, or a particular brand of atheism. And so forth. ‘Speculative’ metaphysics, however, does not. Hegel is a thoroughly Christian philosopher, but he is not one who seeks to vindicate his faith in ‘reflective’ metaphysical terms; his Christianity is not metaphysical but theological.4 The metaphysics he develops in his Logic is simply a comprehensive celebratory survey of the pursuit of truth-as-correctness, in general. And nothing more. Thus what is it, Hegel in effect enquires, to pursue truth-as-correctness in general? This, if you like, is the properly fundamental question of metaphysics. One might say that to pursue truth-as-correctness is to comprehend: • • • • • •

the interplay of Being and Nothingness; the truth of Becoming; the determinacy of determinate moments of Becoming; their finitude and infinitude; their oneness and diversity; and their measurability.

Or that it is to grasp: • • • • •

the Essence (of truth-as-correctness); the interplay of Identity and Difference; the thingness of things; their phenomenality; and their relationships of content and form, whole and part, force and expression, inwardness and outwardness, necessity and contingency, substance and accident, cause and effect, action and reaction.

Or that it is to grasp: • • • •

the Concept (of truth-as-correctness); its development through the interplay of universality, particularity and individuality; the nature of logical judgement, in its various forms; the nature of syllogistic reasoning, in its various forms; and

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•

the nature of the natural sciences, and of philosophic theory, in the broadest sense, as such.

Hegel moves through each of these answers in turn. He sets out, so far as he can, to link them into a coherent sequence of ever-growing complexity. And, in the end, he gathers them all together, in the concept of the ‘Absolute Idea’. Here we have his name for the fullness of metaphysical truth. Yet the ‘Absolute Idea’ is still not the sort of onto-theological result for which ‘reflective’ thinking craves. It is not a result, but a celebration. To be precise: it is nothing other than a retrospective celebration of the whole process which the preceding argument as a whole has surveyed, the whole dynamic of it. The argument, in other words, culminates in a celebration of the sheer appetite for truth-as-correctness, an appetite which it has not so much sought to satisfy, with onto-theological results, as to awaken, by example. This is absolutely what I think metaphysics ought to be – above all, in its restraint. But then, on the other hand, in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel also provides us with a way into trans-metaphysical philosophic theology. That is, he systematically begins to open up the question of what it means to promote the very purest truth-as-Honesty, in philosophic terms. For what else is ‘Spirit’, or ‘Geist’, in the Hegelian sense, if not an emergent will to Honesty? The way he sees it, there are three basic philosophic disciplines: ‘logic’ – that is, primordial metaphysics; ‘philosophy of nature’, which is an extension of metaphysics in relation to natural science; and ‘philosophy of Spirit’. And by ‘Spirit’ he, in effect, quite simply means everything that transcends metaphysics, the way that the pursuit of truth-as-Honesty transcends the pursuit of truth-as-correctness. The discussion of religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit is of course a purely philosophic form of theology, inasmuch as it is, in the first instance, trans-confessionally framed, arriving at a consideration of gospel truth out of an initial consideration of purely universal human experience, as such. And yet, this is philosophic theology: it is entirely free from metaphysics. Hegel preserves the boundaries between the two with, it seems to me, the most admirable clarity. A Threefold Struggle In what follows, however, I want to add something else – something Hegel does not say. I intend to argue that there is an essential threefoldness to the most radical Honesty, a threefoldness directly corresponding to the Christian self-revelation of God as Trinity. Hegel, indeed, is also a pioneer reviver of trinitarian theology, as we shall see. But, for reasons I shall indicate, I think that his doctrine in this regard is actually quite one-sided. And I therefore want to go well beyond it, along these lines.

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The threefoldness I have in mind is the articulation of a threefold struggle, in which Honesty is pitted against three basic forms of dishonesty. Thus: 1 There is the dishonesty that remains, as it were, trapped in the present moment: swept along by routine, going with the flow of things; the sheer low-key unreflectiveness, or spiritual indolence, of those who are content just to belong, and merge inconspicuously into their cultural background, without any commitment to thinking independently, or perhaps without the necessary confidence to do so. This is the dishonesty of the human herd, or, intellectually, the dishonesty of the academic functionary who is no more than a functionary. Let us call it: dishonestyas-banality. 2 There is the far more future-oriented dishonesty of a ruthless plotting and scheming: a matter of seduction, this, by flattery and threats; a corrupted pathos, informing a corrupted form of impassioned solidarity, that is, the typical dishonesty of a gang, which, in an intellectual context, becomes the dishonesty of the ideological party, or clique. Here we have dishonestyas-manipulation, entangling both the manipulater and the manipulated in its cunning. 3 There is the dishonesty involved in a wilfully energetic evasion of responsibility for the past – at its most brutal, the dishonesty of the destructive mob; in a more polite form, the dishonesty of the merely boastful community, which cannot see, or rather does not want to see, its own shadow side. Or else – by way of excessive reaction to that – the dishonesty of the nihilistic individualist, who likewise yearns to be free from all that may be burdensome in the corporate history of which he or she is part. I call this dishonesty-as-disowning. True Honesty, as I would conceive it, is a thoughtful openness towards the otherness of other people, involving a struggle, equally, against all three of these general types of phenomenon. Thus dishonesty-as-banality occludes the otherness of other people, inasmuch as it is a simple, life-impoverishing failure to be at all interested in that otherness, or in the lessons potentially to be learnt from it. Dishonesty-asmanipulation, by contrast, is interested in the otherness of other people, but only because it is preoccupied with the question of how to predict the responses of the other, for aggressive purposes of control. And dishonesty-as-disowning is also interested, but only in a purely self-defensive mode: it is all about constructing systematic defences against reproach – whether reproach framed in terms of the prophetic heritage of one’s own tradition, or the reproach of aggrieved outsiders. Banality, manipulation and disowning: it seems to me that, between them, these three basic categories encompass it all. Each, then (I want to argue) becomes the core issue of a particular species of theology. And moreover these three species of theology directly correspond

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Faith in Honesty

to the three divine ‘Persons’ of the Holy Trinity: ‘First-Person theology’, essentially concerned with the critique of banality; ‘Second-Person theology’, essentially concerned with solidarity-building in resistance to manipulation; ‘Third-Person theology’, essentially concerned with strategies for the proper owning of tradition. That, in short, is my core thesis here. Prospectus Overall, my thesis will be an argument in two parts. Part I is simply a filling out of the suggestion that there is, by nature, an intrinsic threefoldness to the most radical Honesty, in this sense. And then in Part II I go on to try to integrate this into the actual history of Christian trinitarianism. Part I consists of two chapters. In the first I discuss the nature of Honesty with particular critical reference to the thought of Nietzsche. If, after all, one is to try to interpret Christian theological tradition in the sort of terms I propose, then there clearly is quite a major challenge in Nietzsche’s attack on it, inasmuch as Nietzsche charges Christianity precisely with being, by its very nature, ineradicably dishonest. And so – why is Nietzsche wrong? It is not so much, I think, that he is mistaken about the facts, but, rather, I want to argue that Nietzsche’s own notion of ‘honesty’ is crucially defective. After this, in Chapter 2 I go on to discuss Hannah Arendt’s diagnosis of twentieth-century totalitarianism. For what more dramatic type of example could there be of a public culture entirely founded on dishonesty? And Arendt surely remains its finest philosophic analyst. This first part is purely philosophic. It is an attempt to find at any rate some intimations of trinitarian truth already present in the pre-theological aspect of things. But I also want to argue that the Christian dogma of the Trinity implicitly originates, at the deepest level, as a form of testimony to the intrinsic threefoldness of Honesty, and that the history of the doctrine represents a gradual evolution towards explicitly clarifying that origin. Part II develops this case. First therefore, in Chapter 3, I consider the early beginnings of trinitarian theology, from that point of view. Then, in Chapter 4, I follow the history through, up to the two great revivals in trinitarian theology, by Hegel in philosophic form, and by Karl Barth in dogmatic–theological form. And after that there are three further chapters: on the contexts for First-Person theology today, Second-Person theology today and Third-Person theology today. These are, so to speak, samples of the sort of work I think most of all now needs doing, in each of these domains. Of course, these three domains of theology constantly overlap in their concerns. All three are approaches to the whole of theology; and each therefore provides its own distinctive context for a consideration of trinitarian truth as a whole. Yet I hope nevertheless to help make clear the sense in which each does indeed have its own quite distinct integrity, the sense in which they are,

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all three of them, equally necessary, and the sense in which these really are the three faces of the most radical Honesty – a genuinely unsurpassable confessional manifestation, in other words, of the very profoundest transconfessional religious truth.

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PART I PHILOSOPHICAL PREAMBLE: CONTRIBUTION TO THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF HONESTY

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Chapter 1

The Intrinsic Three-in-Oneness of Radical Honesty, (a): Response to Nietzsche’s Critique of Christianity as Being, By Nature, Dishonest

Let us begin with Nietzsche. ‘By their fruits you shall know them’: amongst the, in dialectical terms, most significant fruits of any religious tradition are its dedicated opponents. And none is more deeply dedicated to the critique of Christianity than Nietzsche.1 Thus he is, I think, a quite peculiarly formidable critic of Christianity just by virtue of the way his argument transcends metaphysics, to get right at the very roots of Christian faith.2 Given that faith as such is not rooted in metaphysics, metaphysical arguments cannot in themselves threaten to uproot it; at most they can only compel its reformulation. But Nietzsche’s critique goes altogether deeper. His counter-faith to that of Christianity is explicitly a faith in intellectual honesty – (I shall write the word with a small ‘h’ when referring to his concept). Christian faith, he argues, is by its very nature dishonest. And, as he himself insists, the Christian can by no means escape such a critique by rejecting its presuppositions. For, he argues, it is precisely Christian faith itself which has taught us moderns, in principle, to value the ideal against which it offends. This, Nietzsche thinks, is indeed Christianity’s great historic achievement. That the Christian God is now ‘dead’ is, deep down, because Christian faith has been destroyed from within by its own ‘will to truth’: its monotheistic identification of divinity with the infinite demands of Truth, explicitly recognized as being infinite; and its pressing back, therefore, beyond questions of right action as such, to an ideal of absolute purity of motive – an innermost disciplining of the will.3 His Zarathustra is, above all, the prophet of true honesty – again, a quality of infinite ‘will to truth’. Prophets are needed to establish new virtues, and true honesty is ‘the youngest virtue’.4 But, thanks to centuries of Christianity (he argues), this youngest of virtues – young though it is – already has an irresistible authority. Nietzsche, in short, criticizes Christian faith essentially by seeking to outbid it. And, in the end, the only way he can be answered with any conviction is by our seeking once again to up the stakes. 17

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Let us, therefore, take a closer look at the distinctive Nietzschean notion of ‘honesty’ – with a view to formulating a proper theological response. The Significance of Epicurus It seems to me that Nietzsche’s conception of intellectual honesty has two basic aspects – and that these two aspects are, in turn, quite neatly correlatable to the two sides of his ambivalent relationship to Epicurus.5 Of all classical philosophers Epicurus has on the whole been the one most fiercely rejected by Christian theology; even though – or perhaps partly because – Epicureanism was the one and only Greek precursor movement to Christianity as a missionary enterprise.6 And he became an important symbolic figure for Nietzsche – as ‘the inventor of an idyllic–heroic mode of philosophizing’.7 On the one hand, Nietzsche admires Epicurus as ‘one of the greatest of men’, a critic of the ‘pre-existing Christianity’ of his time.8 But, on the other hand, he also criticizes Epicurus as ‘a typical décadent: first recognized as such by me’.9 These two opposing aspects of Nietzsche’s relationship to Epicurus may I think be said to result from his application of two quite distinct general criteria for intellectual honesty, one of which he shares with Epicurus, whereas the other is very un-Epicurean. Nietzsche’s two criteria directly correspond to the first two of the three that I think need applying. And, as will appear, it is my view that his thinking is ultimately vitiated by his complete ignoring of the third. Yet the additional validity of that third criterion by no means invalidates either of the other two which he does apply. Nietzsche in Agreement with Epicurus: the Criterion of Free-spiritedness Thus intellectual honesty, in the rigorous sense intended here, is far more than just a matter of not consciously and deliberately lying. But, rather, it designates the overcoming of any sort of wilful thoughtlessness. The thinking thereby set loose is not just the thinking involved in solving problems, devising strategies, gaining practical skills, winning arguments. It is, instead, the thinking which already in itself confronts the recalcitrant, corrupted will: thinking in the sense of the warning, ‘stop and think!’ – not merely going with the flow, but genuinely allowing experience to disturb and overthrow prejudice. Its concern, in other words, is not so much with the refining of the technical means required for the attainment of given moral ends as with the prior questioning of those ends themselves – in Nietzschean terms, a continual ‘revaluation of all values’. Clearly, though, not all of those who seek to promote a ‘revaluation of all values’ do so for pure Honesty’s sake. For there are also the manipulators.

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And herein, surely, lies the special symbolic importance of Epicurus. For, of all the leading philosophers of antiquity, it was I think Epicurus who most directly, and most boldly, addressed the problematics of dishonesty-asmanipulation. Clearly, before one can be honest in relation to others one must first escape any merely manipulated subservience to them. And Nietzsche is entirely at one with Epicurus in focusing his critique not so much on the more obvious dishonesty of the manipulator towards the manipulated, but, far more, on the altogether deeper-rooted dishonesty of the manipulated, in denying their manipulatedness. Thus it was the chief aim of Epicurean discipline to render its adepts acutely self-critical with regard to that danger. Manipulation operates through more or less veiled threats and promises. What renders us vulnerable are our addictions, our craving for things which the manipulator may promise to supply or threaten to remove; it may be an addiction to drugs, to luxuries of every sort, to wealth and power, to fame, or to love. When Epicurus identifies wisdom with ‘ataraxy’ he basically means a general freedom from addiction, in the most comprehensive sense. The ‘Garden’ he established at Athens was, in the broadest possible sense, a detoxification centre: a place of tough talking and friendly mutual support in the battle for ataraxy, so defined. As a campaigner against ideological manipulativeness, on the other hand, his enemy number one was Plato. As Nietzsche remarks: How malicious philosophers can be! I know of nothing more venomous than the joke Epicurus allowed himself to make against Plato and the Platonists: he called them Dionysiokolakes. The literal, surface meaning of this word is ‘flatterers of Dionysius’. Or: tyrants’ lickspittles and toadies [after the tyrant Dionysius II of Syracuse, whom Plato sought to train as a philosopher ruler]. At the same time, though, it also amounts to saying, ‘they are all actors, there is nothing genuine about them’ (for Dionysiokolax was a colloquial term for an actor). And that is how he shows his real malice towards Plato.10

So Epicurus taught his followers to see through the pretences of a philosophical high-mindedness which was, he thought, nothing more than a veiled bid for domination. And the Nietzschean doctrine of ‘the will to power’ in a sense simply generalizes this embryonic hermeneutics of suspicion, already present in Epicureanism, converting it into a general precautionary principle for the questioning of all cultural phenomena, without exception. Nietzsche speaks here of Epicurus’ ‘malice’ (Bosheit). For him, ‘malice’ tends to be a thoroughly affirmative term, a key ingredient of honesty. Also of himself he writes, ‘I am no good when I am not malicious.’11 The negative flavour of the word in common parlance brings out, for him, the natural resistance of manipulative dishonesty to being unveiled. And the ‘will to power’ is then what ‘malice’, in this Nietzschean sense, is always and everywhere alert to. ‘This world’, he famously declares, ‘is will to power – and nothing

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Philosophical Preamble

besides!’12 Here we have Nietzsche’s ‘malicious’ inversion of the Christian doctrine of divine creation, as a universal invitation to thoughtfulness in general. Thus the doctrine of ‘will to power’ is precisely intended as a systematic exaltation of ‘malice’ over faith, inasmuch as faith is ‘maliciously’ to be understood as a mere vulnerability to manipulation. Here is clear-eyed, cheerful ‘malice’, understood as the first principle of true honesty. Epicurean ‘malice’ is also deliberately coarse and philistine. Thus: ‘I spit on beauty’, Epicurus declares, ‘and upon those who, pointlessly, respect it when it offers no pleasure.’13 High-minded manipulativeness, of the Platonist type, celebrates the ‘beauty’ of certain sorts of self-sacrifice, for one’s country or one’s creed, in accordance with the Idea of Justice, thereby evoking a tremendous sense of duty, and associated guilt-feelings. The ‘beauty’ Epicurus spits on is surely, above all, the beauty that Platonist philosophy exalts. Plato identifies the political cause of Truth with the self-assertion of a particular educational elite. So he seeks to develop the study of metaphysics into a solidarity-building principle: bonding together the philosopher class, as such, and thereby equipping them to be the proper bearers of supreme authority in the state. The utopian ideal of direct philosopher-rule, somewhat playfully advanced in the Republic, is no doubt impracticable, since authentic philosophers will scarcely have either the time or the inclination to rule as well as study, and it is hard to see how the non-philosophical, and therefore politically unenlightened, masses could be brought to acquiesce in such an arrangement. But in the second-best ideal of the Laws, even though philosophers as such do not rule directly, the whole system is nevertheless still designed to maximize their influence. One of the prime purposes of the proposed constitution in the Laws is to restrict the rival influence of commercial, or clan, interests. And the dominant religious cult will be a worship of the star-gods: a practice quite alien to Greek tradition, imported from the Middle East, but precisely intended to enhance the prestige of the philosopher class, inasmuch as they are also expert in astronomy. In the background, here, is the doctrine of the ‘splendid fiction’ in the Republic, where Socrates is represented as openly advocating a strategic use of religion in order to promote public order, the philosopher class deliberately manipulating the non-philosophers by religious means – and doing so moreover, in all sincerity, with a perfectly clear conscience.14 Epicurus, for his part, completely rejects Platonist religion. Indeed, he rejects the whole Platonist advocacy of philosopher class-interest, because he rejects all forms of class-politics. Any commitment to the politics of classinterest immediately tends to entangle one in forms of strategic manipulation. And, given the actual dominance of class-interest in all existing forms of politics, he actually repudiates any active engagement in politics of any sort. The Garden was very much a place of retreat from the world. As Diogenes Laertius puts it, ‘The reason Epicurus kept out of public life was his exceptional concern for equality.’15 The only membership requirement for the community of the Garden was a basic literacy, and people of all social classes were equally

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welcome – including, very strikingly in that world, quite a good number of women as well as men. ‘I spit on beauty, and upon those who, pointlessly, respect it when it offers no pleasure.’ What everyone knows about Epicurus is, of course, that he was a hedonist. But he was a hedonist, basically, because his primary concern was with the undoing of manipulation, even in its philosophically most sophisticated forms. Thus the key feature of ‘pleasure’, in the context of Classical debate, is that it does not designate a qualification for anything. Classical anti-hedonist thinkers reject the idea that virtue aims essentially at pleasure, above all because they are preoccupied with virtue as a set of membership qualifications. Plato is concerned with what qualifies one to be a good member of the ideal cultural-revolutionary ruling elite. Aristotle focuses on the qualifications for good citizenship in a more general, conservative sense. And similarly for Christian theology, later on: what counts are the qualities of life associated with good, loyal church membership. But in any such notion of virtue Epicurus senses the danger of corporate manipulativeness. ‘For my part’, he says, ‘it is to continuous pleasures that I invite you and not to virtues that are empty and vain and offer only disturbing expectations of reward.’16 ‘Virtue’, if it is not to be a term for what is ‘empty and vain’, needs to be redefined. In Epicurean usage it is no longer an end in itself, but instead a designation for the necessary means to the highest forms of pleasure, which are the highest not because of any supposed association with the life-style of a particular privileged class, but solely in the sense of being the most continuous, immediate and tranquil. Moral manipulators appeal straight to the demands of ‘virtue’, about which they claim to know better than I. But no one, obviously, can know better than I do what gives me such pleasure. That is the underlying rationale of Epicurus’ hedonism. And, in the same spirit, when it comes to metaphysics it seems that, following through his hermeneutics of suspicion, he proceeds according to a twofold logic: first discarding, as illusion, whatever may be thought to derive from the inventiveness of would-be manipulators, and then affirming whatever other elements of traditional Greek piety still remain. He therefore completely rejects the notion of post-mortem rewards and punishments. Platonist propaganda, of course, makes great play with this notion as a device for persuading nonphilosophers to comply with the moral dictates of their betters, even though they cannot comprehend the true philosophic rationale for those dictates. Nothing could be more manipulative! Threats and promises in place of reasoning: here indeed we have the very essence of manipulation. But Epicurus has a gospel to proclaim, a gospel of release from all manipulation, and at the heart of that gospel is the cheerful assurance that death means extinction. He denounces the concept of Fate as a merely manipulative device to make the oppressed acquiesce in their oppression. In general, the whole idea of divine intervention in human affairs appears to him to be manipulative superstition – we should not let ourselves be overawed. To be sure, there are gods. (Do they

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Philosophical Preamble

not appear to us in dreams?) But they could not care less about us. Their divinity simply consists in their being sublime celestial models of ataraxy – the least manipulatable, and the least manipulative, beings imaginable.17 From the Nietzschean point of view, Epicurus is perhaps the prime example of a classic ‘free spirit’. True, Nietzsche himself does not entirely repudiate politics in the way Epicurus does. He is altogether more indulgent towards realpolitik, acknowledging the inevitability of at any rate some quite manipulative strategies on the part of government in the building up of the necessary broad consensus for social coherence. But, none the less, his critique of Christianity very largely builds on Epicurus’ critique of Platonism. Christianity, he argues, is essentially manipulative; no other form of religion is more lethally manipulative than manipulative Christianity. And Epicurus is in this sense, as he puts it, a great critic of ‘pre-existing Christianity’. Epicurus, on the other hand, had only ever known manipulative ideology in the most aristocratic of forms. He had never seen what happens when it is infused with the ressentiment of the oppressed, in the form of ‘slave morality’. Whereas now, Nietzsche remarks: Supposing one had it in one to look down upon the curiously painful, coarse and yet at the same time subtle comedy of European Christianity with the mocking indifference of an Epicurean god, I doubt if there would be any end to one’s laughter and amazement: for does it not appear that one will has dominated Europe these eighteen centuries, namely the will to make of humanity a sublime abortion?18

Nietzsche contra Epicurus: the Criterion of Creative Intensity Well, yes. An Epicurean god, in Nietzsche’s view, would respond to the prevailing ‘will’ made manifest in Christian and post-Christian history with ‘laughter and amazement’. But then, he immediately also goes on, one who, with an opposite ambition, no longer Epicurean but as it were wielding a divine hammer, came up against this almost deliberate corruption and stunting of humanity productive of the European Christian (I think of Pascal for instance), would he not be driven to cry out in rage, in pity, in horror: ‘O you fools, you presumptuous, pitying fools, what have you done? Was this a work for your hands? How you have bungled and botched my beautiful stone! What a thing for you to take upon yourselves!’

Here, juxtaposed with the light-hearted laughter of the Epicurean god, is a very different response. This is the anguish of the Dionysian spirit. And, in the end, Nietzsche is really a devotee not of the Epicurean gods, but of Dionysus. His basic understanding of the demands of radical honesty may, indeed, be quite precisely defined in these terms: his first move is to affirm the Epicurean

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critique of dishonesty-as-manipulation, so far as that goes; his second move, however, carries him decisively beyond Epicurus, into what he himself sees as essentially new territory. Thus, as he puts it: I have presented such terrible images to knowledge that any ‘Epicurean delight’ is out of the question. Only Dionysian joy is sufficient: I have been the first to discover the tragic.19

He claims to be the first to have grasped the true philosophical significance of ‘the tragic’, essentially in the sense that ‘the tragic’ is the dark side of ‘Dionysian joy’. And this is none other than the authentic quality of pathos poetically attendant upon the most radical honesty, in its struggle against, not only dishonesty-as-manipulation, but also what I have called ‘dishonesty-asbanality’. The basic weakness of Epicureanism, for Nietzsche, is that it represents a free-spiritedness which, after all, turns its face away from ‘the tragic’ and therefore from ‘Dionysian joy’. Whereas the dishonesty of manipulativeness, one might say, is a wilful misuse of emotional intelligence, the dishonesty of banality is just an absence of any will to develop such intelligence at all. The manipulator observes other people’s feelings closely in order to exploit them; the one who is banal is content with relationships of sheer emotional superficiality. And ‘Dionysian joy’ is, simply, Nietzsche’s name for the very utmost opposite to that superficiality. It is an absolute jubilant stripping away of all our defences against the moral shaking power of intense experience. But the trouble with Epicurus, from this point of view, is that he is exclusively concerned with the problematics of release from manipulation, and completely blind to the no less serious problematics of overcoming banality. No real thinker, as such, can ever actually defend banality; but it is all too easy to be distracted by other concerns. And Epicureanism is critical of banality only in so far as the banal individual is at the same time subject to manipulation. In fact, Epicureanism is as blind in this regard as mainstream popular conformist Christianity is.20 And necessarily so because of the missionary impulse which both movements share, and their consequent inclination always to try to appeal, as far as possible, to the lowest common denominator of human desire. What Nietzsche is objecting to here is thus the intrinsic dishonesty of any attempt at the mass-marketing of wisdom, as the path to some easily recognizable form of happiness. So he rejects hedonism in the Epicurean sense, inasmuch as Epicurus, in his role as a mass-marketer of ‘wisdom’, defines true pleasure merely as an end to suffering. The whole Epicurean marketing strategy is to promise inner liberation, here and now, from the things that make us suffer. And then – dishonestly, in Nietzsche’s terms – to present just that as the highest form of human fulfilment. But for Nietzsche the highest form of human fulfilment is, on the contrary, whatever

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involves the most thorough, all-inclusive self-questioning, so that, whereas therefore Epicureanism calls into question only our addictions, and the morality which plays upon them, the Nietzschean ideal also fundamentally calls into question the very instinct for self-preservation from suffering, to which Epicureanism for its part appeals. The Epicurean Garden was a spiritually therapeutic community; but it was by no means a community of open-minded debate. On the contrary, the therapy was framed by quite a simple set of dogmas laid down by the founder. And these were never seriously questioned within the community. Nietzsche’s ‘Dionysian joy’, however, transcends the Epicurean outlook in just this respect. For it is, not least, a sheer joy in questioning. By contrast to ‘Epicurean delight’, the attainment of which would put an end to the need for thinking, this ‘joy’ is for ever opening up new challenges, new vistas for thought. That is why it is necessary for the ultimate fullness of honesty, as Nietzsche understands it. It is the very utmost opposite to the banality of the human herd, in that it has nothing whatsoever to do with mere self-preservation from suffering; it is, on the contrary, a great overflow of superabundant life into infinite desire. Of course, the more ambitiously intense one’s desires, the greater one’s vulnerability to the suffering that comes from their probable frustration. But never mind. This is what it means, in Nietzschean terms, to embrace the ‘tragic’ nature of true wisdom. Banality is a wilful turning away from ‘the tragic’, in this sense, because it responds to misfortune, or the risk of misfortune, basically by deciding to care less about life in general. But what Nietzsche calls ‘Dionysian joy’ is the true magnanimity that is able to rise decisively above that all-too-human response. And so it expresses a fundamental readiness, always, to care more about life in general. Honesty requires that we care – the more intensely, the better. Hence death cannot be rightly presented as a simply consolatory, soothing prospect, as it is by Epicurus. For Epicurus, to meditate on death is just to ponder the futility of mortal cares, to practise a discipline of care-freeness. But Nietzsche wants the opposite. ‘Dionysian joy’ derives from a recognition that every moment of time is filled with eternal significance. It allows life to be ‘eternal’, in the sense that points to an infinite intensification of care – only without manipulation, and so without any notion of post-mortem rewards and punishments. To give maximum offence to banality, but minimum scope for manipulation: this, very simply, is what Nietzsche wills when he speaks of the ‘eternal return of the same’, that is, eternal life without rewards and punishments; and of the ‘overman’, as the ideal being who alone can truly affirm such a tragic prospect. This is the sense in which, as he sees it, only the ‘overman’ ultimately grasps the true moral reality of things. The ‘overman’ is Nietzsche’s symbol for infinite desire. Somewhere more or less half-way between Epicurus and Nietzsche there stands, for example, Spinoza. Equally sensitive to the problematics of manipulation, Spinoza is also a quite un-Epicurean advocate of infinite desire at any rate in the form of

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an infinite thirst for explanation. Hence his determinism: an absolute refusal to rest content with anything short of the very fullest explanation of moral phenomena. Yet Spinoza cannot see beyond self-preservation.21 And, besides, it is not only an infinite thirst for explanation which Nietzsche advocates. It is, at the same time, an infinite commitment to creative self-expression, both artistically and politically. This indeed is why he has such mixed feelings, after all, about Plato. For is not Plato also committed to the same? Surely this is just what Plato too is saying, when he speaks of the infinite erotic pull of the ‘Idea of the Good’! Granted, Plato completely fails to distinguish between truth-as-Honesty and truth-as-correctness, and to recognize the proper moral priority of the former. As a result, he lamentably overvalues prosaic thought, aiming at exact truthas-correctness over poetic thought, seeking to evoke the demands of truth-asHonesty. Nietzsche is, I think, quite rightly critical of this. And his claim to be ‘the first to discover the tragic’ is, it seems to me, to this extent also quite valid: he really is a pioneering philosophic poet, or poetic philosopher, exploring new strategies of struggle against banality, premissed on an absolute transcendence of metaphysics. Yet the fact that Plato himself never explicitly distinguishes truth-as-Honesty from truth-as-correctness does not mean that he, for his part, is only concerned with the latter. On the contrary: Platonism may, as Epicurus complained, be deplorably manipulative, but at the same time it cannot be denied that Plato is also a singularly radical critic of the banal. And certainly, as we shall see, Christian thinkers turning back to Plato have almost always been drawn, first and foremost, by the authority of that critique. The Third Criterion Nietzsche for his part attacks Christianity as being, essentially, a sacralization of ‘slave morality’, an expression of moralized ressentiment, that is, quite precisely, a militant combination of manipulativeness and banality – fundamentally dishonest, in that sense. Of course, Nietzsche is an outrageous caricaturist. And an apologist for Christianity may well begin by protesting against the many very sweeping exaggerations in his account of what he is attacking. But – yes, he would no doubt respond, ‘Perhaps I am a buffoon.’22 Only, who cares? The point is: to belong to a church must inevitably mean rubbing along with – and at least to that extent compromising with – all sorts of stuff that is both manipulative and banal. And – why compromise? His commitment to caricature and ‘buffoonery’ basically expresses his absolute repudiation of any compromise whatsoever with manipulatedness or banality. In short, the Nietzschean notion of intellectual honesty consists of a twofold commitment to the very utmost free-spiritedness and creative intensity, plus the negative principle that one should never ever engage in this kind of

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compromise. A second-level Christian apologetics in relation to Nietzsche would first and foremost have to tackle that negative principle. There need be no quarrel here about historical facts. The only real question, I think, is whether Nietzsche is right about the proper nature of intellectual honesty. In other words: the apologist needs to justify community-integrative compromise, not as a qualified retreat from the most demanding form of Honesty, but, on the contrary, as being somehow positively required by it. In my view, however, it surely is! Thus, why compromise? Against Nietzsche, finally, I would answer: it is necessary because intellectual Honesty – understood in the strong sense as a will to the most searching possible moral thoughtfulness – does not only stand opposed to manipulation and banality. To be sure, it is quite incompatible with any form of either. But, at the same time, it also stands equally opposed to what I have called dishonesty-as-disowning. Epicurus represents a vivid testimony to just one of the necessary three criteria for true Honesty. And Nietzsche represents a vivid testimony to just two. But, in the end, we need to go beyond Nietzsche, and try to do proper justice to all three. For, in the light of the third criterion, it seems to me that Nietzsche himself is dishonest. What I would see as his own ultimate dishonesty lies in his quite undisguised craving for a sort of historic innocence. The sheer virulence with which he repudiates his ancestral Lutheranism is just one example. An even clearer case (because uncomplicated by any issue of metaphysics) is his attitude to being German. ‘It is part of my ambition’, he remarks, ‘to be considered a despiser of Germans par excellence.’23 In pursuit of this he even, on somewhat flimsy grounds, pretends to be Polish. English- and French-speaking commentators have often rather liked this anti-German aspect of his thinking – not least because of the way it so obviously helps undermine his sister’s crass attempt, after his breakdown, to establish him as one of the prophets of what was later to become Nazism. But I am not so sure. Nietzsche, it appears, knows no difference between criticizing a religious or cultural tradition and disowning it altogether. I am inclined to call this ‘dishonesty’ essentially because of the way it helps to simplify ethical life. Submitting to manipulation simplifies ethical life; so does confining one’s thinking to the banality necessary in order that one’s ideas may be massmarketable. On the other hand, the sheer repudiation of traditional loyalties does the same – I am thinking in particular here of the way in which such loyalties can cut across divisions of social class or educational refinement, compelling one sympathetically to consider, and respond to, the experience and views of others from quite different backgrounds, as fellow communitymembers. Nietzsche opts out of all that – I would say, dishonestly – preferring the altogether easier business of monologue, in Zarathustran solitude. Radical Honesty, in the sense intended here, is something more than simple sincerity or frankness inasmuch as it involves an ideal openness to the critical perceptions of other people. But for Nietzsche, it seems, the only other people

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who really count in this regard are other solitary thoughtful geniuses. His honesty is an honesty only towards such people. Nietzsche does not want to be compromised, in any way, by keeping bad company, by being associated with the merely banal, or with the crassly manipulative and the manipulated. But his extravagant anti-Christian individualism thus expresses a craving for historic innocence which, unfortunately, only mirrors the corporate craving for historic innocence which disfigures so much Christianity, where the church relates to its past solely as a set of official reasons for boasting. Of course, what Honesty respects in other people is not their banality, or their manipulativeness and manipulatedness. Only, in its ideal form it surely also includes an infinite patience, for the sifting out of what properly demands respect from what does not. And, sadly, Nietzsche lacks any real appreciation for that sort of patience. He sees humanity as being made up of one vast dark mass of manipulative or manipulated herd-animals, plus a few bright free spirits, with very little intermediate shading. It is this elementary chiaroscuro which gives his work its tremendous poetic intensity. Yet it is also, I would argue, what decisively corrupts it.

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Chapter 2

The Intrinsic Three-in-Oneness of Radical Honesty, (b): Building on Hannah Arendt’s Analysis of Totalitarianism

Nietzsche argues that Christianity is by nature dishonest. As I have said, in the end I think that his own argument is dishonestly self-indulgent in its caricatural excess. Of course, the history of Christian tradition is a story of endless struggle between the more or less articulate impulse to true Honesty and various countervailing distortions – one might indeed say the same of any great religious tradition. And nor is that all. For it also seems to me that in the particular case of Christianity the primordial threefoldness of the struggle, at the deepest level, against dishonesty is quite directly related to the sublime theological threefoldness of the Holy Trinity. Thus, properly understood, the core problematic of First-Person theology is surely none other than the struggle against dishonesty-as-banality; the core problematic of Second-Person theology the struggle against dishonesty-asmanipulation; the core problematic of Third-Person theology the struggle against dishonesty-as-disowning. Or so, at any rate, I want to argue. Before actually moving on to that theological level of argument, however, first let us consider these three elementary modes of dishonesty as they are made manifest in secular history. Let us take, for example, that great moment of what I would call ‘negative revelation’: the whole twentieth-century nightmare of totalitarianism. I call this ‘negative revelation’: I mean that it has been a great revelation of the true nature of God, through the occlusion of God’s presence – a revelation of the true nature of Honesty, precisely, through the political triumph of the most aggressive dishonesty. My concern is with what it might mean, in the most systematic terms, to develop the most decisively post-ideological form of theology. Such theology may be defined as a fully explicit cultivation of the most radical corporate Honesty, as the primary determinant of a church community’s approach to mission, ethics, liturgy. In historical terms, therefore: a rigorous discipline of conversational openness, first and foremost, towards everything which the community in question finds most difficult to deal with about its own past – whatever, in that legacy, it continues to find most disturbingly 29

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thought-provoking. Or a systematic harnessing of the raw natural power of traumatic corporate memory to the cause of faith. But it will be widely agreed that, of all twentieth-century memories, the most persistently disturbing and thought-provoking are those of totalitarianism, that is, the specifically modern type of regime produced by hard-line Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Ba’athism – what all of these have in common. How has it been possible for such regimes to flourish? Clearly, the catastrophe has very much involved all three of the elementary forms of dishonesty I have identified, working in concert. Take, in the first place, all the most distinctive positive features of these regimes: the way that, here, the institutions of government have been reduced to a mere front for a selfprofessedly revolutionary movement, in total control of the mass media and dedicated to maximum propaganda effectiveness; the way the coercive power of the movement and its bureaucratic front-agencies is left virtually unchecked by any countervailing judicial mechanisms for the protection of individual rights; the way the cult of the leader is promoted, with a view to generating a wildly enthusiastic sense of social unity; the way absolute terror is deployed to silence dissent. What else is all this, if not simply the very utmost unleashing of dishonesty-as-manipulation? It is absolute gang rule, playing on the hopes and fears of a whole population, without any inhibition. Yet, in order for gang rule to be extended over a whole culture, the gang needs the active collaboration of the herd. And in this connection Hannah Arendt’s famous phrase immediately comes to mind: ‘the banality of evil’. Arendt’s report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961–62, Eichmann in Jerusalem, is subtitled ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’, because that is what she thought she saw pre-eminently represented by Eichmann: a man who had directly organized such fantastic horrors in the rounding up and transport of people to the death camps, but who was, in himself, just such a nobody; a clever enough man in some respects, yet nevertheless virtually devoid of emotional intelligence; a bureaucratic functionary, almost without remainder, who, it seemed, could only think in clichés; and who did what he did for the sole reason that it was, in his situation, the ambitiously conformist thing to do.1 Eichmann was a quite exceptionally banal individual. But totalitarian regimes in general are systematically designed to reward banality; just as they also facilitate manipulation. And then, third, they involve a wholesale disowning of the real past. They aim to have total control over the commemoration of the past; they cannot comfortably coexist with any authoritative tradition which they have not themselves swallowed up. So they promote the rage of the mob, not least against traditional religion. In the Soviet Union and its various offshoots this happened straight away; in the Third Reich the process was slower, because the victimizing of the Jews took time, which somewhat delayed the regime’s final reckoning with the churches. But there is every reason to take seriously Hitler’s ominous remarks about the future for the churches; and, had the course of the war gone differently, what happened to the synagogues on Kristallnacht

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would surely have been replicated wherever there was any serious enduring ecclesiastical dissent. The present currency of the actual term ‘totalitarianism’ largely derives from Hannah Arendt’s great study, first published in 1951, on The Origins of Totalitarianism.2 And moreover Arendt remains, I think, arguably the most important philosophical analyst of the whole phenomenon, not only in that book but also, albeit more obliquely, in her later work, The Human Condition, and in her little essay, ‘What Is Authority?’ In this chapter I therefore want to consider these latter two works in juxtaposition as, so to speak, another possible secular point of entry to my own theological argument. The Forgetting of Isonomy The Human Condition is a more immediately pre-theological work than The Origins of Totalitarianism, basically, due to the way in which Arendt is here intent on universalizing the lessons of the nightmare (just as trinitarian theology also universalizes the lessons of history, by looking through them towards the mystery of God’s eternal unchangingness). At first sight it may even seem that there is a complete break between the concerns of the two books. For, whereas in The Origins of Totalitarianism she is concerned with the general nineteenth- and early twentieth-century background to the eventual emergence of the Hitler and Stalin regimes, in The Human Condition her primary concern is with a general phenomenology of all non-contemplative human activity, in terms of the tripartite distinction between ‘labour’, ‘work’ and ‘action’, which she illustrates, above all, by extensive reference to the life and thought of ancient Athens. Nevertheless, in the later book – no less than in the earlier – she remains, in essence, preoccupied with the deep revelatoriness of the catastrophes which had befallen her own world. For arguably the most disturbing aspect of the whole totalitarian experience was the way in which quite ordinary, nonpsychopathic individuals were induced to collaborate in the psychopathic projects of the totalitarian regimes. And her analysis of ‘labour’, ‘work’ and ‘action’ is really an account of three basic types of mentality, two of which are more or less liable to this sort of corruption, whilst the third is not. The point is this. ‘Labour’ differs from ‘work’, in Arendt’s usage of these terms, by virtue of its being activity undertaken simply for the purposes of survival, or the immediate enhancement of life in the most elementary sense of physical well-being. But ‘work’, by contrast, is what shapes and furnishes the world as an arena for human history: activity, in other words, consciously undertaken in accordance with a design for the relatively long-term future. And, she contends, to these two modes of activity there correspond two basic human types: the animal laborans and homo faber. The animal laborans is one whose whole attitude to public life is determined by the experience of labour, who remains trapped within the essential banality

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of that experience, and whose political ideal is therefore just the provision for a maximum of luxurious consumption. Homo faber, on the other hand, is one who conceives of society essentially as a piece of work, and so places an altogether greater emphasis on the stable durability of the political order, and the scope it provides for spectacular political artistry on the part of rulers, even if this is completely manipulative. When the worst comes to the worst, both of these types are liable to be corrupted by the extravagant dishonesty of totalitarian propaganda. In fact here we have the two most elementary aspects of that propaganda’s appeal. Thus the animal laborans is seduced by the sheer energy of totalitarian movements, the tremendous sense of common purpose they are designed to generate, and all the promises bound up with that energy and purposiveness: of future plentiful abundance for the labouring masses, or for the whole ‘purified’ Volksgemeinschaft. The primary appeal of totalitarian propaganda will always be to the mass-mentality of the animal laborans. But then, again, homo faber is by no means immune. For, of course, totalitarian movements need not only have low-brow appeal; they may also have high-brow appeal. And, whereas their low-brow appeal is to the animal laborans, their high-brow appeal is to homo faber. One has only to consider the ways in which the Nazi Party also sought to play upon the instinctive hopes and fears of the intellectual Right, or the appeal of communism to its intellectuals, likewise seduced by the opportunity offered to play their part within the movement as co-designers of such an ambitiously new-designed world. In both cases we see homo faber profoundly impressed by the sheer spectacular monumentality of totalitarian enterprise, by its grand propaganda visions of the long-term future, by the scope it seems to offer for something like philosopher-rule. And the very deepest lesson of these nightmares, according to Arendt’s interpretation here, is that we should therefore learn to appreciate the proper political independence – from the demands of either ‘labour’ or ‘work’ – of what she calls true ‘action’. For by ‘action’ she means precisely that which all totalitarianism, by its very nature, has to suppress and exclude from politics, outside the narrow circle of the top leadership. It is her term for every sort of spontaneous public performance. Over against the animal laborans and homo faber there stands the devotee of the ethos of ‘action’. This is the ethos to which ancient Greece gave the name ‘isonomy’ (isonomia), ‘equality under the law’. Such a culture seeks to guarantee maximum equality of opportunity, for all citizens, to ‘act’ as freespirited participants in the public domain. This was the prevailing ideal of pre-philosophic Athens – which, in view of its radical difference from any modern democracy, is indeed surely far better called an attempt at isonomy than a ‘democracy’.3 Here we have the true citizen – one who is not only formally and externally, but also substantively and inwardly, a citizen. In stark contrast to the animal laborans or homo faber, this true citizen is intrinsically allergic to totalitarianism.

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And then Arendt tells a story. She became a philosopher as a student of Heidegger’s, and her story is one of cultural decline and fall parallel to, yet at the same time decisively transcending, the story that Heidegger tells.4 Like Heidegger’s, her story traces the original and pervasive error of the Western intellectual tradition all the way back to Plato. But, although she is very much a post-ideological thinker herself, Arendt does not primarily, or only, criticize Plato on the Heideggerian grounds that his idealism represents the original (still ‘lofty’) beginnings of the classical reduction of philosophy to metaphysical ideology. Far rather, she criticizes Plato – no less radically, but in quite unHeideggerian fashion – as an initiator of philosophy’s decisive turn away from the earlier polis-ethos: his altogether one-sided exaltation of contemplative ‘knowledge’, over against that free pluralistic interplay of ‘opinion’ in the polis which, she argues, was in fact the ideal proper environment for authentic citizen-action; his turn away from isonomy, and exaltation instead of homo faber, in the guise of the philosopher–ruler. Heidegger (following on from, and further developing, the thought of Nietzsche) may have developed a vision of philosophy decisively released from the Platonist denigration of poetic truth, but, for Arendt, he too (like Nietzsche) remains trapped within this other primal error, which Plato also represents. In short, what Arendt is looking for is the polar opposite to the absolute dishonesty of totalitarianism – and she finds at least a glimpse of this in the pre-philosophical citizen-ethos of ancient Athens. For here was a political order essentially designed to maximize the opportunities for direct participation in public affairs to every citizen, and a cultural ethos celebrating such participation as the chief source of real meaning in life. In ancient Athens there was no separate political class, within the citizenry, to manipulate the mass of their more passive fellow-citizens – no ruling class, in that sense. But the whole purpose of the system was precisely to prevent such manipulation: both by way of institutional arrangements meant to make it as difficult as possible, and thanks to a moral climate in which political passion was constantly fanned. The business of ruling was systematically disseminated throughout the citizenry, bonding them together as a band of equals, over against the rest of the population. They were all supposed to share political responsibility, because this was regarded as the prime source of true moral education. But Platonist philosophy repudiated that spirit. And for Arendt this is the moment of original sin in the history of Western intellectuality: the ambitious self-exaltation, beginning in Plato’s dialogues, of a new would-be moral elite, distinguished not by the activist virtues of the isonomous citizen, but, instead, by the virtues of a purely contemplative other-worldliness. The fall here basically consists in the way Plato treats the latter virtues as rivals to the former, rather than as complementary to them. Thus, in exalting the contemplative life, he feels impelled decisively to devalue the spirit of isonomy. Anti-isonomous philosophy then becomes entangled with Christian otherworldliness, which begins from the repudiation of a very different, not at all isonomous, political culture, but increasingly loses its original subversive

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significance, not least by being mixed with traditional philosophic prejudice. And there is no remedy for the resultant corruption, either, in the Enlightenment. For, as Arendt sees it, the new political theory of the Enlightenment simply represents another great ‘victory of homo faber’. Plato, abandoning the standpoint, with regard to politics, of the isonomous citizen–participant, had approached the question of political justice very much in the role of a craftsman–legislator instead, that is, in the spirit of homo faber at his morally most exalted. So he set out to construct ideal cities, in thought. Whereas Athenian isonomy was an attempt to create a substantial political realm, within the polis, in which there would no longer be any distinction between rulers and ruled, the philosophic craftsman is on the contrary immediately in the role of an ideal ruler, legislating with a view to the transmission of his own wisdom through an ideal system of quite steeply hierarchic rule. From this point of view, ‘justice’ is therefore essentially definable as rule by the right people, the small elite of the ‘best’, where their rule is rendered as stable and as secure as possible. And hence the purely utopian ideal of direct philosopher-rule in the Republic, which in the secondbest system of the Laws becomes gentleman-rule, under the watchful guidance, at least, of philosopher–guardians. But even in the Laws Platonist philosophic politics still retains the form of a contemplative fantasy, whereas the great difference with the political philosophy of the Enlightenment is just that it is directly bound up with realistic hopes of cultural revolution, overthrowing the old power of the church. And, therefore, in the thinking of the Enlightenment, the older philosophic subordination of the vita activa to the vita contemplativa is, to all intents and purposes, reversed. The political outlook of homo faber, which in Platonism has been restrained by contemplative inhibition, now emerges in a new form, no longer inhibited at all. For Arendt, it is above all the genius of Thomas Hobbes to have captured this moment, with his philosophical analysis of the ideal state as ‘an automaton [an engine] that moves [itself] by springs and wheels as doth a watch’.5 For here we have political theory directly laying claim to something like the revolutionary new prestige that, in the midseventeenth century, had begun to accrue to natural science. Indeed, in Hobbes’s thinking we see the first emergence of a whole new mode of ethical reflection: one in which political systems are assessed not so much in terms of any extrinsic goals those systems may be supposed to serve, but, rather, in terms of their intrinsic system-virtues of procedural fairness as guaranteed by structural coherence, in other words, a stictly utilitarian approach to politics. Certainly, this is no direct move towards totalitarianism. On the contrary, it is Hobbes’s chief concern to exclude any subordination of the state to the extrinsic goals of (what one might well call) proto-totalitarian pseudo-religion. Yet, in thereby reducing political theory to a mere engineering doctrine – about the relationship of rulers and ruled, as such – Hobbes also completely excludes the serious consideration of true citizen-action as anything other than a simple matter of rulership. Preoccupied with the need to preserve

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the smooth operations of the system, he in effect appears to delegitimate any sort of ongoing political creativity from below, even the religiously most liberal. And herein, for Arendt, lies the basic weakness of his approach. Nor is it only Hobbes. In the Arendtian grand narrative, he is simply the prime representative of the Enlightenment generally, considered in its basic character as a ‘victory’ for homo faber. Considered as negative revelation, the nightmare of twentieth-century totalitarianism reveals to us the supreme desirability of that which it seeks fully to extinguish: the spirit of isonomy. And so it highlights the original fall of the Western philosophic tradition, in the work of Plato, away from that spirit into the outlook of homo faber, and the accentuated repetition of that fall, in the Enlightenment. But, in the story Arendt wants to tell, the ‘victory of homo faber’ is also followed by another ‘victory’: that of the animal laborans, which is an event not so much in the history of philosophy, but rather in the history of modern culture as a whole. A key symbolic moment for her, here, is for example when Jeremy Bentham moves on from the principle of ‘utility’ as the foundation for political ethics to the principle of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’.6 She does not regard Bentham as deserving the title of ‘philosopher’. But in this simple turn of phrase he does, she thinks, provide a perfect formula for that second (disastrous) ‘victory’. This is, basically, the moral self-assertion of late modern bureaucracy, along with all its various attendant academic disciplines, of economics, sociology, behavioural psychology. The ‘victory of the animal laborans’ means that the highest good is anti-philosophically defined as ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’: no longer in any way challenging how ‘the greatest possible number’, themselves, immediately conceive of ‘happiness’, but, instead, simply discussing ways and means of satisfying their desires, as given, in free-market terms. As Platonism half-prefigures the ‘victory of homo faber’ in the Enlightenment, so the ‘victory of the animal laborans’ is half-prefigured by the unphilosophical egalitarianism of early Christianity. For in both cases one sees a basic rejection of the natural elitism of philosophic homo faber. The one elementary difference is that what now develops is a form of egalitarianism entirely severed from any real faith in eternal life.7 And this produces a whole new set of extrinsic purposes for the state system to serve, namely: those specified by straightforward economics. Adam Smith figures largely here as a pivotal figure. Again, of course, at one level the liberal economic tradition stemming from Smith represents an absolute antithesis to totalitarianism. Nevertheless, Arendt argues, at another level the new political hegemony of economics, which he helps pioneer, tends to knock down all sorts of older and more fundamental cultural defences against the later emerging danger. Smith’s contempt for the ‘unproductive’ sphere of non-economically driven politics passes over into Karl Marx’s dream of ‘the withering away of the state’. And, she remarks, the mass-democratic character of even the most liberal mass democracy really does tend to make

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the state – in the specific sense of the polis – wither away.8 For the polis was understood by the ancient Greeks precisely as the sphere of truly public-spirited participation in public affairs, in which public-spiritedness rested on a fundamental devaluation of private, economic concerns, and where such concerns were therefore relegated to an altogether different sphere – that of the household. But liberal democracy tends to render politics a mere adjunct to bureaucracy, all in the service of economic goals. More and more, it tends to become the politics of mere consumerism. This, Arendt argues, is a form of politics largely devoid of the sort of publicspiritedness required for a truly effective resistance to totalitarian movements. Indeed: The last stage of the labouring society, the society of jobholders, demands of its members a sheer automatic functioning, as though individual life had actually been submerged in the over-all life process of the species and the only active decision still required of the individual were to let go, so to speak, to abandon his individuality, the still individually sensed pain and trouble of living, and acquiesce in a dazed, ‘tranquillized’, functional type of behaviour. The trouble with modern theories of behaviourism is not that they are wrong but that they could become true, that they actually are the best possible conceptualization of certain trends in modern society. It is quite conceivable that the modern age – which began with such an unprecedented and promising outburst of human activity – may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.9

In this world, it is true, every last vestige of the polis has, in Marx’s phrase, ‘withered away’. Having in The Origins of Totalitarianism focused primarily on Nazism, Arendt in fact first began the research process which issued in The Human Condition intending to write a complementary dissertation on Marxism. Her actual argument in the completed book is much broader in scope. But she is still, at least in part, responding to the initial puzzle out of which it evolved: how a tradition so altogether different from Nazism as Marxism was, in its genuinely noble antecedents, could have so spectacularly degenerated into a parallel horror. The basic reason, as she sees it, is simply that Marx’s analysis so completely overlooks the moral limitations of the animal laborans. This phrase is, in fact, Marx’s own coinage. But, from Arendt’s point of view, he fails to distinguish the animal laborans either from homo faber or from the authentic free agent of isonomy. And his diagnosis of the corruption of nineteenth-century capitalism solely in terms of unjust property relations entirely misses the altogether deeper processes of corruption involved in what she for her part calls the ‘victory of the animal laborans’ in that world, so that he just does not see how deep the real problem goes. She constructs her grand narrative here, basically, by way of critical response to the Marxist one. Whereas the Marxist grand narrative is a story of social

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classes, Arendt responds with her own alternative story, about these three elementary moral types: • • •

first, the animal laborans, who remains mired in banality; then, homo faber, whose great vice, when it comes to politics, is his (or sometimes her) persistent tendency to manipulativeness; and finally, the true citizen, who rises above both.

