Integrating the Human Sciences.

 

          Integrating the Human Sciences is Imitatio’s intellectual priority, because we are convinced that Mimetic Theory can give a single, unified theory of all culture and illuminate even the borderlands between culture and nature, the twilight realm of hominization. MT is the single explanation of the generative power in the depths of human relations and institutions,  that first concentrates and then unfolds them as the history of humanity.

          MT posits the existence of a single mechanism that generates all culture by making society possible. The mechanism does this by containing human violence and channeling it creatively. The technology of this control is what we call Religion and the French call the Sacred. Religion is like a giant factory in which the technology of ritual harnesses the energy of imitative rivalry and reciprocal violence in the service of social stability and cultural creativity.

          The Religion in question is not the current phenomenon of communities of opinion, but the earliest, unconscious processes of ritual, prohibition, and myth that enabled the hominids to become homo sapiens sapiens and generated the human world.

          These processes still go on in culture, more or less obvious and becoming more obvious as religion declines around us and falls. Discerning these processes with the help of the lens given by MT and explaining how they control the ordinary and extraordinary experiences of groups and single individuals confirms  theory, and brings it to the attention of others.

          The two papers I offer here are instances of this strategy of showing the theory in all its explanatory power so as to convince others of its singular importance. These are times when single theories are considered unlikely, and concern for origins even ludicrous; but let them laugh, they have nothing to offer, not just nothing better, but nothing at all.

“ Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

 

                  Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), On Dover Beach.

 

          I have tried in these two papers to show how myth clouds the gross domestic mind, and how imitation and reciprocity don’t just relate individuals to each other but actually construct the individual subject as a relational phenomenon. These two items from MT enable us to understand one of the pervasive cultural mistakes on the one hand, and the most precious blessing of sociality on the other, respectively the mythic lie of moralism and the novelistic truth of love. In the latter case of St Paul MT offers a dramatic way forward in the understanding of ancient and still opaque categories like, “sharing the mind of Christ.”

          Imitatio intends to concentrate intellectual energy in the effort to make MT apparent and eventually irrefutable, at which point we believe the mental map of the human world will no longer include deep forests of fear and nonsense, in which to dribble time away and squander ones soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Messina 04/2009                      

 

         “Not one stone left upon another” (Mark 13:2):

   The Myth of Moralism in the Bible and Shakespeare.

                                          By

                          Robert Hamerton-Kelly

                  Imitatio Inc and Stanford University.

 

          Our conference commemorates the earthquake of 1908. We remember how earthquakes have had a cultural impact in this historic region and beyond, and we are here to think about this phenomenon of the mutual influence of nature and culture, especially as it is highlighted by the event of catastrophe.

          I am brash enough to speak at your conference chiefly because I, like you, live with a natural hazard. I live on the famous San Andreas Fault and a few miles from the Hayward Fault, and seismic tremors are a part of my life. I live in expectation of the “big one” and in memory of the last big one in 1906. There is a town near us named Hollister where you can see on the sidewalks how the two sides of the fault are moving counter to one another, and our local Ballet company two years ago featured a superb French ballerina, Muriel Maffrey, dancing in real time to the sound the Hayward fault makes as stealthily it creeps along, - a music of creaks, cracks and groans, which was on that occasion amplified by the seismic laboratory at UC Berkeley and broadcast to the Opera House. The performance was for me an existential disclosure; a beautiful human body, moving to the secret sound of chaos, celebrating a fragile and temporary form, dancing on the lid of a cauldron of fretful violence, and representing it as elegance and grace.  Here was culture revealing and containing by art nature’s constant violence. Muriel Maffrey has since retired from our ballet company and I miss her madly, nevertheless she will always be there for me in the common mind, as a beautiful assurance of the truth of this conference, that it is the soft and vulnerable human body that links nature and spirit and is the black box through which violence can become grace and chaos art. The embodied mind transforms natural violence, contains it as culture, and lives it as history.

