A Neo-Hegelian Theology: The God of Greatest Hospitality 9781472410870, 9781472410887, 9781472410894

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A Neo-Hegelian Theology

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A Neo-Hegelian Theology The God of Greatest Hospitality

Andrew Shanks Canon Theologian, Manchester Cathedral, UK

© Andrew Shanks 2014 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 right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street Union Road Suite 3-1 Farnham Burlington Surrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-3818 England USA www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Shanks, Andrew, 1954– A neo-Hegelian theology : the God of greatest hospitality / by Andrew Shanks. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4724-1087-0 (hardcover: alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4724-1088-7 (ebook)— ISBN 978-1-4724-1089-4 (epub) 1. Philosophy and religion. 2. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. 3. Trinity. I. Title. BR100.S39 2014 230—dc23 013020867 ISBN 9781472410870 (hbk) ISBN 9781472410887 (ebk – PDF) ISBN 9781472410894 (ebk – ePUB)

IV

Contents

Introduction: Die List der Vernunft  

1

1 ‘Heresy’  

9

2 Renewed Apologetics  

37

3 Anti-propaganda  

69

4 Hegel on History-as-Revelation  

97

5 ‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’  

125

Index  

149

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Introduction Die List der Vernunft By what sort of method, in general, does divine revelation proceed? Or how does the truth of faith emerge? G.W.F. Hegel, in his Science of Logic, outlines two basic alternatives: by ‘violence’ or by ‘cunning’. In the first case, That the end [think: God’s revelatory will] relates itself immediately to an object [the mind of a prophet or an apostle] and makes it a means, as also that through this means it determines another object [the mind of the larger witnesscommunity], may be regarded as violence in so far as the end appears to be of quite another nature than the object, and the two objects similarly are mutually independent totalities.

Here, in the ‘violent’ form of revelation, there are thus three quite distinct entities involved. The ‘end’ and the two ‘objects’ are three separate minds: the mind of God, the mind of the prophet or apostle, and the mind of the community. And the relationship between them is simple. Without any apparent ambiguity, it is the interplay of a primary agency, an instrument, and a passive material. ‘But’, in the second case, that the end [God’s revelatory will] posits itself in a mediate relation with the object [the mind, in this case, of a preferably philosophic interpreter] and interposes another object between itself and it, may be regarded as the cunning of reason.1

What is ‘interposed’ between God and the interpreter, in the work of this ‘cunning’, is – by contrast – a whole historic process, which considered in itself is highly ambiguous: potentially a revelation of God’s truth, but not in an immediately obvious way; and therefore requiring considerable work of discernment, on the part of the interpreter, to be recognised for what it is. So the divine Revealer ‘interposes’ a whole medium of teleological ambiguity, within which the truth of revelation is ‘cunningly’, so far as possible, slipped past the conservative resistances of sinful human instinct. Hegel’s formulation is (beautifully!) abstract. But his reference to ‘the cunning of reason’ – in German, die List der Vernunft – nevertheless makes it clear that his primary concern is with processes of divine revelation, since for him that is what ‘reason’ is. He sees revelation everywhere, in the progress of ‘reason’; he stands absolutely opposed to any mere opposition between ‘faith’ and ‘reason’. 1 G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, translated by A.V. Miller (New York: Humanity Books, 1969), p. 746.

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Classical notions of divine revelation – the revelation, for instance, which is delivered to Moses on Mount Sinai, to the later Hebrew prophets, to the authors of the New Testament, or to the Prophet Muhammad – all of course conform to the first of these two models, the ‘violent’ one. God seizes, one might well say ‘violently’, upon the prophet, or the apostle, as the immediate instrument of revelation. As a philosopher, however, Hegel himself is primarily concerned with the second model. That is to say, he seeks to discern another, much less direct and therefore altogether slower, unfolding of divine truth, immanent within secular historical developments as well as more overtly religious ones. He is interested, so to speak, in God’s gentle opportunism. Clearly, it is in the nature of revealed religion that its traditions tend to originate in great volcanic eruptions of fresh insight, which are, to begin with, understood in classic, ‘violent’ terms, even though they may, in actual fact, be altogether more morally ambiguous than such an understanding would suggest. This way of thinking is indeed what necessarily belongs to the initial breakthrough moments of any such tradition. And yet, it has intrinsic drawbacks. When the tradition in question cools, and sets hard, the ‘violent’ model of revelation – which tends to conceal rather than highlight the ambiguities involved – all too often mutates into a mere rigid fundamentalism. Thus, fundamentalist theology as such essentially excludes any possibility of divine truth ever emerging any other way, apart from the ‘violence’ of the initial eruption. Such thinking is the preservation, but also the corruption, of that ‘violence’: transforming it from the violent assault on traditional moral prejudices which was its original truth, into a more or less violent assault, now, on dissident thoughtfulness instead. Fundamentalist religion tends to corrupt the original creative ‘violence’ of eruptive revelation into a justification for persecutory violence; whilst also drawing down the persecutory counter-violence of fundamentalist irreligion upon itself. In general, therefore, mature religious traditions surely need to evolve beyond a thinking framed only in terms of the ‘violent’ model, with its very narrow historical focus; always more and more, towards a thinking framed in terms of divine ‘cunning’, which seeks, in contrast, to interpret the whole of human history as a medium of divine revelation. This is the all-too-often impatiently derided art of ‘grand narrative’. The practice of good grand-narrative theology by no means signifies losing touch with the truth of the original eruptions. But it is a matter of preserving that truth without corrupting it; transmitting it non-violently; allowing it freely to unfold. A Trinitarian-Shaped Argument What follows is a Trinitarian-shaped Christian theological argument regarding the ‘cunning of reason’. The truth of faith is testimony to an ultimate oneness. Yet, it is not impatiently so. And the essential nature of its patience is threefold.

Introduction

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It is testimony to an ultimate oneness inasmuch as, in relation to the plurality of human cultures, its dynamic is endlessly – albeit, in the end, non-violently – unifying. So it breaks through all divisive, in the sense of conversation-suppressing, closures between cultures or social categories. As Paul, for instance, famously puts it, in the Christian context, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female” (Galatians 3: 28). The oneness of God is made manifest in the opening up of real, truth-seeking conversation between human beings as such, wherever such conversation has been closed down. The breakthrough, tradition-founding moments of divine revelation may involve a certain violence of thought, in protest against the complacent, often over-tolerant closures of sheer thoughtlessness prevailing in the world around. And subsequent openings, again, may well require some reversion to that fierce confrontational spirit. But, as the resultant tradition matures, everything in principle depends upon the initial violence-of-opening not being allowed to harden, as it well may, into the very different violence of bigoted closure, towards outsiders as such. For, God is one; and the divine oneness is precisely what appears in the dissolution of the barriers constituted by such closure. God is one, I would argue, inasmuch as perfect truth-as-openness, opening towards God, is ultimately a unifying principle, leading to the reconciliation of culturally divided people. Nor is there any other God besides the God of perfect truth-as-openness – in Hegel’s terms, the God of true ‘reason’ – who is honoured, essentially, by one’s being opened up towards one’s neighbours, even those from whom one is, at first, most divided by immediate cultural difference. Indeed, truthas-openness, alone, is rightly holy. Nothing else deserves to be considered holy, other than what helps open us up, at the very deepest level of self-critical honesty, towards both friend and stranger. But, at the same time, Christian theology traditionally points towards a certain threefold articulation of perfect truth-as-openness. And there is a rich truthpotential in this intuition, also – even if the tradition has all too often lagged quite lamentably behind it, in actual practice. Thus, the essential threefold-ness of perfect truth-as-openness may be said to consist in three closely inter-related elementary qualifying negations, implicit in its proper work of unification: 1. considered as the basis for a solidarity-building project, perfect truth-asopenness is clearly incompatible with any measure tending to create a closed community, fearful of internal dissent; 2. considered as the content of an apologetic argument to be upheld in conversation with philosophic critics, it is crucial that the proper claims of perfect conversational truth-as-openness, in itself, should not be confused with any sort of merely subsidiary claim to definitive, fixed propositional truth-as-correctness; and 3. considered as the essential principle of a gospel to be disseminated, far and wide, to the world at large, the proper appeal of perfect truth-as-openness remains, despite all temptations, forever intrinsically incompatible with any sort of a propaganda short-cut.

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These are the three negations I want to explore here. Chapter 1 of this book deals primarily with the first; Chapter 2, primarily with the second; Chapters 3 and 4, primarily with the third; and Chapter 5, with all three, although they also overlap right the way through. The dogma of the Trinity originally emerged in reflection of the fact that the early Christians faced three major intellectual challenges; roughly corresponding to those three negations and, in a ‘cunning’ way, helping open the necessary space for them.2 Thus, in the first place, with regard to the Church as a solidaritybuilding project, there had never hitherto existed any religious organisation of the same species as the Church: none with such an urgent sense of missionary calling, seeking to incorporate all and sundry; none so liable to provoke persecution from the authorities; none, therefore, with a such a need for effective forms of organised solidarity, in resistance. When the early Christians prayed for divine guidance in the devising of appropriate solidarity strategies, they primarily addressed their prayers to ‘God the Holy Spirit’, the indwelling inspiration of the Church’s organisation. Secondly, with regard to the Church’s theoretical response to sceptical critics, its theology was originally formed right at the point of collision between two quite different intellectual cultures: that of Hebrew religion and that of Greek philosophy. There is nothing in the Bible even remotely akin to the writings of Plato or Aristotle, say; and nothing anywhere in the literature of Greek philosophy even remotely akin to the Torah or the writings of the prophets. But the early Christian theologians, from the mid-second century onwards, were mostly men trained in Greek philosophy, seeking to reconcile that training with their loyalty to the Hebrew Bible. To them, it was axiomatic that ‘God the Father’, being ‘Father’ to both Jews and Greeks alike, had long been at work in both contexts. Yet, the work of theoretical reconciliation was always going to be arduous; pointing, as it had to, beyond the traditional notions of intellectual ‘correctness’ proper to each side. And then, thirdly, with regard to the dissemination of the gospel, these thinkers faced the further basic problem that to become a Christian was always to be exposed to hostility, even on occasion to violent persecution. So, how on earth could this ever be made an attractive proposition to potential converts? Their prevailing answer was, in fact, to go for maximum defiance: they were inspired to proclaim Christ crucified as nothing less than ‘God the Son’ incarnate, above all by a visceral revulsion against the propaganda of the authorities who had crucified him and who still continued to oppress them. Much of their thinking was driven by their need to give adequate expression to that revulsion; hooking on to the various discontents of those to whom they brought their gospel. Three primary problem-complexes, surrounding a great upsurge of fresh truthas-openness: to the early Christians, these were the three faces of the one God. The basic question that concerns me here is, very simply, what it means to reconnect with that triune vision, as such, in the very different circumstances of today. What do the primordially threefold imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness require afresh of us? 2 Compare the Trinitarian argument in Andrew Shanks, Faith in Honesty: The Essential Nature of Theology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

Introduction

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‘Neo-Hegelianism’ Never before – I want to argue – in the whole of human history has reason’s cunning brought about such an opportunity as now exists, explicitly to recognise the actual truth of God. No doubt it will be said that one should be wary of such a claim: is this not, perhaps, just the native arrogance of modernity speaking? And yes, by no means let us merely assume any privilege! But still, consider the actual case to be made. Such was, of course, also Hegel’s claim, for his own day. (He lived from 1770 to 1831.) And Hegel is, I think, the greatest pioneer, within the Christian tradition, of the point of view which I am advocating.3 However, I am interested not only in the story that Hegel himself tells – of how the insight he represents had for the first time, back then, historically become possible – but also in how that story might now be extended, to take in those elements of post-Hegelian history which have most significantly contributed still further to deepen our potential appreciation of the same. Thus, my argument is not simply an account of the letter of Hegel’s own texts, although I will of course refer to them. But it is, at the same time, a creative attempt to enter into the spirit of his thought and, so far as I can, to redo for today what he did, theologically, for his day; which at times means entering into fresh areas, addressing topics which had still not opened up for him. Hegel is the thinker who, above all others, sets the terms for any future Christian philosophy of history. Seldom, if ever, has a thinker been so assailed with wild misunderstandings, and sometimes even such outright malice, as he has. Yet, it certainly seems to me that, at the deepest level, subsequent history has vindicated him. He was, by anticipation, the most radically, and realistically, anti-totalitarian of thinkers. Does this claim sound strange? It ought not to. But then his thought was too full of fresh truth, deep down, not to evoke quite ruthless resistance, through distortion. In Chapter 1 the focus is on what Hegel calls the ‘principle of subjectivity’, as such. This is his general name for the imperatives of perfect open-mindedness, as applied to solidarity-building; especially in the context of Christian tradition. But here I consider the most fundamental general blockage, within Christian tradition, to that principle, namely, the traditional notion of ‘heresy’. No doubt, good conversation within a religious community does depend to some extent upon a clear, shared sense of procedural limits. To identify the truth of true faith with an ideal open-mindedness is by no means to equate the promptings of the Holy Spirit with theological libertinism; or altogether, therefore, to abandon the desire for solidarity-founding consensus which first gives rise to the ‘orthodoxy’ / ‘heresy’ distinction. Yet, it must nevertheless suggest quite a fundamental redefinition of those concepts. How so, exactly? Chapter 2 is concerned with theology’s developing relationship to the challenge of other academic disciplines; that is to say, what is generally known as its ‘apologetic’ quality. In the past, theology has all too often muddled its proper 3 I have argued this also in Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith: Divided Brain, Atoning Spirit (London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2011).

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role, as celebrant of truth-as-openness, with unsustainable claims to exclusive metaphysical or moral truth-as-correctness. These really are two quite different species of intellectual fulfilment. True faith does not seek at all to explain the world, as secular academic disciplines do; but only to acknowledge what, for spiritual purposes, is most urgently there. Its proper goal is not correct explanation but sheer openness of mind. Hegel’s own term for the sort of thinking which systematically demarcates the proper boundaries in this regard is ‘speculative philosophy’. Such philosophy serves, not least, decisively to distinguish authentic theology, as the direct thinking-through of faith, from its inauthentic (correctnessobsessed) simulacrum, which I term ‘church ideology’. For the sake of a truly rounded picture, however, I juxtapose the Hegelian argument to three later, quite demonstratively non-Hegelian alternative approaches to the critique of church ideology: those represented by Franz Overbeck, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann. In the end, I want to show the essential complementarity, deep down, between these approaches and Hegel’s. And then Chapters 3 and 4 have to do with theology’s developing relationship to the original subversive core of the gospel message: in Hegel’s terminology, its ideal overcoming of what he calls das unglückliche Bewußtseyn, literally ‘the Unhappy Consciousness’, although I prefer to retranslate it ‘the Unatoned State of Mind’, or ‘Unatonement’. In Chapter 3 I approach this essentially through a discussion of the general embattled-ness of true religious liturgy, of any kind, against propaganda, of any kind, whether religious or secular: precisely inasmuch as the former, unlike the latter, goes way beyond any mere manipulative reinforcement of desired social norms, to uphold the Christomorphic imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness in all their rich potential dissidence. Propaganda-thinking, by its very nature, promotes various forms of supposedly normative moral correctness. True religious liturgy, in contrast, calls all norms as such into question. Never before has any generation been so relentlessly bombarded by the most sophisticated forms of propaganda as we are now; never before, therefore, has true liturgy been so urgently needed, as a countervailing medicine for the soul. But the underlying conflict is, of course, already right at the heart of the gospel. From this point of view, I am concerned, in particular, with how the gospel view of history emerged out of the older tradition of Hebrew apocalypticism; that entirely pre-philosophic, myth-rich predecessor to Christian ‘philosophy of history’. I consider the apocalyptic notion of ‘principalities and powers’; asking how that notion is properly to be sublated into Christian thought. At the level of philosophy, however, the prime need surely is for a disciplined focus on the ineradicable ambiguity of any at all effective religious tradition; inasmuch as this is something which propagandist ideology, by its very nature, inclines to deny. In Chapter 4, I contrast Hegel with Kant, in that regard. Kant for his part flees religious ambiguity, at the cost of great theological impoverishment. But Hegel does not. In fact, his philosophic theology, as developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit, is nothing other than a systematic matter of staying

Introduction

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with, even whilst openly acknowledging, the very deepest ambiguities of historic Christian faith. I seek to show how. And the concept of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn is central to his so doing. Never before, such an opportunity! This is, for Hegel, as much because there are lessons to be learnt from the extremities of corruption as because of general developments in enlightenment. A Christian philosophy of history is, first of all, a matter of asking: Where is God most notably at work, in new ways, today? And how does that relate to the good promises of the tradition? But, at the same time, we also have to ask: Where, above all, in the past did things go wrong, and why? So in Chapter 5, finally, I address that latter question. I consider both the corruption of aggressive church ideology and the weakness of an over-defensive theological ‘liberalism’, merely colluding with secularist ideology, as criticised today for instance by the Radical Orthodoxy movement. There is, I think, a struggle to be fought on both fronts. But everything, meanwhile, still depends upon the sort of patient attention to persistent ambiguity which Hegel, above all, exemplifies.

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Chapter 1

‘Heresy’ A Correspondence In the first place: the ‘descent’ of the ‘God the Holy Spirit’ on the apostles at the first Christian Pentecost, described in Acts of the Apostles 2: 1–42, symbolically represents the birth of the Church, as a more than ephemeral organisation. And for the early Christians, faced by the problems involved in devising an essentially new form of religious institution, the Holy Spirit was always first and foremost the divine indwelling of authentic Church life. But if the real truth of Christian faith is essentially to be understood as the Christian expression of perfect truth-asopenness – what then follows, for our theological understanding of the Holy Spirit today, after almost two millennia of Church history? The immediate logical corollary must be that, considered as the basis for a solidarity-building project, perfect truth-as-openness is ultimately incompatible with any measure tending to create a closed community, fearful of internal dissent. What, though, would it mean for us to follow this principle through with absolute consistency, in actual practice? I begin here with a question primarily relating to the Third Person of the Trinity, just because the writing of this book was initiated by an experience which raised it, in a very direct way. Thus, I work as a priest at Manchester Cathedral. Shortly after Easter 2011, the Cathedral hosted an event entitled ‘Spirit of Life’, which a number of people considered scandalous. I was not myself at all involved in the organising. And in fact it represented an evangelistic strategy about which I am somewhat sceptical. But what scandalised me here was not so much the event itself. Rather, it was the extravagance of some of the hostile reaction. Precisely: the heresy-hunting tone of it. The event was intended as a ‘Christian Mind, Body, Spirit fair’. It was designed to appeal to the sort of people who buy books in the ‘Mind, Body, Spirit’ section of twenty-first-century bookshops; who are liable to declare that they are ‘spiritual’ people but not ‘religious’. That is to say: people for whom ‘spirituality’ is all about individual self-fulfilment – supported by small affinity groups perhaps – but without much real loyalty to any ‘religious’ institution; and whose attitude to tradition is essentially that of free-floating consumers, picking and choosing on the basis of their own private ‘spiritual experience’, as opposed to the corporate legacy of traditional ‘religious’ authority. The publicity featured kitsch images of joyous young folk leaping for joy, frolicking in lovely sunlit fields. It offered ‘meditation and mysticism, prophecy and Jesus-Deck Reading [i.e., ‘Christian’ fortune telling, through the use of cards], massage and therapies, creative arts, prayer and conversation’.

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Personally, I am a ‘religious’ person’ rather than a ‘spiritual’ one, in this sense. For, I am mistrustful of the sense of personal innocence which ‘spiritual’ people all too often seem to enjoy, in their inner dissociation from any sort of tarnished corporate tradition. People who live in such innocence are dispensed from a certain sort of hard political and intellectual work, critically engaging with such a tradition from within; which, when it is well done, belongs, I think, to the very essence of the sacred. Nevertheless, I did not share in the outburst of righteous indignation gleefully anticipated by the Daily Mail when it first broke the story at the end of March. As Andrew Brown, writing in the Church Times, comments, this story perfectly exemplified the ‘almost mathematical’ formula for a Daily Mail religion story: A story of this sort … makes sense only within a framework of certain assumptions … [and] all it really tells you is that these assumptions, helpfully spelled out, are reassuringly true. So we learn that ‘the move’ [whatever it is] ‘is certain to anger traditionalists’; also that ‘the Church is in trouble’ [attendances falling and so forth]. There is also one slightly new fact, telling us the same thing in a different way: ‘earlier this month, the Vatican boasted that 900 disaffected Anglicans have left their parishes to become Roman Catholics. Many are believed to have felt alienated by the Church’s 1992 decision to allow women to be ordained as priests’. Once all this is in place, we insert the notional new story, as fragile as the filament in a light-bulb: ‘The Church of England was braced for a fresh row today after a cathedral announced plans to host a “new age” festival’.1

Never mind that all the contributors were self-professed Christians, carefully vetted by the organisers, who in turn were all very much part of the ecclesiastical establishment. No doubt, that was only going to make things worse, in the eyes of critics intent above all on demonstrating how corrupt the establishment itself had become, how much it truly deserved to be ‘in trouble’. Brown goes on: Good luck to the Mail in finding those traditionalists certain to be angered by this outrage. It is also worth noting that the paper, which regards itself as sympathetic to the traditionalists, runs half a page of astrology every day, and most days will have some New Age story in the hypochondria section, reported as if nothing could be more reasonable.2

But how could it be otherwise? Readily outraged ‘traditionalists’ sit side by side with the superstitious readers of horoscopes, in one and the same newspaperreading demographic. And, of course, the anticipated outrage did indeed swiftly materialise. In particular, Charles Raven saw a fine opportunity here. Raven wrote a sharp article in the Church of England Newspaper, and another even sharper one on the website Church Times, April 2011. Ibid.

1 2

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Virtue Online, drawing attention to the event as prime evidence of the Church of England’s current decadence.3 He denounced the organisers’ general apparent ‘disregard for theology’ and raised the spectre of heresy by denouncing them as ‘these modern New Age Gnostics’: stretching the word ‘Gnostic’, I suppose, to cover simply any sort of Christian syncretistic openness towards a larger ‘spiritual’ milieu. I am myself reluctant to use the term ‘Gnostic’ quite so loosely; or, one might well say, so un-theologically. But what really nettled me in Raven’s polemic was his personal attack on our Cathedral Poet, Rachel Mann, who had been invited to participate in the event but then withdrew. Rachel is a parish priest. However, she is also known, amongst other things, for her affectionate defence of the ‘heavy metal’ music scene; her principled refusal to be scandalised by the cheerful comedic blasphemies, and general pantomime rebelliousness, of its bands. Raven professed to be scandalised by her not-being-scandalised.4 Personally, I find the endemic hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness of the Daily Mail (for instance) a good deal more scandalous. And this clearly represents a pretty fundamental difference of theological instinct. At first, I did not recognise Raven’s name. The by-line to the article in the Church of England Newspaper identified him as ‘minister of Christ Church Wyre Forest’ and director of his own ‘Anglican’ campaigning website, entitled ‘SPREAD’. So I looked him up in Crockford’s Clerical Directory. He was not listed as a Church of England cleric. And then it came back to me: a vague memory, dating back to the period 1999–2002, of a local schism in the diocese of Worcester. When the then-Bishop of Worcester, Peter Selby, had made public his dissent from Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, on sexuality – which he (I think quite rightly) saw as a deplorable surrender, by his peers, to rank homophobic prejudice – Raven, as priest in charge of St. John’s Kidderminster in that diocese, had responded by declaring that the Bishop was no longer persona grata there. He had invited in a couple of (impeccably anti-gay) Ugandan bishops to conduct a confirmation service, without permission. And the dispute had then rumbled on until at length his licence expired and he was compelled to leave. Whereupon he had set up a new para-Anglican church, taking about half the congregation of St. John’s with him. In the meantime, he had established himself as one of the major leaders of the puritanical, GAFCON-oriented resistance to the Church of England establishment nationally.5 Hence, his interest in the present matter, which, for him, was very much part of a larger project. 3 Church of England Newspaper, 7 April 2011; www.virtueonline.org, As Eye See It: ‘Manchester Cathedral: From Via Media to Via Medium’, 29 March 2011. 4 These events pre-date the publication of Rachel’s autobiography: Dazzling Darkness: Gender, Sexuality, Illness and God (Glasgow: Wild Goose Publications, 2012). 5 GAFCON: the Global Anglican Futures Conference, June 2008. This issued the Jerusalem Declaration, the founding document of the Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (FCA): the global movement of militant resistance to the sort of liberal attitudes – especially with regard to homosexuality – which have now become the majority stance of the Anglican churches in North America.

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I decided to write to him: 9 April 2011 Dear Charles, I read your articles in ‘Virtue Online’ and the Church of England Newspaper, attacking this Cathedral, with (as you may imagine!) some interest. And, as you frame your attack partly in terms of the need for basic theological seriousness, I’m piqued, as Canon Theologian here, into responding. Actually, the ‘Spirit of Life’ event is something I personally knew nothing about before all the furore blew up. And I’m ready to be persuaded that I ought to be more critical of it than I’m immediately inclined to be. For the theology behind it certainly isn’t my cup of tea at all. But what strikes me here is, in fact, how different this contemporary form of gnosticism is from classical Gnosticism. Thus, it is at any rate free from what I take to be the real nastiness of (a good deal of) classical Gnosticism: namely, the schismatic spiritual elitism of those ancient groups. This modern lot want to gather in a Cathedral, with the blessing of a bishop. Therefore, they aren’t Gnostics in the classical sense. It may be that there’s some silliness involved. But – let’s be serious about sin! Silliness, in itself, isn’t quite the same as sin. Or am I missing something? The essence of heresy, as I understand it, is the positive will to generate schism. Indeed, isn’t that the original understanding? Heresy isn’t just a matter of being wrong; rather, it’s what wilfully destroys the proper conversation space for theology. The hate-driven will which constitutes heresy sabotages the possibility of open, charitable conversation which is the only environment within which God’s truth can really flourish. It leads to the worship of doctrinal ‘correctness’ as an idol: an utterly incorrect over-valuation of mere ‘correctness’, in itself. My thinking this, of course, makes me your enemy. The theology of SPREAD, as demonstrated in the Kidderminster schism, is quite clearly heretical according to my understanding of the term: it’s centred precisely on a heretical notion of the criteria for identifying ‘heresy’. But, because I believe in open, charitable conversation also with heretics, I’m writing to you nonetheless. You perhaps justifiably criticize the ‘Spirit of Life’ people for softening the gospel, removing from it any real call to repentance. I agree: let’s not soften the truthimperative of the gospel. Above all, the gospel demands openness. And therefore I gently invite you to repent the whole closed-down tone of your theology – as you’ll no doubt, reciprocally, want to invite me to repent the whole tone of mine, according to your quite different understanding. I guess you’ll think that I’m a heretic. Very well! My ‘heresy’ is to believe that God is love, overflowing not least towards those whom the godless world treats as outcasts. Therefore, any doctrine insofar as it tends to identify the gospel with ‘traditional’ hatred of social outcasts, such as gay people, is to my mind, anathema. Indeed, I see heresy all over the place in church history. I yield to no Reformer in my sense of just how busy the Antichrist has always been. And where such hatred prevails in the church itself, everything gets confused: ‘God’ is made to look like the great persecutor, Satan; and ‘Satan’, misconceived as the god of all outcasts, begins in certain forms of protest-thinking actually to look a bit like Christ. (For example: in the poetry of Baudelaire, as T.S. Eliot saw; and

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perhaps, although heavy metal isn’t to my bourgeois taste, Rachel Mann is right to find something of the same spirit at work in that sub-culture too!)6 Or again – am I missing something? How do you, fundamentally, justify your conversation-closing commitment to schismatic intolerance? Is it simply self-evident to you? Am I perhaps wasting my time, I wonder, writing this? I do hope not. With all best wishes, Andrew Shanks

It was only, really, in the process of writing this that I discovered why I was writing it: I needed to work out what I thought about ‘heresy’ in general, and here was a chance. Thus, suppose we do not think of ‘heresy’, automatically, as meaning just ‘whatever has in the past acquired that label’ but that, instead, we ask ourselves the elementary question: why do we need a concept of ‘heresy’ in the first place? (Do we even need the concept at all?) By any account, ‘heresy’ is something more than common or garden theological error. Surely, it is that particular sort of error which most fundamentally damages the very space for future conversation within the Church. Consider what does this. The obvious conclusion is that ‘heresy’ is, in the first instance, definable along the lines I suggest: as whatever derives from, and tends to reinforce, a conversation-closing will-towards-schism. In other words: the sort of attitude that prevents people from properly listening to each other; makes them posture and shout instead; reduces the exchange of theological ideas to mere point-scoring debate. At all events, such certainly seems to be the meaning of the words hairēsis and hairētikos in the New Testament, which the 1611 King James Bible renders ‘heresy’ and ‘heretic’. (See 1 Corinthians 11: 18–19, Galatians 5: 20, Titus 3: 10, 2 Peter 2: 1.) Of course, the later notion of ‘heresy’ had not yet developed in the apostolic period; there was no large, well-developed body of ‘orthodox’ doctrine, from which ‘heresy’ might be said to deviate. But, rather, these words referred to any sort of petty-minded community-destroying disputatiousness. William Tyndale, in his pioneering 1526 translation, therefore rendered them as ‘secte’ and ‘author of sectes’ (using intellectual secateurs, as it were, to dissect the community into quarrelsome sections). And one may well prefer Tyndale’s rendition.7 Raven is very much a ‘back to the Bible’ sort of man. In this matter, however, I think I have the Bible on my side. Baudelaire, ‘Les Litanies de Satan’: Les Fleurs du Mal, CXX. Not every aspect of this portrait is Christ-like. But I am thinking in particular of the crucial lines Toi qui, même aux lépreux, aux parias maudits, Enseignes par l’amour le goût du Paradis, O Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère! What else is that, if not an anguished plea for authentic Christianity, to be rescued from the conventional respectability-religion of the bourgeois Church? See T.S. Eliot, ‘Baudelaire’, in Selected Essays (London: Faber & Faber, 1961). 7 See, for instance, Alister McGrath, Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth (London: SPCK, 2009), pp. 37–8. 6

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He replied, I must say, with great courtesy, and at some length. First, he assured me he had not wanted to attack me, or indeed the Bishop of Manchester, who he sensed had been somewhat embarrassed by the whole affair. And then yes, he acknowledged that ‘this modern Gnosticism’ was different from classical Gnosticism. Yet, does not the warning for instance in 1 Timothy 4: 7 to keep away from ‘silly myths’ also apply to the modern version? My describing his doctrinal position, grounded as it is ‘on Canon A5 and the Anglican formularies’, as ‘heretical’ clearly indicated that I was, as he put it, ‘reinterpreting “orthodoxy” in such a way that it no longer has any straightforward relationship with propositional doctrinal statements’. This was a tendency he also discerned in the thought of Archbishop Rowan Williams: to render orthodoxy ‘a conversation rather than a confession’. However, he was anxious lest this degenerate into a mere recipe for muddle. He noted that both the Archbishop and I are admirers of Hegel, as a philosophic celebrant of systematic conversational openness. But he was, he remarked, more than a little suspicious of the ‘institutional convenience’ of such Hegelianism ‘when the ecclesio-political imperative is to keep people at the table come what may’. In fact, he indicated that he was altogether more inclined to sympathise with a polemical militant such as Giles Fraser, on the opposite side of the Anglican civil war to himself: two hard-liners, at any rate sharing the view that some things are simply ‘non-negotiable’. And he referred in particular to Fraser’s foreword to my book Against Innocence, on the Hegelian thought of Gillian Rose, in which this issue is raised.8 After all, not everyone who takes a stand on ‘non-negotiable’ principle is necessarily, as I had put it, ‘hate-driven’. Prior to his own stand, against Bishop Peter Selby, he had in fact been part of a group of evangelical clergy which met monthly with the Bishop, to pursue friendly conversation; and had enjoyed the dialogue – until it had been ‘subverted’ by the Bishop’s decision to launch such a public campaign against the declared will of the Lambeth Conference. ‘I don’t think “non-negotiability” necessarily closes conversation’, he concluded, ‘and I would like to think that this attempt to engage with your challenges makes me, in your eyes, perhaps a little less heretical’. It did. I wrote back: 30 April Dear Charles, Thank you for your thoughtful response to my perhaps rather rude letter. I think you’re right about the Bishop of Manchester, incidentally. And your being one of the very few who have read any of my books immediately causes me to warm towards you! I’m sure I’ve misjudged you. I don’t know Peter Selby. Nor do I know anything of the events in Kidderminster other than from reports in the 8 Andrew Shanks, Against Innocence: Gillian Rose’s Reception and Gift of Faith (London: SCM, 2008), pp. vii–xii.

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media and on the internet. I just see a schism, and am saddened, as indeed I’m saddened by the whole GAFCON business. But I’m grateful: by publicly accusing my cathedral of collusion with heresy, you have at any rate made me think. There surely is a need for new clarity regarding the general concept of ‘heresy’. And perhaps you could help me clarify my unfolding thoughts in this regard, by explaining to me why I’m wrong? The thoughts in question are as follows. 1. You’re right that, as you put it, I’m ‘reinterpreting “orthodoxy” in such a way that it no longer has any straightforward relationship with propositional doctrinal statements’. The traditional concept wavers somewhat confusedly, I think, between an emphasis on propositional correctness and a focus on proper intentionality, in the sense of acting always out of loyalty to the ideal of a truly catholic, truly unified and inclusive church. These two very different sorts of criterion have, for the most part, been muddled together. The degree to which I think it right to prioritise loyal catholic intentionality over any form of mere propositional correctness no doubt does put me in a position where I’m advocating an innovation in the tradition. It’s an innovation that has historically, I guess, been made possible by the development of modern democratic liberalism  – as a culture consensually aiming at maximum inclusivity, and hence at the maximum possible tolerance of diverse opinion, openly expressed. But this new evolving context surely does help liberate the essential truth of the gospel: inasmuch as the resurrection of the Crucified Dissident is God’s definitive reversal of the most brutal possible symbolic antithesis to just such a culture. And as a Hegelian theologian I take John 16: 12–13 very seriously.9 Divine revelation takes centuries to mature. It’s still underway. The general direction is set; but we should never let the fear of ‘heresy’ operate as a frightener, to inhibit fresh liberating insight, fresh clarity. 2. We need I think to distinguish very clearly between ‘heresy’ in what one might call the weak sense and ‘heresy’ in the strong sense. By the weak sense I mean, simply, all those points of view that have as a matter of historical fact come to be called ‘heresy’. But by no means all these are to be reckoned as heresy in the strong sense that we urgently need to go on repressing them, the way they were originally repressed when first declared ‘heretical’. The history of the church’s repression of ‘heresy’ really isn’t very edifying. And so I want to say, let’s put it behind us. God’s love is unconditional: offered to all and sundry, quite regardless of how correct their thinking may or may not be. Therefore, let’s take a positive pride in belonging to the most pluralistic possible sort of church. I don’t want to belong to a church where everyone agrees with me; I’m seriously glad to be Church of England! 3. What then counts as heresy in the strong sense? The criterion must surely derive direct from the logic of the Easter story. Jesus is crucified because he threatens the powers-that-be with his prophetic challenge to their culture 9 The words of Jesus to his disciples at the Last Supper: ‘I have yet many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you into all the truth’.

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of violent closure towards those less powerful than themselves, whom they despise and oppress. Nothing expresses that closure more dramatically than the act of crucifixion. And nothing, therefore, could more vividly express God’s affirmation of a countervailing culture of openness than the reversal of that act, by the resurrection of the Crucified Dissident. Heresy in the strong sense, surely, is definable as whatever most significantly tends to destroy the conversation space of the church itself, by re-installing the very sort of closure, there, that the gospel is in principle meant to overthrow. Two prime examples: • Classical Gnosticism tends to be heretical in the strong sense, inasmuch as it enshrines a fundamental closure, on the part of those who are said to ‘know’, towards the despised common mass of those lesser church members who don’t. All forms of ‘Christian’ esotericism are heretical in this sense. Not everything that might be called ‘Gnostic’, however, is of the same kind. The modern Gnosticism of the folk organizing the Spirit of Life event at Manchester Cathedral doesn’t actually seem to be, at all.10 And for that reason it doesn’t trouble me. • Every sort of ‘Christian’ doctrine tending to justify the actual persecution of scapegoat groups and individuals is heretical in the strongest possible sense. The most shocking case of which I’m aware at present is the stance of my brothers and sisters in the leadership of the Anglican Church in Uganda, insofar as I understand that some of them are actively supporting the proposed persecutory legislation, in that country, directed against gay people. I note that, as a bargaining move, those promoting this legislation have now offered to drop the clauses mandating the death penalty for ‘aggravated’ homosexual acts. Nevertheless, the participation of Christians in this campaign remains to my mind utterly scandalous. As does the apparent failure of GAFCON to remonstrate with them, effectively. If this is not the worst sort of heresy, I really don’t know what is. But also, more generally, any doctrine involving a wilful suppression of serious conversation with other Christians who think differently from oneself, as if such suppression were God’s will, is, I would say, heretical. In the case of church establishments: any attempt to prohibit the expression of thoughtful questioning. And in the case of ‘reformers’: any positive celebration of schism, as a supposed mark of spiritual integrity. I think indeed that one would have to say most ‘orthodox’ church life, down the centuries, has been more or less heretical, in this strong sense. Heresy has been the norm; only now are we at long last, here and there, gradually coming to a point where we might be decisively released from it. I’m not (as you’ll note) against occasional robustness in debate. And I respect your robustness. That’s what encourages me to respond to your response. You say you share Giles Fraser’s ‘concern that Hegel can be institutionally convenient when the ecclesio-political imperative is to keep people at the table come what may’. That’s an interesting remark! First, though: I don’t think anyone’s going to invoke Hegel for his theological prestige, since unfortunately 10 ‘Modern Gnosticism’? On reflection, I now regret being drawn into this unwarrantably loose usage of the term here!

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he doesn’t have anything like the sort of prestige he should have. And second: although I do share the Archbishop of Canterbury’s admiration for Hegel, I don’t actually agree with Rowan’s policy for ‘keeping people at the table’. Indeed, I rather share your suspicions of the sort of theological fudge that this policy is liable to generate. My own view, set out in a little book I published last year called Anglicanism Reimagined, is perhaps eccentric.11 But I’d be interested to know what you make of it. I argue that, when it comes to the shaping of a global communion, bishops shouldn’t be at the table at all. For bishops are properly, first and foremost, the guardians of church discipline. However, the international church unity we need isn’t a disciplinary unity, it’s purely and simply a conversational unity; and therefore the guardians of church discipline are the very last people who should be involved in seeking to develop it. The cultivation of global unity-in-conversation should, in my view, be left to non-episcopal theologians, missionaries, and church-related campaigners for justice and peace. Bishops, with their primary concern for church discipline, should be local figures, never, as a matter of strict taboo, meeting with bishops from other provinces in any sort of meeting with an agenda, or an associated press conference. After all, isn’t it the whole original point of the Anglican Reformation that we believe in English discipline for the English church, Roman discipline for the Romans; and, according to the same principle, Nigerian discipline for the Nigerian church, American discipline for the American church, etc? So let’s be truly Anglican, is what I say. My starting point, consistently, is my observation of what makes for fruitful conversation. The more we can minimise the scope for the libido dominandi, the better, I observe. And it seems to me that this is, also, precisely the basic principle the Easter gospel points towards. Can you, I wonder, explain to me why, in the final analysis, anything else, besides the imperative to try and help keep the church’s conversation as open and thoughtful as possible, should be considered ‘non-negotiable’? (I mean: other than just asserting that some things are.) With all best wishes, Andrew

I felt I needed to refer to my book, so that Raven did not feel he was just debating with the Archbishop of Canterbury, by proxy. He replied a little later, having read the book, and seeking to respond to it. In Anglicanism Reimagined, as also here, I seek to draw a strict distinction between the two species of truth: ‘truth-as-correctness’, by which I mean a potential quality intrinsic to propositions considered in abstraction from any particular conversational context, and ‘truth-as-openness’, understood as a quality of systematic conversational engagement. The truth of true faith, I argue there, is properly to be understood as a renderingsacred of perfect truth-as-openness. And I further identify the truth of the gospel with a deep registering of what I simply call ‘the Question’: that is to say, the Andrew Shanks, Anglicanism Reimagined: An Honest Church? (London: SPCK,

11

2010).

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experience of finding one’s life relentlessly called into question by the infinite demands of the divine ideal, embodied by Jesus. So, I argue, it has at the deepest level nothing whatever to do with any claim to mere correctness, but everything, instead, to do with being opened up, through that encounter, to what lies beyond the typical prejudices of one’s milieu. Raven, for his part, acknowledged the ‘integrity and consistency’ of the conclusions I drew from this basic opposition. But, he said, he remained unconvinced by the extreme sharpness of the opposition itself, at any rate the way I had presented it. For, what I was proposing struck him, he said, as ‘an essentially negative programme’; the application of ‘a solvent which seems also to dissolve a good deal of the New Testament message itself’. Above all, he asked: how could one really call this gospel of dissolution – which seems to do away with everything that communities usually rely on to hold them together – ‘good news’? And would it, in actual fact, ever be capable of sustaining a viable Church community? He thought not. The basic problem with my project, as he saw it, was that ‘its essential negativity represents a serious discontinuity with the basic contours of two thousand years of Christian tradition and the self-understanding of the New Testament writers’. Moreover (he went on) just look at The Episcopal Church (TEC) in the USA and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) today: here were so many actual examples of a bullying closed-mindedness, operating under cover of a liberal rhetoric precisely glorifying ‘openness’. He cited several specific cases. In general, he suggested, a community dedicated to my ideal of ‘truth-asopenness’, just because of its diffuseness, needs an enemy to give it shape, in a way that a more settled sort of faith-community does not. And paradoxically, therefore, it tends towards a certain sort of a priori closure: that is, in relation to people like himself. Had I not, after all, immediately identified him as an ‘enemy’? The trouble with my approach to theology was just that it represented a builtin prejudice against those who, like himself, see theological truth as an intimate mixing-together of openness with factual correctness. Did it not predispose me, closed-mindedly, to misrepresent all such people as bigots? Touché! This is truly just the sort of dialectical reversal that Hegel would have delighted in. And yes, no doubt there is a way of invoking the ideal of perfect ‘truth-as-openness’ in principle which, in practice, thus signifies the exact opposite to what it proclaims. It is true that everything in the domain of theology keeps shape-shifting; fluctuating according to context. One certainly will not arrive at authentic truth-as-openness just by invoking it as a ‘correct’ abstract slogan. Nevertheless, I wrote back once more: 29 May 2011 Dear Charles, Do I think you’re a ‘bigot’? No, no, not at all. A bigot would scarcely have responded as courteously and openly as you have. I admit my initial presumption was that you were. But I was quite wrong. For which I apologize.

‘Heresy’ On the other hand, I don’t see that I mis-spoke in referring to you as an ‘enemy’! You did, after all, rather brutally attack Manchester Cathedral – including our Cathedral poet, my friend Rachel, quite personally. And in any case here we have the Anglican world in a state of civil war, with regard to which we’re on opposite sides. I take it very seriously when we’re told to love our enemies. In fact I think this is quite a precise formula for the progress of theological truth: fresh insight, generally, derives above all from the provocation of enmity transmuted by being, not denied, but charitably worked through. Anyhow, I won’t hold you responsible for all the homophobic bullying and clericalist grandstanding that so disfigures the GAFCON cause – if you in turn will allow me not to be a representative of the TEC and ACoC establishments, either. The fact is, I’ve never set foot in North America, it’s very far from being the centre of my mental world, and I wouldn’t presume to comment on it, other than perhaps quite speculatively. My understanding is that, by comparison with the C[hurch] of E[ngland], a very much larger proportion of North American Anglicans are not Anglican by birth, but people who’ve been drawn in from other church backgrounds, presumably many of them drawn precisely by the allure, to them, of a somewhat liberal church culture. In which case (I speculate) it wouldn’t be surprising if this tended to encourage a certain sometimes regrettable spirit of impatience, on the part of the liberals there, towards those who want to apply the brakes. However, I don’t know. The church that formed me, and which for all its manifest flaws I continue to love, is the C of E. God is shrinking us, and wringing us most painfully, to purge us of our historic sins of establishment pride. But praise God for that! As for the specific, neuralgic issue of sexual morality: well, of course, the inadmissibility of homosexual mores is one of the constant background assumptions of holy scripture, and of the whole mainstream church tradition up until recently – but, it seems to me, in just the same way that the acceptability of institutional slavery is also. The logic of the Easter gospel takes centuries to unfold; here surely are two prime examples. And things are all the more painful in this case because ecclesiastical homophobia is the last relic of the great corruption of the Church, in the later Middle Ages, into a persecutory institution. First, in the eleventh century, we started as never before to seek out ‘heretics’ for persecution; then stupid Christian prejudice against Jews turned persecutory; then we began to persecute ‘lepers’; then, in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries our traditional disapproval of homosexuality for the first time became persecutory; finally, we started systematically going after ‘witches’, as well. Thank God for the Enlightenment, at any rate insofar as it has brought about the slow healing of these various not unrelated diseases of the Church. Persecutory homophobia is, in most places now, just the last one of them still to linger on. That’s how I’d see it. More generally, on the other hand: your instinct is to reject my sharp insistence on the proper theological priority of truth-as-openness over truthas-correctness, because it seems to you too ‘negative’, too restrictive of the overflowing abundance of New Testament revelation. Let me emphasize in response that at any rate I’m not one of those ‘liberals’ against whom Karl Barth quite rightly I think fulminated, for having altogether lost sight of what indeed constitutes the tremendous abiding moral authority of the New Testament texts, namely, their earthquake quality, their testimony to such an urgent and overwhelming experience of everything being called into question.