The Vanishing of Auctoritas Thus, in The Human Condition Arendt deals with the large-scale prehistory of the possibility of totalitarianism, basically with regard to two of the three primary forms of dishonesty I have identified: dishonesty-as-banality and dishonesty-as-manipulation. But as regards the role of the third form, dishonesty-as-disowning, she effectively deals with this in her essay, ‘What Is Authority?’ The first version of ‘What Is Authority?’ was originally published the same year as The Human Condition, in 1958.10 It is a much slighter work, and yet it belongs to a whole other larger strand of her work generally. If the primary thesis of The Human Condition represents what one might term the ‘Greek’ strand in her thinking, then ‘What Is Authority?’ represents the ‘Roman’ strand, which one might also perhaps describe as a sort of ‘secularized Augustinianism’. This second strand is, as it happens, what came first to her: it originates in her 1929 dissertation Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (recently rendered into English as Love and Saint Augustine).11 It resurfaces, for instance, in her various references to Augustine in The Human Condition and in the Willing volume of The Life of the Mind. And both strands are moreover intertwined in her book On Revolution. Arendt is interested in Augustine not only as ‘the first Christian philosopher’, but also as ‘the only philosopher the Romans ever had’.12 Her dissertation on him belongs to much the same historical moment as Anders Nygren’s classic Agape and Eros, which it pre-dates by just a year. Like Nygren, she too sets out to differentiate between two conceptions of love – the distinctively Christian conception and the ideal conception recognized by Greek philosophy – both of which she finds awkwardly mixed together in Augustine’s thought. Thus, on the one hand, Augustine speaks of Christian love for God in the same way that Greek philosophy, generally, justifies its own love for divine wisdom: as a craving, the most enlightened of all cravings, because directed towards the deepest of all potential satisfactions. But on the other hand, she argues, what is different about the love for God actually at the heart of the gospel is just that it is a love not grounded in any craving, but instead in a set of memories, evoking gratitude. And what is truly interesting, to her, in Augustine’s thought is his development of this latter theme.

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The church is an attempt to build neighbour-love on the basis of shared memory, in a community continually referring for inspiration to its own historic origins. Yet so was pagan Rome, with its powerful sense of the political vocation that had been conferred on it at its founding. This is something that biblical and Roman tradition have in common. Both were traditions of authority, in the sense of giving an especially high status to the official guardians of corporate memory, that is, the trustees of the community’s original historic calling, whose basic task was to try to ensure the proper consistency of all that was done, with that. In pagan Rome this was pre-eminently the role of the senate. And the church then, in effect, transferred the old role of the Roman senator to its bishops. Nowadays, however, Arendt complains, secular political theory has more or less forgotten what ‘authority’ in its original Roman sense – as auctoritas – meant. Strictly speaking, she remarks, in so far as she is writing about mainstream politics her essay should not be entitled ‘What Is Authority?’, but ‘What Was Authority?’ For what was once an all-pervasive cultural atmosphere now survives only in pockets of conservative religious counter-culture, and, outside those pockets, liberal prejudice conceals what has thereby been politically lost. As a result of this, political theory has come to use the actual term ‘authority’ very loosely for anything whatever that demands obedience, no matter how coercive. But auctoritas, in the original sense, signified a moral quality quite distinct from any sort of either persuasive or coercive power. Indeed it represented a form of social bonding that was really the exact opposite of coercion. Violence was required only where auctoritas had failed: the better established the auctoritas, the less violence. This is the other aspect of Roman civilization, which is decisively set over against the aspect symbolized by crucifixion. And Augustine is the great philosopher of the Romans essentially by virtue of the way that – in his contrasting of the two ‘cities’ of earth and heaven – he for the first time (in effect) begins to conceptualize the radical opposition between these two primal aspects of the Roman heritage: that which Christianity rejects and that which it transfigures. Again: what are the moral lessons of the totalitarian nightmare? In her essay on ‘authority’ Arendt counterposes two elementary diagnoses, both equally one-sided, yet at the same time, she suggests, both also equally valid: the ‘liberal’ and the ‘conservative’.13 From the liberal perspective the lesson is that we should learn, altogether more deeply, to love the freedoms that totalitarianism does away with. But the conservative focuses instead on the way in which totalitarian propaganda plays upon a pervasive sense of social disintegration, resulting from the decay of traditional religious auctoritas. The basic trouble with conventional liberalism, she argues, is that it tends to miss the absolute difference in kind between authoritarian rule, even at its most harshly repressive, and totalitarianism. It muddles together authoritarianism, tyranny and totalitarianism, almost as if these were just three contrasting intensities of the same. Whereas, if we are to use the terms with

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any precision, they surely refer to three quite different structures. For authoritarian culture is pyramidal in shape, but classical tyranny, as a pure type, is like a pyramid with all the middle layers removed. And totalitarianism, in complete contrast, is onion-shaped. It is a strategy of systematic concealment – concealing the actual fanaticism and savagery of the innermost leadership from the population at large by mediating it through a whole series of concentric layers. This is a series of ‘front’ organizations, each of which is two-faced, as its participants present themselves to their party leaders as ideological devotees, while, at the same time, in relation to the outside world they are keen to appear altogether more moderate. Thus the insiders have their world-view constantly confirmed by the apparent affirmation of those immediately around them, and the wider public is at least to some extent reassured.14 Quite unlike totalitarianism, moreover, authoritarianism in the strict sense is a cultural phenomenon which may either be repressive or not. In principle, it may even be the very opposite of repressive: that is, if those endowed with auctoritas see themselves as the representatives of a tradition essentially dedicated to a generous defence of human rights. There is certainly nothing in the actual concept of auctoritas that renders it by nature incompatible with isonomy. As a matter of contingent history, the Roman notion of auctoritas was quite un-isonomous. And the pre-philosophic culture of ancient Athens, with its pioneering appreciation of isonomy, was completely lacking in any real structures of auctoritas. Thus it was a culture held together by the sheer ethnic and economic homogeneity of its participants, the citizenry of a single city-state, and not by any coherently unified organization, dedicated first and foremost to the preservation and extension of authoritative tradition, in the Roman manner. There was no equivalent in ancient Athens to the Roman reverence for the continuity of their civic tradition, stretching right back to the founding of the city, and no equivalent, either, to the Roman senate, as the body officially charged with preserving that tradition. Hence there was no effective religious and institutional framework for the extension of Athenian isonomy as a cosmopolitan project. Platonist philosophy was a cosmopolitan project, with an authoritative tradition, grounded in the commemoration of Socrates. In the particular context of ancient Athens, therefore, the only real tradition of auctoritas was an anti-isonomous one. But there is no necessary reason why that should always be the case. And there is surely every reason to look for an eventual reconciliation of the two principles. For just as the ideal of isonomy stands in perfect polar opposition to the political interaction of dishonesty-as-banality and dishonesty-asmanipulation, so the ideal principle of auctoritas ideally stands opposed to dishonesty-as-disowning. The corporate memories we ought, for true Honesty’s sake, most urgently to own, but which, because they are so embarrassing, we are most reluctant to confront – do we not need to have them brought home to us with all the auctoritas our culture can muster? Surely we do!

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Critique What, then, would it mean to embody the moral demands of strict isonomy in a truly effective culture of auctoritas? That, I think, is the ultimate question which the element of negative revelation inherent in the twentieth-century nightmare-experiences of totalitarianism invites us to explore. It is, indeed, quite inescapably a theological question, or, at any rate, a question requiring extensive conversation with theological tradition. Arendt herself, however – although her thought leads us to the threshold of such conversation – is evidently reluctant to cross that threshold. She criticizes conventional conservatism, much of it of course informed by old-fashioned Christian theology, for its anti-isonomous tendency to promote a culture of authority solely in terms of maintaining law and order. In so far as this is the dominant goal, the invocation of authority immediately appears as just one means to that end, alongside the judicious use of violence; and so, she argues, authoritarian rhetoric in this context all too often tends to degenerate, in practice, into a mere ideological cover for violence.15 But if one asks what a revived culture of auctoritas might actually look like, which escaped that elementary error, unfortunately she provides no real answer. The two strands of her thought are never quite joined together, as only an altogether closer engagement with theological tradition, I think, could join them.16 Partly, this weakness in her thinking may perhaps be attributed to the historical context in which she was writing. For the issue has, it seems to me, been very greatly sharpened in the intervening period by the rather spectacular development of a largely new arena for isonomous action: in what I want to call the ‘public conscience movements’ of our world. Thus ‘isonomy’ is definable as a political order in which the element of sheer rule is minimized – as the decision-making of rulers is constrained by vigorous public opinion. And ‘isonomous action’ is participation in the politics of public opinionforming – or public conscience-shaping – precisely as opposed to the politics of rule. But the later twentieth century saw a tremendous international proliferation of movements essentially dedicated to just this sort of purpose, not aiming, in the first instance, at any direct share in governmental power, and quite independent therefore of any political party; not part of political society in that sense, but belonging to civil society; entirely intent on consciousness-raising and moral lobbying. Arendt, it is true, in her account of ancient Athenian isonomy, stresses the sharp contrast between the agenda of modern mass-democratic debate and the agenda of public debate in the polis context: on the one hand, the ‘social’ debate of modern democracy, in which economic concerns are paramount; on the other hand, the strictly ‘political’ as opposed to ‘social’ debates of the polis, which effectively excluded economic concerns, relegating them to the other world of private household life, that is, the dark domain of women and slaves. The agenda of the new public conscience movements of today, considered as a collectivity – dealing, as they do, not least with issues of

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gender equality, sexuality and economic justice – is certainly far broader than that of classical Athenian isonomy. Yet isonomy as such is not, primarily, a species of agenda. Rather, it is a quality of organization. And it seems to me that what these movements are now in the process of creating is nothing less than a whole new international space for isonomous action. Everything that was most valuable in the isonomous culture of ancient Athens, in other words, is actually being restored here, without any dependence on slavery, and on a global scale. When Arendt was writing The Human Condition, back in the 1950s, this development had scarcely begun. But now, whatever doubts one may have about its wider efficacy, it is at any rate quite clearly transforming the lifeworld of theology. More and more, all the most urgently thought-provoking challenges to Christian theologians are coming from the secularity of the new public-conscience movements. The current upsurge of isonomous politics brings with it a largely unprecedented questioning of the more repressive elements in church tradition: its patriarchy; its homophobia; its accommodations with racism; its collusion with established power of every sort. Thank God! And, as a result, the general question about the reconciliation of isonomy with auctoritas becomes quite specific. In the first place: to what extent can the church, as a community based upon a heritage of auctoritas, in actual practice learn to receive the disturbing kernel of truth in these challenges? But second, also: what exactly can the church contribute to the secular public-conscience movements, in return? How readily can its far greater folk-rootedness, its corporate prayer life, and all the various riches of its poetic and theological tradition be brought to bear in effective support of their isonomous enterprise? Arendt’s thinking helps set the scene for such questions, against the looming twentieth-century backdrop of negative revelation. But in the end she nevertheless shrinks back from theology. She confines herself to pondering the heritage of Greek and Roman antiquity, never seriously enquiring how the very different heritage of Hebrew prophecy relates to that, as an equi-primordial source of Western culture. So one looks in vain, for instance, in ‘What Is Authority?’ for any discussion of the particular authority-dynamics of prophecy. And neither is there any discussion, in The Human Condition, of prayer – as a general phenomenon, located one might say right on the very boundary between the two ‘lives’, contemplative and active. These really are rather striking omissions! But now let us step across the threshold to which Arendt brings us, and go on to consider how one might, after all, perhaps try further to develop the argument she opens up, in systematic theological terms.

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PART II TRINITARIAN THEOLOGY

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Chapter 3

Origins of the Dogma

We now come to the main thesis of this book. I have argued that Honesty is essentially threefold, in that it is for ever engaged in struggle against three basic forms of closure to truly thoughtful conversation: •

‘dishonesty-as-banality’, arising from a simple desire to fit in, not to be troubled by questions;

•

‘dishonesty-as-manipulation’, arising from the desire to dominate, or at least to collude with the powerful; and

•

‘dishonesty-as-disowning’, arising from the desire to feel innocent, in relation to history.

And I have also suggested that, in theological terms, this phenomenological threefoldness is implicitly a reflection, or a pre-theological intimation, of the trinitarian dynamics at work in Christian revelation. But what is the evidence for that second claim? The New Testament and Beyond I want to argue that the dogma of the Trinity is like a volcano. Its revelatory truth consists in the molten liquid of its eruptions, which are, in every case, great upsurges of response to the demands of the most radical truth-as-Honesty. Then, however, time after time, the lava has cooled and solidified into a mere metaphysical ideology, essentially expressive only of the church’s claim to possess ultimate truth-as-correctness. The first eruption of trinitarian truth was pre-ideological, in the sense that it was still inchoate. All those that have followed have been, in various ways, post-ideological. As an ideologically metaphysical doctrine, traditional trinitarianism – in all its carefully calibrated precision of propositional formulation – has of course long functioned as one of the main touchstones of orthodoxy. It has been seen as the paradoxical mystery of mysteries, a bit of a headache to the ordinary preacher on Trinity Sunday, perhaps, but, just by virtue of its paradoxicality, a key test of ‘faith’, in the simple sense of good will towards ecclesiastical authority. Fundamentally, it has signified a decisive polemical claim, 45

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privileging the Christian story over all others. For in speaking of the three-inoneness of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one is summarizing, in the briefest possible span, the whole dialectic of gospel revelation, basically, here, in order to assert its unique correctness. There is nothing in this metaphysical doctrine, as such, to challenge the church. But it is, on the contrary, essentially a basis for ecclesiastical self-assertion, inasmuch as the church is the institution entrusted with this uniquely correct insight into the very innermost eternal nature of God. From the later patristic period down to the Enlightenment, that was the dominant significance of the doctrine, as indeed, in more conservative circles, it still remains. But let us be clear: this is not how trinitarian thinking actually began. On the contrary, it began very much as a threefold challenge to the church. No doubt the early church always did claim to be in possession of unique metaphysical correctness. Only, that claim was not what first produced the doctrine of the Trinity. It was what took control of the dogma once the original lava had cooled. But the original eruption itself had quite a different underlying rationale. There are two levels to this: trinitarian thinking originates partly out of the intrinsic logic of the gospel story, and partly out of the early church’s troubled interaction with its environment. As regards the first level – Jesus prayed to God as his Father, yet God, we are told, was at the same time incarnate within Jesus, and Jesus also promised a new, future coming of God as Holy Spirit, which was dramatically inaugurated at the first Christian Pentecost. What one might call the immediate ‘picture-thinking’ function of the dogma is simply to hold these three core elements of the gospel story together. The early church, though, was not reflecting on that story in a historic void. And right from the outset, it is clear, the emergent trinitarian dogma was shaped not only by the gospel narrative considered simply in itself, but also by the life-world in which it was being interpreted. Thus, if we consider the actual existential issues with which, in the earliest formative period of trinitarian thought, theologians were wrestling, one might I think very well identify the following three basic problem-complexes: 1 The New Testament literature was produced in the context of the evolution of Jewish Christianity into Hellenistic Christianity; the latter had still not quite emerged as a fully distinct entity. But, in the ensuing period, what sort of people were the theologians of Hellenistic Christianity? They were people who had been educated in Greek philosophy, chiefly of the Platonist variety. Christian theology rises like the Himalayas from the collision of two tectonic plates, two great originary continents of religious tradition. The thought especially of men like Aristeides, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen marks the point of impact. Still deep-rootedly held fast within the philosophic culture in which they had been trained, still sharing many of its instincts, these early Christian theologians were, in effect, preoccupied with the problem of how to

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reconcile that Greek heritage with the very different thought-world of the Hebrew Bible. And this is, clearly, first and foremost an issue relating to the First Person of the Trinity – inasmuch as the First Person is God made manifest, in the most universal terms, already at least to some extent prior to the Incarnation. For these early thinkers, it was crucial that the primordial revelation of the First Person was traceable both in Hebrew scripture and in Greek philosophy. 2 But of course the early church not only experienced the pagan world as a repository of mild philosophic wisdom, potentially complementary to that of the Bible. It was also an often violently threatening environment – and this too required thought. What to say to the church’s enemies? What to say to the faint-hearted within the church, to nerve them for the struggle? How, in the context of evangelism, to articulate just what it is that renders the church, properly, so alien to the world? An appropriate rhetoric was needed. And these were questions naturally involving a particular concentration on the symbolism of the cross; the resurrection of the crucified dissident; the Incarnation as a revolutionary act of God. That is to say: they belonged, in the first instance, to the domain of the Second Person. 3 Nor was it only the church’s relationship to its wider environment that had to be thought through. There further remained the whole issue of how the church was to relate, in tradition-building terms, to itself: to its own roots with a view to its future. The first Christians found themselves charged with the task of devising a brand new organizational structure for their community, and a brand new liturgy. In the midst of a great welter of charismatic improvisation a new order was coming to birth. Just as Moses and the prophets had been inspired in founding and developing the institutions of the old covenant, so now the ‘holy, catholic and apostolic church’ needed equivalent inspiration, to do the same in response to the new covenant. Seeking to do this, it invoked the aid of the Third Person who, as is said in John 16:13, was progressively to ‘guide’ it down the coming years – deeper and deeper – ‘into all truth’, continually re-engaging with, and re-interpreting, the authoritative past. Each of these three problem-complexes generated its own debate, each of which then became a medium through which demands of pure truth-as-Honesty might be transmitted. Each, in other words, became a potential medium of ongoing divine revelation. Three elementary media of revelation: the three faces of God. Three media. My proposal is that we should speak here of ‘First-Person theology’, ‘Second-Person theology’, ‘Third-Person theology’. This is not a traditional way of speaking. But I think it is necessary, in order to get decisively beyond the level of mere metaphysical ideology. Each of these three forms of theology in principle encompasses all the topics of theology;

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only they do so with different priorities. Each, therefore, is a way of looking at the interrelationship of all three Persons, but with a particular emphasis in each case on one in particular, as revealed to us through a particular, still evolving aspect of our corporate history. Note, therefore: not everything ever said about God the Father belongs in the category of ‘First-Person theology’; not everything ever said about God the Son belongs in the category of ‘Second-Person theology’; not everything ever said about God the Holy Spirit belongs in the category of ‘Third-Person theology’. But the point is that ‘First-Person theology’ is theology whose primary problematics relates above all to the revelation of the God the Father, according to the logic suggested above. And so forth. This is a distinction that needs to be kept very clearly in mind.1 Nor, of course, are the boundaries between the three always obvious. But, rather, all of Christian thought may be said to consist of various admixtures of these primary ingredients, each of them suggesting its own distinct set of elementary criteria for gospel truth, as I hope to show. Indeed, if one looks only at the New Testament itself, there is very little intimation of First-Person theology, in this sense, there at all: none of the New Testament writers shows any particular interest in the challenge of philosophy.2 But the New Testament literature, one might say, is fundamentally driven by Second- and Third-Person concerns alone. Nor therefore, let us candidly admit it, is there any intrinsic necessity within the New Testament itself for anything like a full-blown trinitarianism. That necessity only quite gradually emerged over the following centuries. And neither did the doctrine simply develop out of a theological desire to try to harmonize the gospel stories, in the sense of maintaining their compatibility with a consistent metaphysics. There were indeed some early theologians whose sole concern was to establish this sort of harmony. These were the so-called ‘Modalist Monarchians’, or the ‘Sabellians’ – named after Sabellius, an otherwise entirely obscure figure who however is remembered as the leading representative of such theology in early third-century Rome. Thus Monarchianism was a sort of common-sense theology, in a world where theological common sense was essentially determined by the element of apparent congruence between Hebrew monotheism and Platonist monism. And the Monarchians dealt with the threefoldness of the three ‘modes’ of God’s appearance in the gospel story by the quite straightforward expedient of insisting that, properly understood, this is a feature only of first-order gospel story-telling. But when it comes to second-order metaphysical reflection on the story, all the emphasis needs to go on the countervailing truth of God’s essential underlying oneness, instead. This Monarchian procedure is certainly much the most economical way of reconciling the story with monotheistic common sense. It does it at a stroke. And if that really were the only thing at stake, then there would indeed have been nothing more to say. But to understand the early development of trinitarian revelation is, I think, precisely to grasp why the (one might have thought)

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rather obviously sensible approach of the Monarchians was, nevertheless, rejected, for the following two very different sorts of reason. First, explicit Monarchianism originally emerged as a critical response to the First-Person theology of thinkers such as Justin Martyr. Justin, in the midsecond century, had taken up the distinction originally established by the preChristian Jewish philosopher Philo (a contemporary of Jesus) between God and the divine ‘Logos’. This term, ‘Logos’, was current in pagan philosophy, but in Philo’s usage it basically became a name for God revealed, by way of the Hebrew scriptures, to human picture-thinking. As a philosopher, Philo did not think that any form of picture-thinking could ever fully grasp the truth of God. Yet it could reveal the Logos. That is: not God as such, but a direct mediation of God.3 And this was also Justin’s doctrine. It is not clear whether or not Justin was familiar with the doctrine of the Logos in the prologue to the fourth Gospel. However, his teaching is in any case quite different from that of the fourth Gospel. Like Philo – but quite unlike the writer of the fourth Gospel – he is essentially concerned with the problem of reconciling biblical faith with Platonist philosophy. The problem here lies in the immediate tension between the sort of picture-thinking which pervades biblical revelation and the essential Platonist concern to point beyond picture-thinking in general. So, to Justin, the incarnation of the divine Logos in Jesus represents the very highest truth available to picture-thinking in general.4 And yet (like Philo) he is still a Platonist: God as such, he thinks, still remains entirely beyond all pictures. In the end, as he puts it, the Logos is ‘another God’. ‘Another God’: that was the phrase to which the Monarchians most of all objected. On the one hand, there was the God of the philosophers; on the other hand, ‘another God’ – that is, a God for the common people. One may well suppose that there may have been some resentment within the church against the pretensions of the philosophically educated elite whom Justin represented; very likely, a good deal of such resentment underlay the Monarchian reaction. But as long as that elite still wanted to uphold the need for serious philosophic thought, this was always going to pose a basic challenge to Monarchian common sense. And then, second, there was the sort of challenge represented by Tertullian. This came from just the opposite direction. For, unlike Justin, Tertullian was no First-Person theologian in the sense I am using that term. Of course, he had plenty to say about God as ‘Father’, but he was not especially troubled by the sort of problematics, in this regard, that prompted Justin’s theology. On the contrary, he was a brilliant Christian sophist, who, confronting Platonist philosophy as an influence on his Gnostic opponents, just denounced it. But the problematics with which Tertullian was wrestling belong essentially to the spheres of Second-Person and Third-Person theology. As a SecondPerson theologian he wrote with ferocious brilliance against the corruption and persecutoriness of the pagan world in general. (He is rightly notorious for his lyrical account of heaven as a place in which, as he saw it, one of the great

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rewards of the redeemed would be to watch the torments of the pagan damned in the fires of hell!5) And he was a radical Third-Person theologian, in his later years energetically upholding the disruptive claims of the Montanist movement, from Phrygia, that the Holy Spirit was once again at work – just as in the time of the great Hebrew prophets of antiquity – inspiring their prophets, Montanus himself and the two women, Prisca and Aquila. Yet, even though he was thus such an altogether different sort of theologian from Justin, Tertullian is nevertheless, in his own way, no less critical of Monarchianism. His particular target is the Monarchianism of Praxeas, a man who had come to Rome from Asia Minor, and who also offended Tertullian by his active opposition to Montanism.6 According to Tertullian, it was above all due to the intervention of Praxeas that the Pope had been dissuaded from officially endorsing the Montanist prophecies. But it was not only Praxeas’s anti-Montanism that Tertullian attacked; it was his whole theology. For it is clear that Tertullian was deeply mistrustful of any sort of common-sense approach. Monarchianism represented a sort of lowest-denominator theological common sense. But Tertullian’s rhetoric brings to mind Kierkegaard’s insistence that the real truth of the gospel consists, absolutely, in its quality of offence. The Monarchians wanted to step back, in their second-order metaphysical reflection on the gospel, away from the poetic immediacy of the actual story, where God appears in dramatic threefold form to overthrow the corrupted ways of the world. They wanted to step quickly back – away from that – towards the more tranquil domain of metaphysical common sense, where, in accordance with a broad trans-confessional consensus, God is recognized as being ultimately singular. And it is that step back which Tertullian mistrusts. He mistrusts it, surely, because he suspects that it is also a retreat from the true offence of the gospel. Of course, he is not questioning the ultimate singularity of God, but it is a question of not allowing one level of truth to detract from another. Against Praxeas, he wants to insist on the sheer dramatic energy of the story, as a story. And if in the story the immediate appearance of God is threefold, very well then: for Tertullian, everything depends upon our doing proper justice to the original narrative logic of that threefoldness, through which the proper offence of the gospel is dramatically enacted. ‘Religion’ Again, good theology in general, I have argued, differs from sacred ideology in that it looks beyond the supposed correctness of ‘correct’ doctrine, and beyond the simple sincerity of a sincere adherence to correct doctrine as such, to find God made present, first and foremost, in the Honesty of the most genuinely honest conversation, on issues of the most serious spiritual concern. Wherever, in other words, people are truly ready to learn from non-dominant

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others, whose point of view is different from their own; wherever people are truly ready, not just to hold forth themselves or to score points, but to be inwardly changed by their encounter with such others; wherever conversation is truly part of a shared quest for fresh moral insight: there God is. Indeed, God is there to the precise extent that this is the case. And good theology is simply the recognition of that presence. In this elementary sense, whereas sacred ideology is for ever closing down the liberative potential of religiously framed conversation, good theology is for ever struggling to re-open it. But the first, in the sense of the most universal, sort of obstruction to such conversation is just the crass banality of what Hannah Arendt calls the ‘animal laborans’. Thus the animal laborans is the human herd animal, trapped within banality, who may not necessarily be an outright liar, but who will nevertheless never see God primarily in the dictates of pure Honesty – because what binds the herd together is the mere lowest common denominator of its members’ material desires. Thus, for the herd, divinity essentially inheres in whatever best serves to meet those desires. Let us consider the old distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘magic’. I would propose that we redefine the difference here by saying: let ‘magic’ be a general name for the sacred practices of the animal laborans; and let us use the term ‘religion’ for any sacred practice based upon a critique of ‘magic’, in that sense. Thus ‘sacred ideology’ is further definable as: the corruption of originally ‘religious’ tradition, in which, without simply reverting to the older forms of magic, it nevertheless lapses into another, perhaps equally crude mode of basic dishonesty. (Some of the most notable twentieth-century theologians, including Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, have defined ‘religion’ in quite a different way, as designating precisely whatever belongs to what I would call ‘Christian sacred ideology’. But, given that ‘religion’ inescapably also refers to whatever Christianity has in common with other spiritual traditions, this seems to me to represent a most unfortunate mixing together of authentic Christian self-critique with mere Christian chauvinism. For it seems to put all non-Christian spirituality, even the best, automatically on the same level as Christian sacred ideology. And therefore I am most reluctant to follow that lead.7) Once upon a time, I think we might say, all sacred practices were largely magic. But then came that great series of cultural transformations which, together, constitute what Karl Jaspers has termed the ‘Axial Period’ of world history.8 These are the birth, between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, of Hebrew prophecy, the Upanishadic and Buddhist traditions in India, the Confucian tradition in China, and Greek philosophy. Very different traditions, obviously. But all of them, in the terms I am suggesting, are forms of religion. Before the Axial Period, and still persisting outside the sway of the traditions originated in that period, all that exists in the domain of the sacred is a set of magic practices professedly designed to meet the desires of the animal laborans, for health and economic prosperity. In the great empires of antiquity such practices were incorporated into rituals with a major input, also, from

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homo faber: celebrations of the god-given durability of the imperial order as a matrix of immortal fame for the ruling caste. Yet what all the great culturalrevolutionary movements of the Axial Period are chiefly battling against is just the mentality of the animal laborans embedded in magic custom. Each in their own ways representing an infinite new generosity of spirit, these are movements no longer only concerned, like the magic culture they reject, with health and economic prosperity, but rather with salvation, or spiritual liberation. So they offer salvation from the typical sinfulness – or liberation from the typical illusions – bound up with the elementary egocentric materialism of the animal laborans, inasmuch as such materialism pervades the whole of society, from the actual labourers themselves right up to their most exalted employers. They issue in the development of new spiritual elites, for the first time decisively set apart from the older warrior and merchant ruling classes, to represent the dictates of a heavenly order now, for the first time, conceived as being in perpetual tension with the natural values of the earthly order. And in each case alike the perceived fallenness or error of the earthly order is what derives from the intrinsic greed and narrow-mindedness of the animal laborans. What is First-Person theology? It began as the Christian project of reconciling two radically diverse religious traditions, stemming from quite different ‘axial’ origins: the Hebrew-prophetic and the Greek-philosophical. And it encompasses, I would suggest, all such reconciling conversation, including, now, that relating to those other great religious traditions which flow from the Indian and Chinese ‘axial’ sources. Hence it is the systematic exploration of the gospel in its character as a particular outgrowth of ‘axial truth’, beginning from that truth in its most primal form. Platonist philosophy represents a religious repudiation of the animal laborans, the generous intransigence of which is reinforced by a quite singular elitism. By contrast, the Christian church, as a populist missionary enterprise, has very often been tempted to make certain concessions in this regard: either softening the transformative demands of faith; or else identifying it with an impassioned group loyalty, still quite compatible with the persistent banality of the animal laborans. To some extent or other, such banality is of course continually resurgent within every religious tradition with populist ambition. Yet it can never subsist there unproblematically. And whenever, in Christian history, one comes across a new impulse of Platonizing thought it seems always to represent a renewed spirit of protest against tactical compromise, at this level. So First-Person theology, in the most general terms, is definable as the space in which Christian theology is called to be a constant wrestling with dishonesty-as-banality. Easter in the Earthly City Second-Person theology, on the other hand, differs from First-Person theology in that it starts, not from what Christianity has in common with other religious

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traditions, but from that which marks it out as distinct, above all, the symbolic truth inherent in the preaching of a crucified and resurrected Saviour. But the symbolism of Easter, God’s raising to life of one who had been crucified, originally derived its whole meaning from the dramatic contradiction of the primary symbolic statement of crucifixion in itself. Crucifixion, after all, was not just the Roman form of capital punishment. The sheer theatricality of the procedure made it into something far more. It was, in the first instance, a vivid symbolic statement of the prevailing ethical priorities of the Roman order – a great, thunderous rendering-visible of what was otherwise manipulatively concealed, the whole underlying ruthlessness of that order, or, in Arendtian terms, precisely the manipulative ruthlessness of fallen homo faber. The Roman empire was of course a quite astonishing achievement of political and military craftsmanship, designed for maximum durability. In its quality as a symbolic statement, the act of crucifixion proclaimed the absolute preeminence of that goal: to the Romans, evidently, no punishment seemed too cruel for those who endangered the durability of so splendid a work of art. Thus crucifixion was intended as a display of cruelty with real artistic pizzazz – cruelty, at its most civilized and civilizing. What, in the first instance, it symbolizes is the libido dominandi, the addictive lust for exploitative domination as a creative, civilization-building impulse: in Augustine’s terms, the founding principle of the glorious fallen ‘earthly city’, which stands over against the ‘city of God’.9 This ‘earthly city’ is nothing other than the civilization of fallen homo faber, in all its various forms. It encompasses the whole world of manipulative and coercive relationships in general, where individuals are valued either for their usefulness as instruments of rule, or else merely as passive raw material for the system. Again, homo faber may not necessarily be an outright liar. But the question here is how God is envisaged. And those whose theology is framed within the parameters of this mentality will at any rate never find God primarily in the dictates of pure Honesty. What homo faber as such primarily finds divine is, on the contrary, whatever is most effective in the establishment and maintenance of great elegant structures of rule; which is clearly quite another matter. Whereas, in short, all the various types of religious tradition, in their different ways, are movements of liberation from the limitations of the animal laborans, Christianity is – I would argue, above all – unique in the symbolic decisiveness, and poetic intensity, with which it thus goes on, at least in principle, also to tackle the essential tendency to dishonesty-as-manipulation inherent in the world-view of homo faber. Crucifixion perfectly symbolizes this. And the resurrection of the crucified perfectly symbolizes its overthrow. It is, then, I would suggest, the essential task of Second-Person theology to draw out that rationale, and to ward off the ideological re-encroachments of fallen homo faber on the subsequent development of Christian tradition itself.

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Bishops versus Gurus Each of the three basic trinitarian functions of theology, I am arguing, involves a systematic confrontation of gospel-truth with one of the three basic species of dishonesty that I have identified: First-Person theology with dishonestyas-banality; Second-Person theology with dishonesty-as-manipulation; ThirdPerson theology with dishonesty-as-disowning. From this it follows that, if the guiding virtue of First-Person theology is a decisively transcultural generosity, and that of Second-Person theology a truly radical free-spiritedness, what Third-Person theology, for its part, has so far as possible to try to cultivate is essentially a creative flair for tradition. Thus, it is all about strategies for honest tradition-building, a bid to invest the demands of the very purest truth-as-Honesty with a maximum of auctoritas. In the early-church context it was also a matter of improvising a whole new organization and community ethos, capable of surviving the pressures of persecution, and promoting missionary effectiveness. This considerably complicated things, inasmuch as the requirements of corporate survival and missionary effectiveness are by no means the same as the demands of Honesty. But now, two millennia later, I actually think we have certain quite significant potential advantages in this regard, if only we can learn to recognize them! However, as I have already remarked, the problematics of dishonesty-asdisowning encompasses two very different types of phenomena. On the one hand, there is the dishonesty of a self-indulgent individualism: individuals simply disowning any really serious corporate identity, or responsibilities, reluctant to be lumbered with any at all burdensome sort of historic responsibility. And, on the other hand, there is the pervasive dishonesty of boastful institutions, disowning, in the sense of ignoring, whole aspects of actual, embarrassing historic reality. In the first Christian centuries one of the chief factors informing the development of what I would call ‘Third-Person theology’ was the persistent conflict between Catholic and Gnostic Christians. How is this conflict to be understood? It seems to me that, at the deepest level, it represents a basic clash between those who were primarily troubled by the first of these two modes of corruption, and those who were primarily troubled by the second. The Gnostics were certainly much more individualistic in their spirituality than the Catholics. In effect, what they were attempting to create was a Christian guru-culture, that is, a sort of free market in Christian wisdom, minimally institutionalized. Unlike their Catholic opponents, the Gnostics did not believe in a tightly organized institution, under the auctoritas of bishops. Whereas the Catholic bishops sought to legitimate their authority by appeal to history – insisting on the direct historic lines of succession linking them to the apostles as witnesses of Christ’s resurrection – the Gnostic gurus presented their wisdom in mythic terms. They were great constructers of cosmic myth, and Gnostic myth luxuriated, as each divergent sub-tradition established its own distinctive

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identity, in the Gnostic marketplace of ideas, by developing new motifs. The Catholics were keen to present their church institutions as direct inheritors of the divine promise to Israel. Not so the Gnostics. The Marcionite Gnostics even went so far as to reject the Hebrew tradition altogether, arguing that it was the worship of a fallen god. Others were less extreme, but still saw salvation far more in terms of individual enlightenment and loose affinity group loyalties than as a matter of participation in a clearly identifiable ‘chosen people’. Nor did the Gnostics ever develop anything at all equivalent to that crucial Catholic strategy for group bonding, the cult of martyrs. Was Gnostic spirituality intrinsically dishonest in its individualism? No doubt it was liable to all the typical temptations that affect any guru culture: guru conceit, and the retreat of the devotees into the cliqueish company only of the most like-minded. This, of course, is not for one moment to deny that mainstream church tradition has other dishonesty problems of its own – very major problems, indeed, of addiction to corporate boastfulness, habits of such boastfulness accumulated, and reinforced, over centuries now. And, as I shall argue below, I think that Third-Person theology actually faces all sorts of very different challenges today. But at least one element in the actual origins of such theology was surely a fundamental mistrust of Gnostic-style culture for its potential dishonesty. God in Three ‘Persons’ The Latin formula, that God is una substantia, one ‘substance’, in tres Personae, three ‘Persons’, goes back to Tertullian in the early third century. Early Greek theology speaks of one ousia, or ‘essence’, in three hypostaseis, ‘substances’ or ‘realities’, or (less often) three prosópa, which originally meant ‘faces’. Three faces of the very purest truth-as-Honesty. Three divine ‘Persons’. In the twentieth century Karl Barth, most notably, expressed a certain unease about the apparent tritheism of talk about three ‘Persons’, and proposed that we speak of three divine ‘Seinsweisen’ instead – in English, ‘ways of being’.10 But let us take a closer look at this issue. What exactly constitutes a ‘person’ as such? The original Latin word persona had a meaning partly legal and partly theatrical. In the legal context, a ‘person’ is, in the first instance, a litigant, or, therefore, by extension, any human individual in so far as they are a potential litigant. But not only individuals are legal ‘persons’. There are also corporate ‘persons’, whole organized communities, in so far as they too can be litigants. The decisive factor here is just that a ‘person’ is a possessor of rights. ‘Personhood’ is essentially an entitlement to, and hence a demand for, respect. However, inasmuch as God is one who demands and (as the summoner to perfect Honesty) is also entitled to infinite respect, it follows that God is, juridically, the absolute ‘Person’, or set of ‘Persons’. That is, he is the one and

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only true possessor of legal ‘Personhood’, in all its fullness, the only one with perfect legitimacy. So that we mortals may be said to be ‘persons’, or participants in corporate ‘personhood’, only to the extent that our individual or corporate lives, in their conscientiousness, effectively respond to, and reflect, the true ‘personhood’-conferring ideal ‘Personhood’ of God. But in the theatrical context, on the other hand, a persona was first of all a Roman actor’s role-identifying mask, and then, by extension, everything that gives dramatic interest to a character on stage. This was also what ‘prosópon’ meant in Greek – perhaps, though, ‘prosópon’, with its primary meaning of ‘face’, still had, for trinitarian purposes, too much the connotation of a mask? That would explain the theologians’ general preference for ‘hypostasis’, which by contrast suggests a real, substantive depth of character. Latin, however, provided no such choice. And so Tertullian opted for ‘persona’. For trinitarian purposes, one might indeed very well translate ‘persona’ either as ‘Person’ or as ‘Character’. To speak of one God in three ‘Characters’ would be to lose the associated legal flavour of ‘Personhood’, but it might perhaps help bring out something else. For what is it that renders a character on stage dramatically interesting? Surely it is the way in which the drama shows him or her as being inwardly buffeted or torn by competing impulses, above all, the impulses of conscience. To be a ‘character’, or a ‘person’ in this sense is to be the product of an inner conversation process. The more vigorous that conversation process, the more interesting. Yet, what else is God, as dramatically revealed to us through the whole enterprise of theology, if not the supremely characterful source of all true conscientious character? And what else is the historic life of the Holy Trinity as such, if not God dramatically revealed to us by way of the grand, overarching external conversation process, enacted within the theatre of the church, between the three divine Characters, or Persons, as it were presiding over the three internal conversation processes of First-Person, Second-Person and ThirdPerson theology? Three ‘Seinsweisen’ certainly, if you like, also. But in the end, that seems to me to be far too pale and bloodless a term for what is actually involved here!

Chapter 4

Historical Evolution of Trinitarian Thought

I now return to what I said above about the doctrine of the Trinity being like a volcano. There have, I think, been three main secondary eruptions of this volcano: one in the Middle Ages, beginning with the prophetic work of Joachim of Fiore towards the end of the twelfth century; one at the beginning of the nineteenth century, associated with the philosophy of Hegel; and one in the twentieth century, chiefly initiated by the work of Karl Barth. Although there have of course also been all sorts of other, less eruptive yet nevertheless quite significant developments, besides. God of the Philosophers/God for the Common People One obvious early landmark in this history is the Council of Nicaea in 325. A gathering of about three hundred bishops, mostly from around the Eastern Mediterranean, the Council was summoned by the Emperor Constantine because he was concerned for the unity of the church; it was his new policy to use the church as an instrument for unifying the Empire. And to that end the Council produced the first ever official Creed, for universal use: We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things seen and unseen. And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father, that is, only-begotten, from the Father’s substance; Light from Light, very God from very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father; Through Him all things were made, things in heaven and things on earth; Who for us men and for our salvation came down, and was incarnate, was made man, and suffered, rose again the third day, ascended into heaven, and is coming to judge the living and the dead. And in the Holy Spirit. But those who say, ‘There was when He was not’, or ‘Before His generation He was not’, or ‘He came to be out of nothing’, or those who pretend that the Son of God is ‘of another hypostasis or substance’, or is a ‘creature’, or ‘alterable’, or ‘mutable’, these the catholic and apostolic Church anathematizes.

These anathemas were directed at the doctrine of the Alexandrian presbyter Arius, as were the statements at the beginning of the second paragraph. For Arius was in dispute with his bishop, Alexander. In particular, he had rejected 57

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the bishop’s affirmation that the Son is ‘consubstantial’ (homoousios) with the Father, which the creed here, crucially, reaffirms. In Arius’s view, this was a form of crypto-Sabellianism: a disastrous overstatement of identity between the Persons, failing to recognize the true subordination of the Second Person to the First. Thus, according to Arius, creation was a two-stage process: first, before the world’s time, the creation of the Son; and then, through the Son, the creation of the world. Moreover, the Holy Spirit was likewise subordinate to the Son, so that for him the three Persons of the Trinity essentially represented three different levels of divinity. Constantine’s purpose at Nicaea was to snuff out the conflict by peremptorily deciding it in Alexander’s favour. But this attempt failed. The Council merely marked the beginning of a very long-drawn-out struggle. At one stage, during the reign of Constantine’s son Constantius, it actually looked very much as though Arianism would prevail. The heresy was not decisively defeated, within the Empire itself, until the Council of Constantinople, a full fifty-six years after Nicaea, in 381. And even then, outside the Empire, the church of the Goths remained largely Arian, thanks to the work of the great Arian missionary, Ulfilas. The controversy became mixed up with all sorts of other social and political conflicts. Arius himself was evidently not just an academic theologian, but also quite an effective publicist. So, for example, to promote his cause he wrote sea shanties, which became popular among the sailors of Alexandria and among the dockers. But one may presume that the sailors and dockers, when they sang Arius’s songs, were not always doing so for strictly theological reasons. No doubt they had other grievances, which made them want to annoy the city authorities in this way. Nevertheless, the question still remains: why, in that world, should a trinitarian dispute, of all things, have come to play such a role? Obviously, the fact that the church was now being promoted by emperors, as an instrument of their rule, gave theology, in general, a quite unprecedented degree of cultural importance. And yet, at the same time, it equally seems to me that the theological debate here has to be seen as the projection of a specific struggle concerning the changing nature of human authority within the church. Indeed, I think that the Arian controversy is only really intelligible in so far as one recognizes the basic point that – as I have argued above – First-Person theology is not only a doctrine about God as revealed in the Hebrew scriptures, or about the God to whom Jesus prayed, but is also, above all, about the God of Christian/Platonist dialogue. Consider the tradition of early Christian philosophy: the tradition largely initiated by Justin Martyr, also deriving from Aristeides of Athens, and carried forward especially by Athenagoras, Pantaenus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen. None of these men were ever bishops. Origen eventually became a presbyter, and perhaps Clement was one also, but they did not derive their authority as teachers within the church from ordination. Their authority, in each case, derived simply from their philosophic and theological learning.

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At the time of the Arian controversy, however, the nature of authority within the church was undergoing transformation. The adoption of the church by imperial homo faber, as an instrument of rule, was accelerating a transformation which had already begun. What the imperial project required, in each diocese, was of course a maximal concentration of authority in the person of the bishop, as the symbolic local representative of the imperial regime. And an increasingly regimented church had no use for the sort of authority those pre-Constantinian Christian philosophers had enjoyed – authority tied to contemplative scholarship. The philosophic tradition by which the early Christian philosophers were chiefly formed was that of ‘Middle Platonism’, that is, Platonism mixed with Stoicism: in its pagan versions, a thoroughly elitist tradition. Yet these were philosophers who, unlike their pagan counterparts, were not content with solidarity among philosophers alone. They also valued participation in the catholic community of the church, and this then immediately confonted them with a basic problem: how to reconcile the God of philosophy with the God of that catholic community-life. As I have remarked, the problem was not a uniquely Christian one. It was a problem which Philo of Alexandria had already faced – as a philosopher who was also a devout Jew. And their strategy for resolving it was, basically, a continuation of Philo’s. The way they saw it, the special truth of the gospel, as contrasted with pagan philosophy, lay essentially in its character as a medium for divine condescension to the less well educated. So, God as Logos – and as Holy Spirit – is here revealed not only to the pure conceptual thought of philosophy as such, but also to simple picture-thinking, in which all can participate. But what Christian philosophy, supremely, grasps is then the latent identity between the God of the church’s catholic communitylife and the God of philosophy. And that is the revelation of God, not only as Logos and Holy Spirit, but also as the One who ‘sends’ the Logos and the Holy Spirit, the First Person of the Holy Trinity. The authority of these philosopher–teachers within the church was thus bound up with their supposed special insight, first and foremost, into the nature of the First Person, a level of metaphysical truth necessarily more or less hidden from the mass of the faithful. And hence the dispute over the relative status of the three Persons of the Trinity was originally the working out, in projection, of a struggle concerning the status of such intellectuals. To privilege the First Person, in one’s picture of heaven, was by implication to privilege their authority, as a class, within the church. At all events, Arius certainly saw himself as a sort of cultural conservative. He himself was a presbyter, not a bishop. And although he soon acquired episcopal allies, the controversy began with him claiming the right, as a scholar, to challenge the authority of his bishop. He revered the memory, above all, of Origen, as the greatest representative of the old Christian–philosophical tradition. In institutional terms, he represented the tradition of the famous catechetical school at Alexandria, which Origen like Clement before him had headed, and which had probably been founded by Pantaenus. Now, Origen was not an explicit trinitarian subordinationist, the way Arius, later, was. In

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the mid-third century, when Origen was writing, the relationship between the two forms of authority within the church, scholarly and episcopal, had not yet become so fraught, and so the issue did not yet arise for him, as it did in Arius’s day.1 But Arius was by no means alone in nevertheless reading Origen as an implicit subordinationist. His great episcopal ally, Eusebius of Caesarea, wrote a Defence of Origen; this was in response to men like Eustathius of Antioch and Marcellus of Ancyra, anti-Arians who were also fiercely hostile to Origen’s memory. It is true that Athanasius, the greatest anti-Arian of them all, judged Origen a good deal more favourably. But then, Athanasius was bishop of Alexandria, and no doubt there was a certain element of local pride involved in this, as Origen was such a major representative of Alexandrian church tradition. As I have said, the original rationale of the Arian conflict was quite soon overlaid with all sorts of contingent accretions. In general, it became mixed up with the rivalries and animosities of various bishops, not only as individuals but also as representatives of their churches’ local patriotism. And it also became a major factor in imperial politics, as Constantine’s son Constantius reversed his father’s policy, and upheld the Arian cause. On Constantine’s death, in 337, the empire was divided in three, with Constantius becoming ruler of the east, while Constantine’s other sons, Constantine II and Constans, who largely continued their father’s church policy, ruled the western and central provinces respectively. But by 350 Constantius had become ruler of all, and over the following eleven years of his reign very nearly managed to impose Arianism as orthodoxy, everywhere. In the resultant turmoil, clearly, people might have had all sorts of different reasons for choosing one side or the other. At the beginning, though, the key existential contrast between the Arians and their opponents was surely just that the former wanted bishops who would be patrons of Christian Platonism, not merely insistent on hierarchical status, but humbly deferring to philosophic expertise; whereas the latter by contrast tended to be much more anti-intellectual. Nor is it, I think, merely a coincidence that Athanasius – the chief leader of the anti-Arian cause throughout the period from 328, when he became bishop of Alexandria, to his death in 373 – was also the friend and biographer of Antony, the chief pioneer among Christian hermits. Antony was no learned man. On the contrary, what he represented was precisely a form of Christian sanctity involving the most ostentatious possible withdrawal from the whole world of books and debate. Thus Athanasius not only argued for equality up there in heaven, but, in his championing of Antony, he was also very much a campaigner against traditional education-based forms of elitism down here on earth. Augustine: a Brilliant Detour After Athanasius’s final posthumous triumph, in 381, at the Council of Constantinople, the next really significant event in the evolution of trinitarian

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doctrine is Augustine’s great treatise, De Trinitate. It seems that Augustine began to write this just eighteen years later, in the year 399, although it then took him twenty years to complete. De Trinitate is Augustine’s third masterpiece, after the Confessions and the City of God. And, from that day to this, it has been arguably the most influential single work ever devoted to the topic. Not that any of Augustine’s later followers have ever carried his core argument all that much further than he himself does – not even Thomas Aquinas, who is certainly the most brilliant of them, here as in so many other areas. It is a work in fifteen books. The chief polemical thrust of the first seven, not surprisingly, is to reaffirm the eternal equality of the three divine Persons, against Arianism. But then, in his prologue to Book VIII, Augustine announces his intention to do something else: to reinterpret the dogma in, as he puts it, ‘a more inward manner’.2 And this signals the beginning of what is most truly distinctive about his approach. In Genesis 1:26 God says, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.’ Therefore, Augustine sets out to try to trace the trinitarian shape of that image and likeness, within our sense of our own selves. That is, he looks for analogies to the trinitarian life of God in the psychology of each individual human being. What are the three elements within the individual soul which most directly correspond to the threefoldness of the Trinity? Having tried out various formulas, in the end he plumps for the triad: ‘Memory’, ‘Understanding’, and ‘Will’. Note, however, that he is not thinking here of three mental faculties. Rather, he means three modes of relation to self. It is not memory in general that is in question, but ‘memory’ as a form of self-awareness; not understanding in general, but one’s understanding of one’s self; not will in general, but the will to be one’s true self. Thus: 1 ‘Memory’ in the Augustinian sense, as opposed to Understanding, is essentially that which prompts action without reflection. It is the wellspring of intuition, or, when one speaks of ‘being in the groove’, it is the groove. That is, it is a sheer unreflective spontaneity of mind. It is what comes to the fore when one is flowing freely. Augustine also speaks of it simply as ‘Mind’. This, therefore, is a context in which love appears as the sheer self-expression of the lover. 2 Understanding, on the contrary, is the mind at its most reflective, not just a simple self-awareness, but an analytical self-consciousness. It is the mind’s notitia sui, or ‘knowledge of self’, framing love, essentially, as a reasoned appreciation of the intrinsic loveableness of the beloved. 3 Will is the mind at work, creatively mediating between the intuitive impulse of Memory and the reflective impulse of Understanding, binding them together. In this sense it is the mind’s amor sui, or ‘love of (its true) self’ – love not only expressing itself and reflecting upon itself, but also in both ways enjoying itself.

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Just as Memory logically precedes, and ‘begets’, Understanding, Augustine suggests, so it is that the Father ‘begets’ the Son. And just as Will ‘proceeds from’ Memory and Understanding, so it is that the Holy Spirit ‘proceeds from’ the Father and the Son.3 As he himself puts it: When it is not thinking of itself, [the mind] is indeed not in its own view, nor is its gaze being formed from itself, and yet it still knows itself by being somehow its own memory of itself. It is like a man learned in many disciplines; everything he knows is contained in his memory, but nothing is in the view of his mind except what he is actually thinking about. The rest is stacked away in a kind of confidential file of awareness which is called Memory. That is why we were constantly presenting a trinity in this way, placing in Memory that from which the gaze of thought is formed, treating the actual conformation as the image that is printed off from it, and finding the thing that joins both together to be Love or Will. So when the mind views itself by thought, it understands and recognizes itself; thus it begets Understanding or Self-recognition. It is a non-bodily thing that is being understood and viewed, and recognized in the understanding. When the mind by thinking views and understands itself, it does not beget this awareness of itself as though it had previously been unknown to itself; it was already known to itself in the way that things are known which are contained in Memory even when they are not being thought about. We say a man knows letters even when he is thinking about other things, not letters. These two, begetter and begotten, are coupled together by Love as the third, and this is nothing but Will seeking or holding something to be enjoyed. This is why we thought the trinity of the mind should be put forward under these three names, Memory, Understanding, and Will.4

In terms of modern neuroscience, one might perhaps say that ‘Memory’, here, is essentially a name for the sort of thinking which, most of all, engages the right hemisphere of the brain, whereas ‘Understanding’ is a term for predominantly left-hemisphere activity; and ‘Will’ is what derives from our capacity to combine and harmonize these two.5 Augustine’s argument is indeed quite brilliantly original. And yet, I think that in the overall history of the doctrine it is basically just an intriguing detour. For what has he done? He has taken what was, in origin, a registering of the threefold essence, specifically, of Christian theology, as the systematic intellectual response of the church to gospel revelation, and has turned it, instead, into a theological account of the threefold essence of all thinking, of any kind. And, from being the all-encompassing reflection of Christian theology on its own capacity to be a medium for ongoing revelation, the doctrine has thus become something altogether more abstract. The result is certainly a most ingenious metaphysical apologia for already established church orthodoxy. But is that really all that trinitarian theology is for? I do not think so.