          Furthermore I have experienced at first hand this subterranean violence because I lived through a “little big one” in 1989 when the force beneath that very fault to whose music Muriel danced, broke out as the Loma Prietan earthquake and killed 80 plus people in the San Francisco Bay area. The Bay Bridge opened a huge crevasse and cars plunged into the sea, an elevated freeway collapsed and motorists were crushed to death, my office at the University shook like a leaf in the wind and the fire alarm went off with a horrible scream that continued like a soul in torment for two days. (Only the fire department could turn it off and they were too busy to come). My daughter who was out jogging says that she saw the earth undulating towards her like a great snake. In all about 80 people were killed, which caused me grief but more significantly for our present purpose, the quake shook my confidence in terra firma, and allowed me to discover determinatively that natural catastrophes can have a great impact on the mind. I discovered that the firmness of the earth is integral to ones consciousness of order and orientation. The shaking of terra firma was as if the bottom line with reference to which one understands ones place in the world, had lost it authority, and I found out how vital and how fragile are the natural parameters of mind and the sense of orientation. Terra infirma threatens the stability of mental perception. When the earth moves and shakes, one’s sense of basic orientation and epistemological security breaks loose and slides. The earthquake is the natural counterpart of the psychic deconstruction of the centered self, and the naively referential text. So natural catastrophe demonstrates the integral continuity between mind and environment, including, especially for our purpose, its natural environment.

          Astrology is perhaps the most vivid and durable example of the myth of the influence of nature in history. It is deep in human consciousness as the astrology columns in current newspapers show, and also the chatter in bars, where one of the favorite “pick-up” lines is, “What’s your sign?” Queen Elizabeth I had a court astrologer and Shakespeare often refers to astrology.[1] It is of course too much to be dealt with here.

           

         

         

Introduction: Myth, (Legend), and Symbol:

 

          The usual description of myth is that it is “stories about the gods,” of legend that it is “stories about the heroes,” and symbol, that it is “simple representation, by which one thing stands for another.” I shall deal here with only two of this triad, myth and symbol. The myth I shall discuss is the myth of moral order in history, and the symbol, the image of “the beyond.” Most of our time will go to the former, and only a brief passage at the end to the latter.

 

Nature and Myth:

 

          It is important to bear in mind that the relationship between nature and culture is a feedback loop in which nature shapes culture and culture shapes nature. The twofold question is, “How have natural events typically affected human culture, and how have cultural or historic events typically impacted nature?” The latter question seems odd at first sight because of the naïve empiricism that since the 19^th century has controlled the natural sciences, according to which the current of causality flows in one direction only, from the simple to the complex, or, to change the metaphor, is assembled as a hierarchy in which causality climbs from the bottom to the top. On this view myths of the mind, which are higher up the hierarchy, cannot reach down to affect the pre-mental movements of nature.

          In our time, however, there is ample evidence to disrupt this old assumption, evidence of the catastrophic impact of humans on nature. Natural catastrophes might prompt cultural myths and legends, but the opposite is equally if not more true today; human myths and legends cause natural catastrophes. I mention only the dreary examples of global warming (myth: Humankind the Lords of the earth), overpopulation (Religious injunctions like “Be fruitful and multiply”: Genesis 1: 28), and nuclear war (Our belief system is worth more than the existence of the whole human world), each of which threatens the order of nature; especially the last case, of nuclear war, as the Middle East stumbles from blind cruelty to suicidal instability in a forest of nukes. It could be that global warming will be trumped by nuclear winter, when giant clouds of debris blot out the sun, as happened briefly in the 1883, when the Indonesian island of Krakatoa erupted.

           Nature and culture (history), therefore, are linked in a feedback loop, and should be dealt with separately only for the sake of temporarily simplifying the argument, and always within the imagined context of the feedback loop.[2] I shall be separating one side of the loop from the other, history from nature, for the sake of argument, but only methodologically, not really.

          My larger thesis then is a claim about the nature of history in relation to special events of nature, made within the limits set by our conference, namely the instance of catastrophe. This is the claim: natural catastrophes register in history as myths, legends, and symbols; the former two (myth and legend) are by nature self-deceiving, that is, misrepresentations; this mendacity feeds back upon nature as a careless overconfidence. I need not take time here to describe examples of myths feeding back on nature, like the myths of current energy policy that contribute to global warming, the legends that justify global warming as idiopathic and in the normal course of things, the bogus science that excuses it, and the invisible hand of the markets (remember them?) that decoys its critics by casting money in their eyes; all this is self-evident.