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But it’s surely that experience which is authoritative here, and not all the various other things in the New Testament which simply represent the inertia of older prejudices, and tactical accommodations to the hostility of the surrounding world. Is my approach too ‘negative’? What you call ‘negativity’ I’m inclined to call ‘astringency’. The actual truth of the gospel is infinitely astringent – I’m a fervent admirer of the prophet Amos – but it’s true, this means that it isn’t in any very obvious sense ‘good news’. In the end, it’s only ‘good news’ to those who’ve acquired a taste for it. This is rare. (I’m not at all sure the gospel is good news for me, personally.) And therefore gospel truth needs mixing with other elements, softeners and sweeteners, to popularize it – for only so can it be made the basis for an enduring, stable form of catholic community life. Amongst other things, we do, up to a point, need to allow people to cling on to certain propositional formulas of belief as if these might convey unambiguous pure truth in themselves. This is indeed an illusion: all theological propositions, even the most basic, are forever ambiguous, depending on the moral calibre of the persons professing them. But I recognize, one can’t always be insisting on that basic, troubling principle. For human kind really cannot bear very much reality. Only – as I see it, here we have the essential critical calling of theology. Not to forbid the dilution of gospel truth, for necessary evangelistic and churchsustaining purposes; but, at least, to name it for what it is. I actually sense the stirrings, in my mind at present, of a new book, which might well begin with some discussion of what this implies for the concept of ‘heresy’: how proper faithfulness to the imperatives of truth-as-openness surely does require a fundamental rethinking of the whole traditional concept. And I must say that I’m grateful to you, inasmuch as the provocation of this correspondence has in fact rather helped focus my thinking on that question. Indeed, if and when I get around to writing said book, I’d be inclined to acknowledge my indebtedness – in the most appreciative way, I assure you. I hope this would be OK? All the best, Andrew

‘Heresy’ and Human Fallenness ‘In the creeds … the Word made flesh became word. It is part of our reluctance to live by faith that drives us to package Christianity into creeds and formulas, guarded by covenants’. Graham Hellier here is reviewing, and disagreeing with, Alister McGrath’s book Heresy.12 McGrath, in his book, draws a basic distinction between heresy proper and the later medieval idea of ‘heresy’, which he sees as a corruption, largely deriving from the excessive power ambitions of the papacy and its agents. He is, after all, Signs of the Times: The Newsletter of Modern Church, July 2011, p. 4. (The reference to ‘covenants’ refers to the projected global Anglican ‘covenant’, which Hellier deplored and which was eventually scuppered by lack of support from the Church of England, but which was still very much a live option at the time he was writing this.) 12

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a Protestant admirer of those early forerunners of the Reformation, the Lollards, the Hussites, and the Waldensians, all of whom, in their time, were condemned as ‘heretics’. Nonetheless, he remains determined to uphold what one might term the classic notion of ‘heresy’. So he seeks, I think quite cogently, to debunk the sentimental present-day idealisation of early Church ‘heresy’ – the false supposition that all ‘heretics’ were bold, adventurous free thinkers, up against the stifling, rigid conservatism of a corrupt Church establishment – which then feeds into the sort of paranoid fantasy to be found in trashy best-sellers such as The Da Vinci Code, about that establishment’s deliberate suppression of awkward truths. Far rather, he argues, the early evolution of Christian orthodoxy needs to be seen as a conscientious, experimental quest for authenticity. ‘Heresy’, he argues, is definable in this context as ‘a doctrine that ultimately destroys, destabilizes, or distorts a mystery rather than preserving it’.13 In other words, it is a failed experiment in the conceptual articulation of lived faith: precisely, a formulation that turns out to be too rigid, too constricting. But to what extent can we really draw such a clear line between the earlier repudiation of heresy, in the first five centuries or so of Church history, and the later medieval persecution of heretics, as McGrath seeks to? No doubt it is true that the evolution of a sharp distinction between Christian orthodoxy and heresy was inevitable. The early Church was a community under constant pressure. It needed unity in order to survive. Lacking ethnic unity, it had all the more need for doctrinal unity; and increasingly, therefore, it developed an authoritative hierarchy to enforce this. But to say that the horrified intolerance with which the early Church authorities fought against heresy was a natural, and entirely to be expected, human response to the plight in which they found themselves is by no means to say that it was, as such, an unequivocal testament to divine grace! On the contrary, the element of aggression in that intolerance looks to me very much like an immediate reflex of original sin; giving rise to a whole set of attitudes from which we are only now, thank God, quite gradually, as a community, being teased free. Thus, what is ‘original sin’? It actually seems to me that we need to go decisively beyond the classic notion, developed in the early fifth century by Augustine in his polemic against Pelagius. A preliminary definition: original sin is the sheer inertia of our moral attachment to given norms, inasmuch as these norms are, themselves, flawed, impeding genuine growth of spirit towards perfect truth-as-openness. So, it is the sinfulness inherent even in the most sincere – and, in its own terms, most successful – moral striving; to the extent that the operative ideal, the ethos by which one’s conscience has been formed, is still imbued with elements of unresolved spiritual closure. In the Christian context, such closure is naturally associated with traditional notions of ‘heresy’. Augustine’s opponent Pelagius was an advocate of naive moral common sense: what counted morally, for him, was just the most strenuous sincerity. This is what he shares with the later ‘Neo-Pelagians’ of post-Enlightenment modernity, McGrath, Heresy, p. 31.

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although his common sense was quite different from theirs. They are also, in effect, believers in moral naivety: “Just follow your natural moral instincts!” But the very contrast between their common sense and his serves to illustrate the doubtfulness of such reliance on what seems obvious, inasmuch as that which is obvious to one generation is so very different from that which is obvious to another. Whereas later ‘Neo-Pelagian’ common sense was lax and tolerant, Pelagius’s was the common sense of a church culture deeply corrupted by a spirit of fanatical heresy-hunting intolerance. Indeed, Pelagius, before he was condemned as a heresiarch, was himself very much an anxious heresy-hunter. He was an ascetic, concerned above all to differentiate true Christian asceticism, as he saw it, from that of the rival Manichaean tradition. Above all, he mistrusted the potential for misanthropy in the extremely sharp dualism posited by the Manichees between the ultra-ascetic elite and the banal, materialistic masses – the devotees of the elite, who were supposed to derive merit essentially from supporting it, thereby acknowledging their own contemptible wretchedness by contrast. And he thought that he detected traces of a not dissimilar misanthropy still persistent in the Augustinian notion of ‘original sin’. So, it was he who initiated his conflict with Augustine, when he accused the latter of heresy. The Augustinian notion of ‘original sin’ belongs to an argument essentially moderating the fanaticism represented by Pelagius and his allies, Rufinus the Syrian, Caelestius, and Bishop Julian of Eclanum. Pelagianism, in effect, presumes that, deep down, one always, by nature, already knows how to distinguish good and evil, at least sufficiently for the fundamental purposes of salvation, if only one is sincere enough. Augustine says no, original sin is the natural distortion of our consciences, right from the outset. And our ideas of good and evil are then mis-developed by the influences of a corrupted world, to such an extent as to render sincerity, alone, a most unreliable guide. Before his conversion, not least during his time as a Manichee, Augustine had himself, after all, been eminently sincere. Yet, in retrospect, he considers that he had been deluded: in all sincerity, he had been fooling himself. There exists an infinite number of different ways in which one may thus fool oneself – but is not self-fooling, invariably, the natural state of humanity? Therefore, even the most strenuous sincerity is not enough, on its own, for salvation. At one level in the Augustinian worldview, there is further required a proper obedience to the authority of orthodox bishops, as mediating the inscrutable will of God. But at a deeper – and, it must be said, much more genuinely authoritative – level, in addition to sincerity there is also required an experience of having been decisively opened up, by God’s grace, to an ever greater love of one’s neighbour as such, liberated from the all-too-natural moral prejudices of one’s own native milieu, in chastened humility. Insofar as the Augustinian doctrine of ‘original sin’ connotes a systematic and radical mistrust of mere unquestioned moral prejudice, it is, I would argue, profoundly true. Yet, it seems to me, we also need to go further. I think Augustine is wrong – but not because he exaggerates the reality of original sin. Quite to the contrary: his basic error is that he still fails to take that reality anything like seriously enough! Even Augustine fails, in this regard. For, in principle, the true extent of original

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sin is only recognisable to one who steps right outside the manipulative ethos of church ideology and, so, abandons the traditional church-ideological notion of ‘heresy’; which Augustine, however, never questions, any more than any of his contemporaries do. There are two aspects to this. Thus, firstly: consider, how does original sin operate? In the broad sense that it is, in general, what precedes and helps render possible any sinful act, it is in essence surely a condition of moral anaesthesia. We remain confined within the limitations of our given moral prejudices simply because do not feel the reality of our moral situation. To feel that reality would be to care always infinitely more about the proper requirements of agape, overflowing love. It would be to grieve always far more intensely over one’s moral failures, that is, one’s being set apart from God. And it would be to delight always far more intensely in the real beauty of reality, its character as God’s creation. Therefore, I think that to recognise the truth of original sin is, at once, to see the strict impossibility of the old, conventional notions of hell-as-eternal-punishment and heaven-as-eternalreward, within which Augustine’s thought, like that of all his contemporaries and later followers, remains trapped. For, what is hell? It is the condition of being separated from God. We are all of us, in this life, more or less separated from God; therefore, we are in hell. – But what is heaven? It is the condition of being in God’s presence. We are all of us, right here and now, in God’s presence; therefore, we are simultaneously also in heaven. – These are the twin aspects of the deep, but hidden, moral reality of our lives. Hell is objectively the most pitiable of prospects, in that sense the supreme punishment; heaven, the best of prospects, the supreme reward. But ‘original sin’ is the subjective concealment of that objective reality. The torment of hell is what we would feel, if only we were not mercifully anaesthetised against the reality of our separation from God. And the bliss of heaven is, likewise, what we would feel if only that same anaesthesia had not, unfortunately, also supervened to render us unaware of the true reality of God’s presence. Our traditional pictures of heaven and hell are pictures of the hidden actual reality of our lives, so to speak, at the level of eternity. In other words: they are meant to represent that which is of truly abiding significance in our lives, when all the pettiness has been sifted out. The imagination does need to be fed; and we can only imagine eternity by projecting it forwards into a post-mortem future. What we are being shown here, however, is the latent reality of the present moment. These are paradoxical pictures of what can never be pictured, just because it is the reality against which we are always more or less anaesthetised, by original sin. Hell, indeed, cannot exactly be a punishment, in the ordinary sense, if we are anaesthetised against it; and neither can heaven, in the ordinary sense, be a reward. (Here is what many will regard as my own prime ‘heresy’!) Hell is surely full. And so is heaven, with the same people: all of us, to one degree or another, unawares. To grow close to God is to care more, and so to begin – just begin – to sense something both of the hellishness of hell and of the heavenliness of heaven. We may describe great intensities of natural suffering as ‘hellish’; and great intensities

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of natural bliss as ‘heavenly’. But strictly speaking, neither the suffering of hell nor the bliss of heaven is a ‘natural’ phenomenon. They are experiences of divine grace: the energy of grace at work, whether in the form of repulsion, or as an attraction, partly breaking through the anaesthesia that is ours by nature, due to original sin. But we can only imagine this in post-mortem terms, picturing a moment of truth in which the ultimate significance of one’s life as a whole is assessed. And it is all too easy, then, for a manipulative impulse to enter the mix, at the secondary level, introducing those often crassly materialistic notions of reward and punishment which bedevil traditional orthodoxy in this area; notions which are, in fact, quite irreconcilable with the sheer, infinite generosity of divine agape. Yet, this is nothing other than original sin itself at work: covering its traces! At all events, good done for fear of eternal punishment, or in expectation of eternal reward, is not the true good inspired by God’s grace. God changes us by being known as agapeic love, evoking gratitude; not by inviting us to be utilitarian ‘felicific calculators’ and, in that capacity, manipulating us. And moreover – secondly – original sin is at the same time also a condition of wilful distraction from the rich, shifting, actual complexity of our own moral plight, typically leading us to fixate on theoretic moral abstractions instead. So it renders us insensitive to our neighbours; closes down real conversational give-andtake. Not that such insensitivity by any means precludes attitudes of great moral seriousness and sincerity. Only, the resultant moralism takes shape as dedication to an abstract moral theory, or a structure of laws; which, it is sometimes supposed, needs to be promoted by whatever means are available, no matter how coercive. Concrete moral reality having disappeared into the fog of anaesthesia, all sorts of conventional abstractions start to loom large instead. Original sin, in short, is the primordial distortion of our consciences: the inertia that holds us fast within the limitations of a particular ethical culture’s mere unquestioned prejudice; the flawed moral assumptions into which we are born, or which we absorb, as being seemingly self-evident truths.14 And the point is that, as such, it is very directly the inspiration of persecutory heresy-hunting. It is just that rigidity of spirit which primarily generates, and is then reinforced by, the persecution of ‘heretics’. Hence, the traditional, persecutory notion of ‘heresy’ combines these two basic features: • ‘Heresy’ is understood as an offence against a punitive God. It is something that God will punish down in hell. Therefore, the heresy-hunter is morally obliged to punish it already up here on earth, in anticipatory imitation of God. • It is further assumed that, for this purpose, ‘heresy’ is something which can be precisely captured in definitive abstract formulas. In absolute repudiation of any such thinking, I want to appeal both to the essentially unconditional nature of divine love, which does not, in fact, depend at all on any 14 On the closely related Hegelian conception of ‘das unglückliche Bewußtseyn’, see below, pp. 111–15.

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sort of human correctness (Matthew 20: 1–16); and also to the essentially lived nature of true faith, the actual impossibility of ever quite correctly catching it, once and for all, in any net of orthodox propositions (James 2: 19). Indeed, truly to recognise ‘original sin’ for what it is (I would argue) means to acknowledge that, as a matter of principle, no one ever has the right to exclude anyone else from the church community simply on the basis of doctrinal ‘error’. For, after all, we are not un-fallen angels, seeing God’s truth direct. Unlike the angels, we as fallen creatures need free and open conversation – including much error – in order for God’s truth to be experimentally clarified for us, through debate. There may sometimes be good reason for the church authorities to declare certain individuals excommunicate: it is surely too much to ask anyone to remain in community with practising torturers or with active terrorists. And there may very occasionally be good reason for reluctant schism, as in the case of the Confessing Church in 1930s Germany, compelled to split from a state church institution which had been taken over by the Nazi regime. But not much of what conventionally tends to be called ‘heresy’ is of such extreme nature. Again, then, let us redefine ‘heresy’ as: error fundamentally tending to endanger the very space within which authentic Christian theological conversation is able to flourish. What, in the end, does this category properly include? First and foremost, I would suggest, real ‘heresy’ so defined is quite simply any sort of thinking, within the Church, which is either wilfully schismatic or persecutory; or both. Granted, the readjustment of thought I am proposing here is quite drastic! It involves condemning vast tracts of traditional orthodoxy as more or less ‘heretical’. (Although, note: it does, of course, also mean being much gentler towards this ‘heresy’ than heretical ‘orthodoxy’ itself has ever been, towards its foes…) Only – as I argued in my correspondence with Raven – my basic claim is that such a view follows, with inexorable logic, directly from a proper consideration of the Easter gospel: God having been definitively revealed incarnate in the figure of the Crucified Dissident. For, is not crucifixion, as an institution, precisely the ultimate symbol of the will to exclude and persecute others for thinking otherwise from oneself? And does not God, in the Christian symbol of the Resurrection, overthrow everything that crucifixion thus symbolically affirms? That, surely, is the basic criterion to which we must always return. Hegel on the ‘principle of subjectivity’ And now, consider the following absolutely elementary question of theological principle: in what sense does Jesus, as Christ, represent us, before God?15 There are two basic alternatives. Either a. he represents, by virtue of belonging to the human species, the proper Godgiven dignity of the whole species as such, considered in a lump; or else 15 C.f. Dorothee Sölle, Christ the Representative, English translation by David Lewis (London: SCM Press, 1967).

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b. he represents, by virtue of being a single human individual, the proper God-given dignity of human individuality as such. On the whole, the tradition is systematically ambiguous in this regard. Yet, the difference between the two possibilities is radical! Option (a), the celebration of human species-identity, lends itself quite indiscriminately to all sorts of political campaigning. In fact, it allows for the Christological embellishment of virtually any cause that sees itself as representing the interests of humanity as a whole. But option (b), by contrast, is much more specific. It is altogether sharper in its implications. For, if the divinity of Christ represents the infinite value of all human individuality as such, then that immediately focuses Christian political endeavour, as such, on the extension of individual human rights. Hence, option (b) implies, as option (a) need not, an acute, watchful awareness of the fundamental opposition between divine incarnational agape and any sort of (perhaps veiled) gang- or herd-morality, which positively tends to suppress true individuality. Option (b) also connects far more directly to the actual historic reality of the core gospel story. That is, to the symbolic significance of crucifixion, as a Roman-imperial institution: not only putting the dissident individual to death but, moreover, doing so in the most derisively mocking fashion in order to make a propaganda point, precisely scorning the individuality of the crucified victim, as such. It connects directly to the dynamic interplay here of a ruling gang and a herdlike crowd of onlookers; to all the on-the-ground politics of Easter. By contrast, option (a) immediately tends to lift everything here into the domain of pure myth. It places the story of the Second Adam on the same level as that of the First Adam. And so it abstracts the essential working of humanity’s salvation, as a species, from the gospel’s original historic context. It renders that context quite incidental. Since it is simpler, and also much less challenging, to established authority within the Church, option (a) has, in actual practice, always tended to be the default option for traditional Christian theology. It has co-existed, quite easily, with all sorts of ‘Christian’ piety infused with elements of gang- and herd-morality. Option (b) is intrinsically incompatible with any form of church politics merely expressing the corporate self-interest of some clerical elite, or dominant secular social class as such. But option (a) readily lends itself to such politics. Ludwig Feuerbach, the initial star of so-called ‘Left Hegelianism’, in his chief work The Essence of Christianity (1841) proposes a very simple remedy for the corruption of manipulative religion.16 Discussing the traditional dogma of the Incarnation, Feuerbach does not, in any way, even begin to distinguish between options (a) and (b). Instead, he simply proposes to preserve the moral substance of the gospel – with that essential ambiguity left unanalysed at its heart – transposed into a new, atheistic form. In short, he appears to think that he can rescue everything of real value in the Christian tradition with a brisk wave 16 Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, English translation by George Eliot, 1854, reissued with an introductory essay by Karl Barth and a foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).

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of his ideological wand: abandoning the traditional worship of ‘God’ (with all its rich accumulation of poetry) and replacing it with a (poetically impoverished) propaganda-cult of ‘Man’, the glorified human species as such. This, he thinks is what Hegel, as a champion of free, rational thought about religion, ought to have done – and would have done, if only Hegel had possessed the necessary courage, as Feuerbach himself did. But Hegel, in actual fact, is much more discerning. The effect of the Feuerbachian approach is just to replace manipulative church ideology with manipulative ‘humanist’ ideology. Hegel, in contrast, seeks to mobilise all the rich poetic potential of the Christian tradition, quite unambiguously against manipulative ideology of any kind. He focuses precisely on the opposition between options (a) and (b). His philosophic Christology is very much an outworking of option (b), as distinct from (a). Indeed, no other thinker before him had ever highlighted the issue involved in this distinction as he does. There is, for instance, a very striking out-working of it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, when he comes to consider the ‘consequences of Christianity for life and the state’.17 The first, most fundamental of these ‘consequences’, Hegel argues there, is that ‘slavery is ruled out in Christianity’. This is certainly an odd suggestion, in view of the actual history of slavery within Christendom as a whole! Not only is the legitimacy of slavery completely unquestioned within the New Testament, but also there had never been any very serious, organised Christian campaign for the abolition of slavery, prior to Hegel’s own lifetime. Nevertheless, it is of course true that when, in the later eighteenth century, such a movement did at last emerge, most notably at first in Britain, it was led by devout Christians, whose whole argument was steeped in Christian theology.18 And the point is, it was above all this movement which represented Hegel’s idea of true Christianity in practice. Only now, he thought, has it at long last become possible for the truth of Christianity properly to emerge. And here was a prime item of evidence for that contention. At all events, he considers the abolition of slavery to be a necessary logical consequence of authentic Christian faith: for, as Christians, human beings are considered according to what they are inherently, and they are inherently posited as something absolutely valuable, are taken up into the divine nature. Accordingly … they count not as Greeks, Romans, Brāhmans, or Jews, as high or low class; instead they have infinite worth as human beings and, in and for themselves, they are destined for freedom.

That ‘infinite worth’, made manifest in Christ our representative, does not inhere in the species as a whole, with the sort of vagueness that might still allow for all sorts of organic status-differentiation within society, even to the point of legitimating G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1, edited and translated by Robert F. Brown and Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2011), p. 457. 18 The slave trade was abolished by law within the British Empire in 1807, the very year in which the Phenomenology of Spirit was first published. 17

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slavery, as had so often been supposed. Instead, it inheres in each individual as an individual, so that, at the very minimum, no one can ever legitimately be enslaved. For Hegel, the historic emergence of this insight, within his own life-time, as the basis for an organised moral campaign, marks a truly momentous step forward for Christian theology, even though only drawing out what has in fact always been implicit in the gospel itself. He counter-poses this – as he sees it, the pre-eminent truth potential of Christianity – to the somewhat different virtues he especially associates with the pagan civil religion of Ancient Greece. Hegel’s idyllic image of Ancient Greek city-state culture is perhaps not historically very accurate, but it serves to represent a certain one-sided ideal. Thus, he sees the world of Ancient Greece as a symbol of supremely harmonious Sittlichkeit (ethical life): with warm, aesthetically satisfying religion, binding together the whole citizen-community, entirely without manipulation, into a passionate, shared enthusiasm for their city and its gods. This is, for him, an intensely alluring utopian fantasy, and he knows no form of Christianity which even comes close to replicating it, in its fullness. Yet, he at once acknowledges that it is a flawed utopia, even in his fantasy, inasmuch as the harmony of Ancient Greek Sittlichkeit depended upon a slave economy. And so his theology takes shape as a bid to reconcile these two quite distinct ideals: on the one hand, the sheer ‘beauty’ of Ancient Greek togetherness; and, on the other hand, the true individualism of authentic Christianity. In fact, both ideals are surely, more or less, realisable in any religious context. But the basic point remains that, for Hegel, the highest moral truth consists in their reconciliation. For all the faults he finds with modern states, deficient as they are in proper Sittlichkeit, he nevertheless thinks that there are at least some intimations of what this reconciliation might look like already starting to appear within them. As he puts it in the Philosophy of Right: The principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity [i.e., religiously sanctioned true individualism] to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity [i.e., it begins to incorporate it into a coherent Sittlichkeit] and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.19

The ‘principle of subjectivity’: here we have Hegel’s basic name, in this context, for the whole distinctive element of potential truth at the heart of the Christian gospel, which he thinks has gradually been emergent through the course of church history. It is there, always more or less latent, in the primordial symbolism of the Resurrection, as God’s absolute reversal of the prior pagan propaganda-symbolism of the Cross. But it has endlessly tended to be suppressed 19 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, English translation by T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952) , §260, p. 161. And compare his further remarks in the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, pp. 457–9.

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by the Church, insofar as the Church has been corrupted by other, countervailing pressures of worldly expediency. This principle is, indeed, just what emerges when Christ’s role as representative of humanity is understood in terms of option (b). Wherever it is resisted, the resistance is masked by option (a). Hegel is the first Christian thinker, in effect, to put the conflict between these two options truly centre-stage for theology. Elsewhere, again, he simply speaks, in this regard, of ‘freedom’. So, as he seeks to set his own thought into historic context, Hegel constructs a grand narrative of world-historically emergent ‘freedom’, essentially in this Christiantheological sense of the ‘principle of subjectivity’. The narrative is structured by a basic threefold contrast between ‘different degrees of the knowledge of freedom’: Namely, that the Orientals only knew that one [the supreme ruler] is free, that in the Greek and Roman world some [the citizens as such] are free, [but] that we by contrast know that all human beings are intrinsically [entitled to be] free, that the human being as human is free.20

Who are ‘we’, here? ‘We’ are the philosophically enlightened heirs to Christian tradition, who have only now, at long last, learnt to read the gospel properly, according to option (b). Nor, be it noted, is the recognition that gospel truth implicitly requires a wholesale taboo on slavery, and everything akin to it, the only result marking ‘our’ decisive modern advance beyond the standpoint of antiquity. It is clear that the same principle has numerous other implications, as well; some indeed going well beyond what Hegel, back in his day, could see. Thus, in just the same way that the underlying ‘principle of subjectivity’, directly grounded in the symbolism of Easter, contradicts the more superficial teaching, both of Scripture and of church tradition, giving license to slavery, so it surely also contradicts the license given there to homophobia, for instance – or to any other kind of prejudice against scapegoat groups. And, to return to the main topic of this chapter, it must surely also compel a fundamental upward re-evaluation, in Christ’s name, of intellectual liberty within the Church: the entitlement of each individual member of the Church, simply as such, to have their unimpeded say. At this level once again, the implicit individuality-affirming logic of the basic Christian symbol, Resurrection-of-theCrucified, contradicts by far the greater part of actual church tradition. Hence, the Hegelian grand narrative: the whole practical value of which lies precisely in the way it encompasses, within an altogether larger envisioning of divine revelation, the more specific history of church tradition, in order to revalue it. This is nothing other than a bid to out-manoeuvre the Church’s all-too-natural resistance to the gospel, by challenging the narrow notion of divine revelation on which that resistance depends. Thus, a proper appreciation of the ‘principle of subjectivity’ must undoubtedly involve quite a radical re-evaluation of the traditional concept of ‘heresy’. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1, p. 88.

20

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Sebastian Castellio / John Milton / Roger Williams But consider how slowly – with what very patient ‘cunning’, against what powerful resistance – this ‘principle’ has in fact unfolded, through Christian history! What does it mean, in practice, that ‘God is agape’ (1 John 4: 8, 16)? One of the very first things it surely means is just that no one should ever be persecuted in God’s name for what they conscientiously think or do – and that everyone who is so persecuted is, straight away, to that extent, identifiable with the Crucified. Yet, the fact is, it was not until 1554 that the very first book, in the history of Christian theology, dedicated to the thesis that it is always and everywhere wrong to persecute conscientious ‘heretics’ appeared, namely, a little Latin-language pamphlet, published in Basel, entitled De haereticis, an sint persequendi (On Heretics, Whether They Should be Persecuted). A few weeks later, a French translation also appeared. The preface and dedication, to Duke Christoph of Württemberg, were signed ‘Martinus Bellius’, and other sections, ‘Basil Monfort’ and ‘Georg Kleinberg’. These, though, are pseudonyms. The actual author of most, if not all, the work was Sebastian Castellio. He was impelled to write it by his horror at the execution, in Geneva the previous year, of the Spanish heretic Miguel Servetus, who had been burnt at the stake for publicly calling into question the dogma of the Trinity. The execution had been ordered by Jean Calvin. Castellio, who was born in a village not far from Geneva, had at one time been a close associate of Calvin’s. One of the greatest biblical scholars of the age, he devoted much of his life to producing fresh translations of the Bible into both Latin and French. In 1540, at the age of 25, fresh from his university studies at Lyon, he had gone to join Calvin at Strasbourg, and the following year, Calvin, newly recalled to Geneva as leader, had offered him the post of rector at the new academy there. However, their relationship soon foundered. Almost from the outset, Castellio appears to have been critical of Calvin’s authoritarian leadership style, whereas Calvin, for his part, mistrusted Castellio, who had made himself popular in the city not least by his notably courageous ministry to the sick during an outbreak of the plague. In frustration, Castellio had left Geneva for a life of, at first, great poverty in Basel. Servetus, evidently a wild risk-taker, would doubtless have been in grave danger more or less anywhere in Europe. Nor did Castellio seek to defend the teachings for which the Spaniard was condemned. But he saw the Reformation essentially as a movement for freedom of religious conscience. This he had already made clear in the preface to his 1551 Latin translation of the Bible, addressed to King Edward VI of England; and he repeats the same in the preface to his 1555 French translation. He regarded Calvin’s role in the killing as a basic betrayal of that ideal. In the preface to De haereticis, Castellio briefly sets out his case against Calvin. Then, anxious lest his argument be dismissed as flying in the face of all traditional authority, he includes an anthology of extracts from the writings of some 25 Christian writers, ancient and modern, all in one way or another praising toleration.21 Many of these writers, such as Augustine and Luther, might just as well have been quoted, in other 21 Sebastian Castellio, Concerning Heretics, English translation edited by Roland Bainton (London: Octagon, 1965).

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places, arguing very much to the opposite effect. Indeed, Castellio is particularly provocative in also quoting from the early writings of Calvin himself! None of those he cites – with the arguable exception of that most individualistic of Reformers, Sebastian Franck – were remotely as radical in their commitment to freedom of conscience as he himself was. And his opponents responded with extreme ferocity: Calvin in a pre-emptive strike already published before Castellio’s work appeared, and Calvin’s ally Theodore de Bèze (or Beza) in a follow-up polemic published a few months later.22 De Bèze called Servetus ‘of all men that have ever lived the most wicked and blasphemous’; those who condemned his death, ‘emissaries of Satan’; and Castellio’s general advocacy of toleration, a truly ‘diabolical doctrine’. Castellio replied in three works, none of them published in his lifetime but all of which circulated in manuscript: responses to both Calvin’s and de Bèze’s works, plus a brief narrative account of Servetus’s death. And in 1562 he managed to bring out one final book, a work entitled Conseil à la France, désolée, in which he laments the religious warfare then raging in France. He does not think that the state should tolerate writings that are, by intention, blasphemous or overtly atheistic. In his day, that degree of toleration remained virtually unthinkable. But he does, at any rate, represent the moment when, for the very first time, it became possible as a matter of principle to denounce any persecution of professed Christians, no matter how ‘heretical’, by other Christians.23 Castellio’s campaign, indeed, marks the real starting point of a long process – still underway – by which the original, true, politically liberating rationale of the Christian gospel, with regard to free speech, has little by little been recovered and clarified. After which, almost another century had yet to pass before revolutionary political conditions, above all in England and North America, at long last began to render his ideal effectively realisable in the actual practice of a Christian polity. Two figures, then, may be said to represent this second key moment: John Milton (1608–74) as a pioneering theoretician of general religious liberty in the context of Cromwell’s England; and Roger Williams (1603–83), as a pioneer implementer of the same in the context of the Anglo-American colonies. Thus: (i) Milton was an energetic advocate of Protestant free speech throughout his career. Like Castellio before him, he understood the Reformation very much as a vindication of each individual’s liberty, indeed obligation, to interpret the Bible strictly for him or herself: Jean Calvin, Defensio orthodoxae fidei de sacra Trinitate (1554); Theodore de Bèze, De haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis libellus, adversus Martini Bellii (1554). Both are available as Google eBooks. 23 Castellio was by no means altogether alone. A further protest against the death of Servetus, entitled Apologia pro Servetus, was published at Basel in 1555, written it seems by the Italian, Celio Secundo Curione, under the pseudonym of ‘Alphonso Lincurius’. In 1564, another Italian, Acontius, published Satanae stratagemata, also at Basel, generally upholding a point of view akin to Castellio’s. And in 1590, a Dutch Catholic, Thierry Coornhert, published Procès contre le supplice des hérétiques et contre la contrainte de la conscience, framed as a refutation of de Bèze’s argument. 22

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To protestants therefore whose common rule and touchstone is the scripture, nothing can with more conscience, more equitie, nothing more protestantly can be permitted than a free and lawful debate at all times by writing, conference or disputation of what opinion soever, disputable by scripture.24

For Milton, it is quite clear, ‘heresy’ in the derogatory sense is not so much an incorrect content of belief, as the workings of a false motivation for thought. So, for example, in his First Defence (1651) he speaks of ‘avarice and ambition – the two heresies that are most calamitous to the Church’.25 And earlier, in Areopagitica (1644), he had famously gone still further, in a startling reversal of the traditional association of ‘orthodoxy’ with a spirit of conformist submission to the established ecclesiastical authorities. Thus, he considers any sort of unthinking conformism, in itself, to be a vice: Well knows he who uses to consider, that our faith and knowledge thrives by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion.

And therefore – as he puts it – there is actually a sense in which A man may be a heretick in the truth.

That is, If he believe things only because his Pastor says so, or the Assembly so determine, without knowing their reason, though his belief be true [in the sense of being ‘correct’], yet the very truth he holds, becomes his heresie.26

This quite startlingly paradoxical suggestion, that one may be ‘a heretick in the truth’, is, so to speak, Milton’s first great breakthrough-thought. But then, in A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) he also goes on to develop the same argument another way. As a scholar, here, well aware of the original, not at all derogatory, pre-Christian meaning of the term hairēsis, simply meaning ‘shared opinion’ or ‘school of thought’, he seeks to counter the vicious ‘heresy’-hunting tendencies of previous church tradition in the most radical fashion, by reverting to that older usage. Use the word in the way that would have been familiar to the apostle Paul, he suggests, and look, there is after all nothing wrong with ‘heresy’ per se! On the A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659); in Complete Prose Works of John Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82), vol. VII, p. 249. On Milton’s view of ‘heresy’, see for example Janel Mueller, ‘Milton on Heresy’, in Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, eds, Milton and Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Benjamin Myers, ‘Following the Way Which Is Called Heresy: Milton and the Heretical Imperative’, Journal of the History of Ideas 69 (2008), pp. 375–93; and Hugh Wilson, ‘Milton and the Struggle for Human Rights’, in Christophe Tournu and Neil Forsyth, eds, Milton, Rights and Liberties (New York: Peter Lang, 2007). 25 Translated from the original Latin in The Works of John Milton, ed. Frank Allen Patterson (New York: Columbia University Press), vol. VII, pp. 60–61. 26 Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. II, p. 543; my italics. 24

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contrary: to the extent that ‘heresy’, in this case, comes basically to be a term for nonconformist originality of thought, it should be considered a badge of proper Christian pride. It is only ever to be rejected for the reason that Paul repudiated the specific ‘heresies’ of the Corinthians. That is, insofar as it is mixed with the truly objectionable spirit of ‘schism’ – which is, as a matter of fact, just what dominates in any church that persecutes dissidents. With this gesture Milton wipes the theological slate clean. And, furthermore, he does so as the citizen of a republic in which, if only for pragmatic reasons, a quite unprecedented degree of religious pluralism had, in fact, come to be permitted. (ii) Williams, meanwhile, argues for an ethos of maximum religious pluralism in the brave new world over the Atlantic, where everything was experimental anyhow. As a young man, he had been a friend of Milton’s at Cambridge. There, he taught Milton Dutch, in exchange for tutorials in Hebrew. But he left England in 1631, sailing to Boston; and shortly afterwards became pastor of the congregation at Salem. Right from the outset, he was a fierce critic of the Massachusetts Puritan establishment, as represented by figures such as John Cotton, rejecting both their theological authoritarianism, and their ruthlessness, as he saw it, towards the indigenous tribes. So much so that in 1635 he was tried, convicted of sedition and ‘heresy’, and sentenced to banishment. The following winter he therefore departed, to settle as a pioneer at the place he christened ‘Providence’, on Rhode Island. Over the following years, a community of others who likewise felt alienated by the theocratic regime of Cotton and his allies gathered round him in that wilderness, and in 1643 he was despatched back to England to petition for a charter, officially founding Rhode Island as a separate colony. Eventually, the petition was granted. At the same time, whilst in London, he also published his manifesto for the governance of the new colony: a book entitled The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience. Couched in the form of a dialogue between ‘Truth’ and ‘Peace’, this work is a sustained polemic against Cotton’s Calvinist arguments for state-enforced religious uniformity. Williams here advocates the then still quite novel idea of a strict ‘wall of separation’ between church and state, and perfect ‘soul liberty’ for every citizen, with no legal restriction at all on ‘Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or anti-christian consciences and worship’, as such.27 Cotton responded angrily, and in 1652 Williams issued an expanded version, incorporating his further response to Cotton. Of the two, Milton and Williams, the latter was perhaps the more radical, in practice. Milton’s commitment to religious liberty does have its limitations, in particular when it comes to Roman Catholics.28 This is most evident in his last 27 Roger Williams, The bloudy tenent of persecution for the cause of conscience: discussed in a conference between truth and peace: who, in all tender affection, present to the High Court of Parliament, (as a result of their discourse) these, (among other passages) of highest consideration, ed. Richard Groves (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2001), p. 3. 28 See also Thomas Corns, ‘John Milton, Roger Williams and the Limits of Toleration’, in Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer, eds, Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

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major prose work, the 1673 tract entitled Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, Toleration, And what best means may be us’d against the growth of popery.29 To Milton, the Roman Catholic Church appeared to be so irremediably persecutory in nature, and so much more so than any Protestant church, that it could never, with any safety, be allowed equal status with others. By 1673 the prospect of a resurgent Roman Catholicism in England had started to loom much larger than before, and his thinking about ‘heresy’ is drastically affected. Gone are the searching redefinitions to be found in his earlier writing. In Of True Religion Milton has reverted to a completely conventional usage of the term – he just applies it now to ‘Popery’. The effect is most dispiriting! There were no Roman Catholics in the Rhode Island colony during Williams’ time, so the issue did not with any urgency arise for him, but the logic of his argument in The Bloudy Tenent would certainly suggest a more open attitude. Both men alike, though, were way out on the edge of the Christendom of their day. Milton, of course, campaigned for the introduction of laws permitting divorce. And he was, in theology, an Arian: an intellectual elitist, ranking God the Father, as the God of sophisticated thinkers, decisively higher than God the Son, that is, God as revealed direct to the picture thinking of the less well educated. In short, he was in the classic sense very much a ‘heretic’ himself. So, in arguing for a redefinition of the concept, he was, to a large extent, engaged in self-defence. Williams was co-founder in 1638 of the first ever Baptist church in America; yet, he remained a member of that little congregation in Providence for only a few months. Forever in search of a pure Christianity – a form of Christian faith absolutely untainted by any of the impulses that might feed into a persecutory mind-set – he came to the conclusion that this could only be found, and properly testified to, by one who had, for his own part, altogether withdrawn from any actual, existing church loyalty. Therefore, he declared himself to be a member of the ‘invisible church’, alone. And Now … How fortunate, by contrast, the theologians of the present day are; with the chance that now exists, of truly widespread reconnection with the original truth of the gospel, penetrating deep into the mainstream intellectual culture of massmembership churches! Never before, in all of church history, has there been such a favourable environment for whole Christian communities, at least in some parts of the world, to recognise the basic truth that Hegel called the ‘principle of subjectivity’. What has brought this about? In my second letter to Raven, I rather airily attributed it to ‘the development of modern democratic liberalism’. But that is much too loose a formulation. In fact, I think we need the concept of the ‘principle of subjectivity’ precisely in order to penetrate beyond the crude ambiguities of ‘democracy’ and ‘liberalism’. It is true that talk of ‘democratic values’ may, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 8.

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certain contexts, connote the ‘principle of subjectivity’. However, the ethos of democracy, in the primary sense, differs fundamentally from that principle, in that it is first and foremost a method of determining who rules; whereas the ‘principle of subjectivity’ is, rather, a setting of strict limits on any ruler’s self-serving freedom of action, no matter how that ruler may have come to power. Democracy depends upon political parties, deploying propaganda. This propaganda may well collude with angry forms of populist agitation, majorities intent on oppressing minorities and picking on scapegoats. The ‘principle of subjectivity’ signifies the exact opposite. Is it ‘liberal’? Again, everything depends on just what is meant. In a certain sense, yes; but certainly not when ‘liberalism’ means, as it so often does, privileging the typical will of uprooted, individualistic individuals over the concerns of those others who remain more closely integrated into traditional forms of community. Insofar as that is what ‘liberalism’ is – the self-promotion of a deracinated would-be elite social class – the ‘principle of subjectivity’ differs, essentially, in being altogether more egalitarian. It is an affirmation of respect for free-thinking individuality; not of individualism, in the sense of mere uprootedness. And there is a major difference. No, the new opportunity is not in the first instance due to ‘the development of modern democratic liberalism’, as such. But far more significantly, underlying it is another type of social initiative that has sprung up alongside that development. Both phenomena, alike, are bound up with the emergence of mass public opinion. If modern liberal democracy is definable as a type of political regime in which the rulers are, to the greatest possible degree, compelled to have regard for mass public opinion, however, then the ‘principle of subjectivity’, by contrast, is the general sort of truth that flourishes best in a political culture where not only rulers, or would-be rulers, appeal to mass public opinion, but all sorts of other people do so, too. Namely, moral activists unconstrained by the strategic requirements of winning democratic elections, whose primary concern, instead, is purely and simply to draw urgent attention to matters of proper ethical concern, which would otherwise be overlooked. The surge of the ‘principle of subjectivity’ in our world is, above all, the work of what one might call its burgeoning ‘public conscience movements’, in that sense. Movements essentially independent of the state and of any political party, yet secular, in that they appeal to the conscience of all citizens as citizens: these are the agencies that are, I think, now decisively transforming the theological scene for the better.30 The earliest of them was, in fact, the campaign for the abolition of slavery, first organised to any real effect in England in 1787. As a Canon of Manchester Cathedral, I am proudly conscious that the first actual large public meeting of that campaign took place in our building (not yet then a cathedral) on 28 October of that year, when the young campaigner Thomas Clarkson, passing through the town after a fact-finding tour of the slave ports, was prevailed upon to preach. In that it was the birthday of a whole new species of politics, this can, See Shanks, God and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2000).

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in retrospect, be recognised as having been a truly momentous event. But then the great contemporary proliferation of such organisations began in the 1960s. Amnesty International, for example, was founded in 1961. It is, of course, an altogether secular movement. And yet, given that the Christian gospel derives from a revelation of God incarnate in the figure of a representative prisoner of conscience, one can in my view scarcely overstate the theological significance of such an initiative, dedicated to the defence of all such prisoners. What rendered Amnesty International possible has, moreover, also rendered possible the creation of a whole range of other campaigns, likewise expressive of the ‘principle of subjectivity’: campaigns for human rights of every kind, for peace, for economic justice, for ecological responsibility. Nothing, it seems to me, could possibly do more to help liberate the Christian Church from its age-old enslavement to mere self-serving ideology, and reopen it to the gospel itself, than the pressure, towards an ever greater honouring of the ‘principle of subjectivity’, emanating from these movements. Never before has there been such an opportunity for theology, at long last, to be true to itself, by affirming the ‘principle of subjectivity’ embodied in these movements, as God-given; and therefore, also, by joining in.

Chapter 2

Renewed Apologetics The Gospel Versus ‘Church Ideology’ Secondly: the picture of ‘God the Father’ in early Trinitarian theology is, above all, shaped by the interplay of biblical and philosophic ideas. The early Church’s leading theologians, from the mid-second century onwards, were generally men well versed in Greek philosophy; thinkers driven not least by an urgent concern to try and justify their biblical faith to their non-Christian fellow-philosophers. And, in Trinitarian terms, the primary problem-territory, so to speak, specific to the Father is that which comes to light in this way. Thus, in their thinking about the First Person of the Trinity, as such, these pioneer theologians are, all the time, wrestling with the apparent contradiction between the two quite different styles of thought, prevalent in each tradition: the image-rich style of biblical literature, with its close attention to historical narrative about the people of Israel, and the altogether more conceptual attempt to ponder the latent universality of divine reality which lies at the heart of classic Greek philosophy. God’s ‘Father-hood’ is revealed in the perception of God’s being parent to both Jews and Greeks and, indeed, to people of all different intellectual cultures. But, following on from that: if, as I would argue, the primordial oneness of God is essentially made manifest in the dissolution of false barriers to properly thoughtful human conversation between those who come from different cultural backgrounds, then, considered as the content of an apologetic argument to be upheld in conversation with philosophical critics, it is crucial that the proper claims of perfect conversational truth-as-openness, in itself, should not be confused with any merely subsidiary claim to definitive, fixed propositional truth-as-correctness. That is surely the fundamental theoretical distinction that needs to be made. The Church Fathers did not yet properly make it. Indeed, it has required the best part of two millennia’s work, by the cunning of reason, potentially to emerge with real clarity. But look: now at last, thank God, the possibility exists! In short: the proper essence of true religious faith is just perfect openness of mind, dissolving all sorts of cultural barrier between people – acknowledged as a sacred ideal. And, therefore, faith is not a claim to final, culture-specific metaphysical or moral correctness in explaining the phenomena of experience. Traditional theology, to be sure, is forever giving the impression that it does want to make such a claim. But to the extent that this is so, I would argue, it betrays its true vocation. It tends to be corrupted: sinking, in effect, to the level of mere ‘church ideology’. By ‘church ideology’ I mean the consensus of a pious herd; the herd-shaping dogma of a ‘shepherding’ gang; the supposed basis for such a gang’s authority; the

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solemnity of thought that is meant to disguise the gang-nature of the gang. Such ideology does not dissolve cultural barriers but, on the contrary, solidifies one particular set of them. It may well be perfectly sincere, in a certain sort of highminded idealism; it may be highly sophisticated, in its impeccable orthodoxy; it may even do a lot of incidental good. Yet, inasmuch as it is the defence of a closed mind, it is really the exact opposite of gospel truth. Why should the mass of ordinary Christian believers obey the dictates of the institutional Church into which they were born? Or why should they perhaps abandon that community, for the charismatic leadership of some rival Christian sect? Or why should new believers submit themselves to authoritarian constraints on their freedom of thought? – In each case, church ideology seeks to reinforce the credentials of the church leaders in question, as being people who represent not the imperatives of perfect truthas-openness but those of a purported form of truth-as correctness instead. In the first place: metaphysical truth-as-correctness. And then, on that logical basis, secondarily: moral truth-as-correctness. Church ideology is a claim to correctness, deployed as back-up to manipulative power. As such, it is the absolute opposite to authentic faith. Yet, in the traditional thinking of the Church, authentic faith and church ideology are forever muddled together. Faith is Not Meant to Explain the World Church ideology purports to provide a correct explanation of the world. In order to escape it, we surely need, first and foremost, to insist on this elementary axiom: true faith, as such, does nothing whatsoever to explain the world; it cannot; it is not meant to, at all. It has quite another sort of truth. Faith does not explain the world; at best it just explains itself, in the sense of confessing. So it recognises God, in the imperatives of perfect truth-asopenness; it acknowledges those imperatives, and responds to them. It inspires one to be opened up, even to the most difficult of moral realities. And it celebrates such opening up. Faith is what ‘saves’, but ‘salvation’ never consists in a mere explanation of things. Rather, what we need ‘salvation’ from is the condition of being inwardly closed-down: towards other people in all their awkward otherness and towards the complex needs of proper justice. Therefore, true faith asks ‘Why?’ and gives no answer; or answers only with what is, in effect, a re-energising of the question, rather than a settling of it. Indeed, the potential truth of faith largely depends upon its not trying, in any very definite way, to explain things. Insofar as faith is essentially misrepresented as a set of correct explanations, it loses all truth, as a result. The internal resistance of the fallen soul tends to convert it into a purported way of explaining things – basically, so as to evade its real, existential difficulty. Faith is not, in itself, a theory about why things happen in the world. Nor is it even an explanatory opinion, with regard to the metaphysical construction of ultimate reality. It is just a being-opened-up; an infusion of agape, expressed as trust in God, into the soul. And, really, nothing more!

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Never before, it seems to me, has there been such a chance as there now is, for people at large to distinguish true faith, in this sense, from all its various old church-ideological simulacra. Above all, this is due to the sustained pressure of atheistic critique. No matter how exaggerated and indiscriminate that critique, it may well do us good. Ever since the first stirrings of the Enlightenment, especially, the embattled defenders of church ideology have been trying to shore up their apologetic defences against it, with a whole wealth of metaphysical argumentation, more or less mixed with appeals to ‘religious experience’. But the point is that true faith does not need those defences. They do not serve true faith. The metaphysically inclined apologetic impulse serves church ideology alone. And it is just the final recognition of that fact which brings about the proper breakthrough here. ‘Theology’ / ‘Religion’ / ‘Myth’ Hegel indeed already makes the breakthrough, with pioneering philosophic precision, in the early nineteenth century. As I will, shortly, seek to show. But there is such widespread, entrenched resistance to Hegel. How to outmanoeuvre this? Perhaps a bit of indirection may help. Before I turn to Hegel’s critique of (what I am calling) church ideology, first I propose here to call as witness three other, not at all Hegelian later thinkers; they are also great critics of church ideology, but by quite different, albeit I would argue, complementary, means, namely, Franz Overbeck, Karl Barth, and Rudolf Bultmann. What basically sets these three thinkers apart from Hegel is, so to speak, their angle of attack. Thus, Hegel for his part is intent on developing a systematic philosophically informed critique of church ideology. And he sets out to analyse the historically emergent possibility of such critique. These others, by contrast, seek to attack church ideology, not on any sort of philosophical basis but, rather, on the basis of the authority they find inherent in the quite un-philosophic earliest origins of the Church, the memory of the brief moment before the eventual congealing of church ideology; and then the various echoes of that moment, later on. They appeal, above all, to the tremendous urgency of the first Christians’ faith, in its original, apocalyptically framed eruption; the pathos of that revolutionary, anarchic sheer negation of the conventional mores of the world; the exhilarating sense of liberation which so clearly inspired the apostolic generation. The earliest Christians incorrectly anticipated an imminent end to the world. Never mind! If what one cares about is truth-as-openness, rather than truth-as-correctness, there was surely a profound element of truthfulness entangled with, and even to some extent dependent upon, that error. For, all the values of the world were blown open, as a result, to be re-evaluated in the light of an infinite, freshly unlocked hunger for the reign of God. First and foremost, these three thinkers want to celebrate the memory of the extraordinary cultural explosion directly enshrined in the New Testament.