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The Joachimist Eruption When the revelatory volcano erupts, what comes rolling down the mountain is just a molten yearning for fresh truth-as-Honesty. The first major period of such eruptions, out of which the doctrine of the Trinity originally emerges, ran, I would suggest, up to around the time of Origen, in the early third century. Thereafter, by contrast, most of the new developments in trinitarian theology tended to be either a mere campaigning for precisely formulated credal truth-as-correctness, as in the Arian controversy, or else, as in Augustine’s great work, a matter of metaphysical apologetics. But in the latter part of the twelfth century there came another big eruption, of quite a new sort. An abbot in Calabria, Joachim of Fiore, found a new meaning in history. He saw it as building towards an imminent transformation, not the end of the world but a transformation still within history, which would be on a scale directly comparable to the revelation of the Christian gospel itself. And so he spoke of three basic grades, or stages, of revelation-history, quite straightforwardly corresponding to the three Persons of the Trinity. First, the age of God the Father, covering the period of the Hebrew scriptures, down to the birth of Christ. Then, the age of God the Son. And soon – very soon, he promised – would come a third age, the age of the Holy Spirit. Joachim had a highly pictorial mind. He constructed complex schemes for the typological interpretation of the Bible, reading everything in the light of his grand-narrative theory; which he also illustrated with leafy tree-diagrams. Nothing could be further removed from the metaphysical speculations of the Scholastic theologians in the new universities of the following period. In style, he was quite a conservative thinker. But in substance his message was one of explosive new hope. No one previously had ever thought of the three Persons in terms of three stages of history. The dogma had emerged out of the interplay between three different, all equally ongoing, relationships to history. Joachim, converting these three relationships into three cumulative stages, approaches matters entirely from within what I would call the problematics of Third-Person theology. His whole concern is with an ideally truthful owning of church tradition as fully rooted, and yet not trapped within the past. There is indeed a molten yearning here for fresh truth-as-Honesty. What was to be new about the third age of divine revelation, the age of the Holy Spirit, to which Joachim looked forward? His thinking may be seen as the final intellectual culmination of the hopes that had already been at work a century earlier, driving the Gregorian Reform: the imposition of universal clerical celibacy, decisively wrenching the Western church apart from the traditional ethos of early medieval tribalism; and the long struggle, against emperors and kings, by which the papacy had been progressively establishing its independent authority. He himself spent much of his life as a Cistercian, and became a Cistercian abbot, before gaining papal permission to leave the Order, and found his own. He left, it seems, partly because he felt that the

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Cistercians had lost their original pioneer reforming zeal. And yet he could still speak of them as, at heart, an ‘angelic order’. He was looking for a further renewal, to follow up and complete the Cistercian renewal. The third age, in its fullness, would involve a wholesale transformation in the culture of Christendom; however, it had two historic sources. On the one hand, it was prefigured in the lives and testimony of the great Old Testament prophets, Elijah, Elisha and their followers. But, on the other hand, it was also prefigured above all by the work of St Benedict, as the great codifier of Western monasticism, in the sixth century. It would be initiated, he predicted, by the formation of two new religious orders: an order of hermits and an order of preachers. In short, it would involve a final triumph of the monastic ideal, permeating the whole of society. What else, though, is this ideal if not one of perfect truth-as-Honesty? The ascetic toughness of monastic life, in its poverty and chastity, is after all essentially intended as a protest against what I would call the prevailing banality of the secular world; its prayer discipline symbolically confronts that banality head on. And, at the same time, the Rule of St Benedict is in principle designed to minimize the scope for manipulativeness: the vow of obedience, surely, is meant to render manipulation unnecessary for those in authority; it is in that sense a prescription for ‘clean’ community discipline, whereas the whole monastic ethos is, at least, ideally meant to discourage the sort of competitiveness which generates the will to manipulate. Joachim’s dream was of a world in which the monastic tradition, at its best, would attain absolute auctoritas. And he communicated this, in his own day, with great effectiveness. Three popes, in turn, gave him their official backing. King Richard Coeur de Lion stopped off in Calabria as a Crusader on his way to the Holy Land to receive Joachim’s blessing. But after his death his doctrine was taken up by all sorts of different followers. As for the two new religious orders he had prophesied as harbingers of the age of the Holy Spirit, perhaps not surprisingly claims were made on the part of various new orders in the following period that they were one of them. And Joachimist ideas were especially taken up by the hardliners within the Franciscan Order, the so-called ‘Spiritual Franciscans’, as they struggled to preserve the original Franciscan commitment to solidarity with the poor in the most radical way possible. The radicalism of the Spiritual Franciscans was in fact very largely fired by Joachimist apocalyptic hope. So Joachimism became more and more an anti-establishment phenomenon. In the midthirteenth century one particularly militant Spiritual Franciscan firebrand, Fra Gherardo of Borgo San Donnino, actually went so far as to acclaim Joachim’s writings as a ‘Third Testament’, completing, and superseding, the New Testament in the same way that the New Testament was understood to complete, and supersede, the Old Testament. Joachim himself would certainly have been horrified by this. However, the subversive potential of his doctrine is clear. Later forms of it are also to be found, for instance, circulating among the revolutionary Taborites of early fifteenth-century

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Bohemia, and then, at the time of the Reformation, generally among the more plebeian radicals. But perhaps the most interesting version of neo-Joachimist theology dates from the mid-eighteenth century: Lessing’s little treatise, Education of the Human Race. Here, Lessing refers back to the Joachimist ‘enthusiasts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries’. (In the first instance, he means the Spiritual Franciscans, of whom he had read in Mosheim’s church history.) And he speaks warmly of them, hailing them as, in some form at least, forerunners of his own critical project, only criticizing what he sees as their excessive impatience. Thus, he writes: 88. Perhaps their ‘Three Ages of the World’ were not so empty a speculation after all, and assuredly they had no bad intentions when they taught that the new covenant must become as antiquated as the old has become . . . 89. Only they were premature. They believed that they could make their contemporaries, who had scarcely outgrown their childhood, without enlightenment, without preparation, at one stroke men worthy of their third age. 90. And it was just this that made them enthusiasts . . .6

Lessing himself, in this work, looks forward to a new understanding of the gospel, finally purged of potentially manipulative threats and promises. In his version of the three ages, therefore, they essentially represent three different understandings of how to promote morality. In the first age morality is promoted by superstitious promises of material, earthly God-given rewards for the righteous, and material, earthly God-given punishments for the wicked; this, Lessing argues, was necessary as a first step in the moral education of humanity. But then the next great step in that educational process comes when people start to promote morality in terms of post-mortem rewards and punishments. This, the distinctive procedure of the second age, removes at least some of the crude banality of the earlier approach, poetically identifying virtue with a radical turning of the heart, away from material, earthly desires to heavenly ones instead, until, however, the third age dawns, the age of fulfilment. Then humanity will, at long last, have learnt to love morality simply for its own sake, that is, without any need for rewards and punishments, and so without any risk of the rhetoric of reward and punishment being misused – as in the preceding ages it all too often has been – for purposes of mere manipulation. Granted, Lessing’s work is scarcely much more than a provocative little flourish. As an essay in grand narrative, it is very flimsy. Good grand narrative must surely include some account of how it is that the particular historical perspective it represents has now, as a matter of historical fact, become possible. In that sense, the narrator’s own cultural formation has also got to be included in the story. But Lessing does not really include himself, or his own immediate world, in his story at all. He does not explain what exactly has changed between the period of the early Joachimists and his own day, which makes it possible for him to recast their hopes in this new way, nor in what exact sense his own argument escapes the charge he lays against theirs: of being ‘enthusiastic’.

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It is a brief, abstract sketch of a thought, nothing more. Nevertheless, there can be no denying the underlying critical seriousness of that thought. And I shall return to the issues it serves to open up. Schleiermacher and Tholuck Joachim represents the great medieval eruption of something new into the tradition, setting in train a whole series of subsequent neo-Joachimist revivals, all the way up to the time of Lessing, and indeed beyond.7 But then, as I have said, in the post-Enlightenment world there have come two further eruptions of quite another kind: one in the philosophic theology of Hegel, the other above all in Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. I would argue that the relationship between these three eruptions is itself trinitarian, for, whereas Joachim’s thought is a form of trinitarianism conceived primarily in Third-Person theological terms, Hegel’s trinitarian doctrine, by contrast, originates in the domain of First-Person theology, and Barth’s is an essentially Second-Person theological approach. Before going on to consider these latter developments, however, first I think we need to set the context for them by taking a brief look at the sort of postEnlightenment theology against which both Hegel and Barth, in their very different ways, were reacting. And the two key figures in this regard are Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Tholuck. Schleiermacher, of course, is the great church father of later nineteenthand twentieth-century ‘Liberal Protestantism’. But it is notable that in his classic systematic work on The Christian Faith, the dogma of the Trinity is relegated to a final chapter entitled ‘Conclusion’, which is effectively just an appendix. And whilst he does not repudiate it altogether, the whole thrust of his argument is to depreciate the dogma’s real theological importance. He was Hegel’s colleague at the University of Berlin, and in the 1820s the relationship between the two of them became quite fraught, as he successfully intrigued to keep Hegel out of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and each came to play a leading role in rival academic coteries.8 As for Barth: he looks back to Schleiermacher with immense respect, and yet also as the prime source, and symbolic representative, of everything in the mainstream tradition of German academic theology most urgently requiring to be overcome. Tholuck was a younger contemporary of Schleiermacher and Hegel, representing the pietist tradition of the University of Halle. Schleiermacher famously sets out to base his theology on the deliverances of religious experience, in the sense of prayerful ‘feeling’. But, as Barth rather strikingly puts it: ‘in respect of the central concept of his theology, the much-cited “feeling”, Schleiermacher is related to Tholuck as a painted flower to a real one or a game with matches to a conflagration. In the one place there is careful, perceptive teaching about feeling; in the other the reckless, stormy, one-sided language of feeling itself.’9 In the 1820s Tholuck rose to fame both as a

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ferocious critic of Hegel – he was amongst the first to attack Hegel, theologically, as an alleged ‘pantheist’ – and also, unlike Schleiermacher, as a wholesale rejecter of trinitarian theology.10 Why does Schleiermacher relegate the doctrine of the Trinity to the margins of his theology? In order to understand this, one has to consider his basic formula for theological truth in general. In effect, what he puts first is sincerity. Hence his primary concern with religious ‘feeling’. Schleiermacher’s greatness as a theologian is indeed that he is the thinker who, more systematically than any other, has tried to define the truth of the gospel in terms of self-expression. This is already at the heart of his argument in his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (1799), where he seeks to identify the deepest religious truth with the self-expression of the ideal individual ‘religious virtuoso’. And then in The Christian Faith (the first edition of which appeared in 1821–22) he discusses faith as the self-expression of a whole community. Thus, considered in terms of self-expression, religious truth may perhaps be said to require three things: first, perfect sincerity; second, a certain poetic flair, or genius, on the part of the individual; and third, a coherent structure of tradition which facilitates the widest possible range of usage. It is this third criterion with which Schleiermacher is primarily concerned in The Christian Faith. So he argues here that heresy is whatever is logically inconsistent with the elementary affirmation of Christian faith that Jesus is our Redeemer, because departing from the proper via media of orthodoxy, and therefore unduly restricting the potential range of devout Christian selfexpression. As he puts it: If the distinctive essence of Christianity consists in the fact that in it all religious emotions are related to the redemption wrought by Jesus of Nazareth, there will be two ways in which heresy can arise. That is to say: this fundamental formula will be retained in general (for otherwise the contradiction would be manifest and complete, so that participation in Christian communion could not even be desired), but either human nature will be so defined that a redemption in the strict sense cannot be accomplished, or the Redeemer will be defined in such a way that He cannot accomplish redemption.11

Orthodoxy, then, means consistently holding fast to the proper meaning of ‘redemption’. In the correct sense of the word, redemption is neither the wholesale root-and-branch transformation of human nature that Manichean pessimism would require, nor the straightforwardly self-motivated learning of virtue envisaged by Pelagian optimism, but something, as it were, in between, allowing a much wider range of pessimistic or optimistic Christian selfexpression than would be possible in a purely Manichean or Pelagian church. And, again, Christ could not be our Redeemer either if he were as utterly remote from all the rest of us as Docetic theology suggests; or if he were merely as envisaged by the Ebionites, who on the contrary fail to grasp the full extent of his necessary uniqueness. But we need a doctrine that will allow us a much wider range of possible attitudes of feeling towards him. All

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heresy, according to Schleiermacher, derives from these primary errors, in various permutations. It has to be said, however, that there is a certain laxity in this approach. For, surely, one could be entirely sincere, brilliantly articulate, and perfectly consistent in one’s espousal of orthodox doctrine yet, at the same time, quite insufferably complacent about it! Of course, Schleiermacher is not defending complacency. It is just that he has not built into his theological method any very explicit anxiety about it. He remains, in The Christian Faith just as much as in On Religion, primarily an apologetic theologian, far more intent on defending the faith against its ‘cultured despisers’, by showing its consistency, than on criticizing the church. The result is that he has no particular use for the doctrine of the Trinity. He cannot relate to it as an articulation of the theological challenge of the most radical truth-as-Honesty, because his whole primary concern is with subjective truth-as-correctness. As an apologist for subjective Christian truth-ascorrectness, his eminently sensible strategy is always to head straight for the actual experiences underlying each doctrine. No doubt he is right that this is the best policy for that sort of purpose. But, clearly, the doctrine of the Trinity is not in itself a direct expression of feelings, but rather an assembly of other arguments which are. And therefore he finds he has nothing much to say on the subject; he simply argues that we should not get too worked up about it.12 In short, he is just too exclusively preoccupied with apologetics to have any conception of what I would regard as the proper logic of trinitarian dogma: the articulation of a threefold structure of ecclesial self-critique. He is too exclusively concerned, also in his later thought, with defending the church against its ‘cultured despisers’. And from that point of view, it would appear that he finds the dogma to be little more than an embarrassment. As for Tholuck: his basic criteria for theological truth are much the same as Schleiermacher’s, only he is more polemically rumbustious, urging that Christian theology needs to be purged of ‘alien’ philosophic influences. Thus the basic thesis of Tholuck’s book on the Trinity is that ‘the dogma . . . had been falsely read into practically motivated biblical texts by later theologians influenced by Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism’.13 In particular, he points to the triadic theology of pagan Neoplatonism, and accuses the Church Fathers of having been disastrously seduced by that. Tholuck is unusual in being not only a pietist, but also a historical scholar. And he sets out to use his historical scholarship to back up his argument that the traditional doctrine of the Trinity may be all very well if we regard it as a bit of ‘decorative timbering’, but that it is quite wrong to try to make it the foundation of the house of faith. The Hegelian Eruption Hegel developed his doctrine of the Trinity chiefly in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. These lectures were delivered at Berlin University

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on four different occasions, in 1821, 1824, 1827 and 1831, undergoing considerable modification each time.14 The 1821 lectures do not actually contain a properly trinitarian doctrine. There is a triadic shape to the treatment of Christianity here, but (somewhat curiously!) the third moment is associated with both the Second and the Third Persons at once. In 1824, however, the argument has become fully trinitarian. There are a number of both explicit and implicit critical references to Schleiermacher’s recently published dogmatics in this series.15 By 1827, however, Tholuck’s work had appeared, and that then produces a further shift by way of polemical response.16 It seems to me that Hegel concedes a good deal too much to Tholuck’s argument about the alleged pagan origins of trinitarian thought. ‘Although it must be conceded that the Church Fathers studied Greek philosophy,’ he argues, ‘it is still primarily immaterial where the doctrine came from. The question is solely whether it is true in and for itself.’17 For my part, I rather doubt whether the historic origins of any doctrine can be so easily dissociated from its meaning. And in any case (as I have sought to argue above) there is every reason to suppose that the Christian doctrine of the Trinity would have emerged even without the assistance of Neoplatonist precedents. Tholuck’s historiographical thesis is surely a gross oversimplification, looking, as he does, only to the biblical and philosophical texts which early trinitarian theologians would have read, and not to the larger historic predicament with which they had to deal, the whole thought-provoking social and cultural context of their church life. It is I think a major weakness in Hegel’s argument that he fails to challenge Tholuck in these terms, and that in general he so completely abstracts the doctrine from its concrete historical origins and early evolution. Yet his work surely does represent quite a major fresh eruption. Let us therefore consider the trinitarian argument of the Lectures in relation to the, I think, profoundly momentous christological argument sketched out in his earlier Phenomenology of Spirit. Why is the Phenomenology such a very difficult book? Partly, it is because it represents such an extraordinarily original project, and partly because it is so prodigiously ambitious. It is a systematic study of ‘Geist’, ‘Spirit’ or ‘Mind’. That is, in the terms of my argument, precisely the impulse towards the most radical Honesty, or, rather, the impulse towards an ever greater openmindedness, in every way, towards the deliverances of fresh experience – not only in the sort of interpersonal context where it is most natural to speak of ‘honesty’, but also with regard to the observation of things. It is intended as an analysis of that impulse at every different level of experience: from the infant self’s perception of the surrounding world to the experimental enterprises of the scientist, and from the personal interrelationships of purely abstract individuals to the ways in which individuals are shaped by all manner of different types of historic environment. But right at the philosophico-theological heart of the argument there lies a discussion of the self-in-relation-to-itself. How does Geist figure, at this level?

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Geist is an infinite impulse towards open-mindedness. Ideally therefore it requires that every individual should learn to invest his or her self-esteem in being as open-minded as possible. But this is rare; most often, our self-esteem is bound up with all sorts of closed-mindedness. Hegel refers to the resultant condition of the soul as the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’.18 Let us immediately be clear that what he means is a state of mind which is objectively ‘unhappy’, in the sense that the more someone afflicted by it becomes self-aware, the unhappier they will tend to become. Subjectively, where those afflicted by it remain un-self-aware, they may well be perfectly cheerful, even on occasion quite jubilant. The Unhappy Consciousness is a species of mentality, not a mood. It is simply dishonestyas-banality, again, to the extent that banality is ideologized – not just a deficiency, in other words, but a positive deformation of will. So it includes any sort of clinging to prejudices out of a misconceived sense of duty, or out of a sheer lack of the necessary self-confidence to think for oneself. Now, it is obvious that the Unhappy Consciousness, so defined, is an absolutely universal phenomenon, present in every human culture, or subculture, without any exception at all. But what renders Hegel’s argument interesting is the way in which he nevertheless allusively relates the problematics of the condition, above all, to the particular phenomena of Christian history. He does so because he wants to argue that the essential truth of the Christian gospel lies in its implicit symbolic overturning of the Unhappy Consciousness, and that the whole proper calling of Christian theology must be to try to render that overturning fully explicit, in polemical resistance to the constant resurgence, within the Christian world, of the Unhappy Consciousness now dressed up in Christian form. This produces a very curious passage of philosophic writing. Because he is talking about an absolutely universal phenomenon, Hegel in this passage develops what is really an argument about the true meaning of faith in Jesus Christ, as God incarnate, without ever in fact referring to Jesus, or even to God, by name! The entire argument proceeds by veiled allusion. And yet the allusiveness is necessary because he is not, after all, just talking about Christianity. The point is that he wants to get at the underlying universality of the truth to which the Christian gospel, he thinks, gives uniquely direct particular expression. The Unhappy Consciousness, he argues, is in essence a divided consciousness. It is an inner slavishness, a dishonest internalizing of the relationship between master and slave. To adopt post-Hegelian terminology, one might say that it is where the super-ego domineers over the ego. On the one hand, there is the master-aspect of the self, which insists on all manner of rigid prejudice as being beyond challenge; this Hegel therefore calls ‘the Unchangeable’. And on the other hand, there is the slave-aspect, ‘the Changeable’, the self whose fresh experiences of the world might well uncover all sorts of truth in contradiction to the prejudices of the Unchangeable, if only the Unchangeable, by ceasing to be unchangeable, were to permit it. But

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the objective unhappiness of the Unhappy Consciousness lies in the fact that that does not happen. To some extent, no doubt, the Unhappy Consciousness is a feature of every human life. But what really interests Hegel is the way in which, as he sees it, Christian culture, above all, begins to render the problematics of this universal condition, and its overturning, to a unique degree symbolically explicit. For if one compares biblical monotheism to pagan polytheism, one key difference is the way in which the former offers so much more to the Unhappy Consciousness: the Unchangeable is enabled to project itself, with so much greater authoritarianism, onto the figure of the one Lord God, whose representative it now claims to be. The perennial trembling question of the Changeable, ‘What right have I to think for myself?’ becomes still more daunting: ‘What right have I to defy the Lord God?’ Not that this, in itself, necessarily makes the Unhappy Consciousness worse. But, at all events, it does help render it poetically sharper, more explicit. And that is the first step towards the eventual philosophic clarification of its problematics. In the context of biblical culture the Unhappy Consciousness projects the primary difference between the Unchangeable and the Changeable, within the individual soul, onto the difference between the Lord God and humanity in general, accentuating the sheer fearsomeness of that difference, in order symbolically to reinforce the self-abasement of the Changeable. The God of the Unhappy Consciousness is essentially a remote, celestial finger-wagging prohibiter of free-spiritedness and dissent. But then comes the great reversal: the Lord God, in the Pauline phrase, ‘empties himself, taking the form of a slave’ (Philippians 2:7), to become incarnate. God himself appears in the form of an individual free spirit and dissident. Everything is symbolically turned upside down. So Hegel understands the essential truth of the gospel as a great symbolic negation of the Unhappy Consciousness. But, of course, that negation is only the beginning of a long process of struggle. For the truth in question is a universal one – a truth about the infinite value of all free-spirited human individuality. But the gospel communicates it, symbolically, by way of stories about one particular representative individual. And the resurgent Unhappy Consciousness, within Christianity, then focuses on the sheer particularity of Christ, as an ostensibly reverential way of ignoring his true, universal representativeness. It renders that particularity, as it were, opaque, either depoliticizing the gospel, or else reducing its political significance to the mere worldly self-assertion of the church institution. To be sure, it does not deny that Christ was fully human, for it wants to be orthodox. But it nevertheless turns him into an essentially mythic or legendary figure – a totem rather than a real symbol of inner freedom. This, then, is the basic reason why Hegel thinks the church needs philosophy. Philosophy is needed in order to point through the particularity of the gospel stories, and of gospel imagery, to the ultimate universality of the liberative truth they are meant symbolically to particularize – the truth that is the

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overturning of the Unhappy Consciousness. The whole revelatory meaning of history in general, as he reads it, lies in the long slow work of Geist, towards the practical accomplishment of that overturning. Confined as it always will be to a small intellectual elite, philosophy alone certainly cannot accomplish what needs to be accomplished here; what is wanted is an overturning of the Unhappy Consciousness on a grand scale, such as only religion can address. But this requires a politically effective church community, fully recognizing the proper complementarity of philosophy and religion along these lines. And there are, therefore, three basic ‘elements’, or ‘moments’, to the necessary process – in which Hegel finds the three faces of the Trinity. One might say: the three essential contributions of philosophy, religious symbolism and church organization. Rather curiously – and in my view very regrettably – the actual concept of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ has, so to speak, evaporated from Hegel’s later thought. It is no longer there, as an explicit theme, in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, where he finally develops his trinitarian doctrine. Why this has happened I do not know. When Hegel originally wrote the Phenomenology it was intended as the first part of a larger system of thought, but he never constructed that system, and the system that he did construct in his Berlin period no longer has the Phenomenology as its official way in. So, in general, there is something of a break in his thought between the two works. More specifically, also, he is much more concerned in his later thought to emphasize his claim to be a philosophic defender of theological orthodoxy, and to win friends among the devout. This was for strategic reasons, now that he had at last risen to a position of real academic eminence: a position where, just so long as he did not make too many unnecessary enemies in the Prussian political and religious establishment, he could quite realistically imagine his work, with the backing of that establishment, more or less setting the agenda for the whole future teaching of philosophy in German universities. The argument in the Phenomenology around the concept of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ springs from, and continues to suggest, a fierce critique of the ecclesiastical status quo; perhaps it was just that, in the later period, he preferred to keep his more critical thoughts discreetly implicit. But, in any case, even though the earlier argument has evaporated, that is by no means to say it has been disowned. And, logically, it still I think continues to be the core determinant of the later one, albeit behind the scenes. Thus it seems to me that we have to understand it this way: the three faces of the Trinity, for Hegel, are revealed in and through the three essentially complementary contributions of philosophy, religious symbolism and church organization, to the overturning of the Unhappy Consciousness. Granted, with the evaporation of that concept, his later trinitarian argument is somewhat lacking in existential immediacy. In the Philosophy of Mind, especially, the interrelatedness of the three ‘moments’, as he calls them there, is presented in the most abstract logical fashion as corresponding to the primal triadic structure of ‘universality’, ‘particularity’ and ‘singularity’.19 And yet

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the basic point still remains, for the thinking of the first ‘moment’ concentrates on the transculturally universal significance, in principle, of the liberating truth of Geist, above all surely in relation to the Unhappy Consciousness. In the second, the focus is on the translation of that universal truth into the particularity of particular historical truths, in general, especially, the particular truth of Christian revelation. The third has to do with the historic interplay of those universalizing concepts and particular symbols in helping shape the singular identity of Christian culture as a single evolving tradition. As for the Lectures: it is primarily in his discussion of the first ‘element’ that Hegel himself attempts to set out the proper dialectical triangularity of the three. Thus this passage is very largely an interpretation of the traditional notion of the ‘immanent Trinity’. In the tradition, the immanent Trinity is pictorially conceived as God ‘before’ the creation of the world. But in Hegel’s interpretation that picture becomes an image for the implicitly trinitarian dialectic of all thinking: all thinking – regardless of any particular historically determined stimulus – considered, according to its innermost essential nature, simply as a universal possibility. Beyond all picture-thinking, the truth of the ‘immanent Trinity’ is a direct articulation of the most universal rules of all truth. And of primary importance at this level, Hegel argues, is the universal need of all religious or ethical thinking to transcend abstraction, and attain a maximum concreteness. Real concreteness of thought, however, requires a rich interplay between the universal and the particular: the richer the better. The example he himself uses is the elementary proposition ‘God is love’. To grasp the concrete truth of this requires not only that it be grasped in all its proper universality, but also that it be vividly apprehended in terms of particular memories of divine love in action, brought together as the heritage of a singular organized tradition. And so it is that Hegel’s interpretation of the first ‘element’ already points beyond the confines of that ‘element’ itself, with its prioritizing of universality, to the logical necessity of the other two, to concretize its truth. The first ‘element’ of trinitarian truth, according to this teaching, reflects the whole in the form of the ‘immanent Trinity’; and the other two elements, one might say, then reflect it in the form of the ‘economic Trinity’. Here, that is, we have the actual outworking of the logic of the first ‘element’, in history. Thus the account of the second ‘element’ takes shape as a systematic philosophical working through of the biblical scheme of Creation, Fall and Redemption. The biblical imagery provides a medium for the translation of universal truth into particular stories, a record of particular events, and Hegel here works through the narrative concepts of Creation, Fall and Redemption, essentially as three moments in a cumulative symbolic affirmation of freespirited reason. He identifies the claims of free-spirited reason, in the most decisive way, with the primal telos of Creation as a whole. Systematic philosophy is thinking that systematically rejects subordination to any telos other than that of the spiritually most demanding truth. So, to what end – from that specific perspective – was the world created? It was created, above all, to

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the end that the ‘eternal idea’ might emerge out of the abstractness of pure infinitude and struggle towards appropriate concretion, in the form of reason free-spiritedly at work, transforming the finite. Seen against that background, the primal Fall of humanity appears, first and foremost, as the costly but nevertheless necessary opening up of experience to uninhibited rational investigation (O felix culpa!), whilst, again, Redemption in Christ represents a decisive symbolic anticipation of the free spirit’s final triumph. And, then, in the third ‘element’ we have to deal with the subsequent worldhistorical process of gospel truth – in Hegel’s view, its essentially progressive appropriation by, and dissemination through, the church. The gospel represents universal truth particularized in symbolic form, so that it is the singular, identitydefining vocation of the church, in the deployment of that symbolism, to render concrete a particular form of ethical life ideally faithful to the universal truth thereby transmitted. The Lutheran Reformation is, in Hegel’s version of the story, a key development, inasmuch as it is a great vindication of authentic Christian free-spiritedness, helping liberate the true particularity of the gospel from the false particularism of a worldly church’s mere institutional selfinterest. Moreover, so he claims, philosophy has now, at long last, reached a point where the universal rationality of such free-spiritedness can for the first time properly be clarified. The Unhappy Consciousness is not referred to as such, but this whole argument is nevertheless implicitly about its overturning. Tholuck in particular was accusing Hegel of ‘pantheism’, ominously ranking him with Spinoza and Fichte in that regard.20 But, Hegel responded, Tholuck’s critique sprang from a complete disregard for the proper ‘moment of universality’ in theological reflection: the need for theology to incorporate within itself the primary philosophic move beyond the particularity of the stories and imagery of the gospel tradition so as to grasp its latent universal meaning (in relation to the intrinsic universality of the Unhappy Consciousness). That was why Tholuck could not grasp the point of trinitarian theology; he simply lacked any feel for this, the first of its three ‘moments’, or ‘elements’. He could not see the sense in which Christian truth is essentially a particular symbolic expression of something universal: the universal possibility of inner freedom in the overcoming of the Unhappy Consciousness, a possibility which, in itself, is by no means confined to Christians, even though Christians have unique religious resources for articulating it. Therefore Tholuck could not even begin to engage with the distinctive problematics of First-Person theology. Moreover, Tholuck was also quite wrong to lump Hegel together with Spinoza and Fichte. To do so was precisely to miss the real significance of the fact that, unlike either of them, Hegel was a trinitarian philosopher, one, in other words, who fully acknowledged philosophy’s need for what is religiously other from it. That, after all, is what it means when Hegel presents the specific truth of purely philosophic theology as just one ‘element’ in the life of the Trinity: in so doing he is systematically renouncing, as a philosopher, any ultimate philosophic arrogance over against unphilosophic religion. He is

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owning the ultimate incommensurability of the proper authority of that first ‘element’ to the authority of the other two, all three being equally required in the epic struggle of Geist against the Unhappy Consciousness. Again, what needs combating is the power of the Unhappy Consciousness over society as a whole, and to this end philosophy alone can never mobilize a large enough constituency. But it absolutely needs the assistance of appropriate religious symbolism, and church organization. The Barthian Eruption Barth’s doctrine, meanwhile, represents something quite different. For, whereas the Joachimist tradition is a series of trinitarian eruptions essentially originating in the domain of Third-Person theology, and Hegel’s trinitarian thought erupts out of the domain of First-Person theology, Barth by contrast is first and foremost concerned with what I would call Second-Person theology. One might compare him to Kierkegaard, in that like Kierkegaard he is a Christian thinker very largely responding to the rise, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, of a whole new mode of worldly dishonesty-as-manipulation: the manipulativeness of modern propaganda, rendered possible by the new technologies of mass communication. He is, thus, a theologian constantly battling to preserve the church’s proclamation of the gospel from any form of mere collusion with worldly propaganda-ideology. What first prompted Barth’s breakthrough to a distinctive vision of his own was his, I think, completely justified horror at the spectacle of the German theological establishment selling out to the Kaiser at the outbreak of the First World War. Among the ninety-three signatories of the intellectuals’ pro-war manifesto, issued on 1 August 1914, were almost all of the most prominent academic theologians. The prevailing tone of German theology in that period was ‘liberal’, in the sense that it was largely concerned with the defence of Christian faith as a spiritual deepening of respectable citizenship – or so, at least, Barth now came to see it. This implicitly fundamental commitment to respectability was what troubled him, for when the supposedly respectable thing was to be a patriotic supporter of the war effort, it meant that the gospel tended to become, even more than before, a mere adjunct to the heightened nationalist ideology feeding that effort. Barth’s theology indeed continues, right to the end, along the track it was originally launched on in 1914. Whether it be the world of Wilhelmine Germany, the world of the Weimar Republic, the world of the Third Reich, or the world of NATO and the cold war, it always appears that his dominant practical concern is to try to keep the church as fiercely as possible engaged against the ideological manipulativeness of secular political society. To begin with, in the Wilhelmine world, where the main tendencies within German Protestantism were either a somewhat apolitical pietism or else a direct support for political conservatism, he espoused the nascent oppositional cause of

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‘religious socialism’. Yet once the Social Democrats had been absorbed into the political establishment of the Weimar Republic, he also turned against the thereby, for his purposes, immediately compromised rhetoric of ‘socialism’. And to a large extent the history of the church struggle in the Third Reich looks like a great vindication of his basic stance, since, in hindsight, one can only regret the widespread accommodation of the church establishment to Nazi ideology, against which he and his allies then battled. The core truth of Barthian theology therefore lies in what one might call his confrontational ‘shock strategies’, the strategies by which he seeks to compel his readers to sense the underlying sheer shock of gospel truth in its infinite restlessness, the shock of its absolute antithesis, above all to any form of propaganda-mentality. Unlike Hegel, Barth is not a philosophical, but a biblical, theologian. The basic difference here is not in the first instance a difference of doctrine, but a difference of conversational concern: the biblical theologian is not primarily concerned, as the philosophical theologian is, with conversation between Christian and non-Christian, or between believers and sceptics, but, rather, with the training and preparation of preachers. This involves two disciplines. One is biblical commentary, book by book of the Bible; the other is dogmatics, proceeding theme by theme. Barth’s first great work was his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, published just after the First World War: the original, still ‘religious socialist’, edition in 1918, and the second edition, in which he has left ‘religious socialism’ behind, in 1921.21 His shock strategy in this work is essentially an expressivist rhetoric, designed to re-enter, and so far as possible to revive, the original apocalyptic urgency of the Pauline vision for the modern age. Thereafter, however, he devoted himself above all to dogmatics, in 1931 beginning his monumental Church Dogmatics. And in this his basic shock strategy is indeed none other than an absolutely relentless trinitarianism, which pervades the whole vast work. I remarked above on the underlying motivation of Tertullian’s purely dogmatic–theological trinitarianism, that it was, in essence, all about trying to uphold what Kierkegaard called the proper revelatory ‘offence’ of the gospel. And so it is with Barth also. Gospel truth is offensive in that it is interruptive, always coming as a great interruption to the natural course of human thought and practice. What is new in Barth’s trinitarianism is the sheer radicalism, and sustained energy, with which he interprets it as a doctrine of divine interruptiveness. Revelation is necessary for the simple reason that what is revealed is so wonderfully unnatural. It is, as it were, necessarily an abrupt breaking into the world of human nature. Again and again, it shakes and overthrows our natural prejudices – it is, in principle, the very purest opposite to any mere projection of those prejudices onto heaven. The whole truth of the Incarnation, as Barth interprets it, lies in its character as an ideal paradigm for revelation in this sense: God bursting out of the illusory heaven constructed by conventional devout projection to interrupt the all-toonatural inertia of our habits and self-interest. And the dogma of the Trinity is, then, essentially just an affirmation of the absolute authority of the resultant

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offence. For as soon as one starts talking in trinitarian terms one is immediately re-evoking the paradigmatic divine interruptiveness of the Incarnation: the whence, the how and the whither of that event, that great paradigm act of God, breaking into the world. Or, as Barth himself puts it, the dogma presents us with the three-in-oneness of God as ‘the Revealer, the revelation and the revealedness’ of the highest truth, paradigmatically informing the gospel.22 Here we have the essential interruptiveness of divine reality set out in its elementary one–two–three movement. Nor can there, he further insists, be any authentic content to Christian preaching, or therefore Christian dogmatics, derived from outside the interruptiveness articulated in this threefold dialectic. There is no aspect of divine reality which is not, for the true Christian preacher, decisively informed by it, no proper space whatsoever for any non-interruptive, common-sense knowledge of God, so to speak in addition to revealed knowledge, prior to it or underlying it, to modify and soften its claims. And therefore, he argues, the proper place of the doctrine of the Trinity in dogmatic theology, as a ‘regular’ or systematic science, must be right at the beginning. This is, accordingly, where he places it in his own systematic enterprise: after an opening methodological chapter on the proper relationship of such theology, as he understands it, to scripture and church tradition, he plunges, without further delay, straight into the matter. In this he is, as he remarks, actually ‘adopting a very isolated position from the standpoint of dogmatic history’.23 The mainstream approach of the scholastic tradition is that of Thomas Aquinas, who begins his Summa, instead, with a consideration of what he thinks needs saying about God in pre-trinitarian terms, before going on to deal with the doctrine of the Trinity, in effect, as a secondary matter. The classic tradition of Protestant systematic theology, pioneered by Melanchthon and Calvin, follows the same pattern. And, as we have seen, Schleiermacher, the great pioneer of later liberal Protestantism, goes still further. For Barth, indeed, Schleiermacher implicitly represents a sort of modern reversion to the ‘Modalist Monarchianism’ against which Tertullian had campaigned. 24 In shrinking back from a full-blooded trinitarianism, Schleiermacher develops a theology which is, in the end, all about the negotiating of a sophisticated accommodation with the secular world, largely on the world’s own terms. But Barth’s approach is the exact opposite. In stark contrast to Schleiermacher, he will not countenance any theological debate, ever, on any terms other than those that, properly understood, the doctrine of the Trinity itself suggests. And so what does it mean to understand Barth? Perhaps above all, I think it means to grasp the essential connection between, on the one hand, his role in the 1930s as a leader of church resistance to Nazism and, on the other, the radical trinitarianism of the Church Dogmatics, on which he was working at the same time. The Church Dogmatics, substantively, begins with the doctrine of the Trinity; thereafter, in all its parts, it is a prodigious exercise in systematic theological reflection, all held together by a fundamental determination never

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to stray from what is established in that beginning. That is, it never even for one moment lapses into any talk of God which is not quite explicitly trinitarian. But the point of this ‘orthodoxy’ is not just to be orthodox. It is by no means merely a matter of holding fast to Christian truth-as-correctness, for its own sake. On the contrary, Barth’s whole concern is with the Christian dramatization of the most radical truth-as-Honesty, and, more specifically, with the effective communication of that drama through theologically well-prepared preaching. He is an intransigently trinitarian theologian for no other reason than that he thinks this is the sine qua non for the most honest dogmatics. Barth contra Hegel Barth is also, it has to be said, even if not entirely hostile, nevertheless quite mistrustful of Hegel. In my view the two of them need to be reconciled. But perhaps this is not such a difficult matter after all; it simply requires that we recognize the ultimate true complementarity of their two very different enterprises, biblical and philosophical theology. Again, the basic difference between biblical and philosophical theology derives from their contrasting conversational contexts: biblical theology is oriented primarily towards the preaching and reception of the gospel within the church, whereas Christian philosophic theology is oriented far more towards conversation between Christians and non-Christians, or between believers and sceptics. And this naturally leads to quite far-reaching thematic differences as well. Biblical theology in general is all about mobilizing that which is most positively unique about Christian tradition, its most distinctive poetic resources. This, with regard to the demands of pure Honesty, above all means the uniquely direct symbolic confrontation of the gospel to worldly manipulativeness: God paradoxically revealed in the resurrection of a crucified dissident, that absolute poetic ‘no’ to the manipulativeness of worldly ‘powers and principalities’, understood as the central event of revelation history as a whole. The ideal biblical theologian is in principle, therefore, most fundamentally concerned with the thinking through, and rhetorical refinement, of an impassioned appeal to the manipulated and their manipulaters – an imploring cry of ‘Stop! Stop, and for God’s sake change course!’ But philosophic theology, by its very nature, aims at something else. Hegel’s particular project is a prime example: its main concern must always be, so far as possible, to relate what is unique in any religious tradition to the sheer universality of transculturally universal human experience. With regard to the demands of pure Honesty, this naturally also means beginning from the most universal impulse of all authentic religion: the critique of that most elementary form of dishonesty, the dishonesty of the banal. This sort of theology is all about developing, and holding open a space for, a trans-confessional exchange of experiences and ideas. And so it springs from the endlessly reiterated,

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dispassionate yet friendly, encouraging enquiry: ‘So, what might we learn from one another?’ Good biblical theology, oriented towards preaching, has an intrinsic bias towards the dramatization of salvation history. After all, every good sermon is itself a little bit of theatre, drawing on the dramatic resources of scripture with a view to highlighting the larger theatrical rationale of its liturgical context. And what else is the truth of any truthful sermon if not precisely the most radical truth-as-Honesty dramatically enacted, with real passion, as a compelling moment of interruption? The God of biblical theology is therefore primarily conceived in dramatic terms, as an absolutely sovereign free agent, intervening here and there in history to interrupt our normal, routine dishonesty. Philosophical theology, however, does not have the same priorities. Neither, therefore, does it have the same need for that sort of picture. And, as a result, Barth – biblical theologian as he is, through and through – reads Hegel, a philosophical theologian through and through, and complains of what he provocatively calls Hegel’s ‘identification of God with the dialectical method’, which, he argues, ‘implies a scarcely acceptable limitation, even abolition of God’s sovereignty . . . [so that] this God, the God of Hegel, is at the least his own prisoner’.25 Now, it is true that Hegel does insist on the (he argues) quite demonstrable basic rationality, and in that sense even ‘necessity’, of divine revelation having taken the essential shape it does. But, let us note the polemical background to this. Barth’s general term for everything in the received theological tradition he most fundamentally rejects is ‘natural theology’, which one might perhaps define as whatever tends, by smoothing out the disjunction between revelation and nature, to distract attention from, and so to soften, the elementary conflict between the gospel and the essential manipulativeness of the fallen world. But Hegel, by contrast, in effect directs his equivalent polemic against two somewhat different targets: agnosticism and fideism. The actual terms here, ‘agnosticism’ and ‘fideism’, are admittedly mine rather than his – they are terms which have only gained currency in more recent times, after Hegel’s day. Yet these are nevertheless the two basic tendencies against which all his theological polemic is directed. Thus, by ‘agnosticism’ I mean the general standpoint of one who holds nothing sacred that belongs to any actual, organized tradition of moral authority, that is, the wholesale rejection, not only of what is merely ideological in such traditions, but also of that in them which mediates the demands of Honesty, both quite indiscriminately lumped together. And by ‘fideism’ I mean the general standpoint of one who likewise fails to discriminate, because holding too rigidly to the ambiguous externals of a tradition. Both are forms of fundamental impatience, cutting short proper theological conversation. (The crude agnostic: ‘You say that there are rich funds of potential poetic truth in “revealed” tradition. Maybe. But where there are bigots around I prefer just to keep out of the whole business.’ The crude fideist: ‘How do I know my faith is true? I just do. God has inscrutably, yet overwhelmingly, made it clear to me. And it would

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be a sin for me to start questioning it.’) Hegel is quite relentless in his criticism of both these essentially evasive attitudes, and of any collusion with them. It is his fundamental objection to Kant and Fichte, in particular, that they are apologists for theological agnosticism, just as it is his fundamental objection to thinkers like Tholuck, for example, that they are in the end mere apologists for fideism. Barth charges Hegel with failing to do proper justice to God’s sovereign freedom of action. Certainly it is the case that Hegel criticizes the fideist picture of God as an essentially arbitrary agent. And it is also the case that, as a philosopher, he conscientiously abstains from what, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, he calls ‘edification’, in other words, the sort of uplifting rhetoric typical of fideism.26 Meanwhile, he criticizes agnosticism as being an altogether inadequate critical response to fideism, failing, as it does, to challenge the fideists’ spurious claim to be the prime authentic representatives of orthodox church tradition. And, rejecting agnosticism, he describes true philosophy as a disciplined ascent of the mind to God which ideally culminates in what he calls ‘absolute knowing’.27 Many critics have indeed found this particular anti-agnostic formula to be rather sinister! As does Barth. But what does it actually mean? What this ‘knowing’ knows is just the truth of Geist, that is, the divine imperative of Honesty. It is, in that sense, none other than an absolute openmindedness, or, one might say, an absolute, unguarded vulnerability to conversational challenge – just the sort of vulnerability against which both agnosticism and fideism, in their opposing ways, are intended to guard. Barth wants to defend the biblical picture of God. But Hegel does not challenge this picture in itself, only the fideist abuse of it. Nor is he intent on replacing the biblical picture, in any way, with another picture. Rather, he seeks to supplement the picture-thinking of the Bible with quite another type of thinking, a trans-pictorial type of thinking, which is not in competition with biblical picture-thinking at all. Biblical theology is a discipline of picture-thinking inasmuch as it arises out of, and serves to inform, conversation between people who are essentially bonded together by a shared stock of sacred mental pictures. Philosophical theology involves a form of thinking that is trans-pictorial in the sense that it arises out of, and serves to inform, an altogether broader-based species of conversation process, capable of including people from all sorts of different religious, or irreligious, traditions. Yet both species of conversation process are surely necessary. Both may become host environments for divine Honesty. And so why, after all, should we not quite straightforwardly affirm their ultimate complementarity? It seems to me that this is precisely the essential complementarity between true Second-Person theology and true First-Person theology.

Chapter 5

The Context for First-Person Theology Today: ‘Primal Shakenness’ Directly Apprehended

Let me repeat: not everything reverently, truthfully and significantly said about God as the First Person of the Trinity necessarily belongs to what I am calling ‘First-Person theology’. Karl Barth, for example, has plenty to say about the ‘fatherhood’ of God, but always from what I would call a primarily ‘SecondPerson theological’ point of view, and Joachimist thinkers, likewise, from a primarily ‘Third-Person theological’ point of view. On the contrary, each of these three primary species of theology is essentially distinguished by its addressing a particular set of problems, and the basic determinant of First-Person theology is just that it has to do with the problems, for Christianity, arising out of its relationships to other spiritual traditions. Thus it originates as an attempt to see beyond even the most elementary differences between different cultures. Inasmuch as this species of thinking remains trinitarian, and therefore not overweening, it in no sense merely denies the significance of cultural difference; it is by no means merely a matter of pretending that, ‘Deep down, we are all saying the same, really’! Yet it is, in itself, precisely a response to that particular aspect of divine revelation that is to be encountered at the point where – and to to the extent that – cultural difference ceases any longer to inhibit conversation. So it is an encounter with God as the God, implicitly already, of all peoples, and as the God already, even if anonymously, revealed within every, in the strict sense, ‘religious’ tradition. Second-Person theology, by contrast, has to do with that aspect of the Christian gospel which most profoundly differentiates it from other religious traditions: its origins in a relationship of dramatically confrontational struggle with hostile secular power. In taking up this stance, the early church was of course developing certain deep-rooted aspects of the older Hebrew tradition. After the Constantinian cultural revolution, the general oppressiveness of Christendom kept those problematics alive in the experience of ‘heretical’ and ‘schismatic’ minorities: the trauma of the French Revolution was, again, a great reminder to the Catholic church, and twentieth-century totalitarianism repeated the pattern. But where, on the other hand, a religious community has grown largely by way of military conquest, and has mostly therefore flourished under its own 81

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governance – as in the case of Islam – one scarcely finds any equivalent to the sort of Christian thinking associated with the image of Christ’s cross. And neither does one find much that is immediately equivalent in the religious thinking of India or China, where doctrinal nonconformity has for the most part been so much more gently treated. Third-Person theology, likewise, arises out of aspects of Christian experience for which many other religious traditions have little or no equivalent. For the Christian church was, to begin with, an attempt to develop new patterns of community life strictly on the basis of religious auctoritas alone. It was a project involving the outright repudiation of traditional family values, decisively opposed to the simple givenness of ethnic, caste or clan identities. One finds the same impetus later carried over into the great struggle of the early medieval church – the monastically led struggle which, as I have said, forms the background to Joachim’s thought – against the tribal ethos of the northern European peoples. This culminated in the Gregorian Reform, and the final establishment of universal clerical celibacy, which symbolically lifted the clergy in general out of the traditional network of tribal loyalties. And it is also reawakened today, wherever the church finds itself compelled to confront nationalist ideology, or the politics of mere class interest. Yet there are other religious cultures in which such struggles do not take place, and which, to that extent, lack any real equivalent to the Christian experience of the Holy Spirit. In Judaism, for instance, one sees religious and ethnic identity fused together. In Hindu religious culture, caste difference is sacralized. Nor is there in traditional Chinese society any real religious counterbalance to the demands of ‘filial piety’. The one thing which all the great transformations of the Axial Period have in common, however, is (what I would call) their fundamental ‘religiousness’. Here, then, we have the distinctive theme of First-Person theology: God made manifest in that. ‘Religion’, not ‘Religions’ Or, to put it another way: when we think of the Second Person of the Trinity we think first of what is new in the revelation of God as the crucified dissident, and then of all the various earlier anticipations, and later echoes, of that specific moment. So, too, when we think of the Third Person of the Trinity we think first of the story at the outset of The Acts of the Apostles, the ‘descent’ of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, with which the church as such began; then, of the revelatory process initiated at that moment; and also of what prefigured it, in the history of Hebrew prophecy. But when we think of the First Person the movement of thought is the other way around: we think, first, not of what is newly revealed in the New Testament story, but of the older awareness of God which it presupposes, and then transforms. What is in the foreground here is, thus, not any single event. It is, in general, the longing, the hope, the deep restlessness of spirit which, in Christian history,

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has prepared the way for the revelation of the Second and Third Persons, and which, in other religious cultures, has produced other comparable structures of truth. First-Person theology, on this basis, is therefore essentially Christian reflection on divine revelation in what precedes explicit Christianity – or, by the same token, in what continues to be outside it – and on how that relates to the explicitly Christian. Note: it is perhaps an exaggerated quirk, but I had much rather not speak, in this context, of ‘dialogue’ between ‘religions’, or of ‘inter-faith dialogue’, as is the usual practice. Indeed, I prefer not to speak of ‘religions’ in the plural at all, or of ‘faiths’. (In this I follow Wilfred Cantwell Smith.1) Sacred ideology (like racism) tends to get fixated on the most obvious sorts of difference, so it generally accentuates the divisions between Christianity in general and Islam in general, or ‘Judaism’ in general, or ‘Buddhism’ in general, or ‘Hinduism’ in general, and so forth. Post-ideological thought, on the other hand, needs to be altogether more responsive to the sense in which the more thoughtful forms of Christian existence may actually be far closer in spirit to the more thoughtful forms of Islamic, Jewish, Buddhist or Hindu existence than they are to other less thoughtful forms of Christianity, even when, in the latter case, there is no ideological difference involved at all. Therefore I had rather speak of ‘religion’ and ‘faith’ in the singular, and, in the plural – with deliberate looseness – of ‘forms of religion’ or ‘religious traditions’. This might equally well refer to denominational entities such as Christianity in general, or much more localized sub-denominational phenomena, or transdenominational categories like ‘mysticism’. However, whereas ideology rigidifies the difference between traditions, it is not that post-ideology, as I understand it, simply devalues such difference. Inasmuch as only one tradition can ultimately be ‘correct’, ideology tends to turn conversation into aggressive debate, infusing it with a spirit of boastful, merely argumentative, point-scoring competitiveness, and thereby disastrously inhibiting any genuine give-and-take. Honest post-ideology first of all loosens what ideology, in this way, rigidifies. But the point is that what Honesty is always looking for is rich conversation, and the greater the range of different perspectives – as shaped by diverse experience of life – successfully brought together, in genuine give-and-take, the richer the conversation. When Kant advocates a form of ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’ – based on a radical devaluation of any claim to particular historic revelation, and restricting ‘faith’ to a bare minimum of whitewashed postulates – this is, in my usage of the term, just another form of ideology. Kant seeks to make peace between confessional traditions by stripping them, not of what I would call their ideology, but of their poetry. But post-ideological theology is in principle a quest for the very richest possible poetry to articulate the universal claims of Honesty – poetry at its most intense and engaging. This necessarily also means poetry deep rooted in cultural particularity. In the particular case of First-Person theology what we have to deal with is the impulse to deep Honesty, as that impulse variously comes to poetic

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expression in every religious tradition, without exception. I mean the fresh identification of the sacred, in each case, with something more than mere magical power; the according of sacred authority, in each case, to desires which decisively transcend the universal search for health and economic prosperity; the dawning sense, in each case, of the infinite otherness of the true Good from the natural inertia of the human herd; the turning, in each case, against the sheer banality of the animal laborans. Caught up in its militant struggle against hostile secular government, on the one hand – and, on the other hand, in its bid to establish its own auctoritas over against the claims of nationality, caste and clan – the church has again and again been tempted, cheatingly, to reinforce its power base by making certain quasi-magic promises to its adherents, and by cultivating a certain herd mentality of its own. But the core truth of First-Person theology, I would argue, is simply an absolute ‘no’ to any such self-serving relapse. In principle, this sort of theology is therefore a thinking that is opened up, in friendly conversation, to the critical obervation of outsiders, above all with that end in view. Solidarity of the Shaken/Solidarity among Philosophers And so how is the scene set for First-Person theology today? The past one hundred and fifty years have actually seen a whole series of philosophical moves, prompted by the impact of cultural globalization, to distil that initial moment of religious truth, the simple affirmation of what I propose to call ‘primal shakenness’ – that is, the very purest possible antithesis to dishonestyas-banality – and so far as possible to radicalize it, to articulate it with the very utmost intensity. Jaspers’s work, in relation to his discussion of the Axial Period, is a case in point. But consider also the response first of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and then of Heidegger, to Buddhism in particular. (One might perhaps compare the dialectic at work here with the impact of the discovery of African – and Japanese – art on modernist painting.) Hence it is no longer just a matter of responding to the challenge of Plato, as it once was. Throughout the history of Christian theology, the voice of Plato has indeed always been heard precisely as expressing an authoritative reaffirmation of primal shakenness, in the most universal terms. For the core Platonist distinction between the reality of the ‘Idea’ and the illusoriness of mere ‘opinion’ is, of course, a direct assault on the banality of the herd. ‘Opinions’ are what the herd has; they are what bind the herd together; their muddle is due to the essential unreflectiveness of herd thinking. In Christian theology the name of Plato has typically been associated with the mystical via negativa: relentless negation of everything that belongs to the piety of the pious herd. The gospel story displays the destructiveness of the pious herd mentality in narrative form, as the pious herd is shown there, above all, in the assenting crowd around the cross. But, in a way that has no direct biblical precedents, Platonist philosophy helps draw out the methodological implications of this for theology. The point

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is very simple: herd thinking contents itself with affirmations; it has no feel for ambiguities. True theology, on the other hand – for ever probing beyond the surface affirmation of orthodox truth-as-correctness towards a deeper truth-as-Honesty – senses ambiguity everywhere. It recognizes that no affirmation of faith, that can be at all widely shared, is ever unambiguous, and that every positive affirmation about God, even the originally truest, in so far as it becomes the public property of a herd, is immediately falsified. Therefore, in that sense, it systematically affirms that it is always truer to think of God by way of negation, God being always more than we can say. For traditional Christian theology the prime authority behind this absolutely elementary methodological principle was that of Dionysius the Areopagite, St Paul’s convert at Athens, whose name became attached to the writings of an anonymous sixth-century Syrian monk, the ‘Pseudo-Dionysius’. These writings are the classic source of Christian ‘negative theology’. But they are essentially Platonist in substance. They became, in effect, the chief conduit for Platonism into medieval Christianity. And yet, consider Plato as a strategist. His political thinking is directly oriented towards the construction of a certain form of practical solidarity among the enlightened. However, this solidarity is not in fact simply founded on a sharing in primal shakenness. It is not just the solidarity of the shaken, as such. Instead, it is the solidarity of true philosophers with one another, bound up with the utopian fantasy of a world directly ruled by the philosopherclass. Certainly, a true philosopher, for Plato, will be among the shaken. But to be a Platonist philosopher it is also necessary that one should have received a very particular form of education. One has, in the first place, to come from the most privileged of social backgrounds, so as to have plenty of leisure for study. One needs to have studied a quite specific range of subjects. And philosophy also prescribes a distinctive set of attitudes to those subjects, giving clear precedence to some over others. In particular, it systematically subordinates the disciplines of the imagination, poetry and the other arts to the disciplines of the abstractive intellect. This is what Nietzsche objects to. The Platonist elite laid claim to special prestige on the basis of their particular practice and skill in the meticulous, prosaic analysis of concepts; as articulators of morality, they were above all in rivalry with rhetoricians and poets. And Plato’s fundamental complaint is that the skill of rhetoricians and poets merely helps render their lies more seductive. But, if it is indeed typical of artists to love the products of their imagination more than reality, then Plato, Nietzsche insists, was very eminently an artist himself. The only morally significant way in which he differed from his rhetorician and poet rivals was in the sheer bravado of his manipulative conviction that the products of his imagination actually were reality!2 ‘Plato versus Homer: that is the complete, the genuine antagonism – there the sincerest advocate of the “beyond”, the great slanderer of life; here the instinctive deifier, the golden nature.’3 Both, Nietzsche argues, are great artists.