          I wish to test my thesis by examining a single myth, the myth that there is a moral order in history, that natural catastrophes afflict only the morally depraved and spare the morally pure. Preposterous as this may seem it is a hardy piece of continuing nonsense in the gross international mind[3]. I call it the Myth of Moralism. I suggest that it is the most conventional myth generated by the impact of catastrophe, natural and non-natural, the myth that the victims deserved their plight because of their moral failures.

          This is the folk attitude of all cultures as the example of witchcraft shows. In traditional societies it is impossible for significant events to happen by chance. There is always human or divine causation. When a death occurs, therefore, it must have been caused by the malice of someone; people don’t just die, they are killed. At this point the witch doctor is called in and he or she “smells out” the culprit, who is then in turn killed.  So there are in such societies always at least two deaths on the occasion. The human hunger for controllable causation is so great that systems of sin, punishment, reconciliation and expiation are an integral part of all cultures. They are, however, transformations of an original technology of “violence control,” called Religion and are described by Rene Girard in his La Violence et le Sacre (Paris: Grasset, 1961). 

          There is, of course, a rich tradition of philosophical and literary work on the challenge of natural disaster to human understanding. I do not intend even to summarize it because it is too vast, but I cannot ignore the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755 and it cultural aftermath. On All Saints Day, November 1^st, 1755 a hugely destructive earthquake struck Lisbon. It demolished the city and its environs and dealt a deathblow to the 18^th century intellectual consensus, based on the scientific triumphs of Newton and Leibnitz, and confidently optimistic. There was abroad at that time a conviction that we understood nature at last and could conclude complacently with Leibnitz that logically speaking ours was “the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire was one of the influential optimists until the earthquake, when he turned his coat. His first protest was Poeme sur le desastre de Lisbonne, (1756) which provoked a lively correspondence with the young Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought the poem “blasphemous,” thereby showing his disastrously Panglossian propensities at an early stage of their subsequently unfortunate career. In the classic work, Candide (1759), where the myths of 18^th optimism are represented by the fatuous Dr Pangloss, and the innocent Candide must learn how stern nature and history actually are, and how horrible human beings can be, Voltaire made his more lasting contribution to realism in history. The Lisbon earthquake was the beginning of the end of the Enlightenment and the dawn of Romanticism (so why should we be surprised to find the young J-J lurking in the bushes?). 

          I leave Voltaire here because my interest is not philosophy or its problem of theodicy. Rather my approach might be called “the pathology of mythology” because I wish to flush out the mendacity of all myths, since they all prevaricate to conceal violence. I take this understanding of Myth as a lie, from the Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard. Myth is the lying account the violent mob gives to cover-up the fact that society stays together by means of violence against the scapegoat, which violence is controlled by Religion, through its technology of ritual and prohibition and its propaganda of myth. Ritual (sacrifice), prohibition, and myth make up the historical disguise of violence in the form of Religion, which is the socio-psychological mechanism that makes violence unite us rather than divide, by controlling the level of violence in the system through the siphoning off of amounts necessary to maintain equilibrium. The name for this mechanism is the “Generative, Mimetic, Scapegoating Mechanism (GMSM) and its institution is Relgion[4].

          So my chief interpretive assumptions are firstly that myth is a concealment of violence and therefore essentially mendacious; and secondly, that the Gospel is the principal demystifier in history, because by placing the slow torture-to-death of a young Jew by Religion, in its cultic (the priests) and civic (the politicians) modes, at the very center of its narrative, discloses the violence that beneath the surface of history and nature, that is occluded by myth. In this regard the volcano is an appropriate symbol of the violence under the mythological surface of history, and to the extent that it reveals violence it is a natural symbol of the Crucifixion, which is, in turn, the great revealer of the hidden violence of the human world. This concealment is what I call Myth, and this disclosure I call Gospel.

          To get us in the mood for our reflection we might end this introduction by recalling some recent violent catastrophes: the Tsunami of December 26, 2007, the destruction of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina in 2005. 