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It is true that Hegel does not idealise the early Church in the way they do. Nevertheless, it seems to me that both he and they alike are driven by a comparable, underlying trans-metaphysical commitment to openness. And just that, as I say, is what I consider to be truly crucial. Overbeck, Barth, and Bultmann are Bible interpreters. As such, they confront the challenge to the Church from secular philosophy with a fierce counter-challenge – although absolutely not a churchideological one. Hegel, by contrast, is a Christian philosopher, intent on opening up the deliberations of the Church, so far as possible, to include the critical voice of philosophy at its best; he is, precisely, developing a philosophic strategy for the critique of church ideology. Yes, his is quite a different sort of enterprise from theirs. But, again, what surely matters most here is the prioritisation of truth-asopenness over truth-as-correctness – which, after all, he and they have in common, and with regard to which he and they complete each other. In order properly to grasp the meaning of that prioritisation, I think we do need to see the potential complementarity even between such very obviously contrasting thinkers. ‘Church ideology’ is my term, not one which any of these thinkers uses. But I think that one might summarise the relationship between them like this: • Overbeck attacks church ideology specifically in the form of academic theology. Indeed, he identifies the target of his critique, very simply, as ‘theology’ in itself. • Barth goes beyond this, in that he attacks church ideology as a mode of thought equally to be found in academic and non-academic forms of church life. So he calls it ‘religion’, converting ‘religion’, for this purpose, into an essentially derogatory term. • Bultmann goes yet further, inasmuch as, unlike Barth, he identifies elements of church ideology not only in the life of the post-biblical Church but also already nascent within the New Testament itself. It is already embryonically there, he argues, in the whole ‘myth’-aspect, as such, of New Testament thought. • Hegel, in contrast, sets his critique of church ideology into an altogether larger philosophic context. For him, such thinking is a prime instance of the basic mental faculty of Verstand (‘Understanding’) over-reaching itself. Let us then consider each in turn. Franz Overbeck What I call ‘church ideology’ does not prioritise the critique of closed-mindedness as such; instead, it merely criticises irreligion. Overbeck, for his part, does not speak of ‘church ideology’. But he effectively attacks ‘theology’ in general for just this persistent tendency within it. I actually think that Overbeck’s usage of the category ‘theology’ is much too indiscriminate! For, if we turn against ‘theology’ wholesale, what name do we have left for an authentic religious-intellectual celebration of truth-as-openness? Overbeck is not a constructive theologian at all. Nevertheless, he

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remains the great pioneer of a critical negativity grounded in sophisticated sympathy for the primordial, cultural-revolutionary element in Christian faith, as this flourished largely prior to any systematic sort of reflection, or any attempt to reconcile faith with worldly ‘science’. And he frames his argument in terms of a basic opposition between ‘Christianity’ and its long ‘theological’ decadence. Overbeck was Professor of Theology at the University of Basel from 1870 to 1893. However, the fiercely anti-‘theological’ nature of this singular theologian already emerged in his polemical work On the Christianity of Theology (more or less suggesting that its title represented an outright contradiction in terms), which first appeared in 1873; it was reissued with a new Introduction and Afterword in 1903.1 At Basel he became a close friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, who was Professor of Classical Philology there from 1869 to 1879. Overbeck and Nietzsche lived on different floors of the same house. Later, in 1889, when Nietzsche suffered his final catastrophic mental breakdown, it was Overbeck who travelled to Turin, to rescue him. And when Overbeck brought out his original anti-theological polemic, he actually published it in tandem with Nietzsche’s early work of the same year, on David Strauss: The Confessor and the Writer.2 Unlike the later Nietzsche, in fact, Overbeck always spoke well of ‘Christianity’, as he understood it. He treated it with the utmost respect, even though he confessed that after 1873 he no longer counted himself ‘Christian’.3 For, his basic argument in On the Christianity of Theology was that true ‘Christianity’ is something that has long been dead. That is to say, there is absolutely nothing left of the original cultural shock – that extravagant revaluation of all values, opening everything up to question – which alone, he thinks, deserves the name of ‘Christianity’. In a sense, it seems, he saw no real Christians in his world; certainly not among his colleagues, the theologians. For, in his lexicon, the practice of ‘theology’ is precisely definable as the intellectual decadence which prevails where authentic ‘Christianity’ is lost. And now there is no church life anywhere that has not been contaminated by ‘theology’: a mere ideology, as he sees it, promoting the conventional ethos of a privileged class, his own class. The religion of the Church has become worldly and compromised, whereas the whole truth-potential of Christian faith once lay in its absolute repudiation of the world, largely resulting from a sense of the world’s imminent apocalyptic overthrow. There are, oddly, two recent translations of Overbeck’s chief polemical work into English: one translated by John Elbert Wilson, with Introduction and Notes, as On the Christianity of Theology (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2002); and the other translated by Martin Henry as How Christian is our Present-Day Theology? with a preface by David Tracy (London: T. & T. Clark, 2005). 2 Overbeck himself tells this story, at the end of his 1903 Introduction. 3 In notes dating from 1898, unpublished in Overbeck’s lifetime, he specifically remarks, ‘Since my Christianity of Theology, no serious person may consider me a Christian. In the book I explained the reservation with which I wanted to remain a theologian, namely my personal unbelief’. Not that the explanation, however, is actually quite that explicit in the text itself! 1

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Already, David Friedrich Strauss had laid considerable weight on the plain eschatological incorrectness of early Christian hope.4 And later on, first Johannes Weiss and then Albert Schweitzer were further emphatically to reinforce this.5 For Weiss and Schweitzer, however, as for Strauss before them, the apocalyptic aspect of earliest Christianity was just an embarrassment; to be honestly acknowledged as a stumbling block, unfortunately tending to impede any immediate reconnection between the spirit of the apostolic age and ours. Overbeck also recognises the difficulty of such reconnection. But he is the first seriously to challenge the element of modernist prejudice here. Certainly, as compared with the brilliance of Nietzsche, Overbeck was not a great writer; although he may be said to have had a certain flair for irony, befitting his belief in the need for at least some measure of esoteric communication in the religious domain. Moreover, it seems to me that the basic weakness of his thought is the mismatch between his very broad dismissal of ‘theology’, as such, and the really rather restricted range of actual examples he discusses. So he devotes one chapter of The Christianity of Theology to what he calls ‘apologetic theology’, and the other to ‘liberal theology’: these being the two absolutely dominant theological tendencies in the German-speaking world of the 1870s. The former was a shade more conservative than the latter, but both schools were more or less equal in their bourgeois-academic worldliness; neither left much scope for any sort of truly counter-cultural truth-as-openness. At all events, one may well question how genuinely comprehensive Overbeck’s notion of ‘theology’ was. So, it was really very easy for Karl Barth, afterwards, to step forward as advocate for a very different mode of theology, the possibility of which Overbeck seems simply never to have envisaged. Nevertheless, Barth continued to admire Overbeck as a significant predecessor. It is rather as though Overbeck’s critique serves as an initial ‘sighter’ for Barth’s later one. In fact, Barth saw Overbeck as having been a good deal more genuinely Christian at heart than he may at first sight have appeared, under cover of his anti-‘theological’ irony.6 At least in the early period of Barth’s great turn against the ‘apologetic’ and ‘liberal’ theology which had dominated the previous century, Overbeck remained a key figure for him. 4 See, for instance, David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, English translation of the 4th edition (1840) by George Eliot, edited by Peter C. Hodgson (London: SCM, 1973); Editor’s Introduction, p. xxxiii. 5 Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 1892, English translation by Richard Hyde Hiers and David Larrimore Holland (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1971); Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, 1906, English translation by W. Montgomery (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 6 Barth’s main discussion of Overbeck comes in an article he wrote jointly with Eduard Thurneysen, entitled ‘Unsettled Questions for Today’, in response to the posthumous publication of Overbeck’s Christentum und Kultur: English translation by Louise Pettibone Smith, in Barth, Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920–1928 (New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 55–73. He had also befriended Overbeck’s widow; who encouraged him in his understanding of Overbeck’s veiled personality.

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Karl Barth Whereas, however, Overbeck attacks ‘theology’, and continues to speak quite favourably of ‘religion’ in general, Barth, by contrast, identifies himself, first and foremost, as a theological critic of ‘religion’. He subsumes (what I would call) church ideology into ‘religion’; ‘religion’ as opposed to ‘faith’. The chief Barthian systematic discussion of ‘religion’ in this sense is to be found in Section 17 of his Church Dogmatics, ‘The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion’.7 Here, ‘revelation’ is essentially a term for what one might also, perhaps, call the sheer shaking-power of God’s truth: its quality as a shaking, and uprooting, of all comfortable and seemingly well-established knowledge of good and evil. ‘Religion’, then, is, so to speak, the medium within which revelation initially operates. But (Barth argues) considered in itself, ‘religion is faithlessness’. Or again: ‘religion is a concern – one must say, in fact, the concern – of godless man’.8 For, it is just what, most of all, must be shaken loose by the workings of God’s revelatory grace. On the one hand, he declares, faith’s reception of revelation, as God’s ‘self-offering and self-presentation’, involves a profound chastening of the ‘religious’ intellect. On the other hand, as God’s act of ‘reconciliation’, it is also a profound chastening of the ‘religious’ will. Faith forever overthrows both the ‘religious’ intellect’s natural inclination to glorify its alleged metaphysical explanations of the world and the ‘religious’ will’s closely related inclination to complacent self-congratulation, regarding its devout practices. Revelation is necessary because If man grasps after faith, then of necessity it eludes his grasp. So he does not do what he would have to do when the truth comes to him. So, then, he does not have faith. If he had faith, he would listen; but in religion he talks. If he had faith he would allow something to be given to him; but in religion he takes something for himself. If he had faith he would let God himself stand up for God; but in religion he dares that grasping after God. Because it is this grasping, religion is the contradiction to revelation.9

In short, ‘religion’, in Barth’s sense of the word, is first and foremost an expression of the will to power, instrumentalising sacred tradition and thereby rendering it idolatrous. He quotes Calvin: ‘Man’s perpetual genius is to be a factory of idols’.10 7 This has been published as a separate book, translated into English with an introduction by Garrett Green: Karl Barth, On Religion: The Revelation of God as the Sublimation of Religion (New York: T. & T. Clark, 2006). This is a retranslation: Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. I. 2, translated by G.T. Thomson and Harold Knight (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), pp. 280–361. (‘Sublimation’ in Green’s version of the title is the good old Hegelian term ‘Aufhebung’ in the original.) 8 Barth, On Religion, p. 55. 9 Ibid, p. 58. 10 Ibid. See Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, English translation by Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John Thomas McNeill (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), vol. 1, Book 1, Chapter 11, Section 8.

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‘Religion’, for him, is just that ‘factory’, perpetually at work, just as much within orthodox Christendom as outside. The grace of revelation may redeem it, by overwhelming its primary business, opening up what the primary inertia of religion keeps closed. But it remains absolutely dependant on revelation, for that redemption. By ‘religion’, then, Barth means something like the will to power, generating, through ritual and devotion, the phenomenon of mass group-conformity, rife with latent violence. The outbreak of the First World War had been for him – then a young pastor in Switzerland – a moment of tremendous disillusionment. Specifically: in October 1914 a document was published, with the splendid title ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three Intellectuals to the Civilized World’, enthusiastically endorsing the war policy of the Kaiser, with 12 eminent theologians amongst its signatories, including three who had been Barth’s own teachers during his student days in Germany: Adolf von Harnack, Wilhelm Herrmann, and Adolf Schlatter. Von Harnack had actually drafted the Kaiser’s initial proclamation of war, in August, to his people. And the ‘Manifesto of the Ninety-Three’ was shortly followed by another declaration, signed by some 3000 German university lecturers, including a great many more theologians, to the same effect. Barth, looking back, conflated these two documents and misremembered them as having appeared two months earlier, right at the outset of the War, but he was very clear about the shock that he himself had felt, as a Christian Socialist to whom it appeared self-evident that such sentiments were quite incompatible with the true spirit of the gospel.11 What does he have in mind when, later on, he writes of the primordial ‘faithlessness’ of ‘religion’? First and foremost, perhaps, it is the weakness so vividly exemplified, at that crisis moment, by all those German theologians whose Christian faith, as he saw it, still remained, to such a large extent, subordinated to the natural instincts of their social class, even when those instincts were on such a direct collision course with the basic injunction of the gospel, that Christians are to be peacemakers. At the same time, though, the Barthian critique of ‘religion’ is also a transforming revival of the original Reformation polemic against ‘works righteousness’. Thus, just as Luther, and the other Reformers after him, had gone back to Paul and invoked his principle of ‘salvation by faith alone’ against their Roman Catholic adversaries, Barth did the same, against the predominantly ‘Liberal’ (in Overbeck’s terms, both ‘liberal’ and ‘apologetic’) theologians who had, in his view, so clearly sold out in 1914. Therefore, he launched his campaign See the account in A. Rasmusson, ‘Church and Nation State: Karl Barth and German Public Theology in the Early 20th Century’, Ned Geref Teologiese Tydskrif 46: 3–4 (2005); also, Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His life from letters and autobiographical texts, English translation by John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1975), pp. 81–3. Even Martin Rade, the editor of Die Christliche Welt, whose editorial assistant and ally Barth had been, was carried away by the tide of enthusiasm, among these academics, for the war. Ernst Troeltsch expressed the prevailing mood: ‘Oh, if the speaker of this hour were only able to transform each word into a bayonet, a rifle, a cannon!’ These were, absolutely, the most distinguished theologians of the age. 11

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with a great commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans. ‘Since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’, Paul writes, ‘they are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption which is in Christ Jesus’. And hence: ‘What becomes of our boasting? It is excluded. On what principle? On the principle of works? No, but on the principle of faith. For we hold that a person is justified by faith apart from works of law’ (Romans 3: 23–4, 27–8). The ‘principle of works’, surely, is a notion of salvation as being, above all, an achievement of God-willed groupconformity; the ‘works’ in question are the moral tokens of one’s conformity to a given, already very clearly defined group. One might well be tempted to ‘boast’ of such conformity, for, it is precisely motivated by each individual wanting the approval of the group as a whole. But true faith, for Paul, is the sheer antithesis to that temptation. What he chiefly has in mind, of course, is the Jewish form of such group-conformity, as this inspired the demand of his immediate opponents that new Gentile converts to Christian faith should first of all be circumcised and made subject to all the other precepts of Jewish religious law. Nevertheless, he presents his argument against that particular demand, here, in much more universal terms. And so it was surely not illegitimate for the Reformers to apply it to the priestpoliced group-conformity of medieval church ideology; or for Barth, in turn, to reapply it to the bourgeois group-conformity of early twentieth-century Protestant church ideology. The ‘liberal’ theologians had largely sought to make Christian faith attractive to people like themselves, as a metaphysical explanation of things. Like Overbeck, in contrast, Barth identifies theological authenticity with a Pauline sense of the whole world being apocalyptically turned upside down. Hegel, earlier, had also developed a philosophic critique of conventional piety, similarly appealing to the critical spirit of the Reformation and, perhaps, equally remote from the metaphysical concerns of the ‘liberal’ theologians who followed – with their typical appeal, not to the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness but, merely, to what they call ‘religious experience’, which appears to be something else. Against these later church-ideologists, it seems to me that both Barth and Hegel, in their complementary ways, are very much at one in seeking to escalate the proper trans-metaphysical difficulty of faith. My one objection to the Barthian doctrine in this regard (beyond his failure, himself, to see the proper complementarity of Hegelian philosophy to his dogmatics12) has to do with his choice of polemical terminology: ‘religion’ does not seem to me the right term at all! For, is it not a misnomer to use, as it does, the Barth, in developing his critique of ‘religion’, takes a passing swipe at the ‘typical’ Hegelian ‘enlightened know-it-all’: On Religion, pp. 53–4. His anti-Hegelianism (which is, fortunately, by no means unrelieved) is further spelt out at much greater length in his historic survey, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, English translation by Brian Cozens and John Bowden (London: SCM Press, 1972), Chapter 6. It reflects a dogmatic theologian’s general mistrust of philosophy as such, wrapped up in the standard distortions of the ‘Hegel myth’. The notion of the Hegelian ‘know-it-all’, in particular, so completely misses the point of what Hegel really means by ‘Absolute Knowing’! 12

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very word – for the corruption of Christianity which is to be overcome – that has traditionally been used, on the contrary, for what true Christianity has in common with other, non-Christian sacred traditions, at their best? Barth is reacting to the very positive connotations of ‘religion’ in the particular forms of church ideology he is most concerned to attack. But does this not, after all, introduce an entirely unnecessary ambiguity? It is as if the new Christian critics of ‘religion’ are essentially boasting; preening themselves; saying, to the adherents of other, nonChristian traditions: ‘Yah, boo! Our tradition, in its transcendence of “religion”, is so much better than your merely “religious” one, even at its best!’ There is indeed a distinct undertow of latent antisemitism in Luther’s revival of the old Pauline polemic against the ‘principle of works’, mixed in with its profound element of truth: a deeply regrettable suggestion that papalist church ideology is wrong because it is, somehow, too ‘Jewish’ in spirit.13 Barth, reinterpreting Paul as a critic of ‘religion’, extends the ambiguity, so that the critique is no longer so specifically connected to Christian antisemitism as such but (perhaps) to Christian xenophobia in general. How, though, does that help? I think we need to find other ways of expressing the basic critical truth at stake here; ways of better dispelling any such ugly ambiguity. Rudolf Bultmann Whereas Overbeck attacks ‘theology’ and Barth attacks ‘religion’, Bultmann, for his part, goes on to attack ‘myth’. At one level, the Bultmannian concept of ‘myth’ serves a basically analogous function to ‘theology’ for Overbeck and ‘religion’ for Barth’. Indeed, Bultmann’s whole project may well be seen as a bid to carry forward the Barthian dogmatic-theological testimony to radical truth-as-openness by other means. Only, the emphasis has shifted: away from Barth’s absolute focus on the demands of effective preaching as such, and back towards a more ‘critical’ reading of the scriptures. Thus, Bultmann sets out to disentangle true kerygma from ‘myth’. Kerygma: literally, ‘proclamation’; for Bultmann, the life-transforming truth-potential of the core gospel message, proclaimed as in essence a sheer infinite opening-up to fresh insight. ‘Myth’: the whole system of mental images and metaphors traditionally used as a medium to convey that message – insofar, however, as these have been infested with a false metaphysical-explanatory dogmatism, which serves only to close minds. Where this false church-ideological dogmatism prevails, the medium is misidentified as the message itself. Everything, for Bultmann, depends upon clarifying the distinction between the two: liberating the kerygma, in that sense, by ‘demythologising’ it. 13 This latent antisemitism of Luther’s eventually becomes overt in his utterly repulsive treatise On the Jews and Their Lies, which dates from 1543, just three years before his death. In 1523 he had actually written an eloquent attack on crass Christian antisemitism, That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew; but very much in the hope that the reform of the Church he was then initiating would lead to a mass influx of Jewish converts, to be encouraged by friendliness. His later rage arose from his disappointment when this did not happen.

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So, is ‘myth’ the right term for what is problematic here? The Bultmannian usage of the word is far from traditional; there is no sanction for it in Scripture. Kerygma is a biblical term, yet in the Bible has none of the weight that Bultmann seeks to give it. Augustine, it is true, does take a dim view of what, following Varro, he calls ‘mythic theology’. This, though, for Augustine, refers strictly to pagan phenomena. ‘Myth’, of course, very often refers to narratives that are quite devoid of any realistic or historical elements; in that sense, one of the most striking features of the gospel stories, as narratives of divine revelation, is actually how little they fit the category. Bultmann, in contrast, when he speaks of ‘myth’, does not mean that. Rather, he is talking about a particular way of misreading those stories; a reading which, because it has rendered them ‘mythic’, ultimately fails to grasp their proper existential meaning. What he advocates is a systematic translation project: a translation of the kerygma from the language of ‘myth’ into that of post-‘myth’. To what extent is such translation possible? It surely all depends on just what is meant by ‘myth’; but the only positive definition that he offers in the 1941 lecture is stashed away in a footnote. It consists of just two sentences: That mode of representation is mythology in which what is unworldly and divine appears as what is worldly and human, or what is transcendent appears as what is immanent, as when, for example, God’s transcendence is thought of as spatial distance. Mythology is a mode of representation in consequence of which cult is understood as action in which nonmaterial forces are mediated by material means.14

This will scarcely do! The first sentence applies to pretty well all religious metaphor – it begs the question, by what exact criteria are we to distinguish illegitimate myth from perhaps legitimate metaphor? And the second sentence, as it stands, likewise applies to pretty well all sacramental action. Presumably, the ‘mediation’ he has in mind is manipulative mediation, that is to say, magic. Theologians, however, have always been against magic. So what, if anything, does the category of ‘myth’ add that is new? Responding to Julius Schniewind, Bultmann concedes the flimsiness of the formula he has offered but does not improve upon it.15 And in 1952, reviewing the whole demythologisation debate up to that time, he impatiently bats away the demand for a clearer definition: I do not reckon the question about the concept of ‘myth’ among the most important. On the contrary, it seems to me that discussion of this question leads away from what is really at stake in the problem of demythologizing … I use

Rudolph Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology and Other Basic Writings, edited and translated into English by Schubert M. Ogden (London: SCM, 1985), p. 42; HansWerner Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, English translation by Reginald Fuller (London: SPCK, 1972, two volumes in one), I, p. 10. 15 Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, p. 102 (see also pp. 47–8). 14

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the concept ‘myth’ in the sense in which it is customarily used in the science of history and of religion ...16

He shows no interest in the actual history of that ‘customary’ usage: why the word should have played so little role in earlier theology; or why, in view of its traditional marginality, it should nevertheless seem such an obviously appropriate term to him, and others of his generation, for their critical purposes. However, let us revisit the question: how are we to distinguish perhaps legitimate metaphor from illegitimate ‘myth’? Much of the demythologisation debate appears, in fact, to be bedevilled by a basic lack of clarity about the criteria to be applied. Bultmann’s nearest approximation to a proper, succinct answer actually comes in his 1952 review of the debate; where he resorts to a concept of ‘objectification’. ‘In short’, he writes there, ‘myth objectifies the transcendent into the immanent, and thus also into the disposable, as becomes evident when cult more and more becomes action calculated to influence the attitude of the deity by averting its wrath and winning its favour.’17 Myth ‘objectifies’ what ought to be understood, on the contrary, in ‘subjective’ terms. This is at least a gesture, on Bultmann’s part, to the underlying philosophic rationale of his whole approach: namely, his entirely proper radical prioritisation, for theological purposes, of (‘subjective’) truth-as-openness over (‘objective’) ‘truth-as-correctness. He further invokes Martin Heidegger to this effect – and not entirely without reason, since Heidegger does also stand for the same. (Kierkegaard is there in the background, as well.) It is just a shame that that invocation of Heidegger, for the most part, simply serves Bultmann as an excuse for not engaging any further in such matters of basic philosophic principle. Well, yes – but then again: why this particular term, ‘myth’, for that which ‘objectifies’? It is, to be sure, a somewhat idiosyncratic terminological move. And yet, I think that there is a powerful argument in its favour; notwithstanding that Bultmann, himself, is most reluctant to acknowledge it, not wishing to sully the biblical literature by ugly associations! Consider the context. Bultmann delivered his original, highly provocative lecture, calling for a programme of ‘demythologisation’, on 4 June 1941. The blitz of English cities had ended only three weeks earlier; the German army was at that very moment massing in preparation for its assault on the Soviet Union, ‘Operation Barbarossa’, due to be launched 18 days later. Also on 4 June, as it happens, two new antisemitic decrees were issued: one by the Nazi authorities themselves, forbidding Jews within the Third Reich any access to beaches or swimming pools; the other by their allies in Croatia, ordering all Jews there to wear a star with the letter ‘Z’ on it. All of this was going on – so much prodigious barbarism, such monstrous insanity everywhere – whilst the Society of Evangelical Theology, meeting at lovely ‘On the Problem of Demythologizing’, in Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology,

16

p. 95.

Ibid. p. 99.

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Alpirsbach in the Black Forest, spent all day debating the concepts of kerygma and ‘myth’, as applied to the interpretation of the New Testament!18 Only, what else could be done? And moreover, be it noted: at this historical juncture, the concept of ‘myth’ had in fact acquired a whole new resonance, just by virtue of its rather positive role in fascist ideology. Bultmann emphatically dissociates the type of ‘mythological’ thinking to be found in the New Testament from fascist ‘myth’; the differences are, of course, obvious. He has such (justified) contempt for fascist ‘myth’ that he does not want to taint the biblical heritage by allowing even the remotest analogy, here, to it. And so he insists that he is not using the word in anything like ‘the modern [fascist] sense in which it means nothing more than ideology’.19 Nonetheless, his innovative option, in that historical context, for such a derogatory use of this particular term cannot, I think, be altogether insulated from the sinister new currency which it had, then, quite recently acquired. Why did ‘myth’ seem to him such an obvious term for his purposes, when it is in fact so untraditional? This can only be explained by considering what had quite recently happened to the word. Thus, take for instance Alfred Rosenberg’s 1930 Nazi best-seller, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, of which by the end of the Third Reich more than a million copies had been sold.20 In this work Rosenberg sets out the corporate psychosis that was Nazi ideology, in rambling grand narrative form. His describing the resultant doctrine as a ‘myth’ in effect means that he wants it to be invested with much the same sort of sacred status that Christian fundamentalists accord the Bible. Or, consider the earlier celebration of ‘myth’ in the work of Georges Sorel. A much more intelligent thinker than Rosenberg, one might describe Sorel as the Machiavelli of the age of mass propaganda. Although not to any major degree a racist, Sorel is a proto-fascist by virtue of his essentially aesthetic approach to politics, his approval of whatever seems best able to achieve the most spectacularly, he would say ‘heroically’, disruptive propaganda effects. With this general goal in mind, he notes that men who are participating in a great social movement always picture their coming action as a battle in which their cause is certain to triumph.21

And he proposes the term ‘myth’ to designate such inspirational modes of thought, serving to energise warrior virtue, in general. In his ‘Letter to Halevy’ of 1907, 18 Another thing that occurred that same day: the old, by then long-deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II finally died. 19 ‘New Testament and Mythology’ (1941), note 5, in Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology, p. 42; also in Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, p. 10. 20 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythos des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts (Munich: Hoheneichen, 1930). The English translation by James Whisker is available online. 21 Georges Sorel, ‘Letter to Daniel Halevy’, incorporated as an introduction into Reflections on Violence, English translation by T.E. Hulme and J. Roth (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2004), pp. 41–2.

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where he originally develops his account of ‘myth’ so defined, Sorel cites the Marxist doctrine of the coming crisis of capitalism as one example; and the anarcho-syndicalist idea of the ‘general strike’ as another. Later, he flipped for a while from anarcho-syndicalism to fierce insurrectionary French nationalism. And then in 1917, he hailed the Bolshevik Revolution. Consistently, however, he is in quest of the most dynamic possible propaganda ‘myths’. Sorel was a great influence on Mussolini. Never mind if the propaganda message is completely at variance with the facts; for him, a good ‘myth’ is to be judged solely on its provocative power, or manipulative usefulness. And if an unscientific, or pseudoscientific, dogmatism adds to that, then so much the better. Both Rosenberg and Sorel are advocates of a drastic break from Christianity. Rosenberg’s ‘myth of the twentieth century’ signals this with its very name. He is a militant despiser of traditional Church-Christianity, above all in its Roman Catholic form; and he dreams of its being swiftly altogether done away with, by enlightened Nazi governance. (Although he quite bizarrely idolises the good German Meister Eckhart, as if Eckhart somehow had no part in that tradition!) In Rosenberg’s utopia, only a Marcionite form of ‘positive Christianity’ would survive, alongside various forms of neo-paganism: that is, a version entirely purged of all ‘Jewish’ elements. And Sorel, likewise, is cut off from church tradition by his neo-pagan apologia for heroic violence. All the same, it is clear that both thinkers in their role as protagonists of ‘myth’ think they are engaged in the same general species of enterprise as Christian theology. Indeed, this surely is just what it means when they invoke the supposed necessity of a ‘myth’: they consider themselves to be a more progressive, secular equivalent to Christian theologians. Bultmann’s project for the ‘demythologisation’ of theology is, not least, an implicit Christian theological counter-thrust to that delusion: reaffirming the absolute sheer incommensurability of the Christian gospel, rightly understood, with any such secular construct. He will by no means put biblical ‘myth’ on the same sorry level as Sorel’s shamelessness or Rosenberg’s psychopathic delirium.22 But still less the gospel itself – for the gospel is, in principle, the very purest possible antithesis! And ‘demythologisation’ is precisely a matter of accentuating that antithesis, by repudiating the one thing that, after all, biblical ‘myth’ does have in common with the secular counter-‘myths’ of Rosenberg or Sorel, for instance, namely, its persistent anti-scientific or, rather, pseudoscientific, licence. Alas, though, Sorel is not entirely wrong: ‘myth’ is effective. For all its incredibility to those with scientific scruples, Christian ‘myth’ will always be much more immediately attractive to the great mass of fallen mortals than the gospel itself. People cling to the easy dogmatic certainty it purveys, preferring its undemanding reassurance. Schubert Ogden has described Bultmann’s original 1941 lecture, ‘New Testament and Mythology’, as ‘perhaps the single most 22 See ‘On the Problem of Demythologizing’ (1952), note 4, in Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology, p. 124.

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discussed and controversial theological writing of the century’.23 Certainly this was true of the 1950s and the early 1960s, in both the German and the Englishspeaking worlds. The challenge of ‘demythologisation’ dominated discussion in this period because of the ferocious resistance it provoked.24 Nor was the eventual burn-out of this academic firestorm by any means attributable to any real resolution of the issues raised. There are, to be sure, various ways in which Bultmann’s approach is open to valid criticism. In the first place, his New Testament scholarship does now look somewhat dated. Unfortunately, he attributed a key role, in the background of the New Testament, to what he took to be an extensive culture of pre-Christian ‘Gnosticism’; this, he supposed, was one of the chief sources of ‘mythological’ thinking in that world. Subsequent scholarship has tended to cast doubt on the very existence of such a culture, as a coherent entity.25 And then – what exactly does ‘demythologisation’ involve? Bultmann is no mere defensive apologist for Christian faith, in the sense of seeking only to render it more acceptable to the scientifically minded. On the contrary: his basic aim in clearing away the false scandal of Christian ‘myth’, as such, is to uncover the proper scandal of the gospel itself. Once again, it is not so much to make faith easier as to show up its authentic difficulty. But the true scandal of the gospel requires a maximum poetic intensity of language for its communication; and how, after all, is one to discern the exact point at which gospel-serving biblical poetry ends and ‘myth’ begins? What about a bold philo-mythic theology like that of John Moriarty, for instance?26 I do not think Bultmann necessarily wants to proscribe that. In the end, I think that one surely does have to distinguish between false myth and true myth: on the one hand, In his Preface to Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology, p. vii. For a flavour of the controversy, at its best, see the collection of articles by various authors, in Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth. Perhaps Bultmann’s most measured statement of his project in general is his ‘Reply to the Theses of J. Schniewind’ here: I, pp. 102–23. 24 The key moment in the controversy came in 1953, when the bishops’ conference of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Germany issued a pronouncement, to be solemnly read from the pulpit of every member church on the Sunday before Advent, denouncing the ‘danger’ inherent in the work of ‘some theologians in our universities’ who ‘have set about “demythologizing” the New Testament, as they call it’. For the full text, see Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, II, pp. 1–2. And see also, for instance, Bultmann’s little essay of 1960, ‘In Retrospect’, his exasperated reflection on the great volume of denunciatory mail he received from people from who had never actually read his work: ibid. pp. vii–viii. 25 Akey contribution in this regard was that of Carsten Colpe, Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule: Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom gnostischen Erlößermythus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961). 26 John Moriarty, Nostos (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 2001). And see also his other works, all with the same publisher: Dreamtime (1994); the trilogy Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Crossing the Kedron (1996), Horsehead Nebula Neighing (1997), and Anaconda Canoe (1998); Invoking Ireland (2005); Night Journey to Buddh Gaia (2006); Serious Sounds (2007); What the Curlew Said: Nostos Continued (2007). 23

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the would-be world-explanatory parlance of church ideology, entwined with and distorting the kerygma, right from the outset; but, on the other hand, the necessary, essentially playful, poetic outworking of the kerygma itself. Nevertheless, all honour to the provocation of Bultmann’s thought! There has, it is true, always been a certain ‘demythologising’ impulse at work in Christian theology; albeit, prior to Bultmann, not with that name. In his 1941 lecture he criticises two earlier forms of this, from the later nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century period: ‘liberal theology’ and the ‘history-of-religions school’ – these are exactly the same antagonists that Overbeck had earlier identified.27 As modernising thinkers, the adherents of these two approaches are critical of the anti-scientific element of ‘myth’ in the tradition. Yet, neither of them, in Bultmann’s view, does justice to the proper, all-transforming sheer urgency of the kerygma. Demythologising the gospel certainly does not mean, for him, diminishing the authority traditionally accorded the experience of the apostolic Church. Some amongst his critics, such as Fritz Buri and Karl Jaspers, have urged that it should.28 He, however, remains much closer to Karl Barth in this regard. Like Barth and Overbeck before him, Bultmann holds fast to the principle that the fullness of gospel truth is necessarily a cultural earthquake; and that it is, therefore, the fundamental task of theology to try and reawaken the Church to this, by reconnecting to the memory of the historic moment when it was most obvious. The kerygma, as he understands it, is not a timeless set of truths; it remains the vivid remembering of an earthquake. Barth, of course, remains a theologian with distinctly different priorities.29 The much more direct Barthian prioritisation of preaching generates a whole different theological style. When it comes to the specific purposes of preaching, a basic rule of the game is that one is always reverential towards Holy Scripture. Not that Barth by any means denies the need for a certain amount of largely tacit demythologising, even in the context of his own enterprise. His unease with Bultmann’s programme, however, has to do with its representing such a systematic mix of reverence with quite overt irreverence towards the biblical texts. And no doubt Barth is right, at least to this extent: it does need to be made clear that this programme is not intended as a revision of the rules of preaching. It properly belongs on quite a different level. Yet, the underlying critical thrust of Bultmann’s Bultmann, New Testament & Mythology, pp. 12–14; Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, I, pp. 12–15. 28 Karl Jaspers, ‘Myth and Religion’, in Bartsch, ed., Kerygma and Myth, II, pp. 133–80. Kerygma and Myth consists of a selection from the four volume German original, Kerygma und Mythos (Hamburg: Reich, 1948–68) which includes two essays by Buri, omitted from the English: ‘Entmythologisierung oder Entkerygmatisierung der Theologie’, in vol. II (1952), and ‘Theologie der Existenz’ in vol. III (1954). As the title of the first of these indicates, Buri advocates not only demythologisation but also ‘dekerygmatisation’: in the sense of a theology aiming to liberate Christian faith, in the most radical fashion, from the authoritative grip of the past altogether. 29 Karl Barth, ‘Rudolf Bultmann – An Attempt to Understand Him’, ibid, pp. 83–132. 27

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thought still seems to me to be essentially consonant with that of Barth’s; here too, it ought not simply to be assumed that differences of approach automatically signify fundamental rivalry. ‘Intellectual Chastity’ The gospel originates as great eruption of truth-as-openness; mixed however, right from the outset, with countervailing impulses of church ideology, towards new, ‘Christian’ modes of closure. And, by way of diversion, church ideology lays claim to quite another sort of truth altogether: namely, truth-as-correctness. Overbeck and Barth celebrate the primordial eruption of truth-as-openness here. Bultmann not only echoes this but also adds a fresh sceptical attack on church ideology’s intemperate claims to truth-as-correctness, as these claims contribute to occluding the proper imperatives of openness. His programme of demythologisation is, in this sense, a post-Barthian summons to radical ‘intellectual chastity’, as applied to biblical scholarship. Never before such a chance to recognise the proper implications of the gospel! Why? Not the least of the various different reasons one might adduce is that we live in a world where the values of intellectual chastity, in general, are increasingly apparent. ‘Intellectual chastity’: a disciplined holding back, with regard to the explanation of things, from the gratifications of instant intellectual self-certainty; a scrupulous waiting upon actual, solid evidence. The fresh impulse to such chastity results from the general progress of the sciences, both natural science and social science – not that ‘science’-invoking atheism is always very chaste, when it comes to the explanation of religious phenomena! But theology may well learn from the frustrations of its encounter with such atheism, at any rate, the more clearly to appreciate what a better quality of debate, in principle, requires. Truth-as-correctness is the sort of truth which may be useful: that is to say, it may well contribute to the devising of effective strategies for controlling one’s environment. But the deep truth of true faith is not useful, at all. If it correctly explained the world, then of course it would be useful, for it would give us a handle on the God-aspect of how things work, showing us, in Bultmann’s phrase, ‘how to influence the deity by averting its wrath and winning its favour’. However, it does not do this. On the contrary: the achievement of truth-as-openness precisely depends upon suspending, at least for a moment, one’s preoccupation with controlling one’s natural and social environment. For, after all, one is not truly open to other people if one is only interested in discovering the most effective ways to manipulate, and so control, them. Paradoxically, the capacity to suspend one’s immediate preoccupation with what is useful for controlling one’s environment may itself be useful: if one could not, from time to time, stand back from one’s various projects in life, one would never be able to reassess one’s aims and objectives, for prudential purposes. There is no doubt a good evolutionary rationale for the human species to have developed

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the ability inwardly to withdraw and contemplate, as a means of reassessing lifestrategy. Yet, faith goes further. In principle, it values the sheer contemplative recognition of difficult moral reality for its own sake. And so it is that the definitive Christian image for the perfection of faith is the depiction of a man who no longer has any control over his environment at all: hands and feet nailed to planks of wood. This vividly declares true faith’s transcendence of mere usefulness. True faith is not a useful means of achieving one’s already pre-determined goals in life, deriving from the natural impulses of the ego; rather, it is all about the radical transformation of those already pre-determined goals by a deepened contemplative appreciation of reality, entirely beyond any prudential concerns. Above all: by a better feel for the reality of other people, quite apart from their usefulness to oneself. At the same time, the distortion of faith, into what Bultmann calls ‘myth’, may well prove to be a very useful error! Thus: consider for instance the biologist Jesse Bering’s reductionist attempt to show what he suggests is the basic Darwinian rationale for belief in God.30 (Granted, we have moved here into a somewhat different atmosphere of thought! But perhaps the very incongruity may prove instructive. At all events, I find Bering an entertaining and rather likeable antagonist…) Bering is, in fact, talking exclusively about what I would call ‘church ideology’, and its other-religious equivalents; not about the kind of faith which authentic theology attempts to cultivate. He has no interest in the latter, does not so much as acknowledge it as a possibility – precisely because it is not useful, in evolutionary terms. His quest is for a comprehensive, purely Darwinian explanation for religion. To this end, he begins by pointing (a) to the evolutionary usefulness of the human lust for explanation, itself. So it appears that, for Bering, ‘religion’ is by definition first and foremost a purported explanation of the world. He cites the University of California psychologist Alison Gopnik, in particular, the analogy she draws between the drive to seek causal explanations and the drive to reproduce; between intellectual curiosity and sex.31 In humans, uniquely, the first of these may be said to have become, in its way, of comparable urgency to the second. So Gopnik compares the pleasure obtained from arriving at a satisfying explanation for something to the pleasure of orgasm. Amongst children, above all, the desire for what Bering calls ‘explanatory highs’ can be overwhelming. But here is another similarity to sex: Your explanation doesn’t actually need to be correct to give you that satisfying bolus of orgasmic pleasure driving your search for answers … Gopnik writes, “The function of sex is still to reproduce even if reproduction doesn’t occur in

Jesse Bering, The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life (London: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2011). 31 Ibid. pp. 140–44; Alison Gopnik, ‘Explanation as Orgasm and the Drive for Causal Understanding: The Evolution, Function, and Phenomenology of the Theory-Formation System’, in F. Keil and R. Wilson, eds, Cognition and Explanation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). 30

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the vast majority of cases.” Sex leads to orgasm, and that feels good as an end in itself, even if it’s ultimately a fruitless cardio exercise. Likewise, when it comes to the innate explanatory drive, you’ve just got to believe you’ve solved the problem to derive the pleasure.32

Nature is wasteful. For the crude purposes of biological evolution, the need is simply for a universal impulse, which will at least sometimes produce the right result. Religion, as Bering sees it, is in essence a product of ‘the innate explanatory drive’ misfiring, in the sense of producing consistently incorrect explanations; yet nevertheless gaining its reward thereby and, indeed, clinging to this reward with an especial energy, by according sacred prestige, no less, to a specific set of prescribed explanatory beliefs. He has no notion of a possible religious faith informed by intellectual chastity. On the contrary: as he understands it, the whole attraction of religion in general necessarily lies in its quite shameless appeal to intellectual licence. (b) As for belief in God, this Bering attributes to intellectual licence playing upon another unique product of human evolution, namely, ‘theory of mind’. That is to say, the special ability which human beings, again to a far greater degree than any other species, have acquired, to imagine how the world looks from the point of view of other minds, not their own; and to read the behaviour of other individuals in terms of such imagining. The obvious, repeatedly proven usefulness of this ability brings with it an immediate temptation to over-extend the use of it. And, for Bering, that is just what belief in God is. In the same way that one imaginatively enters into the minds of other human individuals by reading their behaviour, so one then goes on to read all the events in one’s environment, without exception, as signs of what is going on in a vast cosmic mind. This explains those events, and so it satisfies the lust for explanation. He reports on an experiment that he himself had helped organise with children, engaged in a guessing game, who were told of a magical friendly princess called Alice who is invisibly in the room with them and wants to help them. The aim of the experiment was to establish at what age children start to be capable of reading odd events, such as a picture falling off the wall or the lights starting to flicker, as messages from an invisible presence. It appears to be at around seven: younger children simply do not draw the conclusions hinted at. ‘Contrary to the common assumption that superstitious beliefs represent a childish mode of sloppy and undeveloped thinking’, he comments, ‘the ability to be superstitious demands some mental sophistication. At the very least, it’s an acquired cognitive skill.’33 It is, he suggests, the overflow of our, for evolutionary purposes invaluable, gradually developing ability to read the minds of other human beings. And moreover, (c) the resultant delusion is itself useful, at yet another level. Crucially, Bering argues, it helps us deal with the most problematic consequence of language use: the problem of gossip. The use of language has the knock-on Bering, The God Instinct, p. 141. Ibid. p. 96.

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effect of enormously increasing the necessity for inhibition. For, where there is language, and hence also gossip, there are reputations to be enhanced or lost. Therefore, we need to restrain impulsive behaviour by always considering how what we do will appear to others. But such restraint tends to be very much enhanced by the thought that our behaviour is being directly observed. Again, he reports on further ‘Princess Alice’ experiments with children, designed to test the effect of the fiction on their tendency to cheat at a game. By the age of seven, some had begun to see through the fiction, and so were prepared to cheat in front of the imaginary Princess Alice. Nevertheless, it was quite clear that ‘those who said they believed in Princess Alice were much less likely to cheat than those who said they didn’t.’34 The social usefulness of this effect, then, powerfully reinforces the mix of intellectual licence with an over-exuberant ‘theory of mind’, which has in the first place generated the belief. Here, then, we have Bering’s threefold – atheistically ‘orgasmic’ – basic evolutionary explanation for the popular success of religion. Even though the thrust of his argument is that I have based my whole life on an error, I cannot deny the charm of his writing; with its delightfully ebullient hilarity and joie de vivre. The one thing wrong here is Bering’s seemingly quite unquestioned assumption that all religion is, always, all about people’s greed for cheap causal explanations. But, alas – this surely is quite a fundamental mistake! In averting his eyes from the very possibility of religiously sanctioned intellectual chastity, Bering closes down the scope of his enquiry and exaggerates the explanatory power of his own theory, in what is, after all, an entirely unscientific fashion. At the same time, the example provided by his work is, at any rate, very useful for clarifying the meaning of ‘myth’, in the specific sense intended by Bultmann. For, one might well say that ‘myth’ in this sense is, quite simply, whatever form of religious belief is, indeed, explicable in Bering’s terms; whereas the kerygma is that which, in Christianity, most of all is not. Or, mutatis mutandis, the same with the Barthian distinction between ‘religion’ and faith. Compare Iain McGilchrist’s extensive meditation on brain-hemisphere differentiation.35 Why do brains, of every kind, always consist of two such distinct halves, each half capable of sustaining life on its own, even without the other? Clearly, there is a major evolutionary advantage in a division of labour between the two halves. Already in the brains of the less sophisticated species, each half of the brain specialises in a different quality of attention: one half, almost always on the left, accustomed to close focus on an immediate task, hunting or scavenging; the other, usually on the right, surveying things and registering the bigger picture. Ibid. p. 194. Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making

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of the Western World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). McGilchrist’s fine work details the history of actual research behind the broad assertions made here. I discuss the theological implications of his argument at greater length in Hegel and Religious Faith (London: T. & T. Clark, 2011).