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Far better, though, in his judgement, is art that is cheerfully and uncomplicatedly artistic, like Homer’s, than art turned against art in the Platonist fashion, art brazenly claiming to be more than art, a jealous art intent on suppressing every supposedly rival genre – in that sense ‘slandering’ the natural, unfettered creative vitality of the human spirit. There are poets in the utopian Platonic republic. But the poetry these poets write is neither vibrant Homeric epic nor any lyric expression of human frailty. Instead, it is always edifying, strictly censored and licensed by philosophy, with its strict identification of wisdom with cool reason and deep mistrust of any real intensity of pathos. And the result, one can only suppose, will therefore be a quite deadly sort of ersatz versification.4 So, on the one hand, Nietzsche’s polemic is directed against popular Christianity: religiosity full of poetic colour, but largely permeated by herd mentality. Yet, on the other hand, it is also directed against Platonism, which certainly challenges any sort of herd mentality, but which at the same time combines that challenge with a certain sort of censoriousness – all too congenial, later on, to the censorious instincts of the Christian clergy. Nietzsche thus represents a first move beyond the Platonist solidarity of true philosophers, as philosophers, towards a philosophical celebration of the pure solidarity of the shaken. He, at any rate, begins the work of explicitly separating out the testimony to primal shakenness in the philosophic tradition from the various forms of ideologized corporate self-interest with which that testimony has come to be mixed, whether it be the ideologized corporate selfinterest of pagan philosophers, of Christian clergy, or of modern secular intellectuals. His celebration of Homer, set over against Plato, symbolically represents a more general attitude: a fundamental affirmation of non-censorious creativity of every sort, a corresponding rejection of ideologically motivated censoriousness of any kind. The Heideggerian Challenge And then comes Heidegger, who is, from this point of view, a profoundly ambiguous figure. For, on the one hand, Heidegger carries forward the movement initiated by Nietzsche, towards an altogether purer appreciation of what (following Jan Pato˘cka) I am calling the ‘solidarity of the shaken’. But, on the other hand, in his impatience for actual practical effectiveness he also regresses – just as indeed Nietzsche continued to do, yet still more disastrously than Nietzsche – into renewed fantasies of philosopher-rule. In what follows, I want to focus especially on Heidegger and on his great critic Emmanuel Levinas. Heidegger and Levinas: two philosophers, not Christian theologians, but arguably, nevertheless, the two most significant twentieth-century thinkers in helping set the scene for any future First-Person theology, the way that Plato helped set the scene for early First-Person theology. They are two great pioneers of a whole new sort of philosophy, very directly

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concentrated on the vindication of primal shakenness, purely and simply as such, at its most intense. We begin by considering how Heidegger goes beyond Nietzsche. There are I think three basic aspects to this. In the first place, whereas Nietzsche critically contrasts Plato’s censorious artistry with the innocent art of Homer, Heidegger’s preference is for the altogether more anguished, and clearly shaken, sort of poetry paradigmatically represented, for him, by Hölderlin. Second, he also contrasts Plato’s de-poeticized metaphysics, in a way that Nietzsche does not, with the (he argues) not yet metaphysical thinking of the Presocratic philosophers, chiefly Heraclitus and Parmenides. But then, third, he also turns against Nietzsche in a much more radical fashion, repudiating what he calls Nietzsche’s own lingering attachment to ‘metaphysics’. By this he means the way in which Nietzsche polemically generalizes his critique of dishonesty in Christian form, into a wholesale onslaught on Christianity itself – to all appearances, as though what really mattered here was the knocking down of a particular structure of metaphysical beliefs, and the Nietzschean analysis of corrupted Christian ‘will to power’ were merely a means to that end. Not so, from the Heideggerian point of view. Indeed, absolutely to the contrary: the real truth of the Nietzschean critique will only emerge in so far as it is quite explicitly and decisively set apart from that sort of stillmetaphysical conception of what is at stake. Thus, when Heidegger describes his own thinking as a decisive ‘step back’ from metaphysics, what he is primarily criticizing is just what I would call ‘ideologized’ metaphysics, as well as ‘ideologized’ dogmatic theology. The basic problem with Plato, according to this analysis, is that he is, above all, the thinker who first disastrously reduced the philosophic pursuit of alétheia – ‘truth’, one might say, in the sense of any valid registering of primal shakenness – to the mere pursuit of orthotés, that is, ‘correctness’ (or so, at any rate, Heidegger argues in his major works on the topic). 5 Alétheia, etymologically, is ‘unconcealedness’. It is, Heidegger contends, ‘truth’ originally as a quality of certain events – a certain species of event, wherever ‘concealment’ falls away. By whatever means. But orthotés, by contrast, is correctness: pre-eminently a quality of good philosophic doctrine, demanding, above all, conceptual precision and consistency rather than ‘mere’ poetic evocativeness. Heraclitus and Parmenides are pre-metaphysical philosophers, for Heidegger, basically it seems in so far as they are poetic philosophers. For the Presocratics in general the name of the deepest alétheia was phusis (‘nature’); the thought of Heraclitus, or of Parmenides, was essentially intended as an evocation of phusis. Plato, however, aims for something else – just by virtue of the way in which he opposes philosophy to poetry. The poetic mythmaking interludes in his dialogues are clearly marked off from the more serious business of conceptual refinement, as moments of playful relaxation. So, in Plato’s

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thinking, the problematics of phusis give way to the problematics of the idea: a bid to capture reality in a single correctly defined (and therefore legitimately intolerant) doctrinal tradition, aggressively privileging the philosopher’s pursuit of correct definitions over the poets’ or rhetoricians’ quest for eloquent evocativeness. This aggression, for Heidegger, is ‘metaphysics’, which then progressively continues to detach philosophic ‘truth’ from the original, ‘true’ sense of alétheia. To this extent, the Heideggerian Plato-critique simply echoes the Nietzschean. Only, the difference is that Heidegger’s step back from metaphysics is a step back from any sort of thinking that would restrict our openness to the intrinsic perspectival pluralism of poetic truth, whether the restrictive thinking be Platonist metaphysics, Christian dogmatic orthodoxy – or the Nietzschean antithesis. Nietzsche refuses to allow for the possibility of poetic truth in Christian form. He, to all intents and purposes, rejects Christianity as being intrinsically incorrect. Yet the poetic evocation of primal shakenness, deep Honesty, is clearly possible within all manner of different doctrinal religious contexts, Christian as well as non-Christian. And therefore Heidegger, by contrast, systematically brackets debate concerning the relative merits of this or that such context. He does not want to talk about God – either to affirm or to repudiate theistic faith, in any form. True, he will happily talk about ‘the gods’, but that is just because there is in our culture no grand imposing metaphysical orthodoxy with regard to such talk. It is generally tolerated as a poetic conceit, and a poet like Hölderlin may perhaps transform it into something much more; however, it does not stir metaphysical passions. Unlike Nietzsche, Heidegger wants to set such passions altogether aside. And so, instead of ‘God’, he speaks of ‘Being’. He insists on the absolute theological neutrality of the term, and uses it, one might say, in pre-emptive fashion, to block up the space where talk of God might otherwise arise. This is by no means agnosticism: unlike Kant, Heidegger has no desire to prohibit theology as a thinking through of divine revelation. But his ‘thinking of Being’ is designed to remain systematically set apart from theology, the better, as he sees it, to bear witness to the truth of primal shakenness, in all its intrinsically trans-confessional universality. To be sure, that is also what Hegel, above all, is already saying to us, from within the theological tradition (if only we can get back behind that other element, the layer of Christian–confessional apologetics, with which Hegel increasingly covered up his argument). And, as a Christian theologian, I naturally want to argue that in the end the Hegelian strategy of direct philosophic engagement with theology is preferable to Heideggerian separatism. But Heidegger, I think, nevertheless represents a theologically very instructive variant on the theme – instructive, just because of how he secularizes it, poeticizes it, and compels us to consider it afresh in the twentieth-century context, not least by mixing it with such very dubious politics.

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Levinas’s Critique of Heidegger Heidegger was, of course, not only a philosophical genius, but at the same time also a Nazi! And so what, exactly, was it that went wrong? Let us consider Levinas’s diagnosis. Levinas’s whole thought is shaped by his response to Heidegger. And it certainly is a response of the most thoroughgoing repudiation. Heidegger prides himself on his transcendence of ‘metaphysics’, and his overcoming of the heritage of Plato; Levinas presents his own thought both as a renewal of ‘metaphysics’ and, more particularly, as a revival of Platonism. What Nietzsche and Heidegger criticize in Plato is Plato’s mixing of his testimony to primal shakenness with an aggressive form of corporate conceit, glorifying philosophy in opposition to poetry. But, then, Heidegger’s thought is equally aggressive, only in another way. It is equally bound up with a certain yearning for coercive, censorious power, even though that yearning is in his case eventually tempered by despair. Unlike Plato, Heidegger does not restrict his party to philosophers as opposed to poets. On the contrary, he is a poetic nationalist: the Heideggerian party includes any sort of thinker – poet or poetically minded philosopher – who seeks to mediate a vivid testimony to primal shakenness through an encompassing loyalty to the poetic element in German national tradition. The basic trouble with Heidegger, it seems to me, is that, whilst he develops an admirable critique of one particular form of corporate conceit, that which comes to expression in ideologized metaphysics and theology, he nevertheless does not explicitly reject the politics of corporate conceit as such; but, in effect, opts for a poetic–nationalist form instead. As a Jew, interned by the Nazis in 1940 as a French prisoner of war, Levinas is, naturally enough, repelled by this. And, as a philosopher, he seeks to get beyond intellectual partisanship of any sort. Heidegger theoretically founds his trans-metaphysical partisanship on the repudiation of Plato’s metaphysical partisanship; Levinas responds by defending Plato. But it is not Plato’s partisanship that he defends. It is not that Levinas wants to reinstate the old Platonist privileging of doctrinal correctness over poetic evocativeness. On the contrary, his own thinking is entirely evocative. But he simply refocuses on Plato’s other teaching, the Platonist testimony to primal shakenness. Plato, in the Republic, affirms such shakenness in terms of a quest for the Good that is ‘beyond Being’, where ‘Being’ is whatever is apprehended with anything less than the most intense thoughtfulness. 6 This notion of ‘Being’ is, of course, the exact opposite of what Heidegger means by the trans-metaphysical truth of ‘Being’. And yet Levinas, mischievously, adopts the Platonist formula as his own, very much by way of symbolic antithesis to Heidegger.7 And, in the same way, he also opts to use the term ‘metaphysics’ in a much less ambivalent way than Heidegger does, emphasizing its potential conveyance of primal shakenness far more than its potential ideologization. His whole relationship to Heidegger thus takes shape as a deliberate, angry talking at cross-purposes. Where Heidegger speaks, interchangeably, of ‘metaphysics’

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and ‘onto-theology’, Levinas affirms ‘metaphysics’ while rejecting both ‘ontology’ and ‘theology’, both of which, in his usage, effectively refer to forms of thinking compromised by intellectual aggression, mere bids for domination, supposedly in the name of doctrinal correctness.8 Heidegger’s Grand Narrative However, Levinas not only rejects Heidegger’s partisan political ambitions, and his core terminology. He also repudiates what Heidegger’s thought, most intriguingly, has in common with traditional Christian theology, that is, Heidegger’s attempt to develop his own trans-metaphysical functional equivalent to Christian salvation history – the Heideggerian grand narrative. By ‘grand narrative’ I mean any narrative told by a community •

• •

situating that community’s own particular history within the general context of human history as a whole, with a view to establishing, in historical terms, its members’ claim to be the pioneers of a truth universally valid for all humanity; designed for ambitious missionary use, and therefore intended especially to diagnose the reasons for the historic suppression of that truth, and to celebrate its struggles, from a missionary point of view; and investing the this-worldly historic hopes of the narrating community with maximum authority.

The first ever such narrative – sufficiently large scale, sufficiently missionary in orientation, sufficiently this-worldly in its associated hopes, to qualify – was the Christian gospel. (In itself, Platonism lacks the large-scale historiographical scope; traditional Judaism lacks the missionary ambition; classical Buddhism repudiates the attachment to this-worldly aspirations.) And here, again, we encounter the elementary trinitarian shape of the gospel: the three criteria I have listed clearly correspond to the three domains of FirstPerson, Second-Person and Third-Person theology. In so far as ‘modernity’ is definable as that which is constituted by grand narrative, then modernity began at Pentecost, with the original transformation of Jesus’s disciples into a church. Since then, grand narrative has also developed in Islamic form. And from the Enlightenment onwards there have started to appear the various secularized versions, as well. In the world of political parties these may be said to have crystallized into three main overlapping types: liberal, socialist and messianic nationalist. But the later Heidegger is, without any doubt, one of the truly great constructers of grand narrative. Thus he seeks not so much to confront Christian faith as to encompass it – within a scheme which, if accepted, would indeed transform its traditional self-understanding, yet not destroy it. He builds a grand narrative (fascinatingly akin, yet in contrast, to Hannah Arendt’s,

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considered above) tracing the historic trajectory of metaphysics, in that sense, as he himself puts it, a history of ‘the oblivion of Being’. Levinas, on the other hand – like the earlier Heidegger of Being and Time, yet ferociously turning against the later Heidegger – prefers, as a philosopher, to abstain from grand narrative entirely. This general rejection of grand narrative is of course to be found in a very great deal of contemporary thought – everything that is termed ‘postmodernist’. But Levinas is at least arguably the most formidable representative of such thinking, in religious terms. So he turns away from grand narrative to develop an ethics framed in terms of a purely trans-historical phenomenology of interpersonal relationships, as the only appropriate approach. And there clearly is a radical challenge here, also, for any form of trinitarian theology. For what else, after all, is the dogma of the Trinity if not a framework for grand narrative? As a Christian theologian I want to affirm the ultimate potential validity of grand-narrative thought. Certainly, I think we need to take Levinas’s repudiation of such an approach very seriously. But I also think we need to take the Heideggerian doctrine, which he is reacting against, no less seriously, because it is such a strangely thought-provoking mix of genuine wisdom with folly. So, let us consider it, this grand narrative of Heidegger’s. In general, I think Heidegger represents a crucial challenge to Christian theology precisely by virtue of his principled refusal directly to engage with it, his flamboyant withdrawal from it, on the grounds of its traditional mixing together, and confusion, of primal shakenness with metaphysics. The challenge lies in the way he positively compels us, in response, to try to unravel that traditional confusion. It is indeed a quite unprecedented challenge. And his grand narrative is essentially framed as a systematic analysis, explanation and vindication of that unprecedentedness. Underlying the story as a whole is a basic appeal to German people’s pride in Germany as a nation, pre-eminently, of ‘Denker und Dichter’, ‘thinkers and poets’; its designated carrier community is the class of nationalistically minded German intellectuals, whose nationalism is inspired by that pride. But German national identity cuts across the metaphysically grounded divisions between Catholic and Protestant, Christian and unbeliever; at the pre-political level it is these metaphysical differences that represent the chief rivals to Germanness, as a focus for German people’s loyalty. And Heidegger’s primary concern is with the pre-political grounding for an ideal nationalism. Hence his preoccupation with the overcoming (for this purpose) of metaphysics as the special pioneer vocation, he thinks, of the German intellectual community, its exemplary gift to the world at large. The history of metaphysics, as he sees it, begins in ancient Greece and culminates in modern Germany: the world of Kant, of Hegel, and of Nietzsche. One finds German intellectuals seeking to define the German national vocation in terms of a special relationship with ancient Greece, repeatedly, from the eighteenth century onwards. Hölderlin, in particular, is a very striking example. And Heidegger admires Hölderlin extravagantly. In his famous letter to

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Böhlendorf, Hölderlin speaks of two primary elements, the perfect combination of which would constitute the highest wisdom: on the one hand, ‘fire from heaven’, a blazing uncensored spontaneity of creative enthusiasm; on the other hand, ‘clarity of representation’, the fruit of sober reflectiveness.9 Ancient Greek culture, as Hölderlin sees it, was uniquely rich in fire from heaven; that was its distinctive strength. But in order for humanity to learn clarity of representation, there was necessary a long discipline of – at least to some extent – doing without such fire. Modern German culture is the product of that long discipline; its distinctive strength is its clarity of representation. ‘Greece’ and ‘Germany’ thus symbolically stand for two opposing types of culture. In each case the great task, the essence of salvation, is to reach out towards the alien quality: in ancient Greece, the great artists and thinkers were those who most successfully worked at clarity of representation; in Germany, the equivalent task is to lay oneself so far as possible open to the fire from heaven. So Hölderlin suggests. We are no longer fired by fire from heaven as the ancient Greeks were. In his poetry Hölderlin represents this loss as a departure of the gods. But where Hölderlin argues mythopoetically Heidegger writes in grand-narrative terms: the departure of the gods, for him, comes about in and through the development and eventual triumph of metaphysics. And the requirements of any future possibility of redemption are to be thought through, again, in relation to the subsequent history of metaphysics. There are in Heidegger’s account, it would appear, two basic stages to the redemption struggle within modern Germany. The first is the moment of Hölderlinian truth, against the background of the Enlightenment. The second is the moment of his own breakthrough, against the background of the development of bureaucratic mass society, ‘the age of the world picture’, with its idolatrous relationship to technology. The truth of primal shakenness – in Heidegger’s terms the truth beyond ‘truth’, beyond metaphysics, pure alétheia – is a religious truth. That is, it is a response to sacred authority, to all the accumulated authority of one’s own cultural traditions at their best, now experienced as demanding an infinite impassioned self-questioning thoughtfulness. The trouble with metaphysics, from this point of view, is just that it lowers the emotional intensity of the demand. In place of the sheer demand – which is the voice of primal shakenness, or in Heidegger’s terms the mystery of ‘Being’ – metaphysics presents us with a mere theory. Classical metaphysics begins the process, with its privileging of philosophic prose, as the articulation of correct doctrine, over any sort of more evocatively intense poetic utterance. This is done largely in the interests of a Platonist or Christian power elite, intent on keeping the critical negativity of primal shakenness within strict limits and under control. But Enlightenment metaphysics – culminating with Kant – goes still further. It privileges, methodologically, the standpoint of the private individual: the abstract ego cogitans, whose spiritual identity is systematically abstracted from any

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loyalty to a given sacred tradition, and to that extent is decisively insulated from all the various emotional energies bound up in such tradition. To be sure, Descartes, the originater of this revolution, remains a good Catholic. But Descartes’s thinking does not formally begin from his Catholic faith. It is no longer, like the old scholastic metaphysics it supplants, directly conceived as a process of ‘faith in search of understanding’; instead, in methodological terms, it begins from doubt. And this doubt presupposes an absolute reduction of Catholic faith to the level of mere metaphysical opinion. For what Descartes first doubts, and then seeks to re-establish, is truly nothing but a set of metaphysical opinions, and to that extent, for Heidegger, this represents a yet deeper fall into ‘the oblivion of Being’. ‘But yet beside danger grows/That which saves’ – as Hölderlin puts it in the opening lines of his poem Patmos. Out of the Enlightenment, in critical response to it, there then comes the great surge of philhellenic communitarianism whose most intense exponent is Hölderlin himself. Hölderlin’s whole work expresses the most poignant visionary revulsion against a world of inwardly isolated individuals, in which the most isolated of all is precisely the shaken poet. This is the world which produced the Enlightenment, whose values the Enlightenment reinforces. And for Hölderlin it is hell. It is hell because of its sheer suppression of poetic primal shakenness, in Hölderlin’s heretical terms, its god-forsakenness. To the extent that the Enlightenment has successfully helped dissolve the old bonds of sacred tradition, the effective bonding together of society is more and more left to the mere operation of herd instinct, the banality of the animal laborans, legitimated by secular ideology. Hölderlin’s poetry is, in essence, a passionate attempt to reach back, beyond the immediate conflict between the protagonists of the Enlightenment and their orthodox church opponents, to an altogether deeper ideal of primally shaken, richly poetic religiousness which, in his view, both alike have betrayed. On the other hand, after Hölderlin’s day – as Heidegger sees it – the clouds have darkened yet further. The world has grown yet more forgetful of Being, as the age of the Enlightenment has given way to the still developing ‘age of the world picture’.10 This is the thought-world of rampant bureaucracy. It is fundamentally characterized, for Heidegger, by the conversion of academic work into a quasi-industrial process: divided up into different institutionalized disciplines and methodologies; pushed forward by teams; responding to commissions from funding institutions and publishers. By the ‘world picture’ Heidegger means the sum of all the various serviceable maps of reality produced, not by autonomous scholars, but by researchers belonging to this quasi-industrial process. These mental maps, at their best, are true not because they are authoritative, but only because they are useful. This is an age which sees a further decline in the authority of sacred tradition, directly corresponding to, and produced by, the rise in the prestige of inwardly detached scientific research. But if true ‘thinking’, in the strict sense, is a response to primal shakenness, then such research work is not, in that sense, thinking!11 On the contrary: it is the main substitute for thinking, now, in the world of what

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Ernst Jünger calls ‘total mobilization’: mass society, as a single vast economic enterprise, driven by the sheer inertia of technological advance.12 In this context, the ‘oblivion of Being’ is pushed to its ultimate extreme. ‘But yet beside danger . . .’ The age of the world picture is also the provocation for the grand narrative by which it is finally called into question. From a political point of view it is an age torn between the two great alternatives of Bolshevism and ‘Americanism’. But what Heidegger is looking for is quite another ideal – a form of politics altogether determined by the demands of true thinking, in its absolute transcendence of any mere ‘world picture’. Heidegger’s grand narrative is teleologically shaped by a certain hope, for cultural revolution, which he never abandons. After his brief involvement in the actual turmoil of political intrigue, in 1933–34, he quite quickly abandoned any anticipation of its imminent realization. But, under cover of that despair, the actual hope itself surely remains, unchanged, if only with the effect of excluding any other sort of hope that might replace it. What is it that he hopes for? No doubt, tactical considerations in 1933–34 made him appear a good deal more straightforwardly Nazi than he was, while the subsequent pressures – first of Nazi censorship and then, I guess, after the war, acute embarrassment – led him to prefer a rather lofty mode of prophetic indirectness. Basically, though, it is clear that what he is looking for is a government eager to devote every sort of resource at its disposal to an ideal programme of education. In short, he wants the state to dedicate itself to instilling, in the people at large, a new sense of respect for sacred authority, strictly on the understanding that the true bearers of that authority are none other than the great articulators of primal shakenness. That was what, at the time of the Nazi revolution, he quixotically hoped the new regime might in fact begin to try to do. In this sense, his aim, like Hölderlin’s, is to get back beyond the God of orthodox church metaphysics, but also beyond the merely metaphysical rejection of that God, to the truly ‘divine’ God: the God of the most profoundly shaken sacramental poetry. Like Hölderlin, Heidegger is looking for an ideal religious culture in which that God would at the same time, so far as possible, become the God of popular religion.13 And then, in addition, he is hoping for a political regime which would actually share that aspiration, and act, in revolutionary fashion, to promote it. His grand narrative is the story of that hope; what has deflected and delayed it; but also how it has, nevertheless, eventually emerged clear. That is, he is, in the broadest terms, tracing a history of confusion. He is trying to show, first, how the intrinsic truth of primal shakenness has been mistakenly identified with the particular metaphysical forms through which it has historically come to expression. And second, how it has (he thinks) at long last now become possible for that age-old confusion finally to be dispelled.

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The Levinasian Alternative I think that there is a good deal of real, pioneering truth in the underlying prepolitical Heideggerian critique of ideologized metaphysics at the heart of this grand narrative. Indeed, at the pre-political – and therefore also pre-theological – level, in a sense I am simply trying here to tag along where he has opened up the way. Yet it is not only that he was briefly, in the first few months of the Third Reich, an active Nazi. He was also, later, notably dishonest about his own past.14 Nor did he ever manage to find any form of reflection adequate to the trauma of the Holocaust, a failure which has of course often been remarked on, and rightly so. It is hard to imagine a more troubling cautionary tale for the future of philosophy. So, then, any serious discussion of his legacy has to come circling back to the question: how deep does the trouble go? For Levinas, in particular, it is plain: recoiling from Heidegger’s error, as I have said, he repudiates not only Heidegger’s grand narrative but the whole genre, grand narrative in general, as if Heidegger’s very option for grand narrative, in itself, was already a factor in his fall. In Levinas’s thought, that is, we encounter a radical exploration of primal shakenness, directly identified with postmodernist taboos – postmodernism at its most religious, and theologically disturbing. For his approach is one of purely transhistoric phenomenology: transhistoric phenomenology versus ‘theology’, presented as an attempt to rescue the innermost essence of Hebrew scriptural truth from its Christian theological distortion. The closest precedent for such phenomenology is Heidegger’s Being and Time. But, already before the supposed fall of Heidegger’s thought into grand narrative, Levinas finds in Being and Time a still deeper-rooted problem, helping render possible that later fall. Thus both thinkers are in my terms theoreticians of primal shakenness – seeking to isolate the experience of primal shakenness, in itself, and to radicalize it. But the difference is precisely in the way they identify the roots, in each case, of their own particular forms of shaken thought. The shaken thinker is shaken, primally – by what? For Heidegger, it is by encounter with the trans-metaphysical mystery of ‘Being’. For Levinas, however, it is by encounter with the transhistoric reality of ‘the Other’, in other words, the otherness of the other person, one’s neighbour, encountered simply as such – or as a ‘face’ – at a level beyond any historically or biographically determined identity, yet encountered, also, as in principle requiring a response of absolute dedication and service. ‘Being’, in the Heideggerian sense, has a history: of being forgotten, in metaphysics; and then of being remembered again, in the formation of new, decisively trans-metaphysical loyalties. But to encounter the Other, in the Levinasian sense, is to set history aside. For it is to encounter that deepest level of ethical obligation which absolutely transcends any sort of historically informed communal loyalties. In a context of communal hostilities and persecution, most dramatically, it is the upsurge of conscience that may lead

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one, even perhaps at great risk to oneself, to abandon such historic loyalties, and defend or seek to rescue an individual belonging to the enemy community, as under Nazi rule for instance some Gentiles, despite everything, protected Jews. The chief moral justification of philosophy, for Levinas, evidently lies in its potential role as a vindication of this elementary instinct, over against all the various veilings and rationalizations of self-interest which might tend to suppress it. Levinas throws a large conceptual net around everything, in the history of philosophy, that he wants to criticize. And he calls it ‘ontology’. The net is so called because the particular fish he is most of all concerned to catch in it is Heidegger, the thinker of ‘Being’. But it is a large net, pretty well as large as Heidegger’s own comparable net, of ‘metaphysics’. It is not only Heidegger, the admirer of the Presocratics, who is caught in it. Socrates is there, too,15 and indeed (notwithstanding Levinas’s special admiration for Socrates’ disciple Plato) more or less the whole post-Socratic tradition. ‘Ontology’, in this Levinasian sense, is philosophy’s collusion with what he calls the ‘idea of totality’. His first great book is entitled Totality and Infinity. The ‘infinity’ in question is the properly infinite ethical demand intrinsic to the primal encounter with the Other. But ‘totality’ is whatever, in the domain of human thought, tends to suppress that, and especially with a grand-narrative flourish. The book opens with a discussion of ‘war’: in the broadest sense, as that which ‘suspends morality’. But, Levinas argues, The aspect of being made manifest in war is fixed in the concept of totality, which dominates Western philosophy. Individuals are reduced to being the bearers of forces which direct them without their realizing it. The meaning of individuals (invisible outside of this totality) is derived from the totality. Each present moment’s uniqueness is continually sacrificed to a future on which its objective significance supposedly depends. For only the final meaning counts; it is only in the last act that beings become themselves. They are just whatever the already plastic forms of the epic will reveal them to be.16

Note, though, that there are two aspects to this. On the one hand, Levinas is concerned – in his own very distinctive fashion – with the difference between what I have been calling truth-as-Honesty and truth-as-correctness. The sort of philosophic doctrine he is criticizing is, to this extent, any systematic pursuit of truth-as-correctness, as the ultimate goal. But, on the other hand, he also develops a closely intertwined, yet quite distinct (and I think altogether more questionable) critique of the mainstream philosophical tradition, for its general idealization of ‘freedom’. And these two aspects of his argument also correspond to the two sides of his crucial relationship with Heidegger. Levinas with Heidegger In the first place, the Levinasian category of ‘philosophy dominated by the concept of totality’ clearly includes any doctrine limiting the claims of primal

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shakenness by, in any way, subordinating them to those of a particular form of (supposed) onto-theological truth-as-correctness, that is, any form of what I would call sacred ideology. In this first aspect of the matter Levinas is essentially carrying forward the Heideggerian argument by other means, so to speak adding an extra ‘ethical’ thrust to what Heidegger is already saying, confronting the same opponents, from another angle. In Heideggerian terms: if onto-theology seeks to interpret ‘Being’ in the sense of the basic ordered coherence of the totality of ‘beings’, then Heidegger’s own thought by contrast is an evocation of the sublime difference between ‘Being’ and ‘beings’, that is, the difference between a genuine registering of primal shakenness, Heidegger’s goal, and even the most perfect and comprehensive attainment of onto-theological truth-as-correctness. In Levinasian terms, if onto-theology is a systematic investigation into the overall correctness of what is said about God, and about Being in general, then Levinas’s own thought is, again, an evocation of that which for ever eludes such thought, namely, truth as a quality not of ‘the said’ but of ‘the saying’ – in the sense of that which evokes sheer ‘exposure to another’.17 ‘The said’ presents itself for judgement; it is what is either correct, or not. But, in its difference from ‘the said’ – and quite regardless of what is said – ‘the saying’ is nothing other than a trans-theoretical moral claim: the always infinite moral claim upon me of the Other, the speaker, demanding an honest response from me. This moral claim is infinite, in that it is not for me to limit it by judging it, but only to be shaken by it. ‘The said’, alone, invites judgement. ‘The saying’ really is of quite another order. And Levinas’s whole thought-project as a philosopher is, in effect, to try to evoke the larger phenomenological context for that elementary distinction. So the Heideggerian differentiation between ‘Being’ and ‘beings’ mutates into the Levinasian differentiation between ‘the saying’ and ‘the said’. Levinas speaks of the ‘anarchy’ of religious truth. What exactly is the form of rule that is overthrown in this anarchy? It is just the supposed hegemony of truth-as-correctness, in the religious domain, as distinct from sheer truth-asHonesty, responding to the absolute immediacy of one’s encounter with the Other. Heidegger does not express it this way. And yet, in his own way, he too is an anarchic thinker; the sublimity he evokes is also an anarchic principle. The relationship between Levinas and Heidegger is at least partly an alliance. Levinas against Heidegger However, in its other aspect, this relationship becomes an outright opposition. Again to quote Levinas’s own formulation, he opposes Heidegger on the grounds that to affirm the priority of Being over existents [as Heidegger does] is . . . to subordinate the relationship with an existent someone (the ethical relationship) to a relationship with the Being of existents. Which, in its impersonality, permits one,

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Partly I agree with this – but partly I am unsure about it. No doubt it is true that Heidegger’s presentation of the highest religious truth in terms of an ‘impersonal’ relationship to ‘Being’ results in a very much less direct evocation of the primal demands of pure Honesty than Levinas’s. For Honesty is first and foremost a relationship to the Other, not to ‘Being’. Yet then it appears that Levinasian ‘justice’ involves giving up any aspiration to the ‘freedom’ which belongs to ‘knowledge’. And what does this mean? The context of the passage I have cited juxtaposes Heidegger, most significantly, with Socrates. The knowledge that is correlated to freedom for Socrates is, of course, a form of spiritual excavation. It is a matter of discovering, consciously, what one already knows unconsciously. One comes to such knowledge through a process of introspective recollection: digging down beneath the concealment of superficial ‘opinion’, mere conventionality, learnt from outside. In this sense the true wisdom which philosophy is to love is a knowledge of the world arising out of judgements informed by authentic self-knowledge, attained through a disciplined cultivation of inner autonomy. Levinas’s verdict is vigorously expressed: This was Socrates’s teaching: to receive nothing of the Other but what is in me, as though from all eternity I was in possession of what comes to me from the outside – to receive nothing, or to be free . . . The ideal of Socratic truth thus rests on the essential self-sufficiency of the same, its identification in ipseity, its egoism. [Socratic] philosophy is an egology.19

And therefore it is false. Compare Being and Time. Heidegger does not refer to Socrates here. But again it is true that, deep down, his argument may very well be seen as springing from the Socratic tradition. For what else is Being and Time if not an elaborate phenomenological analysis of the preconditions for just such knowledge, just such freedom? The transition from Socratic recollection to Heideggerian Eigentlichkeit (authenticity, genuine owning of that which is one’s ‘ownmost’) involves a thick accretion of themes deriving (via Kierkegaard) from Christian spirituality, although systematically lifted out of their original Christian theological context: centring upon the intrinsic revelatoriness of Angst, most radically ‘in the face of death’. But from Levinas’s point of view Socrates and Heidegger are the two great representative figures standing at either end of the dominant philosophical tradition he is intent on dissolving.

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Levinas rejects this whole ideal of freedom-as-knowledge because of its introversion, that is, its lack of direct reference to the claims of the Other. Socratic freedom is a matter of ‘receiving nothing of the Other but what is in me’ already. But the knowledge on which it depends is a gift – in Heideggerian terms, a gift from the bounty of ‘Being’ – which is mine to appropriate, and so to possess, as Levinas says, to ‘dominate’. Against this, Levinas for his part speaks of another sort of freedom, one with which we are ‘invested’ precisely by submission to the claims of the Other. Here we have freedom not in dominating, but, paradoxically, in being dominated, not by any manipulative ideology – not by any ‘idea of totality’ – but, on the contrary, by the sheer infinity of the moral claim inarticulately present in the sheer ‘proximity’ of the Other. This moral claim is simply there in the face of the Other, quite regardless of any sense of biographical or historic identity that might qualify the encounter and inhibit one’s primitive exposure to it, by giving one something there to judge. This is thus a freedom in the radical abandonment of judgement, a freedom in ‘passivity’. It is an uttermost passivity, the passivity of a ‘hostage’ – Levinas seeks to express it as provocatively as he can. The point is to cut away at the very deepest roots of aggressive corporate conceit, its most hidden roots, its deep-rootedness even in the very noblest-seeming philosophic aspirations, in so far as these help veil our all too natural repugnance to such truth. So it is not only grand-narrative theory that Levinas rejects. He is intent on a level of truth only attainable by, as it were, digging away the very soil out of which a grand-narrative theory might grow: ‘truth’ in the wholesale bracketing of any historical reflection whatsoever, and in the complete abandonment of all ‘Socratic’ ambition. Socrates speaks of wisdom as the fruit of a process of recollection within the individual soul; grand narrative traces an equivalent process, writ large. It is meant to be the history of the recollection of the Idea of the Good, this time, within the corporate soul of humanity as a whole. However, all that Levinas for his part sees here, in actual practice, is an opportunity for the dishonesty of individual or corporate conceit to disguise itself. And so he dismisses ‘Socratic’ introversion – on any scale – as a mere rationalizing of moral distraction, a glorified turning away from the properly infinite claims of the Other, nothing more. Yet is this not, in fact, to confuse two quite different intellectual contexts, the political and the pre-political? Levinas’ primary phenomenological concern is always with the pre-political context for moral truth. In so far as he also refers to the necessity of politics in his philosophical writing, it is only ever to insist upon the proper subordination of that necessity to the ethical truth which precedes it. All well and good. Only, the simple question is: subordination in what sense, exactly? Grand narrative, obviously, belongs to the world of politics, or perhaps, alternatively, ‘anti-politics’ – for it need not always be an ideology of government. Either way, however, it is a response to problematics of organization, a basis for organized solidarity. Here we are no longer dealing in the first instance with the interplay between one person and another, but

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between groups, or between groups and individuals. And does not this, quite properly, mean that other sorts of criteria also start to apply? Socratic freedom is freedom from the mere ‘opinions’ of the human herd; Heideggerian Eigentlichkeit is counterposed to the ‘idle chatter’ of the human herd (das Man); so is Levinasian justice – but the Socratic and Heideggerian ideals are different inasmuch as both of them initiate strategies of struggle, in this regard, going well beyond the simple writing of books. Socratic thinking flows (eventually) into the political organization of the Platonist philosopherelite. Heidegger moves on from Being and Time to develop his own political strategy for promoting a philosophically transfigured sense of national identity. As with any other solidarity-building strategy, both these projects involve the construction of a certain ‘us’, defined in opposition to all others. It seems to me that both are, undeniably, flawed. But this does not necessarily mean that there could not be a better philosophic construction of an ‘us’! The real problem with Levinas’s rigorism, in my view, is that it quite simply leaves his followers no positive guidance in undertaking that task. To be sure, good (anti-)political strategy does need to be strictly subordinated, in terms of its ultimate goals, to the intransigent requirements of pure Honesty. However, it also needs to be effective. No doubt any effective solidarity-building process will be corruptible, just by virtue of its effectiveness: effective strategies generate power; power tends to corrupt, to lapse towards domination. And yet, how else are we to resist organizational corruption, if not by counter-organization? The only alternative would be to confine ourselves, exclusively, to preaching against it, a counsel of complete despair.20 Grand narrative, in particular, is patently a very powerful way of constructing an ‘us’ – consider Christianity, consider Islam, consider the Enlightenment, consider Marxism, each of which, of course, also provides plenty of examples of its corruption, into the ideological dishonesty which Levinas is rejecting. But an alternative response would be: let us therefore go back to the task again, and try to make our grand narrative even more explicitly and thoughtfully an account of the historic vicissitudes of pure Honesty. Why not? Beyond both Heidegger and Levinas Indeed, there are surely just three primary species of effective solidaritybuilding: • •

the bringing together of people on a basis of shared ethnic, caste or class identity, more or less mixed with shared religious ideas; the bringing together of people, opportunistically and quite regardless of character or deeper principle, as a matter of realpolitik, for particular limited purposes; and

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the bringing together of people by the imaginative power of grand narrative.

From a post-ideological point of view, the ideal must be the development of organized solidarity, so far as possible, strictly on the basis of an explicit shared dedication to Honesty. This is what I would term the ‘solidarity of the shaken’. But this, in principle, surely requires a particular form of grand narrative. The solidarity of the shaken does not coincide with any limitations of ethnic identity. Neither is it in any way compatible with the limited goals of those who play at realpolitik. On the contrary, it entails the systematic calling into question of all such contingently given identities or goals. And, in the end, only grand narrative can articulate such a project at all effectively, in so far as it comes to be explicitly conceived, precisely, as a history tracing the emergent recognition of what true Honesty requires, wherever this may have occurred, within religious and other communities. But Levinas does not see this. He does not see it because he is just not interested in the philosophic or theological construction of an ‘us’. And again one can well understand why. It is because he is so altogether committed to an already pre-existent ‘us’: the already given ‘us’ defined by the orthopraxy and orthodoxy of traditional Judaism. The more intense, the more dramatic the tragedies and struggles of one’s native community, the tighter its loyalty claims naturally become. And rightly so. Levinas dedicated his book Otherwise than Being ‘to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the other man, the same anti-semitism’. Deep down, the whole thrust of his militantly transhistorical thought clearly springs from that specific historical context. Levinas’s major philosophic writings are centrally concerned with the prepolitical claims of pure Honesty; he alludes to the domain of politics, in these writings, only as it relates to that which, ethically, precedes it and helps set the terms for it. In other, more marginal writings he does, it is true, at least begin to address political issues in more directly political terms,21 but only at a much lower level of intellectual intensity. These more political essays belong essentially to the category of journalism – fine journalism, to be sure, but not philosophy, on anything like the level of his major works. They articulate a liberal-minded religious Zionism – and there you have it. In short, I think that Levinas is right in his fundamental, pre-political critique of Heidegger – and of the whole ‘ontological’ tradition, stretching back to Socrates and beyond – for failing explicitly to grasp the absolutely primary religious significance of pure Honesty, in the elementary sense of sheer ‘exposure to another’. I agree that the ‘question of Being’, even when apprehended in the most decisively post-ideological terms, remains by comparison a secondary issue. This is why I say that for perhaps the most

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seriously challenging of all challenges to Christian First-Person theology today – even more than Heidegger – read Levinas! And yet, against Levinas, I nevertheless still want to hold open the possibility of valid grand narrative, not, to be sure, as a pretended ‘scientific’ dogma, but as a necessary art form, as the chief proper medium, indeed, for any extended attempt at translating the pre-political ‘anarchy’ – as he puts it – of the deepest religious truth into actual, effective political terms, and rendering explicit the solidarity of the shaken. Such a grand narrative must very largely be a history of (what I am calling) the ideological impulse, in all its various permutations, oriented towards its eventual overcoming. This is also very much what Heidegger, in his later thought, is attempting. But it is not only that, as Levinas objects, the sheer impersonality of the Heideggerian thinker’s relationship to ‘Being’ disastrously dissipates the proper resistance of philosophy to corrupt ideology (because it distracts from the absolute primacy of the moral claims of the Other, as such – which with especial urgency in the context of a regime like the Third Reich obviously means, above all, the persecuted Other). At the same time, it seems to me, Heidegger is also led astray – in more positive fashion – by something else. And this is the way he persistently identifies the cause of primal shakenness with a politics of cultural revolution, like Plato. How deep does the trouble with Heidegger go? I do not think that it begins with his option for grand narrative; rather, I think it begins with his option for cultural revolution, coercively imposed from above through the agency of governmental power. Hence his option for cultural-revolutionary grand narrative. Grand narrative impacts upon the world by virtue of the energy it gives to hope, or – as in Heidegger’s case from the mid-1930s onwards – by the energy of that hope’s conversion into despair. The rejection of this in contemporary postmodernism, of course, derives its plausibility from the spectacle of such hope turned poisonously impatient, grand narrative deployed as legitimation for violence. The postmodern turn against grand narrative in general actually originates from the historic conjunction of two things: a cumulative disillusionment with Marxist grand narrative in particular, plus retrospective dismay at the politics of Heidegger the Nazi. In both cases, it is a reaction against the same basic species of problem. And yet here I come back, by way of contrast, to Hegel, not as a precursor of later, more aggressive forms of grand narrative, but, on the contrary, as representing a real alternative. For compare Heidegger and Hegel: both thinkers seek to go decisively beyond any merely ideologized form of metaphysics, so as to tap into the primordial truth of what I am calling ‘primal shakenness’. Both thinkers seek to construct a grand-narrative account of the unfolding of primal shakenness; however, they do so in two obviously quite opposite ways. What is the essential difference here? It is surely very simple: whereas Heidegger identifies the highest truth with a radically cultural-revolutionary stance towards the prevailing religious and political order of his world, Hegel

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by contrast is always a philosophic ‘horse-whisperer’. Heidegger constructs his grand narrative very much as an argument either for impatience or despair, so he presents it as the story of an all-pervasive ‘forgetting’, which continues to escalate; the way he tells the tale, the one and only way that remembrance could ever supervene, on a significant scale, would be in the form of a cataclysm. But Hegel on the contrary constructs a grand narrative which is all about the cultivation of a cheerful patience. For the specific purposes of this story, ‘what is actual is rational, and what is rational is actual’.22 In other words, it is all about reasons to be calm, inasmuch as philosophy has nothing more to do than recognize where Geist is already at work, and quietly to affirm that ongoing process, wherever it can be found.23 Indeed, the contrast with Heidegger quite vividly illustrates the point – and I would add, the real wisdom – of that Hegelian principle. Thus it is a question of the basic a priori mood with which, as a philosopher, one approaches the facts of history. The story Heidegger tells is precisely all about the nonrationality of the actual, the non-actuality of the rational; first and foremost, in other words, he looks at history and picks out, gives narrative priority to, whatever elements there can be presented as belonging to a grand process of disastrous forgetting. But Hegel looks at history and does the opposite: as a matter of principle he selects whatever may serve to produce a story of progressive revelation. And this is because, in relation to the non-philosophic world, he wants so far as possible not to denounce but rather to affirm, and to encourage. Of course, they also differ in their attitude to Christianity. Hegel writes as a philosophic Christian; Heidegger adopts a stance of principled neutrality towards the metaphysical claims of Christian orthodoxy. However, the point is that this neutrality is, in the end, profoundly ambiguous. On the one hand it expresses a decisive differentiation between truth-as-Honesty and any sort of metaphysical truth-as-correctness – just what I am arguing good Christian theology must also emphasize. Yet, on the other hand, it is at the same time a cultural-revolutionary gesture. And so it becomes, not just a step back from metaphysics as such, and from theology to the extent that it is mixed with metaphysics, but unfortunately also a wholesale, impatient or despairing withdrawal from the conversation processes of church theology in any form. Heidegger does not seek, as a matter of philosophic dogma, to outlaw church theology the way Kant does. But, still, he has no time for it. He has no time, himself, for disentangling what is purely theological here, in the sense of being trans-metaphysical, from its metaphysical accompaniments. His cultural-revolutionary ambitions are, simply, too pressing. Therefore, he ignores the distinction. Hegel differs in that – to both of those two skittish beasts, church and state – he consistently remains a horse-whisperer. This was the lesson he had learnt from the chastening spectacle of the revolutionary Terror in France: it is never good directly to attack and undermine a whole well-rooted and popular system of ethical life, or Sittlichkeit, as, first in Enlightenment theory and then in

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Revolutionary practice, the old traditions of French Catholicism had been attacked and undermined; instead, the better policy is always, so far as possible, gradually to try to shift the already established Sittlichkeit of one’s immediate world, by reinterpretation, non-violently from within. His thinking, therefore, one might say, functions as a sort of constitutional monarchy. On the one hand, his grand narrative gives the throne to quite a bold fresh form of hope. (Indeed, to the end of his days he regularly drank a toast on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille!) Yet, on the other hand, the sovereignty of that hope is carefully circled round with popular-traditionalist, Lutheran checks and balances to prevent it running wild. Heidegger, however, recklessly abolishes all such checks and balances. The proper popular community for Heidegger’s religion is an ideal ‘Germany’; yet this ideal ‘Germany’ has little or nothing to do with any sort of popular religious tradition already in existence. As a real form of Sittlichkeit, it belongs entirely to the future. And that, I think, is where the basic trouble with Heidegger lies: in the way his militantly elitist philosophy constitutionally enshrines, right at its heart, such an extreme and all-encompassing sheer self-indulgent rage against the present day. The result is that what Heidegger opposes to metaphysics is not straight truth-as-Honesty. It is, in Being and Time, truth-as-Eigentlichkeit (authenticity): an ideal of radical honesty mixed with heroic cultural-revolutionary impatience, or, later, truth-as-Gelassenheit (releasement): an ideal of radical honesty mixed with heroic cultural-revolutionary despair – mixed and thereby straight away, I think, distorted. Christ in Anonymity I would propose it as a general principle that the best grand narrative is both: • •

that which is most directly and generously a history of the solidarity of the shaken, in all its various approximate manifestations across a range of diverse cultures; and yet also that which most constructively contributes to the negotiating of an accommodation between the solidarity of the shaken and whatever sort of already established popular religious tradition the narrator may happen to belong to.

As a Christian theologian, what I am interested in trying to develop is, thus, a grand narrative whose central theme would be the historic emergence of the possibility of a church truly dedicated to the solidarity of the shaken – a church which would explicitly identify its own vocation as a kenotic contribution to that larger ideal. In trinitarian terms, one might say, the interplay between the two solidarities, the solidarity of the shaken and the solidarity of popular church religion, is

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exactly what also appears in the interplay between First-Person and SecondPerson theology. For in both cases, it is essentially a question of defining the sharpest possible ‘no’ to organized secular dishonesty. But good First-Person theology moves from the requirements of the former solidarity to those of the latter, whereas good Second-Person theology moves in the opposite direction, from the latter to the former. And then it is the basic function of good ThirdPerson theology to draw both these negations of corrupted secularity together, into a constructive strategy for practical church reform. The solidarity of the shaken is a solidarity potentially uniting Christians with the adherents of all manner of other religious traditions – it may be for any sort of emancipatory political purpose – purely and simply, to begin with, on the grounds of a shared trans-ideological commitment to primal shakenness. At its best, one might say, First-Person theology is thus all about identifying the anonymous presence of Jesus Christ in whatever contributes to the pure solidarity of the shaken. On the one hand, it is about the sense in which, for Christian faith, Jesus, as the Christ, symbolizes the elementary pre-political Honesty-imperative, the impulse of shakenness, immediately intrinsic to any encounter whatsoever with the simple otherness of the Other (as in the picture of the Last Judgement in Matthew 25:31–46). And then, on the other hand, it is also a systematic acknowledgement of his role as a symbol for that same imperative converted into a political ideal: what Hegel intended in his discussion of the Unhappy Consciousness and its overcoming – the dissident free spirit in any confessional context, Christian or non-Christian, directly confronting the destructive prejudices of the herd. Such theology is therefore, I would argue, essentially an opening up to the need for a grand narrative on that basis, a grand narrative that traces the historic emergence of the solidarity of the shaken, in the most general terms, as divine revelation.