                                          *****

 

The Bible and Apocalypse:

         

          I ask you now to turn with me to the Bible. I wish to base my further reflections on some sayings of Jesus in the Gospels. It is generally assumed that the Bible is the bedrock representative in the West of the view that history is moral. The Bible allegedly expects morally good people to prosper and morally bad people to perish. I daresay Vesuvius is more vividly associated with such moralism than Etna, the demise of Pompeii and Herculaneum being seen as examples of the wrath of God against sexual immorality[5]. I hope to show that the Bible as a whole does not share this tit-for-tat view of history, despite significant exceptions. On the contrary, the Bible’s dominant teaching on this matter is that if there is a moral order in history, it is the order of the devil, “the Prince of this World, (John 16:11).” who is “a liar and a murderer from the beginning (John 8:42-45).” The “moral order” of this world comes most clearly to light in the slow torture of the young Jew, Jesus, to death on a cross, who was innocent of any crime or cruelty, and who lived a life of non-violent love. We murdered him not despite his loving innocence but because of it. That is the Bible’s anti-mythical view of the moral order in history. In Shakespeare’s King Lear the Duke of Gloucester sums it up:

 

                  “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods;

                  They kill us for their sport ” (King Lear 4.1.36-37).         

The Gospel is way ahead of this World in the matter of honesty. We who belong to this world are eagerly self-deceived about the nature of life here. We practice this self-deception by means of myths, in this case the myth of a moral order in history.  The Gospel demystifies the world by showcasing the greatest catastrophe imaginable, the murder of God. (Here would be a task worthy of your European Center for the Study of Myth and Symbol; take the epiphany of the devil in the violence of the Cross and use it to demystify the myths of Europe’s self arrogated glory!).

          In the Gospel all justice lies beyond this world, in heaven, not “here” but “there,” not “now” but “then.” Here is Crucifixion; there is Resurrection and Judgment. This is the apocalyptic view of history and the title of this paper quotes the words of Jesus that introduce the “synoptic apocalypse (Mark 13).”  As his group emerges from the temple in Jerusalem one of his disciples exclaims in admiration, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” and Jesus replies, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down (Mark 13:1-2).” With these words St Mark’s gospel introduces a series of prophecies and warnings about the imminent future and the end of the world.        

          This genre of literature in Mark 13 is called “apocalypse,” after the last book in the Bible, the apocalypse of John, known in English as the “Revelation.” The latter begins, “The revelation of Jesus Christ which God gave him to show to his servants what must soon take place… (apokalypsis Iesou christou en edoken autoi ho theos deiksai tois doulois autou ha dei yenesthai en tachei…). At the time of writing John was a slave in the imperial copper mines on the isle of Patmos, and this Sitz im Leben might explain the heated tenor of the work, its radical rejection of this world, its passionate hope that the persecuting empire will soon be crushed, violently and forever. (We might soon receive comparable works mutatis mutandis form Abu Chraib or Guantanamo Bay). I shall not deal with the Apocalypse of John here, because it is too demanding for the time available.                  

          The Ur-apocalypse in the Bible is the Book of Daniel, which comes from similar circumstances of stress, namely, the Maccabean wars of rebellion against Syrian Greek military and cultural oppression in the second century BCE, but the ultimate origin of the genre lies much farther back, in the creation myths of Mesopotamia. The copies of these myths that we have suggest a provenance in the early 2^nd millennium BCE. They were brought to the West, - to the Greeks by the Persian armies, and to the Jews by the exiles returning from Babylon, - in the late 6^th century BCE. Thus both Athens and Jerusalem received and absorbed through the myths the pre-mythic truth of the primacy of violence in the provenance of culture; as shown in the former case by the Milesian pre-Socratics, attested by Heraclitus’ pronouncement that war is the father of all and the king of all (frg. 53, from Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies 4).      In the latter, biblical, case this is shown by the Book of Daniel and the many Jewish apocalypses of the subsequent period.

          I understand war here to refer ultimately to the creation-by-combat myth of Mesopotamia, in which the good violence of order (Marduk) controls the bad violence of chaos. These Myths of Origin are famously represented by the Enuma Elish, from the late 3^rd millennium and extant in Akkadian fragments from Babylonia and Assyria, and in the Phoenician version from coastal Syria and extant in the Ugaritic texts from Ras Shamra[6]. The Akkadian version features Marduk and Tiamat and the Ugaritic version, Baal and Moth (death), competitors in the war between order and chaos. For example Marduk slays Tiamat and cuts her body lengthwise building the firmament of heaven out of one slice and the solid earth out of another.