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In the human brain, the left half tends to specialise in the analysis of phenomena, deducing and applying general theoretical rules, calculating, seeking out causal explanations; in other words, pursuing the sort of intellectual pleasure with which Bering, for his part, is preoccupied. But the right half specialises, rather, in recognition: apprehending the specificity of individual entities, places, or people; and discerning the significance of context, how the meaning of ‘text’, that which is conveyed by words or other signs, varies from con-text to con-text. In relation to other people, calculative left-hemisphere thought specialises in projects of technical collaboration, and therefore typically evaluates everything in the utilitarian terms suggested by such projects. The right hemisphere’s skill in recognition and sensitivity to context, by contrast, enables a capacity for sheer empathy, essentially transcending utilitarian calculation. Damage to the left hemisphere often does away altogether with the technical, strategic ability to use language. Without a properly functioning right hemisphere, language use may well persist – but not the sort of alertness-to-context required for the use and comprehension of fresh metaphor, or any sort of serious poetic creativity. As a mode of poetic thought, authentic faith in God is, it would seem, pre-eminently right-hemisphere work. That is to say, it is a mode of partnership between the two hemispheres in which the right is very much allowed to take the lead. The left hemisphere, at its most thoughtful, chiefly pursues truth-as-correctness, useful or academic truth. Right-hemisphere thought, very differently, aims at truth-asopenness: the truth that true faith appropriates, as belonging to ‘salvation’. The sad thing is, though, that the value of the latter is so much less obvious than the value of the former. It is so much more of an acquired taste. McGilchrist deplores what he sees as the prevalent, militant over-privileging of the left hemisphere, and its works, over the right, especially in contemporary Western culture. The title of his book, The Master and His Emissary, refers to what he argues is the proper, so to speak, spiritual relationship between the two hemispheres: the right hemisphere is properly the ‘master’, inasmuch as its special capacity for empathy confers on it a much more direct relationship to the real, that is, the spiritually deepest, meaning of experience in general. At this level of ultimate seriousness, the left hemisphere is properly the ‘emissary’, or interpreter, of the right. But all too often the relationship between the two has come to be inverted. Bering’s thought exemplifies such inversion, at its most absolute. The emotional tone of his writing, its buoyant glee, is itself just what is typical of solo left-hemisphere function at its brightest. And his attitude to religious faith, likewise, perfectly encapsulates the natural theoretic worldview of the solo left hemisphere. His evident blank incomprehension of the essentially non-utilitarian truth-potential of faith seems to derive from a fundamental devaluation of all that primarily belongs to righthemisphere-engaged thoughtfulness. Bering proffers me a scientific explanation for the delusions under which I and so many others labour. No hard feelings! Such folly is, after all, only natural in evolutionary terms, he reassures me, as if patting me on the back. In return, I offer him a scientific explanation for his attitude. It comes, I think, from his only fully using one half of his brain; which, I must say, does seem to be a bit of a shame.

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The right hemisphere of the human brain tends to specialise in metaphor. In this regard, faith is its empowering, for the purposes of perfect truth-as-openness. ‘What! Surely you do not mean that all you say about God is just metaphor?’ Oh no, it is not ‘just metaphor’. On the contrary: it is nothing less than a groping for the potential fullness of metaphor. It is a quest for metaphor at full stretch – working to open our minds. Not everyone, by any means, is capable of rigorous metaphorical thinking; it requires practice. True faith, as I would understand it, is, in essence, a lifelong commitment to work, in communion with others, at this most necessary and endlessly difficult skill. A culture that scorns such work is lost. Never before has there been such a chance of real opening to the deepest truth of the gospel. In part, this is due to developments in the Church’s socio-political context: lessons learnt from often bitter experience. But in part, also, it is due to developments in other sorts of intellectual discipline, interacting with theology. And of these, I think that the most significant of all is the recent progress made in the study of brain-hemisphere difference – just because of the way in which that progress helps clarify the contrast between the two elementary species of truth. In my preferred terminology: ‘truth-as-openness’ and ‘truth-as-correctness’. Hegel’s Two Great Books Why is Heidegger so important to Bultmann? Above all, one might say, Bultmann is influenced by Heidegger’s pioneering exploration of what is, in effect, the same distinction between the two primordial species of truth – ‘truth-as-openness’ and ‘truth-as-correctness’ – even though, of course, Heidegger’s terminology is different. Once again: what I am calling ‘truth-as-openness’ is a quality of soul, or mental orientation. An ideal approach to conversation, it is truth as concretely embodied in a life. And, what I am calling ‘truth-as-correctness’ is a quality of propositions considered, purely and simply, in themselves; that is, in abstraction from conversational context. Heidegger’s strange and beautiful masterpiece, Being and Time, amounts to a systematic philosophic analysis of the preconditions for truth-as-openness; strictly differentiated from truth-as-correctness, and rendered independent from it, hence from any discussion of ‘metaphysics’, where ‘metaphysics’ is precisely definable as the most allencompassing quest for truth-as-correctness.36 Being and Time is framed as a study of Dasein: the German word means ‘existence’, but also, more literally, ‘being-there’. Dasein, then, is the being-there of human thought, in the sense of its responsiveness to the way in which meaning shifts according to context, the ‘there’ of it, as one and the same utterance potentially means quite different things and may come to have such a very different truth-value, depending on who is speaking and the varying ‘existential’ quality of the resultant thought. Heidegger knew nothing of neuropsychology. But inasmuch as such responsiveness to context is righthemisphere work, Dasein is surely the specific truth-potential of that hemisphere. 36 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, English translation by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

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Heidegger, however, also systematically brackets any consideration of theology here. (McGilchrist, who very much admires Heidegger, does the same in his discussion of the cerebral hemispheres, as such.) The argument of Being and Time represents an attempt altogether to avoid any terminology freighted with theological connotations, even whilst dealing with so much that has traditionally, in European intellectual culture, been the province of theology. It proceeds very much on the assumption that theological language, as a whole, is irremediably ‘metaphysical’. ‘Metaphysics’ is the general Heideggerian term for illegitimate world-explaining truth-as-correctness claims; ‘myth’, in the Bultmannian sense of the word, is the specifically biblical variant of this larger category. And Bultmann’s call for a ‘demythologising’ form of Christian theology is thus, not least, a direct challenge to Heidegger’s reductionist dismissal of theology as a whole. Indeed, the greater part of Bultmann’s 1941 lecture is an opening up of the question of what it might mean for biblical hermeneutics to remove the brackets that Heidegger has imposed around theology and, so, to develop a new form of theological reflection, otherwise in the closest possible accord with the basic project of Being and Time. It is, I think, more than a little regrettable that Heidegger himself never responded, at all seriously, to the resultant prospect. Moreover, it is surely also regrettable that neither thinker ever quite recognised the earlier systematic background-contribution to what one might call ‘transmetaphysical theology’ made, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by Hegel. Bultmann, for his part, just ignores Hegel. As I have said, he appears to invoke Heidegger basically so as not to have to deal with anything else philosophically challenging, whilst he gets on with biblical exegesis. And Heidegger, I am afraid, fundamentally misrepresents Hegel.37 Yet, it is Hegel, as we shall see, who does most, in philosophic terms, to open up the possibility of (in Heidegger’s sense) a truly trans-metaphysical form of theology: fundamentally looking beyond the metaphysicians’ preoccupation with theoretic truth-as-correctness, to truth-asopenness. Thus, whereas Heidegger in Being and Time considers the impulse towards perfect truth-as-openness only in one limited aspect, namely its intrinsic otherness from any metaphysical dogma, Hegel in the Phenomenology of Spirit sets out to evoke the same impulse in all its aspects. The result is a much more scatter-fire, chaotic approach. But also it does serve, at least in principle, to reopen the possibility of fresh conversation between philosophers and theologians, at a point decisively beyond metaphysics. How indeed are we to understand the very widespread allergic reaction to Hegel, from thinkers of all kinds; the positive will to misinterpret his thought, which appears to be so prevalent? After all, it is not as though he has had any very great practical influence, either in the religious or the political domain, to which one might take exception. And yet, the hostile ‘Hegel myth’ is so much more than just a matter of occasional innocent misunderstandings. Sometimes it has been promoted by truly great thinkers, intent on promoting their own thought-projects, On Heidegger’s misreading of Hegel, see Hegel and Religious Faith, pp. 121–36.

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in the market place of ideas, by contrast to his, but opting to caricature his in the process. Heidegger is one prime example of this; Kierkegaard, another; a third, William Desmond.38 More often, though, it has simply been an academic herdphenomenon. On the one hand, in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel remarks that ‘philosophy must beware of the wish to be edifying’.39 He is repelled by anything that, to him, savours of kitsch spirituality; and he has, as a result, offended the devout by the not at all ‘edifying’ sheer austerity of his writing. At the same time, on the other hand, he has equally offended the militant enemies of religion by his patient repudiation of their impatience. Above all, he has made enemies by the sheer ambition, and hence the demanding nature, of his thought. Hegel’s thinking, at its best, is an astonishingly sustained single gaze: an attempt to consider everything, all at once, in the largest possible context. From this prodigious ambition there sprang two extraordinary masterpieces, the Science of Logic (1812–16) and the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Almost as unreadable as Finnegans Wake but with none of the whimsical charm of Joyce’s work, the Logic and Phenomenology are rendered difficult by the sheer obsessive intensity of their thoughtfulness. Such difficulty is not calculated to win easy friends. Hostile criticism, assuring us that there is no real point in engaging with it, may well be regarded as a sort of public service, sparing us much painful effort. Consensual, pre-emptive scorn, in this sort of case, saves us no end of trouble; as well as mercifully protecting our baffled vanity. Nonetheless, let us acknowledge the pioneering way in which these writings already so very clearly highlight the basic contrast between truth-as-correctness and truth-as-openness; with a view to making peace between the proper claims of both. Thus, consider the two books as two very different approaches towards God: • The Logic is an unfolding of what Hegel calls the ‘Absolute Idea’ (die absolute Idee); that is, the ‘idea’ of everything co-inhering, considered in terms of the linguistic tools employed by thought aiming at the most lucid truth-as-correctness. It takes shape as a comprehensive lexicon of abstract terms for the inter-relatedness of phenomena: a survey of all the various categories of abstract thought held up, as so many lenses, to the ultimate fullness of reality. Each lens is tested, in turn, for its capacity to mediate correctness of vision. The argument begins from the highly blurred vision of that ultimate fullness conveyed by the category of ‘Being’. Or, in effect, from the thought: ‘Everything co-inheres by virtue of all things’ participation in Being’. And then it moves steadily on to the ever sharper possibilities of comprehensive vision suggested by other categories. So it progresses, an epic philosophic optician’s experiment. Hegel probes, for instance, at the infinity of Being and at its simple oneness. Then he shifts to the categories of ‘Essence’; in other words, to the underlying thought, On Desmond, especially, see Hegel and Religious Faith, Chapters 1–3. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, English translation by A.V. Miller

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(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 5–6.

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‘Everything co-inheres by virtue of the dependence of the inessential on the essential’. The variations on this involve the relationship of form and matter, necessity and contingency, substance and accidents, and so forth. Until, at length, we arrive at the categories of ‘the Concept’: the rules of formal logic, the guiding principles of natural science. By this stage, the underlying thought is, ‘Everything co-inheres by virtue of all things’ subordination to methodically discoverable rules’. Here, then, laid out before us, we have layer upon layer, all the various different thoughtprocesses distinctively typical of the left hemisphere of the brain. This is a work of metaphysics: an engagement with the metaphysical tradition, surveying the core vocabulary of metaphysics, as such. But note: it is not ‘metaphysics’ in the derogatory Heideggerian sense of a thinking that disrespectfully invades the proper territory of the right hemisphere. To be sure, it is all, in the end, about God; for it has to do with the very nature of truth(-as-correctness), and God is the fullness of all truth. Therefore, Hegel himself elsewhere describes it as a series of ‘metaphysical definitions of God’.40 But the ‘God’ in question is, crucially, not the God of theology, in the sense that theology is the science of faith. Hegel is quite clear about the distinction; clearer than anybody ever before him. Notoriously, he describes the content of the Logic as ‘the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and a finite mind’.41 In other words, it 40 This formulation is to be found in Hegel’s 1817 shorter version of the Logic, Part One of his three-part Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, §85; translated into English by William Wallace as Hegel’s Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 123. 41 Hegel, Science of Logic, English translation by A.V. Miller (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1969), p. 50. In the writings of his Jena period, 1801–06, Hegel uses the term aether for this purely metaphysical notion of the divine: not yet the ‘living God’, revealed in the history of Spirit, but only the quite abstract ‘Idea of God’. Aether, as such, pretty well disappears from his later thought; indeed, apart from one brief reference, the notion has already evaporated in the Phenomenology, written at the end of the period. But when, years later, in a series of lectures dating from 1829, he attempts a qualified rehabilitation of the old metaphysical ‘proofs’ of God’s existence, I think that once again one might say that what he is discussing is the necessary existence not so much of the ‘living God’ as of aether. Thus, aether in this sense is, so to speak, the objective correlate to the space within our metaphysically oriented – left-hemisphere dominated – thinking, into which the ‘living God’ of right-hemisphere insight may break. It is the necessary background to any such divine revelation; the intrinsic theatricality of the cosmos, which renders it possible; the sheer primordial swirl of cosmic expectancy. Or: the latency of God, within what is not yet Spirit. Hence, Hegel also calls it ‘absolute matter’. At first no more than the abstract logical possibility of divine revelation, it then unfolds, as it were, in the contexts of inanimate physicality and pre-human life; until, at last, the possibility is ready to be fulfilled. See H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development 2: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–6) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), index of references, p. 596; and Stephen Crites, Dialectic and Gospel in the Development of Hegel’s Thinking (University Park, PA: State University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998), index of references, p. 565.

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does not speak, at all, of the God who is revealed in the narratives of faith. Whereas theology responds to the God of faith, logic in the Hegelian sense responds, on quite another level and in complementary fashion, to the God of the very purest intellectual chastity. How is it about God? Precisely, in fact, by keeping silence. Very strikingly, ‘God’ is not amongst the actual categories of the Logic. All previous Christian metaphysical doctrines had, as a matter of misconceived piety, placed ‘God’ right in the foreground. The whole spiritual point of Hegel’s metaphysics, however, is to clear an open space, an area of quiet at just that point, for authentic trans-metaphysical Christian faith to take root. Compare Kant’s famous claim to have denied ‘knowledge’ of God in order to make room for faith. One may well be somewhat sceptical about it: Kant’s rather rigid, metaphor-constraining notion of ‘religion within the limits of reason alone’ does not leave much room for faith. The a priori ‘limits’ he prescribes are far too restrictive. But, insofar as the ‘knowledge’ in question is a privileging of metaphysical claims to truth-as-correctness, Hegel really does do just what Kant claims to have done. • The Phenomenology, in contrast, unfolds towards what Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’ (das absolute Wissen), which is just the point at which philosophy, ideally, flows over into theology. So, it is all about the impulse to truth-as-openness. ‘Spirit’, Geist, is that impulse, on the way to theological articulacy. And ‘Absolute Knowing’ is its fulfilment: the final recognition of the impulse to perfect truth-as-openness for what it truly is, namely, the proper essence of the divine. To approach this, Hegel here presents us with a systematic survey of possible mentalities, at every different level of intentionality. Everywhere, the impulse towards openness coming up against modes of closure: in the relationship of the mind to the physical world; in the relationship of the individual to other individuals, as such; in each self’s relationship to self; and in the relationship of the socialised human animal, first, to society in the abstract, then to specific forms of historic culture. At length it becomes apparent that ‘Spirit’ has, all along, been a name for the anonymity of God, the Spirit of God, always implicitly at work throughout the pre-theological life of the species. As a work of philosophy, the Phenomenology is, of course, a high-intensity deployment of left-hemisphere theoretical technique. But ‘Spirit’, in itself, is essentially the forever restless critical energy of right-hemisphere thought at its truest, breaking through into this domain. In the Phenomenology Hegel sets out to study that breakthrough in all its aspects. To put it in Heideggerian terms, one might say that ‘Spirit’ is the truth-potential of Dasein. But it is that truth-potential revealed in the full range of its constant battles against the pressures of inauthenticity. The Phenomenology surveys those battles, layer upon layer of their detritus. And it is quite un-Heideggerian in its eventual progress towards a philosophically transfigured form of Christian faith – as human ‘Spirit’ grows translucent to the Holy Spirit. In theological terms, it

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is a systematic study both of original sin and of the countervailing universal human capacity for Atonement; an attempted comprehensive analysis of the various types of existential problem that true faith addresses. On the one hand intellectual chastity, and on the other hand faith: Hegel’s thought vindicates both virtues at once, patiently resolving their conflicts. The Logic is an overview of the entire domain of thought seeking correctly, and with maximum analytic precision, to explain the ways of nature, and human nature. It also overflows into the Philosophy of Nature. Since the real poetic truth of faith is not of this un-poetic kind, the God of faith simply does not appear here. Rather, the overview is informed by a strict chastity: no meddling interference of popularreligious theory, whatsoever, in what really belongs to secular science. Yet, at the same time, the Phenomenology opens up quite another domain, that of thought seeking to awaken, in the end, the most wide-ranging and effective empathy. Out of the matrix of the very purest intellectual chastity, it represents, so to speak, the virgin birth of philosophic faith. Indeed, American theology of the 1960s produced a particularly striking fresh upsurge of ostentatious intellectual chastity, Namely, the so-called ‘Death of God’ movement promoted by Gabriel Vahanian, Paul Van Buren, William Hamilton, Thomas Altizer, and others. Thus, these thinkers declared the ‘God’ who mixes the proper imperatives of truth-as-openness with false, extra claims to metaphysical or moral truth-as-correctness – ‘dead’. Nothing less! When, however, their project is compared with Hegel’s epic enterprise, arguably the one real element of innovation it involved was a brilliant layer of fresh hype; a grand rhetorical flourish. Little that was all that more substantial. At all events, for Hegel himself the great thinker of intellectual chastity was Spinoza. Only, Spinoza, of course, lacks faith. Intellectual chastity: at every level of reflection, this means no precipitate claim to have explained anything, short of a cogent unifying explanation of everything. Spinoza speaks of that always ultimately impossible but, to the true thinker, nevertheless urgently alluring final explanation as the knowledge of ‘Substance’. ‘In my view’ – Hegel however remarks in the preface to the Phenomenology – ‘everything turns on grasping the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject’.42 What does this mean? The Phenomenology as a whole is to be the answer. Whereas ‘the True as Substance’ is reality, in general, unveiled as an object of explanation, ‘the True as Subject’, by contrast, is the unveiling of one’s own reality, and the reality of other people, through wondering love. Preceding explanation, this is a loving sheer attentiveness to the otherness of the other person; beyond any project of control, in other words, which explanation might serve, it is a willing acceptance of vulnerability. In the Phenomenology we are first shown the emergence of such love, out of human animal existence; how it is prefigured in simpler forms of wonder; and some of the obstacles that impede it. Then we are shown the out-workings of its urge to political organisation. And finally: what Hegel sees as its proper culminating Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 17, pp. 9–10.

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sublation into Christian faith. The topic is vast, impressionistically summarised, and held together in an argument of staggering compression and difficulty. But the basic aim of the work, at any rate, remains quite straightforward: to evoke the possibility of a world-view in which the Spinozist insistence on intellectual chastity is fully preserved, even as its anti-poetic reductionism, and consequent refusal of faith, is decisively transcended. ‘Speculative Reason’ Hegel’s own term for the specific character of his thought is that it is, preeminently, a project of ‘Speculative Reason’. One may well question the advisability of this term, in view of the derogatory connotations so often attached to the idea of ‘speculation’, not only now but already in Hegel’s own day: morally dubious financial dealings, on the one hand, and wild guesswork, on the other. But Hegel adopts it partly, no doubt, because of the etymological derivation of ‘speculative’ from the Latin speculum, meaning ‘mirror’. He wants, in fact, to contrast good, complexity-recognising ‘speculative’ thought with bad, oversimplifying ‘reflective’ thought, as two different qualities of ‘mirroring’. Partly, also, I guess he likes the association of ‘speculation’ with wondering. And again, ‘speculation’ is associated with investment; in the case of ‘Speculative Reason’, the investment of a real, more than merely agnostic, confidence in the value of philosophic questioning. What constitutes ‘Speculative Reason’ for Hegel? It is the third of three cumulative ‘negations’; three levels of critical thinking, in general; three modes of systematic confrontation with the ambiguities of ordinary speech.43 First, there is Verstand, or ‘Understanding’. This confronts the most pervasive sort of ambiguity in human speech, as a whole: that which derives, very simply, from not-thinking. Indeed, Hegel calls Verstand ‘the most astonishing and mightiest of powers’.44 For, this is the basic energy of all analytic thought. Thus, Verstand is forever insisting on clarity: ‘What, exactly, do you mean when you say “x”? Do you mean this, or do you mean that?’ From the point of view of Verstand, it is always strictly either / or. But then that first negation, the universal work of Verstand, is itself negated by ‘Dialectic’. For, Verstand, in its drive to clarify concepts, is forever impelled to abstract them, out of the mess and muddle of everyday talk. And this process is itself ambivalent! Indeed, Verstand attacks ambiguity quite indiscriminately. Left to itself, it will do away not only with the ambiguity that arises from sheer thoughtlessness but also with the creatively thoughtful ambiguities of poetic metaphor. In relation to popular religion, Verstand in general, therefore, generates the essential abstraction of metaphysical theism, deism, or atheism. That is to say, it reduces the rich potential meaningfulness of religious imagery and ritual to mere abstract theory, the stuff of purely cerebral debate. It lifts the basic Wallace, ed., Hegel’s Logic, Chapter VI. The Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 32, p. 18.

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concepts of religious thought out of their original context and fails to appreciate just how context-dependent they actually are, for the fulfilment of their proper truth-potential. And, moreover, it is liable to do so with contempt, as the more or less discreetly veiled contempt of the Platonist metaphysician, for popular religion as such, mutates into the quite open, intellectual labour-saving contempt of the atheist metaphysician. So Verstand falls short of what is needed for a proper appreciation of religious truth just because it is too given to abstraction. Dialectic, however, is the opposite. Thus, by way of critical response to the one-sidedness of Verstand, Dialectic focuses precisely on the intrinsic ambiguity of all abstract concepts, simply as such. Against the abstraction of Verstand, it points back to the specificity of context, as a prime determinant of actual meaning. It is forever prodding and probing at abstract concepts, seeking to destabilise them; its whole aim is to highlight the inevitable mismatch between tidy abstraction and untidy concrete reality. Again, to put it in post-Hegelian terms: whereas Verstand is typically the work of the domineering left hemisphere of the brain, enjoying its dominance, Dialectic is what interrupts it, reminding the left hemisphere of its ultimate dependence on the prior insights of the right hemisphere. For, the left hemisphere essentially represents, in abstract concepts, what the right hemisphere first presents to us as a direct registering of the world. We need the work of the left hemisphere in order to get a grip on things, and to devise strategies for controlling them. But we need the work of the right hemisphere in order to rise above the otherwise merely superrobotic control-projects of the left hemisphere, in a disinterested appreciation of other people for what they are in their own right, and of our environment, as a source of sheer wonder. Dialectic begins to open towards this. And yet, Dialectic on its own still falls short of what is finally required, inasmuch as it can provide no effective basis for strategic collaboration, either in the disciplines of intellectual endeavour or in broader community-building. What the cause of Truth surely demands is an ideal spirit of solidarity among those who have been shaken by the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness. Dialectic enacts shakenness, right-hemisphere insight, but it cannot, without supplement, found the solidarity of the shaken, which requires strategy, a left-hemisphere concern. By itself, indeed, it merely issues in the most rampant scepticism, a sheer individualism, which altogether precludes the sort of thinking that depends on serious commitment. ‘Speculative Reason’ then is Hegel’s name, essentially, for what supplies this lack in self-sufficient Dialectic. It is that which systematically holds together the truth of Dialectic, as a direct opening to the concreteness of actual reality, with the truth of a chastened, no longer metaphysically aggressive Verstand, in its specific role as a contribution to thoughtful strategic collaboration. This holding-together is the ‘Absolute’. Speculative Reason thinks the ‘Absolute’, as such. The basic division of Hegel’s thought, pre-eminently embodied in the contrast between the Logic and the Phenomenology, represents the bifurcation of the ‘Absolute’ into the ‘Absolute Idea’ and ‘Absolute Knowing’. Again, by the

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‘Absolute Idea’ Hegel means the driving impulse behind every human collaborative project dedicated, purely and simply, to the attainment of theoretical truth-ascorrectness, for its own sake. He studies this primarily in his Logic and Philosophy of Nature; and here Verstand is quite properly dominant.45 These works survey all forms of thought aiming at a correct explanation of particular phenomena, in terms of universal, abstract first principles. Dialectic is constantly at work here as well, chipping away at the categories deployed by Verstand; refining them; rendering them more precise, better adapted to tackling the concrete complexities of what is to be explained. Yet, it remains subordinate: the Logic essentially considers the whole domain of Verstand, its application to reality as a whole, in the light of this refinement-process as such, the work of Dialectic. ‘Absolute Knowing’, in contrast, is (I repeat) an ideal appreciation of the drive towards perfect truth-as-openness, throughout human thought – the topic of the Phenomenology of Spirit. And in this work, by contrast, it is Dialectic which prevails. For, the Phenomenology is a systematic study, not so much of abstract categories but, rather, of possible contexts for thought. It surveys how the drive towards truth-as-openness, the work of ‘Spirit’, is manifest in every different sort of existential context. Verstand is still rightly resurgent, here also: it is present in the constant attempts of ‘Spirit’ to crystallise its thinking into clear-cut, widely comprehensible theoretic principles, for moral, political, artistic, and religious collaboration. But Dialectic takes the lead. The Logic and the Phenomenology thus represent two different modes of Speculative Reason at work, through the interaction of Dialectic and Verstand in different mixes. No doubt, Hegel was ill-advised to go for the phrase ‘Absolute Knowing’! It is so often misunderstood, as if he were somehow intent on making a quite monstrous, self-aggrandising claim to have arrived at ‘absolute’ truth-as-correctness in spiritual matters; on promoting a new ‘pantheistic’ or ‘panentheistic’ metaphysical doctrine, intended to supplant older forms of Christian metaphysical orthodoxy as such. Nothing, though, could be further from the truth. Rather, the final outcome of all the Dialectic here is just an enhanced, essentially trans-metaphysical appreciation for primarily right-hemisphere wisdom. That is to say: a condition of radical shakenness, out of prejudice; the most urgent desire to empathise with other people; a delighted acceptance of other people’s otherness; a cheerful relaxation of the will to control; sheer truth-as-openness. Once more, what ‘Absolute Knowing’ knows (what it knows absolutely, with absolute confidence, having surveyed the struggles of Spirit at every level of its emergence-to-consciousness) is nothing more or less than that this is sacred; indeed, that it is the defining essence of the 45 Because Hegel is so often so critical of rigidified forms of Verstand, typical, for example, of hard-line Enlightenment anti-theological polemic, commentators sometimes misleadingly suggest that it is, for him, intrinsically a derogatory term. Yet, in another sense, the whole movement of the Logic is, in fact, towards what will best satisfy the legitimate demands of Verstand. That is its primary governing principle. See John W. Burbidge, Hegel on Logic and Religion (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), Chapter 4, ‘Where is the Place of Understanding?’.

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truly sacred. Hence, in a Christian culture, it moves towards theology, as the proper medium for its popular dissemination. (Just as in a Buddhist culture it will move towards a renewed study of dharma, for instance.) But the theology towards which it moves is theology altogether grounded in intellectual chastity. And, applied to biblical exegesis, the result will therefore be a systematic project of ‘demythologisation’. Never before has there been such a chance to recognise the ways of providence. One reason (which I propose to discuss elsewhere, at length) is surely the tremendous progress made in the study, which Hegel helped launch, of comparative religion. And what else is ‘Absolute Knowing’ if not the basic precondition for learning the proper moral lessons potentially to be learnt from this study: critical self-awareness emerging from the most empathetic possible awareness of others? At this level, all different religious traditions are essentially recognised as being so many complementary strategies for the promotion of perfect truth-as-openness, as sacred. Thus: what is Christian theology, in its proper calling? One might very simply define it as the systematic consideration of strategies for the promotion of truth-as-openness, recognised as God’s will revealed in Christ. In the Christian context, theology grapples with a tradition which, from the outset, generously lends itself to this purpose; but within which other quite contrary impulses are no less deep-rooted. The contradiction of the latter to the essential truth-potential of the gospel has always been more or less concealed by the fog-effect of the gospel’s being ‘mythologised’. Never before Hegel’s day had it been possible to attack this elementary problem as he did. And even then, his attempt encountered the most obstinate incomprehension. Surely though – two centuries on – the academic resistance, at least, will eventually begin to dissipate. It is certainly high time!

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Chapter 3

Anti-propaganda The Slow Truth of Liturgy Thirdly: what does it mean to see ‘God the Son’ incarnate in the figure of a crucified dissident? It is clear that there is a tremendous poetic challenge, here, to the legitimacy of the regime that crucified him. But just how far does the challenge then extend? It is surely not confined to that one particular regime alone. Rather, it applies to all other regimes, also, that resemble the original crucifying regime, in the specific aspect which the act of crucifixion symbolises. And so, what does this include? Crucifixion is not just capital punishment. It is also an act of propaganda. It is capital punishment at its most theatrical, making a statement by its sheer ostentatious cruelty. The gospel formula, Resurrection-of-the-Crucified, inverts that propaganda statement, in anti-propagandist fashion. Understood as an affirmation of the most radical truth-as-openness, it thus, in the first instance, renders crucifixion into a symbol for the spiritual deadliness of any moral regime enshrining a spirit of closure, that is, a refusal of open conversation. However, there is an element of closure already inherent in all forms of propaganda, even the softest, inasmuch as the propagandist as such aims only to manipulate other people, not to learn from them. Not only is crucifixion an act of propaganda but also, when God incarnate is seen hanging on the cross, it becomes an unveiling of what is problematic in the very propaganda-impulse itself, as this appears, so to speak, lit up by God’s judgement. For, here, the closure that is intrinsic to all propaganda is dramatically exposed. The crucifixion of Christ is revelatory by virtue of that exposure, which, at least to some degree, encompasses by implication every form of propaganda, without exception. And hence it follows that, considered as the essential principle of a gospel to be disseminated, far and wide, to the world at large, the proper appeal of perfect truth-as-openness remains, despite all temptations, forever intrinsically incompatible with any sort of propaganda short-cut. Such truth, I want to argue, demands to be disseminated not by propaganda means – not by the propaganda of church ideology – but, on the contrary, by authentic liturgy, understood as being the very utmost opposite to propaganda in general.1 Authentic liturgy: the ritual provision of no-strings-attached imaginative resources for a slow, meditative self-opening towards the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness; slow food for the soul. Propaganda: quick-hit measures, designed not to help people think with any real openness but, on the contrary, 1 See Andrew Shanks, ‘A Desire for the Impossible’, in Ewan Fernie, ed., Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today (London: Continuum, 2012).

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just to manipulate their behaviour, by flattering or frightening them, triggering and accentuating their prejudices and their most immediate desires. The saving truth of the gospel story fundamentally consists in the extraordinary boldness with which it dramatises that opposition. In this story, oriented as it is towards authentic liturgy, the crucified dissident represents the infinite challenge of perfect truth-as-openness; the crucifiers represent propaganda-based power in general. In them we see propaganda-based power responding with extreme exasperation to the challenge of perfect truth-as-openness, which it can never accept. And so the Resurrection-of-the-Crucified represents the ultimate futility of closed, propaganda-confined thinking, of any kind, for the proper purposes of salvation. This brings us to the second aspect of church ideology: the sheer dogmatic impatience of its claim to represent not only explanatory, metaphysical correctness but also moral correctness. Thus, church ideology fundamentally betrays the gospel by confusing its truth with the mere internalising of various social norms, as such; precisely, in the sense that ‘social norms’ are the sort of injunctions which lend themselves to effective dissemination by propaganda-means. Against which, let it be insisted that true theology does not just busy itself (usefully) reinforcing what society requires by way of an order-guaranteeing consensus, or set of norms. That is for other disciplines of thought to help provide. But theology, as it responds to the enormity of God, is a discipline of being opened up; precisely, to that which is beyond the merely normal. And thank God, again: never before has there been such a chance for this principle, also, to gain widespread recognition. Although the lesson has been a singularly bitter one! For, it belongs, above all, to the extreme revelation of human fallen-ness in the various totalitarian nightmares of the late modern world. The original gospel revelation consists in a dramatic act of God, being seen to reverse the propaganda-symbolism of the cross. It largely depends, for its liberating power, on the pre-existent oppressive power of that symbolism. Gospel truth erupts where the critical tradition stemming from the Hebrew prophets collides with the singularly sophisticated ruthlessness of Roman tyranny. This eruption requires the interaction of both elements. But the trauma of late modern totalitarianism, inasmuch as it represents such a tremendous re-energising of the crucifying spirit, surely also helps open up, as nothing else could, fresh opportunities of reconnection with that same truth. Thus, after two millennia of propaganda-making church ideology, our revulsion from the propaganda of totalitarianism – this being, in essence, a type of regime in which propaganda is given the very greatest possible, unchecked scope – may well have the effect of reawakening, in the Church at large, a proper sense of the primordial opposition between liturgy and propaganda, generally. Christ is Not a Brand Indeed, nothing could more powerfully display the essential inhumanity of the propaganda impulse, as such, than its rise to absolute power in totalitarian regimes. Its inhumanity: that is to say, its intrinsic incompatibility – even in the case of good ‘Christian’ propaganda at its theologically most orthodox – with the

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ultimate, fully humanising plenitude of gospel truth. Propaganda is ‘inhuman’ in the basic sense that to be human is to be truly a human individual; inasmuch as it is just the human capacity for self-aware individuality that most radically distinguishes us, in the sight of God, from other living creatures. But propaganda by its very nature does the opposite of promote individuality. It animates gangs, mobs, and herds, in which individuality is swallowed up and disappears. Even where it is deployed for the most benign of purposes, quite different from those of totalitarian ideology, it still remains, quite unlike authentic liturgy, essentially antithetical to what Hegel calls the ‘principle of subjectivity’; and hence it is deficient in true humanity, defined according to that principle. Therefore, the biblical way of talking about it is as the activity of the inhuman ‘principalities and powers’, the ‘authorities’, the ‘thrones’, the ‘dominions’, or the ‘names’.2 The biblical texts picture these, in dramatic personalised inhuman form, as angels or demons. However, this supernatural imagery is also quite straightforwardly translatable into the naturalistic terms of social biology: what is meant is surely just the work of dominant, inertial ‘memeplexes’ – that is, clusters of ‘memes’, the mental, incorporeal equivalent of genes – not yet fully subdued to the purposes of divine grace.3 The angels and demons of the Bible are the symbolic embodiments of memeplexes precisely insofar as these are sheer agencies of dehumanising willto-power, libido dominandi, set over against the humanising demands of perfect truth-as-openness. Or again, one might say that they are, broadly speaking, the manifestation of competing brands. In biblical language, whenever people work at constructing or developing brands, alike whether commercial or political, they are conjuring with, or rather being conjured by, one of the ‘principalities and powers’ of the fallen world. These ‘principalities and powers’ essentially represent the swirling, purely manipulative and to that extent inhuman energies of brandpromoting propaganda, in all its very many and various kinds. It is the tradition of ‘apocalyptic’ thought which first introduces the imagery of ‘the powers’, from the Maccabean period, in the mid-second century bce, onwards. (In order to comprehend this, we will, indeed, need to make a bit of an excursion, here, away from the home territory of Hegelian philosophy.) What has happened, to generate such thought? I would tell the story as follows. The biblical tradition, in its character as a coherent, radical, literary alternative to the typical type of worldview otherwise prevalent in the surrounding world, begins in the mid-eighth century bce with the book of Amos.4 Prior to Amos, there is no evidence that the The leading systematic analyst of this whole area of New Testament thought is Walter Wink, in his trilogy: Naming the Powers: The Language of Power in the New Testament (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984), Unmasking the Powers: The Invisible Forces that Determine Human Existence (Philadelphia PA: Fortress Press, 1986), Engaging the Powers: Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination (Philadelphia PA: Fortress Press, 1992). 3 Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 4 I have discussed Amos in several places elsewhere: notably, in ‘What Is Truth? Towards a Theological Poetics (London: Routledge, 2001), Chapter 5, and in The Other Calling: Theology, Intellectual Vocation and Truth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 158–70. 2

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sacred cult of YHWH, the Hebrews’ God, was at all different in kind from the sacred cults of other ruling-class gods. All such gods in that world, according to their priests, offered the same basic trade: magic favours, in exchange for flattery. What they wanted, so it was supposed, was just conformity to the basic moral consensus holding society together, plus ritual sacrifice and other observances in their honour. It was the same with YHWH as with any of the other ruling-class gods of the various peoples. But in the original core of the book of Amos – for the first date-able time – a completely new literary phenomenon erupts, with savage fury, tremendous critical energy. For, here we have the self-revelation of a God who, in unprecedented fashion, demands ‘justice and righteousness’ as something that must transform the social order: a complete shift in the ordinary attitude of the ruling classes towards the poor, a quite new spirit of compassion; and no mere flattery, no sacrifices, no worship at all, without that shift. This is, in short, an infinite demand for truth-as-openness, as never before! The sheer rage in YHWH’s voice, as poetically registered by Amos, conveys that infinitude. And it is compelling. But it is also deeply problematic, inasmuch as Amos provides no actual programme of reform, around which an effective political community might actually cohere. The moral demand he conveys, for ‘justice and righteousness’, has the effect of radically devaluing the ritual practices which, to a large extent, served to hold Hebrew society together; and his prophecy offers no bonding alternative. How were people to remain faithful to the infinite, profoundly truthful demands of this God without society dissolving, merely corroded by the moralistic fury of his devotees? In the following generation, the prophet Hosea in effect comes up with a solution. In order to mark the freshly revealed uniqueness of YHWH, as envisioned by Amos, Hosea hears YHWH demanding that the Hebrews should entirely cease to worship any other gods, anywhere. This was also quite new! Hitherto, it had been the unquestioned norm, amongst the Hebrews just as much as amongst their neighbours, for people to worship a plurality of gods; different ones for different purposes. There are reports of earlier factional fighting within the royal court, between the devotees of YHWH and the devotees of Baal, over which god should enjoy primacy there (1 Kings 16: 29–19: 21). But Hosea inaugurates a completely novel project of reform: to ban the worship of other gods, not just at court but everywhere, at every level of Hebrew society, without exception. So, he translates the incoherent infinitude of Amos’s demand for ‘justice and righteousness’ into a finite, and ultimately quite realisable, political enterprise. The book of Hosea, written in the late eighth century bce, is the oldest text of what one might term the ‘YHWH-alone-ist’ revolutionary movement. Much of Hebrew Scripture is, essentially, the campaign literature of the movement launched, in literary terms, by Hosea: most of the Pentateuch, all of the history books, and all the subsequent prophetic writings, until the time of Daniel. Of course, the movement projected its origins way back into the mythic past, the days of Moses. But there is no properly historical evidence for such a political project, aiming at the creation of a people unified around the exclusive worship of a single god, before Hosea. And it took

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the greater part of half a millennium, thereafter, for the job to be accomplished. At long last, though, it was done. By the time of the Maccabees the ‘YHWH-aloneist’ movement had prevailed: the uniqueness of the God of Israel was plain for all to see. The whole people affirmed it. Now, though, the religious thinking of Israel grew to be increasingly driven by a somewhat different problem, Namely, how to hold fast to the proper moral intransigence of the God of Israel, in resistance to the propaganda politics of alien, Gentile imperial regimes. First it was the Seleucid heirs of Alexander the Great, into whose empire Israel had been absorbed. The violent attempt of the Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV Epiphanes (174–63 bce) to suppress Jewish religious distinctiveness, and in particular his installation of a statue of Zeus in the Jerusalem temple, was a truly momentous provocation. It led to the successful Maccabean uprising and the establishment, once again, of what was at first a semi-autonomous, and later a fully autonomous, Jewish state. But then the Romans arrived: in 63 bce they conquered Jerusalem and decisively reduced the kings of Israel to vassal status. Apocalyptic thinking first appears in the book of Daniel, as a response to the cultural threat of Seleucid despotism. And after the Roman conquest it revives, by way of resistance to the new cultural threat from Rome. In both instances, it is essentially a polemic against the sheer glamour of the imperial overlords; a bid to dissuade the worshippers of YHWH from any sort of active collaboration with them. And so it confronts the propaganda of those overlords with a glorious, protracted ‘apocalyptic’ vision of their future overthrow by YHWH. With regard to the fundamental opposition between authentic liturgy and propaganda in general, both ‘YHWH-alone-ism’ and apocalypticism are, however, profoundly ambiguous phenomena. As such, they differ radically from the book of Amos. What Amos stands for is unequivocal: a straightforward onslaught on the customary propaganda of the rich and powerful; a ferocious testimony to the need for ever greater truth-as-openness, on the part of the privileged, towards the oppressed poor. Propaganda requires a coherent campaigning group, to make it; the book Amos knows of no such group. It does not, as propaganda thinking does, flatter its own constituency. It flatters no one. Nor does it, in the manner of propaganda, evoke manipulative threats, urging conformity to the will of the propagandists in order to escape disaster. For, the disasters which Amos sees coming are not presented, manipulatively, as contingent future possibilities, such as might be averted by repentance. They are said to be irreversibly decreed: this, indeed, is the whole point of the vision sequence in Amos 7:1–9, 8: 1–3. The sequence ends with the injunction, ‘Be silent!’ What is surely being silenced here is nothing other than the voice of the propagandist, the servant of would-be manipulative power, in any form. As I have said, one way of understanding ‘YHWH-alone-ism’ is to see it as a strategy for giving political coherence to the politically still quite inchoate intransigence of Amos’s testimony to truth-as-openness. So the ‘YHWH-aloneists’ build on the revelation, in Amos, of YHWH’s radical otherness from all other gods. ‘Given that otherness’, they argue, ‘let us campaign for the worship

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of YHWH to be absolutely separated from any worship of those others’. And apocalypticism, then, may be seen as representing a further development of the same project: dramatising, as it does, YHWH’s uniqueness in the most cosmopolitan of visionary terms. But political coherence, and consequent effectiveness, comes at a theological price. ‘YHWH-alone-ism’ forever risks corruption into a fresh form of propaganda; with Amos-like critique of ruling-class prejudice mutating into the merely partisan ideology of a puritanical, self-proclaimed spiritual elite group, flattering itself and demonising its foes. After which, apocalyptic thinking, in turn, risks corruption into mere propaganda for xenophobic nationalism. ‘Apocalypse’, indeed, means ‘revelation’; that is, ‘dissolving of ambiguity’. However, apocalyptic thought is actually a most ambiguous dissolving of ambiguity, inasmuch as all religious thinking is in fact prey to two quite different modes of ambiguity. Thus: (a) the ambiguity that apocalypticism shows dissolved is just the sort bound up with the ineradicable possibilities of insincerity or selfdeception. In the everyday human world, the struggle between that which serves the good cause and that which opposes it is endlessly muddled by the mixed motives at work within each individual human soul involved: egoistic impulses complicating, and compromising, one’s simple loyalty to the cause that one professes. Apocalyptic thinking therefore fixes its gaze on what lies beyond that muddle. It focuses on God’s warfare against the imperialistic ‘powers’, as such; altogether abstracted from the frailty of the human instruments employed. But then (b) there remains the further, quite different sort of ambiguity deriving from the endless capacity of resistant closed-mindedness to lay hold of, and distort, religious doctrines originally intended to affirm the claims of perfect truth-asopenness – slyly converting them into the opposite, a mere basis for propaganda. This may be done with perfect sincerity. It is by no means to be confused with the corruption of mere insincerity. And, the trouble is, apocalypticism does nothing at all to dissolve this second sort of theological ambiguity. Thus, apocalyptic thought evokes an epic struggle of ‘powers’ against ‘powers’. On one side: the demonic ‘powers’ at work in Seleucid or Roman imperialism. On the other side: the angelic ‘powers’, the hosts of YHWH. But what, if anything, differentiates these opposing ‘powers’ from one another, at a deeper level than the clash of merely partisan rival loyalties, such as one’s loyalty to one’s tribe or one’s football team, say? Apocalypticism gives no clear indication. It simply presupposes the opposition which it dramatises; it does little or nothing to explicate it, by showing its deeper, underlying ethical rationale. The demonic ‘powers’ exercise their seductive influence over human beings, essentially, by means of ruthless propaganda. How, though, do the political methods of the angelic ‘powers’ differ? Apocalyptic thought does not tell us. By projecting the struggle into heaven, it deflects attention away from that sort of question. So it does not suggest any critique of propaganda as such. For apocalyptic thought, seemingly, what is wrong with the propaganda of Seleucid or Roman imperialism is not that it is propagandist but only that it is propaganda serving the wrong side. Indeed, apocalyptic literature is essentially a preparation for counter-propaganda.