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Chapter 6

The Context for Second-Person Theology Today: Clean Evangelism

Now let us ponder the splendid rolling words of the Letter to the Ephesians: For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe, according to the working of his great might which he accomplished in Christ when he raised him from the dead and made him sit at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in that which is to come; and he has put all things under his feet and has made him head over all things for the church, which is his body, the fulness of him who fills all in all. (Ephesians 1:15–23)

And let us consider what is meant by this. Christ is exalted ‘far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named’ essentially, I would argue, in the sense that the phenomena intended here are all tainted, not just by simple banality, but at the same time by political manipulation. For he also represents the perfect opposite to that. A few verses further on, in the same epistle, there is reference to ‘the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience’ (2:2). Here, too, we surely have the spirit of manipulativeness, in general, pervading the ‘air’, that is, the whole moral atmosphere of a corrupted culture. ‘For we are not contending against flesh and blood’, this author writes, ‘but against principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places’ (6:12).1 In other words, the dishonesty in question is not just the dishonesty of particular human individuals, but is an essential aspect of the bonding together of whole social systems and institutions, designed to manipulate us, so that we will collude with the interests of the powerful. Thus the pagan world of the spirits is here both demythologized, in its own terms, and remythologized, in Christian terms, the better to subvert the whole culture of manipulativeness it reflects, in the most impassioned way possible. 107

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In the Revelation to John, meanwhile, dishonesty-as-manipulation is represented in various phantasmagoric cartoon-forms: first, as a seven-headed dragon; then as two prodigious beasts, one from the sea, the other from the earth; finally, as ‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations’. The great whore, ‘Babylon’, evidently represents the Roman empire primarily in its economic power, trading its favours. She is mounted on the beast from the sea which, with its ten heads each wearing a crown, stands for the political power of the Roman emperors. The beast from the earth, who incites people to worship the other beast, is the power of the pagan Roman priesthood, whilst the dragon, a cosmic figure cast down from heaven, represents the supposed power of the Roman gods. Or perhaps one might say: the great whore is the potential manipulativeness of wealth, generally; the beast from the earth is any sort of power backed up by a manipulative appeal to superstition; the beast from the sea is manipulative power, of any kind, in so far as it is reliant on sheer terror, and the primal dragon is a symbol for all of these considered together. Christ, however, is the pure antithesis. Against the manipulativeness of wealth, he comes as a prophet, in the tradition originally stemming from Amos, to proclaim ‘good news to the poor’. The Roman empire sought to mobilize superstition by promoting the worship of its emperors as divine figures. To this the Christian gospel responds by presenting us with an image of God incarnate in the person of a little infant, a child of the poor, lying in a bed of straw. But, above all, Roman power rested on manipulation by terror, the prime symbol and instrument of which was crucifixion. And, again, the raising of Jesus is surely far more than just a symbolic reversal of Pontius Pilate’s verdict of death in this one particular case. Rather, it is a dramatic reversal of everything that crucifixion, as such, was always meant to convey. The Romans sought to make crucifixion as public and as theatrical a mode of execution as they could, the better to maximize its deterrent effect. But God takes the intrinsic theatricality of the Roman institution, and turns it against Rome, appearing in the form of a crucified dissident, precisely so as symbolically to vindicate the very boldest sort of free-spirited resistance to manipulation of any kind. Yet there is of course no guarantee that the resultant gospel-symbolism will actually deliver what it is, in this regard, ideally meant to deliver. It is indeed the basic error of sacred ideology that it pretends to deliver guaranteed truth about God, whereas the fact is that to make such a claim immediately means betraying that truth, inasmuch as it reduces the claims of radical truth-asHonesty to the level of mere metaphysical, or legalistic, truth-as-correctness. Nothing is as slippery as religious truth. First-Person theology tackles that slipperiness in relation to the problematics of dishonesty-as-banality; SecondPerson theology does the same in relation to the problematics of dishonestyas-manipulation. And so it has to deal with the constant resurgence of such dishonesty, in new forms, right at the very heart of Christian tradition itself, even in what purports to be most distinctively and orthodoxly Christian.

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Christians and Epicureans Let us compare Christianity and Epicureanism from this point of view. I have argued above that classical Epicureanism was a form of philosophy fundamentally concerned with the overcoming of dishonesty-as-manipulation. This is my terminology, not Epicurus’. But, as I have said, consider the logic of Epicurean hedonism. In making ‘pleasure’ the chief criterion for all morality, Epicurus is essentially repudiating any rhetoric of self-sacrificial virtue. Why? Surely, it is above all because he sees how such rhetoric can be exploited by moralistic manipulators. Of course, Epicurus represents a very austere form of hedonism; the whole spiritual discipline of Epicureanism is a rigorous therapy against addiction of every kind, both physical and mental. The good Epicurean does not want to grow accustomed to luxuries, lest they become addictive. This, though, it seems to me, has to be seen very much as an extension of the same logic, in that, just as a misguided adherence to ideas of self-sacrifical virtue renders one vulnerable to manipulation in one way, so too one’s various addictions tend to render one vulnerable to manipulation in another way. Someone addicted to material gratifications is easily manipulated by those who can control access to those gratifications. Someone addicted to flattery, or excitement, or a sense of glamour, is easily manipulated by those who offer these things; and so forth. The Epicurean ideal of ‘ataraxy’ is indeed a quality of being quite immune from manipulation of any kind. To be sure, Epicureanism represents a very different strategy of resistance to dishonesty-as-manipulation from the not at all hedonistic Christian one. That is obvious! And yet, there was a time when Christians and Epicureans were considered, at least in some circles, to be kindred types. One can see this for example in the second-century pagan satirist Lucian’s (true) story of the guru Alexander of Abonoteichus. This Alexander was the founder of a new cult of the healing god, Aesculepius; his public career spanned a period from approximately 150 to 170 CE. Lucian calls him ‘Alexander the false prophet’, and describes him as a complete charlatan, systematically attempting to exploit people’s credulity with all manner of ingenious trickery. He established a shrine at Abonoteichus, a small town on the Black Sea coast (the modern Inebolu), which was soon famous throughout the empire as a source of oracular advice, ostensibly delivered by a speaking snake. And he further instituted an annual three-day sacred festival there. But, according to Lucian, the Abonoteichus festival actually began with the proclamation of a formal warning: ‘If any atheist or Christian or Epicurean’ – Alexander cried out – ‘has come to spy upon the rites, let him be off, and let those who believe in the god perform the mysteries, under the blessing of Heaven.’ Whereupon there followed a ritual ‘expulsion’, in which the prophet himself chanted, ‘Out with the Christians!’ and the whole congregation responded with the chant, ‘Out with the Epicureans!’2 Nor was it by any means only the manipulativeness of confidence tricksters that the Epicureans were concerned to criticize; like the Christians, also, they

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were equally concerned by the altogether more extensive manipulativeness of the ruling classes as a whole. Epicurus was fiercely critical of Platonism as a form of philosophy aspiring to inform the ethos of a ruling class. And Epicurean wisdom is the exact opposite: it originates essentially as an enlightened plebeian rebelliousness. So it informed a missionary movement, seeking to recruit followers, quite indiscriminately, from all social classes, including slaves, women as well as men. No other school of Greek philosophy was ever a missionary movement in the way that Epicureanism was; it was, in that regard, the Christian church’s one and only real Mediterranean predecessor.3 Being originally quite a-political, it did not depend on any particular environment, and for three hundred years before the Christian era it had been spreading throughout the Greek-speaking world and beyond, first following in the wake of the conquering armies of Alexander the Great eastwards, then moving west. The authorities were sometimes suspicious: Athenaeus, for instance, records the occasion, early in the second century BCE, when the Senate expelled two Epicureans, Alcaeus and Philiscus, from Rome – on the criminal charge of ‘introducing pleasures’.4 But one hundred years later – as Cicero laments – those pleasures were well established all over Italy. And there is certainly every reason to suppose that Epicureanism was thriving in the Greek cities of the Decapolis with which the Galileans of Jesus’s day largely traded.5 Indeed, the profound reverence of the Epicureans for their founder to some extent prefigured the Christian reverence for Jesus: it became common practice for them to speak of him as ‘the saviour’, a godlike figure. The great Epicurean poet Lucretius hails him as ‘our father, the revealer of truth, the giver of fatherly precepts’.6 Disciples were urged to live their lives as it were in the sight of Epicurus.7 They carried small icons of him around with them, and decorated their houses with paintings and busts of him. They even held regular ritual banquets, on the twentieth of each month, in continuation of his practice and in commemoration of his life, a practice which obviously anticipates the Christian eucharist. Like Christianity, this was a movement named after its founder.8 It was the Epicureans who first pioneered the genres of the missionary epistle and the missionary tract, which the Christians subsequently adopted. So, too, their biographical tributes to the founder and to his most notable disciples played the same role as later Christian hagiography. And yet Epicureanism represented a much less high-pathos, less confrontational – and therefore, in every sense, less risky – strategy of resistance to oppressive power than Christianity did. There is no actual surviving Epicurean critique of early Christianity. However, one can well imagine how such a critique might have run. First and foremost, the Epicureans would have been acutely mistrustful of the Christian notion of eternal life. What else, after all, is manipulation if not precisely the deployment of threats and promises in place of moral reasoning? Epicurus himself had repudiated the Platonist notion of eternal life, in effect, as an intrinsically manipulative device. Death, he had insisted, just means extinction; the only people, as he had seen it, with a serious interest in our

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thinking otherwise are those who want to dominate us by exploiting the hopes and fears thereby awakened. And, imbued with that basic principle of suspicion, his followers would no doubt have seen early Christianity as merely opposing one form of manipulation, that of the pagan ruling classes, with another. One might reply: surely, the cause of true Honesty demands the very richest and most urgent possible poetic advocacy! Lacking any notion of eternal life, the fact is, Epicureanism is far less well endowed than Christianity with sheer poetic power, for this purpose. It may avoid all manner of corruption into which the Christian tradition has fallen; yet it does so at a quite unnecessary price. Certainly, that would be my view. But none the less the question remains: how, then, is Christian eschatology actually to be purged of the corruption on which an Epicurean critique would focus? ‘Marana tha!’ I think we need to distinguish, as it were, three main layers of Christian eschatology, differentiated by their contrasting existential origins: 1 One layer, originating out of the early church’s extreme sense of embattlement, is a sublimely defiant expression of corporate hope for truth soon to prevail. 2 Another layer arises out of individual believers’ experience of personal bereavement, and is thus an expression of solidarity with the dead. 3 The third layer originates as a prescription for the proper response of each believer to the prospect of their own individual mortality. And to these three layers, I would argue, there then belong three basic different forms of theological interplay between Honesty and manipulation. At the end of dictating his first letter to the Corinthian church Paul added a few greetings, as he says, in his own hand. Among them is the little prayer in Aramaic, ‘Marana tha!’ ‘Our Lord, come!’9 Presumably this was a liturgical formula which he is quoting, a fragment from the very earliest Christian liturgy. And here we have the first of the three layers: the early church’s urgent expectation of the imminent parousia, or advent of the glorified Christ. In 1 Thessalonians, the earliest extant Christian text of all, which Paul probably wrote at some point in the years 50–51, he pictures the parousia in sharp poetic terms: The Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. (1 Thessalonians 4:16–17)

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But why is God traditionally imagined as inhabiting heaven, in the sky above? The sky is that space which earthly rulers cannot control. In Paul’s picture of the parousia the rising up of the redeemed, into the sky, surely symbolizes their being lifted, once and for all, out beyond the control of manipulative earthly power, as they are brought face to face with Honesty. Writing perhaps forty years later, John, the author of Revelation, then lavishly elaborates on that original Pauline picture. The dragon is cast down; ‘Babylon’ falls; the two beasts (or the beast and the ‘false prophet’) are overthrown. After that, divine judgement is doubled into two instalments, the first of which is the millennial reign of the martyred saints. And finally, after one last cataclysm, it is not just the Lord who descends triumphantly from heaven, but it is the ‘New Jerusalem’, first in the form of a chaste bride, the antithesis to ‘Babylon’, and then as a whole glittering city. Here, the simple prayer ‘Marana tha!’ has grown into an epic vision, with a cast of thousands. Yet we know that right from the beginning there were also some Christians who rejected the whole idea of the parousia. In 1 Corinthians Paul argues at length against those who, as he puts it, ‘say that there is no resurrection of the dead’ (1 Corinthians 15:12). Just what exactly these opponents of Paul were in fact arguing is unclear. As Christians they could scarcely have rejected the notion of human immortality altogether, nor will they have denied the resurrection of Jesus. Were they saying, like Hymenaeus and Philetus, denounced in 2 Timothy 2:17–18, that ‘the resurrection is past already’? If so, they will have regarded the resurrection of Jesus simply as a symbolic promise of spiritual liberation for individual believers, without any hope that God was going to bring the whole earthly system crashing down. This seems the most likely explanation – it would certainly fit with Paul’s acid irony earlier in 1 Corinthians: ‘Already you are filled! Already you have become rich! Without us you have become kings! And would that you did reign, so that we might share the rule with you!’ (4:8). And so, what practical difference did that make? Paul himself suggests one answer in 1 Corinthians 4:10, where, again ironically, he says to his opponents, ‘We are fools for Christ’s sake, but you are wise in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are held in honour, but we in disrepute.’ They have lowered the moral intensity of the gospel. With their pride regarding what, in their lives, has already been achieved – their ‘wisdom’, ‘strength’ and ‘honour’ – they have set limits on the properly infinite impulse to restlessness involved in true Christian discipleship, and to that extent have made it far easier for themselves to feel comfortable in the world. But, on the other hand, it may also be the case that these non-Pauline early Christians shrank back from the intensity of the Pauline vision because they instinctively sensed something of its intrinsic ambiguity. For while this is indeed a vision originally springing from the imperatives of Honesty, the fact is that the ferocious conflicts which it then sets up tend to infect it with a very different sort of impulse, namely an impulse of sectarian vindictiveness, eschatologically projected into fantasies of divine rewards and punishments. Nietzsche, in his

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account of Christian origins, notoriously sees the impulse of vindictiveness completely overriding the impulse to Honesty. No doubt the Nietzschean diagnosis is very one-sided. And yet it would perhaps be equally one-sided to deny it any truth at all. The wildness of Pauline eschatology has also embarrassed modern theological ‘liberals’, especially when, as in the case of Albert Schweitzer, for instance, they have – probably mistakenly – supposed that the Pauline expectation of an imminent end of the world was something the Pauline church inherited direct from Jesus himself. In so far as their anxiety simply springs from a prejudice, all too natural on the part of ‘liberal’ academics, in favour of mere bourgeois equanimity, I think that Barth’s great expressivist commentary on Romans represents quite a compelling response. If, as I would argue, theology is properly the theistic form of the science of the sacralization of Honesty, then the more it is able to infuse the demands of Honesty with a real jagged urgency, the better. The hopes by which Paul and his followers were driven may have proved chimeric. But, as Barth helps us see, the extraordinary urgency which those chimeric hopes expressed, and nurtured, is no embarrassment. On the contrary, this is precisely what gives to the Pauline texts their special authority – or so it seems to me. However, Barth’s argument only works to the extent that it really is the impulse to Honesty which is at work here, and not just a sort of sectarianism. And now let us go back a bit in history, to set the issue here into its proper context. The first book of the Bible to be written, more or less in the form we now have it, was Amos. (Parts of other books, in particular some of the Psalms, are probably older; also, the closing oracles of restoration in Amos are perhaps a later addition; but otherwise Amos is the first.) I think the book of Amos poses a fundamental problem with which all the rest of Hebrew and Christian scripture thereafter is wrestling – a wrestling which, at the deepest level, then holds the Bible as a whole together. For the God of Amos is a God of terrible rage, infinitely demanding, a God who will be content with nothing short of perfect ‘justice and righteousness’ on earth. The problem, however, is: how can human beings actually live with that? What Amos calls ‘justice and righteousness’ is, it would seem, the pure antithesis to any kind of political manipulativeness. His God absolutely refuses to accept any worship which is not an expression of perfect ‘justice and righteousness’ in that sense. But the sheer intransigence of this prophecy appears to leave no practicable basis for valid community life at all. The solitary prophet can scarcely gather a reforming movement around him: he has no actual programme, his message is simply too purist. The Hebrew scriptures may be said to provide two main alternative visions to that of Amos: 1 One alternative was to replace Amos’s anti-politics with a much more political project, that is, a movement with an altogether more specific programme, first and foremost for suppressing the worship of other gods.

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There is nothing much in Amos’s recorded prophecy about the wrongness of worshipping other gods – he was exclusively interested in an ideal of ‘justice and righteousness’ between mortals. In fact there is no clear evidence, from before the time of Hosea, of anyone challenging the worship of other gods, alongside that of YHWH, by the common people. The story of Moses is largely a projection back, from a later period, after Hosea; Elijah’s struggle only concerned the practice of the royal court. But, a generation after Amos, Hosea launches a cultural-revolutionary political movement aiming, for the first time ever, at the creation of a whole people exclusively devoted to one sole God. And all the later prophets belong to the YHWH-aloneist movement which Hosea pioneered, as do the Deuteronomist historians. How then does the YHWH of YHWH-aloneism relate to the YHWH of Amos? He is still, of course, an often very angry God, but his rage is no longer, as in the case of Amos, simply directed against ‘injustice and unrighteousness’ in the basic sense of dishonestyas-manipulation. And, as his devotees have plunged into the world of political intrigue, it surely must be conceded that there is, at least, a certain risk, now, of his angry authority being invoked, not against dishonesty-asmanipulation, but, on the contrary, for quite manipulative purposes, with all anti-manipulative inhibitions being swept away by a fanatical sense of cultural-revolutionary political correctness. 2 The other alternative was that represented by ‘Wisdom’ literature. There is no risk of cultural-revolutionary manipulativeness in the ‘Wisdom’ tradition; this tradition, unlike YHWH-aloneism, is not culturalrevolutionary at all. It represents a worship of YHWH tempered by a large dose of quiet ruling-class common sense. The ‘Wisdom’ tradition has all the virtues Amos lacks: it is thoroughly humane and civilized. Yet it has none of his fire and dramatic verve. Jesus, on the other hand, in a sense represents a return to the pure anti-political radicalism of Amos. However, he develops another way of making this something people might humanly live with. The God who speaks through Amos is infinitely demanding, way beyond any particular programme of political reform, and the God who speaks through Jesus is the same. But the difference is that the God who speaks through Jesus is also infinitely forgiving – infinitely demanding, yet at the same time infinitely forgiving; infinitely forgiving, yet at the same time infinitely demanding. The unique beauty of the gospel story lies, arguably above all, in the way Jesus combines an Amos-like extravagant passion for ‘justice and righteousness’ with what Amos for his part so completely lacks, a sublime serenity. That is, the serenity of one who embodies sheer agapé: overflowing love – love not only in response to love, but love equally embracing both friends and enemies, saints and sinners. But how could the church, buffeted as it was by persecution, effectively sustain that serenity? Exceptional individuals may well achieve levels of wisdom which no whole group ever can. The pressure was more or less bound

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to be too great. And so, in just the same way as the YHWH-aloneist movement politicized the anti-political God of Amos, the early church also, straight away, tended to render sectarian the originally quite anti-sectarian urgency of Jesus. The Inspiration of Bereavement The second of the three layers of Christian eschatology, meanwhile, makes its first appearance in 1 Corinthians 15:29, where Paul refers, in passing, to the practice – perhaps a regular feature of Corinthian church life? – of people being baptized ‘on behalf of the dead’. Because there is no other evidence of this practice in the first century, it is not entirely clear what is meant; but the most natural interpretation is that people were being baptized ‘on behalf of’, and in the belief that this would somehow benefit, other Christians, who had died unbaptized. That the practice was eventually abandoned was no doubt due to its being seen to be too much like magic. However, it surely springs from the same basic type of impulse, the same type of prayerful concern for the dead, which later evolved into the Western doctrine of ‘purgatory’. This doctrine is also anticipated in 2 Maccabees 12:39–45. The actual term, ‘purgatory’, derives from Gregory the Great’s interpretation of Matthew 12:32, the words of Jesus: ‘Whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come’; Gregory, understanding ‘the age to come’ as a reference to post-mortem existence, pictured the possibility of forgiveness there in terms of a ‘purgatorius ignis’, a ‘purifying fire’.10 This was in the later sixth century. But already in the third century one finds Origen, for instance, affirming the notion of non-eternal post-mortem punishments, with particular reference to Matthew 5:25–26, where Jesus says, ‘Make friends quickly with your accuser, while you are going with him to court, lest your accuser hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you be put in prison; truly I say to you, you will never get out till you have paid the last penny.’11 The idea also appears to have been a commonplace among pagan Neoplatonists. Augustine, in City of God, XXI, 13, argues against them, that not all post-mortem punishment is of this transitory kind; yet he, too, still accepts that some is. And so there emerged the great tripartite scheme classically articulated in Dante’s Divine Comedy, where purgatory is pictured as a great antipodean mountain – an inversion of the cavernous cone of hell, pointing up into heaven – with the penitent, who are being purged, toiling up it. The Protestant Reformers, of course, saw the whole notion of purgatory as nothing but a manipulative device, a systematic exploitation of superstitious fear, by priests trading notional benefits to the dead, as they pass though purgatory, in return for the pious generosity of the living. And therefore Protestantism has strictly rejected the practice of prayer for the dead, in any form. But is prayer for the dead always bound up with a spiritual economy of

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manipulation? Surely not! Once again, I would argue, we are confronted here by a radical ambiguity. Certainly, for me, one very important motive for honouring Honesty is my loyalty to the dead, those who by their example have done most to teach me what Honesty means, and whom I love. I am moved to pray for them, as an expression of that love. The traditional doctrine of purgatory, however, essentially affirms such prayer as being of significant benefit to the dead themselves. And so in what sense, if at all, might such prayer really be said to benefit the dead? In the end, I think, it is not just the act of prayer considered by itself alone, but the whole conduct of the church community which is relevant in this regard. For the point is that my commitment to the cause of Honesty involves a fundamental concern for the moral community that I belong to, that it should grow more and more transparent to Honesty, not only in my lifetime but also afterwards. I have, so to speak, invested a large part of my soul into the community. In the sense that one’s ‘soul’ is none other than the true meaning of one’s life – one’s actual share in the cause of Honesty – then it might surely be said that in ceasing, at death, to be embodied in an individual frame, one’s soul then becomes embodied, instead, within the ongoing life of the whole community (or, rather, within the ongoing life of all the various overlapping communities to which one belongs). My life’s ultimate meaning, in other words, is not simply fixed at death, but will change, depending on what happens in the larger meaning-giving story, or stories, of which my own individual story is just one small part. When I consider my death, I do not simply approach it as an isolated individual; it matters to me what will happen afterwards to my people, and what they will achieve. And it matters, above all, that they should draw steadily closer to Honesty. As I see it, in short, the potential truth of the doctrine of purgatory lies in its poetic articulation of the interplay between two basic forms of loyalty, both of which are possible carriers for Honesty: first: the loyalty of the bereaved to the memory of the dead; and second: the loyalty of individuals to their community, as something that will continue after their death. The doctrine only becomes manipulative when the preachers of purgatory start to play, in superstitious fashion, upon people’s egotistical anxieties about their own postmortem future, as solitary individuals. This corruption, against which the Reformers were reacting, is by no means intrinsic to the doctrine. Indeed, it appears to be far more a feature of the Western tradition than of Eastern Orthodoxy. But everything, I think, depends upon our being completely clear about the basic issues involved. The fire of purgatory is surely, quite precisely, an image for the moral work of death, inasmuch as it burns away every illusion of meaningfulness in life tied to mere egoism, every attachment to that which does not abide. Yet the corrupted, manipulative fantasy-doctrine here, with its conditional promise of accelerated bliss, does not at all seriously challenge our egoism. Rather, it seeks to exploit it.

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Disciplinary Eschatology: the Old Platonist Error To recapitulate: there are three main layers of Christian eschatological concern. The first layer is a vindication of the church’s corporate repudiation of the secular world; the second layer, a response to the experience of bereavement; and the third layer is an invitation to reflect upon one’s own death. The doctrine of purgatory, one might say, represents the join between the second and third layers. But now let us, also, compare the teaching of the New Testament Jesus tradition, as to how one should approach one’s own death, with that of Plato’s Socrates, for example. Consider the poetic doctrine attributed to Jesus in Matthew 25:31–46. This is a picture of the last judgement, essentially, in terms of its significance for individuals. All the nations of the world are gathered together; the ‘Son of Man’ arrives, and starts to separate them, as individuals, one from another ‘as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats’. Some are sent to ‘eternal punishment’, others to ‘eternal life’. But note: the point of this story is not simply that it pays to be good. On the contrary, it is a story about what it means to be good. Thus: Then the King will say to those at his right hand, ‘Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me.’

What those on the right hand did, those on the left hand – likewise unaware of what was at stake – failed to do. They were dishonest, in the same way that the rich man of Luke 16:19–31 was also dishonest towards the destitute Lazarus – and only too late discovered the true eternal significance of that dishonesty. The whole emphasis in this passage is, precisely, on divine judgement as a rendering explicit of perfect Honesty. The Platonist doctrine of the afterlife, developed in the Phaedo, is altogether different.12 There is no such dramatic revelation of Honesty in the Phaedo. Rather, Socrates develops a myth of judgement at death, which, in itself, simply tells us that it pays to be good. Quite unlike Jesus’s teaching, Socrates’ story is not designed to make any particular comment on what it means to be good: the criteria for the judgement of the dead, in his view, are simply the conventional ones of ordinary common sense, plus a special affirmation of the philosophic way of life, which of course the whole dialogue has presupposed. What the story itself adds is basically just a set of images

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portraying the punishment of the wicked, tossed into the underground maelstrom of Tartarus, and the disembodied bliss of the virtuous. It is, in other words, essentially an exercise in providing moral incentives, no more. Moreover, these incentives are clearly intended, first and foremost, not for those who are philosophically enlightened themselves, but for the nonphilosophical masses. The assumption at work appears to be that, whereas philosophers will pursue virtue because they have a purely intellectual understanding of its intrinsic value, the masses do not, and therefore need myths to help awaken their consciences by imaginative means. This myth thus belongs in the context of what Leo Strauss for instance calls Platonist ‘philosophic politics’: not only the utopian dream of philosopher-rule developed in the Republic, but also Plato’s more general concern to protect philosophy from the suspicion that, in questioning established values, it was liable to endanger the whole political order. That suspicion had, after all, brought Socrates to his death. And so, in order to refute it, Plato is keen to portray Socrates as a teacher of salutory myth, the essential purpose of which is to serve as religious back-up to law and order. This indeed is what Epicurus was reacting against. To Epicurus, it would appear, the Platonist notion of the afterlife was nothing but a form of ruling-class manipulativeness, a fingerwagging doctrine of superstitious moral bribery and intimidation, which Plato himself perhaps never believed, but merely considered useful. And yet the Fathers of the Church welcomed it, saw it as a direct philosophic anticipation of gospel truth. The more the church grew established, the more it tended to embrace what one might call Platonist ‘disciplinary eschatology’. Christian preaching, in this regard, became more and more, as Nietzsche put it, ‘Platonism for the masses’. I think that Nietzsche is right: the result was a disaster! As Nietzsche saw, the real truth behind all ideas of eternal life is surely just that we should always care more. The prospect of our own mortality, as it bears in upon us, may move us in either one of two ways. It may may tempt us, egotistically, to think, in the words of Ecclesiastes 1:2, ‘Vanity of vanities! All is vanity’, and therefore to extrapolate: ‘Let us eat, drink and be merry, and indulge in distraction, for tomorrow we die. That nothing endures means that nothing is really worth caring about.’ Or else the same prospect may move us to exactly the opposite conclusion, giving added urgency to our caring as we recognize that every moment of our lives is of eternal significance. The truth of faith is none other than a sacralization of Honesty – and Honesty, perfect conversational receptivity, necessarily demands that we care, the more the better. The rulers of a dishonest order crucified Jesus because he represented Honesty, by which they felt threatened: crucifixion was intended not least as a deterrent to caring, in the sense that Honesty requires. It is the voice of Death – Death as a depressive prospect, the enemy of Honesty, urging ‘Vanity of vanities!’ – deliberately amplified to the symbolic utmost. And the resurrection of the crucified is thus the countervailing voice of Honesty, always urging that we care more, likewise amplified to the symbolic utmost.

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However, the point is that ‘that we should always care more’ is one thing; ‘that it pays to be good’ is quite another. The truth of eternal life lies entirely I think in the former principle, and not at all in the latter. If we can only care about things when there are, in the conventional sense, rewards and punishments attached, then, I would argue, we have no actual share in eternal life. Of course, as soon as we seek to translate the principle ‘that we should always care more’ into imaginative terms – therefore affirming that every moment of our lives has an eternal significance, undiminished by mortality – the result is a poetic doctrine of life-after-death which also lends itself, very easily, to arguments suggesting ‘that it pays to be good’, due to post-mortem rewards and punishments, conventionally conceived. That is how imagination works; it is so clumsy an enterprise. And I guess we do need to allow our imaginations, even though clumsy, some freedom to work on the theme. Yet the use of such imagery to suggest the existence of hidden metaphysical mechanisms somehow guaranteeing ‘that it pays to be good’ is, I would argue, straight away a corruption of the doctrine. It is, inevitably, manipulative. I have already referred to Lessing’s little treatise, Education of the Human Race.13 As I said, this was also already Lessing’s view, back in the eighteenth century. Lessing looked forward to the eventual ideal development of a Christian culture in which people would, by general agreement, reckon virtue to be – for all eternity – its own reward, without the need for any further fanciful incentives. I share his hope. What is more, I think that now, at long last, there actually is a real prospect of that hope beginning to be fulfilled. There is, I sense, in the more intellectually conscientious churches a widespread uncertainty and embarrassment about this whole aspect of the tradition. The church has always wanted to use the notions of heaven and hell for mass evangelistic purposes. So we have used the promise of heaven and the threat of hell as arguments – directly addressed to all the world – showing ‘that it pays to be good’, and more particularly that it pays to become, and to remain, a loyal church member. ‘That we should always care more’ is by no means obvious. On the contrary, its true desirability only gradually becomes apparent, through a never-ending discipline of the spirit; it is, in that sense, a ‘mystery’. But the promise of heaven and the threat of hell, deployed in the context of crudely manipulative mass evangelism, are by contrast meant to make it obvious ‘that it pays to be good’. And therefore we have tended to present that promise and that threat, not as mysteries, but as things that anyone might understand, without further ado. Let us be quite clear, though: this is not what Jesus did. Jesus was not, in the first instance, founding, and trying to recruit new members to, a church. He was proclaiming an altogether more elusive ideal. And hence when he speaks of heaven and hell (or, at any rate, when the early Jesus tradition does) the effective message is very different. He is, precisely, pointing towards a mystery: the latent presence of God, above all, among the poor and the neglected. His doctrine, quite unlike the Platonist one – and also quite unlike the usual doctrine

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of Christian mass evangelism – does not presuppose, and merely seek to reinforce, an already given moral ideal; rather, it announces a long-term programme for the systematic revaluation of all values. When, according to this doctrine, the Son of Man comes in his glory, to separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, the righteous will indeed be despatched to ‘eternal life’ and the unrighteous to ‘eternal punishment’. But what exactly is this ‘eternal life’; and what is this ‘eternal punishment’? Surely, ‘eternal life’ is just the true moral reality of good deeds, and ‘eternal punishment’ the true moral reality of bad deeds – the way we would feel about them, if only we could at last arrive at perfect Honesty. However, in actual practice perfect Honesty is not a viewpoint of which we are, any of us, ever fully capable. And to that extent, therefore, eternal reality must, as a matter of principle, remain eternally beyond us, we being the actual people we are. We may be permitted a glimpse of it, but nothing more. Thus, first, consider heaven. ‘That we should always care more’ is a principle pointing into mystery. Honesty, in the most radical sense – the perfect Honesty of heaven – is an infinitely recessive acquired taste. It is often said that heaven is a ‘boring’ prospect. And yes, so indeed it must appear to us – who have not yet acquired the taste for it. For heaven is the presence of God fully revealed, life lived in perfect truth; the delights of heaven are the delights of the most radical Honesty. To those who have not acquired a taste for something, whatever it is, that thing inevitably appears boring, if not positively repulsive. And so it is with heaven. Then consider hell. Dishonesty is hell; life lived as a turning away from God is a horror. That is the truth. It is the truth in the sense that, if we were radically honest, that is how we would feel about it. But, at the same time, it is only the truth in so far as it can be proclaimed without manipulation. And if we are to escape manipulativeness, then we surely must also acknowledge that sinfulness is, in essence, a condition of moral anaesthesia, both now and – I would argue – for all eternity. To talk of eternal life is to talk of the eternal aspect of the here and now, the deep reality of our lives, which abides, and which is in that sense beyond time, that is, beyond the simple logic of ‘let us eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die’. We can only imagine this ‘beyond time’ as if it were extra time, after death. But, in principle, in so far as we are separated from God we are already in hell, right now – all of us, surely, to some extent or other, since none of us is perfect. We are in hell, yet we do not know it. We do not know it, because we are anaesthetized. And, at the same time, as God is already with us, summoning us to Honesty, we are also in heaven. Yet, again, we do not know it, for heaven is only recognizable to those who have acquired the taste for it. Heaven and hell: God being with us, us separating ourselves from God – these are the deep realities of our life, right here and now, which we simply do not grasp, due to our superficiality. To talk of heaven and hell is to gesture, at least,

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towards the objective truth of eternity from which our normal dishonesty cuts us off and shields us. Truly to grasp that we are in heaven would be bliss; so faith informs us. Truly to grasp that we are in hell would be torment. But this level of truth is only apparent to – and can only be experienced by – those who have fully acquired a taste for it. Not the rest of us, in so far as we have not yet acquired that taste. Hell is a purgative prospect for those emerging from it, that is, those now entering the historic jurisdiction of God, whose experience Jesus’s parable-vision is meant to project, and so evoke. But its being a purgative prospect for them is one thing. Its being presented as a manipulative threat of post-mortem punishment to those still mired in ordinary human fallenness is something altogether different and, I think, quite mistaken. Heaven and hell are not to be presented as a mere metaphysical carrot and stick for human donkeys; for this completely distorts the real moral truth of the symbolism here. The conventionally imagined torments of hell are in principle, surely, a picture of how we would feel about our sins if only we were not anaesthetized by them, and if we therefore felt their true reality. Hell is indeed an infinite horror, always greater than we mortals have yet realized – in that sense, extending into eternity. But it is not what we would ordinarily call a punishment. That is, it is not the infliction of a positive evil in return for evil. Justice here does not demand any supposedly corrective addition of evil, but only a revelation of evil’s actual nothingness. The ‘punishment’ in question is not a positive punishment at all, to those anaesthetized against it, for they cannot feel it. On the contrary, it is entirely negative. And it is the same with the conventionally imagined joys of heaven: here we have a picture of how we would feel about the presence of God with us, if only we were properly capable of recognizing and appreciating it. But is heaven a reward? The closer people come to this recognition and appreciation, the more they desire it. Yet everything, I think, depends upon our not being too hasty in our attempts to try to make it seem desirable to sinners; lest we distort it. The True Meaning of ‘Original Sin’ I am very conscious that in drawing such a sharp distinction, in relation to the gospel notion of eternal life, between the two principles ‘that we should always care more’ and ‘that it pays to be good’ I am developing quite a non-traditional line of argument. The great pioneer of this point of view is Lessing. But Lessing was not a systematic theologian. And he remains, even now, a somewhat isolated figure within church tradition. However, I would argue that such an argument is necessary, not least as a matter of taking seriously the real truth of ‘original sin’. What else, after all, is ‘original sin’ if not precisely a name for our natural lack of appreciation for Honesty, or our moral anaesthesia, and, hence, our elementary natural incapacity for the eternal? The traditional doctrine of

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original sin first emerged out of Augustine’s polemic against the Pelagians, yet, against Augustine, I would argue that not even he goes anything like far enough. What was really at stake in the Pelagian controversy? It is difficult at this distance in time clearly to discern the real pre-ideological concerns at work beneath the ideological surface of the debate. However, it seems to me that there was at any rate some potential truth on both sides. On the Pelagian side: an attack on manipulative ideology advancing the power-claims of the church institution in itself; on the Augustinian side: an attack on Christian collusion with worldly structures of manipulation, the constitutive manipulativeness of the ‘earthly city’. Pelagius and his followers were evidently reacting against the continual tendency of manipulative church ideology to identify salvation, to all intents and purposes, with simple church membership alone. The more one emphasizes the intrinsic significance, for salvation, of simple church membership, the more one makes God appear arbitrary, unjust and cruel. Membership of the church is very largely just a matter of luck: the luck of being born in the right place, or happening to come into contact with the right people. But salvation, the Pelagians wanted to insist, is not a matter of luck. The doctrine of original sin makes it appear that, in general, salvation is a matter of luck – entirely dependent on the apparent capriciousness of divine grace. And therefore they rejected the doctrine. They rejected it, in short, because they associated it with a crude church-ideological over-emphasis on the salvific effect of simple church membership. Against this they wanted to argue first, perhaps, for a rather more charitable attitude to the pagan world, inasmuch as ignorance or misunderstanding of the gospel is not in itself to be accounted sufficient reason for damnation; but second, and more important, for a much fiercer ascetic understanding of proper Christian discipleship. In a world where Christianity had become the established religion of the Roman empire, and church membership was easy, they looked back to the heroism of the old days, the days of the martyrs, with nostalgia. Augustine, however, defended the notion of original sin because he wanted to highlight the pervasiveness of sin throughout the whole moral atmosphere of this-worldly society. So, for him, our fallenness into original sin is a form of ‘citizenship’ – participation in the ‘earthly city’ which stands over against the ‘city of God’. The distinction here is not between paganism and simple church membership; it is between, on the one hand, a world fundamentally enslaved to structures of manipulation and, on the other hand, a world in which such structures have been overcome. The point is that my enslavement to the manipulative structures of the ‘earthly city’ is not something I can escape by the exercise of my free will, deciding to follow the dictates of my conscience. Precisely the manipulativeness of those structures prevents this because it means that, in so far as they continue to prevail, my conscience itself is distorted. Drawing out the implications of the Augustinian insight, one might surely say that my inheritance of original sin is inherent in the givenness of each of

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my various civil identities: my family identity; my ethnic identity; my class identity; my confessional religious, or irreligious, identity. ‘For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive’ (1 Corinthians 15:22). Too often, it seems to me, original sin is thought of in quite abstract terms, as a distortion of our simple humanity. And Augustine’s special association of it with the sheer naturalness of human sexuality is, indeed, a case in point. But Paul, in 1 Corinthians, does not describe Adam’s fall as a distortion of our simple humanity; he describes it, far more emphatically, as that humanity’s death. We are no longer members of humanity in a simple, abstract way, as other animals simply belong to their species. Adam is dead: that state of affairs is over. Adam fell, out of simple species-existence, into history. And original sin is transmitted to us, concretely, in and through all the various ways we are born into history, all the various inescapable historic complications of our simple humanity. Each of these represents some immediate entanglement in a particular economy of manipulation. Salvation, as liberation from the confines of the ‘earthly city’, is pure gift: the gift (I would argue) of divine grace mediated through my being opened up, by encounter with the critical judgement of the Other, to an honest reassessment of my various identities within that ‘city’. Is this a form of salvation by luck? In a sense it is, but it is not the luck of mere church membership; rather, it is the luck of what I have called, above, ‘primal shakenness’. Behind the ideological dispute, in pre-ideological terms Augustine is not defending what the Pelagians are chiefly attacking. The two parties are, I suspect, talking pretty much at cross-purposes. But I think that there is also another problem with the Augustinian argument, which the Pelagians cannot see, an elementary problem which, thank God, has now become much easier for us to recognize. Again I go back to what is perhaps Augustine’s greatest soteriological breakthrough: his identification of the ‘earthly city’ with the workings of the libido dominandi, the lust for exploitative domination. So, as he classically puts it: the two cities [of earth and Heaven] were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self . . . In the former the lust for domination lords it over its princes as over the nations it subjugates; in the other both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience. The one city loves its own strength shown in its powerful leaders; the other says to God, ‘I will love you, my Lord, my strength.’14

Note: Augustine certainly does not identify the heavenly city with the church. And yet he still thinks of the earthly city – the city of manipulative ideology – as a primarily pagan phenomenon. If the church falls short of its vocation to embody the heavenly city, this is, for him, very much a matter of its having failed adequately to resist, or its having colluded with, the characteristic libido dominandi of paganism.

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Seeing the libido dominandi only as an essentially pagan phenomenon seems to me to be the chief error of the whole Augustinian tradition. It is an error entirely understandable in the circumstances, and no doubt inevitable, but one which now, at long last, we have a golden opportunity to put behind us. It is the error of just not seeing the libido dominandi also at work in what is distinctively Christian. The Pelagians attacked Augustine for the cruelty of his doctrine of original sin, inasmuch as it implies that God sends even infants, if they die unbaptized, to hell. This clearly is a cruel doctrine, a cruelly manipulative expression of the libido dominandi at work in the church. However, I do not think the problem is necessarily with the notion of original sin, as the Pelagians supposed. I would argue that it goes far deeper than that, and lies in the conventional notion of heaven and hell, which the Pelagians themselves shared: heaven as a carrot, and hell as a stick, for human donkeys. Surely this is just what a proper understanding of original sin ought to rule out! Heaven cannot be a carrot to human donkeys who, as fallen beings, lack any natural appetite for it. Neither can hell serve as a stick to those who, as fallen beings, are anaesthetized against its true reality. The manipulative cruelty and falsehood of the Augustinian doctrine, as I see it, comes from hell being envisaged in positive terms: as a punishment whose horror is immediately apparent to, and experienceable by, those who are liable to it. And yet, surely, hell would only be such a punishment to those who are not in it – the unanaesthetized, the perfectly honest. In so far as we fallen beings fall short of that ideal, hell is none other than the ordinary blankness of our fallenness. It is that blankness in its dishonestly unperceived eternal aspect. Like Jesus’s original crucifiers, in other words, we inhabitants of hell do not know what we are doing; we fail to recognize the Son of Man. We remain banal. The whole truth of Jesus’s vision lies in its simple, not at all ideological, intensification of moral choice, that is, its stark contradiction to the dishonesty of the banal. And, again, the simple truth potentially conveyed by talk of heaven and hell is just this same intensification. It is the simple truth that our choices always matter infinitely more than we yet realize, since what is at stake is nothing less than our eternal destiny. But, in contradicting the dishonesty of the banal, clearly we also need to take equal care not to lapse into the complementary dishonesty of the manipulative. Heaven and hell are the realities which the militantly secular moralist cannot see. Yet their reality is no justification for the manipulativeness against which the militantly secular moralist is, perhaps, reacting. Thus the militantly secular moralist in effect takes up the stance of an ideal conscientious bureaucrat, anxious to avoid any manipulative exploitation of the general public with whose welfare he, or she, is charged, who is therefore simply content to be guided by the givenness of even their most banal desires, identifying the moral good with whatever is useful in those given terms. Jesus’s vision, by contrast, is the vision of a prophet, not that of a bureaucrat, or any other sort of earthly ruler – quite the contrary. It points, absolutely, beyond the

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jurisdiction of any earthly ruler to the authority of God. Nevertheless, this certainly does not mean that the militantly secular moralist is wrong to be concerned about the way in which prophetic visions get distorted whenever they are pressed, against their nature, into the service of earthly rulers. Whether it be the rulers of the confessionally identified state or, for that matter, the leaders of the church itself – either way, we surely do need to be very wary of their manipulative self-interest, as they promise heaven as a reward for obedience to themselves, in God’s name, and threaten the disobedient with hell. Two Forms of Corporate Conceit As the systematic critique of that distortion, Second-Person theology has, first and foremost, to confront the corporate conceit of those whom manipulative rulers seek to manipulate with flattery. Throughout Jesus’s teaching the primary test of Honesty is represented as a matter of practical openness to the needs, and hence also by implication the moral viewpoint, of the Outsider – the Other who is most distanced from being a representative of ruling power within one’s own world. But what is it that most of all hinders the church, as a community, from attaining such Honesty? Clearly, it is our corporate conceit which makes Honesty appear unnecessary, as we attend to the wishes of our rulers and their apologists instead. This conceit, though, may be said to come in two basic forms. It may either be morally consensual, or else puritan–revolutionary. The Conceit of Moral Consensualism The conceit of Christian moral consensualism turns a blind eye to forms of dishonesty operative under cover of upholding some already established social order. Such conceit comes in many different guises, depending on the particular demands of its context: conservative or liberal; hierarchical or egalitarian; nationalist or cosmopolitan. But its defining feature, in every instance, is its ultimate complicity with some ideology of rule, designed to smooth away moral conflict between the church and the surrounding world. Theologically, therefore, the result is to reduce Christian discipleship, in effect, to the role of a mere back-up to common-sense morality – interpreting faith not as a continual calling into question of moral prejudice but, on the contrary, merely as an energizing principle, inspiring us to pursue our given moral ideals in ever more strenuous fashion, that is, with ever greater sincerity. And talk of heaven and hell is understood here as a straightforward incentive to such strenuousness. Now, Jesus died for all. And he was raised to be the Saviour of all. Even including members of the English middle classes, for instance. But did he die for middle-class English people, and was he raised to be their Saviour, merely by way of encouragement, for them to cultivate the ordinary virtues of

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middle-class Englishness with greater energy than they otherwise would? Is salvation really just a matter of added energy, in this way? Or does it not also, in every case, necessarily involve a radical openness to the challenge of other points of view, besides those of one’s own native culture, maybe involving quite different principles of moral judgement? Moral consensualism prides itself both on its common sense and on its sincerity, and without sincerity there can indeed be no Honesty. Yet, at the same time, the more sincerely one clings to the natural prejudices associated with one’s ethnic or class identity, the more those prejudices are reinforced – against the demands of authentic Honesty. Sincere conceit is reinforced conceit. The gospel narratives show us Jesus endlessly battling against conceit in the guise of morality. In contemporary common parlance the term ‘morality’ has become the name of a battlefield – a field of battle between rival forms of moral correctness, each bidding to become the dominant moral consensus – the moral correctness of the right versus the moral correctness of the left, as rival projects of conceit. But in this sense, I would certainly agree with John Milbank that Christian ‘morality’ is, properly speaking, a contradiction in terms.15 Likewise, I am in complete agreement with Karl Barth’s argument, in Church Dogmatics II, 2, that there should in principle be no methodological separation between the Christian study of ‘ethics’, in general, and ‘dogmatics’.16 Thus, in his primary role as a Second-Person theologian, Barth is chiefly concerned with the distinctiveness of Christian truth. But that distinctiveness may well be said to lie precisely in the dogmatic intensification of a certain ethical vision, which is the very purest negation of mere morality. It is the negation of morality in the sense that ‘morality’ is a code of behaviour not yet informed by a proper mistrust of dishonesty-as-manipulation. Jesus is the preacher, and symbolic representative, of the most determined resistance to the constitutive manipulativeness of the ‘earthly city’. And God’s resurrection of this crucified dissident, ideally, founds the most elementary hermeneutics of suspicion: seeking out the deepest roots of that ‘city’s’ moralized conceit, latent in every form of ordinary moral common sense. Christians therefore, like Epicureans, are in principle meant to differ from their neighbours, crucially, in being more aware of pseudo-ethical manipulation, and hence more mistrustful of their own prejudices. However, unlike Epicureanism, the gospel also serves to infuse that mistrust with infinite religious pathos: this, surely, is the real uniqueness of Christian truth, the truly distinctive ethical impact of Christian dogmatics. In so far, however, as dogmatics ceases to be understood along these lines – that is, where the definition of Christian distinctiveness is in actual practice divorced from such suspicion – straight away, faith is reduced to the level of abstract ideological opinion, with all sorts of potential ethical associations, dependent on the culturally conditioned whim of the believer, but no genuinely necessary ethical content of its own. That is the phenomenon which Barth quite rightly, I think, deplores. So on the one hand, for Barth, there is the specific sort of ethics which is dogmatics, or the ethics which the proper study of dogmatics is – in short,

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‘divine’ ethics. And, on the other hand, there is the ‘general conception’ of ethics, or merely ‘human’ ethics. But, ‘strange as it may seem’, he remarks, the ‘general conception of ethics coincides exactly with the conception of sin’.17 Morality, in this sense, is sin: in other words, it is what Christ saves us from. Again, the ‘general conception’ of ethics is, essentially, ethical reflection unchecked by a gospel-based hermeneutics of suspicion. And no matter how mild, common-sense and sincere such thinking may be – no matter, either, how orthodox, in purely ideological terms, the theology into which it is incorporated – to that extent, at least, it is still complicit with the underlying thoughtlessness which it neglects to uncover. All too often, as Barth argues, in every period of church history Christian ethical thinking has been governed by apologetic rather than properly critical dogmatic concerns. He compares true theology, in its relationship to the ‘general conception’ of ethics, with the children of Israel, under Joshua, invading the promised land.18 They are, in the scriptural account, commanded to act with a ruthless savagery which, considered at the level of the literal sense, is certainly appalling by any humane standards, not to mention the standards of the gospel. But let these texts be read as a metaphor for the proper claims of the ‘heavenly city’ in relation to the ‘earthly’. Having settled in, and ceased their warfare, the children of Israel were (so the story goes) tempted to turn away from God and worship the other gods of their neighbours. And is it not the same with us? Certainly it is, it seems to me, when ethical debate within the church merely replicates what is also to be found in the various newspapers and public forums of the secular world, with some token reference perhaps to scripture or tradition by way of adornment, but little more. Then something, somewhere, has indeed gone very wrong. The Conceit of Revolutionary Puritanism Yet, in saying this, everything then depends on not misinterpreting it as a crude vindication of the countervailing conceit of Christian revolutionary puritanism, by which I mean corrupted dogmatics. This corruption derives – in direct contradiction to moral consensualism – from the hostile prejudices of a self-consciously embattled church against its neighbours. The conceit of revolutionary puritanism turns a blind eye to forms of manipulation operative under cover of upholding God’s wrath against the wicked, and especially wicked rulers. So it identifies salvation not with Honesty, but with a certain dissident orthopraxy instead – the orthopraxy of the righteous few. Here we have Augustinianism gone wrong. One finds it in both Protestant and Catholic forms. But perhaps its ideal habitat is classical Calvinism. Of course, Calvinist theology affirms salvation by faith alone, and not by an orthopraxy of mere ‘works’, valued purely and simply for themselves. But what does this mean? In Reformation thought generally ‘faith’ is still not understood, in the full sense, as a quality of Honesty, which would therefore

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point beyond confessional orthopraxy altogether as the determining criterion for salvation. But, once again, it is conceived as a simple matter of frank sincerity. Inasmuch as even the most perfect frankness and sincerity falls short of full Honesty – since frankness and sincerity are qualities of individual or corporate self-expression, but not of listening to outsiders – none of the Reformers seem to me, in the end, to have properly grasped the actual truth of their own guiding principle, salvation by faith alone. That we are saved by faith alone, for Calvin, means only that we are saved by the frankness and sincerity with which we appropriate the ideological truth of the gospel in terms of a properly ‘biblical’, that is, puritan church orthopraxy. And moreover he notoriously seeks to glamorize the earthly struggle of the puritan elect community against the hostile world around by back-projecting it into the very deepest depths of eternity. He intensifies its pathos by effectively denying the original universality of God’s love. Right from the beginning, he suggests, God loves only the elect. The rest of us God (to all intents and purposes) hates. God hates us with such a virulent hatred that he has positively predestined us to do such things as will make us have to face an eternal future of punishment. Why? We do not know; we cannot know; we should not even wish to know. Christ did not die for all, but only for the few. Does this seem unjust? Calvin responds: we have no right to judge our Judge, which, in a certain sense, is undoubtedly true, but does not answer the real question. Can this really be the Judge who, simply, is eternal Love? Now, Calvin is not writing for people like me. He is writing for those who clearly see themselves as members of the puritan elect community. And he argues that this is a doctrine necessary both to teach them proper humility, as they confess their utter dependence on God’s predestinating grace, and to give them the needful assurance of God’s constancy.19 One finds much the same doctrine already developed by Augustine; it had also been revived by Luther. But it is Calvin who crucially first began to link it, not just to a schismatic movement, as Luther had done, but to a social revolutionary one. Unlike Lutheranism, Calvinism was not generally spread by the patronage of princes; it came up from below. Therefore, in Calvinism the old ideological aggression of the Augustinian doctrine of election was largely set free from any counterbalancing need, or inclination, to be tactful towards the secular powers. The politically more conservative Arminian Remonstrants, in the early seventeenth century, protested against the aggression of the doctrine. The theologians of seventeenth-century Lutheranism, confronted by the Calvinist approach, shrank back from it, turning aside from Luther’s own teaching in the process. Yet the proposed remedy, in both these cases, was essentially still ideological. So the Remonstrants and the Lutherans turned back to the ancient distinction between positive divine decree and simple divine foreknowledge: where mainstream Calvinism spoke of God predestinating by ‘absolute decree’, they preferred instead to picture God, so to speak, as an only half-engaged spectator, not decreeing but, altogether more gently – in the sense of more passively – foreknowing who would be saved and who not.