          So the core of these myths is the combat between mythic representatives of chaos and order, and their existential message is that human life is radically insecure, always threatened by chaos and necessarily violent. Religion, which contains (in both senses of the word, - to include violence in itself as part of itself, and to restrain violence outside of itself by means of this inside violence) the “bad” violence of chaos by means of the “good” violence of order, is essentially this good and necessary violence, deployed as a spiritual technology in the existential war. Its rituals, primarily sacrifice and prohibition, are intended to strengthen Marduk against Tiamat and Baal against Mot (death). Faith or belief was not important, performance of the rituals and observance of the taboos was everything. If they were neglected, society and nature itself would spin out of control and culture would succumb to chaos (and another virgin would have to be thrown into the volcano).

 

                                  *****

The Myth of Moralism in the Hebrew Bible:

 

          Although it is far from being the only source, in our culture the Bible is probably the chief cause of the moralistic myth. Anthropologically speaking there are clearly other possible sources, and philosophically speaking there is, in addition to Newton and Leibnitz and J-J Rousseau, the towering testimony of Kant to “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.”                                

          Nevertheless, I warrant that even in these ignorant and exiguous times there are still more people who read the Bible than read Kant, and know their own heart and its yearning for order and control better than the witness of ethnography. And in any case the churches of all denominations teach relentlessly that the good prosper and the wicked perish, if only to instill a moral conscience in children, so that when they grow up and turn to the universal thievery that is the world of politics and finance, they may at least have (diminishing) pangs of conscience. There must be tangible rewards and punishments to make the case for morals at least initially compelling.

          Thus the Moralistic myth could be seen as a biblically generated myth. It appears to many Christian teachers of morality, most of whom have never heard of the great Lisbon nor read Candide, to be not a myth but rather God’s truth as attested in the Bible.

           I wish now to look briefly at the biblical evidence. The myth comes primarily from the Deuteronomic tradition in the Hebrew Bible (OT= Old Testament), (The books of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Kings, and Chronicles), although there is memorable evidence from the earlier sources like the Yahwist-Elohist, whose most dramatic story of this kind is the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, for, - what else? -, the sin of Sodomy. (Genesis: 18-19), or the story of Noah and the flood, where God destroys the whole world because of its general sinfulness (Gen: 6-9) According to this tradition those who obey the law of God prosper and those who do not perish.

          The Book of Deuteronomy, which is one of the five most authoritative books for Jews, being the fifth in what they call the Torah (Teaching), is presented as the words of Moses himself to the nation. The first part (Chap. 1-3) makes the case that in warfare Israel wins when it obeys the divine teaching and loses when it disobeys. This is the simplest form of the moralist myth: obey you win, disobey you lose[7]. When in Deuteronomy Chap. 4 ff Moses turns to lawgiving and ethical instruction the whole presentation is permeated by the same logic of success and failure. It is even formalized into a covenant, in which the divine and human parties agree to a series of quid pro quo (4:30-31).

 

          “You shall be careful to do therefore as the Lord your God commanded, you shall not turn aside to the right hand or the left. You shall walk in all the way which the Lord your god has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land which you shall possess (5:32-33).”

 

  “Behold I set before you this day a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you this day, and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you this day, to go after other gods which you have not known (12:26-28).”

 

          History is an “either-or” proposition, and whether it turns out to be a blessing or a curse can be controlled by the free assent of the will. To be sure, the mind behind this is by no means as simplistic as I have made it sound. The “either-or” nests in a larger matrix of meaning, namely that Israel is the chosen people of God and that God therefore plays an especially active and solicitous role in their history. The covenant expresses this understanding of a special relationship with God that makes of Israel the great exception among the nations. Theirs is not a general providence but a special partnership, and within such a context transgression of the divine will brings special catastrophe.