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Compare Christianity from this point of view. Just as apocalypticism originates as a mutation of ‘YHWH-alone-ism’, so Christianity may be said to originate as a mutation of apocalypticism; it carries forward the apocalyptic critique of the Roman imperial ethos, and of those who collaborated with it, now in quite a new way. Certainly, as contrasted with the older apocalyptic tradition, Christianity does not represent any guaranteed removal of theological ambiguity! But it does, I think, at any rate make possible a much clearer acknowledgement of it, at the deepest level. For, here God is revealed not simply through the agency of angels but, on the contrary, primarily in the not-at-all-angelic figure of a man nailed to a cross.5 Angels, after all, may take many forms, but when have they ever been known to suffer pain as humans do? The innermost potential-for-truth of the gospel consists in the way it transfigures the significance of a human individual’s pain. So, in the first instance, Christ’s pain has the same significance as the pain suffered by every victim of crucifixion. Again, his death is a propaganda-act, on the part of an imperial regime addicted to propaganda; potentially, at least, it may serve as a symbol for all the cruelty ever bound up with propaganda politics, in any form. But in this case, the crucified dissident is resurrected; the theatrically enacted verdict of the crucifier, the propaganda-message intrinsic to the very institution of the cross, is thereby theatrically reversed by God. The crucifier’s propaganda message is inverted, and, as the one who has been raised from death is recognised as God incarnate, no less, that inversion is received by the first Christians as the very essence of God’s truth. They hail as their Saviour one who is not only a martyred victim of propagandist closed-mindedness but also, in his previous teaching ministry as recorded in the gospels, a clear champion of anti-propagandist truthas-openness – a second Amos, so to speak. It is, in short, quite possible to read the story as a pointer towards the most radical overthrow of the propaganda-making ‘powers’, in their very nature as propaganda-makers. Later Christian practice, of course, repeatedly betrays this, as the Church itself has become a propagandamaking ‘power’. But the potential, at least, for a purely anti-propagandist reading remains. It is ineradicable, because primordial. St. Paul looks forward to the coming end of time, when Christ will deliver the kingdom to God the Father, after destroying every [rival] rule, every authority and power’ (I Corinthians 15: 24). For the Pauline author of Ephesians, in contrast, God the Father, having raised Christ from the dead, has already ‘seated him 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’ (Ephesians 1: 20–21). This supremacy may be pictured, fully revealed to all, at the end of time; but it is quite apparent even now to the eye of faith. And the author of Colossians (who may, indeed, be Paul himself, or another follower) backdates it to the very dawn of time: Compare Luther on the contrast between ‘theology of glory’ and ‘theology of the cross’; which in ‘What Is Truth?’ I have sought to extend into a fundamental contrast between the two modes of poetic communication, ‘pathos of glory’ and ‘pathos of shakenness’. I think it becomes much easier to draw this distinction once the apocalyptic tradition has been inflected by Christianity. 5

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A Neo-Hegelian Theology [Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him. (1: 15–16)

In other words: Christ, as the symbol of perfect truth-as-openness, represents the ultimate fullness of meaning; way beyond any other bid to give meaning to life, of the kind represented by the ‘powers’. They represent at best the limited truthpotential of particular political cultures; he represents the highest possible truth, which belongs to the order of nature itself. I think that what is crucially at issue in all three of these texts is the contrast between two quite different modes of evangelism. The evangelism that in principle derives from, and serves to convey, the true gospel of Christ is not just different in content from the secular, pagan evangelism inspired by the rival ‘thrones or dominions or rulers or powers’. It is of an altogether different order – precisely, inasmuch as it is not propagandistic. Not being, to any degree, motivated by a crude quest for power, it eschews manipulation, and is altogether oriented towards perfect truth-as-openness instead. But what, then, of propaganda methods being used by the advocates of a fundamentally good cause; let us say, in response to urgent need, and the likely unreceptiveness, otherwise, of the audience they are addressing? The author of Hebrews addresses this: In many and various ways God spoke of old to our fathers by the prophets; but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son … who, when he had made purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has obtained is more excellent than theirs. (1: 1–4)

The angels in question here are not the ‘principalities and powers’ at work in the pagan world, referred to in 1 Corinthians, Ephesians and Colossians. They are, on the contrary, the good angels of YHWH. But Christ is nonetheless decisively exalted above them, as well! Again, I think we need to read this as an implicit critique of the propagandist aspects of traditional ‘YHWH-alone-ism’, and of the apocalyptic tradition that grew from it. The truth of the old covenant may at many points be mediated angelically, that is, by propagandist modes of communication. But there can be no element of propaganda in christomorphic revelation as such. Christ is elevated above the angels: this means that his cause cannot be properly promoted as if it were angelic, a propaganda-message. On the contrary, its whole truth lies in its essential nature as anti-propaganda. Or, to say the same thing another way: Christ is not a brand. Compare, on the other hand, the book of Revelation. Here we have a text that belongs, absolutely, to the apocalyptic tradition, even whilst also being Christian. And, as a result, I think there is a distinct implicit tension between the Christological polemic of Hebrews and the picture of the heavenly Christ in Revelation. Thus, the author of Hebrews is at pains to emphasise the contrast

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between Christ and the angels: ‘It was not to angels that God subjected the world to come’ (2: 5). Rather, it was to one who was not ashamed to call us his brothers and sisters (2:11). The author cites a version of Isaiah 8: 18: ‘Behold, here am I and the children whom God has given me’ (2:13); hears this as the voice of Christ speaking; and comments, Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through [propagandistically exploited] fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage. For surely it was not with angels that he is concerned but with the descendants of Abraham. Therefore he had to be made like his brothers and sisters in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make expiation for the sins of the people. For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted. (2: 14–18)

Christ is only qualified to be ‘a merciful and faithful high priest’ by his having – quite unlike any angel – entered into our ‘weaknesses’, so that he may have compassion on those whom, as high priest, he represents (4: 15). He is the definitive representative of human individuality, in its highest calling: our true representative, above all in the sense that true, ‘merciful and faithful’ representation is surely the very purest possible antithesis to any sort of propagandist manipulation, even in God’s name. Here is a high priest who does not manipulate his people but, on the contrary, truly represents them, instead. In particular, he does not play upon their feelings of guilt or shame, propaganda-fashion, but simply ‘makes expiation’, mediating God’s love to them by becoming one of them. This is a theme which is completely and, indeed, very strikingly absent from Revelation! For, far from being a compassionate high-priestly representative of human individuality, the Christ of Revelation appears, on the contrary, to be as gloriously in-human as any of his angelic subordinates. He is described, in a phrase lifted from Daniel 7: 13, as ‘one like (homoion) a son of man’ (Revelation 1: 13): does this mean only like a human being, rather than actually one? At all events, his voice is described as resembling the inhuman sound of many waters; and his face, the inhuman brightness of the sun shining in full strength. In scarcely human hieratic pose, he holds seven stars in his hand, whilst a sharp sword floats from his mouth (1: 15–16). Later on, he reappears seated on a white cloud (14: 14–16). Here he is carrying a sickle with which he ‘reaps the earth’; immediately afterwards, however, another sickle-bearing figure appears, putting in the blade to gather clusters of grapes, ‘the vintage of the earth’, this latter figure being an angel. The first reaping is a beneficent gathering-in of the saved; the second is an act of terrible judgement, as the grapes are thrown into ‘the great wine press of the wrath of God’ (14: 17–20). But the act of Christ is otherwise no different in kind from the act of the angel. Next, we see him riding out to war on a white horse and slaughtering his enemies (19: 11–21). This battle scene echoes the earlier one (12: 7–9) in which the archangel Michael and his angelic troops overthrow the fallen angels, who

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serve the dragon, Satan; it is really just the same general sort of battle. Revelation does not contrast Christ with the angels, as Hebrews so emphatically does. Rather, it systematically situates Christ in an angelic context; it makes him seem very much like another Michael, only higher ranking. And then it also represents him, in a still more inhuman image, as ‘the Lamb’: a sacrificial animal with seven horns and seven eyes (5: 7). What else is this if not a propaganda ploy: the Church, as the ideal community of those who serve ‘the Lamb’, flattering itself, proclaiming its corporate lamb-like innocence – even as it dreams the most bloodthirsty dreams of revenge against its demonised enemies? Menacing them with that multitude of eyes, from which they cannot hide? In short: what we surely see in Revelation is the phantasmagorical, propagandist projection of a struggle between two opposing modes of propaganda, the persecutory propaganda of Empire versus the hate-filled, revenge-dreaming propaganda of the actually or at least potentially persecuted Church. What are we to make of this, in theological terms? The case of propaganda is surely analogous to that of war. At the heart of the gospel stands Jesus’s radical blessing upon peacemakers, his absolute repudiation of the spirit of revenge. My own, quite conventional view is that it may nevertheless sometimes be legitimate – albeit reluctantly, and always within closely specified limits – to speak of ‘just war’. Never, though: of ‘holy war’. Likewise, in certain cases one may, I think, acknowledge the possibility of ‘just propaganda’. But – ‘holy propaganda’? Never! There is much to be said in favour of liberal democracy, much at any rate to be said against all the currently viable alternatives; and liberal democracy depends upon the working of political parties, which are in essence propaganda-making enterprises. All modern societies largely depend upon such propaganda projects to bond them together, with some sense of common purpose. And, moreover, governments with more specific public health messages, or the like, to disseminate also need propaganda for that sort of purpose. These are certainly possible instances of ‘just propaganda’: quick-hit mass communication where nothing else will do. But what of propaganda deployed in the service of Christian evangelism? Altogether to rule out propaganda methods for this purpose would be to render most, if not all, truly effective mass-evangelism, as currently practised, impossible – do I really want that? And yet, the point is that propaganda methods can never convey the core truth of the gospel. They cannot convey even the faintest hint of it, such is its essential elusiveness, as a summons to the most searching sort of thoughtfulness. Such methods of communication may contribute to the building up of warm, supportive, loving church communities. And warm, supportive, loving communities of any kind – Christian, other-religious, or secular, alike – are obviously always a natural good. If propaganda-sustained communities are going to help lift people out of loneliness, out of anomie, out of drug addiction, out of gang-existence, out of criminality, then how can one simply despise the propaganda in question? The ‘Christian’ message tends to be mixed here with an implicit, if not explicit, appeal to national, or class loyalties; an appeal to consumer appetites, with the promise

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of putting one’s life in order, so that one may prosper. At best, it has the effect of softening the corporate aggression otherwise associated with those loyalties and moderating the intrinsic egoism of those appetites. Is this not eminently desirable? Of course it is! Nevertheless, the fact remains that propagandist Christian evangelism, insofar as it pretends to be communicating the core truth of the gospel, is entirely self-deluding. At that point, it becomes a lie. Can propagandist Christian evangelism still be justified, in view of the undeniable good it sometimes does? To the extent that its protagonists clearly and publicly acknowledge the theological limitations of their work: yes. But how clear about this are they ever, in fact, likely to be? Ultimately, I think that the only solution for the Church lies in a quite explicit division of labour. The Church does not need evangelists simply to recruit the greatest possible number of new members, in what might look like a spirit of mere corporate egoism, a bid to boost its own wealth and power. Rather, the cause of truth-as-openness ideally requires the creation of global conversation communities, as inclusive as possible of the widest possible range of different voices. We need evangelists to work at broadening the range of different viewpoints engaged in the great conversation of the world Church, and in that of each local church, just because the greater the diversity of voices well heard, the greater the truth-potential of the conversation, as an open sharing of diverse life experience. But this evangelistic work will, inevitably, forever run the risk of lapsing back towards propaganda, in an attempt to ease the access, to the Church, of new people. And hence the need, also, for theologians who are not in the first instance evangelists but who are, on the contrary, chiefly called to check the often over-eager ambition of evangelists, countering the evangelists’ natural tendency to oversimplify the gospel message, and soften its proper offence, both to the established authorities and to the unthinking herd, for the sake of propaganda effectiveness. As well as evangelists proclaiming the good news of the gospel, we also need theologians to insist on the essential paradox of this good news; its absolute difference in kind from anything else that we might call ‘good news’; its quality, even, as ‘bad news’; to the propaganda-addict as such, in a certain sense perhaps the worst of all news. If Christ were a brand, then the most successful church would, by definition, be the fastest growing. But Christ is not a brand. And the calling of the true theologian is surely always to reaffirm the real existential difficulty of the gospel, which evangelistic propaganda, in its hunger for quick growth, tends to ignore or deny. I just cannot see, in principle, how the spectacular ‘success’ of today’s new mega-churches could ever be compatible with genuine faithfulness to gospel-truth. We live in an age that has witnessed what the New Testament calls the ‘powers and principalities’, the competing agencies of propagandist agitation, go on the rampage, with greater technological sophistication than ever before. Where they have thrown off all inhibition, the result has been the nightmare politics of modern totalitarianism. This has surely been a revelatory experience. Never before has the fundamental point of true theology’s conscientious refusal of propaganda methods been made so vividly apparent.

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The Stupidity of Evil True theology, then, surely represents an absolute refusal to let one’s thinking, on any topic of morality or religion, be confined within the limits of what is communicable in propaganda terms. Church ideology, its simulacrum and mortal enemy, differs essentially inasmuch as it blunts that refusal. Hence, I would say that church ideology, even where it speaks with perfect orthodoxy and great sincerity in Christ’s name, actually compromises with the demonic. Not least, it tinges its understanding of divine love with all sorts of human hatred. And yet, it may well be objected, with some alarm: ‘How can you speak so of “the demonic”? Is not any such talk itself, intrinsically, a lapse into ancient patterns of hate-filled ideology?’ Modern liberal theology is born, not least, out of a deep revulsion against the corruption of Christian tradition by the Devil-obsessed corporate insanity that, at its most extreme, leads to the persecution, in Christ’s name, of ‘witches’. Friedrich Schleiermacher will by no means have been the first Christian thinker for whom the traditional notion of the Devil had become an embarrassment, but he is the great pioneer of a fully spelt-out, radical theological liberalism in this regard. Thus, in his systematic work of dogmatic theology, The Christian Faith (1820–21), Schleiermacher inserts two appendices to his discussion of the concept of ‘Creation’: one on angels, and one on the Devil.6 And in these appendices he is primarily concerned to relieve Christian believers of any positive duty of serious devotion to the angels, or serious anxiety in relation to the Devil, as such. So, he argues for the permissibility, at least, of regarding traditional talk about the angels and the Devil as nothing more than a venerable type of poetic conceit, harmless if not taken too seriously; as very much part of the incidental cultural trappings of New Testament thought, rather than in any sense belonging to the actual essence of the gospel. For, it does not seem to him that there is anything significantly new here, either in the teaching of Christ himself or in that of the apostles. But rather, he suggests, they have, for immediate tactical convenience, simply gone along with the folk-concepts of their world. And, furthermore, he proposes a doctrine of religious progress according to which the more civilised we become, the more firmly we take personal responsibility for whatever is evil in our lives, rather than blaming the external influence of the Devil; and the more confident we accordingly also become about the possibility of amendment, undaunted by any notion of the Devil’s continuing power. So that, in the end (he says), the conception of the Devil will hopefully ‘become obsolete’.7 Few have argued along these lines with anything like the admirable frankness of Schleiermacher. But in the world of academic theology, it does look very much as though his hope is, in actual fact, well on the way to being fulfilled. Generally much more insulated than other forms of Christian thought and practice from the liberalising influence of secular academia, the vast surge of Pentecostalism does, 6 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, English translation edited by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928), pp. 156–70. 7 Ibid, pp. 168–9.

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of course, represent a pretty major counter-current. However, reference to the Devil and to the demonic has, on the whole, been quite uniformly recessive in all forms of mainline, non-Pentecostal Protestantism, from the Enlightenment period onwards. It has faded more slowly from Roman Catholic theology. And yet faded it nevertheless has, also there. The Vatican’s deposition of Archbishop Milingo from the see of Lusaka in 1982, for instance, was motivated simply by embarrassment at Milingo’s uninhibited and, in its own terms, very successful showman-ministry, involving a constant flow of exorcisms, dramatic conversations with demons, and witchcraft rhetoric, not only in Zambia but also in Italy. It is striking to observe just how scandalous this had by now become, even in that highly conservative cultural milieu.8 And yes, I think that there are two things fundamentally wrong with the traditional notion of the Devil which Schleiermacher repudiates. First, (a) it tends to be all too ‘mythological’, in Bultmann’s derogatory sense of that term. To be sure, not all talk of ‘the demonic’ need be of this kind. But certainly the imperative to ‘demythologise’ must rule out any practice of exorcism offered in rivalry to the therapies of medical science. And again: true theology, if it is to use such language at all, must surely be quite explicit about its non-explanatory nature. There needs to be absolute clarity that ‘the demonic’ is not a category properly deployed for purposes of explanation. It is not intended to help explain any otherwise mysterious natural phenomena. But its true application, and analysis, is simply a demystifying moral verdict on acts of self-mystifying manipulative power: it is just such mystification which is ‘demonic’. The traditional notion goes wrong, first of all, to the extent that it muddles this by ‘mythologising’ it. In addition to which, (b) it further tends, disastrously, to glamourise evil. As regards the glamourisation of evil – as ‘the occult’ – I actually have a little anecdote to tell here, by way of illustration. This happened when I was working as a parish priest in an area on the edge of Leeds. There, late one Sunday evening, my doorbell rang. It was a young woman pushing a baby in a pram; clearly, she was in a state of considerable distress. Would I please come quickly, and exorcise her house, she begged me. That afternoon she and some others had been playing with an Ouija board. They had received a message, purporting to come from Satan himself: a threat that, before midnight, someone would be killed in that house. I went with her to the house, part of a battered-looking block of maisonettes. As I had been trained to do, I said a prayer over a bowl of water and went round sprinkling each of the rooms with it. I said I would sit with her until midnight, to Archbishop Milingo naturally saw this as evidence of demonic influence at work within the Vatican. Some years later, in 2001, he teamed up with Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church and was himself married to a Korean woman, Maria Sung, in one of the mass wedding ceremonies which the Unification Church organises. When the Roman authorities, soon afterwards, persuaded him to disown her, she staged a hunger strike and a dramatic protest action outside St. Peter’s in Rome. Eventually, in 2006 he founded a campaigning group, ‘Married Priests Now’; rejoined his wife; consecrated four married American men as bishops – and was, as a result, excommunicated by the pope. 8

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make sure that nothing bad would happen. She went out into the kitchen, to make me a cup of tea – when, all of a sudden, there was a thud, and three people burst in through the front door. There were two young men and a woman. They were, it seemed, rather taken aback to encounter me. These, though, were the others who had earlier participated in the Ouija board session. And one of the men, who appeared to be a somewhat jumpy, noisy individual, immediately started to tell me all about it. The second man meanwhile maintained a heavy silence, watching me – warily, I thought; while the woman seemed abstracted. There had, according to the noisy man, been some quite dramatic goings-on when Satan spoke to them through the Ouija board. “It was like some force, or some fucking spirit, like, picked me up and threw me, you know, right across the room. I’m telling you, it threw me – do you see? – from just about here to right over there. Yeah? So, now, what the fuck do you think of that?” Well, I said, the experience did sound pretty grim, but all the same I was not necessarily convinced that it was the Devil’s doing. He was a bit riled by this. “Sure”, he said, “I don’t fucking have to believe in such things. And really, to be honest like, I never have, much. Not me. But you – if you don’t believe in them, a vicar like you – yeah, well, fuck me, you might just as well be a fucking dustman!” The other man grinned, as we went on to discuss the matter. At length, the clock on the mantelpiece ticked round towards midnight. Once we had passed Satan’s deadline, I got up and took my leave. On the other side of the road I saw the Ouija board lying in a patch of grass, beneath a garden wall, where it had been hurled out earlier. Just a week or two later the police were at my door. I was required as a witness, to give my account of that evening, in court. They had arrested the silent one of the two men – I will call him ‘M’ – on a charge of imprisoning and violently mistreating the second of the two women. And my evidence was required in order to corroborate her credibility as a witness, with regard to that day. At the eventual trial M was found guilty. Apparently, he loved to terrorise people, presenting himself as a man in league with Satan, possessed of supernatural powers. The episode with the Ouija board was, in fact, just the sort of stunt he regularly went in for. I was also told that, with reference to the evening when I met him, he said there indeed very nearly had been a murder. For, he had felt a powerful, Satanic urge to kill ‘that little vicar’. When he was at length released at the end of his time in prison, the police again called on me, to warn me. Since I had been a witness against him, they felt I ought to know he was out. But, in the event, he went straight down to Bournemouth – where he tied up, raped, and murdered a barmaid, the girlfriend of one of his fellow prisoners. During my conversation with M’s friend, as the clock on the mantelpiece ticked, I had professed a good deal of scepticism about Satan. Partly I did so out of a principled modernist objection to anti-scientific ‘mythology’ as such. But first and foremost, I was simply trying to cool down the overheated atmosphere which – as it later turned out – M had been working to stoke up. We should, indeed, surely be very suspicious, not only of any thinking, like M’s, which

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expresses a fascinated attraction to ‘the occult’, that is, glamourised evil but also, and just as much, of any thinking which puts its Christian devotees into the role of embattled antagonists of ‘the occult’. Before appearing as witness in M’s trial I was interviewed by a police officer who had, I felt, watched rather too many horror movies, a bit uncritically. This officer was determined that I should say how spooked I had been by the whole atmosphere, how I had felt cold shivers running up my spine, and so forth. But no, I said. In retrospect, it was clear that I should have been a good deal more anxious than I actually was. At the time, though, I was acting as a pastor, seeking to dispel the hysteria of those I was with; and had been blithely naïve, quite unaware of the real menace of M. The officer declined to write this down. He showed me a sinister object they had found in M’s flat. It was a metal fleur-de-lis. My guess, I said, was that it had once been on top of a boy scouts’ flagpole. It was sad to see his dawning disappointment: such a provenance scarcely fitted the horror-movie scenario he had imagined. Why, indeed, do people so want to believe in ‘the occult’? I suppose that this sort of belief always belongs to ego-boosting fantasies of power. In M’s case these were terroristic fantasies, of harnessing the hidden power of evil. The police officer, I guess, was just excited by the prospect that he might play a role in overpowering the terrific magic power to which M laid claim. And so too, the sense of power enjoyed by enthusiastic Christian exorcists, and witch-hunters, is all the greater, the more magic potency they attribute to the terrors they are seen to face down. Confronted with the feverish turmoil in the maisonette, I had been trying to cool things down. However, I am by no means one who is opposed to all warmth of religious passion. On the contrary, as a Christian theologian, I rejoice in the singular capacity of the ‘Abrahamic’ religious traditions, in general, to express and promote a positively fiery passion for perfect truth-as-openness. This is, of course, bound up with those traditions’ readiness to employ the very boldest sort of person-analogy in matters of religion: analogy linking our experience not only of the divine but also of that which most lamentably opposes the divine, to our experience of passionate emotional engagement with other human persons. I am not one of those who think that the solution to the problems posed by bad religion is simply to depersonalise the way we speak about good and evil; to put a taboo on the concept of the Devil or, likewise, on any talk of God in personal terms just so as to lower the emotional temperature. That view seems to me to represent a basic failure to discriminate. Clearly, the higher the temperature of religious thought and practice, the greater the risks of fanaticism. Those other religious traditions which operate with an impersonal notion of the sacred, and of the evil which opposes it, do thereby reduce those risks. However, they reduce it at a cost, a diminution of poetic power. Again, to put it in theistic terms: every act of divine self-revelation is a gamble on the part of God. Whether the risks involved are ultimately worth it, we will never be in a position to tell; all that theology can hope to do is delineate the gamble as accurately as possible. But where the gamble is lost, the problem does not necessarily lie in the use of temperature-raising religious person-analogy as such. Rather, it lies in the corruption of such analogy by the sort of impulses

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on which religious propaganda plays, as opposed to authentic liturgy. And where the gamble is won, the temperature-raising analogy is vindicated by such impulses being overcome. The propaganda-notion of the Devil, belonging to the thought-world of ‘the occult’, is a manipulative escalation of terror, directly inimical to any real practice of truth-as-openness. For, the more terrified one is, the more difficult it obviously becomes to respond with genuine open-mindedness to those one sees as representing the terror. This is the notion that, taken to its ultimate extreme, informs the (itself demonic) practice of witch-hunting. Yet, compare the doctrine of the Pauline epistles: where the Devil is placed, crucially, in relationship to the ‘powers’. That relationship is ambivalent, not all angels being fallen. Propagandathinking about evil, insofar as it is a simple triggering of hatreds, tends to see it as sheer. But the Pauline doctrine is not of this kind. On the contrary: the ‘powers’ are the larger agencies whose individual human agents are the political rulers of the world. Sometimes, of course, these rulers persecute the Church, and in that context the ‘powers’ do, indeed, appear to be, quite straightforwardly, the hosts of Satan; as for example in Ephesians 6: 11–12: Put on the whole armour of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places …

However, outside that context, for Paul and his followers the ‘powers’ are by no means always to be regarded as ‘hosts of wickedness’. Where the normality envisaged in Romans 13 prevails, and their human agents have no other ambition than just to uphold civilised law and order, they are, after all, doing no more than fulfil a God-given ordinance.9 Here, indeed, they are agencies of ‘just propaganda’. The Satanic potential of the ‘powers’ only emerges to the extent that, inspired by hubris, they seek to over-reach their God-given remit and usurp what is not theirs. And what is our proper response to this spectacle? Surely, it is not so much terror, as horrified pity. Again, in present-day terminology one might say that the ‘powers’ are first and foremost propaganda-making agencies, as such; and that propaganda becomes ‘demonic’ only when, informed by hubris, it claims directly to represent the very highest truth, already attained and in no way improvable, so justifying the absolute repression of any alternative worldview. For Christian theology, crucifixion is Wesley Carr indeed seeks to argue that in the original Pauline conception, the ‘powers’ were always essentially good – so, for instance, he sees Ephesians 6: 12, which quite explicitly suggests otherwise, as a later interpolation into the text. It was largely the provocation of this argument that then stimulated Walter Wink’s subsequent work; Wink reads the texts quite differently. (See note 1 above.) Carr’s main exposition of his case is in the book Angels and Principalities: The Background, Meaning, and Development of the Pauline Phrase “Hai Archai kai hai Exousiai” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 9

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the paradigmatic act of such hubris. Yet, the same hubris is also what comes to its ultimate extreme in the propaganda of modern totalitarian regimes. Properly understood, to say that hubristic propaganda is ‘of the Devil’ is not a panicresponse of terror – for that would merely be to collude with it! After all, it likes to evoke terror, as the necessary flip-side to its flattery and seductive promises. But rather, to speak in this way is to grieve at the, in essence, pitiable prospect of individuals and whole societies possessed by impulses profoundly inimical to their own best interests. The ideology of ‘the occult’, inasmuch as it merely seeks to stress what it sees as the terrifying latent power belonging to evil, provides no real justification for its own use of person-analogy in this regard. For, there is, after all, also terrifying power in volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and plagues; quite im-personal forces. But properly to speak of demonic propaganda as such is, I would argue, to speak of the stupidity of evil – as only persons can be stupid. That is to say: persons caught up into, and made part of, a stupid corporate personhood informing the crowd around them. Whereas the crucified Christ shows forth the indwelling divine personhood of God, his crucifiers represent all those who have been possessed by the demonic corporate personhood of stupid ‘principalities and powers’. The Devil, their master, truly is a mighty evangelist: promising fulfilment in every kind of unrepentant moral stupidity. I think here, for instance, of Hugh Latimer’s great Sermon of the Plough, delivered at St. Paul’s Cross in London on 18 January 1548. In this sermon Latimer, ardent Protestant advocate of reform as he was, denounces the worldliness, the frequent absenteeism, the general lazy ineffectiveness of the typical unreformed bishop. Then he asks what he himself calls ‘a strange question’: Who is the most diligentest bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing his office? I can tell,

says he, for I know him who it is; I know him well. But now I think I see you listening and hearkening that I should name him. There is one that passeth all the other, and is the most diligent prelate and preacher in all England. And will you know who it is?

(One may picture the crowd now uncertain and all agog …) I will tell you: it is the Devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all other; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied; he is ever in his parish; he keepeth residence at all times; ye shall never find him out of the way, call for him when ye will he is ever home; the diligentest preacher in all the realm; he is ever at his plough; to devise as many ways as can be to deface and obscure God’s glory.10 10 Hugh Latimer, Sermons (London: J.M. Dent & Co., Everyman Library, 1906), pp. 54–71. My thanks to Michael Schmidt for drawing my attention to this text.

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In the context of the 1540s, Latimer associates the Devil’s preaching with the outward forms of late medieval piety, all the various practices, endorsed by church propaganda, which the Protestant Reformers wanted to abolish. Nowadays, one would have different critical priorities. But the basic insight, nonetheless, remains. The Devil, essentially revealed in the scenario of the crucifixion, is first and foremost a mighty evangelist; always, whatever the context, he urges simple conformity to some sort of shared closed-mindedness. He is a great salesman, selling ever larger doses of moral anaesthesia, emotional stupidity. Indeed, the evangelism of demonic propaganda operates on several levels. Thus, in the first place: such propaganda offers peace of mind to the thoughtlessly conformist; indicating the prescribed channels for their conformism. This initial level is just what is captured in Václav Havel’s parable of the greengrocer, back in 1970s Czechoslovakia.11 In the midst of his onions and carrots the greengrocer places a propaganda slogan, ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He does not do so on his own initiative; the slogan was delivered along with the onions and carrots from the enterprise headquarters. But, ‘Why not?’ he thinks. ‘What’s wrong with the workers of the world uniting?’ And, after all, nobody will notice the slogan. His superiors will notice if it is not there; then he will be in trouble. For the shoppers and passers-by, however, it simply becomes an inconspicuous part of their everyday propaganda-saturated environment. Underneath its surface meaning, the slogan’s real message is addressed to the authorities. It says, ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient’. And it becomes part of a vast murmur of voices all saying the same thing, each reinforcing the other. In the ‘post-totalitarian’, but still utterly repressive, environment of a society like that of 1970s Czechoslovakia the dynamic at work is especially obvious. Just as in the case of the Christian gospel story, a cruel context sheds harsh light on the universal human condition. Yet, at least to some extent, there are analogous processes at work wherever the technology of mass-media communication exists, to shape the behaviour of human herds. In Pauline terms: here, surely, we see the perennial ‘powers’ at work – with unprecedented means at their disposal. At the same time, demonic propaganda also provides a necessary jargon for those who are driven by ambition to do great evil. Hannah Arendt’s famous commentary on the trial of Adolf Eichmann classically illustrates this all-toowidespread phenomenon. And the furious controversy that her Eichmann in Jerusalem provoked very vividly illustrates the difficulty of properly registering it. The book bears the sub-title ‘A Report on the Banality of Evil’.12 Eichmann had, of course, been one of the chief administrators of the Holocaust and had escaped to Argentina after the War, before being captured by Israeli agents in 1960 and smuggled back to Israel, to be put on trial. Arendt, attending the trial, observed a man who was not only extremely evil but also extraordinarily banal, Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978), English translation by P. Wilson; in the English language collection of Havel’s writings, Living in Truth, edited by Jan Vladislav (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), Sections III, VI, VII. 12 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (London: Penguin Classics, 2006). 11

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in the sense of having a quite exceptional inability to think – other, that is, than in crass propaganda-slogans and clichés – even about what were, in themselves, the most intensely thought-provoking life-experiences. In that sense, she remarks, he really did not know what he was doing. Functionally clever, he appeared to have no moral intelligence at all. One is immediately reminded of Jesus’s prayer for his crucifiers, ‘Father forgive them; for they know not what they do’ (Luke 23: 34). However, Arendt’s book ignited a wildfire of rage.13 Partly, this was to do with her critique of the Israeli trial-process, for its somewhat melodramatic, indeed propagandistic, staging; partly, also, it was provoked by her harsh historical judgement on the Jewish communal authorities in Nazi-occupied territories, who had attempted to protect their people by collaborating with the enemy.14 And her critics, as well, were able to pick upon a number of detailed factual errors in her account. But the core issue had to do with her polemical insistence on the sheer banality of the man on trial. To many of her readers, it seemed that she was making excuses for Eichmann, belittling his moral responsibility. They wanted an adequate object of hatred. But her argument in the spirit of Luke 23: 34, that Eichmann was actually a moral nobody, was intended to belittle him in that role. Arendt herself became an object of hatred, perceived as cold and arrogant. The whole debate became extremely ugly. Reflecting upon it now, half a century later, the conclusion I would draw is that the proper object of hatred here was not the morally vacuous individual Adolf Eichmann, and by no means Hannah Arendt, either, for the undeniably tactless way in which she said this. Rather, it was just the demonic principle as such, by which the despicable yet hapless Eichmann and the whole Nazi world was possessed. Thirdly: the principle at work in demonic propaganda is also quite readily able to come to a live-and-let-live accommodation with the not-at-all propagandistic thought and art of gifted public figures who remain politically quite opportunistic or, perhaps, in a spirit of creative narcissism, resolutely apolitical. Thomas Mann, for instance, addresses this in his great novel Doctor Faustus, set in the first half of the twentieth century.15 Thus, the central character of this novel, Adrian Leverkühn, is a pioneering composer. A latter-day Faust, he is (in some sense) seen as having sold his soul to the Devil in return for musical inspiration: ‘creative narcissism’ seems an apt term for his essential motivation in so doing. He is no Nazi. The reader is drawn towards him in a mix of admiration and sympathetic horror.16 Yet, Mann 13 See Michael Ezra, ‘The Eichmann Polemics: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics’, in Democratiya 9 (Summer 2007), pp. 141—165. 14 Cf. Steve Sem-Sandberg’s novel, on the particular case of the ghetto at Łódź: The Emperor of Lies, English translation by Sarah Death (London: Faber and Faber, 2011). 15 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, English translation by H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). The German original was first published in 1947. 16 ‘The demonic in Doctor Faustus is at once terrible and terribly, tenderly lovable’: Ewan Fernie, The Demonic: Literature and Experience (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 141. (Fernie’s brilliant work is a wide-ranging survey of the general topic indicated by its title; also, indeed, featuring a warmly affirmative ‘diabolical reading of Hegel’, in Chapter 14.)

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nevertheless quite clearly intends us to see the Devil with whom Leverkühn deals as close kin to the demons which had possessed Nazi Germany. There was, after all, no lack of sophisticated intellectual fellow-travellers with, or at least passive accepters of, the propaganda movements that created and sustained early twentiethcentury totalitarianism. Mann himself, although he became, from the early 1920s onwards, a leading defender of liberal democratic values in the Weimar Republic and hence a fierce critic of emergent Nazism, had previously (in 1918) published an essay, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, upholding the German national cause in the First World War. This was an elegant work, very much of high-culture intellectual collusion with the older German-nationalist propaganda ideology, out of which the Nazi variant was to emerge.17 Doctor Faustus, it seems, partly arises out of Mann’s repenting his own past. And Leverkühn’s story also directly echoes that of Nietzsche, another obvious example of bold intellectuality at least to some extent compromised by the vulgar company it keeps. Nietzsche is invoked as a key authority in Mann’s earlier Reflections. The teasing Devil whom Leverkühn encounters keeps changing appearance: from gangster to learned scholar, to conventional demon, and then back to gangster again.18 Mann is reflecting here on the culturally multi-layered nature of the prodigious evil that had engulfed his world. Let us return, now, to Schleiermacher. He, for his part, is plainly embarrassed by traditional talk of angels, and of the Devil. Because it is there in the New Testament, he cannot, as an orthodox theologian, altogether repudiate it; nevertheless, it troubles him, how readily it lends itself to superstitious distortion. Yet, there is a great gap in Schleiermacher’s work, just at the point where one might look for some general account of how gospel truth overthrows the propaganda spirit as such. For, Schleiermacher was, as a matter of fact, himself rather prone to sympathise with certain sorts of propaganda, namely, the enthusiastic new insurgent Germannationalist propaganda-ideology of his day, which had been stirred up in reaction to the trauma of the Napoleonic Wars. He is not guilty of the gross antisemitism of some of its other protagonists, Fichte, Arndt, Jahn, or Fries. (Although dismissive of Judaism as a religion, Schleiermacher was not hostile to Jews as citizens.19) Yet, he was very clearly the political ally of such men, otherwise. Indeed, it was this, above all, which led to his rather strained relationship with his colleague at the University of Berlin, Hegel – who was, by contrast, utterly allergic to such ideology. Schleiermacher, in consequence, lacks any impulse creatively to re-engage with the biblical doctrine regarding the ‘powers’; the superstitious distortion of which he has so candidly criticised. He has seemingly lost all sense of its real, original truth-potential, beyond that distortion. Mann, ‘Reflections of an Unpolitical Man’, English translation in Joseph W. Angell, ed., The Thomas Mann Reader (New York: Knopf, 1950). 18 Doctor Faustus, Chapter 25. 19 See Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 61–76. 17

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A Church That Does Not Boast Church ideology may share with true theology the same terminology, the same symbolism, the same rules of doctrinal orthodoxy. It may be equally scholarly and sophisticated. They are flowers growing in the same hedgerow and are very easily confused at first sight. And yet, they represent opposite principles of love. For, again, what I am calling ‘church ideology’ sets out quite simply to define and vindicate certain norms of behaviour, said to be the markers of authentic Christianity, in the sense that ‘norms’ are what constitute the set-apart internal conformity of a particular moral community. The whole moral purpose of such ideology, and of its rituals, is to reinforce the norms of the Church, or the particular movement within the Church, which it serves. And that is all. But true theology is different, in that it has another aim. Of course, it depends upon the norm-constituted community which church ideology, straightforwardly, serves. Only it does so in the way that fire depends upon fuel. Whereas church ideology heaps up ecclesial norms, true theology ignites them, in order to light up the world. In Vincent Lloyd’s teasing formulation, the liturgy towards which true theology works would, at the deepest level of its inspiration, be ‘a practice without norms’.20 It may follow strict procedural rules, but these rules are nothing other than a strategy for enabling its participants’ imaginative transcendence of mere norm-governed life. Unlike church ideology, which is typically preoccupied with reinforcing the set-apart, distinctive ‘correctness’ of its own community’s official standpoint, and engaging in polemical debates to uphold it, true theology thus seeks, in contrast, to open up genuine, honest, and respectful conversation, bridging every sort of conversation-inhibiting difference. How, indeed, can God ever be heard by the church ideologist to say anything truly new? Such a thinker approaches the data of Holy Scripture and church tradition intent on finding proof-texts, authoritative precedents, weighty allies, in the struggle to uphold a certain set of norms which are, for the most part, already predetermined. To be sure, the true theologian is also prejudiced. However, the prejudice of the true theologian is, very differently, a prejudice against easy and self-serving answers as such; therefore, a prejudice against all that savours of corporate conceit; a prejudice, precisely, against any closure – to God’s agapeic infinitude. Hence, true theology and church ideology represent two quite different attitudes to propaganda, in general. Church ideology has the effect of converting the gospel into material well suited for propagandist diffusion, norms being just the sort of thing that propaganda may promote. But true theology is focused on the gospel’s original logic: inasmuch as it points towards absolute release from propaganda thinking in any form. Again, by no means all simple persuasive talk is ‘propaganda’ in the sense intended here. I repeat: what is distinctive about propaganda is its character as the work of a gang, addressing a herd. No matter how benevolent it may be – and it may, after all, be entirely benevolent – propaganda is always the essentially 20 Vincent Lloyd, The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp. 117, 119.

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manipulative activity of a gang; a strategy designed to help consolidate the herd, by exciting and agitating it. At its most spectacularly effective, and least benevolent, propaganda has the effect of fusing the herd into a mob, the rampaging crowds of Kristallnacht and the like. The Christian gospel, however, is the story of a single individual set apart from the herd, and decisively at odds with its natural herd-inertia, who dies at the hands of a gang, which has whipped up a mob to demand the death. Moreover, the death that he dies is itself the most dramatic propaganda act; the signature-act, one might say, of a singularly ambitious and ruthless propaganda-regime. This individual, the crucified dissident, is seen to be raised from the dead; dramatically vindicated by God against the mob, the gang, the herd; uniquely lifted out of the death-dealing domain of their propaganda co-ordinated interplay. Here, in principle, we have a symbolic pointer towards that which most fundamentally transcends the scope of any propaganda project, whatsoever. And then the resurrected one is recognised as God incarnate. The individual once condemned, by the propagandist powers, to death on the cross will come, in the final reckoning, to be our judge. That is to say: the truth inherent in this ultimate anti-propaganda symbol, resurrection-of-the-crucified, is revealed to be, of all truths, absolutely the most sacred. Consider how St. Paul pictures the last judgement. Writing to the church at Thessalonica, he is primarily concerned to insist on the inclusion of the already dead, alongside the living, in this event. For, as the judgement implicit in the resurrection of the crucified, it is not just a matter of God passing verdict on people’s private lives, looked at in atomistic abstraction from their participation in society at large. It is not, therefore, simply a judgement on that which has ended when an individual dies; a moment through which the dead might be said already to have passed, at the point of their dying. Rather, it is also a judgement on whole world-historical phenomena; on the broader moral cultures within which our individual lives are encompassed. Thus, here, not least, we have God’s final confrontation with the workings of the propaganda-making powers. It is, first and foremost, the placing of these ephemera into the context of ultimate truth, the way things look when viewed in the light of eternity. Paul, indeed, conjures up a very simple image for this. In his words: 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)

Why ‘in the air’? Surely, it is because the air, the sky in all its vaulting remoteness, represents everything that forever eludes the control of the propagandist powers. These powers may dominate the earth and everything upon it. But the vastness of the sky is just that element of our everyday experience which is, by its very nature, beyond the scope of their dominance. This is why the earthly story of Jesus symbolically ends with the image of his ‘ascension’. And Paul’s notion of

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the last judgement also follows the same symbolic rationale. For us to be opened up to ultimate moral reality requires, first of all, that we be lifted up, as it were, decisively above the entire arena of manipulative propaganda-ideology. Hence, likewise, the revelatory potential of desert landscapes: the sort of places that draw contemplative solitaries, far from either gang or herd.21 Only, it is the sky which most immediately and universally speaks of such liberation.22 No religious symbolism is immune from corruption. In the Left Behind series of novels, which has been such an extraordinary publishing success, above all in the United States, over recent years, the Pauline imagery of ‘rapture’ here has, of course, itself been incorporated into a grotesque propaganda ideology: absurdly literalised, infused with extravagant violence, rendered into a most vivid channel for the resentment-fantasies of the respectable devout.23 But the original Pauline text, in itself, actually represents the exact opposite. Granted, the Left Behind fantasy has not come out of nowhere. There is a long tradition of militant church ideology behind it. The most immediate influence is that of Hal Lindsey’s bestseller The Late, Great Planet Earth, dating from 1970. Lindsey was re-energising the ‘rapture’-ideology of John Nelson Darby (1800–82), the great Anglo-Irish patriarch of the Plymouth Brethren. Darby stands in a tradition largely stemming from seventeenth-century American Puritanism. And that tradition, in turn, was simply reviving the early-church apocalypticism of the book of Revelation. There are three constituent elements in the most aggressive sort of propaganda. First, it charms its audience, draws them in with alluring promises. Then, it sets out to bond them together by playing on their fears and hatreds, dehumanising and lampooning their common enemies. And thirdly, it seeks to enthuse them with the assurance of ultimate victory, their enemies overthrown and punished, everything at length made right. The book of Revelation elaborates on the simple Pauline notion of the day of judgement in all three of these ways. To charm its readers, it treats them to visions of magnificent ritual in the throne room of the Almighty and flashes the tremendous bling of the Heavenly Jerusalem before their eyes. As for the forces of the enemy: these are represented by a series of utterly monstrous figures. Satan is a seven-headed, ten-horned dragon. Rome, in various aspects, 21 See Belden C. Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring Desert and Mountain Spirituality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 22 Compare, however, the reference in Ephesians 2: 2 to ‘the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient’. Here, by contrast, there is no upwards thrust; only, it seems, the horizontal blowing of a noxious wind. 23 Sixteen novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, first published 1995–2007. Whilst they have never caught on at all in Europe, such has been their popularity in America that Jerry Falwell, for instance, once declared, with specific reference to the first of the series: ‘In terms of its impact on Christianity, it’s probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible’! (Quoted in David van Biema et al., ‘The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America’, Time Magazine, January 2005.) See Glenn Shuck, Marks of the Beast: The Left Behind Novels and the Struggle for Evangelical Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

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is likewise a seven-headed, ten-horned beast; also a second beast, viceroy to the first; and the Whore of Babylon. After many horrors, the beast turns upon the whore, and burns her. Then, however, he is himself consigned to a lake of fire and brimstone, and the dragon with him. Of the Heavenly Jerusalem, on the other hand, we are told that nothing unclean shall enter it, nor anyone who practices abomination or falsehood, but only those who are written in the Lamb’s book of life. (21: 27)

Coming after so much violence, is there not something really quite sinister about this purity? To me, it sounds ominously like the sort of propaganda-defined purity that totalitarian regimes dream of, and seek to implement with their ‘purges’. Is it right that we should continue to treat the book of Revelation as a part of Holy Scripture and to say ‘This is the word of the Lord’ after it is read in the liturgy? Yes, I think it is. For, what we have here is a text that is absolutely crucial for our understanding of the historic moment when Christian gospel-truth originally burst into the world. None of the New Testament texts bears unequivocal testimony to that irruption. The authority of these texts lies simply in their closeness to the event itself; but none is altogether clear in distinguishing true theology from church ideology. Nowhere more vividly than in the book of Revelation do we get to see what very soon happened to the original gospel message as a result of the early Church’s traumatic experience of the world’s hostility. In order to survive under the sort of psychological pressure the early Christians were regularly exposed to, a community tends to become fanatical. It is, after all, only natural that it should. What we encounter in Revelation is the ‘word of the Lord’ urgently appealing to the Christians of that early period to beware of assimilating into the pagan world around them. Had they assimilated, it is true that the gospel heritage with which they were entrusted would scarcely have survived. Let us acknowledge, then, the need for such an appeal. But let us, nevertheless, also be quite clear: in this book we find the ‘word of the Lord’ already heavily distorted by a spirit of fanaticism which, although perfectly understandable, is in itself quite inimical to the proper openness of gospel truth. The ‘word of the Lord’ is a term for that with which true Christian theology, in its character as a response to historic revelation, most fundamentally and most respectfully has to reckon. Most fundamentally and most respectfully: that is to say, at the very least, with the utmost compassion. Other books of the New Testament demand theological admiration. In the case of the book of Revelation, what is required is, far rather, surely, sheer compassion – for the mental anguish of the whole community to which it is in the first instance addressed, the anguish that it seeks to account for and interpret. No other text bears such troubling witness to the primal trauma of Christian history. This is what constitutes its authority. Here for the first time we see the primordial antipropagandist truth of the Christian gospel decisively caught up into, and distorted by, a new propaganda ideology, that of the Church itself; a fanatical, vindictive propagandist counterblast to the bully-propaganda of the Roman authorities. No doubt, in the circumstances, it was inevitable. Yet, it remains a moment of

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great sadness. And all the more so, as this text is the very oldest clear marker of a confusion by which, to this day, the Church’s thinking remains bedevilled. For, the primal trauma still grips us. So formative was it, for the Church in its earliest period, that even after almost two millennia, its after-effects still persist, inscribed, as it were, amongst our most primitive institutional instincts. It still grips us. Yes – but maybe not forever! That, after all, is the great hope with which I read Revelation. I read it hoping that now, as never before, we may finally begin to see the sadness here for what it is, and so try and work our way, as Christians, free. How come? What I think is emerging, now, is the possibility – by no means yet the actual achievement, but at least the possibility – of a whole new type of Church, namely, the ideal of the truly honest Church, which has once and for all put aside the propagandist impulse. Thus, what will it take in principle for the elementary distinction between true theology and its counterfeit, mere church ideology, to become widely recognised? The church community to which the book of Revelation is addressed, and by which it was initially treasured, responded to the experience of being harassed, or even persecuted, with a fierce determination to grow as fast as possible, at all costs to make more converts, in order to defeat the enemy. To do so it needed a simple propaganda message, for instant appeal to the widest possible public. And the violence of the struggle also embittered it, rendered it resolutely closed to any criticism – even the best reasoned – from outside. It is just these two factors that generate church ideology: firstly, the alltoo-urgent impatience of young, thrusting new churches to grow, in whatever way is most likely to speed the process; and secondly, the prickliness of embattled church institutions, instinctively hostile to whatever they do not dominate. The new opportunity, then, that I discern materialises, above all, in old, wellestablished church cultures, no longer entirely given over to the mere requirements of growth; cultures where, or at any rate to the extent that, the traditional impulses of corporate lust for domination, which once used to fuel religious warfare, have, at long last, also been extinguished. For, look: this is happening! In the original heartlands of Western Christendom, here in Europe, the older churches keep on shrinking. It is surely God who is shrinking them – so as to redeem them from their old lust for domination. They were, in their heyday, collectively, just too big, too powerful in worldly terms. Their size and their power had corrupted them. Membership within them tended all too often to function as little more than an indicator of basic social respectability; their leaders tended to be quite serious careerists. As they now shrink (thank God), respectability migrates from them, and the enticements to careerism dwindle. One possible response to this is, of course, panic; leading to renewed enthusiasm for church-ideological propaganda, in the hope of reversing the process. Another is just to drift: adapt to the ways of the secular world, accommodate customary church life to the requirements of the ‘heritage industry’, and operate it essentially as a club, catering to a particular sort of leisure-time entertainment-interest. Yet, there is a third option. It is, at any rate, possible that, in this nascent situation, here and there some people may be ready, without regret, to let the old days go and to seize

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the opportunity, now as never before, for a whole new ethos of honesty within the Church; a far more radically counter-cultural understanding of the gospel than any traditional form of church ideology, as such, has ever hitherto allowed. Take, for example, the Church of England, to which I belong. There have been, in the history of the Church of England, two thinkers in particular who have advanced what I would call a strong theological interpretation of its corporate vocation: Thomas Hobbes in the mid-seventeenth century and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the early nineteenth.24 Others have expounded versions of Anglican church ideology in piecemeal reaction to Roman Catholic or harder-line Protestant critique. But Hobbes and Coleridge are, I think, the two pre-eminent representatives of a line of argument justifying the distinctive order of the Church of England in truly systematic theological terms. That is to say: by effectively suggesting an Anglican answer to the basic question of what it is that the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness require, above all else, by way of the ideal Church? Granted, Hobbes was not a man conspicuous for his piety. He focuses, however, on the undeniably deleterious effect, with regard to truth-as-openness, of violent schism. For, such schism creates an environment in which the warring parties are anything but open to one another. Hobbes observes that, as a matter of fact, the chief cause of violent schism within Christian societies historically has been the division between Church and State as two separate, and rival, sovereign institutions. Therefore, he concludes that the ideal Church must be an institution whose sovereignty is perfectly merged with that of the State: an ideal to which the Church of England only approximates, but to which it does, at least, approximate, arguably, as well as any other church. And he backs up this key polemical conclusion both with a systematic theory of the primordial ‘social contract’, as such, and with a wide-ranging consideration of Holy Scripture. Then, to the logic of this Hobbesian argument, Coleridge goes on to add his own urgent concern for the civilising of civil society as a whole. That is, for the opening up of a truly national conversation about national identity: one in which every social class is, so far as possible, included; one which is, at the same time, informed by a real seriousness about moral ideals transcending the mere pursuit of material self-interest. This, Coleridge suggests, is the proper work of a ‘National Church’. To stimulate and channel the conversation-processes of the National Church, so defined, there is needed what he terms a ‘clerisy’: a broad social class including scholarly historians and cultural critics, and dedicated schoolteachers – but crucially also, in any Christian country, a clergy who understand their loyalty to the Church in terms consonant with a high-minded patriotism. And to that end, as an Englishman, he advocates ever greater official recognition for the special role of the Church of England, leading to substantially increased financial support from the State. Hobbes, Leviathan: On the Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, 1651, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2010); Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and the State, 1830, ed. John Barrell (J.M. Dent & Sons, 1972). 24

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What is lacking, however, in the thought of both Hobbes and Coleridge is any serious critique of the ideological closure surely involved in the Church of England’s traditional, prevailing socio-political conservatism. Hobbes, preoccupied by his generation’s nightmare experience of religiously aggravated outright civil war, has only one theological concern: as far as possible, to keep religious venom out of politics. Whilst Coleridge, as he affirms the special contribution of the Anglican clergy as pastors to people of every different social class alike, sees nothing wrong in this Church being to such a large extent, at the same time, the institutional defender of specifically ruling-class political self-interest. Nor, indeed, could anyone, back then, have so exalted the Church of England in theological terms as Hobbes and Coleridge do, without turning a blind eye to this all-too-worldly aspect of its corporate identity. Yet, the situation now is clearly quite different. For, of course, the Church of England no longer plays anything like such a central role in the British establishment as it once did. Centuries of attrition by Nonconformists, Roman Catholics, and secular Humanists have eaten away at its privileges and status. More and more, the establishment nature of this established church ceases to connote serious, theologically corrupting hegemonic power but, instead, simply signifies a binding sense of obligation to maintain an equal presence everywhere in the land, plus a pressing civil-religious sense of responsibility for everyone, which forever tends to open up the core church community to the moral concern of others around it. Once upon a time, the Church of England was absolutely an oppressor church: the religious arm of royal power, excluding its enemies by law from Parliament and from the universities; the church of the top people, and of those others willing to defer to them; the less deferentially inclined having, for the most part, jumped ship. In the old days it was obvious what the Church of England was for. But now it is much less so. That sense of manifest purpose was bound up with the repressive cultural hegemony that has, to all intents, been lost. And, in consequence, we have become a singularly bewildered church; a battleground for often quite disloyal factions, competing for ideological supremacy. This surely is a context in which some, at least, may well grow pretty disenchanted with church ideology, in general. Our current bewilderment presses us to think again, in potentially fresh terms, about our calling as a church. One of the possibilities before us is a new honesty. Thus, it is not inconceivable that the Church of England might one day evolve into something never yet seen, anywhere before: a genuinely self-aware, and therefore penitent, ex-oppressor church as such. In other words, a church which, like a recovering alcoholic, openly acknowledges the destructiveness of its old addiction to self-serving ideology and which, looking forward, openly identifies as its vocation a quest for true sobriety in this regard. ‘Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion’ (1 Peter, 5: 8). Like a roaring lion – or, one might also say, like a roaring crowd of drunks! Once, the Church of England was in there with the worst of them, roistering with the devil, a fearsome and most effective propaganda-making power. But lately God has shrunk us. Willy-nilly, we are being forced to reinvent ourselves.