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Does this remedy work? It leaves us with a God who condemns more in sorrow than in anger. But it cannot, I think, be said to get to the real heart of the matter at all. This is, perhaps, merely to turn back towards softer forms of ecclesiastical conceit – less angry, in the sense of being more broadly consensual, yet no less conceited. However, what is surely needed is a decisive reappropriation of the truth of Jesus Christ, precisely as the Christian symbol for the infinite demands of pure Honesty. Our Saviour is Jesus, who neither propounded ideological doctrine nor legislated for church-orthopraxy; who was a perpetual critic of pharisaic puritanism; who taught love for one’s enemies; who spoke up for outsiders of every sort; who is, in short, the great polarizer of the opposition between divine love, truly expressed, and even the most orthodoxly ‘Christian’ form of corporate conceit. Here, too, compare Barth’s argument. In effect, this is also just what Barth says. Barth may well be seen as a radical critic not only of moral consensualism, but equally of revolutionary puritanism.20 He expresses it differently, but, coming from a Calvinist background – which still informs his critique of moral consensualism – at the same time his whole aim, in his pioneering reinterpretation of the doctrine of divine election, is so far as possible to break free from the old ideological terms of debate between classical Calvinism and its opponents. In particular, Barth largely rejects the traditional Augustinian/Calvinist insistence on the primordial inscrutability of God. Again, this tradition first creates a problem: how to reconcile the elementary biblical truth that ‘God is love’ with an understanding of predestination which seems to suggest the opposite. And then it resolves that problem with an ideological shrug of the shoulders: ‘God moves in a mysterious way; if we cannot see how the one is reconcilable with the other, then that is simply due to the insufficiency of our finite understanding to grasp the inscrutable depths of the divine wisdom.’ But, Barth argues, let us go back to what, as Christians, we most basically do know about God. And then, if we are only strict enough in resisting every sort of ideological distraction from that most basic knowledge, the original problem actually melts away. For what, quite apart from all abstract sacred ideology, we basically know is God revealed in Jesus Christ. Who is the God who judges us, electing some and reproving others? It is not the abstract God of natural reason; it is God in Jesus Christ. And how does divine election work? We do not come before God’s judgement, as abstract individuals, alone; we come as represented by Jesus Christ. As Barth puts it, he is both the ‘electing God’ and the ‘elected man’, which means that there is, in principle, no room left for any notion of a revolutionary puritan God judging in hatred. Such a notion can only arise in sheer abstraction from what is revealed in the – not at all puritan – figure of Jesus Christ. The supposed problem which the Augustinian/Calvinist tradition solves through its invocation of divine inscrutability is merely a figment of the revolutionary puritan imagination. There is no such real problem. After all, there is nothing there that needs resolving.

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Christ died for all. Unequivocally. Barth’s great Catholic ally, Hans Urs von Balthasar, following the visionary insights of Adrienne von Speyr, has further sought to develop the imaginative force of this proposition through a vivid renewal of the ancient doctrine of the ‘harrowing of hell’. In the Apostles’ Creed we confess our faith in Jesus Christ who ‘suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried’, and who then ‘descended into hell’ – the mystery of Holy Saturday, before, on the third day, ‘he rose again from the dead’. The descent into hell disappears from the Nicene Creed; nor does one really find it in the New Testament, although it is propounded in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus, and has become a major theme of Eastern Orthodox iconography. In the traditional understanding it is a mythical conception: Christ descends as a living figure among the dead, like Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas or Dante. But von Balthasar demythologizes it. He insists that we have to think here of Christ as truly dead.21 On the one hand we have the resurrection of the crucified; on the other hand, God incarnate, even to the point of death. These are of course two aspects of the same. But whereas the former is a definitive symbol of the absolute otherness of God’s judgement from that of the this-worldly ‘powers’, the latter by contrast is a revelation of God’s mercy, even towards those still enslaved by the ‘powers’. To think of Holy Saturday is to think of God’s unconditional solidarity with all mortal life without exception. The immortal is no longer alien from the mortal: God who, in Christ, shares even ‘the pains of death’ (Acts 2:24), is revealed as the agapé which suffers with the suffering of the Other, even the enemy Other who in human terms most ‘deserves’ to suffer. So that here we see it: all puritan limits dramatically cancelled. As von Balthasar himself puts it, even hell is now ‘a christological place’.22 Certain critics have charged both Barth and von Balthasar with drawing dangerously close to the ancient heresy of Origen, who taught his followers to expect an eventual apokatastasis, or ‘restoration of all things’, in the sense that at the end of time all evil will be purged away, and there will be salvation for all.23 Neither of them, in fact, accepts the criticism. Both are agreed that, whilst it is indeed legitimate, and as a matter of charity only proper, to hope for such a culmination, it would be quite wrong to presume upon it.24 Surely, though, the underlying logic of what they are both saying actually points a good deal further than they themselves appear willing to go. I would argue that it all depends on whether one still holds fast to the naive old view of heaven and hell as immediately intelligible moral incentives. In the context of that view no doubt the Origenist doctrine of apokatastasis does run some risk of degenerating into a mere incentive to ultimate complacency. (Even though Origen himself speaks, in imposing mythic terms, of a purgatory lasting ‘many ages’, nevertheless, his critics feared, complacency will clutch at any straw!) But only in that case. If, on the other hand, hell is, as I have argued, essentially a state of moral anaesthesia – and therefore all loss, but no positive punishment – the whole dilemma effectively disappears. Nor is there then any need for Origen’s fanciful myth of post-mortem purgatory.

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Everything that Barth and von Balthasar have to say tends to soften the manipulative cruelty of the old moral-incentivist doctrine. But the trouble is, they still do not exactly repudiate that view.25 They do not align themselves, in this regard, with Lessing. Instead, when confronted with the charge of Origenism, they straight away revert to the rhetoric of divine inscrutability which otherwise, I think quite rightly, they attack. So deep-rooted and resilient is the old error, backed up as it is with all the authority of Augustine, and the other anti-Origenist Fathers that, faced with the question, ‘Is it God’s will that, in the end, hell should be empty?’ they reply, ‘Although we hope so, we do not know.’ And yet – how can we not know? Given that God is agapé, overflowing love embracing even the most obstinate enemy, then we must know! Hell is full. For in so far as we remain imperfect we are all of us, to some extent, in hell. But it is also sheer emptiness. It is the eternal significance of ordinary, dishonest, and to that extent God-empty lives. God-empty, however, is by no means the same as full of punishment. That the old notion of a punitive hell has, in actual practice, effectively lost so much of its old power, in so much of church life, is surely all to the good, and needs to be welcomed with something altogether more than just a discreet sort of theological agnosticism. The fact is that from all eternity hell was, and is, full only of blank emptiness. It can never be anything else, because agapé does not – it cannot – want, positively, to punish without hope of reform. Revolutionary puritanism, especially, has always wanted as it were to liven hell up, to infuse it with vivid mythic life, as a place of punishment. That, though, is surely sheer manipulative illusion – nothing but a vain projection of moralized ressentiment, a mere vindictive dream of one’s wicked enemies roasting. What, then – it may be asked – of psychopathic murderers, or genocidal totalitarian dictators and their henchmen? As the SS doctor Kremer remarked, in the context of Auschwitz, ‘Dante’s Inferno seems almost a comedy’ by comparison. Maybe so. But would divine justice really be vindicated here by some eschatological version of ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’? How does that fit with the sermon on the mount? To adopt such a view is, I think, merely to collude with the self-glamorization of the self-consciously wicked. If we are to maintain solidarity with the victims of such people, I do not see how we can in any real sense share the ‘Origenist’ hope that even they will somehow participate in salvation. But let us be clear about this: the alternatives are not only salvation or punishment. When we speak of ‘eternal’ life, this means life lived with true inner meaningfulness, that is, beyond the dreary, morally anaesthetizing mechanisms of manipulation and manipulatedness. Some people, however, are, it seems, caught up within those mechanisms virtually without remainder. And there is, I would argue, only one possible response of true faith to the memory of the very worst. It is the simple, quite un-punitive prayer of Ulrich Simon, ‘May they never arise again!’26

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Compare John 5:28–29: the words of Jesus, ‘A time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear [the voice of the Son of Man] and come out – those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.’ In terms of this imagery, I think, all are indeed called, by agapé, to rise, but some – as Simon puts it – rise only, then, to ‘recede like ghosts into the cold air’, and, soul-less, hapless, unable to respond, to disappear again, so that, in short, whereas the positive torments of hell are a representation of what perfect Honesty would feel if (as is impossible) it were to live in contradiction to itself, what dishonesty, in so far as it prevails, is actually condemned to is surely just the sheer negativity of not ‘rising to live’. Honesty as Fire Conventional disciplinary eschatology, with its over-hasty concern to persuade all and sundry ‘that it pays to be good’, naturally conceives of eternal life in futuristic terms, as a matter of future rewards and punishments, two quite divergent potential destinations. But the more the emphasis shifts away from this towards the quite separate principle ‘that we should always care more’, the more eternal life will be conceived in terms of its immanence within the present. And the more one thinks of heaven and hell in these terms, the more they tend essentially to appear as the two primary elements of a single purgative mix. The classic exposition of this point of view is that of St Catherine of Genoa, in her little Treatise on Purgatory. Catherine, who lived from 1447 to 1510, does not positively reject the old carrot-and-stick notions of heaven and hell – in her day that was not an option. And yet the whole theme of this work is the immanence of eternal life within the mortal here and now. So she makes it clear that in talking about the future condition of the souls in purgatory she is at the same time describing her own present experience. As she herself puts it: What I see as the experience of the souls in Purgatory, I feel in my own mind. These last two years I have felt it most: every day I feel it, and see it, more clearly. I see the present bodily housing of my soul as a sort of purgatory, approximating to the ultimate Purgatory, only tempered, so that the body can bear it and survive; yet gradually intensifying, until the body die. I see my spirit estranged from everything that once fed it; from every joy, every delight, every consolation, even the most spiritual; to the point that I am now quite indifferent to whatever, either temporally or spiritually, may befall me, and to every impulse, whether it be of the will, or of the mind, or of the memory. Inwardly, I find myself, so to speak, under siege. Little by little, my inner self has been deprived of everything by which spiritual or bodily life is refreshed; only now to perceive how much those things used to feed and comfort me. Yet, in the light of the spirit, they have come to appear so hateful and abhorrent that they must all go, never to return. This is because of the spirit’s instinct to rid itself of whatever

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stands in the way of its perfection. It is so ruthless in the pursuit of its purpose that it would all but cast itself into Hell. And so it is for ever robbing the inner self of all its old resources, besieging it so cunningly that not even the least atom of imperfection is allowed to pass unseen or unabhorred. As for my outer self, it too, since the spirit does not respond to it, is so besieged that it no longer finds anything on earth to refresh it, according to its instincts. No comfort remains to it, except God, who does all this out of love, and very mercifully, in fulfilment of his justice. To perceive this gives my outer self great peace and happiness, but happiness which neither lessens my pain nor weakens the siege. No pain, however, could ever be inflicted on me so great as to make me wish to depart from the divine ordinance. I do not leave my prison, I have no desire to do so – let God do what is necessary! My happiness is that God be satisfied. Nor could I suffer a worse pain than that of transgressing God’s ordinance, which I see to be so just and merciful. All these things of which I have spoken are what I see and, as it were, touch. Yet I cannot find words adequate to describe the experience; nor can I rightly express the true meaning of the process underway in me, which I have felt spiritually. Here, though, is my account . . . 27

What does it mean, as a finite being, to have a real intimation of eternal life, immanent within time? For Catherine, the answer is very simple. It is an experience of intensified moral existence: intensified joy in the presence of God, intensified pain in confronting the legacy of sin, intensified desire for inner transformation. On the one hand she writes, ‘I believe no happiness can be found comparable to that of a soul in Purgatory, except that of the saints in Paradise.’28 Yet on the other hand she also writes, ‘I see there is in Purgatory as much pain as there is in Hell.’29 This intimation of eternal life is rendered possible by a decisive penitential turning of the will towards Honesty. (A truly decisive turn: the idea of purgatory, after all, is of a condition in which there is no further possibility of sinning, only a legacy of sin to be dealt with.) But Catherine is also quite clear that what she is describing is an experience of purgation, not punishment. And so there is no egocentric brooding here over what exactly one deserves; no comparison of self with others; no measurement of extenuating circumstances in assessing one’s personal guilt. There is only a sheer anguished yearning to be changed. The soul drawn, purgatively, into Honesty is thereby radically released from self-preoccupation, to gaze instead on God alone.30 The purgatory of which Catherine is speaking is the world of Honesty, experienced as fire. In this world the soul gazes on God, while God gazes on the soul. And the fire of purgatory, as she understands it, is none other than God’s gaze, or ‘uniting look’, which, along with the ‘rust’ of sin, also burns away all self-centred thought of either guilt or merit. Here then we have a turning of the will which, quite simply, has nothing at all to do with any dream of punishment or reward. Catherine’s Treatise is a very short work. It really consists of just one thought, examined from various angles. Yet I think it represents a profoundly truthful moral vision – a perfect blend, indeed, of the element of truth also to be found

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in Epicurean ‘ataraxy’ with a quite un-Epicurean apprehension of divine agapé. And if, beyond all corruption by the traditional impulses of manipulative church-conceit, we are after all to recover a form of Christian faith that would be genuinely faithful to the true logic of Easter, this surely is the way we need to go.

Chapter 7

The Context for Third-Person Theology Today: Liturgical Proposals

Von Balthasar, in his Theo-Drama, compares the interplay between the three Persons of the Trinity to what is involved in any dramatic production, considered as a collaborative venture, involving the three roles of author, actor and director.1 It is, I think, quite a helpful suggestion. Thus, in the terms of this analogy, the First Person of the Trinity is like the author of the drama. To develop the thought in an admittedly somewhat un-Balthasarian way: when one considers a drama in terms of the author’s intentions one may well want to compare it with other scripts by the same author. The divine author of the Christian gospel is also the author of the Hebrew religious tradition, the religious tradition of Greek philosophy, all the various genuinely religious traditions of the world, in so far as they rise above the level of magic and remain uncorrupted into ideology. First-Person theology originates as a theological study of this whole oeuvre in its ultimate unity. The Second Person, on the other hand, is like an actor: God playing the human role of Christ, bringing the divine author’s original conception to life. To use a Pauline term, the special skill of the actor is that of kenosis, selfemptying. As Paul wrote to the church at Philippi: ‘Have this mind among yourselves, which you have in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant’ (Philippians 2:6–7). God, in a movement of divine self-emptying, plays the role of a human saviour, in ‘the form of a servant’, so that we, in a reciprocal movement of human self-emptying, may play the role of the saved, that is, those who are saved from the manipulative cunning of other powers, within the ‘earthly city’. But the problem is of course that those powers offer us other roles, in other dramas, roles which are, in every instance, morally easier to play. God’s drama is thus a dramatized confrontation with worldly drama. In the gospel story, the point is that Jesus is the only character who fully understands what the true drama is; all the others think that they are in some other play. ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ Not even the disciples really know what they are doing, what drama they are in.2 And Second-Person theology is then, surely, in essence a meditation on this unknowing, a reflection on our struggle to learn the only sort of role that is ultimately right for us, in the great gospel-drama of God’s confrontation with manipulative hubris. 135

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But, besides author and actor, drama also requires a director: in the trinitarian context this is God’s work as Holy Spirit. It is the director’s task here, one might say, to determine what general style of performance will best do justice to the deepest intentions of the author, and give the freest possible rein to the genius of the central actor, while at the same time minimizing the damage done by the incompetence of others. The style in question is the style of church life. Third-Person theology is, so to speak, a study of ecclesiastical stagecraft. This stagecraft is all about bringing the gospel story alive by connecting it with all the other stories of ecclesiastical history, allowing it, as it were, to draw life from those other stories, and so it is about the liturgical, and devotional, owning of our historically given identities. Both Second-Person and Third-Person theology have essentially to do with what is unique to the gospel. But whereas Second-Person theology deals in the first instance with the authentic reception of the gospel by the unmanipulated Christian individual, Third-Person theology deals with the mediation of the gospel through our corporate belonging together. It is the study of Honesty in the owning of our corporate past, as a whole. That is, it is about us absorbing, so far as possible, precisely the whole of what the history of our corporate past has to teach us – because Honesty surely requires nothing less. It does not allow us to own only what we ourselves approve in that history, as being ‘our’ heritage, while disowning whatever is embarrassing, as being merely what ‘they’, of previous generations, did. For how, in general, is the memory of the past rendered morally instructive? It seems to me that everything depends upon its being truly owned – imaginatively entered into, with real sympathy and penitence, and in the context of faith, made a theme of serious prayer. And therefore the more we can own, in this way, the better. There are those who want to dismiss all actual participation in a church, in order to reconnect with the truth for which Jesus stands, supposedly without institutional mediation. Others want to recreate something like the church of the very first generation, as recorded in the New Testament, while more or less disregarding everything that came after. So they want to recapture the first fresh experience of the Holy Spirit which bubbled up in the charismatic practice of the early church. Others again, by contrast, see the Holy Spirit continuously at work in the long unfolding of church tradition, right down to the present, but are only interested in actually commemorating the glories of that history, never its shadow side. And this indeed has always been the prevailing attitude of my own church. All of these approaches, however, seem to me to represent variations of the same basic species of error: not enough owning. Three Levels of Liturgy Søren Kierkegaard once famously distinguished three ‘stages on life’s way’, or three ‘spheres of existence’: the ‘aesthetic’, the ‘ethical’ and the ‘religious’.

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In Kierkegaard’s writings this scheme is elaborated, at great length, above all in terms of the interior life of individuals.3 But it seems to me that one might also apply it to the study of liturgy. Corresponding to these three ‘stages’, I would suggest, there are three quite different modes of participation in church worship. At the ‘aesthetic’ level, one might say, the great virtue of good liturgy is its seductiveness. To participate in worship according to this first mode is to encounter an artist-God, a God not really so very demanding as regards loyal community membership – not at all, in that sense, a jealous or oppressive God. But it is to love ritual virtually for ritual’s sake, the sheer absorbing game of it. The authority of the ritual is found altogether in its intrinsic beauty. It belongs to the category of remedies against boredom, appealing, most, to a highly educated refinement, the more sophisticated the greater the appeal. For the chief precondition is a rich sense of history, to pick up all the esoteric nuances involved. By contrast, at the ‘ethical’ level the key thing looked for is community bonding. Here God tends to appear very much as the jealous Lord of a jealously loving community. The moral authority of the liturgy, in this case, depends upon its being incorporated into a vigorous programme of pastoral care. What is offered is first and foremost a remedy against loneliness, a place to belong, where one is warmly affirmed in one’s belonging. In so far as a community makes such warmth its first priority it will seek to make itself as appealing as possible to all-comers – with a minimum of educational preconditions. So it frames its liturgy accordingly. The overriding goal is consensual camaraderie. But then there is the third sphere, that of ‘religion’ proper. And this, finally, is where the issue of Honesty becomes all-important. I am one of those to whom all three spheres matter. So, as regards the ‘aesthetic’ sphere, I am happy to confess that what originally seduced me into the church was my discovery of the literature of medieval and CounterReformation mysticism, a miscellaneous collection of old volumes tracked down in second-hand bookshops. I love the austere seduction of Gregorian plainsong, or Russian church choirs, or the poetry of the Book of Common Prayer. I feel at home in Gothic cathedrals. I developed a strong attachment to the little medieval church at the back of my house, where I used to live, still gazing out, as it has for a thousand years now, over the rural scene into the far distance. With regard to the ‘ethical’ sphere; the emotionally warmest church communities are often, to the wrong temperament, at the same time the most suffocating. But I have also worked as a priest in the inner city – a battered, at one point riot-torn neighbourhood where the churches really were among the last bastions of moral order against the surging chaos. And, having seen what that can mean, I have absolutely no interest in devaluing the sometimes quite desperate struggle such churches are engaged in, battling, as they are, for the preservation or restoration of people’s basic self-respect, even where everything else seems set to undermine it.

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Yet, after all, of what ultimate value is even the most alluringly seductive, or even the most dynamically community-bonding, liturgy without Honesty? A Way Forward Take, for instance, the parable Jesus told about two men who went into the temple to pray, a Pharisee and a sinful tax collector: The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’ (Luke 18:11–13)

Of course, according to Jesus it was the tax collector who went home that day ‘justified’. But if one then compares the regular prayer of the church – considered as a corporate person – which of these two figures does the church itself most resemble? Is it not the Pharisee? True, the different church traditions have produced a wide variety of calendars. But almost all of them, up to now, have been fundamentally ideological in inspiration. If one considers their implicit rationale, the governing assumption always seems to be that the church is the privileged carrier community of final truth-as-correctness. And therefore (so the logic appears to run) the whole purpose of a liturgical calendar is to promote the commemoration of whatever aspects of the past are best calculated to reflect glory on this community, for that truth’s sake. What needs commemorating is whatever the church as a whole can feel proudest of; whatever memories are in that sense most encouraging; whatever will best help glamorize the church, and present it in the most attractive light to potential converts, so that the ideological truth whose bearer it is may thereby be disseminated as widely as possible. It is obvious to us that this is what a liturgical calendar is for. First, in all the major festivals of the year, we celebrate the glorious origins of the church. Then, at a secondary level, we go on to fill the whole year round with saints’ days. These give us our official picture of church history, as a whole succession of further glories. That there has also been a shadow side is not denied; how could it be? But it is never the main thing focused on, in liturgy. When the church, as a corporate person, ponders its corporate history in public prayer, the main focus is always on the glories of that history. I am talking about the behaviour of the church as a corporate person. Again and again the church encourages its members to confess their sins – as individuals. But in traditional church liturgy every act of confession tends to

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be followed by some authoritative pronouncement of absolution. The priest, or minister, who pronounces absolution does so by virtue of the authority that comes from being an official representative of the institutionalized church community. And what does this say? It very clearly implies that the sins in question are not the sins of the church itself, as a corporate person, but that, on the contrary, the sin of the community has been systematically dissolved and broken down into the sins of its individual members, while the community’s role has become more or less exclusively a channelling, to them, of God’s forgiveness. Considered as a corporate person, the church thus behaves exactly like the Pharisee in the parable. Let us presume that everything the Pharisee said was perfectly true and sincere. Even so, it was not he who went home justified. And why should it be any different with the church, corporately? The plain fact is that we operate quite blatant double standards: we prescribe one sort of approach to God for private individual church members, and another very different approach for the church itself as a whole. No doubt, we do need to celebrate everything in our tradition that gives us authentic role-models for the Honesty to which we ought to aspire. But if the operative principle for determining the overall shape of the church’s calendar were in fact gospel-Honesty, it seems to me that the results would be quite different from what they mostly now are. For in that case, I would suggest, the guiding purpose of a liturgical calendar would be not so much to glamorize the church’s corporate identity but, rather, precisely to work through all that is in moral terms most problematic about it, in other words, all that is most demanding of a real working through, whatever memories most of all need pondering, simply, for pure Honesty’s sake. And on that basis we surely need to remember not only the original founding dreams of the tradition, and the glorious achievements of its saints, as providing a standard against which to measure the corporate failings of the present, but also the great failings of the past. We have to remember both the church’s various historic sins of aggressive self-assertion, in the name of Christ, and, at the same time, its many other sins of passive collusion, with the corruption of nations, social classes, ethnic communities. The operative criterion here is that we we should focus, with especial urgency, on whatever memories, to this day, remain most alive – not least as reasons for other people to mistrust us – all those things in the worshipping community’s history of which it is most embarrassed to be reminded, and which it is therefore most tempted merely to disown. For maybe, one would have to say, those who mistrust us are right to do so, if our only response to such memories is a self-defensive one, and we refuse to face the facts with the real seriousness they demand. Good worship is worship which serves the needs of good, trust-building conversation, not only within the worshipping community itself, but also between that community and its neighbours. Hence it has to be as open as possible to the influence of outside voices: God speaking, indirectly, through the outsider. It is a matter of dealing,

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not just sincerely, but patiently and honestly, with whatever has the quality of still-troubling trauma. And an honest church is one that doesn’t only remember the disturbing past, but truly appropriates it, truly becoming ‘the body of Christ’, in the sense that Christ is Christ above all by virtue of the way he ‘bears the sins of the world’. Such a church so far as possible bears the corporate sins of its own past, in frank acknowledgement that this is what we have done, the better to learn the lessons of the past, for the future. It does so on the understanding that a pan-historical communion of saints which was not equally understood to be a pan-historical communion of sinners would be the merest spiritual candyfloss. And thou shalt not live by candyfloss alone. Christ, after all, was crucified at the behest of a crowd, a crowd, moreover, which had been stirred up by the leaders of the religious establishment. In so far as the cross symbolically defines the nature of sin, it is in the first instance very much a corporate affair, with the Pharisees and Sadducees as anticipatory representatives of the sinful church itself. And so it was also for the Hebrew prophets. What concerned them, always, was the sin of their people as a whole. The festival of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, is the chief attempt in the Jewish calendar at giving direct liturgical expression to the prophetic spirit. In sharp contrast to prevailing Christian liturgical practice, the prayers of Yom Kippur are prayers for forgiveness without absolution, not because of any lack of faith in God’s forgiving love, but just because the forgiveness requested is for the community as a whole – and what could ever give any individual the necessary authority to pronounce absolution on all Israel? Yom Kippur is the ‘Sabbath of Sabbaths’, the holiest of all Jewish festivals. In the days of the Jerusalem temple it was the one occasion in the year when the high priest passed through the veil into the Holy of Holies. There he burnt a cloud of incense – to evoke, by symbolically concealing, the numinous presence of God – in the midst of which he scattered the blood of two sacrificed animals, a bull for his own sins, a goat for the sins of the people, and then another goat, the scapegoat, also ‘bearing all their iniquities’, was driven out into the wilderness. In the New Testament Letter to the Hebrews, 9:1–14, we find a poetic interpretation of the Yom Kippur sacrifice as a foreshadowing of Christ’s death on the cross – inasmuch as Christ is both high priest and sacrificial victim in one. But the whole point of this metaphor is, thus, to present Christ as the redeemer of whole communities from their corporate sin. It certainly seems to me to be a shame that our liturgy gives us so little space to explore this. And therefore my first practical suggestion is that we begin the necessary task of rebalancing the church’s calendar with the institution, precisely, of a Christian Day of Atonement. Such a day might be quite different in the actual form of its observance from the Jewish Yom Kippur. But, as with Yom Kippur, it would be a day set aside for the worshipping community’s confession of its corporate sin in general, perhaps on the same day, or on the nearest Sunday to Yom Kippur itself.4 When I have proposed this in the past people have sometimes objected that, surely, we already have the necessary slots available in our given calendar:

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Ash Wednesday, for instance; Good Friday; Lent as a whole; or Advent. And yes, I wholeheartedly agree, it would indeed be good if the observance of those days and seasons were in future increasingly set free from the traditional constraints, to serve the purpose. However, the liturgical privatization of our concept of sin is so deep-rooted, I guess that in the end it can only be shifted, with any real effect, by something more. A Christian Day of Atonement would be the beginning of that something more: a day for the global church, ecumenically, to be the penitent in the temple. And then – if the criterion is that we should seek to work through whatever corporate memories remain most troubling to us, and most thought-provoking – there is clearly a good case to be made for all sorts of other new observances, as well, with rather more specific historical reference. Again, the corporate sins which each congregation, as the body of Christ, is called upon to ‘bear’ are, it seems to me, not only those most directly bound up with their membership of the church, in itself, but also those bound up with their various ethnic identities, class identities, gender identities and so forth. No such identity is ever altogether innocent. And Honesty, I think, ideally demands that all should receive at least some degree of serious commemorative working through in communal prayer. This is a civil religious task. In much theology ‘civil religion’ has a bad name, for the simple reason that most hithertoestablished forms of it have been sponsored by state power for secular ideological purposes, generally nationalistic: a nation’s thanksgiving to God, in the spirit of the Pharisee, that ‘we are not like other nations’. But there is no reason why the memories of ‘civil’ history should not equally inform a liturgy of the opposite sort. Let me give some examples from a contemporary British perspective. The new institution, beginning in 2001, of an annual ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ on 27 January, as the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, is at least potentially an occasion for the kind of thing I have in mind. True, this is a state-sponsored event, and one may well have some misgivings about the actual motivation of the secular political establishment in promoting it. However, that does nothing to lessen the very specific reasons which the church in particular has to adopt the day for itself. Let us not be distracted by any arguments either for or against Zionism. Let the Zionist movement seek to appropriate the memory of the Holocaust in whatever way it sees fit – for the church that is not really, in the first instance, what is at issue at all. The rights or wrongs of Zionism have, for the time being, got to be bracketed, so that we, as the church, can deal with what we must deal with. What we must deal with is just the plain, awkward fact that behind the secularized phenomenon of Nazism there lies century upon century of often very violent Christian persecution of the Jews, in the name of Christ. How can the churches ever claim to be honest about their history until they start to take this ugly aspect of it at least as seriously, in liturgical terms, as they take the memory of their own martyrs? Even with regard to the specific horrors of the Third Reich, and the churches’ only very partial resistance, it is

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not only Christian Germany that has to wrestle with the memories; it is the whole of Christendom, in the spirit of ‘there but for the grace of God go we’. The church’s relationship with the Jews has always been so intimately bound up with its innermost identity that where that relationship goes wrong, everything is wrong. And it has so often gone so badly wrong. Not in the first instance for the Jews’ sake, therefore (although, of course, always in friendly conversation with our Jewish neighbours), but for our own sake – that is, for the sake of the salvation of our own corporate soul – we Christians surely do need to be thinking, with real urgency, about how this could have happened; and about all that needs to change, in order that nothing remotely like it can ever happen again. I think it is regrettable that we had not got around to registering this in our calendar long before the state stepped in to help us, but it is certainly good that we now have the chance. What about adopting 18 December, the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the USA, in 1865, as a ‘Slavery Memorial Day’? Not only do we need to remember the stubborn persistence of slavery today, but also, of all the great unmastered memories still washing around our culture, that of the old trans-Atlantic slave trade plainly remains one of the most destructive, as a continuing source of deep-rooted mistrust between black and white. The fact is that in our British inner cities, alienated young Afro-Caribbean people have for some time been abandoning their parents’ Christian faith largely because of the churches’ failure to address this aspect of Christian history. They have become Rastafarians, with a spirituality entirely determined by their equation of the biblical image of Israel-in-slavery with themselves, and of the biblical theme of a return to the promised land with their own hope of being restored to a liberated Africa. And I think the churches ought to take their disenchantment very seriously indeed, as a theological challenge. So too it seems to me that we in the British churches need some sort of ‘Ireland Day’ to think through, pray through, the troubled history of our relationship with our geographic neighbours. Explosive memories like these require defusing – with all the careful, cool attentiveness which constitutes authentically meditative prayer. (One possible date for this might be 17 August, the anniversary of the founding, in 1976, of the Northern Ireland Peace People movement.) The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, on 9 November 1989, might serve as a ‘Totalitarianism Memorial Day’. In each case what counts is the raw shaking-power of the memories involved. But – as Hannah Arendt classically saw – the shaking-power of the memories to which such a day might be devoted lies, essentially, in all that totalitarian regimes have in common with the governments of any industrial (or post-industrial) mass society, their character as a caricatural embodiment of some of the very deepest tendencies of contemporary mass society in general. The theological need is to penetrate deep beneath the superficial politics of the matter. To see only the differences between totalitarianism and pluralist democracy is merely to reconfirm us, the fortunate citizens of pluralist democracy, in our ordinary

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pluralist–democratic complacency. No real shaking-power there. Yet totalitarian politics represents the twin dynamic of responsibility-erasing bureaucracy plus systematically mass-manipulative propaganda, which are features common to every contemporary mass society without exception, including even the most entirely pluralist–democratic. All totalitarianism does is push these universal features a little further than other regimes. Liturgy today, it seems to me, has a new calling and a new social necessity, which only emerged with the birth of industrial mass society to serve as a medicine against these sicknesses. I think we should allow ourselves some regular liturgical time to register this development, by pondering the great historic corruptions of our condition. Above all, how was it that so many quite ordinary people, like ourselves, could be ensnared into active collaboration with what, in retrospect, we can now see to have been such fantastic horrors? Indeed, there is no doubt a whole range of other more or less similar observances that might also be worth experimenting with, on the same principle, depending on the context.

Objections An Epicurean, or a liberal, might object: how can I, as an individual here and now, validly be caught up into the guilt of past generations? Is not the whole traditional idea of ‘sin’ manipulative from the start, anyway? And are not these proposals merely a licence for all manner of emotional incontinence, and moral blackmail by those who revel in their inherited ‘victim’ status? There are, I think, a number of clarifications to be made. Sin/Guilt/Shame I certainly would not want to defend the concept of ‘sin’ deployed by the more aggressive forms of Christian evangelism. That is: where manipulative evangelism plays upon vulnerable people’s weakness and lack of self-esteem to convince them that they are miserable guilty sinners, in urgent need of salvation – the more miserable the better – so as then to present them with the promise of what is actually a rather easy way out, simply by joining the warm, joyous, reassuring community of the church, and learning to obey its leaders. Such preaching identifies sinfulness with individuality; and salvation with being swallowed up into the glorious collective. The more utterly swallowed up the better. But the notion of corporate sin that would be involved in a Christian Day of Atonement or other such festivals of corporate Honesty is, of course, the exact opposite to this. Nevertheless, a sceptic might persist: would not these proposals merely mean replacing that old form of manipulativeness with a new form, now in the name of whatever happens to be the latest ‘political correctness’?

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Well yes, I suppose that is always a danger. But only in so far as we still continue to confuse a sense of sin with feelings of guilt and shame. For theological manipulation is the art of playing upon those feelings, whereas, in itself, a sense of sin isn’t a feeling at all. It is a pure turning of the will, a pure abandonment of self-will. St John of the Cross, writing for the members of a contemplative religious order, famously speaks of a ‘dark night of the soul’ through which the contemplative life tends to lead: a time of absolute emotional aridity, in which prayer has become nothing but a burden.5 This may appear to be a terrible lapse backwards from an earlier piety of rich feelings, and yet – he insists – properly understood, it is on the contrary a necessary purgation. All that one has to do is to persist in the routine. The dark night is then the existential separating out of the pure act of will which leads to truth, from the incidental emotions which help launch it, but with which it ought never to be confused. Just so: we are not saved by feelings. What saves us is faith, that is, pure Honesty – in emotional terms, come what may. In any case the emotion that most positively accompanies the true repentance of faith is not the sort of guilt or shame that can be manipulated, in the interests of other people’s power. It is a shaken passion of responsibility, which, I think, is something quite different. For who feels guilty, in a way that is open to manipulation? The answer, I think, is: someone who, in a spirit of moral conceit, wants to feel innocent – and is frustrated, because of what they have done. Who feels shame, in a way that is open to manipulation? The answer is: someone who, in a spirit of moral conceit, wants to feel glamorously proud of what they are, in social terms – and is frustrated, because of the shortcomings of the community or social category to which they belong. But is it right to want to feel innocent? Or to seek glamour? What else, indeed, is salvation if not, precisely, release from those desires, and all that they then generate when frustrated? Those addicted to the consolations of ecclesiastical conceit, when actually confronted with the historic record of the church’s corporate sin, will respond with more or less sincere shame, and will feel compelled to apologize. In so far as elements of corruption persist, with them involved, they will no doubt also feel got at, to feel guilty. But let me insist, that is not the point. What I am arguing for is not a more neurotically apologetic church, nor is it a self-hating church. On the contrary, it is just a church finally released from its old addiction to corporate conceit, and hence its old defensiveness against critique – a church in other words that is, at last, happy to own its actual historic responsibilities in full, without any prevarication or defensiveness, simply because its selfrespect no longer depends on anything except its commitment to Honesty. Saints, as such, are not glamorous: to be glamorous is to be ostentatiously enviable – and there is no earthly reason to envy them, as saints. Nor, by all accounts, do they feel innocent. On the contrary, the very holiest are in principle those blessed with the strongest sense of sin. These are people who are shaken by an infinite restlessness, an infinite vocation to Honesty, that is, an infinite

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desire to know God, in the sense of honestly participating in God’s knowledge of themselves, as sinners. And is not this, also, very much the true role model for the church to follow, in its collective life? Victim Memory/Oppressor Memory But, people sometimes say, is it not better to let the traumatic past go? Consider for instance how the Serbs remember the medieval battle of Kosovo, and how they’ve woven a great national myth around it: a vision of themselves as a heroic victim-people, on Christendom’s front line. And look at how, in the chaotic break-up of post-Communist Yugoslavia, that myth turned murderous. Surely it would be far better for everyone if the Serbs could somehow finally learn to let go of the memory, and allow the battle of Kosovo to be just another bit of ancient history. And doesn’t the same apply, more or less, to every other self-perceived victim-community as well? I agree: there is always a certain sense in which the heirs of the victims do need to learn to let go of the past. Nothing is as potentially venomous as a victim-group’s corporate conceit, where this becomes the defining principle, for a community, of its whole historic identity. If one is forever, in one’s own eyes, the innocent victim, then of course one feels oneself to have carte blanche for all manner of subsequent injustice, justified in the name of revenge. I would not deny that there are plenty of examples of this, also, in the recent history of the Zionist movement; nor that other examples might be cited from the more fanatical forms of ‘black power’ ideology; or from Irish republicanism. And so on. But the question nevertheless remains: what does that imply for the rest of us: the heirs of the oppressors and the bystanders? To say ‘let go of the past’ is perhaps a very British, and still more a very English, attitude. A nation which has so triumphally managed to impose its language on the whole world, as the British nation has, finds it difficult to grasp how it feels to be part of a small, embattled culture, or how that affects one’s view of the past. With a history so full of military and economic success, we British do not easily comprehend the bitterness of others, who, by contrast have tended to be losers. For us, in our secular identity, history is the stuff of colourful costume drama, enjoyed as something picturesque, or it is what organizations like the National Trust and English Heritage so immaculately preserve: the goal of a pleasant afternoon out, sightseeing. Not much more. And yet, is it not the case that, where there is trauma in the air, the more the heirs of the oppressors and the bystanders also take their share in the serious work of remembrance, the easier it becomes for the heirs of the victims to gain some real breathing space? So far as I can see, the only way positively to help ease the bitterness is by trying to bear part of the burden. The new liturgy of atonement I have in mind is strictly intended for the heirs of the oppressors and the bystanders. It is, in the first instance, a proposal addressed to my own church, the Church of England.

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The Kairos Now ‘The time has arrived.’ So Jesus proclaimed (Mark 1:15). The ‘time’, that is, the kairos – a time of opportunity, a season, an opening up. And what was it that had opened up? None other, surely, than a fresh historic chance for Honesty to be publicly recognized. But there is, I would argue, also a fresh such opportunity today. The kairos of the present moment is, I think, essentially bound up with the current proliferation of a particular form of organization. The Ancient Greeks have bequeathed us several names for different modes of political organization. Some are etymologically derived from kratos, meaning ‘coercive power’: democracy, aristocracy, plutocracy, gerontocracy, ochlocracy, theocracy (not to mention etymological hybrids like bureaucracy, meritocracy). Others are derived from archein, meaning ‘to rule’: monarchy, oligarchy, hierarchy. All of these are in different ways corruptible into tyranny – but what shall we call the pure antithesis to tyranny? One possibility is ‘anarchy’. The obvious trouble with ‘anarchy’, however, is that, notwithstanding the best efforts of the more peaceable type of self-professed anarchists, it retains such a strong association with mere chaos. The chief alternative term is ‘isonomy’. This has the disadvantage of relative unfamiliarity; nevertheless, as I argued above in Chapter 2, I think we might do well to try to retrieve it. ‘Isonomy’ denotes an approach to public affairs that is not about the pursuit of coercive power (kratos) or the art of ruling (archein), but which seeks on the contrary to subordinate coercive rule to the proper dictates of law (nomos). It is precisely an upholding of equality (isotés) as guaranteed by law. Herodotus in his History imagines a debate between the seven Persian princes who, in 522 BCE, overthrew the Magian usurper Gaumata: what kind of political order should they establish?6 Eventually, they decide in favour of a monarchy, under Darius, but not before they have at least considered the alternative of something more egalitarian. The chief advocate of this more egalitarian approach, Otanes, calls it ‘isonomy’. His fellow conspirators understand ‘isonomy’ as just another name for ‘democracy’, which they reject, caricaturing it as mere rule by the rabble. But Otanes is not arguing for a system of rule. Rather, he is an upholder of isonomy in the sense that, as he puts it, ‘I neither want to rule nor to be ruled.’ So let us define ‘isonomy’, in the very broadest terms, as the ethos of those who, like Otanes, want, so far as possible, neither to rule nor to be ruled. One would surely then have to say that, in this-worldly terms, Jesus of Nazareth – as king of a kingdom ‘not of this world’ – was also a great proponent of isonomy. Moreover (again I come back to this), the last fifty years have witnessed a spectacular flourishing of, in this sense, essentially isonomous organizations within secular civil society: campaigning movements cut loose from political parties and not seeking any direct share in governmental power, but working only to constrain the power of this-worldly rulers by the cultivation of a truly

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effective culture of enlightened public opinion. In Chapter 2 I referred to these as ‘public conscience movements’ – but one might perhaps equally call them ‘isonomy movements’. Having abandoned the quest for coercive power, such movements can only be effective in so far as they gain moral authority. But moral authority derives from being seen to be honest; here, therefore, we have movements with a direct constitutive commitment to the cause of Honesty. The aim of isonomy movements is, in every instance, to try to gain a hearing for voices that would otherwise remain unattended to: the voices of those hitherto more or less excluded from public debate by reason of gender, sexual orientation, age, race or sheer poverty; the voices of those who are unheard because they are foreign, even though they may be directly affected by our own economic and diplomatic activities; the voices of our official ‘enemies’; the voices of the unborn, under threat from our ecological irresponsibility. This is the work of Honesty, in its most direct political expression. And over the last fifty years there has been a truly remarkable increase in such campaigning work, in all but the most repressive cultures, globally. Indeed I think that this has completely transformed the whole context for religious life, and hence also for theology, to a still bewildering, and for the most part largely unrecognized, extent – above all, in the Christian context, inasmuch as it actually represents a quite unprecedented new opportunity for us to reconnect with the original truth of the gospel. Third-Person theology, in general, is surely all about the discernment of the evolving kairos for divine revelation, or, to put it another way: it is essentially a theological study of ‘modernity’ and its demands. For I repeat: what else is ‘modernity’, in the philosophical or theological context, if not that which is constituted by grand narrative?7 That is, any narrative: • • •

intended to define the true meaning of life for all; relating it to the history of a particular missionary carrier community for that truth; and investing it with a maximum of this-worldly pathos.

Again, by ‘grand narrative’ I mean any narrative identifying the highest wisdom, not with any ultimate inner spiritual withdrawal from this-worldly struggles, but rather with an infinite commitment to a particular evangelistic enterprise, of unlimited ambition for the universal transformation of public life. But, as I have said, defined in this way it is clear that ‘modernity’, strictly speaking, is something that began at Pentecost, with the birth of the Christian church. However, as for the cultural epoch initiated by the Enlightenment, I think we need to think of this essentially as a ‘second modernity’. The basic difference between ‘first’ and ‘second’ modernity, then, is just the difference between two basic contrasting species of carrier community for grand narrative. Thus, first modernity is what has for its carrier community a confessional religious organization, the Christian church or the Islamic umma,

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whereas second modernity either replaces or supplements this carrier-role of the confessional religious community with a more or less equivalent celebration of movements aiming at governmental power within a secular state. But now I think we are potentially on the threshold of a no less momentous further long-term transformation. What is at present opening up is nothing less than the possibility of a third modernity: an understanding of world history as a revelatory process, culminating for us in the emergence, as prime carrier communities for the highest cause, of the new isonomy movements in general. The highest cause is the cause of Honesty, and, in organizational terms, what Honesty requires is the solidarity of the shaken, a solidarity, purely and simply, on the basis of shared shakenness, a shared commitment to Honesty. First modernity begins, in both the Christian and the Islamic contexts, with an eruption of the solidarity of the shaken, and is host to a whole series of further such eruptions; but it mixes the solidarity of the shaken, very often to its serious detriment, with another solidarity – that of the confessionally orthodox. Second modernity challenges this mixture. Here too we encounter the solidarity of the shaken, in numerous different eruptive forms. But in the context of second modernity, the trouble is that it is mixed with all sorts of other loyalties, bound up with the demands of secular realpolitik, which again confuse the basic issue in other ways. The great beauty of third modernity, on the other hand, is that it is the ethos of organizations whose actual solidarity is in principle uniquely transparent to the solidarity of the shaken. These secular agencies, not aiming at direct governmental power, offer so much less scope to the manipulative lust for domination than either the confessional religious communities of first modernity or the political parties of mature second modernity. And they simply depend, for their continued existence, upon the moral authority that, in the end, only a reputation for Honesty can confer. Each form of modernity is, at the deepest level of its potential truth, an epoch in the Holy Spirit’s work. Generations of ‘liberal’ theologians in the past have sought to reconcile the truth-potential of second modernity with the older heritage of first modernity. And now I think we are being called to do the same for third modernity, decisively transcending the limitations both of ‘liberal’ theology and of its more conservative opponents. The liturgical proposals I have advanced are intended as a response to the kairos of the present moment, the moment of the emergence of the possibility of third modernity. Over the last few years in Britain, at the prompting of churchrelated isonomy movement pressure groups, a number of new observances have indeed actually started to appear in the church calendar. I am thinking of such things as One World Week, Christian Aid Week, Prisoners’ Week, Peace Sunday, World Aids Day, Unemployment Sunday, and so forth. Each of these ‘issue airings’, as one might call them, is in principle the occasion for a particular set of pressure groups – concerned with a certain span of current socio-political issues – to set out their stalls before the larger church community. And this seems to be a promising beginning, already made, to what I hope

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will eventually become an altogether bolder process. But it is after all only quite a small and still very marginal beginning, so far. Moltmann/Hauerwas The great systematic theologian of second modernity was Hegel. It was Hegel who, in that context, most radically differentiated the critical essence of gospel truth from its entanglement in the ideological deformations of corrupted first modernity, and who, more than anyone else, constructed a cogent, multi-faceted grand narrative to show how and why the new insight that he was advocating had emerged. But now, I would argue, we need to re-do what Hegel did for second modernity, only, this time, for third modernity. In theological terms, a good deal of raw material (so to speak) has already been assembled for this, and some construction work has begun. The various isonomy movements have made their impact: feminist theology, black theology, green theology, justice-and-peace theology – all of these are lively conversation processes, directly resulting from that impact. But now the need is to draw them all together. What I am advocating is a systematic theological response to that which all of these diverse movements ultimately have in common: the whole underlying isonomy ethos. Consider, for example, the work of Jürgen Moltmann. In my view, Moltmann is undoubtedly the most notable Third-Person theologian of the twentieth century, just by virtue of the beginning he has made in this regard. Thus Moltmann is a post-Barthian theologian in the German Reformed Church, whose whole work, however, has essentially been a mediation between the world of the isonomy movements and that of the church. His first major book, Theology of Hope – originally published in 1964 – was in effect an opening up of fresh dialogue between post-Barthian theology and the New Left of that period. But then, from the 1980s onwards, he became a major advocate, especially, of Christian involvement in the anti-nuclear peace movement, in green politics and in the politics of feminism.8 He is a theologian who sets out systematically to explore the deepest resources of church tradition in the service of such causes. Moltmann, however, does not advocate anything like the calendar reform that I am proposing. For one thing, the only type of civil religion he envisages is the conventional sort, especially ‘American civil religion’, as first defined by Robert Bellah.9 Yet he by no means shares Bellah’s 1960s optimism about the possibility of appropriating this for progressive purposes.10 In fact, he increasingly seeks to correlate his loyalty to isonomy movements with an ecclesiology derived, in the main, from the Radical Reformation tradition: a vision of the ideal church very much as a ‘contrast society’, fiercely repudiating any kind of self-identification with its secular host culture.11 So his theology takes shape as a systematic attempt to bring together two quite distinct modes of anti-establishment thinking: one that belongs to third modernity; the other

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deriving from first modernity. And the great question it thereby raises is, to what extent these two approaches are in the end truly compatible with one another. The Swedish theologian Arne Rasmusson has, interestingly, picked up this basic tension in Moltmann’s thought.12 Rasmusson is a theological advocate of the Radical Reformation tradition. And, from that point of view, he seeks to mobilize Moltmann against Moltmann. So Rasmusson criticizes Moltmann, quite sharply, for being far too uncritical of the various ‘progressive’ secular movements he supports. After all, Rasmusson asks, are not these movements simply the selfexpression of an up-and-coming new establishment? Their participants are mostly middle-class, well-educated people, who do not have to struggle much in order to survive – people who therefore have the necessary leisure to concern themselves with the great issues of global politics, and who are also free to reject what they tend to see as the rigid moral authoritarianism of earlier generations, who were more preoccupied with the necessary disciplines of wealth creation. Rasmusson refers to Ronald Inglehart’s analysis, tracing the rise of this new ‘Postmaterialist’ class over the period following the Second World War, and its various struggles with the older ‘Materialist’ establishment.13 Moltmann wants to speak up, always, for the ‘oppressed’. But this desire itself is also a typical expression of Postmaterialist sentiment. In fact, Rasmusson argues, Moltmann’s ‘political theology’ is nothing but Postmaterialism baptized. Against his professed intentions, Moltmann is in reality a spokesman for this new privileged elite: his ethical instincts are, on the whole, identical with their natural prejudices. The one slight discrepancy is with regard to abortion, where Moltmann does admittedly have a rather more conservative attitude than would be normal in Postmaterialist circles.14 But it is not as though the issue of abortion is one of his major concerns. And in every other respect he is essentially a theological advocate for standard Postmaterialism, in quite a militant form. Rasmusson, for his part, is highly suspicious of this. And it seems to me that he does have a point. I agree with Moltmann to the extent that he effectively identifies the new isonomy movements as the primary (anti-)political carriers of moral truth in our world; and I share his theological concern systematically to integrate that new form of moral insight into the old religious truth of church tradition. But this certainly is not to say that the isonomy movements are beyond theological criticism! Moltmann is far more critical of the churches than he is of the isonomy movements. I would not wish to follow him in that. One can scarcely deny the large element of truth in Inglehart’s sociological analysis, or that, like any other movements, those of Postmaterialism, too, are fully subject to original sin. Inasmuch as they do not directly seek governmental power, isonomy movements are much freer from the temptation merely to pursue maximum propaganda effectiveness than, say, political parties are. Their strategic commitment to rational persuasion is also a strong tactical inducement to non-violence. But as agencies of latent class struggle they – undeniably! –

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also remain subject to certain other impulses besides those of truth, which require theological critique. Rasmusson is critical of Moltmann, more particularly, for his tendency to think in quite crude dualistic terms: upholding, on the one hand, the ‘oppressed’ and their allies, the upholders of unfettered spontaneity and self-expression, the defenders of the planet, against, on the other hand, ‘capitalism’, or bourgeois authoritarianism, with its culture of patriarchy and alienation, continually pressing towards the further rape of the earth and nuclear armageddon. As if it were just a simple matter of two quite clearly definable opposing camps. In so far as isonomy movements lapse into mere propaganda thinking, this is indeed the shape which that thinking takes. And I think one would have to concede that Moltmann does not always take any very great precautions against it. Detailed political analysis – tracing the interplay between competing goods, or between greater and lesser evils – is not what he is best at. So, too, Rasmusson criticizes Moltmann’s undoubted weakness for the rhetoric of political ‘revolution’. Moltmann is a theologian whose work largely originates from a process of sympathetic dialogue with the more libertarian forms of Marxism. Behind his Theology of Hope there looms the great figure of Ernst Bloch, with his neo-Marxist philosophy of hope; in The Crucified God Moltmann is, again, significantly responding to the challenge of neoMarxist ‘critical theory’, as represented by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. He has also long had a major commitment to solidarity with Latin American ‘theology of liberation’, itself a revolutionary enterprise, at times directly involved in violent resistance to the established order. With his commitment to the anti-nuclear peace movement in the 1980s, Moltmann started to interpret the sermon on the mount in the traditional manner of the Radical Reformation, as a hardline pacifist manifesto, at the level of NATO defence policy. Yet he still continued to hold back from applying it in the same way, for instance, to the anti-imperialist military struggle of the Marxist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. And, in the terms of my argument, one would therefore have to say that Moltmann has never quite completed the transition from the world-view of left-wing second modernity to that of third modernity. Rasmusson, who in general wants to uphold the Radical Reformation element in Moltmann’s thought against the Postmaterialist element, at the same time also compares Moltmann’s work to that of Stanley Hauerwas as an, in his view, fundamentally preferable example of pure Radical Reformation theology. This is certainly a very interesting move. Hauerwas is quite a different sort of thinker from Moltmann in style, as well as in substance. He is an unsystematic essayist on issues of Christian ethics and a dissident figure within North American Methodism.15 But he does represent more or less everything that Rasmusson is looking for, expressed with often pungent humour. Nor indeed could there possibly be a more troubling challenge to us English Anglicans, with our state-church heritage, than Hauerwas’s. Let us consider the matter in church-historical terms. All Radical Reformation thought is of

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course premissed on a reading of church history in which the conversion of the Roman empire under Constantine figures as the great catastrophe, the decisive moment of the church’s corruption. Moltmann is also a fiercely anti‘Constantinian’ thinker. But the difference is just that, in this regard, Hauerwas is altogether more radical. So he wants to insist that, when it comes to our sense of public belonging, we Christians should have an ultimately exclusive loyalty to the church – a highly critical loyalty, to be sure, but exclusive. The sort of church Hauerwas is advocating would be a pure contrast society, a community, in his controversial phrase, of ‘resident aliens’.16 It would strictly eschew any kind of self-identification with its host community. In the American context, very significantly, this means no flags in church, and as a matter of principle no participation, by any church member, in the military, plus all that then follows, in relation to the state. But also – by extension of the same principle – it means no strategic allegiance to secular isonomy movements either, of the sort that Moltmann represents. As a born Anglican, however, I want to protest: surely, it all depends upon the particular moral quality of the church’s self-identification with its host community! Are there not two quite opposite types of such self-identification? On the one hand, there is that which conforms to the model of the Pharisee in Jesus’s parable, and on the other, that which conforms to the model of the penitent tax collector. In the first case we have what one might perhaps term ‘ideological inculturation’, where church loyalty is mixed with other loyalties merely to give an extra blessing to some given power structure. But in the second case we have ‘anti-ideological inculturation’, where on the contrary the church seeks to represent its host community, before God, with real Honesty, without self-flattery, undefensively. I would agree that ideological inculturation is always false – even in relation to isonomy movements. However, I would argue that what we need instead is a strictly anti-ideological, alternative form of inculturation. This, it seems to me, is a valid ideal even in relation to nation-states. I have no interest in defending any version of the current ‘Constantinian’ status quo which Hauerwas is attacking. Without drastic calendar reform – and the far-reaching shift in corporate self-perception which that would entail – I do not think that there can ever be any real beginning of release, for us members of traditionally ‘Constantinian’ churches, from our age-old addiction to sacralized secular ideology. To this extent I would entirely agree with Hauerwas. As things stand at present, most if not all so-called ‘public theology’ in our now democratic world remains at least to some extent locked into a stifling collusion with democratic norms. Democracy may be the least bad form of government, but good theology involves a spirited resistance to the glamour of any form of worldly government, even this. And, on the whole, we present-day ‘Constantinians’ remain all too uncritical of the narrow confines of standard democratic propaganda-debate, the whole dynamic of democracy as a system of rule by elected elites – precisely, in short, everything that differentiates it from the non-governmental ethos of isonomy.