          Be that as it may, I think that in the Christian world this Deuteronomic point of view has been generally adopted without such nuances, and catastrophes have been understood simply as instances of divine displeasure. The God of the Bible is in some measure a violent God whose anger breaks out from time to time against those who cross him, and especially against his covenanted people when they do not fulfil their part of the contract.

 

          And then there comes upon the scene to challenge this point of view, the book of Job, the righteous man whom God crushed to win a bet with the devil.[8] Job never stopped insisting on his innocence and accusing God of injustice, and in the end God said that he Job was right and the pious friends wrong (Job 42:7).

 

          “After the Lord had spoken these words to Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, ‘My wrath is kindled against you and against your two friends; for you have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant Job has.’”

         

          What did Eliphaz say that was wrong?

                 

                  “Think now who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright ever cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed (4:7-9).

 

  What did Job say that was “right?”

         

          Job confessed that the meaning of history was beyond his comprehension and that the one thing needful was not patent justice but a relationship with God in which we trust God blindly:

 

          “Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know…I had heard of Thee with the hearing of my ear, but now my eye sees thee; therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (42:3-5).

 

          In the canonical order of the Hebrew Bible (OT) the Psalms follow Job and the Proverbs follow the Psalms and then we come upon Qoheleth (Greek: Ecclesiastes), and we hear again the protest against the moral myth, only more radical this time.       

                 

          “ ‘Vanity of Vanities,’ says the preacher, ‘Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity ‘” (1:2).

 

          Here is a perfect description of the cold immorality of catastrophe:

 

                  “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all. For man does not know his time. Like fish which are taken in an evil net, and like birds which are caught in a snare, so the sons of men are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them“ (Ecclesiastes 9:11-12).

 

          That is a good description of a catastrophe; without sense, driven by time and chance “it suddenly falls upon them.” And for no discernible reason!

          We need not pile up examples from this exquisite literature, - the poem of Job is among the greatest masterpieces -, but simply ask, “What is going on here in the Hebrew canon?”

          Evidently the Wisdom tradition, from which Job and Ecclesiastes come, is criticizing the Yahwist and Deuteronomic traditions and in fact refuting their prime directive. Astonishingly for all biblical fundamentalists one biblical tradition is pointedly refuting another. The Bible is submitting itself to a pungent criticism from within, and in this action it is unique amongst all the founding books of Religions. This enhances the credibility of the biblical witness immensely, because it lodges criticism at its own center, thereby teaching an open attitude to a dynamically historical truth rather than a monumental smugness about a solid truism. In this self-criticism the Bible makes a fundamentalist hermeneutic impossible.  How can one infallible tradition infallibly refute another?

           

 

The Gospels and the Myth of Moralism:

          I turn now again to the Gospels, which are in their turn criticisms of the Jewish religion out of which they themselves come. You understand that I treat them as pieces of ancient literature and not ecclesiastically privileged texts. Consider the follow passage from the 13^th chapter of Luke’s gospel:

          Certain of those present at his teaching told Jesus of the Galileans whom Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor, had murdered while they were engaged in worship in the temple in Jerusalem, whose “blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices.

          “He (Jesus) replied, “Do you think that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans. Of course not, but I warn you, unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or do you think the 18 people on whom the tower of Siloam collapsed deserved this misfortune more than all other dwellers in Jerusalem? Not at all, I tell you, but if you do not repent you will all likewise perish (Luke 1:1-5).”

         

          Thus Jesus comments on two recent catastrophes, both quasi-historical but in effect like nature. A chance murder of worshippers by the Roman patrols was presumably as random as a flood and, although humans built the tower, its collapse on the 18 unfortunates was, shall we say, the result of gravity. It is not really necessary to dissect the cause of each – for example, “Did the worshipers misbehave? Was the tower jerry-built?” – because the point Jesus makes is in any case clear. It is that there is no correlation between moral behavior and catastrophe. The Galileans and the victims of the tower, might have been exemplary in their piety, nevertheless, they died catastrophically. Clearly the moralistic myth must have been present in the minds of Jesus’ hearers, which alone attests its part in the cultural assumptions of a Jewish society of that time

          What then is the significance of these events, according to Jesus? They demonstrate at least the vulnerability of all human beings to apparently random death. In the course of human history there is no way to determine what, if anything, controls events. Events may actually be random or more likely for Jesus, apparently random, because we cannot know the nature of the divine causality, and in any case it is clear that our ideas of right and wrong are not confirmed by history.  Either there is no moral order in history, or we humans are not able to understand the one there is. By our lights the good do not prosper and the wicked do not perish; but our lights might be too dim to see by.                    