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True liturgy is, not least, a discipline of intellectual sobriety: a patient, selfmistrustful resolution to stay with difficult reality, forever repudiating the intoxicating allure of propaganda. In a propaganda-saturated culture, it is precisely a systematic course of therapy against propaganda’s sundry ploys, in general. It neither flatters nor menaces; it is premised on the ideal of agape, overflowing love for all, even including one’s enemies; it never glamourises power; it supplies rich imaginative material for an all-questioning spirit of thoughtfulness, but with minimal prescription of final moral or metaphysical answers. One of the fresh possibilities now opening up for us would be, quite explicitly, to opt for this.

Chapter 4

Hegel on History-as-Revelation Ineradicable Ambiguity But what kind of thinking is further required, beyond simply naming the propaganda-making celestial ‘powers and principalities’ for the inhuman agencies they are? What particular skills of discernment will do most to help, in devising strategies of liberation here? What intellectual virtues? First and foremost, I would argue, we need to cultivate a sustained, close alertness to the ineradicable ambiguity of, quite simply, all theological utterance; inasmuch asit always all depends on who is speaking, where and when. For, propaganda-thinking cannot cope with ambiguity, openly acknowledged. The propagandists’ effects depend upon the suppression of any such acknowledgement; their rhetoric requires clear-cut slogans and definitive formulas, as such. What those who are trying to carve out a little space of theological freedom beyond the propagandists’ sway surely need, above all else, is the very thing that propagandist thinkers flee. And here too, the great pioneer, I think, is Hegel. For, what else is the Phenomenology of Spirit, in its theological aspect, if not a systematic bid to contemplate the deep ambiguity, and ambivalence, of Christian faith, as an abstract historic phenomenon? ‘Religion’ Minus Revelation? Thus, compare Kant, for instance, advocating ‘religion’ purged of all the various ambiguities bound up with notions of special historic divine revelation. Or, rather, without what he more specifically terms ‘external revelation’, mediated through the foundational sacred narratives of church institutions and the like – as opposed to the ‘inner revelation’ mediated to each religiously uprooted moral individual, at the cost of that uprooted-ness, which, on the contrary Kant approves.1 Kant, after all, is the thinker whom Hegel began by following and from whom he most significantly, therefore, had to break free. In his preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787, Kant famously describes himself as having been obliged systematically to ‘deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith’.2 I am not altogether sure about the 1 Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, English translation by Allen W. Wood and Gertrude M. Clark (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978), pp. 160–64. 2 Critique of Pure Reason, English translation by Norman Kemp Smith, 2nd revised edition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 29.

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appropriateness of the actual phrase here, ‘deny knowledge’ – for reasons I will come to later. But (setting that aside for now) I nevertheless still think this Kantian notion of ‘making room for faith’ represents a real breakthrough moment in the history of philosophical theology. For, insofar as the ‘knowledge’ Kant seeks to ‘deny’ is just that which, quite unjustifiably, purports to offer a correct explanation of otherwise inexplicable worldly events, by reference to divine action, it surely does mark a major step towards proper clarity with regard to the elementary distinction between the two species of truth: truth-as-correctness and truth-asopenness. Instead of pretending to explain things, comparably to correct scientific explanation, the ‘faith’ for which he is ‘making room’ seeks simply to motivate. It is the motivating of an ideal rational openness of mind. And it is true to the extent it achieves that end. So far, so good! My misgivings, however, begin immediately Kant starts to give a positive account of this ‘faith’ of his. For, reconstructing the argument he develops over several works, it might well be said that there are two quite distinct logical moments conjoined in Kantian faith: • a belief in fundamental ethical self-mistrust; and • a prophylaxis against moral despair. Let us consider each of these two moments in turn. Both, I think, require some modification. First, Kant believes in fundamental ethical self-mistrust: that is to say, he considers that there is always a greater opposition between, on the one hand, our authentic moral duty and, on the other hand, our natural inclination than we are ever naturally inclined to allow. To him it appears self-evident that the more we really think about the matter, the clearer the truth of this principle must become. What needs overcoming is just the inertia of our automatic behaviour, unchecked by serious self-critical thought. We may be inclined, by nature, to sentimental benevolence towards other people, but this is not to be confused with the authentic philanthropy that is our duty. Or again, some people are naturally inclined to masochistic self-mortification. Neither, however, is that to be confused with the authentic self-overcoming demanded by true moral reason. By ‘duty’, Kant means nothing other than the sense of moral obligation which follows from sheer hard, rational thought, driven by a commitment to strict impartiality. How, though, in actual practice, is any real commitment to impartiality possible? His answer is: by virtue of the persuasive power of ‘religion’. Which, in the true sense, he defines as ‘the recognition of all duties as divine commands’.3 3 Kant in fact repeats this formulation in several places: Critique of Practical Reason, English translation by Lewis White Beck (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 134; Critique of Judgment, English translation by J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Co., 1951), p. 334; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, English translation by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), p. 142; Metaphysics of Morals, English translation by Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 234–5.

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This, for him, is what ‘religion’ is for; and nothing else. Kantian religious ‘faith’ is, in essence, an embattled upholding of austerely rational duty against inclination. It is the sheer antithesis to any sort of hedonistic thinking about ethics; duty falling back on a rhetorical invocation of the sacred, to reinforce it, a moral rhetoric designed entirely to obviate any mere appeal to enlightened self-interest. The basic frailty of his thought at this first level, however, is I think his failure, as an advocate of what one might call ‘primary ethical self-mistrust’, ever properly to engage with the (so to speak) ‘secondary’ demand for ethical self-mistrust very often, in fact, informing hedonistic thought, namely, the hedonist’s quite justified mistrust of the potential for moralistic manipulation ever-present in any serious rhetoric of ‘duty’. Take Epicurus, for instance. Arguably the best way to approach Epicureanism is to understand it as the systematic working out of the most militant possible hostility towards manipulation of any kind. Epicurus therefore advocates a strict discipline of restraint: minimising one’s appetites, in order to minimise the possibility one’s being manipulated by conditional promises to supply one with what one craves, or by conditional threats to deprive one of it. However, at the same time, he also links his asceticism to a doctrine of frank hedonism, since this minimises the potential authority attaching to guilt-feelings, on which more moralistic manipulators can also play. Epicurus is, in this sense, the least moralistic of moralists. Kant’s doctrine, by contrast, is exclusively addressed to the problems arising not from moralistic manipulation but from anti-rational sloth. But is not Kant, as a result, underestimating the actual cunning of un-reason? It may well be argued that Epicurus represents an equal imbalance the other way: exclusively preoccupied with the problems arising from moralistic manipulation, he ignores the problems arising from sheer anti-rational sloth. Surely, though, we somehow need to tackle both at once! A true moral doctrine, put into practice, will no doubt tend to generate the exact opposite of a totalitarian ethos. The nightmare experiences of the twentieth century, resulting from the upsurge of overt totalitarian ideologies, may help us see what true morality requires, more clearly than ever before. On the one hand, it is true that, in order to prevail, a totalitarian ethos needs to exploit sheer moral sloth. What kind of person, after all, is most likely to resist the excesses of a totalitarian regime? Whereas the hedonists of this world will tend to retreat, as ‘inner emigrants’, into private life, the more active and (to the regime) altogether more dangerous dissidents are, I guess, always going to be those who are motivated by a strong sense of duty, in the Kantian sense. To be sure, this impulse to active resistance may be mediated in all sorts of religious and political ways that Kant himself would reject; but, deep down, the operative factor will always be what he calls a sense of ‘duty’. And yet – on the other hand – note how totalitarian regimes also invoke ‘duty’, in their propaganda! Kant himself was anything but a propagandist thinker. Nevertheless, observe how, already in his lifetime, his ethical teaching mutates

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in the hands of his most brilliant contemporary disciple, J.G. Fichte.4 Kant, it is true, repudiated Fichte. But this repudiation is not argued for at any length. Fichte, for his part, consistently claimed to be a loyal Kantian, only going beyond Kant’s own moral teaching inasmuch as he, unlike the Master, was concerned with the question of how that teaching might most rapidly and most decisively be propagated, in practice, as a programme for the revolutionary moral reform of large human populations. And the upshot is, indeed, an unmistakably proto-totalitarian ideology. Fichte advocates a revolutionary programme which will begin by, in effect, converting the entire state into a vast school – with a rigorous discipline, designed to break the corrupted wills of those being trained for virtue, clearing a space in their minds for the free choice of authentic duty. Eventually, once its job is done, the school-state is going to wither away. For the time being, however, it is clear that the path towards this long-term ideal will involve extensive use of state-sponsored morality-imposing violence. In short, Fichte is an early pioneer of totalitarianism, laying the groundwork for a violent propaganda-regime that would constantly be extolling the greatness of Kant. How could such a thing have happened? Not least, I think, it indicates the presence of a gaping hole in Kant’s moral-religious doctrine, just at the point where this sort of misappropriation ought to be unequivocally precluded. In that basic sense, it seems to me that Kant’s advocacy of moral self-mistrust fails, itself, to be sufficiently informed by selfmistrust. He thinks he is escaping moral ambiguity by the simple expedient of absolute adherence to an abstract rhetoric of altruism, which he calls ‘religion’. But with regard to the pursuit of pure truth-as-openness, the outcome is itself profoundly ambivalent! And, moreover, the second logical moment of Kant’s doctrine – the prophylaxis he proposes against moral despair – raises further problems of another kind. Thus, here he is asking: what are the minimal requirements of ‘religion’, in order that it may do its job of reinforcing the proper claims of moral duty, against the counterpressures of inclination? And he focuses on the need for the enlightened moral individual, that is, one who already fully recognises the essential opposition between duty and inclination, not to be overwhelmed by a crushing sense of the apparent ultimate futility of conscientious struggle. This is the context for his famous set of ‘moral arguments’ for belief in the existence of God, for belief in the prospect of eternal life, for belief in the freedom of the will, and in the possibility of divine forgiveness. He is concerned here with the practical necessity of hope, with regard to the energising of virtue. The truth of true religious faith consists not in its explanatory power but in its motivational power, as an inspiration to authentic virtue. And a key element in such motivation is, clearly, hope. Authentic virtue, for Kant, being essentially a disposition to follow the alwaysand-everywhere valid maxims of pure moral rationality, the hope in question has I have discussed Fichte in relationship to Hegel, in Hegel and Religious Faith (London: T. & T. Clark, 2011), Chapter 6. For a discussion of Fichte that places him in the context of the whole progression from Rousseau, through Kant, to Hegel, see George Armstrong Kelly, Idealism, Politics and History: Sources of Hegelian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969). 4

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to inform the most all-encompassing possible worldview. It is not enough that I may hope to be successful in my own particular projects. The hope which is required in order properly to energise true moral rationality must be a hope for the ultimate triumph of such rationality in the most global of terms. When Kant speaks of ‘God’ he means the principle that is seen to guarantee the universality of that triumph. But what, exactly, is meant by ‘triumph’ here? It has to be the case that, for one who truly commits to the cause of pure moral duty, not even the most terrible resultant suffering would render it justifiable, in the end, to regret having done so. For the call of duty to be ideally energised, one has to look beyond the sufferings of the present moment, which might, indeed, tempt one to such regret, and view everything, instead, from the sublimely detached viewpoint of eternity. In other words: one has to live one’s life as belonging not only to the ego-centric immediacy of one’s own time and place but also to the self-unfolding life of the eternal. Traditional notions of heaven and hell muddle the notion of eternal life with carrot-and-stick images of post-mortem rewards and punishments: attempting to motivate morality by appeal to pre-moral appetites and fears. The Kantian notion, quite rightly, I think, represents a fundamental repudiation of such metaphysical bribery. For (as I myself have argued above), only the already perfectly virtuous can fully comprehend the attraction of heaven, that is, the virtuous life as seen in the context of eternity.5 And likewise only the already perfectly virtuous can fully sense the horror of hell, the vicious life as seen in the light of eternity; the rest of us being more or less anaesthetised against that horror, by our moral insensibility. Therefore, heaven is not exactly a reward, nor is hell a punishment, to those whose morality remains confined within the limits of ordinary hedonistic calculation. The traditional doctrine, insofar as it appeals to that sort of calculation, tends to be corrupted by its sheer impatience to persuade us. Yet, some notion of ‘eternal life’ – so Kant argues – we nevertheless do need – simply in order to envisage the final vindication of virtue, as such. Moreover, we also need to see virtue as something that we are always free to choose; and we need to hope that, whatever the gravity of the guilt we may have previously incurred, our turning towards virtue will always be met by divine forgiveness. Therefore, Kant anathematises fatalism as a mere surrender to demoralisation. And a key element in his late treatise Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is his vindication, there, of theological talk about the potential forgiveness of sins, in the case of true repentance, to overcome the morally de-energising impact of excessive self-hatred. In his Lectures on Philosophical Theology Kant couches these various moral arguments, collectively, in terms of what he calls a reductio ad absurdum practicum.6 His (anti-)theology consists in an identification of that bare minimum of religious belief, to deny which (he argues) would be to affirm an attitude of ultimate moral despair, directly inimical to the proper motivational truth of faith. For, to anyone who already recognises what duty ultimately demands, such denial would constitute the absurdum practicum, the practical absurdity, of wilfully See above, pp. 23–4. Kant, Lectures on Philosophical Theology, pp. 122–3.

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setting oneself against that demand of duty, in the sense of rendering its fulfilment more difficult than it need be – and so, to that extent, actually committing oneself to be a ‘scoundrel’, ein Bösewicht! If there are, in relation to religion, no other valid criteria for truth other than its potential motivational effectiveness in the service of true virtue, then there can be no good reason for rejecting, at any rate, this much religious belief. But then he wants to stop right there. That is the problem. He advocates a philosophical attitude of affirming only what can be conclusively demonstrated on the basis of an absurdum practicum argument. Here, for Kant, is the criterion that defines the ‘inner revelation’ of pure reason, which he approves. Having affirmed this, however, the proper contribution of philosophy, as he sees it, must always be systematically to devalue whatever else belongs to actual religious tradition. The whole purpose of Kantian philosophy, in relation to religion, is to try and help liberate the somewhat abstract deliverances of ‘inner revelation’, so defined, from the culturally more specific encumbrances of ‘external revelation’. Why? It really is a very drastic programme of reductionist abstraction – a good deal more drastic, indeed, than perhaps at first appears. Kant himself purports to be upholding a basic faith in God, on the basis of an absurdum practicum argument. In fact, though, the job he allots to faith in God may surely just as well be done by a Hindu or Buddhist philosophic devotion to the principle of Dharma, conceived in quite impersonal, non-theistic terms. For, the principle of Dharma, equally, affirms the ultimate cosmic triumph of the good. And so too when it comes to the notion of eternal life, as the arena within which that triumph is accomplished: there is no necessary reason, on the basis of an absurdum practicum argument, to imagine this in the sort of adapted Christian eschatological terms that, of course, came naturally to Kant and his original readers. Again, it may also – and maybe just as well – for instance, be pictured in Hindu or Buddhist fashion: as a cyclical transmigration of souls, from which only perfect moral enlightenment can in the end deliver one. And note furthermore how arbitrary Kant’s choice of a starting point for his argument is! Clearly, his absurdum practicum approach, if it is to be persuasive, presupposes a high degree of already achieved moral enlightenment, in the sense of one’s already having been lifted decisively out of the sort of morality that is driven by mere herd-conformity, into a much more critical, and rational, sense of duty. One might say that this approach is precisely the direct translation of achieved moral enlightenment into a supportive religious enlightenment. So, it begins from a threat of despair endangering the morale specifically of those who already know what true duty is, in pure rational terms; and it is the prescription of a minimal religious prophylaxis against that despair. Suppose, however, that we begin from further back. Kant is simply concerned with what is required, in practice, to encourage those who seek to live in accordance with the very purest moral enlightenment. Yes – but why should we only be concerned about the bolstering-up of such enlightenment after it has been achieved? Why not also ask:

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how is it to be motivated – over and above the (not in themselves very motivational) workings of pure abstract logic – in the first place? Why fixate exclusively on the subsequently emergent threat of despair? Why not, just as much, focus on the original struggle of true moral reason to emerge, in resistance to the primordial sheer inertia of human herd-existence? In short: why privilege the problem of despair, so altogether, over the quite different, prior problem of banality? Indeed, let us pursue the question: how does the average sensual human herd animal begin to grow discontented with the moral banality, as such, of herdexistence? True moral rationality is always latent as a possibility, within human nature, but what kind of process will bring it to the surface and render it actual? After all, the simple abstract validity of its logic is by no means enough on its own, especially in view of its extreme potential inconvenience to our average sensual selves! But, surely, the initial spur will always be some impulse or other of impassioned loyalty. One’s loyalty to one’s family, or to one’s friends – wherever such loyalty conflicts with the pressures of herd-conformity, there it is that the critical thinking first begins, which may at length evolve into a fully rational philosophic understanding of the good. Or: how can the most basic impulses of morality be given proper traction, in our souls? Consider, for instance, a soldier, in the heat of battle, enraged and tempted to commit atrocities. Suppose that, such is the chaos, it looks as though he might well get away with it, undetected. What will, in this situation, nevertheless restrain him? It is unlikely that it will be an abstract philosophic argument about the nature of the just war and what this requires – there is just no time for that. Far more immediately effective will be his instinctive reluctance to besmirch the honour of his regiment: the instant thought, ‘That isn’t what we do’. In other words, it will be his impassioned loyalty to his comrades, informed by and informing his military discipline. Where conflict erupts into the open, the human herd tends to mutate into a mob. Military drill is essentially designed to preclude that. It moulds loyalties, in order to preserve a certain basic moral order, able to withstand extreme stress. Religious ritual, of course, is meant to prepare its practitioners for a much wider range of potential crises. But it is, likewise, a drilling of impassioned loyalties. What do recovering alcoholics, or other drug addicts, most require by way of motivation, to keep them clean? These are people in whom ordinary herd-morality has failed; clearly, they need something more. But will what Kant offers – just a good clean dose of abstract logical argument regarding moral duty – actually be sufficient, on its own, to do the trick? Probably not! Far more likely to be effective is surely a sense of being loved, and a responsive loyalty – whether to particular individuals, to a support group such as Alcoholics Anonymous, or, it may well be, to a supportive religious community, altogether more unconditional in its offer of love than any herd as such. Kant recognises the debilitating moral effects of excessive self-hatred; hence, his insistence on an abstract theoretical recognition of divine forgiveness, for repentant sinners, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. How, though, is that recognition to be existentially appropriated? No doubt he would concede that, ideally, it requires the effective incorporation

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of the individual into some sort of loving ethical community. But what, then, is required, beyond an abstract moral theory, for the cultivation of such community; what shared narratives, shared art, or shared ritual? Hegel criticises Kant, basically, for his failure to pursue that question with any real seriousness. True, Kant is not Fichte. He is not intent on laying the foundation for a manipulatively moralistic propaganda-ideology. Yet, above all: what real solidarity-strategy does he develop, for effective resistance to such ideology, in general? Christian faith is a response to God revealed in the figure of a crucified dissident. What, though, actually motivates heroic conscientious dissent, of the kind represented by Christ on the cross? Abstract logical principles may perhaps play a secondary role – among the more philosophically inclined. Once again, though, the main actual motivating impulse will surely be an intense commitment to specific loyalties, which clash with the dictates of the oppressor. And many of these loyalties may well be religious in character or, at any rate, more or less reinforced by an admixture of religion. Note the relentless hostility typically shown by the most brutal totalitarian regimes to the sort of organised religion which Kant for his part so mistrusts. This, surely, is one of the strongest items of actual historical evidence to be cited – against Kant – in favour of such religion. The basic trouble with Kant’s ethical theory, Hegel suggests, is just the extreme abruptness with which it abstracts Moralität, moral rationality finally formalised as a set of ‘pure’ logical principles, from Sittlichkeit, the original matrix of herdtranscendent specific loyalties out of which moral rationality actually comes to birth.7 Of course, no large-scale embodiment of Sittlichkeit – no sort of clanstructure, no organised secular affinity group, no religious community – can ever be altogether guaranteed against corruption by the resurgent herd-mentality. Whatever serves to mediate sittlich loyalty may also be corrupted into a mere agency of corporate egoism; every political expression of Sittlichkeit is, by its very nature, in this sense ambiguous. But what Hegel criticises is the absolute impatience of Kant’s response to such ambiguity. It is Kant’s altogether dismissive, pre-emptive antagonism to all the main agencies of Sittlichkeit; his dogmatic commitment, in effect, to an ethos of sheer moral individualism. And, in particular, it is the way that this distorts conversation between philosophy and organised religion, immediately framing it as a battle, which philosophy has to win, with no real possibility of mutual learning. Kant repudiates every doctrine of ‘external revelation’, foundational for organised religion, evidently on the a priori assumption that such doctrine is always, first and foremost, a basis for corporate egoism. He shows no interest in the alternative possibility: that here, on the contrary, we might encounter Sittlichkeit at its most reflective, pondering its own history, and placing itself in an eschatological context which fundamentally opens it up to further rational development. Hegel is no less committed than Kant to thinking of religious truth in motivational rather than explanatory, or ‘metaphysical’, terms. 7 ‘Herd-transcendent’ is my term, not Hegel’s. But what Hegel calls ‘Sittlichkeit’ is very much a steady process of refining away herd-loyalties, by the operation of ‘Spirit’ – into something no less warm, and yet ever more opened up to outsiders.

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Only, his starting point is different. He, by contrast, begins from the necessary motivational requirements of Sittlichkeit. And so he does not reject the sort of loyalties founded upon traditional Christian notions of, in Kant’s terminology, ‘external revelation’. Far rather, he sets out to ‘sublate’ them philosophically.8 In other words, to adopt them in full philosophic consciousness of their ineradicable ambiguity: in no way denying either their ever-present corruptibility or, however, their equally ever-present truth-potential. Kant, for his part, is brutal in his attempt to drive a wedge between the public rituals or associated devotions of already existing religious Sittlichkeit and the emotionally much drier, more individualistic species of moral rationality that he advocates. As he puts it, for instance, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone: The delusion that we can effect something, in view of our justification before God, by means of religious worship, is religious superstition; and the delusion that we can effect something by attempts at a supposed intercourse with God is religious fanaticism … If then a Church doctrine is to abolish or prevent all religious delusion, it must – over and above its statutory teachings, with which it cannot, for the present, entirely dispense – contain within itself a principle which shall enable it to bring about the religion of a pure life, as the true end of the whole movement, and then to dispense with those temporary doctrines.9

The ‘statutory teachings’ in question here include everything that belongs to the Church’s narratives of ‘external revelation’: the whole notion of the Trinity, all that is bound up with the concept of the Incarnation, and the entire narrative symbolcomplex, resurrection-of-the-crucified. For Kant, these are all mere ‘temporary doctrines’. Eventually, the Church will learn to dispense with them. And never before – he thinks – has there, in actual fact, been such a good chance of this happening. On the whole, he thinks of history as being gradually progressive. Fichte, in distinctly more sinister fashion, sees the present age as one in which humanity has plunged to the very lowest moral depths. This serves to justify Fichte’s (quite un-Kantian) proto-totalitarian commitment to revolutionary violence: on the grounds that such violence is a necessary extreme-crisis measure, in the forthcoming decisive struggle to emancipate true Moralität from false Sittlichkeit. Kant differs, inasmuch as he simply applauds the historic contribution he considers the Enlightenment, as a whole, already to have made, towards that goal. In his 1784 essay ‘Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View’, he identifies his ideal of moral progress, politically, with the project of constructing a single structure of world governance, combining maximum international coherence with maximum respect for the rights of the individual.10 ‘Sublate’: aufheben. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. 162–3. 10 English translation in Kant, On History, edited by Lewis White Beck (Indianopolis, 8

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To this end, he seeks to constrain the workings of Sittlichkeit, in general, minimising the political influence of sittlich loyalties; and the ideal of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone is, in his view, the natural corollary to that project. By the removal of any religious sanction for potential corporate egoism on the part of particular sittlich communities, he seeks to help facilitate this overarching, ‘cosmopolitan’ form of governance. And, given that starting point, he develops an alluring argument. The basic weakness of this argument, however, surely lies in the way it so completely excludes any possible counter-considerations. Thus, Kant shows no interest whatsoever in trying, sympathetically, to understand the religious doctrines he repudiates – from an historic point of view, how or why they arose. In his obsessional concern to rule out any doctrine that might be co-opted by a spirit of corporate religious egoism, he has no eyes at all for the countervailing secular tendencies towards a popular culture of sheer demoralised banality, which are so gravely accentuated where traditional forms of Sittlichkeit begin to atrophy. He seems to think he can somehow completely extirpate the risk of corporate religious egoism without sacrificing anything of real value in the process. Hegel, however, argues that he cannot. How fair is Hegel’s critique of Kant’s resultant religious doctrine? The primary text in question is Chapter 6 of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Sections C (a), the passage sub-headed ‘The Moral View of the World’, and (b) ‘Moral Duplicity’.11 It is a striking feature of this text that, although it quite clearly addresses the Kantian doctrine, Kant himself is not named, other than in one sarcastic aside. This is, in fact, a characteristic feature of Hegel’s procedure throughout the book: the arguments of the Phenomenology are typically allusive, rather than specific. But it also reflects the fact that he does not purport to be directly responding to Kant on Kant’s own terms. Rather, the whole force of his critique derives from his having taken Kant’s theoretical ‘faith’ and transported it into another context. The writing here is admittedly barbarous in its contortion, as is the whole of the Phenomenology, which was completed at great speed, and governed by the madly, but wondrously, over-ambitious overall conception of the work. Nevertheless, the basic drift is clear and, I think, cogent. So Hegel, in effect, assesses the ability of the Kantian ‘religious’ postulates, not to do the job that Kant gives them, of protecting the already enlightened moral individual from the threat of despair, but to do the job that the best sort of popular religion does, of framing and reinforcing an effective Sittlichkeit to awaken otherwise merely banal average sensual individuals from their banality. And he displays the plain inadequacies of Kantian ‘religion’ in that regard. For, the Kantian ‘God’ is precisely defined by His absolute refusal to make any appeal to the ‘natural’ loyalty-impulses by which such individuals, as such, are governed. The God of good popular religion works with those impulses, to re-channel them, towards an energising of moral rationality. But the Kantian doctrine forbids this. And therefore, Hegel argues, it is simply not a serious approach to what he, for his part, regards as the real business Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, paras. 599–631, pp. 365–83.

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of religion. Kant’s show of religiousness is nothing more than that: a ‘duplicitous’ show. In the end, it is futile. Well, yes, of course, I will concede that in one sense it is unfair to demand of Kant’s theory that it do a job Kant himself never had in mind for it! And yet – the job in question surely does need doing. Fichte, indeed, sees this. Eschewing traditional popular-religious Sittlichkeit as Kant does, Fichte accordingly envisages a programme to instil rational moral principle into the not-yet-enlightened masses by other means, namely, by violent cultural-revolutionary coercion. At any rate, one can scarcely accuse Fichte of not being serious, the way Hegel accuses Kant. But what Hegel is looking for is just a truly serious practical alternative to the proto-totalitarian violence advocated by Fichte. And in search of that alternative, finally, he also grows exasperated by the whole Kantian / Fichtean rhetoric of (anti-)theological agnosticism. (Here, I come back to his claim of having ‘denied knowledge, in order to make room for faith’.) For, whilst this rhetoric is a key part of Kant’s general bid to escape the moral ambiguities of popular religion, it is itself profoundly ambiguous. It might connote an entirely desirable, generous and sympathetic interest in other people’s differing points of view, with regard to religion; an opening-up of conversation, which would otherwise be closed down by dogmatic claims already to ‘know’ everything one needs to ‘know’ about ultimate religious truth, merely by virtue of belonging to the ‘right’ popular-religious tradition. But then, equally, it might also mean the exact opposite! That is to say, it might mean a closing-down of conversation across popular-religious boundaries, by dogmatic indifference. As if, with a casual shrug of one’s shoulders, one were drawing the quite false inference: ‘We don’t know, we can’t ever know, the final truth here – and so what, in the end, is the point of our troubling ourselves about the matter, at all?’ Kant seems oblivious of this latter possibility; which one might call agnosticism as a mere cover for intellectual indolence. Hegel, by contrast, is acutely aware of it. And he is pugnacious in his protest. No doubt, it was unwise of Hegel to speak of the culminating achievement of perfect, fully articulate, sacralised open-mindedness he envisages in the Phenomenology as ‘Absolute Knowing’. The phrase is too easily misunderstood. Yet, one has to see his choice of language here in the original context of his own thought-world: not least as a furious reaction against the corruption of pseudo‘Kantian’ intellectual indolence, the invocation of Kant to justify a merely smug form of agnosticism, which Hegel, in fact, kept bumping up against. Maybe he goes too far, in the energy of his language. Still, I do not think we should let this blind us to the actual corrective truth he intends by it. After all, the key thing that ‘Absolute Knowing’ knows is really nothing other than the need for proper patience, and real hard critical work, in the face of ambiguity. What has gone wrong with Kant? Above all, I think it is his sheer impatience with the ineradicable ambiguity of true religious faith. Kant wants to escape that ambiguity – and so he starts chopping. He believes in butchering religion, with brutal de-contextualised simplicity, rather than

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understanding it in context. Hegel is interested in a patient cultivation of imaginative discernment with regard to religious phenomena, seeking out their truth-potential even in the midst of all their ambiguity. Kant, however, just wants to get out, once and for all – to where he imagines there can be a bit of straightforward unambiguous clarity, as regards what the propositions of faith really mean. I am afraid that this is, already in itself, a somewhat lethal delusion! Beyond What Belongs to Creeds Kant thinks of philosophy, in its theological aspect, as a filleting of traditional religion, the extracting of its ‘rational’ core. Hegel, in contrast, sees philosophy as a supplement to traditional theology. So, for him, it is an Aufhebung, a preservingin-another-form or sublation of the tradition. It does not seek to cancel, or replace, the picture-thinking on which the popular reach of the tradition depends. But it steps just for a moment outside that picture-thinking, precisely in order to highlight the constant, universal ambiguity of traditional religious ideas: the mixed potentialfor-truth and potential-for-falsehood, as he sees it, more or less present in all of them, always, inasmuch as the proper truth in question is not truth-as-correctness, but truth-as-openness. Thus, consider the various official creeds of church tradition: these, of course, represent a series of attempts to fix the essence of the gospel, over against the challenge of ‘heresy’. And, as such, they are in Hegelian terms fundamentally a work of Verstand. (See the discussion of the three principles ‘Verstand’, ‘Dialectic’, and ‘Speculative Reason’ at the end of Chapter 2.)12 In other words: they are supposed to transmit a settled, abstract result of the Church’s thought, an item of definitive truth-as-correctness. But the whole purpose of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is to shift people away, when it comes to what is spiritual, from the general outlook of Verstand, ultimately to that of Speculative Reason; which systematically points beyond such claims, towards an ever greater appropriation of truth-as-openness instead. Hegel by no means sees himself as a heretic; he does not want to reject the orthodox creeds. Yet, his approach to theology is not framed as an upholding, or critical refining, of such creed-defined orthodoxy. Quite to the contrary: it is framed as an exploration of the territory defined, instead, by what he calls ‘speculative propositions’.13 What is a ‘speculative proposition’? In the first place, it is something far more than just a playful sally of Dialectic. Rather, it is very much a programmatic statement of principle; suggesting the agenda for a large-scale collaborative project of thought. But secondly, it works in exactly the opposite way to the equivalent propositions of Verstand, such as one finds in orthodoxy-defining creeds. For, whereas the See pages 64–7, above. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, paras. 58–66, pp. 35–41.

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latter are designed to augment clarity – in that they simply add further relevant information to an accumulating pile of the same – a speculative proposition, by contrast, points towards the dissolution of what, the more we examine it, is seen to have been an initially misleading sense of clarity. Thus, a speculative proposition is typically a conjunction of two terms which puts both of them into a spin: as it were, into a dance together. (A ‘bacchanalian revel’, Hegel calls it.)14 Such a proposition serves to define a fierce force-field of thought, in which all manner of hitherto overlooked ambiguities are eventually liable to be churned up, and exposed to critical examination. Speculative propositions are, indeed, for Hegel, especially associated with divine revelation. For, they represent an influx of divine mystery into human thinking, breaking down the self-assertive, self-defensive constructs of Verstand. The primary example he himself gives, in the Preface to the Phenomenology, is the simple statement: ‘God is Being’.15

The point, here, surely lies in the sheer vertigo of the thought: the way it straight off begins to draw us out beyond all our normal, pictorial conceptions of God, into much less homely territory. As Hegel puts it, the subject of the proposition – or, rather, our limited preconception of that subject – entirely ‘dissolves’ in the vastness of the predicate. Or, again, another example he also gives, in the same place, is, ‘The actual is the universal’.

This is, in a sense, the converse of ‘God is Being’. The point: that, somehow, always elusively latent within our own ‘actual’ experience of the world is the revelation of God’s ‘universal’ truth, pressing for our attention. How? Well, that is the vertiginous project: to define the criteria for discerning it. Or, one might refer to the famous, not to say infamous, double speculative proposition which first appeared in the Preface to the Philosophy of Right: ‘What is reasonable is realised, and what is realised is reasonable’.16

The ‘reasonableness’ in question is that of God’s law, revealed through an attentive, not unsympathetic investigation of political ‘reality’, in all its frequent squalor. And, conversely, to comprehend the true moral meaning of that ‘reality’, one needs, above all, to be always on the look-out for the traces of divine ‘reasonableness’ still latent at its heart. Neither the apolitical innocence of the Ibid, para. 47, p. 27. Ibid, para. 62, pp. 38–9. 16 G.F.W. Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, p. 10. He also then repeated this formula in 14

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‘beautiful soul’, nor the irreligious opportunism of the would-be Machiavellian ‘prince’ will do; but true justice lies precisely in what is furthest from both of these, at once. So, the dance of Hegelian political philosophy begins, towards that elusive point. A ‘speculative proposition’ is, so to speak, a little nugget of anti-creed. It is a sparkle of light playing upon waves. Creeds put a consensus into a theoretical sequence; speculative propositions systematically jam any such sequence. They unlock the creative chaos which creeds, left to themselves, would merely stifle. We surely need both: creeds, for initial catechetical purposes; speculative propositions, for pointing beyond. What is it that Hegel essentially has to contribute to theology? To express it in terms of a fresh speculative proposition, not one that he himself formulated – my own – but nevertheless, I think, a not inaccurate summary of his core insight in this regard: he contributes an exceptionally acute awareness that The revelation of God is nothing other than the ultimate ambiguity of all that is human, ultimately revealed.

Why Hegel? For me, as a theologian, the prime reason for studying him is just that he is the true pioneer in exploring this most elementary force-field of ideas. He is the great un-masker of abstract religious ambiguity. Above all in the Phenomenology, he sets out to trace the more or less latent presence of divine revelation everywhere, throughout the entire range of human experience, in all its manifold ambiguities: forever wrapped in ambiguity; but also never altogether absent, as a possibility, in even the most benighted of cultural contexts. He does so with such astonishing pell-mell energy; one can scarcely keep up. But if only one could! A History of ‘Atonement’ The fourth gospel, also, begins with an extended speculative proposition: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it … And the Word became flesh. (John 1: 1–5, 14)

One may, indeed, read this as just the first sketch of a metaphysical creed. But Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology suggests quite another approach. And this is where it really does have the potential to make a practical difference. For, is not what the Evangelist calls ‘the Word’, in the end, identical with what Hegel means by ‘Spirit’? ‘Without’ the Word ‘was not anything made that was made’. From the outset, surely, everything in creation is such that its true significance, that is, its immediate

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relationship back to God the Creator, can only emerge, for us, in the light cast by the God-given impulse, within us, towards ever greater openness. Viewed in any other light – as an instrument of, or obstacle to, more egocentric desires, or as a matter of mere indifference – the world’s ultimate reality is obscured. The Word, then, is both the shining of that reality, all the way from the out-of-time moment of divine Creation, and the subsequent, temporal opening-up of the human mind to receive it. It is the whole revelation-process: both the original initiative of grace, the work of God’s Spirit, and the human receptive participation in what follows from that initiative, the response of the human spirit. So, too, the Hegelian notion of ‘Spirit’ encompasses both aspects; the essential intertwining of the divine and human in the life of the Word. ‘And the Word was made flesh’. There is a sense in which one might say that the Word is always, by its very nature, in the act of becoming incarnate. Of course, in the first instance, the Evangelist is talking about the single individual, Jesus. But, as the Word of God incarnate, Jesus is also our representative. His individuality, with unique authority, represents the ‘that of God’ which is more or less concealed within each one of us, as individuals. The Phenomenology, so to speak, sets out to study the Word’s engagement with flesh systematically, at every different level of common human experience: wherever the impulse towards greater openness is at work. So, as I have said, Hegel here considers the various obstacles to that impulse, the truthful energy of Spirit, at each level, one by one. He seeks to evoke the impulse, in all of its diverse collisions within the fallen human mind. Its divinity is not obvious at first; it is only really appreciated right at the end of the argument. Only then is it ‘absolutely’ known. For the purposes of Christology, the key new concept which Hegel introduces here is that of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn.17 This is usually translated, in the most literal fashion, as ‘the Unhappy Consciousness’. However, as I have argued in my book Hegel and Religious Faith, there are major problems with the conventional translation: for das unglückliche Bewußtseyn is surely far more a sub-conscious than conscious condition; and at the conscious level, it may well not seem, in the slightest, unhappy!18 In fact, the words ‘consciousness’ and Bewußtsein have, to a large extent, changed in meaning (as well as spelling in the German) since Hegel’s day, due to the introduction of the distinction between ‘consciousness’ and ‘sub-consciousness’, which was not part of his vocabulary, or that of his contemporaries, at all. Das unglückliche Bewußtseyn is certainly an ‘unhappy’ condition, considered in objective terms – or, one might say, at the sub-conscious level. But, the more powerful the grip of this mentality on its victims is, the less conscious they will in fact be of their unhappiness. Its whole power over us consists in that very lack of conscious self-knowledge. And therefore I have proposed an alternative translation, using the opportunity offered by translation, to try and clarify the matter. My suggestion is Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Chapters IV, B and VII, C. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, Chapter 3.

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that we should speak, in English, not of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ but, rather, of the ‘Unatoned State of Mind’. Or, more succinctly: of ‘Unatonement’. ‘Un-at-one-ment’, not being at one with oneself: das unglückliche Bewußtseyn is a condition of inner division, even civil war, within the psyche. Having in a previous passage discussed the dialectical interplay between master and slave, as two abstractly conceived distinct individuals, Hegel now goes on, under this rubric, to discuss the internalisation of that relationship, where one aspect of the self plays the role of master and the other plays that of slave.19 Das unglückliche Bewußtseyn, the ‘Unatoned State of Mind’, is, in the first instance, simply a general term for every kind of mental slavery, as such. This is clearly one of the most elementary obstacles to Spirit, in its striving towards truth-as-openness. It is, indeed, nothing other than a failure to be the individual one is called to be. The Unatoned State of Mind lacks the necessary self-confidence, in its individuality, to open up to the lessons of fresh experience one’s experience as an individual, insofar as that experience comes into conflict with the prejudices bound up with social conformism. In Hegel and Religious Faith I argue, in post-Hegelian neuro-psychological terms – drawing on Iain McGilchrist’s work, referred to above – that the inner dualism of Unatonement is really the duality of the two cerebral hemispheres gone wrong.20 Hegel himself calls the self-suppressed slave aspect of the self ‘the Changeable’: here we have, in Unatonement, the not-yet-fulfilled capacity for being opened up to fresh experience and, so, being changed by it. He calls the despotic master aspect the ‘Unchangeable’. For, this is the fixing of unchangeable, externally prescribed prejudice. The Unchangeable is thus the inner spokesperson, within the soul, for the dictates of conformist gang- or herd-morality. But is not the Changeable, at the same time, the sub-self that corresponds to the primary skills and authentic, fresh empathetic insights of the right hemisphere of the brain; and the Unchangeable, the corruption of the sub-self that corresponds to the primary skills and calculative insights of the left hemisphere? In the Unatoned State of Mind the two hemispheres, which collaborate in almost all that we do, are not only collaborating but are also, at another level, drawn into a degree of self-destructive conflict with one another. The left hemisphere, which ought to be, in McGilchrist’s phrase, the respectful ‘emissary’ of the right, is seized with hubris and seeks instead to domineer. So, it sets itself against the Changeable, as the Un-changeable. Unatonement is, then, vulnerability to manipulation: the Unchangeable’s impulse to domineer is what – within the unatoned self – the external manipulator grabs hold of and exploits. Community established on this basis is, on the one hand, the lamentable opposite to the spontaneous harmony represented, for Hegel, by his dream-image of Ancient Greek Sittlichkeit. But, on the other hand, in its suppression of authentic individuality, the sickness of the Unatoned State of Mind is also just what the Christian gospel is, in principle, meant to heal. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 206, p. 126. Shanks, Hegel and Religious Faith, Chapter 4; referring to Iain McGilchrist, The

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Master and His Emissary. See above, pp. XXX.