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The undoubted greatness of Hauerwas lies in his relentless harrying of what I would term ideologically inculturated theology, in this context. And I think that there will always be a place within the ecumenical conversation processes of world Christianity – indeed, I would hope an increasingly prominent place – for contrast-society churches (like the Mennonites and Quakers) as corporate prophetic witnesses against that temptation. Yet I nevertheless hold fast to my argument: we also need another way of being the church, a new way, complementary to that of the old contrast-society churches. What does it take for a cultural establishment to change, morally, for the better? It surely takes two sorts of influence, working in concert. Confrontational opposition from the outside is one sort of influence needed. This is what the old contrast-society churches are set up to help provide, as, in another way, are isonomy movements. But then there have to be answering voices from within the establishment as well, to acknowledge whatever justice there may be in the critique, and to help dismantle the defensive mental barriers which prevent that justice from being more generally acknowledged. The reform that I am suggesting is a strategy for the systematic encouragement of such answering voices. It is, quite unashamedly, a strategy for churches in so far as their members are the beneficiaries of a history of oppression: a way of coping with that heritage – not with mere shame or embarrassment – but, equally, without evasion. It seems to me that the mission of the world church requires a basic division of labour. In addition to the traditional type of contrast-society churches, I think that we need a new species of establishment churches to be their partners; what one might call atoning establishment churches. This, as I see it, is how the old ‘Constantinian’ traditions are called to evolve. As churchgoing for simple respectability’s sake declines, the opportunity for such a transformation begins to open up by the grace of the Holy Spirit – now, as never before. And why not? Healing, at Last Unfortunately, church ideology has deep roots. I would argue that Radical Reformation historiography for the most part altogether underestimates the problem. Thus the Radical Reformation tradition seeks to liberate itself from every last trace of ‘Constantinianism’ in order to return to the spirit of the early church. Very well. But, by way of response, I come back to the question: just how honest, really, was the early church? I do not think that we should shrink from this question. To be realistic, how honest could the early church have been? Let us, also, be fair. A radically honest society – at any rate, in the sense of the word adopted here – is, essentially, one that is to the greatest possible extent open and ready to learn new things, by giving free space to dissident voices which challenge

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the dominant consensus. In this sense, the early church directly confronted the dishonesty of the wider society within which it found itself, often with remarkable courage. But the trouble is, the more it did so, the harder it was for it to remain fully honest in its own internal affairs. Let me repeat what I have already said above, and elsewhere. What the early church prioritized was survival and growth. Therefore, not Honesty. That is why it survived and grew. Otherwise it would no doubt have been crushed. The pre-church community around Jesus was a radical contrast society, so far as we can see, strictly for pure Honesty’s sake, but without strategic defences. When God’s truth prevails, Jesus proclaimed, ‘Many that are first will be last, and the last first’ (Mark 10:31 and parallels). Of course, he was in general a partisan advocate of those who are the ‘last’ to have their voices heard. In society at large his gospel was ‘good news to the poor’, inasmuch as it encouraged those who were otherwise silenced to speak up and challenge the conventional dishonesty of their silencers. Within each particular slave-owning patriarchal household it was good news primarily to the slaves, the womenfolk, the children. But the church was already in plenty of trouble because of its relatively superficial ritual nonconformity. True, this ritual nonconformity drew its original rationale from a fundamental questioning of the dishonesty involved in various forms of oppression, both political and domestic; yet the fact is, nervous church leaders – responsibly labouring for the survival and growth of their communities – had every reason to try to minimize the scandal of the gospel by, so far as possible, confining that scandal to its most superficial, purely ritual level. Already in the New Testament the first layer of such defences is beginning to appear, notably in the exhortatory ‘household code’ texts which are such a prominent feature of the post-Pauline New Testament epistles.17 The purpose of these texts is quite clearly spelt out, for instance, in 1 Peter 2:11a–12: Beloved, I beseech you as aliens and exiles . . . Maintain good conduct among the Gentiles, so that in case they speak against you as wrongdoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God on the day of visitation.

Granted, the church is a community of ‘aliens and exiles’, but, from the point of view of the nervous church leader, this is not to say that Christians should fall into the trap of seeming to confirm their enemies’ prejudices. On the contrary, it is far better always to try to confound hostile expectations – with ‘good conduct’ in the sense of good moral camouflage for the true alienation effects of faith. (I respectfully assume that what is advocated here is, indeed, only intended for camouflage . . .) Thus: ‘Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors’ (vv. 13–14). ‘Servants, be submissive to your masters with all respect, not only to the kind and gentle but also to the overbearing’ (v. 18). ‘Likewise you wives, be submissive to your husbands’ (3:1). So we see the original free-spiritedness of the pre-church community being suppressed.

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Because it had to be. And the church discipline which is to be seen taking shape in the Pastoral Epistles was, in the first instance, very largely a system for policing this necessary suppression.18 Meanwhile, the orthodox (non-Gnostic) church also developed a passionate cult of martyrdom. But can a community which congratulates itself on its martyrs ever, in fact, be honestly self-critical? No doubt Nietzsche overstates the case: That martyrs prove anything about the truth of a cause is so little true I would be disposed to deny that a martyr has ever had anything whatever to do with truth. In the tone with which a martyr throws his opinion at the world’s head there is already expressed so low a degree of intellectual integrity, such obtuseness to the question of ‘truth’, that one never needs to refute a martyr.19

This scarcely applies to a martyr like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Oscar Romero, say, or Martin Luther King. These, though, are all martyrs involved in Christian struggle for justice in the secular world, so that, when the church honours them, in each case it is pointing beyond its own corporate self-interest to a larger cause. The martyrs of the early church, by contrast, died purely and simply for the institution which then honoured them. That is the phenomenon which Nietzsche chiefly has in mind. He is thinking of the way in which the early church used its martyr stories, as a source of glamour, for recruiting purposes; and the way it coupled them (as in Revelation) with terrible dreams of eschatological vengeance against the persecutors. The success of the early church was due partly to the core element of truth in the gospel, but partly, also, to the church’s readiness to make the necessary compromises; and partly to the sheer ideological self-confidence with which it was able to inspire its martyrs. Bonhoeffer, Romero, King: these were Christian martyrs who died, unequivocally, for the cause of greater public Honesty, in the deepest sense. The early Christian martyrs, by contrast, died for a sacred ideology. They were the champions of an institution which defined its authority claims in thoroughly ideological terms. Their courage, in this sense, sprang from the same source as the church’s anathematization of heretics – the one phenomenon is only really intelligible in the context of the other. For a community which is constantly facing the more or less immediate prospect of martyrdom cannot afford to be easily pluralistic. It truly needs a good dose of single-minded fanaticism. It cannot leave space for doubts; it must define, and anathematize. But to anathematize is to refuse to listen. Straight away it renders any honest conversation with the anathematized impossible. One can only shout – and, perhaps, practice a frank sincerity in one’s shouting. As Simone Weil put it: Christianity has, in fact, since the very beginning, or nearly so, suffered from an intellectual malaise. This malaise is due to the way in which the Church has

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conceived its power of jurisdiction and especially the use of the formula anathema sit.20

Things got worse with the Constantinian revolution, and again, as Weil also remarks, above all in the thirteenth century. But the beginnings of the process are already all there in the New Testament. And she is surely right: the result is nothing less than ‘an absolutely insurmountable obstacle to the incarnation of [true] Christianity’.21 ‘This formula’ – the formula anathema sit – ‘and the use to which it has been put prevent the Church from being Catholic other than in name.’22 Here, in short, is the real problem: the church evolved as an organism designed to survive violent persecution. Its deepest organizational and intellectual instincts derive from that context, and that necessity. To this day, it remains ideally adapted to the task of survival in such circumstances. Even in the very gentlest of environments, it still has all the right disciplinary reflexes for that task, waiting to be brought back into play. But, when the church came to power, what had begun as a set of survival mechanisms went on to become persecutory mechanisms. Strict ideological single-mindedness serves both purposes, as church history, only too clearly, illustrates. In an environment such as contemporary Britain, where there is no danger at all of the church suffering violent persecution – but very great danger (and already considerable damage) from people’s questioning of its general moral integrity – the old reflexes have become almost entirely dysfunctional. Yet they are rooted in such a primal trauma, it may well be that they are ineradicable. The calendar reform that I am proposing would be a direct contribution to therapy for this trauma: in particular, to observe a Christian Day of Atonement would be to set about therapeutically working through its various destructive consequences. However, I will concede that the obstacles are formidable. What I am proposing is that we try to drop our old habits of corporate boasting, on our own account. But a persecuted community, in justifying its resistance, is driven to boast. It cannot do otherwise. We learnt the habit very early on. And how can such fundamental habits be shed? A ‘Second-order’ Contrast-church? If any church could do it, it would be the Church of England. We could do it – just because, by comparison with other churches, we have so little, seriously, to boast about. I used to live a few miles up the road from the ruins of Rievaulx Abbey, where Abbot Aelred once, amidst the stonemasons’ din, sat writing his great treatise on ‘spiritual friendship’. What Aelred helped build, the founders of the Church of England, four centuries later, destroyed, to enrich the king. True, the Rievaulx of the sixteenth century was much declined from the original enthusiasm of the pioneer days. But there you have it: what produced the

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Church of England was, first, a long-term decline of institutional morale, and, then, a savage act of governmental rapacity. No church could be more Constantinian in its original conception than the Church of England. We have our saints, as every church does. And, with a blithe generosity of spirit which is not all that easy to distinguish from sheer cheek, we have also co-opted others, from outside, who would perhaps be rather surprised by the honour we now pay them. What, for instance, does it say about our sense of history when, on 6 July, we celebrate the feast day of Thomas More and John Fisher, martyrs, who were, after all, condemned to death precisely for their conscientious resistance to our original break with Rome? Or what does it say when, on 30 August, we celebrate John Bunyan, whom we locked up in Bedford gaol? We cheerfully sing Bunyan’s hymn, ‘Who would true valour see’, seldom perhaps reflecting that what Bunyan actually had in mind was the valour needed by Dissenters like himself to resist us. In the same way, we also sing William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ as a hymn, with its magnificent invocation of struggle against the world of ‘dark Satanic mills’, even though this is in fact Blake’s image for everything belonging to the Establishment, which he loathed, and perhaps especially for our churches – the very buildings in which we are singing. Such is our ecumenical openness – or historic self-forgetfulness. I am not saying that we should give up singing ‘Who would true valour see’ or ‘Jerusalem’. On the contrary! My plea, though, is that we should sing them, always, with full awareness of their original meaning, and in acknowledgement that for much the greater part of our history we have been, by and large, an oppressor church – both an agency of oppression in relation to our rivals, and apologists for oppression more generally. It would be far nicer to be like our brothers and sisters in the Anglican church of South Africa, say, now flourishing because of the leading role of the church, during the apartheid years, in the resistance against oppression. But different situations shape different vocations. I am glad to belong to the Church of England, because I do not especially want to belong to an already good church. I suppose that if I had been born into an already good church – in the sense that the Mennonites or the Society of Friends, say, might be said to be ‘good’ churches – I would not positively have sought out a worse one. But I think that churches, like people, are to be loved, not only because they are good, but because they are there, and, so far as we can, in order to help them become a bit better. Should the Church of England be disestablished? I by no means want to defend every aspect of the present arrangements. What I have called an ‘atoning’ establishment church would not wish to be privileged, but only to be broadly representative, that is, as broadly representative as possible of the great plurality of divergent moral points of view in the surrounding world; for the gospel’s sake, simply seeking to dissolve the elements of rigid prejudice in each – but doing so with real effectiveness. It would in this sense seek to be a ‘second-order’ campaigning agency – in other words, never inclined to commit itself, as an institution, to one side or another of the great, genuinely

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open moral debates of the day; as a matter of principle, never seeking to constrain the freedom of its members to adopt honestly diverse views. But, rather, as an institution, it would campaign against whatever manipulatively distorts such debates, or coercively limits them. This kind of church would thus be what one might further call a purely ‘second-order’ contrast society – as distinct from the ‘first-order’ contrastsociety churches of the Radical Reformation tradition, or, to some extent, the Roman Catholic tradition. In short, unlike the latter, it would not want to be set apart from its host society by anything other than the exemplary Honesty of its conversation processes. The Church of England, on the other hand, is at present somewhat muddled about this. The issue of divorce is an example: our continuing official reluctance to solemnize the remarriage of divorced persons clearly does reflect at any rate a certain hankering after the role of a ‘first-order’ contrast society. But the gesture is superficial, and therefore ineffectual. Let us face reality. There is no way we can ever be an effective ‘first-order’ contrast society while we continue to be, on the whole, so easily ready to baptize the children of non-churchgoing parents, or to conduct the (first-time) weddings of non-churchgoers; when we place no limits on the career choices of our members, other than those of ordinary respectability – not, for instance, making the sort of difficulties that the Roman Catholic church makes for medical staff involved in abortions, or that the Radical Reformation churches make for members of the military; and when, in general, we still present ourselves as the established church of this land. I would have no problem about being part of a church which does these things – if only we were, at the same time, decisively committed to the vocation of a ‘second-order’ contrast society. In other words, if only we would try to earn the right, as Christians, to follow such easy-going ways, by making full use of the gospel opportunity thereby opened up, to work at a truly honest form of moral pluralism in our community life. I do not think that we have any automatic right to do what we do; we need to earn it. And I would agree with our critics that at present we do not adequately do so. The Church of England has indeed ended up as a church quite broadly representative of its host society, with a membership drawn from a wide range of different class and ethnic groups, nowadays, thank God, also enjoying rather friendly relationships with most other religious communities. In my view, this represents a great – but as yet largely unrealized – opportunity, and a very particular corporate vocation. It seems to me that it is our clear vocation, within the larger ecumenical community, to help pioneer the new role of atoning establishment church, that is, the role of a truly, and profoundly, repentant exoppressor-church. And how else, after all, is this do-able, other than by way of something like the sort of calendar reform that I am proposing? Synodical reports and debates are all very well; but the heart of a church’s life is its liturgy.

Chapter 8

Conclusion: An Empty Tomb

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God and saying, ‘The time has arrived, and Honesty is knocking at the door; open your minds to welcome the good news.’ (c.f. Mark 1:14–15)

Christian tradition is like a great tree with three trunks. But here is the seed: Jesus of Nazareth, preaching a gospel of Honesty. He of course called it ‘the kingdom of God’, which was, in the world of first-century Palestine, the natural formula to hand. But the long intervening history of Christian kings, and other Christian authority figures, purporting to represent the kingly authority of God – yet doing so with rather less than perfect Honesty – has rendered that formula, I think, somewhat problematic today. Jesus was crucified by the rulers of his world because of his perceived threat to their power, above all, in so far as it depended upon the dishonesty he challenged. They condemned him to a death of maximum public cruelty, as an act, one might say, of symbolic contempt for Honesty. And his disciples then saw him symbolically raised to life again, in token, one might also say, of God’s fundamental affirmation of Honesty, against all odds. What gives the Bible, in general, its special authority? I would argue that it is, quite simply, the unique urgency with which the prophetic books of Hebrew scripture, first, and then the gospel stories, serve to dramatize the demands of Honesty and its promises; and the way the other books also help us to appreciate that urgency, by setting it in context. People often speak of biblical ‘faith’, on the one hand, and natural ‘reason’, on the other hand, as two alternative – perhaps complementary or perhaps rival – modes of access to divine truth. However, it seems to me that this is nothing but a recipe for confusion. The trouble here is just that both these terms, ‘faith’ and ‘reason’, abstractly counterposed to one another, are so ambiguous. For in both cases everything depends on what exact species of truth-claim is being made: whether ‘faith’ is merely understood as a set of opinions possessing perfect truth-as-correctness, or – quite differently! – as a confessionally framed opening towards the proper demands of truth-as-Honesty; and, likewise, whether ‘reason’ is understood as a set of techniques for arriving at perfect truth-as-correctness, or, again quite differently, as a trans-confessionally framed opening towards the most radical truth-as-Honesty. Far better, I think, would be to speak of two basic different levels of divine revelation: one the implicit revelation of God to us in and through every 159

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experience of serious conversation that we ever have, as we come to appreciate what makes for good communication and good listening in general, the essential qualities of Honesty. All that is required at this first level is a straightforward intuitive revulsion against what I have called dishonesty-asbanality, dishonesty-as-manipulation, dishonesty-as-disowning. But then, at the second level, we also need the richest possible shared poetic resources for actually articulating that implicit awareness. And, I would argue, the authority of the Bible, as of any sacred scripture, essentially derives from its efficacy in this. Of course, not everything in any scripture serves the purposes of revelation, understood along such lines. What counts as revelation, in scripture, is what helps challenge conventional sympathy-inhibiting gut reactions, not what confirms them; what helps make us more open and attentive to unfamiliar voices, not what reinforces closedness. I do not see how there could be anything revelatory in texts that merely reproduce conventional homophobia, for instance, or conventional patriarchy. And so how shall we read the Bible? Jack Miles presents the issue in terms of two basic options.1 The Bible, he suggests, may be compared to a stainedglass window. One interpretative approach looks at the window; the other is a constant struggle to look through it. Following Hans Frei, Miles is an advocate, and indeed a very distinguished exponent, of the first of these two approaches. Thus he is content to read the Bible as a composite work of art, a ‘biography of God’. What interests him is the overall dialectic of the story, as presented in the canonical texts, with all its twists and turns, its internal echoes and allusions. Unlike the protagonists of the second approach, in other words, he is not preoccupied with the question of what ‘really’ happened. Nor with the closely associated questions of how exactly these texts evolved. Miles does not approach the Bible in a spirit of detective work, but as a literary critic. In the contemporary world of biblical scholarship, this remains very much a minority option. Most scholarly study of the Bible is, in essence, an attempt to look through the stained glass, to what lies behind it. But Miles deplores the sheer dominance of that approach. Historical criticism of the Bible is for ever trying to sort out historical fact from fiction. Why, though, he asks, should this matter so much? Cannot fiction, after all, also be a valid medium for divine revelation, just as much as factual reportage? He quotes with approval Frei’s remark that the liberal historical critics are really just ‘siblings under the skin’ to their fundamentalist opponents.2 For both groups are at one in their apparent inability to recognize divine truth in the sheer beauty of the received texts or, therefore, to read them, with any real intensity, in their own terms. I think Miles is right: Honesty can indeed speak through fiction just as well as through factual reportage. And yet, historical criticism surely does have one great virtue. It alerts us to the travails of Honesty behind the texts. Thus, let me give an example: the ending of Mark’s gospel. There is I think a profound truth in the reticence shown here, in the Marcan account of the resurrection, a profound truth which can only be understood in

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so far as one recognizes the polemical intention of this particular author. For I am talking about the first-century version of Mark, the version ending with 16:1–8, before the second-century addition of 9–20. It is certainly quite an abrupt ending: And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb when the sun had risen. And they were saying to one another, ‘Who will roll away the stone for us from the door of the tomb?’ And looking up, they saw that the stone was rolled back; for it was very large. And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, ‘Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you’. And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and atonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to any one, for they were afraid.

There were two bodies of tradition relating to the resurrection current in the early church: this empty-tomb tradition, perhaps associated with a regular Easter pilgrimage to the holy sepulchre; and the various stories of the risen Jesus appearing to the disciples. The other canonical gospels combine both. And the later added conclusion to Mark also supplies a couple of appearance stories. But the first-century version omits them.3 Why? Compare Paul’s version of the Easter story, in 1 Corinthians 15:3–10, where he itemizes what he regards as the key elements of the tradition. Namely: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brethren at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace towards me was not in vain.

This Pauline tradition may be said to do two things. On the one hand, it does the same as the empty-tomb tradition: it affirms God’s raising of the crucified dissident, that is, God’s great vindication of Honesty. But on the other hand it also provides a basis for authority within the church. It is indeed very striking that Paul does not tell us anything about these various appearances, other than who received them. He does not tell us what sort of experience was involved; that does not appear to be at all important to him. What matters to him is just the simple fact that Christ is risen, and that these are the primary God-chosen witnesses of that fact, himself being one of them. It is clear from the rest of the letter that his authority has been challenged by certain elements within the Corinthian church, and that he is most anxious

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to reassert it. He may be ‘the least of the apostles’, but it is nevertheless vitally important to him that he should be accorded that authoritative title; which he cannot take for granted (c.f. 9:2). So he actually begins the letter by underlining his claim to be an apostle. And that claim is moreover directly linked to his having been one of the primary witnesses to Christ’s resurrection: Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? . . . This is my defense to those who would examine me. (9:1, 3)

Note also that he does not mention Jesus appearing to any women, here, as in Matthew 28:9–10, and John 20:14–18. Clearly, such stories, which may well have been associated with a polemical challenge to notions of exclusively male ‘apostolic’ leadership in the church, do not serve Paul’s particular polemical purpose. Mark’s omission of all appearance stories, meanwhile, is perhaps best understood as a still more radical challenge to the various traditions of ‘apostolic’ leadership. It has to be seen in connection with the generally very critical portrayal of the apostles, running right the way through his (or – who knows? – perhaps her) work. Time and again, the evangelist emphasizes the apostles’ failure to understand Jesus. Where one also finds the same theme in the other gospels, it is in passages taken over by them from the Marcan tradition; this really is a most distinctive feature of Mark’s authorship. And, above all, the apostles are shown as being foolishly preoccupied with their own personal status. Thus, in Mark 9:33–37 we read how Jesus and the apostles arrived in Capernaum after a journey: And when he was in the house he asked them, ‘What were you discussing on the way?’ But they were silent; for on the way they had discussed with one another who was the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve; and he said to them, ‘If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of all.’ And he took a child, and put him in the midst of them; and taking him in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me’.

And again, in 10:35–37 we read how James and John, the sons of Zebedee came forward to [Jesus], and said to him, ‘Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you’. And he said to them, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ And they said to him, ‘Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory’.

Whereupon, when the ten heard it, they began to be indignant at James and John. And Jesus called them to him and said to them, ‘You know that those who are supposed to rule over the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over

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them. But it shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be slave of all.’ (41–44)

In so far as the various stories of the risen Jesus appearing to the apostles were bound up with the subsequent prestige-claims of those first witnesses, and their official successors, here surely is the real reason for Mark’s reticence about them. It is not that he denies the truth of those stories; he prefers as it were to keep them secret. And perhaps we also need to see this secrecy in the light of that other very notable feature of the Marcan tradition: the way it repeatedly portrays Jesus himself attempting to keep his true messianic identity secret. As Mark tells the tale, when Jesus casts out demons and the demons recognize him as the Holy One of God, the Son of God (1:24–25, 34; 3:11– 12), he bids them be silent – for what do demons truly understand of God’s truth? And, again, when he heals the sick or the disabled, he tries to keep it secret (1:43–44; 5:43; 7:36; 8:22–26). The danger is that he will be regarded merely as a healer, and his deeper message will be missed. His style of teaching, in parables, is said to be esoteric, so that ‘those outside . . . may indeed see, but not perceive’(4:10–12; 33–34). So, too, when Peter recognizes him as the Christ, he forbids the disciples from immediately making this public (8:30); and when Peter, James and John have seen him revealed in glory, at the Transfiguration, he repeats the same injunction (9:9). It seems overwhelmingly clear to me that, as Wilhelm Wrede in fact first argued back in 1901, this theme of the messianic ‘secret’ is an editorial invention of the evangelist, or of the evangelist’s community.4 After all, it is not credible, as a matter of actual historic record, that Jesus could have hoped to keep secret a miracle such as the healing of Jairus’s daughter: a little girl, supposedly dead, in a house full of mourners (5:21–23, 35–43), or that he could have expected a blind man whose sight had been miraculously restored to tell no one how it had happened (8:22–26). However, I find Wrede’s explanation of the theological motive at work here somewhat less convincing. Wrede’s theory is that the evangelist was trying to deal with a fundamental discrepancy between the church’s confession of Jesus as the Christ and a lingering memory that Jesus had not in fact claimed this status for himself. But against this, the fact is that, whatever Jesus did or did not claim for himself, there is nothing anywhere to suggest that there was any group, among his disciples, positively suggesting that he was anything else. That is, it does not seem that there was anyone whom the evangelist might actually have been trying to refute, along these lines. Nor does it seem consistent, in this case, that Jesus should be represented, so unequivocally, as breaking the ‘secret’ when confronted at his trial by the high priest (14:61– 62). Therefore I think that Edward Schillebeeckx is probably right: that, in reality, ‘the so-called “messianic secret” . . . is . . . less a secret than a veto on what

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Mark considers to be a false Christology’.5 Schillebeeckx’s term for what Mark rejects is ‘“power” Christology’. And the basic problem with ‘power’ Christology is, surely, that it is still grounded in an attitude of superficial adulation. Instead of seeing the metaphoric significance of Jesus’s mighty acts, as symbols of the shock involved in the triumph of true Honesty, such Christology focuses on the mightiness here displayed, merely in itself – and seeks to invoke it, in effect, as a source of reflected glory, to enhance the prestige of Jesus’s followers. In other words, it is an intrinsically ideological form of Christology, a straightforward expression of ecclesiastical conceit, the very impulse condemned in 9:33–37 and 10:35–45, only in sublated form. ‘Power’ Christology is the result of Jesus being hailed as Christ by people who have not learnt the lesson there. Naturally, these people tend to emphasize his power, which they seek to represent, rather than his truthfulness, in so far as it challenges them, failing to see the absolute subordination of the one to the other. That, I think, is why Mark shows Jesus trying to conceal his power.6 But in portraying Jesus himself as such a model of reticence, the evangelist is surely alerting us to the need for reticence more generally, and not least with regard to the resurrection. What matters for Mark is just that, in final symbolic vindication of the gospel of Honesty he preached, the crucified dissident has been raised. Just this – and nothing else. Both Matthew and Luke begin with a profoundly truth-laden legend, the story of the virgin birth: a poetic symbol of true Honesty, radically severed as it must be from the conventional order of domestic patriarchy. Mark, likewise, ends with a profoundly truth-laden legend, the story of the empty tomb: a poetic symbol of true Honesty as something no public tyranny can ultimately kill and contain. Thus, for Mark, the whole essential truth of the resurrection lies in the simple reversal of the pagan symbolism of the cross, encapsulated by this symbol. But everything depends upon our systematically preserving that essential truth from any possibility, whatsoever, of contamination by ecclesiastical conceit. And hence the reticence: it is basically intended as a cautionary signal. From what first begins to sprout here, however, Christian truth has grown up like a tree – a great tree, with three trunks, representing – in essence, it seems to me – a threefold continuation of just the same elementary struggle, between Honesty and ecclesiastical conceit, all the way down to the present. The tree has three trunks: God is revealed to us in three Persons; the struggle belongs to three primary contexts. For, as I have argued, 1 Honesty, in itself, needs to be decisively distinguished from any of its particular cultural expressions; and, hence, the revelation of Honesty requires a fundamental openness towards its manifestations also in other cultures besides one’s own. In the early church, the coming together of the two cultures of Hebrew scripture and Greek philosophy served to highlight the claims of Honesty in their most elementary and therefore most transculturally universal form: as a sheer antithesis to banality. But then, straight away, ecclesiastical conceit muscled in. Ecclesiastical conceit may

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be purely biblicist in character, it may be highly philosophic, it may be anything in between. Yet, whatever its form, it attaches itself to the supposed truth-as-correctness of its own particular ecclesial culture in such a way as more or less to stifle honest conversation across cultural boundaries. And so the underlying critique of dishonesty-as-banality slips away behind a mere affirmation of sincerity-in-orthodoxy, instead. 2 Dishonesty-as-banality is for ever being supplemented, complicated, reinforced by dishonesty-as-manipulation. The primary Christian symbol for this is the action of the first century Roman political establishment, and its collaborators, in condemning God incarnate to death. But then everything depends upon that action being understood to represent, not just the manipulative dishonesty of pagan Rome and its collaborators, but the inherent dishonesty of manipulativeness in general, including the manipulativeness of the Christian church itself. Ecclesiastical conceit, of course, fails to do this. On the contrary, it allows itself all manner of manipulativeness, with the supposed correctness of its orthodoxy in effect functioning as a comprehensive excuse. 3 In order that Honesty may actually prevail in the world at large, it requires incorporation into an authoritative tradition. The early church contrived to develop a tradition of quite extraordinary resilience and popular attractiveness. Yet the problem remains: how to combine those qualities with the very deepest Honesty, in the owning of every aspect of the corporate past? Ecclesiastical conceit is not interested in owning its history with any very serious thoughtfulness; it is exclusively interested in those aspects of the past which tend to enhance its self-image. It may be perfectly sincere, and even quite fervent, in its invocation of the Holy Spirit, but no matter how sincerely fervent it may be, this invocation therefore remains essentially dishonest. And so the struggle has developed, and the tree has grown, with its three trunks: First-Person theology, Second-Person theology, Third-Person theology. In all three forms it is, I would argue, the fundamental calling of theology, so far as possible, to rise up above the merely historiographical and metaphysical disputes, about the supposed truth-as-correctness of the gospel, with which ecclesiastical conceit is preoccupied. If it is to be its authentic self, theology has to be quite clear about the distinctiveness of its own proper concerns, in their basic otherness from those of secular historiography and metaphysics. And so it is called to re-engage with the poetic requirements of what Jesus called the ‘kingdom of God’, radical Honesty at its most intransigent, completely without distraction.

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Notes

Introduction 1

G.E. Lessing, Eine Duplik (1778); in Werke, Vol. 8, München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1979, pp. 32–3. My translation.

2

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, English translation by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; Preface.

3

G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, translated by A.V. Miller, London, 1969.

4

Hegel is sometimes described as a ‘panentheist’. If one has to label his thought, then maybe this is as good a label as any, but only if it is quite clearly recognized (a) that this is not his own term; and (b) that ‘panentheism’, here, is just a theological style. It is by no means a metaphysical dogma.

Chapter 1 1

For a vigorous and insightful discussion of the creative significance, for theology, of the Nietzschean challenge, see Giles Fraser, Redeeming Nietzsche, London: Routledge, 2002.

2

Nietzsche himself defines ‘metaphysics’ as that form of thinking which privileges ‘being’ over ‘becoming’, that is, distracting us from the issue of how our ideas become what they are, their psychological sources. (See especially The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, §§576, 579.) But the whole point, for him, of focusing on this process of ‘becoming’ is to raise what is, also in his view, the primary issue of intellectual honesty: that we should be honest with regard to those psychological sources.

3

For this argument, see in particular The Joyous Science, §357, and The Genealogy of Morals, III, §27.

4

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, §3, ‘Of the Afterworldsmen’.

5

See for example Fritz Bornmann, ‘Nietzsches Epikur’, in Nietzsche Studien, 13 (1984), pp. 177–88.

6

The chief early church polemicists against Epicureanism were Arnobius and Lactantius in the late third century. But the general patristic verdict was unanimous; and one of the results of Christianity’s eventual triumph was the loss of by far the greater part of Epicurus’ own writings. The one major scholarly attempt to rehabilitate Epicurus’ reputation within Christendom was Pierre Gassendi’s De Vita et Moribus Epicuri, published in 1647. Gassendi, however, was primarily interested in Epicurus as a symbolic representative of atomistic physics – a rival classic authority to counterpose in that regard to Aristotle. When it comes to matters of theology he remains, unsurprisingly, entirely on the defensive.

7

Human, All Too Human, II, 2, ‘The Wanderer and His Shadow’, §295; and cf. The Joyous Science, §45.

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8 The Will to Power, §438; also The Antichrist, §58. 9 The Antichrist, §30. 10

Beyond Good and Evil, §7.

11

Ecce Homo, Appendix, p. 343 in the Kaufmann translation.

12

The Will to Power, §1067.

13

H. Usener, Epicurea, Leipzig: Teubner, 1887; 512.

14

Republic, 414–15. The manipulative myth here is of the very simplest sort, justifying a certain structure of class distinction as an aspect of the God given natural order. But in justifying this, Socrates is surely also, by implication, giving a green light to all manner of other more elaborate mythopeia, for further manipulative purposes.

15

Diogenes Laertius, Life of Epicurus, 10.

16

Usener, Epicurea, 116.

17

See for example ‘Leading Doctrine 1’, in George K. Strodach, The Philosophy of Epicurus, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1963, p. 196: The blessed and indestructible being of the divine has no concerns of its own, nor does it make troubles for others. It is not affected by feelings of anger or benevolence, because these are found where there is lack of strength.

18

Beyond Good and Evil, §62.

19

The Will to Power, §1029.

20

The Joyous Science, §370 (repeated in Nietzsche Contra Wagner, ‘We Antipodes’).

21

Cf. Nietzsche’s linking together of Epicurus and Spinoza in The Will to Power, §911.

22

Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am a Destiny’, §1.

23

Ibid., ‘The Case of Wagner’, §4.

Chapter 2 1 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977. 2 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966. 3 Arendt does not actually use the term ‘isonomy’ herself, in The Human Condition. But she adopts it in On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973; p. 30. 4 On the philosophical Arendt/Heidegger relationship in general, see Dana R. Villa, Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. And see above, pp. 90–94. 5 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Introduction. 6 Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 308. 7 Ibid., pp. 313–20. 8 Ibid., pp. 45, 60, 117. 9 Ibid., p. 322.

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10

Carl J. Friedrich, ed., Nomos 1: Authority, Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1958. The revised version is in Arendt, Between Past and Future, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

11

Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

12

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, Vol. 2; Willing, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 84.

13

Between Past and Future, pp. 100–101.

14

Ibid., pp. 99–100.

15

Ibid., p. 103.

16

Villa, with whose advocacy of Arendt I otherwise largely agree, deals with the issue here in another way: by polemically downplaying the significance of her reflections on auctoritas. (Arendt and Heidegger, pp. 157–65). So he ignores the dissertation on Augustine, and in discussing ‘What is Authority?’ focuses exclusively on Arendt’s discussion there of the attempt by Plato and Aristotle to ‘introduce something akin to authority in the public life of the Greek polis’. Villa dismisses the ‘familiar canard’ that Arendt is ‘somehow nostalgic for authority’ by pointing to her rejection of Platonist and Aristotelian metaphysics. But the metaphysically grounded ‘something akin to authority’ to which Plato and Aristotle lay claim still remains quite a long way removed from the pre-metaphysical phenomenon of Roman auctoritas, which is her other topic. Not that she is by any means exactly ‘nostalgic’ for that, either. And yet, even so, I am not sure that Villa quite does justice to her real concern here: her attempt, as it were, to rescue the concept of ‘authority’, both from its negative usage in liberal ideology and from its positive usage in conservative ideology, and her opening up, in this way, of a whole set of new questions, undreamed of in either.

Chapter 3 1

The threefoldness of the Holy Trinity is indeed, I would argue, not only a principle explicitly permeating the whole systematic enterprise of Christian theology as such, but it is also at least dimly already foreshadowed – if only by way of contrast – in the so-called ‘theology’ of pre-Christian paganism. Thus, I am not talking here about the various threefold divinities, or divine triads, to be found in other magic and religious traditions besides Christianity. (On the whole, these bear no more than the most superficial resemblance to the Christian dogma of the Trinity.) But let us go right back to the very earliest beginnings of ‘theology’. We tend to think of theology as an intrinsically Christian enterprise, or perhaps Jewish and Muslim as well; yet the first thinkers to call themselves ‘theologians’ were pagans. The first actual usage of the term ‘theology’ is in Plato’s Republic (379a5–6). And in the second century BCE a school of pagan ‘theology’ emerged, whose greatest representative was M.T. Varro. Varro, who lived from 116 to 27 BCE, derived his methodological approach from Q.M. Scaevola, who in turn belonged to a tradition stemming from Panaetius of Rhodes. Only fragments of his encyclopaedic work of theology, Antiquitates rerum humanarum et divinarum, have been preserved. (See Burkhart Cardauns, M. Terentius Varro: Antiquitates Rerum Divinarum, Fragmente und Kommentar, Wiesbaden: Abhandl. Akad. Mainz, Geistes- und Sozialwiss. Klasse, 1976. That we have any at all is chiefly thanks to Augustine: who, some four and a half centuries later, chose to develop his anti-pagan polemic in The City of God with particular reference to Varro.) Nevertheless, at least the broad systematic outlines of this pagan form of theology are clear.

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Faith in Honesty These pagan pioneers divided theology into three: ‘natural theology’, ‘civil theology’ and ‘mythic theology’. Natural theology was a study of the general concept of the divine, operative within speculative philosophy. This is what they put first, inasmuch as it sets the terms for the other two. Then came civil theology, a generally affirmative survey of popular religio from the perspective of the statesman, concerned with the flourishing of civil order. And then mythic theology, which was an altogether more critical survey of how the gods were represented in poetry and on the stage. But already in this ‘tripartite theology’ of Varro and his tradition it seems to me that one can see the space beginning to develop, later to be filled by Christian trinitarianism. Varro is not, by any means, driven by all that much of an appreciation for the proper demands of radical Honesty, and yet, it seems to me, his categories are nevertheless placemarkers for what was to come. For what Varro calls ‘natural theology’ surely corresponds to Christian First-Person theology, if only to the extent that Varro, like so many of the early Christian theologians, was himself also a Platonist. What Varro calls ‘mythic theology’ occupies the space later to be filled by Christian Second-Person theology: inasmuch as it has to do with the quality of pathos in the portrayal of the gods by Homer, the Greek tragedians and other poets; in the same way that Christian Second-Person theology has to do with all that is most intensely pathos-filled in the Bible. And what Varro calls ‘civil theology’ loosely anticipates Christian Third-Person theology in its basic concern with the interplay between sacred ritual and traditional social identities – the way it is all about ritual as an articulation of proper corporate pride. True, there is no equivalent in Varro’s ‘natural theology’ to the Christian tension between philosophy and scripture; Varro simply expounds the Platonist doctrine of God. Neither does there seem to have been any equivalent in Varro’s thought to what Christian SecondPerson theology derives from the political poetry of Easter. He does not develop any such critique of unjust worldly domination. And the basic argument of Varro’s ‘civil theology’ is also very simple: the whole purpose of ritual, as Varro sees it, is just to reinforce existing family values and civic loyalties, so as to bind society ever more tightly together. There is no equivalent in Varro’s thought to the Christian Third-Person theological concern for the development of fresh loyalties, as the imperatives of the kingdom of God, the heavenly city, confront those of conventional worldliness, the earthly city. Indeed, Varronian theology in general seems to have been a fairly straightforward blending of Platonist educationalelite ideology with the ideological self-interest of the Roman ruling classes. And to that extent it actually represents the exact opposite to what I would see as the real truth of Christian trinitarianism, in the latter’s character as a fundamental threefold negation of all ideology. Compare the two, and it is clear that Christian faith complicates everything, to an infinite degree. But, even so, the basic point remains: there is at least something of the underlying shape of Christian trinitarianism already present in Varro’s thought.

2 The only real hint of such an interest is in Acts 17:16–34, where we see Paul in Athens, debating with Stoics, Epicureans and others who are, it seems, keen to hear him in a spirit of philosophic open-mindedness. In that debate, as Paul claims to represent the ‘unknown God’ for whom philosophy also yearns, we actually do have the very earliest recorded beginnings of First-Person theology (unless, that is, one counts the pre-Christian theology of Jewish philosophers like Philo). 3 Also in the background here is the older biblical notion of divine ‘Wisdom’ (or ‘Sophia’) as a mediation of God, although Philo prefers the philosophic term ‘Logos’, and tends to speak of wisdom as flowing from the Logos; in Legum Allegoriarum 1. 63 he explicitly identifies Logos with Wisdom. 4 From this point of view, the incarnation, so to speak, retrospectively absorbs all the old God stories of the Hebrew tradition. Justin’s younger contemporary, Irenaeus, develops the same thought: ‘The Son of God is scattered, as seed, everywhere in the scriptures:

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sometimes talking to Abraham, sometimes to Noah, giving him the measurements [of the Ark], at another point looking for Adam, or bringing judgement on the men of Sodom, or again when he appeared and guided Jacob on his way, or talked to Moses from the bush.’ Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, IV, 10, 1. 5

Tertullian, De Spectaculis, 29. (Nietzsche quotes this passage at length in his Genealogy of Morals, I, 15, and also refers to Thomas Aquinas arguing to the same effect as Tertullian in Summa Theologiae, III, Supplementum, Q 94, Art. 1.)

6

Tertullian, Against Praxeas, 1. This work dates to c. 213.

7

Barth of course is down on ‘religion’ not least because it is such a positive word in Schleiermacher’s lexicon. Thus Schleiermacher sought to defend Christianity by first defending ‘religion’ in general against its ‘cultured despisers’. His apologetic aim was to persuade those cultured despisers to respect ‘religion’, primarily, as a discipline of inwardness; for him, this is the number one priority. For Barth, however, the number one priority is to defend the gospel, not so much from its cultured despisers, but rather from those among its advocates who, in their anxiety to appease and win round those despisers, are inclined to soften its proper critical otherness, over against the various dominant ideologies of the secular world. As a way of signalling this basic difference in priorities Barth therefore takes the term ‘religion’, which Schleiermacher had invested with such favourable connotations, and renders it instead into a more or less direct equivalent to the Pauline concept of ‘works righteousness’, as developed by Luther. Just as Luther criticizes the excessive concern of the Roman church for the righteousness of ‘good works’, so Barth criticizes liberal Protestantism for its mistaken attachment to ‘religion’. In both cases, what is being attacked is a form of evangelism which seeks to promote the spread of the gospel too easily, by making faith easier. So far, so good. And yet – again in both cases, I think – there is a basic problem with the rhetoric. For, since Paul’s original polemic had been directed against those within the church who, as he saw it, overvalued the continuing authority of Jewish Law, it follows that when Luther went back to the Pauline model, to accuse his Roman opponents of, likewise, overvaluing ‘works righteousness’, this meant that, in effect, he was accusing them of being, spiritually, too Jewish. At a certain level, much of the actual power of his argument derived from its implicit appeal to traditional anti-Semitic prejudice. Barth’s use of the non-Pauline term ‘religion’ adds another filter. It serves to generalize the prejudice implicitly invoked here. But, I would argue, that is all. To be sure, Barth does allow that there may be some, in his terms, trans-’religious’ implicit manifestation of Christ also in non-Christian cultures. And yet he provides no criteria for actually identifying this. He provides criteria for distinguishing ‘faith’ from ‘religion’ in the Christian context; in a sense, his whole theology is an attempt to do that. But he does not do so in the nonChristian context. Presumably, though, any form of Christlike behaviour in a non-Christian culture will, as a matter of fact, tend to be quite ‘religious’ in form, according to the normal usage of that term. And so, when, exactly, does non-Christian ‘religion’ according to the normal sense begin or cease to be ‘religious’ according to the peculiar Barthian sense? When does ‘religion’ begin or cease to be ‘religion’? And what, exactly, is gained by creating the terminological muddle encapsulated in that question, as Barth does? What else indeed – if not, after all, a certain undercover smuggling-in of xenophobic prejudice, just as in the case of Luther before him? And then the same also goes for Bonhoeffer’s ‘religionless Christianity’. Both Barth and Bonhoeffer, it seems to me, thus end up battling against explicit xenophobia by implicitly xenophobic means.

8

Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, English translation, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953, Chapters 1 and 5.

9

Augustine, City of God, XIV, 28.

172 10

Faith in Honesty Barth, Church Dogmatics, I: 1, English translation, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2nd edn, 1975, pp. 355–61. Barth does not propose that the use of ‘Person’, for trinitarian purposes, be outlawed. But he cites with approval the misgivings about it expressed especially by Augustine and Anselm, who adopt it, they say, only for lack of anything better. Then he suggests that, after all, modern German provides what they lacked.

Chapter 4 1 Back in those days there was no controversy over subordinationism: even Tertullian, complete anti-Platonist though he is, sometimes speaks in casually subordinationist terms. But the Arian controversy arises out of the particular meaning which implicit subordinationism had come to have in the heavily Platonist intellectual world of Alexandria, specifically. 2 Augustine, The Trinity, English translation by Edmund Hill, O.P., New York: New City Press, 1991, VIII, 1, p. 242. 3 It is Augustine who is largely responsible for the addition of ‘filioque’ to Western creeds, the affirmation that the Holy Spirit proceeds not only from the Father but also from the Son, which has always been repudiated (albeit more for reasons of protocol, regarding the manner of its introduction, than for any metaphysical reason) by the Eastern churches. 4 The Trinity, XIV, 8, p. 376. 5 See for example John Cutting, Principles of Psychopathology, Oxford: OUP, 1997. 6 Henry Chadwick’s translation, in his English-language edition of Lessing’s Theological Writings, London: A. & C. Black, 1956. Education of the Human Race was first published in 1780. 7 Schelling sought to develop a neo-Joachimist argument in lecture 36 of his posthumously published Philosophy of Revelation. For him, the Age of the Father is early, or Petrine, Christianity up to the Reformation; the Age of the Son is Pauline Christianity, as revived at the Reformation; the Age of the Holy Spirit will be a flowering of Johannine wisdom. The first Age is a revelation of gospel truth in predominantly communitarian form; the second Age is a revelation of truth in much more individualistic form; the third Age will finally synthesize these truths. Schelling, Sämtliche Werke, II, 4, Stuttgart and Augsburg: J.G. Cotta, 1858. George Sand developed a neo-Joachimist argument, related to early Christian socialism, in her Gothic novel Spiridion, of 1839. And Joachim is also one of the great heroes of Ernst Bloch, for whom he appears as a remote forerunner of Marxist truth. 8 For a detailed account of this conflict, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 9 Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, English translation, London: SCM Press, 1972, p. 511. 10

Tholuck’s initial attack on Hegel occurs in the second edition of Die Lehre von der Sünde und vom Versöhner; oder, Die wahre Weihe des Zweiflers, which he published in 1825. And then he published his anti-trinitarian polemic, Die speculative Trinitätslehre des späteren Orients: Eine religionsphilosophische Monographie aus Handschriftlichen Quellen der Leydener, Oxforder und Berliner Bibliothek in the following year.

11

Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, English translation edited by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928, p. 98.

12

Ibid., pp. 738–51.

Notes

173

13

Hegel: The Letters, translated by Clark Butler and Christiane Seiler, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984, p. 518.

14

The English translation is edited by Peter C. Hodgson, in three volumes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984–87. And see also, for a commentary on the immediate background, Philip M. Merklinger, Philosophy, Theology, and Hegel’s Berlin Philosophy of Religion, 1821–7, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993.

15

Hegel’s critical engagement with Schleiermacher actually begins in his 1802 essay, Faith and Knowledge – English translation by Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1977, pp. 150–52 – where he briefly links Schleiermacher’s 1799 Speeches on Religion with the thought of F.H. Jacobi. But, alongside Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, the other main text in this connection is his (really rather belligerent) 1822 Introduction to H. Hinrichs’s Religionsphilosophie, translated into English in Eric von der Luft, ed., Hegel, Hinrichs and Schleiermacher: On Feeling and Reason in Religion. The Texts of the 1821–2 Debate, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1987.

16

Note also his direct response to Tholuck, in a personal letter of July 1826: Does not the sublime Christian knowledge of God as Triune merit respect of a wholly different order than comes from ascribing it merely to such an externally historical source? In your entire publication I have not been able to feel or find any traces of a native understanding of this doctrine. I am a Lutheran, and through philosophy have been at once confirmed in Lutheranism. I do not allow myself to be put off such a basic doctrine by externally historical modes of explanation. There is a higher spirit than merely that of such human tradition. I detest seeing such things explained in the same manner as perhaps the descent and dissemination of silk culture, cherries, smallpox, and the like[!] Hegel: The Letters, pp. 520–21.

17

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), Vol. 1, p. 157.

18

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, English translation by A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977; pp. 126–38.

19

‘Singularity’ or ‘individuality’: Einzelheit. See The Philosophy of Mind, English translation by William Wallace and A.V. Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, §§566–71.

20

Tholuck in fact distinguished three basic forms of ‘pantheism’: ‘pantheism of the concept’ (Spinoza, Fichte, Hegel); ‘pantheism of imagination’ (Schelling); and ‘pantheism of feeling’ (the mystics).

21

Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, English translation (of the second edition) by Sir Edwyn Hoskyns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933.

22

Barth, Church Dogmatics I: 1, English translation, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2nd edn, 1975, pp. 295–304.

23

Ibid., p. 300 (although he does also cite two medieval theologians who proceed similarly: Peter Lombard in his Sentences and Bonaventura in his Breviloquium).

24

Ibid., p. 353.

25

Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, English translation, London: SCM Press, 1972, p. 420.

26

Phenomenology of Spirit, pp. 5–6.