          That is the case in the historical framework of reality, but in the apocalyptic framework of Jesus’ message catastrophic events are demonstrations of our ultimate vulnerability. “In the end you shall all perish” - through the final judgment of the apocalypse - therefore set all other assumptions aside and come, follow me!” So the Gospel substitutes the personal relationship with Jesus for the ethical order of the world.  Not a moral code but a loving relationship with the creator who became human to make such a relationship possible, is the true way to be human. In such a case sudden death is merely a moment in the our relationship with the absolutely secure love of the creator who brought us into being and holds us in being as long as his eternal love lasts.

          The Resurrection is the meaning of history; the Cross is the meaning in history. Neither is moral, neither is Law, both are Gospel, both are Grace. Please note this distinction between meaning in history and the meaning of history. In history the violent immorality of the cross, of history the loving kindness of the Resurrection. This view of life is essentially the same as the totally traditional Christian view that life in this world is a pilgrimage through the vale of tears, in which we are subject to “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”  (Hamlet 3.1.59), as we persevere on our way to heaven. As far as I can see we have no abiding city here and await the city of God, no justice here and await the judgment of heaven (Hebrews 13:14). If you have a better account of the way it is with us I would love to hear it.

          Thus catastrophe as apocalypse points to the meaninglessness of history apart from a source beyond history, and that source cannot be a moral ideal or a structure of meaning, it can only be a personal God who loves all that he has made. If you ask why that love does not prevent our suffering you open the door to the mystery of freedom and the window on the moving fact that love, as we know it is strongest in the face of adversity and that loyalty is the highest value.[9]

          Catastrophe, according to Jesus, is not a fate or destiny, not a nemesis or karma; we can repent. “Unless you repent,” he says. History unfolds as freedom, and repentance is the exercise of the freedom to change the goal and direction of ones life, in this case to follow Jesus rather than the “Prince of this world.” 

          There is a repetition of the synoptic denial of a quid-pro-quo in history (Luke 13) in the 9^th chapter of John’s Gospel. It is important to take note of this Johannine instance because it comes from an historical tradition separate from the synoptics and so broadens the historical basis of this element in the teaching of Jesus.  The disciples, seeing a man born blind ask:

 

          “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind? Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned, (he is like this) in order that the work of God might be demonstrated in him’ “(John 9: 1-3).

 

          Once again Jesus denies the close correlation of sin and catastrophe. The idea that God would create a man blind just so that on this very occasion Jesus can heal him and demonstrate his divine power, raises it own questions, but we cannot take them up here, excepting to say that if one believes in God the privilege of serving the divine purpose is greater than the privilege of sight. The blindness was for a limited period, the man was born blind and so could not feel the agonies of loss that one who had lost his sight might have felt, and in any case he was to receive the gift of sight from the hands of Jesus, and from the narrative we learn that he was a relatively young man since his parents have to point out that he no longer is a child, as if he could easily be mistaken for one (9:21).

          Jesus therefore denies a moral meaning in history. Catastrophe in history is not a manifestation of divine judgment. Only at the end of history, in the apocalypse, does there emerge something like a moral meaning of the whole of the human story, in the final Judgment. So, to repeat, there a moral meaning of history but not in history.

 

                                          *****

 

  A Shakespearean Cadenza:

         

          Catastrophe, nevertheless, demands that we remain with the question of meaning in history, a little longer, and search another source of wisdom. The indiscriminate wounding of many people without respect of age or deserving, especially the death of children, forces us to probe the occasions when life in this world is but “a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing,” a stage on which “walking shadows” mime meaning as we  “strut and fret” until our brief candle dies, and darkness covers our little drama with silence. You will of course recognize that I am paraphrasing Shakespeare (Macbeth 5.5.15-28) where, a poet who knew the tragic pointlessness of it all, tragic beyond the classical tragedy of the Greeks, which still had nemesis and hubris to give history some causal order, drives the drama all the way to chaos, like Lear on the heath with Edgar feigning madness (“Poor Tom”) in the storm (King Lear 3:2ff). As sane Edgar mimes madness so mad Lear mimes sanity, clinging to it while it slips slowly from his cold hands and he gradually sinks below the last boundary of the tragic and drowns in madness, death, and chaos. Tiamat comes again, Yamm (The Sea) floods the mind, and Moth marches on.[10] This is the symbol of Apocalypse (C.f. Rev.13).