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Because Hegel’s initial discussion of this phenomenon is full of veiled allusions to Christianity, commentators have sometimes wanted to decode it as the description of a mentality especially typical of, and widespread within, Christendom; or even, especially, medieval Christendom. Nonsense! The Unatoned State of Mind, in itself, is a universal phenomenon, to be found within every sort of cultural context without exception. To put it in theological terms: it is as universal as original sin. Because that is exactly what it is! Hegel’s analysis of the Unatoned State of Mind is nothing other than his phenomenological account of original sin, its modus operandi; a common element, operative to some extent or other within every human soul, simply as such. Unatonement, in itself, is universal; what differs from culture to culture is simply the degree of articulate poetic expression it is potentially accorded. To an extent, its misery is always dulled by the moral anaesthesia which belongs to original sin. But some cultures, nevertheless, are better than others in providing it with channels for self-expression / self-betrayal. And the point is that in monotheistic cultures it does tend to be expressed in particularly vivid poetic fashion. For, here the Unchangeable projects itself, onto heaven. It constructs an idolatrous mental image of ‘God’ reflecting its own moral dogmatism; and then it presents itself as the dutiful representative, within the self, of this ‘Lord God’, a celestial despot. Unatonement may be just as prevalent, in practice, where it is relatively inarticulate, in imaginative terms. There is no remedy in mere inarticulacy. It may be just as virulent in non-theistic religious cultures, or in atheistic secular ones, as in a theistic context. (It is certainly not overcome, for instance, in Feuerbach’s post-Christian Humanism, as this eventually became caught up into Marxist ideology. One has only to look at the propaganda of twentieth-century Marxist regimes, which surely represents the most rampant kind of Unatonement!) But the monotheistic version of Unatonement (the cult of ‘Old Nobodaddy’, as William Blake called it) does, at any rate, serve to highlight the problem, in picture-thinking terms. And, as it highlights the problem, so by the same token it further renders possible a singularly direct imaginative counter-blast. This then, the provision of the counter-blast, is what Hegel sees as the prime, proper rationale of the Christian gospel. For, in the first instance, Christ represents the absolute symbolic inversion of Unatonement, as it penetrates theology. The false ‘Lord God’ envisaged by Unatonement-projecting theology is altogether a suppressor of human conscientious-dissident individuality. But in Christ we see God incarnate precisely as an individual conscientious dissident, put to death for his dissent! St. Paul, addressing the first Christians at Philippi perhaps in the words of an already existent very early hymn, encapsulates this great reversal in legendary form. So, he imagines ‘Christ Jesus’ as a ‘self-emptying’ divine principle, the exact opposite of any conventional, self-exalting god, freely choosing to become a human individual: Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited,

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‘Taking the form of a slave’: crucifixion was known as the ‘slaves’ punishment’, and regardless of their crimes full Roman citizens were exempt from it. There could not, in principle, be a more decisive divine rejection of Unatonement-projecting theology than God’s ‘taking the form of a slave’ in this way! Jesus is revealed as the Christ, finally, in the symbolism of God resurrecting to life one whom the Roman regime had put to death by crucifixion. This inverts not only every traditional Unatonement-infected idea of the divine but also that so theatrically enacted human-judicial suppression of conscientious-dissident individuality – to affirm just what Rome thus, in general, condemned. The despotic ‘Lord God’, who is really the idolatrous self-projection of the Unchangeable aspect of the Unatoned State of Mind and who forbids true freedom of thought, gives way here to his absolute nemesis. Only such a reading really makes sense of the gospel symbolism as a whole. But look: it makes perfect sense of it! Nevertheless, Hegel’s main theological use for the concept of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn, the ‘Unatoned State of Mind’, is not as part of an argument seeking to demonstrate the abstract truth-as-correctness of Christian faith in the Incarnation. Rather, it is to insist on its fundamental orientation towards truth-as-openness. And, no matter how ‘correctly’ the dogma may be formulated, there can never be any guarantee that it will in fact do its proper poetic job, from that point of view. For, Unatonement is a formidably slippery enemy; it will never take no for an answer but is forever re-insinuating itself where it is meant to have been cast out. And all it has to do, in this case, is just present the gospel as an arbitrary sheer datum of faith, beyond reason. (A little shudder of awe-struck piety may help.) Whereupon, without any further departure from traditional salvific orthodoxy required, it quite readily manages to take over again. With the primordial emancipatory rationale of the gospel scooped out, but all the paraphernalia nevertheless remaining, Christ is reduced in effect to nothing more than just another face, another mask, for the self-projection of the Unchangeable. This is why Hegel, in his initial discussion of

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the phenomenon of Unatonement in general, illustrates it with veiled allusions to Christian history. It is not so much because Unatonement is especially prevalent within Christendom as because its persistence even there is such clear evidence of its resilient elusiveness, lost within the everlasting ambiguity of not yet philosophically clarified religious thought. The veiling of the allusions is Hegel’s tribute to the universality of the actual phenomenon in itself. But the allusive references to Christendom indicate his particular philosophical-theological interest in the topic, as he seeks, above all, to establish the basic criteria for a specifically Christian celebration of ideal open-mindedness. What particularly interests him here is the struggle between the cunning of reason and the cunning of un-reason, right at the heart of Christian tradition as a whole. No one before Hegel had ever argued along these lines. He was a complete pioneer, as his fumbling style bears often painful witness. And consider some of the (I think one has to say) perfectly bizarre misinterpretations of his thought in subsequent generations: scholars for instance, quite a number of them, describing him as a thinker who was ‘really’ an atheist or ‘really’ an anti-Christian! It seems that this ambiguity-identifying approach of his remains somewhat baffling, even now, to some very clever and learned people. Following McGilchrist, I am inclined to say: such is the persistent power of left-hemisphere despotism, not least amongst the most gifted. From a theological point of view, David Friedrich Strauss once described the Phenomenology of Spirit as the ‘alpha and omega of Hegel’.21 I think Strauss was right. In Hegel’s earlier writings, one can observe the steady progress of his thought towards the Phenomenology. The critical outlook opened up by his analysis of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn first, in fact, clearly starts to emerge in his 1798–1800 essay (unpublished in his own lifetime) on ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’.22 Up to this point, he had largely seen himself as a populariser of Kantian religious reform. But here, for the first time, he turns decisively against Kant. Of course, he remains entirely at one with Kant in identifying the primordial injunction of philosophy, ‘Think for yourself!’ with the very essence of the truly sacred. Now, though, he has come to question what he sees as Kant’s over-simple identification of that injunction with a set of secondary recommendations: that one should abstain from close participation in a community of public religious ritual and should reject the sort of concrete-imaginative thinking bound up with such community, framing one’s moral convictions in terms of exclusively abstract21 Strauss, Christian Märklin: Ein Lebens und Characterbild Aus Der Gegenwart, 1851 (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2010), Chapter 3. 22 Hegel, Early Theological Writings, pp. 182–301. Note: Hegel still remains confined within a rather caricatural anti-Judaism here. In the Phenomenology the concept of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn has the entirely desirable effect of universalising the negative charge that he had hitherto tended to identify symbolically with religious Judaism. And in his later career he reacted with admirable allergy to the antisemitism of the new German Nationalism, emerging out of the Napoleonic Wars.

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theoretical principle instead. For, he now sees, there can be no guarantee that such procedure will in fact produce true thinking-for-oneself; nor, indeed, that doing the opposite, plunging deep into a religious community, will have the opposite effect. Again, all that the Kantian proposals actually guarantee (Hegel now thinks) is an imaginative impoverishment of one’s theology and an emotional aridity in one’s faith. More specifically, for instance, in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone Kant had compared the prince bishops of Central Europe and the hard-line puritan Christian colonists of North America with the shamans of the Tungus and Vogul peoples in Siberia.23 Notwithstanding all their obvious differences, all of these alike, he argues, exemplify the same basic failing: servitude to philosophically unchallenged dogma. Well, yes, Hegel now replies. But is there not also another level of inner servitude, which may equally afflict the Tungus or Vogul shaman, the North American puritan, the European prince bishop – and the would-be Kantian philosopher, too?24 For, suppose that, in actual practice, the real motivation of the latter is nothing but a mere adherence to intellectual fashion, mixed with snobbish and ethnocentric philosophic contempt for ‘unenlightened’ non-philosophers. This is by no means unimaginable! But then the philosopher, for all his sophistication, will in the end be no closer than the others to authentic truth-as-openness. Perhaps the shaman, or the puritan, or even the prince bishop, may actually be more open to the sheer humanity of an outsider to their own culture, than such a Kantian manages to be. And is there not, in that case, a sense in which they are less enslaved than the Kantian? If what one is talking about is ‘slavery’ to rigid prejudice, purely and simply as such, then they surely would be. What matters for Hegel, in short, is just the substantive spiritual achievement of open-minded thinking-for-oneself, whatever the formal religious or irreligious context. Here, for the first time, we see it: with the suggestion of this thought, he is embarked upon the course that will eventually issue in the Phenomenology, the whole of which is then, I think, built up around that core. For philosophical theology, as Hegel sees it, everything comes down to ‘Think freely for yourself! Be opened up!’ – embedded not so much in any one particular theological or agnostic orthodoxy, as such, but, rather, in a sustained critical-sympathetic engagement with the actual ambiguities of all religious, and broader moral, tradition, from this point of view. The Phenomenology as a whole opens towards that concern, and elaborates upon it, systematically. Unfortunately, it is true that in his later writings Hegel no longer speaks of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn. The concept only makes proper sense in the larger context provided by the Phenomenology, and he never again returns to that level Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, p. 164. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, p. 211: ‘Between the Shaman of the Tungus, the

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European prelate who rules church and state, the Voguls, and the Puritans, on the one hand, and the man who listens to his own command of duty [in the sense that Kant prescribes], on the other, the difference is not that the former make themselves slaves, while the latter is free, but that the former have their lord outside themselves, while the latter carries his lord in himself, yet at the same time is his own slave’.

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of philosophic intensity with regard to the problematics of Spirit. His later writings are for the most part lecture series, intended for an undergraduate audience. He evidently judged the argument of the Phenomenology too ambitious, too difficult, for that context. One can well see why he thought so. Yet, it nevertheless does seem to me to be a shame that he allowed such a key element in his greatest work to slip from sight in this way. Hegel is always a cautious thinker politically, chastened as he had been in his youth by the spectacle of the Jacobin Terror. But in the Phenomenology he is a very bold one religiously. His later lectures are, I think, largely a veiling of that boldness; not least, behind a great show of vindicating the intrinsic superiority of Christianity to other religions, after all. (A mere matter of purported truth-as-correctness, appeasing the church ideologists: as though it mattered!) He still presents the Christian gospel here as, at its truest, an emancipatory summons. Yet, the dialectical energy of his argument is much diminished. And, moreover, I am afraid that these later lectures are also unfortunate in another way. For, they represent a bid, on Hegel’s part, to devise a model curriculum, a systematic scheme for the teaching of philosophy throughout the resurgent universities of early nineteenth-century Germany – with philosophy laying claim to a major leadership role, as the discipline charged with defining the very mission of the university. Not that there was anything outlandish about this project. In pursuing it, he was really just doing his job as Professor of Philosophy in Berlin. It so happened to be the case that he was a man of encyclopaedic interests, keen to cover the whole discipline, with conscientious thoroughness. The bid for power informing the later ‘Hegelian’ project was driven as much by the ambition of his friends and admirers as by his own ambition. How could it not have emerged, in these circumstances? And the resultant ‘system’ is a beautiful work of intellectual architecture, in its own right. Nevertheless, it is not surprising that it should have evoked so much hostility from those who were reluctant to be, as they felt, taken in hand by the ‘Hegelians’; or that this hostility should then have played a major role, along with the sheer difficulty of Hegel’s writing, in generating the prolific malice of the ‘Hegel myth’, which is still, alas, by no means dispelled. Wildly over-ambitious, and hence impenetrable, the Phenomenology of Spirit may be. Unlike most of his later writings, Hegel did not envisage it as a source of direct teaching material for undergraduates. But I think it does need to be insisted that this is (therefore) his great work. For, it represents the breakthrough period in his life, when nothing yet impelled him, tactically, to compromise. ‘Spirit’: Founding the Solidarity of the Shaken Never before, in the whole of history, had there been such a chance to recognise the ways of providence. So Hegel argued, in his day. Above all, what was new was the possibility, realised in his work, of thinking the concept, ‘Spirit’, as defined by the Phenomenology.

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I have sought here to reframe that same thinking, in fresh terms. What does Hegel mean by ‘Spirit’? Again: what the Phenomenology traces is just the impulse to ever greater truth-as-openness, in all its multifarious forms. ‘Spirit’ is the impulse forever opening us up to new insight of every kind; battling against the various resistances of easy habit and fear. And to speak of ‘Spirit’ as Hegel does is to recognise just that impulse – purely and simply in itself – as the one and only true essence of the sacred. It is the essence of the sacred inasmuch as it is the sole basis for the most desirable of all species of solidarity between people, namely, what I would call the ‘solidarity of the shaken’: the mutual recognition, and mutual support, of those who are most ‘shaken’ by the imperatives of openness, as such. When Hegel speaks of ‘Spirit’, he means divine Spirit indwelling human Spirit. By far the greater part of its operations go on under the surface, in the sense that its divinity normally remains unrecognised, even by the most devout. This divinity is mostly a latent, anonymous presence, stirring deep within our souls. Only right at the end of the Phenomenology is it finally recognised for what it is. Never before, indeed, in the history of philosophy had anyone ever undertaken to analyse the all-pervasive, indwelling presence of God-in-the-soul with anything like the systematic thoroughness which comes to culmination in this work. And so what had happened, historically, to help render it possible? Much of Hegel’s thought takes shape as a vast grand narrative, cumulatively seeking, in effect, to answer that historiographical question. Thus, this grand narrative is nothing other than the story of embodied Spirit’s long journey to self-awareness: through art, politics, religion, and philosophy. It is sometimes misunderstood, as though Hegel were claiming to unveil the necessary course of History, in the sense of an inevitable progress. All that he is actually attempting to show is how, as a matter of fact, something like his philosophic standpoint has at long last become possible. He does not need, in any sense, to claim that such a development always had to take place. And neither is he analysing the past in order, predictively, to extrapolate the leading tendencies of the future. Unlike the Marxists after him, Hegel leaves the future entirely open. Why, after all, would he want to predict the future? He is not constructing a propagandist vision of things to come: ‘This way you are assured of being on the winning side.’ Quite to the contrary! I have already referred to his immediate predecessor as Professor of Philosophy at Berlin: Fichte. In sharp contrast to Hegel, who was a notoriously poor public speaker, Fichte had been a fine orator, an accomplished emotional manipulator of crowds. He was also a philosophic visionary, who claimed to see the future very clearly, and his doctrine flowed straight into a justification for the most virulent nationalist-revolutionary propaganda. Fichte brilliantly illustrates the potential philosophic sickness of the age, at its most feverish. Against Fichte, however, Hegel stands four-square for the defence of genuine civilisation. So, he very strikingly affirms the indwelling of the divine within the legally transparent State: that is, the high potential dignity of politics, in that sort of context, as a vocation. But by this he surely means pure anti-propaganda politics. What is divine is none other than the essentially non-manipulative civil religious welling-up of authentic

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Sittlichkeit. The story Hegel has to tell, of Spirit’s journey to self-awareness, is intended, he remarks, as a ‘theodicy’; a justification of the historic ways of God.25 For, like any other grand narrative, it is meant to serve as a basis for solidaritybuilding. To that end, it is, indeed, an argument for hope: the necessary minimum of open-ended hope without which effective political organisation is impossible. This vindication of political activism emerges out of a singularly vast contemplative enterprise; and to understand the Hegelian philosophy of history is surely, above all, to grasp the proper reasons for this vastness. The narrative needs to be vast because it is oriented towards the most resilient, long-term form of hope: that which is the most decisively lifted beyond any risk of immediate discouragement. Yet, this resilience, at the same time, also implies a decisive critical detachment from the mere opportunism typical of political agents preoccupied with the shortterm demands of propaganda effectiveness. Again, what Hegel has in mind is, in effect, the cultivation of the most difficult species of solidarity: that solidarity which bears the most vivid possible testimony to the imperatives of perfect truthas-openness and, so, right from the outset, is furthest removed from any possibility of promotion by propaganda. The Hegelian grand narrative is an argument for the most thoughtful, anti-propagandist form of hope, organised in principled resistance to every sort of cheap, propaganda-generated hope. What he is advocating is, thus, the kind of hope most in need of authentic, patient, un-scripted thinking-through. And how else is it to be thought through, if not by way of a truly cosmopolitan meditation on the grand sweep of history, the whole struggle of Atonement down the centuries? Hegel himself provides no actual name for the solidarity principle in question here, as such. The name I have adopted, the ‘solidarity of the shaken’, derives from the later twentieth-century struggle, from within, against the decaying relics of Communist totalitarianism.26 But, even though this is such a different context from Hegel’s own, I think that the phrase, in fact, fits his basic critical concerns very precisely. The solidarity of the shaken may overlap all manner of other solidarity: that which is bound up with tribal identity, class identity, shared citizenship, participation in campaigning organisations, or religious community life. Yet, it transcends all of these, ideally transfiguring them, in that it is the kind of solidarity which is most directly incompatible with a totalitarian mentality. In fact, if one looks at the history of philosophy in the apocalyptic light cast by the experience of twentieth century totalitarianism, then I think it has to be said that Hegel passes the test better than perhaps any other. Of all philosophers, that is to say, he is the one who, in the most systematic way, lays the necessary theoretic G.F.W. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, vol. 1, pp. 85–6. Originally the coinage of Jan Patočka, the philosopher who in 1977 co-founded,

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with Václav Havel, the Czech civil rights campaign Charter 77, and then also adopted by Havel himself; in Czech the phrase is solidarita otřesených. I have sought to give it theological currency in a series of works: Civil Society, Civil Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995); God and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2000); The Other Calling (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); as well as Hegel and Religious Faith.

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foundations for effective resistance to such folly. However tendentiously some of the more disgracefully malevolent proponents of ‘Hegel mythology’, such as Karl Popper or Eric Voegelin, may have insinuated to the contrary, the whole thrust of his thinking actually represents the most militant possible opposition to totalitarianism, in both pre-political and political terms.27 At the pre-political level, it does so simply by virtue of its close focus on the dialectical process of Atonement, as such. For, again, what else is das unglückliche Bewußtseyn, the ‘Unatonement’ which is here overcome, if not the psychological predisposition to be manipulated by propaganda in general – and hence, in particular, to be sucked into that most all-encompassing form of propaganda-thought, totalitarian ideology? But then, at the political level too, his celebration of the legally transparent State is, above all, an upholding of the various institutional structures which totalitarianism, by its very nature, tends to hollow out, or abolish. In short: what he has in mind is very much the State as defender of the individual, against the social mass; the State as bulwark against the mass-surge of the Movement; the State, in the sense of that whole structure of proper legal process which his generation had seen the totalitarian Jacobin Terror, for instance, so terrifyingly sweep away. Compare Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s famous notion, dreamed up in a Nazi prison cell, of ‘religionless Christianity’.28 I have the same basic objection to Bonhoeffer’s usage of the term ‘religion’ here as I have to Barth’s, from whom he derived and adapted it.29 But set that aside. Bonhoeffer, on the whole, appears to subscribe to the prejudice-laden Barthian view of Hegel. Nevertheless, as in his prison cell he starts to move somewhat out beyond the orbit of his previous Barthian orthodoxy, to a new sense of ‘the world come age’ (never before such an opportunity!) he does, I think, begin to steer in a distinctly Hegelian-looking direction. Bonhoeffer only sketches this new idea in his letters to Eberhard Bethge, and the sketchiness of the thought has allowed all sorts of later interpreters to try and lay claim to it, for their own purposes, exploiting the pathos associated with Bonhoeffer’s memory as such a notable martyr of the struggle against Nazism. That struggle, though, surely is the key to understanding Bonhoeffer’s basic intention. Thus, there is a sense in which, for the citizens of a world ‘come of age’, ‘religion’ has ceased to be thoughtfully possible, at least as a truly honest worldview. How so? In his prison cell Bonhoeffer draws up the outline for a short book he proposes to write, once he is able, the first chapter of which will deal with this ‘coming of age’. And the crucial factor, for him, is the emergence On the ‘mythology’ in general, see Jon Stewart, ed., The Hegel Myths and Legends (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996). 28 Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, edited by Eberhard Bethge, English translation by Reginald Fuller, Frank Clarke, John Bowden et al., enlarged edition (London: SCM, 1971); letters dated 30 April, 5 May, 8 June, and ‘Outline for a Book’; pp. 280–81, 286, 328, 382. The whole evolution of Bonhoeffer’s thought, in this regard, is exhaustively examined in Ralf K. Wüstenberg, A Theology of Life: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Religionless Christianity, English translation by Doug Stott (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998). 29 See above, pp. XXX. 27

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of a new mega-problem. Once upon a time, the whole shape of human cultural and political life was basically determined by the species’ grand struggle to be ‘independent of nature’, or at least to rise beyond what is required by the mere dictates of natural survival. Now, however, that original condition of humanity has, at last, been decisively superseded: Nature was formerly conquered by spiritual means, with us by technical organization of all kinds. Our immediate environment is not nature, as formerly, but organization. But with this protection from nature’s menace there arises a new one – through organization itself. But the spiritual force is lacking. The question is: What protects us against the menace of organisation?30

Humanity’s ‘coming of age’ is its arrival at a tipping point, in this immensely long-term process. Everything has changed. In the past, the world in which the Christian tradition itself was originally formed, faith was very largely a matter of people being spiritually empowered to cope, in an organised way, with the pressures of un-mastered nature. From now on, however, faith has to adapt to a world in which its primary calling is to empower us against ‘the menace of organisation’ instead. In other words: against the menace supremely exemplified by the totalitarian regime in one of whose prison cells Bonhoeffer himself was at that moment confined. ‘Religion’, in the emergent Bonhoefferian sense of the word, is thus definable as everything which has the effect of distracting the Church from its vocation to resistance. ‘What does it mean’, he asks, ‘to “interpret in a religious sense”? I think it means to speak on the one hand metaphysically and on the other hand individualistically’.31 Again, ‘metaphysics’ here is a general term for theology misframed as a pursuit of puzzle-solving explanations for natural phenomena; the cult of a ‘stopgap’ God, supposedly made manifest wherever natural science comes up against its explanatory limits. And the ‘individualism’ Bonhoeffer has in mind is the sanctified narcissism of a purely other-worldly piety, focused only on the concerns of private life. Such ‘individualism’ offers no real challenge to conventional social norms. But, rather, it is simply the process of their private internalisation; the essentially atomistic condition which renders one most vulnerable to propagandamanipulation, the individualism, indeed, that pervades the herd. ‘Religion’, in Bonhoeffer’s usage of the term, is just what these two very different types of phenomena negatively have in common: inasmuch as they both alike represent motivations for belief in God which have nothing at all to do with a prophetic love of justice, or a yearning for the coming of God’s kingdom. ‘Metaphysics’ and ‘individualism’, as the two ingredients of anti-revelatory ‘religion’, are twin modes of withdrawal from the struggle against ‘the menace of organisation’; the hallmarks of a religiosity that remains perfectly compatible with passive acquiescence in the ghastliness of the Third Reich, or of other such regimes. But ‘religionless Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 380. Ibid, pp. 285–6.

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Christianity’ is Bonhoeffer’s name for a new form of church life in which such acquiescence will be quite impossible. Everything in this ideal Church of the future will thus be oriented towards the preparation of people for prophetically inspired struggle; a celebration, therefore, of Christ-like conscientious dissent. Christian evangelism will no longer be a preying on people’s weaknesses or a mere offering of consolation. Instead, it will be a building of solidarity, on the basis of the inner strength required for real honesty, in defiance of mere propaganda. Bonhoefferian ‘religionless Christianity’ really is very close to Hegel’s hope for the Church’s future! And note: just as Bonhoeffer’s hope for the future is based on the potential instructiveness of terrible decadence, so too is Hegel’s. In Bonhoeffer’s case, it is the decadence represented by the great trauma of twentiethcentury totalitarianism; in Hegel’s case, the decadence which, in the days of his youth, had come to its hitherto most extreme expression in the Jacobin Terror. Whereas Bonhoeffer asks what it was that had so weakened the Christian culture of Germany as to render possible the rise of Nazism, Hegel likewise asks: what had so weakened the Christian culture of France as to allow such barbarism to erupt? To the end of his days he used to drink a toast on the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille: he certainly sympathised with the idealism of the original revolutionary upsurge. Yet, he lamented a state of affairs in which the Church had proved so utterly incapable of channelling that rebellious idealism, and keeping it civilised, contained within the bounds of an accommodating Sittlichkeit. On the one hand, he thinks that, all other things being equal, Roman Catholic cultures are in principle more vulnerable to such disasters than Protestant ones. (This is debatable!) But, on the other hand, he also attributes much of the mischief to the Sittlichkeit-dissolving impact of the Enlightenment – in a broad sense, very much including the particular influence of Rousseau.32 And, in the German Protestant context, he further deplores the influence of other-worldly Pietism as an additional weakening of the culture’s defences. Just as Bonhoeffer deplores religious ‘metaphysics’ and ‘individualism’, or ‘inwardness’, so Hegel deplores the twin impacts of the Enlightenment, deflecting theology towards increasingly reductionist metaphysical apologetics, and Pietism, again understood as an inward-turning beautiful-soul deflection of theology from proper, critical publicspiritedness.33 His lament sounds most lyrically at the end of the 1821 manuscript version of his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, as he complains especially of the disconnection between a semi-Enlightened clergy and the common people: Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, VI, B, 3, ‘Absolute Freedom and Terror’: emerging out of VI, B, 2, ‘The Enlightenment’. 33 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, ‘The Consummate Religion’ , English translation edited by Peter C. Hodgson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 343–6. This comes at the end of the 1827 lecture series, where Hegel is especially concerned to defend himself from the attack recently launched upon him by F.A.G. Tholuck, a Pietist theologian at the (predominantly Pietist) University of Halle. So he attacks Pietism, here, chiefly as an enemy of ‘philosophy’. But he means his own brand of philosophy, in its underlying political-theological orientation. See also The Phenomenology of Spirit, VI, B, 1b, ‘Faith and pure insight’. 32

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Where the gospel is not preached to the poor, who are the ones closest to infinite anguish; where the teaching of love in anguish is abandoned in favour of enjoyment, love without anguish; where the gospel is preached in a naturalistic way – there the salt has lost its savour [Matthew 5: 13].34

Thus these lectures end, as he himself puts it, on a ‘discordant note’.35 He compares the decadence of the present day with the decadence of Ancient Rome in the time of the early Church – the same comparison is also echoed at the beginning of the 1824 version of these lectures and in his 1822–23 Lectures on the Philosophy of World History.36 For him, the world of Ancient Rome is the very epitome of one in which traditional Sittlichkeit has largely atrophied, provoking a tremendous groundswell of discontent and, hence, the prospect of a great breakthrough of fresh religious creativity. This happened in Ancient Rome, with the original rise of Christianity. Might something comparable also be possible now, in the form of a philosophically transfigured Christian renewal? Indeed, Hegel only hints at the possibility. As a matter of conscientious principle, he makes no inflammatory, definite predictions. And since his day, things have proceeded in ways that he certainly could not foresee. Nevertheless, such was his half-articulated hope, the hope that drove his own philosophical-theological creativity. So: what might it mean to re-do, for the early twenty-first century, what Hegel did for the early nineteenth? In his own formula, as noted above, the truth of the true modern State essentially consists in the coherent, organised expression it gives to the anti-prejudicial ‘principle of subjectivity’.37 Nowadays, of course, the ‘principle of subjectivity’ has pushed on and is engaged in a whole range of new struggles – against closed-minded prejudice relating to gender, sexuality, disability, and race – fought on political battlefields that lie way beyond those of Hegel’s antique modernity. Nevertheless, I repeat: consistency would surely still lead him (supposing he were now back with us) to affirm the same principle, also in these new contexts. And he would, moreover, undoubtedly welcome the new organisations now everywhere at work on that principle’s promotion: recognising those various heirs to the movement for the abolition of slavery in his day, the innumerable public conscience movements of present-day civil society, as major potential agencies of Spirit. He would, I think, regard it as the prime task of philosophical theology today to help shift the thinking of these various progressive movements systematically beyond the level of mere propaganda. In the preceding three chapters I have sought to outline what seem to me the most significant advances in theological enlightenment that have, so to speak, come to meet these wider political developments. (a) A growing demand, in at Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, p. 160. Ibid, p. 161, note 256 (supplementary material originally from the lost transcript of

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these lectures by Hegel’s student, Leopold von Henning). 36 Ibid, pp. 159–62, 168–9; Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, p. 433. 37 See above, pp. 25–9.

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least some churches, for freedom of theological speech clearly helps the Church as a whole open up towards the fresh opportunities of the present. Here, at any rate, is one aspect of contemporary secularity, bound up with the developing ethos of the public conscience movements, which is entirely to be welcomed. (b) The constant attrition of ‘science’-invoking atheism is, little by little, prodding theology towards a proper appreciation of the elementary difference between truth-as-correctness and truth-as-openness and of its own vocation to prioritise the latter. We are, in that sense, learning intellectual chastity; disentangling theology proper from the vast distraction of metaphysics. And, (c) our being constantly bombarded, more than any other generation before us, by so much such slick and glamorous mendacity may well help us understand – better than any generation before us – the crucial antithesis between authentic religious liturgy and mere sacred propaganda. Thus, we are being taught more thought-provokingly than ever before, by the unprecedented intensity of our culture’s propaganda-fever, rightly to recognise the perennial critical vocation of religious liturgy, in general: to serve as contemplative medicine for the soul, against propaganda, in general. Never before, such an opportunity!

Chapter 5

‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ Two Modes of Betrayal Never before, in the history of the Church, has there been such an opportunity for us to appreciate the deep truth of the gospel. For, this truth is not just something given; it is not operative until it has been appropriated. And its appropriation, by whole communities as by individuals, depends upon processes of trial and error, some of which may extend over many generations, even perhaps millennia. Why not? A key task for the Christian philosopher of history, as such, is thus the historic diagnosis of deep-rooted, still-persistent error, hindering that process of appropriation: where, exactly, did it all go wrong? However, a true reading of church history will surely be one which identifies the most serious form of error with what Hegel calls das unglückliche Bewußtseyn, or Unatonement, in all its very many diverse forms; not just in one or another of them. Thus, on the one hand, there is the aggressive form of church ideology which is just the self-assertion of some particular clerical elite, or particular sect, in Christ’s name. Broad categories of this include, for instance, Gnostic Unatonement; Arian Unatonement embattled against Athanasian Unatonement; Hildebrandine Unatonement evolving into Ultramontane Roman Catholic Unatonement; and Protestant-schismatic Unatonement in all its sundry denominations. Notwithstanding all the obvious differences between these various historic phenomena, in each such case alike, the essential theological problem consists, precisely, in its being Unatonement which is at work here: that is, a fundamental turning away from authentic truth-as-openness. On the other hand, there is also the more self-defensive or fellow-travelling form of church ideology, which arises as a mere theological accommodation with Unatonement in the primary form of a secular propaganda-ideology. In past ages, this might involve the invocation of God’s manifest blessing upon empire, or the ‘divine right of kings’. Nowadays, it is a matter of ideologies self-labelled as ‘democratic’, ‘republican’, ‘liberal’, ‘socialist’, ‘conservative’, or ‘nationalist’. But, whatever the label, once again the theological disaster consists in the sell-out involved, to Unatonement. Of course, in all of these contexts, Atonement has also always remained possible. The Holy Spirit does not abandon us. But let us, finally, ponder the historical shape of the resistances. Historic Workings of the Antichrist “Where, in Christian history, did it all go wrong?” Not many people, nowadays, are seriously going to defend the wave upon wave of persecutory violence, perpetrated

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in Christ’s name or at least condoned by the clergy, that so disfigure church history especially in the epoch from the late eleventh century to the late seventeenth – violence directed first against ‘heretics’ and Jews; then also against lepers and homosexuals; and finally against ‘witches’. But what actually rendered all these horrors possible, and just how much of the rest of church tradition is properly discredited by association with them? R.I. Moore has highlighted the role of the medieval literati and their later heirs, the thrusting, upwardly mobile class of men at work in the church bureaucracies of the period, as they sought to reinforce the authority deriving from their educational attainments by identifying – or one might say inventing! – ever new threats to public order, such as could only be dealt with by new systems of disciplinary order under their supervision.1 No doubt, there is a large element of truth in this analysis. Indeed, I think it is a pretty basic criterion for good theology that it should teach intellectuals, as such, to be self-mistrustful. These historic workings of the Antichrist, however, would not have been possible without the development, beginning in the early fourth century, first with King Tiridates III of Armenia and then with Emperor Constantine, of professedly ‘Christian’ governments. So, was that the great mistake; as the theologians of the Radical Reformation would have it? When I consider the history of Constantinian church life, I am certainly tempted to think it was. Yet, I think, too, of what is involved in the principled turning aside of more other-worldly churches from the mainstream of public life: the element of sheer closure, the shutting down of debate, immediately involved in such renunciation. And, in the end, I am simply grateful for the providential divisions of Christendom. Is it not good, after all, that we have both sorts of church, Constantinian ones and anti-Constantinian ones, a whole array of contrasting experiments from which to learn? A more radical consideration, I would argue, is that there could not have been any persecution had the Church had a proper theological understanding of the Incarnation. Here, I come back to the argument of Chapter 1 regarding the two basic alternative possible understandings of Christ’s role as our representative before God. Does he simply – (option ‘a’) – by virtue of his being by nature human, represent humanity as a species? Or does he – (option ‘b’) – by virtue of being a human individual, represent human individuality as such? Again, the vagueness of option ‘a’ allows the authority of Christ to be coopted for all sorts of political enterprises, supposedly serving the best interests of humanity at large. This includes all the various projects of church ideology at its persecutory worst – for, in every case the persecutors justified their behaviour in the name of God’s love of the human species as a whole, effectively overriding any rights that might be claimed for individuals as such. But option ‘b’ – as it identifies the gospel, on the contrary, with a political concern to uphold the infinite value of human individuality as such – must surely imply a fundamental commitment to the defence of individual human rights, very much including the right to dissent, which would straightaway prevent these various cruelties. 1 R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 2nd edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). This includes his response to criticisms of the first edition (1987).

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“Where did it all go wrong”? The first thinker who unambiguously commits to the politically over-permissive option ‘a’ here, as opposed to the true option ‘b’, was in fact Anselm of Canterbury, in his treatise Cur Deus homo (Why a God man? Or Why did God Become Man?), written in 1098.2 What a profoundly original thinker, in general, Anselm was! No one before him had ever really asked the retrospective question that he asks here: what is it about the nature of the human need for salvation that renders it necessary, for the purpose of salvation actually being brought about, for God to have been made incarnate? All previous Christian theology had simply treated the Incarnation as a contingent given fact; allowing its determining logic to be more or less veiled in ambiguity, between the two basic options. But the stringency of Anselm’s newly posed question has the effect of dissolving that ambiguity. In previous theology, the gospel’s potential for mediating Atonement was always more or less muddled up with its counterpotential for reinforcing Unatonement. In Anselm’s thought, the latter appears effectively separated out from the former. Thus, in a nutshell, Anselm is essentially interested in the abstract logic of divine infinity. His soteriology in Cur Deus Homo may, in this regard, be seen as an extension of his earlier meditations on the necessary existence of God in the Monologion and Proslogion. The ‘God’ of those meditations necessarily exists just by virtue of being, by definition, that which is infinitely great or infinitely authoritative, inasmuch as non-existence would detract from these modes of infinity. And how, then, does the ‘God’ whose existence is necessary in this sense relate to the God of actual Christian faith? For finite mortals to know the infinity of ‘God’ is, for Anselm, first and foremost a matter of their acknowledging the infinite gravity of sin: that which actively divides their finitude from the divine infinity. But to recognise the infinite gravity of sin, we need to be shown its infinite offence to God; the infinite demand for punitive justice which this offence evokes; and the infinite compassion of God, in suffering, as incarnate, the infinite penalty on humanity’s behalf – which, indeed, only God can do, since only God can suffer infinitely, as required. It is a neat argument, beautifully and passionately elaborated by Anselm. In the end, though, it is just a bit too neat! For, its neatness depends upon leaving so much out. The argument of Cur Deus Homo involves, in the first place, no reference to Christ’s resurrection. And, furthermore, it is not only the resurrection that Anselm’s argument leaves unaccounted for. This argument gives no reason for the particular form of Christ’s death: why, precisely, a crucified Saviour? In Anselm’s philosophic reading of the gospel, the fact of Christ dying on the cross appears to be entirely contingent; he shows no awareness of the specific symbolism either of crucifixion, or therefore of the resurrection of the crucified, as such. In fact, he makes no reference whatsoever here to any aspect of the actual historic context of Christ’s passion. Why at that point in history? What made it 2 Anselm of Canterbury, Why God Became Man and The Virgin Conception and Original Sin, translated with an introduction by Joseph M. Colleran (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1969).

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possible, then? The original politics of the gospel story are altogether vaporised in Anselm’s retelling of it. Jesus appears as a figure, exclusively, on the same mythic level of reality as Adam, representative of the species as such, whose sin he reverses. And, as a result, more or less the whole anti-propagandistic – or what I would call truly ‘atoning’ – potential power of the original narrative has been lost. What moral does Anselm draw from his meditation on Christ’s passion? Above all, it is an advocacy of infinite self-abnegation. He has no critique of false, propagandist conceptions of ‘sin’, no notion of Atonement as a release from such manipulation and, hence, a liberation of true individuality. On the contrary, he just assumes that we already know what sin is. It is what the Church, as guardian of traditional ‘Christian’ herd morality, has always taught us to recognise as such. And, for him, the process of salvation is simply an infinite intensification of sincerity, in the appropriation of that herd-morality sense of sin. This theology of atonement is, indeed, a singularly pure theoretical expression of what I would term Unatonement, at its most masochistic: as Anselm sees it, the torments of hell are overcome only by God being submitted to the utmost torment, a torment in which God’s true devotees must also, it is supposed, participate, through sympathy, the sympathy his whole argument is designed to evoke. The de-historicised abstraction of this argument corresponds to its radical remoteness, in spirit, from the original liberating rationale of New Testament faith. Here, then, we have the underlying ‘unhappiness’ of the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’, das unglückliche Bewußtseyn, absolutely laid bare. Yet, what Anselm’s argument thus lays bare had no doubt long been a major element in the general muddle of orthodox ideas about salvation. What is new in his thought is not the ‘unhappiness’ it expresses, in itself. The new element is the logical clarity he brings to the expression of that ‘unhappiness’. After all, it is not as though there had ever been an earlier golden age of theology, in which the proper truth of Atonement was expounded with anything even remotely equivalent to the clarity which Anselm brings to his exposition of the opposite. Not until Hegel do we have a truly cogent alternative answer to Anselm’s question – “Why was it necessary for God to become incarnate?” – rightly prioritising option ‘b’ over option ‘a’. Hegel is the first to see that the Incarnation was necessary, basically, in order that we might learn to recognise the infinite, sacred value of authentic human individuality as such; revealed to us in the figure of one who represents exactly that principle (in Hegel’s terminology, the ‘principle of subjectivity’), embattled against a regime which altogether sets its face against it, representing precisely through the symbolic act of crucifixion all regimes of that kind. The potential for such insight had always been there, latent within the tradition. But it had never, prior to Hegel, been more than latent. Granted, the persecutory violence of the epoch from the late eleventh century to the late seventeenth was far uglier than anything ever before, in church history. And yet, I am, in general, inclined to be wary of the temptation to over-idealise either all, or any part of, the Church’s earlier self-understanding. For, there was not, I think, any very well-established set of proper theological taboos in place, such as there

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ideally should have been for the defence of authentic faith; there was no bulwark of basic principle which had first to be breached, before the catastrophe could ensue. Or was there? Maybe I am wrong in this. Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, in an intriguing recent work, Saving Paradise, claim to identify a key prior moment of transition which, as they see it, actually did have just that sort of taboo-destroying effect!3 They point, in particular, to two major developments in the early Middle Ages: (i) the introduction of large-scale devotional depictions of Christ hanging dead on the cross; and (ii) the move towards a Eucharistic theology of ‘transubstantiation’. And yes, it certainly is a striking fact that the art of the early Church never showed Christ’s dead body hanging on the cross. The earliest such images date from illuminated manuscripts produced in the late ninth-century Carolingian Empire. The oldest surviving three dimensional representation of Christ slumped dead, designed for public display, is the ‘Gero Cross’, sculpted from oak in Saxony probably at some point in the decade 960—70. This is a life-size image, originally commissioned by Archbishop Gero of Cologne and now hanging in Cologne Cathedral.4 What, then, had happened here, to bring about this innovation? Brock and Parker link it to the controversial innovations in Eucharistic theology promoted, above all, first by the monk, Paschasius Radbertus and then by Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, in the mid-ninth century, emphasising the sacramental identity between the consecrated Eucharistic elements and the body and blood of Christ crucified, as such.5 This, they argue, is the historic point where things have Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Saving Paradise: How Christianity Traded Love of This World for Crucifixion and Empire (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2008). Their joint project, which spills out into a global church history, originates as a genealogy of ‘Christian’ misogyny. See also their earlier work: Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker, Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemption, Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002). 4 Cf. Gertrude Schiller, The Passion of Jesus Christ, vol. 2 of Iconography of Christian Art, translated by Janet Seligman (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1972). As Brock and Parker make clear (p. 473), whereas Schiller uses the term ‘crucifixion’ for any depiction of Christ on the cross, what chiefly interests them is the phenomenon of ‘largescale images on public display in places of worship, in which Christ is clearly dead with his eyes closed’. There are two notable images from the eighth century – an icon from St. Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai and a wall painting in a side chapel of St. Maria Antiqua in Rome – which already show Christ with the cross. But in these paintings he stands upright, fully clothed in purple. In the Sinai image his eyes are closed, but he is not hanging; rather, he stands on a platform mounted on the cross. And in the Roman image, although he is being wounded by a spear, his eyes are open, and he is clearly very much alive. Most of the other images of Christ crucified predating the Gero Cross also show him with eyes open; and, moreover, as they are to be found in illuminated manuscripts, ivory book covers, or tiny amulets, they were produced only for the eyes of an elite few. 5 See Celia Chazelle, The Crucified God in the Carolingian Era: Theology and Art of Christ’s Passion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); also Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia Press, 2002). 3

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most momentously gone wrong for Christian theology; for, what we see in these developments is essentially a manipulative strategy, adopted by ecclesiastical rulers who were intent on consolidating their own power, and the power of their secular ruling class allies, over the faithful. Earlier Christian art is first and foremost a counter-cultural evocation of paradise on earth. But in the later art of the Western Church, earthly existence is, to an ever greater extent, overshadowed by the deathagony of Christ on the cross, while paradise is deferred to the afterlife. Here, Brock and Parker suggest, we are essentially being shown the inevitability of cruel suffering, urged to resign ourselves to it, and offered fantasies of post-mortem consolation to help us. The result, in their view, has been an epic catastrophe. For, the more we Christians have gazed upon God in death, the more our whole faith has, in actual practice, been rendered morbidly neurotic. And likewise, they argue, earlier generations had understood participation in the Eucharist as a lifeaffirming foretaste of heaven, an always potentially subversive expression of hope for the actual coming of God’s kingdom upon earth. Now, however, it had become a ritual confrontation with humanity’s native wretchedness; serving as a constant reminder of its participants’ primordial guilt, their fellowship with the crucifiers, and consequent need of expiation through works of obedience. Indeed, Brock and Parker are scathing about the innovation represented by Paschasius: With the triumph of a Eucharist that presented a dead body on the Communion table, death, instead of being defeated, became eternal. This innovation changed the ontological status of death. Whereas in the traditional Eucharist, Jesus had overcome death, never to die again, with Paschasius’s Eucharist he entered a state of perpetual dying. Death, no longer in the past, became coeternal with life. Christ’s dying became eternally present and began to haunt the Western European imagination, riddling it with a diffuse anxiety about existence, a terror of judgment, and a piety of holy suffering. Though some scholars interpret the change in the interpretation of the Eucharist as emphasizing Christ’s vulnerable humanity and drawing him closer to human beings, in fact the change alienated him from [truly fulfilled] humanity by changing the meaning of the human nature he revealed. Previously, Christ’s incarnation revealed humanity’s likeness to God and restored [a recognition of] humanity’s divine powers as first given in paradise. To be human was to become divine. Now, Christ’s incarnation revealed humanity’s mortality and powerlessness and its brokenness and suffering. To be human was to suffer and die.6

Although they make no reference to Hegel, they are, in effect, accusing Paschasius precisely of being a pioneer theological advocate and intensifier of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn. So, they see Paschasius’s doctrine essentially as an expression of finger-wagging moralistic oppression, in the service of an oppressive political regime. It is as if the whole practical point of the Eucharist was just to tell potential rebels: “To know God is the same as to bow before this symbol of the futility of Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, p. 237.

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any demand for a better life here on earth – nor, after all, do you, in your fellowship with those who once killed God, have the moral right to make any such demand – but your proper Christian duty is simply to submit, in proper meekness, to the way things are!”7 Here, they see a first intimation of the great change in Christian sensibility that first became fully visible in the Gero Cross. Indeed, in terms of the argument I have been building, Brock and Parker are very much would-be historians of the interplay between Atonement and Unatonement. This not the way they themselves put it. For them, ‘atonement theology’ is invariably a name for the sort of doctrine formulated by Anselm, which they deplore. But never mind. Their basic moral concern is certainly one with which I sympathise. Only – how plausible is their general analysis of the interconnections here? I am not, after all, entirely persuaded. As regards the link they see between the iconographical development initiated with the Gero Cross and the earlier theological innovations represented by Paschasius and Hincmar: I think that, up to a point, they are right about that. Both of these phenomena alike reflect the concern of church leaders anxious to disseminate a more intense spirit of piety across whole populations, nominally Christian but not yet, in the view of those church leaders, sufficiently engaged. And no doubt it is also true that there is a very large element of (in my terminology) Unatonement at work here. However, I think that there is, likewise, a good deal of it in the earlier spirituality which, by contrast, Brock and Parker celebrate – never let us underestimate the sheer counter-cunning of unreason, in its perennial resistance to the benign cunning of reason! And, moreover, there are, at the same time, surely other, quite different factors at work both in the development from Paschasius to Thomas Aquinas, with regard to the theology of the Eucharist and in what follows, artistically, from the innovation of the Gero Cross. Neither of these developments seems to me primarily an escalation of Unatonement – as Brock and Parker, in effect, suggest. Thus, in the case of the Paschasian / Thomist doctrine of ‘transubstantiation’, I think we have to reckon, too, with the working of quite another sort of urgent pastoral motivation: namely, a concern for the very fullest possible integration, into the ecclesiastical community, of the illiterate. The more seriously, after all, one seeks to emphasise Christ’s real presence in the bread and wine of the sacrament, the more one is acknowledging the reality of Christ’s self-presencing, not only to the educated through abstract ideas but also to the illiterate, just by means of that which is most sensuous and, therefore, equally accessible to all. What was the real objection of Paschasius’s original contemporary critics, Ratramnus and Gottschalk (whom Brock and Parker rather applaud), to his pioneering emphasis on this? I suspect that there may have been a distinct element of class-prejudice involved! Whereas Paschasius, and Hincmar after him, wanted to emphasise the sheer egalitarian physicality of Christ’s sacramental presence, their critics recoiled, anxious, on the contrary, to stress the importance, for salvation, of the associated work of theoretic teaching also involved in the Eucharist. Was this not because 7 In this sense, they remark, for instance, that ‘the Carolingians inflicted their Eucharist on the people they conquered’ (my emphasis): ibid.