27

‘Absolute Knowing’ is the title of the final, largely retrospective, chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

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Faith in Honesty

Chapter 5 1 Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, New York: Mentor, 1964. 2 Nietzsche, The Will To Power, English translation ed. Walter Kaufman, New York: Vintage, 1968, §572. 3 The Genealogy of Morals, English translation ed. Walter Kaufman, New York: Vintage, 1969, III, §25. 4 Republic, 607. 5 See especially his 1942 essay, ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, English translation by John Barlow in W. Barret and H.D. Aiken, eds, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, New York: Random House, 1962. Also the 1931–32 lecture series, Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und Theätet, vol. 34 in the Gesamtausgabe, ed. Hermann Mörchen, Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1988. It should however also be noted that Heidegger eventually retracted his original sharp differentiation of the Platonist view of truth from that of the earlier philosophers – inasmuch as he came to locate the truly decisive fall from grace even further back, abandoning the hypothesis of a lost golden age of philosophy, in this regard. See Time and Being (Zur Sache des Denkens, 1969), English translation by Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, p. 70. This is in part a response to the critique of Paul Friedländer. See John Sallis, Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986, pp. 170–85. 6 Republic, 509b. 7 See for instance Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini: essai sur l’extériorité, 1961), English translation by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991, p. 103: ‘The Place of the Good above every essence is the most profound teaching, the definitive teaching, not of theology, but of philosophy.’ And it notably provides the title for Levinas’s second major work, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (1974), translated as Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence by Alphonso Lingis, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. 8 I am of course unwilling to accept the derogatory usage of ‘theology’, in both cases. For Heidegger, all ‘theology’ is a form of ‘metaphysics’; for Levinas, all ‘theology’ is a form of ‘ontology’. But what interests me is indeed precisely the possibility of a theology – in the elementary, general sense of a thinking about history informed by basic loyalty to ‘revealed’ tradition – which would be both decisively trans-’metaphysical’, in the Heideggerian sense, and completely transcendent of ‘ontology’, in the Levinasian sense! 9 Letter dated 12 December 1801: Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, Große Stuttgarter Ausgabe, ed. F. Beißner and Adolf Beck, Stuttgart: Cotta/Kohlhammer, 1943–86, Vol. 6, pp. 425–8. Heidegger discusses this letter in several places. See his 1934/5 lectures, Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein’, ed. Suzanne Ziegler, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 39, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1980, pp. 290–94; the 1942 lectures Hölderlins Hymne ‘Der Ister’, ed. Walter Biemel, Gesamtausgabe, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984, pp. 168–70; and Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung, 5th edn, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981, pp. 83–7. 10

The essay ‘Die Zeit des Weltbildes’, originally a lecture delivered in 1938, was published in Holzwege, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1952. Translated into English by William Lovitt, it appears in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Notes 11

175

Cf. What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray, New York: Harper & Row, 1968, p. 159, where Heidegger defines the fourfold ‘weakness’ of true ‘thinking’ as follows: 1 2 3 4

Thinking does not bring knowledge as do the sciences. Thinking does not produce usable practical wisdom. Thinking solves no cosmic riddles. Thinking does not endow us directly with the power to act.

And yet, in the deepest sense, ‘thinking’ is nevertheless salvation. 12

Ernst Jünger, ‘Die totale Mobilmachung’ (1930), in Werke, Vol. 5, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1960; and see also Der Arbeiter (1932), in Werke, Vol. 6. Jünger’s work is of course crucial in setting the scene for Heidegger’s historical vision.

13

For a meticulous (and loyally Heideggerian) account of this, see George Kovacs, The Question of God in Heidegger’s Phenomenology, Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1990.

14

The definitive study remains Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1988.

15

See especially Totality and Infinity, pp. 43–4.

16

Ibid., pp. 21–2; but my translation.

17

This is a major theme of Otherwise than Being.

18

Totality and Infinity, p. 45; but my translation.

19

Ibid., p. 44.

20

Cf. Levinas’s remark in ‘Ideology and Idealism’, The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford: Blackwell, 1989, p. 247: ‘I am neither a preacher nor the son of a preacher.’ The allusion is to Amos 7:14; where Amos denies being either a prophet or the son of a prophet – in the conventional sense of the term. A more conventional sort of prophet might have some hope of changing things, some realistic strategy. Amos in his unconventional intransigence has lost all hope. All that is left to him is to continue to speak out like a prophet, even though bereft of realistic strategy.

21

See the section headed ‘Politics’ in The Levinas Reader.

22

Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Preface; English translation by T.M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952; p. 10.

23

For Heidegger’s own discussion of Hegel, see Hegel’s Concept of Experience, English translation by J. Glenn Gray and Fred D. Wieck, New York: Harper & Row, 1970; originally published in Holzwege, 1950; and the brief remarks in Identity and Difference, English translation by Joan Stambaugh, New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Chapter 6 1

Cf. also especially Romans 8:38–9; Colossians 2:13–15.

2

Lucian, Alexander the False Prophet, 38.

3

See Norman Wentworth De Witt, Epicurus and His Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1954, Chapter XV.

4

Athenaeus XII, 547.

5

As a paradoxical quirk of history, at the Seleucid court in Antioch, uniquely, Epicureanism actually became, for a while, a sort of establishment philosophy: it was at about the same

176

Faith in Honesty time as Alcaeus and Philiscus were expelled from Rome that the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes was converted. Antiochus, being a great monarch, played hard to get – it required no less than one hundred and twenty-five tracts, specially composed for him, to answer all his queries. But, although the evidence is scanty, it is quite possible that he was drawn to the a-political wisdom of Epicurus, at least to some extent, precisely as an instrument of policy. For Antiochus’ realm included Judaea, and he was preoccupied with the problem of subduing the Jews, in just the same way the Romans were, after him. With other peoples one might supplement coercion with religious syncretism, absorbing their gods into the official pantheon by identification with the gods of Greece, and Antiochus was also an energetic promoter of such syncretism. But with the Jews this was impossible. In such circumstances a missionary philosophy which promised to defuse religious passion had obvious merits. There was, moreover, a potentially receptive audience in Jerusalem. The inclusion of the Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew scriptures is evidence of the influx of Hellenistic patterns of thought into Jewish culture in this period: whilst its provenance is uncertain, Ecclesiastes does read very much like a Cynic or an Epicurean text, with just a thin editorial overlay of more orthodox references to divine judgment. In the end Antiochus resorted to the most brutal repression of Jewish dissent. But, as the Books of the Maccabees reveal, there was no shortage of willing collaborators: the high priest himself had taken the Greek name Jason, and his followers, the ‘Antiochenes’, had established a Greek gymnasium in Jerusalem, a major scandal to the orthodox (1 Maccabees I:11–15; 2 Maccabees IV:7–15). It may well be that the king’s patronage of Epicureanism was partly inspired by a hope of also converting these collaborators, thereby setting a final seal on their hellenization; and the fact that apikoros, a corruption of ‘Epicurean’, was to become the main rabbinical term for Jewish unbelievers in general is perhaps an echo of the ensuing struggle.

6 Lucretius, On The Nature of Things, III, 9. 7 Seneca, Letters, 25.5; 11.8. 8 De Witt draws attention to St Luke’s remark that it was in Antioch that the name ‘Christian’ first came to be used, that is, precisely in one of the chief centres of Epicureanism. As he remarks, ‘Since adherents of the older sect were already known by the name of their founder, it was natural for Roman residents . . . to designate the adherents of the new sect in a similar way’ (Epicurus and his Philosophy, p. 334). 9 1 Corinthians 16:22. The same formula also appears in the second-century text, the Didache, x. 6, in a eucharistic context. And cf. also Revelation 22:20. 10

Gregory, Dialogues, IV, 39.

11

Origen, Treatise on Prayer, XXIX, 16.

12

Plato, Phaedo, 107a–115a.

13

See above, p. 65.

14

Augustine, City of God, XIV, 28; English translation by Henry Bettenson, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, p. 593. (Augustine derives the phrase libido dominandi from Sallust.)

15

John Milbank, The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, Chapter 9: ‘Can Morality Be Christian?’

16

Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 2, §36, 1; English translation, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1957. Also I, 2, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956, pp. 782–96.

17

Church Dogmatics, II, 2, p. 518.

18

Ibid., pp. 518–19.

19

Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III, 21; English translation by Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1960.

Notes

177

20

Church Dogmatics, II, 2, Chapter VII. (The two halves of II, 2 correspond to the two forms of conceit: first Barth tackles revolutionary puritanism, then moral consensualism.)

21

See for example Hans urs von Balthasar, Skizzen in Theologie, Vol. 4, Pneuma und Institution, Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1974, pp. 393–5.

22

Ibid., p. 444.

23

Von Balthasar himself indeed gently criticizes Barth along these lines, in his book The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, translated Edward T. Oakes, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, p. 186; and again in Dare We Hope that ‘All May be Saved?’, English translation by D. Lipp and L. Krauth, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988, pp. 44–5. For Origen’s own (hesitant) suggestions, see in particular De Principiis, I.6.3. Although he does not say so in any surviving text – and indeed, on the contrary, strongly denies it – he was also widely believed to have taught that at the end even Satan would be redeemed.

24

For example: Barth, Church Dogmatics, II, 2, pp. 417–18; IV, 3 (i), pp. 477–8. Von Balthasar sets out his views at length in Dare We Hope that ‘All May be Saved?’, a response to a sustained polemical attack on his doctrine in this regard, from conservatives in the German Catholic theological world, which erupted in 1984.

25

Would Barth have been more decisive in the unwritten volumes of Church Dogmatics? Maybe. They would have been focused on eschatology.

26

Ulrich Simon, A Theology of Auschwitz, London: SPCK, 1978, p. 75.

27

Catherine of Genoa, Treatise on Purgatory, XVII.

28

Ibid., II.

29

Ibid., VIII.

30

As Catherine herself expresses it, in mythic terms: Only once, as they pass from this life, do [the inhabitants of Purgatory] see the cause of the Purgatory they endure; never again do they see it, for in another sight of it there would be self. (Ibid., I)

Chapter 7 1

Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, translated by Graham Harrison, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, Vol. 1.

2

Except, perhaps, for Mary; if she is in fact rightly to be regarded as ‘co-redemptrix’.

3

The scheme runs right through Kierkegaard’s work, and is fundamental to its coherence as a whole. See, for example, the extensive discussion in Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, English translation edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971.

4

I am not the only one advocating this. Compare Russ Parker, Healing Wounded History; London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 2001, which, by way of contrast, represents an essentially evangelical approach.

5

See The Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, English translation by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez, London: Nelson, 1966.

6

Herodotus, History, III, 80–83.

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Faith in Honesty

7 See above, p. 90. And in what follows, I am also summarizing the core argument of my earlier work, God and Modernity, London: Routledge, 2000. 8 Moltmann’s earliest writings are on the history of Reformed theology. Then comes the great trilogy: in English translation, Theology of Hope, London: SCM, 1967; The Crucified God, London: SCM, 1974; The Church in the Power of the Spirit, London: SCM, 1977. The primary works of his third phase are The Trinity and the Kingdom, London: SCM, 1981; God in Creation, London: SCM, 1985; The Way of Jesus Christ, London: SCM, 1990; The Spirit of Life, London: SCM, 1992; The Coming of God, London: SCM, 1996. 9 See Bellah’s article of 1965, ‘Civil religion in America’, reprinted in Russell E. Richey and Donald G. Jones, eds, American Civil Religion, New York: Harper & Row, 1974; and, again, the discussion in my Civil Society, Civil Religion. 10

‘The Cross and Civil Religion’, in J. Moltmann et al., Religion and Political Society, New York: Edwin Mellen, 1974; and ‘Christian Theology and Political Religion’, in Leroy S. Rouner, ed., Civil Religion and Political Theology, Notre Dame, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1986.

11

Moltmann, in The Way of Jesus Christ, borrows this term from Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus and Community: The Social Dimension of Christian Faith, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

12

Arne Rasmusson, The Church as Polis: From Political Theology to Theological Politics as Exemplified by Jürgen Moltmann and Stanley Hauerwas, Lund: Lund University Press, 1994.

13

Ronald Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989.

14

See for example The Way of Jesus Christ, p. 268; and for a discussion of other texts, Rasmusson, pp. 166–7.

15

He is an ecumenically minded Methodist, who is actually closest of all in spirit to the Mennonite tradition, as represented for example by his great theological ally, John Howard Yoder. But see also, for example, his magnificent sermon for Reformation Sunday, ‘Reformation Is Sin’, in Sanctify Them in the Truth, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998, which includes, among other things, a spirited defence both of Marian devotion and of the institution of the papacy – as a symbol of the proper ideal of cosmopolitan church unity. Because of his Radical Reformation attitude to secularity Hauerwas is often charged with being a ‘sectarian’ thinker. But since the polemical force of the charge essentially derives from the common association of the term ‘sectarian’ with all sorts of anti-ecumenical narrow-mindedness, I must say this does seem to me to be rather unfortunate.

16

Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony, Nashville: Abingdon, 1989.

17

Ephesians 5:21–6:9; Colossians 3:18–4:1; 1 Peter 2:11–3:12. And cf. 1 Timothy 3:4–5; 6:1–2; Titus 2:1–10.

18

On this whole process, see in particular Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins, London: SCM, 1983, Part III.

19

Nietzsche, The Antichrist, §53; English translation, with Twilight of the Idols, by R.J. Hollingdale, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968, p. 170.

20

‘Letter to a Priest’, §28; English translation in Weil, Gateway to God, ed. David Raper, London: Fontana, 1974, pp. 133–4.

21

‘Spiritual Autobiography’; English translation by Emma Craufurd, in Weil, Waiting on God, London: Fontana, 1959, p. 43.

22

Gateway to God, p. 134.

Notes

179

Chapter 8 1

Miles, Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, London: Random House, 2002. (And cf. also the companion volume, God, A Biography, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996; on the Hebrew scriptures.)

2

Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God, pp. 299–300.

3

There is much debate about the redactional history of Mark: see for example John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus, New York: HarperCollins, 1992, pp. 410–16. Among other things, Crossan suggests that the very earliest version of the gospel ended – even more reticently than the first canonical version! – with the centurion’s confession in 15:39.

4

Wilhelm Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901.

5

Edward Schillebeeckx, Jesus: An Experiment in Christology, English translation by Hubert Hoskins, London: Collins, 1979, p. 417.

6

For another interpretation, see Graham Shaw, The Cost of Authority, London: SCM, 1983. Shaw’s book is in general a provocative analysis of what he sees as manipulative patterns of thought at work within the New Testament. I think it deserves to be taken much more seriously than it has been, up to now, as a contribution to debate. Shaw is highly suspicious of the Marcan theme of the messianic ‘secret’. He sees it as a manipulative device, a way of flattering the reader; here, he argues, it is as though we are being initiated, as an elite, into hidden knowledge. And in so far as Mark undercuts the authority of the twelve apostles and their designated heirs, Shaw suggests that this is in support of a rival new Gentile leadership group within the church. The new Marcan leadership group, according to Shaw’s theory, prided themselves on their charismatic gifts, especially of exorcism: hence the particular emphasis in Mark on this aspect of Jesus’s work, and the commentary in 9:28–9, 38–9. And were they any less prone to ideological impulses than their more ‘apostolic’ opponents? Not if, for them, Jesus’s teaching against ecclesiastical conceit in 9:33–7 and 10:35–45 was merely to be understood as an attack on their opponents, and an endorsement of their own rival authority claim, as true ‘servants’ and ‘children’! – as Shaw, irreverently, also suggests. But I am not persuaded by this argument, which seems to rest upon the, to my mind, very questionable assumption that any form of esotericism is simply bound to be manipulative. I suppose it is just possible that there was some such rival leadership group, presenting itself in this way. Yet the fact is that there is no supporting evidence for it. And it is surely much more natural to read 9:33–7 and 10:33–45 the way I have.

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Appendix I

Who’s Who

Aquinas, Thomas (1225–74) Italian, Dominican friar, taught at the newly established University of Paris. The greatest of the pioneers who first converted theology into a university discipline; above all, with his vast multi-volume textbook, the Summa Theologica. Arendt, Hannah (1906–1975) German Jewish philosopher; had been one of Heidegger’s students in the 1920s; fled Germany in 1933, and in 1941 settled in the USA. There she dedicated herself to thinking through the moral lessons to be learnt from the whole nightmare of totalitarianism. Arius (c. 250–336) Theologian of Alexandria, already a venerable old man when the great controversy over his teaching erupted. Athanasius (c. 296–373) Became bishop of Alexandria in 328; driven out five times in the course of his struggle against the Arians, he spent more than seventeen out of the forty years of his episcopacy in exile; but triumphed at last. Augustine (353–430) Bishop of Hippo, in present-day Algeria. In his Confessions he wrote the world’s first ever real autobiography, telling the story of his conversion; in the City of God, originally a theological response to the sack of Rome by the Goths in 410, he developed a pioneering theology of world history. But he also wrote much else. A century after the emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity, the church in Augustine’s day was increasingly the real mainstay of Roman civilization. He was the absolutely dominant figure in the development of Latin theology. Balthasar, Hans Urs von (1905–88) Swiss Roman Catholic theologian. He left the Jesuits to found a ‘secular institute’ and publishing house in Basel, in collaboration with the visionary Adrienne von Speyr. Although his relationship with the Swiss church hierarchy was not always very good, von Balthasar became known as Pope John Paul II’s ‘favourite theologian’. He was a personal friend of Karl Barth’s. A strong supporter of the Second Vatican Council, even though unable to participate in it, he was nevertheless quite critical of some of the 181

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more liberal theological tendencies emerging out of it, as represented for example by Karl Rahner, or still more Hans Küng. Barth, Karl (1886–1968) Swiss Reformed theologian; the prime mover behind the great shift, in the first half of the twentieth century, away from ‘liberal theology’ towards a more counter-cultural approach. Barth takes us back to the critical spirit of the sixteenth-century Reformers, and so also back to the critical spirit of Paul, revived, in critical conversation with the whole tradition of dogmatic theology. And he represents dogmatic theology infused with a profoundly renewed self-confidence, in relation to philosophy and secular academia generally. Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832) English intellectual, who saw himself as rescuing ethical common sense from the grip of superstition. Calvin, John (1509–64) French Reformer, chief leader of the Reformation in Geneva, and in his Institutes the great systematizer of post-Lutheran Reformed theology. His doctrine of predestination became especially controversial, and that is what I have focused on here; but it should be noted that it by no means dominates the Institutes. Epicurus (c. 341–271 BCE) Anti-philosophical Greek philosopher, advocating an austere hedonism. Epicureanism developed alongside Stoicism and Cynicism, all three of them being strategies for the popularization of contemplative wisdom. But the Epicureans were more organized than the Cynics, and differed from the Stoics not least in their much fiercer opposition to the older tradition of philosophic elitism, pre-eminently represented by Plato. Hauerwas, Stanley (1940–) Texan pacifist; certainly one of the most readable and thought-provoking of contemporary theologians. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1770–1831) German philosopher. Not everyone shares my view that Hegel is among the very greatest of Christian thinkers. I have previously set out my reasons for thinking this, above all, in Hegel’s Political Theology and God and Modernity. But not only did Hegel not believe in making a great show of piety; he is also a notoriously very difficult writer, and especially where he is making his most brilliantly original contribution to theology, in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). This has made him very unpopular in some circles. Some of his admirers have themselves been quite anti-religious, and have therefore wanted to dismiss the theological aspect of his thought, or even to suggest that he did not really mean it. Conservative theologians, on the other hand, have mistrusted his liberal-mindedness. Pay no heed to

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accounts of Hegel that tell you he taught a doctrine of ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’: he did not in fact use this terminology, and it gives a quite misleading impression of mechanically abstract method. Do not believe accounts, either, that represent him as a political reactionary. He belonged to the generation that was chastened by the spectacle of the French Revolutionary Terror, and was therefore politically cautious; in the terms of his day, however, he was very much a liberal. Thus he believed strongly in the secularity of the secular state, as providing the only proper context for a true understanding of the gospel. His Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion are relatively readable, but, I’m afraid, a bit of a disappointment after the Phenomenology. For a good introduction, see for instance Stephen Houlgate, Freedom, Truth and History: An Introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1991). Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976) German philosopher. Author of Being and Time (1927) and numerous smaller works thereafter, more or less affected by his (as he himself later insisted) actually quite brief flirtation with overt Nazism in 1933, and his subsequent at least partial recoil. Some people are allergic to Heidegger’s portentous manner. But one can scarcely deny his extraordinary originality and bold ambition. And he has influenced a wide range of other thinkers with very different political instincts from his, including such figures as Arendt, Sartre, Derrida, Lyotard, Rorty, Pato˘cka, Václav Havel; and theologians like Bultmann and Rahner. His story is I think a true tragedy, of heroic wisdom compounded with spectacular folly. Hobbes, Thomas (1588–1679) English political philosopher; preoccupied with the need to prevent society being torn apart by conflicts deriving from religious fanaticism, as he saw happening in the English Civil War. Therefore he adocates completely doing away with any division between sacred and secular authority: both must be united in a system of rule the one primary aim of which is simply to keep the peace. Hölderlin, Friedrich (1770–1843) German poet. A close friend of Hegel’s in his youth; extravagantly admired by Heidegger. His great poetry dates from quite a brief period, 1797–1805, before his sanity finally collapsed. I have written about Hölderlin, as a great exemplar of the ‘pathos of shakenness’, in my book, ‘What Is Truth?’. He constructs his own mythology, contrasting the god-forsakenness of the modern world with the glorious god-inhabited world of ancient Greece. For him, Christ is the last of the (Greek) gods! Jaspers, Karl (1883–1969) Swiss psychologist and philosopher; liberal public intellectual; friend of Hannah Arendt’s.

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Joachim of Fiore (1145–1202) Prophet of an imminent new age, the Age of the Holy Spirit. Joachim’s writings are unlikely ever to become popular reading again: he approaches scripture generally, and Revelation especially, in a very un-modern, artificial way, imposing his own metaphorical meanings on everything. His significance is just as a symbol for the abiding possibility of faith shot through with fresh historic hope. Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165) Born into a pagan Greek family in Palestine, Justin was already a Platonist philosopher before he converted to Christianity. He wrote two Apologies, defending Christian faith from a philosophical point of view, and the Dialogue with Trypho, justifying it to a Jewish interlocutor, before being martyred in Rome. Kant, Immanuel (1724–1804) German philosopher. His book Religion Within the Limits of Pure Reason (1793) is a classic manifesto for agnostic anti-theology. In the immediately following period, Kant’s agnosticism helped stimulate a great outburst of philosophic creativity amongst thinkers struggling, in one way or another, to amplify or transcend it: most notably, Fichte, Schelling – and Hegel. Kierkegaard, Søren (1813–55) Danish religious philosopher and man of letters; a ferocious Christian critic of conventional bourgeois ‘Christendom’, and of Hegelian philosophy (bizarrely misinterpreted) as an ideological vindication of that ethos. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (1729–81) German dramatist and public intellectual. A great campaigner for freedom of religious thought. His play Nathan the Wise, in particular, is an impassioned advocacy of open-minded mutual respect between Christians, Jews and Muslims. Levinas, Emmanuel (1906–95) Jewish philosopher, born in Lithuania, but from 1923 resident in France; powerfully influenced, at first positively, but then more negatively, by the work of Heidegger. He survived the Nazi invasion of France as a prisoner of war. His two great works are Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, which is dedicated ‘to the memory of those who were closest among the six million assassinated by the National Socialists, and of the millions on millions of all confessions and all nations, victims of the same hatred of the the other man, the same anti-semitism’. Moltmann, Jürgen (1926–) German ‘political theologian’, closely associated with the World Council of Churches; became a Christian while a prisoner of war. Along with such others as Helmut Gollwitzer, Johannes B. Metz and Dorothee Sölle, he has worked not least to carry forward the lessons of the German church struggle against Nazism into the post-Nazi era.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich (1844–1900) German philosopher; did not believe in modesty. A provocative, beautifully extravagant writer. The son of a Lutheran pastor, not content with being a relentless critic of Christianity, in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche attempts to produce an alternative holy scripture, for his own creed. His ultimate ideal is the ‘overman’ (Übermensch): the sublimely creative solitary genius, who bears no grudges; quite untouched by ‘slave morality’, which is essentially the systematic moralization of grudges. In order to bear no grudges, the ‘overman’, uniquely, affirms the whole of life, just as it is, to the extent of positively willing that all should recur eternally, without alteration. Origen (185–c. 254) Greek theologian, originally from Alexandria, but from 231 in Palestine. A philosophically sophisticated scholar, Origen was a prolific author, although not all of his works survive. His father had died a martyr, and he too died after having been imprisoned and tortured during the emperor Decius’s persecution of the church. Nowadays he is, after Augustine, perhaps the most studied of all the early Church Fathers. Pelagius (fl. 409–18) British-born theologian, the leading representative of a group who repudiated the hardline predestinarian theory championed by Augustine. The Pelagians were eventually condemned first by the Pope, then by the Emperor and then by the assembled bishops at the Ecumenical Council of Ephesus for denying that every infant is born burdened with the guilt of Adam’s primal sin. Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE–50 CE) Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher; author of numerous works aiming to vindicate Jewish faith, from a broadly Platonist point of view. Apart from this project, he is quite a conventional, although thoroughly competent ‘Middle Platonist’ philosopher, that is, he represents a form of Platonism, typical of his day, with strong admixtures of Stoic thought. Plato (427–347 BCE) Greek philosopher, author of numerous dialogues, mostly, though not all, featuring his teacher Socrates. (The absence of Socrates from the Laws serves to signal that this is a work intentionally pitched at a much more modest level than, in particular, Plato’s other great discussion of politics, in the Republic.) Among Plato’s innumerable admirers and followers have been a great number of Christian theologians, attracted by the way he looks beyond the gods of pagan folk religion and poetry to the supreme holiness of the philosophically apprehended ‘Idea of the Good’, which the theologians have liked to identify with the God of the Bible; and by his teaching about the immortality of the soul. There is however, nothing in the Bible even remotely similar to Plato’s militant intellectual elitism!

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Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768–1834) German Reformed theologian. His greatness lies in the way he sets out systematically to rethink the whole of Christian theology in the sort of terms that made sense to his generation, with their Romantic enthusiasm for the authentic self-expression of the individual genius, or of each people’s own distinctive national spirit. Spinoza, Benedict (1632–77) Jewish philosopher, of Amsterdam; often called a ‘pantheist’, because of his fundamental doctrine equating the two terms ‘God’ and ‘Nature’. Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225) Latin theologian, of Carthage. An apologist for Christianity who, unlike the contemporary Greek apologists, was not a philosopher, but was a great rhetorician. By temperament a hardliner, he defiantly cries out ‘I believe because it is absurd’, and (thinking of Athens as the home of philosophy) ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ Tholuck, Friedrich August Gottreu (1799–1877) A now largely forgotten German theologian. The pietist movement to which he belonged was, roughly speaking, the Lutheran equivalent to Methodism, forming a rather puritanical community with a strong emphasis on Bible study, direct evangelism and enthusiastic personal testimony.

Appendix II

A Brief Note on the Question of Gender

To be a ‘fallen’ creature is to have been socialized into a cultural order which is structurally dishonest, in that it unjustly excludes certain voices from a proper public hearing; the Fall is I think definable as a condition of moral anaesthesia, consequent upon the suppression of dissident voices. And inasmuch as patriarchy involves a certain suppression of women’s voices, it follows that this has indeed to be regarded as a prime symptom of the Fall. But, just because patriarchy is so primordial, it is also that aspect of our fallenness against which Honesty has found it the least easy actually to organize, with the result, it seems to me, that the career of Honesty, within biblical civilization, has essentially had to be a two-stage process. Thus it necessarily began by tackling the more easily resisted forms of fallenness: in societies where all, or almost all, public authority belonged to men, it pitted the male authority of the inspired prophet and his followers against the male authority of the king and his courtiers; and God, refusing to be politically marginalized, appeared, for the time being, in male form. Over against the dishonest ‘fatherliness’ of political tyrants, the claims of Honesty were revealed as the sovereign commandments of ‘God the Father’, while, over against the dishonesty of emperors hailed as incarnate sons of God, the church set the figure of ‘God the Son’, crucified. Yet, now, the simple fact that it has also become possible to organize quite explicitly against patriarchy surely means that we are entering another stage. At last, God is able to withdraw from that ancient, but nevertheless always provisional, imagery. And the cause of Honesty, which once required it, now surely demands its transcendence. For a more extended discussion of the issues arising, see for example Gavin D’Costa’s study, Sexing the Trinity: Gender, Culture and the Divine (London: SCM, 2000), an interesting and to my mind largely persuasive response, especially, to the feminist challenge of Luce Irigaray. D’Costa, here, also speaks with particular admiration of the classic icon of the Trinity painted, in the early fifteenth century, by Andrei Rublev. Rublev’s icon is sometimes referred to as ‘the Old Testament Trinity’, because it portrays the dogma in terms of the story in Genesis 18, where God appears to Abraham in the form of ‘three men’, that is to say, three angels. This is an image of the Trinity which delightfully escapes the old formula of two bearded patriarchs, and a hieratic dove. It is indeed a very strikingly un-patriarchal representation. The three angels in the icon have identical, androgynous faces; the sameness in their faces represents the oneness of God. 187

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They are also each, for symbolic reasons, exactly the same in size and prominence. Between them, they form a circle. And they are seated on three sides of an altar, on which a chalice stands. We, meanwhile, are on the fourth side, with Abraham and Sarah, as we are caught up sacramentally into the festivity of divine life. Various details serve to differentiate the three: The angel on the left represents the First Person of the Trinity. All three angels wear a blue robe representing divinity; but this angel also wears a shimmering ethereal golden robe over the blue beneath. Each, again, holds a staff to symbolize divine authority; but this angel clasps the staff, with especial emphasis, in both hands. And in the background stands a house, recalling the words of Jesus in John 14:2: ‘In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.’ The angel in the middle, looking towards the first, represents the Second Person. The brown garment which this figure wears represents the earth, and so, by association, God’s incarnation upon earth, in Christ. A gold stripe also speaks of Christ’s kingship. This angel is blessing the chalice, with two fingers, again representing Christ’s twofold, divine and human nature. In the background stands a tree: this could be a reference to the oak trees of Genesis 18:1, ‘the oaks of Mamre’, under which the angels appeared to Abraham as he sat at the door of his tent. But it also recalls ‘the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ in the Garden of Eden, with its forbidden fruit, which Adam and Eve ate; and, at another level, the wood of Christ’s cross, the tree of death which has become for us the tree of eternal life in Revelation 22:2. So it symbolizes the whole drama of humanity’s primal fallenness, as represented by Adam and Eve, and redemption in Christ. The angel on the right, representing the Third Person, wears a green robe, to symbolize the new life which the coming of the Holy Spirit brings; and touches the table, symbolically earthing the divine life of God. In the background, here, stands a mountain: an allusion to Mount Sinai, on which God encountered Moses, and hence to every experience of prophetic inspiration, as the Holy Spirit ‘speaks through the prophets’. The mountain bends, as the angel also bends, towards the other two.

Sat together at table, the three converse as perfect equals. What Rublev has painted is a vision in which the highest wisdom, the supreme goal of the Christian life, is identified precisely with an ideal perfection in the skills of conversation: a perfect sympathetic openness, lightness and straightforward ease with the other. And so the question arises: how are we to reproduce the truth of that beautifully un-patriarchal, gender-transcendent vision, also, now in our liturgical language? How might we best, creatively, seek to supplement and enrich our traditional talk of ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’? I have just two little suggestions to offer in this regard. One possibility might be to differentiate the three Persons in terms of their different relationships to the overall dynamics of salvation history. For example, as:

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God, Source of all Wisdom; God in kenosis; and God, Pentecostal Spirit. Another possibility would be to focus on their complementary modes of action with regard to the salvation of each individual: the First Person waking us from the sleep of mere banality; the Second Person rescuing us from the toils of manipulation; the Third Person educating us properly to own our place in history. And so, for instance, what is the Rublev icon saying? I think it is the communication of a blessing: God wake you; God rescue you; God educate you; and the blessing of the Holy Trinity be among you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Appendix III

Texts for a Christian Day of Atonement

The following texts were originally written for a service at All Saints Church, Hawnby, North Yorkshire, in September 2000. 1. A Collect You, whom first our incapacity and then our ravening neediness conceals; forgotten in the misremembered past and covered by the tangled overgrowth of habit; now, infinite intensity of dark and light, allow no more of this; but prompt our faltering appetite for thought; stir up in us the proper restlessness of faith and, by your Spirit, set our self-imprisoned spirits free; in Jesus’ name, whom cruel power crucified, yet whom you raised; the prophet and the living symbol of true honesty; bearer of sin, and so its nemesis; our pioneer; the way, the truth, the life for all eternity. 2. A Litany I Let us pray. God of the prophets, poets and sages, all-transforming goodness, we invoke you. God incarnate, so dishonoured by our false honouring, we seek you. 191

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God, Pentecostal Spirit, still awaiting a people with ears to hear, we appeal to you. Holy Trinity, we cry to you. II From seductive lies, Redeemer, deliver us. From the games of propaganda politics and propaganda religion; from the flattery of propaganda; from its triggering of prejudice. From herd behaviour; from ‘only obeying orders’; from moral anaesthesia. From the desire to be envied and from the desire to feel innocent; from every self-serving distortion of the past; from the moral delusions of kitsch, Redeemer, deliver us. From all attachment to privilege; and from deference to glamour. From resentment, in all its works; from the pleasures of hatred; from all enslavement to past trauma, self-righteous grievance, longings for revenge. From moralistic self-indulgence; and from moral panic, Redeemer, deliver us. From our instinctive fear of strangers, strange practices, strange ideas. From false certainty, obstinately clung to, Redeemer, deliver us.

Appendix III

From all that may poison the relationships of men and women; or of adults and children. From the addictive lust for domination, Redeemer, deliver us. III Benighted children of Adam and Eve, we confess our need of grace fully to face our history, openly to own all that by birth or choice is ours, truly to see what others see us as. Oh, sun of righteousness, arise, dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds. Churchpeople, guardians of traditional religion, we confess that we, by nature, are the scribes and pharisees of our age. Oh, light of the world, enlighten us. And that the crowd which cried, ‘Crucify him!’ symbolically stands for us. Oh, judge of judges, turn us around. We confess that, as a community anxious to survive and grow, we have all too often made the gospel cheap, pretended to sell easy answers, exploited people’s weakness. Oh, after all the spiritual tempests of our past, the earthquakes and the flames, come, still small voice of sanity, whisper quiet wisdom to us. We confess our sins of communal complicity, collaboration with the evildoer, and apathy; that in times past we all too often sold out to the powerful and, for the sake of ease, went with the flow, which we called good. But now, at last, let us move on.

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Oh, true desire of all the nations, come, uplift us. IV For every moment of fresh insight, God of honesty, we praise you. For the multiplicity of moral and religious cultures; for their conversational encounter; for their agreement, for their disagreement, for all that this may have to teach us, we bless you. For poets and artists of real integrity; for all originality of visionary inspiration, we praise you. For the ongoing process of revelation and for the progress of theology, we bless you. For our true friends; those who are near, those who are far away, those whose memory we treasure, we praise you. For all resolute and penetrating questioners; for the courage of the conscientious whistleblower; and for the solidarity of the shaken, we bless you. For those, especially, who have sacrificed their liberty, or their life, in following their conscience, we praise you. For every good example of loving one’s enemy, we bless you. For the weighty promise of eternity; for the solitary prospect of death; for all that helps raise us out of the everydayness of the everyday, and gives space to the soul, we praise you, we bless you.

Appendix III

V Creator, opener of horizons, pulse of the imagination, point out the path to truth and guide us. Help us communicate: give us good-humoured politics, free-spirited debate, popular respect for thoughtfulness. Point out the path to truth. Liberate the oppressed: embolden the lowly, amplify the trembling voices of the silenced. And guide us. Make us good listeners: ironical, alert, attentive to the changing signs of the times. Point out the path. Inspire the critics of religion: sharpen their salutory challenge, give them a probing tenacity and patience. And guide us. Heal your ailing church: from all our old neuroses; from stiff orthodoxy, fanatical enthusiasm, loss of nerve, heal us for ever. Point out the path to truth, and guide us. VI Bound together as the body of Christ, we affirm our shared calling: to love the truth which is love, to be true to the love which is truth. In your will is our peace; nor will our hearts know honest rest until they find their rest in you.

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God, source of all meaning, source of all hope, source of all final fulfilment, come, chasten and change us. 3. A Hymn Glory be to Jesus, risen from the dead, he who hacked the path through, which we too must tread. Glory to the prophets who, like him, have fought to uphold the truth of what their conscience taught. Glory to the artists who have found new ways with imagination to set minds ablaze. Glory, too, to all those brave enough to break rules of false propriety for their neighbour’s sake. Glory to the Spirit, infinitely wise, pilgrim with the pilgrims, shatterer of lies. Travellers from slavery to the promised land, now we pray for guidance: come, take us in hand! Holy Saviour, teach us all we need to know; take us, shape us, show us where we’re called to go.

Appendix IV

A Sermon for Trinity Sunday

(The original setting for this was a gathering of the retired clergy of the Cleveland Archdeaconry, on Trinity Sunday 2003.) The bishop thought that what you’d like, for this occasion, would be a bit of theology. And no doubt today being what it is does makes this quite appropriate. Because when we speak of God as ‘Holy Trinity’, essentially, what we’re speaking about is the way God’s revealed through Christian theology, considered as a systematic enterprise. And Trinity Sunday is, I guess, the nearest thing we have to a proper festival in celebration of that, potentially, very beautiful thing: the scientific art or artistic science of theology . . . So, then, what’s the difference between good theology and bad theology? It seems to me: bad theology simply takes what serves the corporate egoism of the church and codifies it, dresses it up as something else, presents it as God’s will. But good theology does the opposite. Good theology’s the mortal enemy to any sort of corporate egoism. What’s good theology? One might, perhaps, describe it as 197

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an all-encompassing encounter between the two primordial forms of intelligence. On the one hand: intellectual intelligence. On the other hand: emotional intelligence. Or rather, to be more precise, good theology (it seems to me) is none other than intellectual intelligence paying homage to honest emotional intelligence. In fact, the most complete homage possible. Because it’s all about salvation – and what are we to be saved from? The power of sin is dishonesty, and the emotional stupidity that goes along with it . . . Good theology is intellectual intelligence, therefore, in the most decisive way possible paying homage to honest emotional intelligence. But, now, look: honest emotional intelligence, as cultivated through faith in God, is fundamentally threefold . . . To begin at the beginning: the theologians of the early church faced three basic problem areas. First – they were mostly men trained in Greek philosophy. They had to work out, theologically, how the God of the Hebrew Bible related to the very different-seeming God of Greek philosophy. Second – they were members of a dissident, and often persecuted, community. They needed theological strategies for encouraging one another in resistance, and for explaining their dissident point of view to outsiders. Third – they were involved in inventing the church, as a brand new sort of religious organization. They faced the problem of how best to guarantee their community’s faithfulness to its tradition, whilst also facilitating its growth and effectiveness. As they sought (firstly) to reconcile the God of the Hebrew Bible

Appendix IV

with the God of Greek philosophy, they found themselves, in effect, thinking about the way God transcends all cultural divides. What does it mean that all human beings of every culture are children of God? To tackle this question is, in intellectual terms, to encounter the First Person of the Trinity. As they sought (secondly) to think through their resistance to the dominant order of their world, they found themselves driven, over and over again, to reinterpret what it means to see God in the figure of the Crucified Dissident. Their own affliction brought home to them the reality of the Second Person of the Trinity. As they wrestled (thirdly) with organizational problems, they prayed for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of divine creativity, who’d spoken through the prophets, and who, Jesus had promised, would, eventually, lead them into all truth. So they encountered the Third Person of the Trinity. They faced these three basic theological challenges. But in each case alike what was essentially required of them was a form of honest emotional intelligence . . . With regard, especially, to the First Person of the Trinity: it was a question of learning how to relate to people from other cultural backgrounds. Back then, Greek-speaking intellectuals had to come to terms both with an originally Hebrew tradition and with a larger community of non-intellectuals. This demanded a certain sort of honest emotional intelligence. Just the same, surely, as is also involved today, wherever deep cultural difference is overcome. For instance: I once lived a couple of years in Upper Egypt.

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There were three of us the first year, two the second, the only foreigners in the little town of Qena. If you look it up in the tourist guide books, they’ll tell you: don’t, on any account, go to Qena, it’s a dull place, they say, and, what’s more, dangerous – tourists have been killed there. But those were two of the very happiest years of my life. Living in a place where you’re such an outsider can make you feel quite exposed and vulnerable, highly sensitive to how local people see you. But the great charm of Arab culture, in general, is the way it promotes hospitality to strangers. Sometimes this was, no doubt, just a game people liked to play. But often, it was clear, it involved real honest emotional intelligence. And I must say, I feel immensely grateful. If I ask myself, where have I myself actually met God as the First Person of the Trinity? the answer is: perhaps above all, in that dusty little town. With regard, especially, to the Second Person of the Trinity: the story of the Crucified Dissident, likewise, comes alive wherever people have to learn solidarity under pressure. Which is, again, essentially a discipline of honest emotional intelligence. During the later 1980s, for example, I became involved in a solidarity-project aiming to bring together church-related people belonging to the Western European peace movement with church-related Eastern European dissidents. So I met quite a number of people involved in organizations such as ‘Solidarity’ in Poland or ‘Charter 77’ in Czechoslovakia. These were men and women who had to live in a world full of spies and informers, everywhere, and with a constant threat of arrest and torture. Again and again, I found myself thinking: these folk have had a real, direct foretaste of the Day of Judgement, such as we’ll never have.

Appendix IV

To maintain one’s integrity in such conditions plainly requires very great honest emotional intelligence. And if I ask myself, where have I myself met God as the Second Person of the Trinity? I think the answer is: perhaps above all, in the presence of those people. With regard, especially, to the Third Person of the Trinity: well – I guess anyone who’s worked as a parish priest knows at least a little bit of what it takes, by way of honest emotional intelligence, to do that job well. I’ve seen, and I see, many good parish priests at work, doing the job well. And if I ask myself, where have I myself met God as the Third Person of the Trinity? I think the answer is: above all, there. The honest emotional intelligence required for relating well to cultural outsiders . . . The honest emotional intelligence required for building effective forms of solidarity, in defence of true freedom, under pressure . . . The honest emotional intelligence required for helping draw a tradition-based community thoughtfully together . . . These are, all three, quite obviously desirable qualities. You don’t need explicit faith in God to recognize the essential desirability of honest emotional intelligence in each of these three forms. And yet – I also want to say – the theological fact of the matter is, here we have the three faces of the triune God. So, then, the question arises: what does it mean to add this extra, this theological element? What does it mean to speak of these undeniable virtues not just as virtues but, at the same time, also as spiritual openings-up to the three faces of the triune God? What does it mean? I think it, basically, means that the imperatives of honest emotional intelligence are, in principle, infinite. I think it, very simply, means that

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enough, here, never is, never will be, never can be enough. Because (the point is) all the true meaning of everything depends on nothing less than an infinite longing . . .

Index

Adorno 151 Aelred of Rievaulx 156 agnosticism 6–7, 79–80, 88 Amos 108, 113–15, 175 n20 animal laborans 31–2, 35–7, 51–2, 53, 84, 93 Anselm 172 ch 3 n10 Antony 60 Aquinas 4, 61, 77, 171 n5, 181 Arendt 12, 29–41, 51, 90–91, 142, 181 Arianism 57–60, 61, 63, 172 n1, 181 Aristeides 46, 58 Aristotle/Aristotelianism 7, 21, 68, 69, 167 n6, 169 n16 Arminianism 128 Athanasius 60, 181 Athenaeus, on the expulsion of Alcaeus and Philiscus 110 Athenagoras 46, 58 Augustine 37, 38, 53, 60–62, 63, 115, 122–4, 127, 128, 129, 131, 169 ch 2 n16, ch 3 n1, 172 ch 3 n10, ch 4 n3, 181 authority (auctoritas) 37–9, 40–41, 54, 58–9, 64, 82, 84, 93, 94, 147–8, 155, 159–60, 161–4, 169 n16, 179 n6 Axial Period 51–2, 82, 84 Balthasar 130–31, 135, 177 n21, n23, n24, ch 7 n1, 181–2 banality 11–12, 22–5, 26, 27, 29, 30, 31–2, 37, 39, 45, 51–2, 54, 64, 65, 70, 78, 84, 93, 107, 108, 124, 160, 164–5, 189; see also animal laborans; primal shakenness Barth 12, 51, 55, 57, 66, 75–80, 81, 113, 126–7, 129–31, 149, 171 n7, 172 ch 3 n10, 177 n20, ns 23–5, 182 Bellah, Robert 149

Benedict 64 Bentham 35, 182 Blake 157 Bloch 151, 172 n7 Bonhoeffer 51, 155, 171 n7 Buddhism 2, 82, 83, 84, 90 Bunyan 157 calendar reform 138–43, 149, 152, 156, 158 Calvin 77, 127–9, 182 Catherine of Genoa 132–4, 177 n30 Chinese religion 82, 83 Church of England 145, 151, 152, 156–8 Cicero 110 city of God/earthly city 38, 53, 122–3, 126, 127, 135, 170 n1 civil religion 141, 149 Clement of Alexandria 46, 58, 59 crucifixion/resurrection 38, 47, 52–3, 78, 108, 112, 118, 126, 140, 159, 160–63, 164, 165 Dante 115, 130, 131 D’Costa, Gavin 187 Descartes 93 Dionysius the Areopagite 85 disciplinary eschatology 49–50, 117–21, 124–5, 128–32 disowning 11–12, 25–7, 29, 30–31, 37, 39, 45, 54–5, 136, 139, 160, 165, 189; see also authority (auctoritas); calendar reform Docetism 67 early church: the demands of survival and growth 111–13, 114–15, 153–6 Ebionitism 67 Ecclesiastes 118, 176 n5 Eichmann 30

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Enlightenment 34–5, 90, 92–3, 100, 103–4, 147–8 Ephesians 107 Epicurus/Epicureanism 18–25, 26, 109–11, 118, 126, 134, 143, 167 n6, 168 n21, 170 n2, 175–6 n5, n8, 182 eternal life 21, 24, 35, 65, 110–11, 115–21; see also disciplinary eschatology; purgatory Fichte 74, 80, 173 n20, 184 fideism 8, 79–80 First-Person theology 11–13, 29, 46–8, 49, 50–52, 54, 56, 58–60, 66, 74, 75, 80, 81–105, 108, 135, 164–5, 170 n1 Fraser, Giles 167 ch 1 n1 Frei, Hans 160 Gassendi 167 n6 Gherardo of Borgo San Donnino 64 Gnosticism 49, 54–5 grand narrative 90–91, 95, 99–100, 101–2, 104, 105, 147–8 Arendt’s 33–7 Hegel’s 102–4 Heidegger’s 90–94 Joachim’s 63–5 Lessing’s 65–6 Gregorian Reform 63, 82 Gregory the Great 115 Hauerwas, Stanley 151–3, 178 ns 15–16, 182 heaven see disciplinary eschatology Hegel 7–10, 12, 57, 66–7, 68–75, 76, 78–80, 88, 91, 102–4, 105, 149, 167 ns 3–4, 173 ns 14–16, n20, 182–3, 184 Heidegger 33, 84, 86–104, 174 n5, ns 8–10, 175 ns 11–14, n23, 183 hell see disciplinary eschatology Heraclitus 87 Herodotus 146 Hindu religion 82, 83 Hobbes 34–5, 183 Hölderlin 87, 88, 91–4, 183 Holocaust Memorial Day 141 homo faber 31–2, 33, 34–7, 51–2, 53, 59

honesty/sincerity/frankness 1–2, 26–7, 67–8, 126, 128, 155, 165 Horkheimer 151 Hosea 114 Inglehart, Ronald 150 ‘intellectual conceit’ 2–4, 89–90; see also metaphysics; Plato Irenaeus 170–71 n4 Islam 81–2, 83, 90, 100, 147–8 isonomy 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40–41, 146–7, 148, 149, 152, 153, 168 n3 Jaspers 51, 84, 183 Jesus’s teaching 114–15, 117, 119–20, 124–5, 138–9, 152, 154, 159, 165 Joachim of Fiore 57, 63–5, 75, 81, 82, 172 n7, 184 John of the Cross 144 Judaism 82, 83, 90 Jünger 93–4, 175 n12 Justin Martyr 46, 49, 58, 184 Kant 6–7, 80, 83, 88, 91, 92, 103, 184 Kierkegaard 50, 75, 76, 98, 136–7, 177 n3, 184 Kosovo, batttle of 145 Lessing 2–3, 65–6, 119, 121, 131, 184 Levinas 86, 89–91, 95–102, 174 ns 7–8, 175 n20, 184 liberation theology 151 libido dominandi 53, 123–4, 148 Lucian 109 Lucretius 110 Lutheranism 74, 104, 128, 171 magic 51–2, 84 Manicheanism 67 manipulation 11–12, 18–22, 25, 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 45, 53, 54, 64, 65, 75, 78, 79, 99, 107–8, 109–11, 112, 113, 114, 115–16, 118–19, 120, 122–5, 126, 131, 134, 135, 143, 157–8, 160, 165, 168 n14, 179 n6, 189; see also homo faber; city of God/earthly city Mark 160–64, 179 n6 martyrdom 155, 157 Marx 35–7, 100, 102

Index Melanchthon 77 metaphysics 3–4, 7–10, 17, 20, 21–2, 25, 26, 33, 45–6, 47, 48, 50, 59, 62, 63, 87–8, 89–90, 91, 92–3, 94, 95, 102, 103, 108, 165, 167 ch 1 n2, 169 n16, 174 n8 Milbank, John 126 Miles, Jack 160 ‘modernity’ (‘first’, ‘second’, ‘third’) 90, 147–8, 149, 151 Moltmann, Jürgen 149–52, 178 n8, ns 10–12, n14, 184 Monarchianism 48–50, 77 Montanism 50 Nicaea, Council of 57–8 Nietzsche 8, 12, 17–27, 29, 33, 84, 85–6, 87, 88, 89, 91, 112–13, 118, 155, 167 Intro 2, ch 1 ns 1–2, 185 Nygren 37 Origen 46, 58, 59–60, 63, 115, 130–31, 177 n23, 185 original sin 121–5, 150 Pantaenus 46, 58, 59 Parmenides 87 Pato˘cka 86 patriarchy 41, 159, 164, 187–9 Paul 111–13, 115, 123, 135, 161–2, 170 n2, 171 n7 Pelagianism 67, 122–4, 185 ‘persons’ 55–6, 172 n10 Philo of Alexandria 49, 59, 170 ns 2–3, 185 Plato/Platonism 7, 19–22, 25, 33–4, 35, 39, 46, 48, 58–60, 68, 69, 84–6, 87–8, 89, 90, 96, 100, 102, 110, 115, 117–18, 119, 169 ch 2 n16, ch 3 n1, 170 n1, 174 n5, 185 positivism 6–7 primal shakenness 84, 86–7, 88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96–7, 102, 105, 123 propaganda 5, 75, 76, 143, 150, 151, 152 public conscience movements 40–41, 146–9, 150–51, 152–3 purgatory 115–16, 117, 130, 132–4 Radical Reformation 149–53, 158, 178 n15

205

Rasmusson, Arne 150–51 Rastafarianism 142 ‘religion’ 50–52, 81, 82–4, 136–7, 171 n7 resurrection see crucifixion/resurrection ‘revelation’ 7, 29, 41, 45–6, 47, 48–9, 59, 62, 63–4, 72, 73, 76–7, 79, 81, 82–3, 88, 103, 105, 117, 130, 146, 147, 159–60, 164–5 Revelation, Book of 108, 112, 155 Rublev 187–8 Sabellius 48, 58 ‘sacred ideology’ 2–3, 4–7, 9, 29, 40, 45–6, 47, 50–51, 53, 75–6, 82, 83, 87, 89–90, 93, 95, 96–7, 99, 102, 108, 122, 123, 125, 129, 135, 152, 153, 155, 164–5, 179 n6 Sand, George 172 n7 Schelling 172 n7, 173 n20, 184 Schillebeeckx 163–4 Schleiermacher 66–8, 69, 77, 171 n7, 173 n15, 186 Schopenhauer 84 Schweitzer 113 Second-Person theology 11–13, 29, 47–8, 49–50, 52–3, 54, 56, 66, 75, 80, 81, 82, 90, 105, 107–34, 135–6, 165, 170 n1 Shaw, Graham 179 n6 Simon, Ulrich 131–2 sin/guilt/shame 143–5 Smith, Adam 35 Smith, Wilfred Cantwell 83 Socrates 39, 96, 98–100, 101, 117–18, 168 n14 solidarity of the shaken 85, 86, 101–2, 104–5, 148 Spinoza 7, 24–5, 74, 173 n20, 186 Spiritual Franciscans 64, 85 Strauss, Leo 118 Taborites 64–5 Tertullian 8, 49–50, 55, 56, 76, 77, 172 n1, 186 ‘theology’ 1–10, 29–30, 40, 41, 50–51, 88, 90, 95, 103; see also FirstPerson theology; Second-Person theology; Third-Person theology

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Third-Person theology 11–13, 29, 47–8, 49–50, 54–5, 56, 63–6, 75, 81, 82, 90, 105, 135–58, 165, 170 n1 Tholuck 66–7, 68, 69, 74, 80, 172 n10, 173 n16, n20, 186 Unhappy Consciousness 70–73, 74, 75, 105 Varro 169–70 n1

Villa, Dana R. 168 n4, 169 n16 Weil, Simone 155–6 Wisdom 170 n3 ‘Wisdom’ literature 114 world picture, age of the 92–4 Wrede 163 Yom Kippur 140