          The Gospel, however, does not by its denial of the moral meaning in history return us to King Lear’s chaos. The backdrop of the catastrophe of the Cross is the eucatastrophe of the Resurrection. There is a meaning of history that lies beyond history, and enters history from somewhere else, bypasses linear reasoning and normal experience.  While the historical catastrophe of the death-by-torture of Jesus the young Jew, is the face of the Gospel in this world, his Resurrection from the dead is the face of the Gospel from beyond this world.

          If there is no such spiritual force of rectification from “beyond” there is no sense at all, and life really is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, and as Gloucester confirms, “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods, They kill us for their sport (King Lear 4.1.36-37).” Today we are culturally beyond even Lear’s madness, in a landscape of icy silence and depression where figures sans substance or expectation disappear in suffering silence with no bang nor whimper. Once again Lear comes to mind, “Nothing?  Nothing will come of nothing. (1.1.85-90). (A comment on our current global financial crisis?).

Symbol: The Beyond: 

          In conclusion I take up the category of symbol, and deal with it as it has come up out of our discussion of the myth of morality, as the symbol of the “Beyond”. Shakespeare’s Lear drives us beyond tragedy to where meaning ends, and then on into the “beyond.” Greek tragedy still has categories of order, like hubris and nemesis, Macbeth, Shakespeare’s tragedy immediately prior to Lear still has the villain die and some sense restored to the world. In Lear the opposite: all is lost; nothing comes of nothing and the gods regard us as wanton boys regard flies. So we come to the most important symbolic correlative of natural catastrophe, the Beyond.

          As an outbreak of violence from subterranean containment, the earthquake is a break-in from beyond. Natural catastrophe is, therefore, a powerful symbol of “the beyond” in its several senses. By the symbol of catastrophe ”the beyond” is: “beyond our morality,” which means, “beyond our control” and “beyond our comprehension.” Since we cannot understand the moral causation and cannot control the outcome we cannot see anything like morality in nature, and if we cannot see it in nature we cannot see it in history, outside of enclaves of temporary significance whose laws we decree, that we set up from time to time.

          There is one more symbolic referent I wish to point out: violence. An earthquake is a symbol of violence underlying and threatening the world. Violence is violently contained for the time being, but it is always there pressing against the bars of its prison. In the human world this is the vision of Girard and his Mimetic Theory, his vision of Religion as the technology of violence-control.

          Thus “the Beyond” means “beyond morality,” which in turn means beyond comprehension and beyond control. “Violence” means Religion and its technology of control of that wich is beyond comprehension.

          The Gospel understands Lear perfectly. Because in this world the innocent are crushed; the precious Cordelia, the young Jesus, the only ones who dealt honestly and loved purely, because of this, the meaning in history and the meaning of history are both “beyond” us. We cannot comprehend them, we can only admire and adore, and give thanks that in this “valley of the shadow” there is pure love and faithfulness. The lovely Cordelia is innocent, the only sister who would not flatter her father, the only one who loved him truly. The lovely Jesus is innocent, entirely and wholly innocent, the only one ever to have been so, and for that very reason we tortured him to death. History cannot endure innocence, or even goodness, but this girl and this boy  are there like a bone in the throat of history. Could there be a more trenchant refutation of the moral structure of history? Cordelia is crushed for refusing hypocrisy and loving truly; Jesus is executed for doing good and speaking truth; but history has choked on them. Despite all they stand out as signs of hope in the midst of chaos, of gentleness in the face  of force.

          I have tried to establish the mendacity of the myth of meaning in this world, and the truth of the apocalypse of love beyond this world. Now I entrust my arguments to you.