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they themselves were teachers of theology, anxious not least in this key context to uphold the privileged status of their class and its contribution to God’s work?8 As for the artistic depiction of the dead Christ: Brock and Parker, in fact, already acknowledge a potential ambiguity in the Gero Cross. At one level, they argue, it represents the governing ideology of (what remained of) the Carolingian Empire: this is the reproachful, suffering heavenly Judge in whose name the rulers of that Empire ruled. Yet, at another level, actually working against the grain of their own main argument, they also recognise that it might, at the same time, represent Christ as co-sufferer with a conquered and repressed people. They make much of the mid-ninth century German vernacular re-telling of the gospel story, the Heliand (the ‘Healer’), which they interpret as a veiled act of insurgency, the inculturation of the gospel story into the folk-traditions of the Saxon people, essentially picturing Christ as a hero of resistance to the tyranny of Romaburg, ‘Fort Rome’.9 And they speculatively associate the Gero Cross – set up a century later in what was, indeed, a Saxon city – with the same general imaginative strategy.10 However, who knows what was in the mind of the sculptor? All I can say is that when I look at this image, what I immediately see is neither, on the one hand, a manipulative propaganda-message urging obedience to the established authorities nor, on the other hand, an oblique, belated gesture of rebellion. Rather, it is just a vivid affirmation of divine compassion. Religious meaning always depends, to such a large extent, on context. To take one extreme development of what begins with the Gero Cross: I must say that, in general, Counter-Reformation Baroque crucifixion scenes do leave me quite cold. That, though, is the effect of the theatrical setting. I mean the invitation, there, to become a marvelling mere spectator of clichéd heavenly events – so self-consciously awed – with every swirling thing so posed, on the brink – all, in that sense, so false. (Counter-Reformation Baroque: the ultimate aesthetic ideal of the Antichrist!) But, then, compare that other, no less extreme variant: the crucifixion scene on the outer panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece, by Meister Mathis Gothardt Neithardt, otherwise known as ‘Matthias Grünewald’.11 This is an image of sheer dismay: Hincmar was also fiercely critical of Gottschalk’s hard-line insistence on the divine predestination of souls. The two issues are, I think, intertwined, inasmuch as Hincmar’s basic concern in both cases was to do everything he possibly could to encourage earnest participation by the common people in the sacraments. The danger he saw with Gottschalk’s doctrine of predestination was that it might be taken as an argument for fatalistic indifference to the grace which the sacraments conferred. And he warmed to Paschasius’s sheer populism. 9 Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, pp. 240–48. See G. Ronald Murphy, trans., The Heliand: The Saxon Gospel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); also by Murphy, The Saxon Saviour: The Germanic Transformation of the Gospel in the Ninth Century Heliand (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); and James E. Cathey, ed., Hêliand: Text and Commentary (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002). 10 Brock and Parker, Saving Paradise, pp. 252–3. 11 ‘Matthias Grünewald’ was not a name the artist himself would have recognised. It was given him by a seventeenth-century art historian. So little was remembered about him, biographically. 8

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Just as there were many who were astonished at him – so marred was his appearance, beyond human semblance, and his form beyond that of mortals – so he shall startle many nations; kings shall shut their mouths because of him. (Isaiah 52: 14–15)

The vast body of the Crucified hangs limp, from rough-hewn timber, his limbs twisted and his livid khaki leathered skin all bruised and pierced, against a pitchblack background. To the left, three figures are rocked back with introspective shock. To the right, the eerie anachronism of John the Baptist, holding an open Bible, seems to represent the self-effacing artist, who points to his subject. Beside him are the Baptist’s words in John 3: 30: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’. At his feet are a tiny, frowning lamb with a cross, and a chalice: code, surely, for theological metaphor in general and, hence, for all the work of Christian art. Paradoxically, although the central figure represents humanity reduced to what is, in the order of nature, most ugly, the effect is still beautiful. For, the whole composition is filled with the transfiguring beauty of divine grace. It already anticipates the jubilation of the inner images, which were designed to be revealed when this outer panel was opened up, showing the Annunciation, the Christ child newly born, and the Resurrection. The Isenheim Altarpiece, now disassembled and on display in the Unterlinden Museum at Colmar in Alsace, was originally painted in the period 1506–15 for a nearby hospital, run by monks of the Antonite order. Many of the patients treated there were people disfigured by ‘Saint Anthony’s Fire’, a disease, widespread at the time, which set off painful skin eruptions that blackened and turned gangrenous, accompanied by nervous spasms. The idea clearly was for these sick people to see their own humiliating affliction reflected in this work of art; to see it taken up into God’s love and, thereby, transformed. Karl Barth always kept a reproduction of Meister Mathis’s painting above his writing desk. I think he had good taste.12 12 Compare also Hegel’s general view. As a young man, Hegel was very critical of the Christianity in which he had been brought up, contrasting it most unfavourably with an idealized picture of Ancient Greek religion. And one of its main defects, as he then saw it, was that it is ‘not designed for the Imagination – as with the Greeks – [in that it is too] sad and melancholy’: fragment ‘Unter objecktiver Religion’, also known as the ‘Berne Plan of 1794’, translated in H.S. Harris, Hegel’s Development 1: Towards the Sunlight 1770–1801 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 509. He surely means just that aspect of the tradition which Brock and Parker are criticising! And to the end he remains a radically anti-puritanical thinker, acutely conscious of the potential for cruelty in any over-insistent form of religious ‘sadness and melancholy’. Nevertheless, at the end of his 1802 essay on Faith and Knowledge, English translation by Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), pp. 190–91, he begins to speak of the ‘speculative Good Friday’, that is, precisely the element of religious truth intrinsic to a work such as the Isenheim Altarpiece, as ‘a moment’, at least, ‘of the supreme Idea’, even if ‘no more than a moment’.

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Therefore, in the end: no. I am not altogether persuaded by Brock and Parker’s analysis of Carolingian developments as being so pivotally disastrous. “Where did it all go wrong?” I think that the real trouble actually began far further back; long before the Carolingians. It was already there right at the beginning. Surely, I would argue, the one thing that did most, historically, to scupper (or, hopefully, in the long run just to delay) the growth of a true Christian culture of Atonement was simply the infant Church’s primordial traumatic experience of being persecuted. It was the damaging shock of that initial formative experience; the deep-rooted and, alas, decisive effect it had on the Church’s corporate psyche. I mean: consider Tertullian for instance – around the year 200 ce – exulting at the prospect of the Last Judgement, when a major part of his hoped-for heavenly reward, he anticipates, will be the delightful prospect of hell; the sight of those who have persecuted the Church being persecuted, in their turn, by God. How he revels in their imagined torments!13 Or, again consider Revelation: all that tremendous rhetoric of resentment. I read that book trembling at the prospect of what might happen if (God forbid!) the community within which, and for which, it was written should ever come into any sort of serious power. For, I repeat: how can a persecuted community, such as the apostolic Church was, practise the virtues that belong to proper truth-as-openness? In order to survive, such a community urgently needs, on the contrary, to cultivate fanaticism. The Church is an organism originally evolved, above all, for the purpose of surviving persecution. In its earliest period it even managed to thrive on persecution, as it exploited the glorious memory of its martyrs. Appealing to every sort of discontent in a harshly governed and far from equitable state, it was very successfully able to present itself as the heroic great alternative. But that was just the problem: it appealed to every sort of discontent. No doubt, some discontent with the prevailing ethos of Unatonement, as such, was also in there, part of the mix. Yet, it was muddled with so much else, including impulses of fanaticism, sporadically exacerbated by the community’s experience of life-or-death struggle, which were more or less bound to suppress the authentic truth-potential of the gospel as testimony to Atonement. The ideological corruption of the early, pre-Constantinian Church is less visible than that of the Church after Constantine, only because it lacked power. Things started to become really ugly in the Carolingian world, where Christianity was imposed by coercion on large pagan populations. And then the rise of an ever larger class of literati in the later Middle Ages generated all those fresh tensions, the early development of which R.I. Moore in particular has analysed. But, I would argue that the actual primary sickness of church ideology, in itself, was absolutely there right from the very outset; above all, because the early Church was so traumatised by the violence then inflicted upon it.

13 Tertullian, De Spectaculis, English translation by Terrot Reaveley Glover (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1931), Chapter 30.

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The Neo-Augustinian Diagnosis Never before, such an opportunity to break free from all that! But – at the same time – what is required, in order to realise this opportunity, is not only a critique of the theology underlying aggressively persecutory church ideology. Unatonement, after all, is not confined to religious forms. It may just as well be secular in expression. Militant secularist ideology, indeed, recoils from unatoned religion by rejecting religion, when what needs to be rejected is Unatonement itself. And, such ideology is all too easily then adapted to give shelter to secularised Unatonement – as the whole history of Marxist thought, above all, so vividly illustrates. The project, or cause, of Atonement requires maximum poetic energy to promote it. Therefore, its protagonists, even the least theologically minded among them, will surely welcome whatever contribution theology may also bring, in harnessing the more or less latent testimony to authentic Atonement in the gospel tradition. But this must involve a form of theology critically concerned with human existence in its entirety, not splitting the religious from the secular. We need atoning theology to force its way back into the domains of secular public debate, refusing to be excluded; we need a theology just as much committed to combating Unatonement in secular form as Unatonement in religious form. And, hence, the need is for a critique of the unatoned secular world, not only for being mistaken in its failure to accept the gospel, but for being perverse, because unatoned, in ways which the gospel, properly apprehended, serves to highlight. It is Augustine who, at the beginning of the fifth century, first develops a systematic argument to that effect, in the City of God. So, Augustine here contrasts the ‘heavenly city’ to the ‘earthly city’ as two opposing principles of human sociability, corresponding to two quite different kinds of love: on the one hand, the love of domination and glory, or glamour; and, on the other hand, the love of God.14 The perverse love which definitively informs the ‘earthly city’ is that to which propaganda, in general, appeals. Forever closing down real attention to the outsider, or the outcast, it is just what is represented by the crucifiers in the gospel story. But the true love of God, constituting the ‘heavenly city’, is what the Crucified represents. The twentieth century produced a whole series of theologians, often selfidentified as ‘Neo-Augustinians’, who sought to reinvigorate the traditional Augustinian critique of the ‘earthly city’ as such, in resistance to more defensive forms of Christian apologetics, which are essentially concerned, it seems, to vindicate the potential compatibility of Christian faith with the prevailing values of secular modernity. ‘Liberal’ – in the sense of essentially defensive, apologetic – theology has tended, in effect, to acquiesce in the secularist attempt to cordon religion off, as a matter of private conviction, not meant to obtrude into the 14 Augustine, City of God, English translation by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), Book XIV, Chapter 28.

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deliberations of the public sphere. And, to that extent, it has allowed the conflict between the two ‘cities’, which Augustine sought to intensify, to dissipate. A ‘Neo-Augustinian’ exploration of church history might be defined as one that is primarily a critique of such dissipation. Karl Barth, to return once more to him, is actually the great pioneer of this sort of approach. “Where did it all go wrong?” Preoccupied as he is by the German theologians’ collective betrayal of their calling in 1914, when the great majority of them endorsed the Kaiser’s war aims, Barth sets out in his history of Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century to tell the story of the particular tradition most immediately implicated in that betrayal. And the key figure here is Schleiermacher.15 Barth, like Schleiermacher before him, is a theologian of the Reformed tradition; in the first instance, he shares the orthodox Reformed conception of where things went wrong in church history. But then, notwithstanding his great respect for Schleiermacher’s genius, he also thinks that things went very badly wrong, once again, when Schleiermacher became the dominant influence over later nineteenth-century German Protestant thinking. For, Schleiermacher’s thought is a classic case of theology largely originating out of an impulse of apologetic defensiveness. Schleiermacher addressed his first major work, his 1799 Speeches on Religion, to religion’s ‘cultured despisers’. Compare Augustine, aggressively demanding cultural hegemony for the principles of the ‘heavenly city’. Schleiermacher is much less critical of the secular environment; his primary concern is with persuading religion’s ‘cultured despisers’ to allow the legitimacy of what they have too hastily dismissed. He wants them to recognise it as the expression of a particular sort of experience, even if they have not, themselves, actually undergone that experience. Namely, the experience which is, as he sees it, the quintessence of authentic religion: having a sense of ‘absolutely dependence’ on God. Thus, Schleiermacher’s theology is not so much a demand for cultural hegemony as a plea for tolerance; a plea for locating gospel truth in the sheer inwardness of the true believer’s faith, a species of subjective experience beyond judgement. And on this basis he brilliantly develops a whole systematic account of Christian doctrine.16 Barth, however, sees Schleiermacher’s doctrine as the highpoint beginning of a cascade leading in the end to a Church disastrously incapable of effective political resistance when faced by such secular monstrosities as the nationalist ideologies engaged in the First World War or, afterwards, the rise of totalitarianism. In the light of these catastrophes, he repudiates any approach to theology which, like Schleiermacher’s, in effect systematically prioritises mere defensive apologetics over counter-cultural critique of injustice. And, then: later forms of Neo-Augustinianism have delved further back into history, to locate the very earliest initial moment of theology’s mistaken abdication Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Chapter 11. This is the pivot of Barth’s history, the opening chapter of Part 2, ‘History’, Part 1 having been ‘Background’. 16 Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, English translation edited by H.R. Mackintosh and J.S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1928). 15

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from its true sovereignty – most notably, in recent years, the movement of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’.17 By contrast to Barthianism, Radical Orthodoxy originates in an Anglo-Catholic milieu; is altogether more philosophic in its concerns, and less clerical; it has less of a direct dogmatic-theological orientation towards the business of preaching. Its success, in the contemporary Anglophone university world, is perhaps partly due to the vacuum left there by the evaporation of Marxist ideology, for it represents an alternative form of ‘socialist’ insurgency, now made newly credible in theological form due to the decline, in power and prestige, of the conservative church establishment. “Where in church history did it all go wrong?” Radical Orthodoxy offers a diagnosis that goes all the way back, originally, to the university world of the High Middle Ages. In particular, its protagonists focus on the figure of John Duns Scotus (c. 1265–1308) as one who, with singular brilliance, represents a general trend already beginning in his day towards the abdication they deplore.18 Thus, Thomas Aquinas teaches ‘analogy of being’; Duns Scotus, after him, teaches ‘univocity of being’. Aquinas’s is a doctrine of layers: God’s ‘being’ is the deepest layer of all ‘being’; creatures have ‘being’ only by virtue of their participation in God’s primordial ‘being’; their ‘being’, in itself, is no more than analogous to God’s, in that theirs is partial whereas God’s ‘being’ is full. Therefore, God’s truth, for Aquinas, has absolute hegemony, as the truth of all truth. But the teaching of Duns Scotus, by contrast, flattens ‘being’ out. ‘Univocity’, here, is tantamount to flatness. Scotus no longer thinks of ‘being’ in layers; rather, for him, ‘being’ appears, so to speak, as a flat field. God’s truth has ceased to be understood as the whole of truth at its deepest layer. Instead, it is seen as just that particular area of the flat field which is most mysterious: God being absolutely free, issuing decrees utterly and forever beyond our understanding. So, theology’s claim to hegemony is qualified. Secular reason is allowed its own segment of the field, its separate domain, quite apart from, and not interfering with, the domain of faith. In this extremely abstruse discussion of fundamental ontology, Radical Orthodoxy detects the high-point beginning of a cascade, at the end of which we encounter people saying, “For the purposes of public debate, only what belongs to the domain of secular reason really counts; faith is a quite separate, private matter, of no serious concern to any except those who indulge in it, as a private community…” Scotus was a devout Franciscan friar. Although his modern critics tend to call themselves ‘Augustinian’, he also honoured Augustine. Nevertheless, as his critics see it, his thinking helps set in motion a fateful development which, if we let it, would culminate with a massive suppression of the sorts of conversation which, surely, authentic theology is in its very essence called to open up, and poetically deepen. For, it is a descent into self-defeating theological over-modesty. Like the For an overview, see James K.A. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy: Mapping a Post-secular Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004). The movement takes its name from a collection of essays edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology (London: Routledge, 1999). 18 Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, pp. 96–100. 17

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Nominalists, still more, after him, Scotus is perhaps recoiling from the corruption of Augustinianism which results from its incorporation into the aggressive church ideology of late medieval papalism. Therefore, he and his successors seek to reframe theology, less as a bold claim to comprehensive cultural hegemony and more as a defensive apologetics for the mystery of faith: reassuringly abandoning older modes of theological rhetoric which might be misinterpreted as justification for theologians exercising arbitrary censorship over secular scholarship. But, so the argument of Radical Orthodoxy goes, he and they are sacrificing altogether too much in the process. And I would agree. For, again: the basic distinction that needs to be drawn, in defining the essential vocation of theology, is between the two species of truth – truth-as-openness and truth-as-correctness – not just between the domains of faith and secular reason, as two modes of the latter. The error of church ideology, in general, is that it misses the proper primary reference of faith to truth-as-openness, as distinct from mere supposed metaphysical truth-as-correctness. And its false claims to exclusive metaphysical truth-as-correctness then become attached to the tyrannical pictures of God generated by Unatonement. But this is not well remedied merely by restricting the scope of theology to a limited range of ‘religious’ concerns alone. Not only true theology but also its true other-religious equivalents are necessarily ambitious of absolute cultural hegemony; and such ambition rightly belongs to their very nature, inasmuch as they attempt to promote the imperatives of perfect truth-as-openness, investing those imperatives with maximum sacred authority, throughout society. To the extent that theology and its equivalents are then, however, corrupted into mere competing expressions of self-serving confessional aggression – church ideology and its other-religious rivals – they surely need to be resisted, not so much by restricting the space in which they are allowed to operate but rather by recalling them to their quite different proper vocation. In fact, I would go further. Let us not be unfair to Duns Scotus. “Where did it all go wrong?” There is, I think, a sense in which it was already a disaster for Christian theology when, a century or so before his time, it had allowed itself to be reduced to the status of a university discipline in the first place; a discipline of the same general kind as the trivium (Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric), the quadrivium (Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy), Law, Medicine, and Metaphysics. Of course, in the circumstances of the day, when universities were just beginning, this was pretty much inevitable. But a theological tradition lacking a properly clarified sense of faith’s essential prioritisation of truth-as-openness over truthas-correctness, and its consequent absolute difference in nature from those other disciplines, inasmuch as they are confined to the study of truth-as-correctness, then found itself in negotiation with them: seeking (disastrously!) to define itself simply by laying claim to its own special area of truth-as-correctness, bordering, above all, on Metaphysics but differentiated by its revelation-derived subject matter. In effect, this is what Scotus sets out to do, in what seems to him the most reasonable and accommodating way. However, the proper distinction between the two species of truth at stake had by no means been decisively made by Aquinas, that great hero of Radical Orthodoxy, either. No one made it at all, clearly, before Hegel.

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The fact is that authentic theology is necessarily, and rightly, a perpetual misfit in the university context. To be true to its vocation, it must forever consciously battle against the impulse to banality inherent in its academic professionalisation, the resultant tendency for it to be ethically subsumed by the mere class-interests of its privileged scholarly practitioners. If this is what ‘Neo-Augustinianism’ means – why, then, yes; I am all for it! But, in that case, the ‘Neo-Augustinians’ would surely, also, be ‘Neo-Hegelian’. For here, after all, we have the kernel of the great offence that Hegel has always represented to academic norms: in the name of ‘philosophy’, he revives the wild truth of true theology, its essential orientation to Atonement; and he accords it all its essential, anti-ideological glory, as it entirely bursts the bounds of ordinary, sober academic professionalism, in consequence. Unfortunately, though, these theologians tend not to see this. For the most part, in fact, the Neo-Augustinians prefer to invoke the name ‘Augustine’ against ‘Hegel’. Yet, the name ‘Augustine’ has, down the centuries, been invoked in association with so many very different enterprises – and sometimes even as an authority supposed to justify outright persecution – that one may well wonder just how meaningful the invocation really is. In any event, no one, so far as I know, has ever been quite so wrong-headed as to invoke the name ‘Hegel’ with a view to justifying persecution. (Was ‘Hegel’ an authority in the Marxist world? Only ever quite peripherally – and, then, it was always with civilising intent.) Be it noted: Hegel was already very critical of Schleiermacher, his colleague at the University of Berlin, for reasons, it seems to me, essentially consonant with Barth’s misgivings. Like Barth, Hegel too rejected Schleiermacher’s move to base theology on the deliverances of a special area of experience, designated ‘religious’. As I have said, the whole point of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to show, in philosophic terms, how theology ought, on the contrary, to be based on an interpretation of human experience as a whole. And, like the protagonists of Radical Orthodoxy, Hegel too refuses to separate the domain of secular reason, the modern state, from the domain of God’s sovereignty.19 Only, his particular contribution is just to be uniquely precise in specifying that God’s sovereignty, in this context, means the overthrow of das unglückliche Bewußtseyn and all its works. See, for instance, Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, addition to §270, pp. 283–5. Here he rejects the notion that ‘the state must grow out of religion’ in the sense that the institutional Church should have a dominant role; and he is critical of the use of religious rhetoric to justify arbitrary rule, or the cutting short of rational public debate. Yet, he affirms the need, in principle, for a political culture bound together by the strongest possible shared reverence for civilised principles recognised as sacred. ‘Of course a bad State is worldly and finite and nothing else, but the rational State is inherently infinite.’ That is, it embodies moral claims of infinite divine authority. In short, Hegel seeks to resolve the ancient conflict between authoritarian church ideology and militant secularism by turning to something equally remote from either: a vivid Christian civil-religious celebration of ‘freedom’, as the political outworking of Atonement. And see also his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, pp. 188–9. 19

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Like Barth before them, the leading thinkers of Radical Orthodoxy, John Milbank first and foremost, appear to be altogether more ‘against’ Hegel than ‘for’ him.20 Is this simply due to the malign influence of the old ‘Hegel myth’; or does it John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), Chapter 6. John is a good friend and, so far as I understand him, right about a lot of things. But about Hegel he is, I think, quite wrong. In this foundational text, he attacks Hegel for ‘three great philosophical errors’ (p. 154): (a) his ‘retention of the Cartesian subject’; (b) his ‘myth of negation’; and (c) his ‘misconstrual of infinitude’. Thus: • Milbank for his part repudiates the ‘Cartesian subject’ – that purely abstract, deracinated notion of a thinking individual – inasmuch as he prefers the persona of the Christian subject, thinking in communion with other Christian subjects. For theological purposes, he simply advocates maximum immersion in Church-membership. And yes, it is true that, as a solidarity-building principle, the Hegelian ideal of ‘Absolute Knowing’ represents something else, in that it does not so much correlate to the solidarity of Christian with Christian, but rather, in my terminology, to the ‘solidarity of the shaken’. Theologically, however, this just reflects the difference between the Church and the kingdom of God; which the Church after all can scarcely repudiate. And there is, in reality, nothing ‘Cartesian’ about the Hegelian ideal! For, after all, Descartes’ sceptical method belongs entirely to a quest for metaphysical truth-as-correctness; not to the truth of Spirit, perfect truth-as-openness, which is by contrast Hegel’s sole concern. • By the ‘myth of negation’, it seems, Milbank means the myth that the various dialectical ‘negations’ constituting the arguments of Hegel’s Phenomenology and Science of Logic amount, in the end, to a compelling proof of something or other. He is quite right: strictly speaking, they do not. And no doubt Hegel may be criticised for failing to make it clear enough that his arguments are not in fact intended as proofs – but simply as descriptions, analyses, catalogues, polemics, attempts to establish the parameters for necessary ethical negotiation at the very deepest level. Nevertheless, this failure is quite easily remedied. And it is by no means a justification for dismissing the value of his work in all other regards! • What Milbank calls the Hegelian ‘misconstrual of infinitude’ is Hegel’s self-distancing from what he calls conventional religious ‘Vorstellung’, or ‘picture-thinking’. Here, the Milbankian objection is akin to Barth’s. It is true that Hegel gives very little direct aid to us preachers, who necessarily operate as such within the terms of theological Vorstellung. Theology oriented towards preaching quite properly represents the interplay between divine infinity and human finitude the way the Bible pictures it, sticking close to the particularity of particular revelatory stories; rather than the way philosophy seeks to conceptualise it, attempting so far as possible to analyse the universality of universal rationality, direct. Hegel of course is absolutely a philosophic theologian. But note: he is not contemptuous of the different type of thought required for good preaching. He by no means seeks to suppress it. Rather, he offers something else by way of a supplement. He distances himself from conventional Christian Vorstellung not in any hope of finding an unambiguous alternative, capable of doing the same community-building job; but only so as to enable a heightened critical awareness of the ineradicable ambiguities of such Vorstellung, its constant fluctuation between gospel truth and church ideology. And to the extent that he achieves this, I see no need to call his work a ‘misconstrual’. For most everyday purposes, certainly, we will always need to construe divine infinity in, so to 20

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indicate a certain equivocation right at the heart of the Radical Orthodoxy project? I am inclined to think it is more the former than the latter. But, if we are, after all, to affirm the authority of ‘Augustine’, prophet of the ‘heavenly city’, today, then it surely does need to be made quite clear (a good deal clearer, in fact, than Augustine himself ever makes it) that the heavenliness of that ‘city’ essentially consists in its being the home of perfect truth-as-openness. And, hence, that it is the absolute opposite, in spirit, to any mere construct of old-fashioned, unatoned church ideology of the kind that Hegel so incisively challenges. In the theology of the past one hundred years, Hegel has, for the most part, been a haunting but recessive presence, equally misrepresented and repudiated, in the end, both by the dominant Neo-Augustinians and by their ‘Liberal’ opponents. Yet, I think it would be strange if this state of affairs were to continue forever. It is just too great an injustice! ‘Our duty, / Nature! now to name you …’ I am going to sign off now with a poem. It is my translation of one by Friedrich Hölderlin, entitled ‘At the Source of the Danube’. As a young man, Hölderlin was actually a close friend of Hegel’s. Born in the same year, 1770, they were, from 1788 to 1795, fellow-students of theology – indeed, at one point, roommates together with the younger prodigy, Schelling – at the Tübingen Stift; again, in the period 1797–1800, the two were closely associated during Hegel’s residence, as a house tutor, in Frankfurt, with Hölderlin living nearby in Homburg. Hölderlin’s truly great poetry dates from a short span of years, 1800–1802, before the mental breakdown which left him, for the second half of his life, largely incapacitated. When he wrote the poem which follows, he was already suffering acute inner stress. He felt himself to be, apart from his friendship with Hegel and one or two other friendships, utterly alone in the world; and his inner solitude was both cause and effect of an ultra-critical attitude, especially, towards the religious life of his culture. In general, Hölderlin’s acute mental frailty heightens the pathos of an insatiable sheer passion for truth. Nevertheless, he forbids himself any indulgence in self-righteous rage. Instead, his poetry juxtaposes exultant delight in a vision of what ideally might be – by way of a Sittlichkeit, that is, an ethical culture, saturated with authentic religious generosity, capable of including even a natural outsider like himself – with desolate grief at the lack of such Sittlichkeit in actuality. This grief comes to expression in an speak, first-order poetic fashion. But why should that rule out the sort of second-order critical re-construal which Hegel pioneers? There is a threat here; but it is only a threat to church ideology. ‘ Hegel’ also figures largely in Milbank’s flamboyant debate with Slavoj Žižek, edited by Creston Davis: The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). But neither of the two ‘Hegels’ on show there, in the end, actually seem to me anything like as interesting as (what I take to be) the real Hegel!

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idiosyncratic mythology where what ideally might be is represented as what once was. So, he imagines a mythic past in which gods once walked the earth. Now, however, they have all gone. Mostly, these are the gods of pagan Greek antiquity. And Christ, the most beloved of them all, has seemingly departed as well. ‘At the Source of the Danube’, however, begins with a glorious returning arrival. What arrives – or returns – is a voice from the East. Above all, this is the voice of the Bible. The poem’s title locates it in the Swabian town of Donaueschingen: there is a spring at Donaueschingen which is conventionally regarded as the source of the Danube. Hölderlin was a Swabian, and he is writing here about his homeland, his own spiritual world. The Danube is the one great European river which flows eastward. In the context of the poem it thus represents, for him, the yearning of Swabia, of Germany, of Western Christendom as a whole, towards the wisdom which comes from that direction. Like Hegel, he seeks to integrate the biblical heritage with elements deriving from other spiritual sources: firstly, the memory of the ancient Greek polis, considered as a model of all-encompassing civil-religious Sittlichkeit; and, secondly, the traditions of philosophy. Both of these are invoked here. The polis is represented by its Games. Philosophy appears as the ‘naming’ of Nature – immediately, in the intellectual world of Hölderlin’s day, a formulation evoking Spinoza, who simply identified ‘God’ with ‘Nature’. But, as a poet, Hölderlin calls for the very thing that Hegel sets out to enact as a philosopher, namely, the reconciliation of the most rigorous intellectual chastity, represented by Spinoza, with the latent poetic testimony to Atonement in the Bible. Never before had there been such an opportunity of opening to the gospel’s deeper truth. Hölderlin and Hegel were exact contemporaries of William Wordsworth. They were young men at the outbreak of the French Revolution; and as Wordsworth put it: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!21

All manner of revolutionary progress then seemed possible. At Tübingen they were ostensibly training for ministry in the Lutheran Church. But they loathed the conservative atmosphere of the Stift, the sheer tedium and banal conventionality, as they saw it, of the church life it represented. And for several years they dreamed of a whole new beginning, not least in religion; a decisive move right beyond Christianity. Gradually the trauma of the Jacobin Terror, and the general subsiding of revolutionary enthusiasm thereafter, led them both to reassess this. Hölderlin’s poem belongs to that moment of reassessment. He is still praying for a drastic new beginning, but now he is also casting around for traditional resources to draw upon, not least from the Bible. And what, in his own condition of anguished inner solitude, Hölderlin draws from in the Bible is precisely its recurrent celebration of prophethood, the condition of being singled out, and called to endure acute isolation, 21 Wordsworth, Poetical Works, (London: Oxford University Press, revised edition 1936) ‘Poems of the Imagination’ XXVIII, pp. 165—6, ‘French Revolution: as it appeared to enthusiasts at its commencement’; written 1804.

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for the truth’s sake. As the poets of Greek antiquity praised the wrestlers at their Games, so he, for his part, praises those great wrestlers with spiritual solitude, the prophets of ancient Israel. But how far away the world of the Bible actually seems to him! Centuries of church ideology have contributed to this cut-off remoteness, which is weirdly, and poignantly, expressed in the geographical fuzziness of the poem. Thus, at one moment the Bible is associated with the deserts of Arabia, then with the mountain heights of the Caucasus. Arabia and the Caucasus are, of course, for the most part, places of sublime solitude and, as such, are for him symbolic of the prophetic vocation. But the looseness of the Bible’s association here with the topography of ‘Mother Asia’, in general, is telling. (The geography of Greece is much more closely specified – isthmus, river, and mountain range – as these represent an easier-to-appropriate, less distorted heritage.) What counts, for Hölderlin, is by no means any claim to exact truth-as-correctness: so, with this ostentatious gesture of geographical incorrectness, he is signalling. Rather, it is truth-as-openness alone: the unique, but in itself still one-sided, truth-potential of biblical prophecy, finally reconciled with that of other more civil-religious or philosophic traditions. Never before, such an opportunity of real connection with that truth-potential! The poem throbs with its author’s excitement at the nearness of the possibility – which also, however, accentuates his grief at the persistent remoteness of the actuality, as the communal happening that it has to be. One might define the essential vocation of theology as being to try and integrate the ‘pathos of shakenness’ – that is, the most immediate emotional registering of the demands of perfect truth-asopenness – into effective strategies of religious solidarity-building. This is what Hegel is concerned with, as a philosopher. Here, though, we have a little shot of the ‘pathos of shakenness’, as it were, neat. Like all of Hölderlin’s mature work, it takes its stand in the ‘broken middle’ and evokes the brokenness of that middle with an ecstatic wistfulness which I, for my part, find very moving.22 I have attempted, so far as possible, to render it into an English version that lends itself to a fluent reading aloud. At The Source of the Danube As when in church, at dawn, the rampant organ Bursts into full-flooding cry – awake, awake! – And then, through lofty aisles, The sumptuous prelude wells, and swirls Around, warm rivulets of melody, probing The shadows, far and wide, till all’s astir; And, thereupon, the sunlit Festal choir responds On everyone’s behalf; just so It came: the Eastern Word. And now, O Asia, I can hear your echo 22 On Gillian Rose’s concept of the ‘broken middle’, see my Against Innocence (London: SCM, 2008).

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A Neo-Hegelian Theology As it circles, still, the rocks Of high Parnassus, and around Kithairon, How it breaks upon the Capitol, and how It also plunges down the Alps To us; that eerie, Wakening voice which, More than any other, made us who we are. And all whom once it struck Were overwhelmed. Night swathed The best of eyes. For, great though man’s ambition is, Who has, by artifice, subdued Flood, rock and raging fire, And, dauntless, doesn’t flinch From necessary warfare, yet, encountering this, The strongest, even, may be halted. And then they’re (almost) like The deer; which, driven by sweet youth, Was roaming restless on the slopes, Enjoying his own strength, At warm mid-day. But when, All of a sudden, there descends, slanting Through the playful air and wreathed In cooler breeze, a joyous shaft of sanctity To bless the earth, that deer’s transfixed. Quite unprepared For such a revelation, there in a dream it stands, as if The stars were shining where the sun still is. So, too, with us! The light in many an eye, confronted By those god-sent, friendly gifts from Greece, And from Arabia, went out. Benighted Generations languished, unaware Of what true liturgy might be. Only a very few remained awake. In them, you Greeks Of long ago, the lovely spirit of your Games lived on: Thus, they at least were still inspired to praise – as once The self-effacing great amongst the poets might have Praised the wrestlers, for their childlike single-mindedness. Love then it was. Nor is it any different now, Although we’ve rightly split apart. Once more, You dwellers on the Isthmus, By Kephisos and Taygetos, your gleeful challenge Stops us short. And so, you immemorial Valleys of the Kaukasos, we also think Of your lost paradises, patriarchs and prophets, O Mother Asia, all your mighty ones!

‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’ They feared no worldly scheme of things, Heaved heaven and fate upon their shoulders, Planted themselves on mountaintops, And were the first To see the point of being all alone With God. These now rest. But since you Ancients never found A proper name for what, in mundane terms, came first – And such a name is needed – Let us supply that lack! It surely is our bounden duty, Nature! now to name you; from whom All that’s divinely born emerges, as from a bath. We move (it’s true) like orphans, for the most part: Coltish, bereft of loving guidance. To anyone, however, who recalls Their childhood dreams, this world still holds a welcome. Such people re-enact the primal grace Of heaven’s three-beat dance. Nor was the gift of loyalty Imparted to our souls in vain, For, all you friendly spirits, in our loyal lives You live on, too. And in the sacred relics, here, The armoury of words which you, Departing, left behind for us, who so entirely lack Your innate flair, you still abide. Too often, when the holy cloud descends To cover one of us, the rest are just confounded. Yet, spice our breath with heaven’s fare, And then, for sure, we’ll laugh! – We’ll laugh and, after, Ponder. But mortals whom you love too much Can never be at peace until they’ve joined you. Therefore, of your mercy, hold apart To spare me; for I still have more to sing. Although, not now. For now – it’s time. And this sad, smiling troubadour romance of mine draws To its blushing-blanching End. Indeed, I know that nothing’s Been resolved. But so (you see) I see the world.23

In the original German:

23

Am Quell der Donau

Denn, wie wenn hoch von der herrlichgestimmten, der Orgel Im heiligen Saal, Reinquillend aus den unerschöpflichen Röhren, Das Vorspiel, weckend, des Morgens beginnt Und weitumher, von Halle zu Halle, Der erfrischende nun, der melodische Strom rinnt, Bis in den kalten Schatten das Haus

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Von Begeisterungen erfüllt, Nun aber erwacht ist, nun, aufsteigend ihr, Der Sonne des Fests, antwortet Der Chor der Gemeinde; so kam Das Wort aus Osten zu uns, Und an Parnassos Felsen und am Kithäron hör’ ich O Asia, das Echo von dir und es bricht sich Am Kapitol und jählings herab von den Alpen Kommt eine Fremdlingin sie Zu uns, die Erweckerin, Die menschenbildende Stimme. Da faßt’ ein Staunen die Seele Der Getroffenen all und Nacht War über den Augen der Besten. Denn vieles vermag Und die Flut und den Fels und Feuersgewalt auch Bezwinget mit Kunst der Mensch Und achtet, der Hochgesinnte, das Schwert Nicht, aber es steht Vor Göttlichem der Starke niedergeschlagen, Und gleichet dem Wild fast; das, Von süßer Jugend getrieben, Schweift rastlos über die Berg’ Und fühlet die eigene Kraft In der Mittagshitze. Wenn aber Herabgeführt, in spielenden Lüften, Das heilige Licht, und mit dem kühleren Strahl Der freudige Geist kommt zu Der seligen Erde, dann erliegt es, ungewohnt Des Schönsten und schlummert wachenden Schlaf, Noch ehe Gestirn naht. So auch wir. Denn manchen erlosch Das Augenlicht schon vor den göttlichgesendeten Gaben, Den freundlichen, die aus Ionien uns, Auch aus Arabia kamen, und froh ward Der teuern Lehr’ und auch der holden Gesänge Die Seele jener Entschlafenen nie, Doch einige wachten. Und sie wandelten oft Zufrieden unter euch, ihr Bürger schöner Städte, Beim Kampfspiel, wo sonst unsichtbar der Heros Geheim bei Dichtern saß, die Ringer schaut und lächelnd Pries, der gepriesene, die müßigernsten Kinder. Ein unaufhörlich Lieben wars und ists. Und wohlgeschieden, aber darum denken Wir aneinander doch, ihr Fröhlichen am Isthmos, Und am Cephyß und am Taygetos,

‘Where Did It All Go Wrong?’

Auch eurer denken wir, ihr Tale des Kaukasos, So alt ihr seid, ihr Paradiese dort Und deiner Patriarchen und deiner Propheten, O Asia, deiner Starken, o Mutter! Die furchtlos vor den Zeichen der Welt, Und den Himmel auf Schultern und alles Schicksal, Taglang auf Bergen gewurzelt, Zuerst es verstanden, Allein zu reden Zu Gott. Die ruhn nun. Aber wenn ihr Und dies ist zu sagen, Ihr Alten all, nicht sagtet, woher? Wir nennen dich, heiliggenötiget, nennen, Natur! dich wir, und neu, wie dem Bad entsteigt Dir alles Göttlichgeborne. Zwar gehn wir fast, wie die Waisen; Wohl ists, wie sonst, nur jene Pflege nicht wieder; Doch Jünglinge, der Kindheit gedenk, Im Hause sind auch diese nicht fremde. Sie leben dreifach, eben wie auch Die ersten Söhne des Himmels. Und nicht umsonst ward uns In die Seele die Treue gegeben. Nicht uns, auch Eures bewahrt sie, Und bei den Heiligtümern, den Waffen des Worts Die scheidend ihr den Ungeschickteren uns Ihr Schicksalssöhne, zurückgelassen Ihr guten Geister, da seid ihr auch, Oftmals, wenn einen dann die heilige Wolk umschwebt, Da staunen wir und wissens nicht zu deuten. Ihr aber würzt mit Nektar uns den Othem Und dann frohlocken wir oft oder es befällt uns Ein Sinnen, wenn ihr aber einen zu sehr liebt Er ruht nicht, bis er euer einer geworden. Darum, ihr Gütigen! umgebet mich leicht, Damit ich bleiben möge, denn noch ist manches zu singen, Jetzt aber endiget, seligweinend, Wie eine Sage der Liebe, Mir der Gesang, und so auch ist er Mir, mit Erröten, Erblassen, Von Anfang her gegangen. Doch Alles geht so.

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Index ‘Absolute Idea’ 60–61, 65–6 ‘Absolute Knowing’ 45n12, 62–3, 65–7, 107, 140n20 ‘aether’ 61n41 agnosticism 107–8 Amos 20, 71–2, 73–4, 75 angels 25, 71, 75–8, 80, 84, 88 Anselm of Canterbury 127–8, 131 apocalypticism 6, 39, 41–2, 45, 71, 73–5, 76, 91, 119 Aquinas, Thomas 131, 137, 138 Arendt, Hannah 86–7 ‘Atonement’ 6, 63, 110, 112–17, 119, 120, 125, 127–8, 131, 134, 135, 138, 139, 142 Augustine 21–3, 30, 47, 135–9, 141 Barth, Karl 6, 19, 26n16, 39, 40, 42, 43–6, 52–3, 56, 120, 133, 136, 137, 139–40 Baudelaire, Charles 12, 13n6 Bering, Jesse 54–7 Bèze, Theodore de 31 Blake, William 113 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 120–22 Brock, Rita Nakashima 129–34 Brown, Andrew 10 Bultmann, Rudolf 6, 39, 40, 46–53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 81 Buri, Fritz 52 Calvin, Jean 30–31, 33, 43 Castellio, Sebastian 30–31 ‘church ideology’ 6, 7, 23, 27, 37–40, 43, 45, 46, 52, 53, 54, 69, 70, 80, 89, 91, 92, 93–4, 95, 125, 126, 134, 135, 138, 139n19, 140n20, 141, 143 Church of England 10, 11, 15, 20n12, 94–5 Clarkson, Thomas 35–6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 94–5 Confessing Church 25

crucifixion 4, 15–16, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 69– 70, 75, 84–5, 86, 90, 104, 105, 114, 127, 128, 129n4, 130, 132–3, 135 ‘cunning of reason’ 1–2, 4, 5, 30, 37, 115, 131 Daily Mail 10–11 Daniel 72–3, 77 ‘death of God’ 63 democracy 15, 34–5, 78 demons 6, 71, 74, 75–6, 77, 79, 80–88, 90, 95 Desmond, William 60 Devil see demons Dialectic 64–6, 108, 140n20 Epicureanism 99 Eucharist 129, 130, 131–2 Fernie, Ewan 87n16 Feuerbach, Ludwig 26–7, 113 Fichte, J.G. 88, 100, 104, 105, 107, 118 Fraser, Giles 14, 16 GAFCON 11, 15, 16, 19 Gero Cross 129, 131–2 Gnosticism 12, 14, 16, 51 Gopnik, Alison 54–5 Gottschalk 131, 132n8 ‘Grünewald, Matthias’ 132–3 Harnack, Adolf von 44 Havel, Václav 86, 119n26 heaven 23–4, 74, 75–6, 90–92, 101, 113, 130, 134, 135, 136 Hebrews 76–8 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich and Augustine 139 and Barth 6, 39, 40, 45 and Bonhoeffer 120–22 and Bultmann 6, 39, 40, 59, 67 and Fichte 100n4, 107, 118

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and Heidegger 59 and Hölderlin 142, 143 and Kant 6, 97, 104, 106–8, 115–16 and Overbeck 6, 39, 40 and Schleiermacher 88, 139 and Spinoza 63–4 caricatured by the ‘Hegel myth’ 39, 45, 59–60, 117, 119–20, 140–41 Hegelian grand narrative 2, 5, 7, 15, 27–9, 34, 62–4, 67, 71, 110–24, 125, 138, 139n19 holding conversation open 14, 16–17, 18 Logic 60–62, 63, 65–6, 140n20 on Christology 25–7, 29, 110–15, 128, 130, 133n12 on evil 87n16 on ‘revelation’ 1–2, 3 Phenomenology of Spirit 62–4, 65–6, 108, 110, 115, 116, 117, 118, 139, 140n20 ‘speculative’ philosopher 6, 64–7, 108–10, 133n12 Heidegger, Martin 48, 58–9, 60, 61, 62 hell 23–4, 101, 128, 134 heresy 5, 9–25, 29, 30–34, 108 Hincmar of Reims 129, 131, 132n8 Hobbes, Thomas 94–5 Hölderlin, Friedrich 141–7 Hosea 72 Incarnation 25–7, 105, 114, 126–8, 130 ‘individualism’ 28, 35, 65, 104, 121–2 ‘intellectual chastity’ 53–8, 62, 63–4, 67, 124, 142 Isenheim Altarpiece 132–3 Jaspers, Karl 52 Kant, Immanuel 6, 62, 97–108, 115–16 Kierkegaard, Søren 48, 60 Latimer, Hugh 85–6 Left Behind novels 91 ‘liberal theology’ 7, 19, 35, 42, 44–5, 52, 80, 135–6, 141 libido dominandi 17, 71, 135 Lloyd, Vincent 89 Luther, Martin 30–31, 44, 46, 75n5

Mann, Rachel 11, 13, 19 Mann, Thomas 87–8 McGilchrist, Iain 56–7, 59, 112, 115 McGrath, Alister 13n7, 20–21 mega-churches 79 ‘metaphysics’ 6, 37, 38–9, 40, 43, 45, 46, 58–9, 61–2, 63, 64–5, 66, 70, 96, 101, 121–2, 124, 138, 140n20 Milbank, John 137n17, 140–41 Milingo, Emmanuel 81 Milton, John 31–4 Moore, R.I. 126, 134 Moriarty, John 51 ‘myth’ 6, 26, 40, 46–53, 54, 56, 59, 67, 81, 128, 141–2 Neo-Augustinianism 135–41 Nietzsche, Friedrich 41, 42, 88 ‘norms’ 6, 21, 70, 89, 121 original sin 21–5, 62–3, 113 Overbeck, Franz 6, 39, 40–42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 52, 53 Parker, Rebecca Ann 129–34 Paschasius Radbertus 129, 130–32 Patočka, Jan 119n40 Paul 3, 32–3, 44–5, 46 Pelagius 21–2 ‘powers’ see demons ‘principle of subjectivity’ 5, 25–9, 34–6, 71, 123, 128 propaganda and crucifixion 4, 26, 28–9, 69–70, 75, 86, 90 incapable of communicating gospel truth 3, 69, 70–71, 78–9, 89 of biblical religion 74, 76–8, 84, 91–3, 95 of secular modernity 26–7, 35, 49–50, 78, 85, 86–8, 99–100, 104, 113, 118 the possibility of truth-telling ‘just propaganda’ 78–9 the work of ‘the powers’ 71–3, 74–8, 84–6, 90–91, 97 versus true liturgy 6, 69–70, 73, 80, 83–4, 96, 124 versus the solidarity of the shaken 119, 120, 121–2, 123

Index ‘public conscience movements’ 35–6, 123–4 ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ 7, 136–41 rapture 91 Ratramnus 131 Raven Charles 10–20, 25, 34 ‘religion’ 2, 40, 43–6, 54–6, 97–108, 120–23, 135, 136 ‘revelation’ 1–2, 3, 15, 19, 29, 36, 43–4, 61n41, 70, 72, 73, 74, 76, 83, 92, 97, 102, 104, 105, 109, 110, 111, 138 Revelation 76–8, 91–3, 134 Rosenberg, Alfred 49, 50 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 122 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 80–81, 88, 136, 139 Schweitzer, Albert 42 Scotus, John Duns 137–8 Servetus, Miguel 30–31 Sittlichkeit 28, 104–7, 112, 118, 122–3, 141–2 slavery 19, 27–9, 35, 123 ‘solidarity of the shaken’ 65, 118, 119, 140n20 Sorel, Georges 49–50 ‘Speculative Reason’ 6, 64–7, 108–10, 133n12 Spinoza, Baruch de 63–4, 142 ‘Spirit’ (in the thought of Hegel) 61n41, 62–3, 66, 104n7, 110–12, 116–19, 123, 140n20 Strauss, David Friedrich 41, 42, 115 Tertullian 134

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Trinity 4, 9, 30, 37, 69, 105 truth triune structure of perfect ‘truth-asopenness’ 3–4, 9, 37, 69 ‘truth-as-openness’ the essence of authentic orthodoxy 20, 21, 32 ‘truth-as-openness’ / ‘truth-ascorrectness’ 3, 5–6, 17, 18, 19, 37–8, 39, 40, 48, 53, 57–63, 65–6, 98, 108, 114, 117, 124, 138, 140n20, 143 ‘truth-as-openness’ more than Kantian altruism 100, 116 ‘truth-as-openness’ the goal of Spirit 118 ‘truth-as-openness’ versus church ideology 42, 45, 67, 94, 125, 134, 141 ‘truth-as-openness’ versus the ‘powers’ in general 71, 72, 73–4, 76, 83, 84, 112 Tyndale, William 13 ‘Unatonement’ 6–7, 24n14, 111–15, 116–17, 120, 125, 127, 128, 130–31, 134, 135, 138, 139 unglückliche Bewußtseyn see Unatonement ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ see Unatonement Verstand 40, 64–6, 108–9 Williams, Roger 31, 33, 34 Williams, Rowan 14, 17 Wordsworth, William 142 ‘YHWH-alone-ism’ 71–4, 75, 76