The general synthesis of reality, or at least as much “reality” as we allow ourselves to perceive, with the amalgamation of religion and science—scientific religion?—tends to the corollary of the decomposition of our very natures. The query that must be posed is this: what kind of Darwinian experience must we undergo in order for us to disseminate into this juxtaposition of the ether of monotheism and the hierarchy of the culmination of a technological Messiah and the atheism of science? The reality (“reality,” heh) of a super-imposed Christianization of society is not only that it promotes enslavement, but that it also reduces the will to accept responsibility for our own idiosyncratic actions and vindications.
The religious innuendos that reek from A Prayer for Owen Meany reveal either a deeply profound author whose own insights into humanity and criticisms of religion is both revelatory and piercingly truthful or he is a religious freak who must be exterminated immediately – unless, of course, his fanaticism leads to the subjugation of a plethora of people (Cattle!), and in turn, the rise of both harsh degradation and chauvinism. Regardless, A Prayer for Owen Meany does all of these things, except, of course, warrant the assassination of Irving, which is probably more a reflection of my own desires than those of the author’s. In any case, religion is more about the repression of people and the negation of
Rand’s “Affirmation of Self.”
Jacques Lacan famously stated: “I love you, but there is something in you more than yourself that I love, objet petit a, so I destroy you.” This is the ultimate destruction and decomposition of humanity: the paradox of our existence. We destroy each other to seek pleasure, to gain meaning, to feel superior. Why? What so possesses us to destroy others for the benefit of ourselves? Is this not the very idea Rand purported, that idea that at the end of Atlas Shrugged, as John Galt lifted his hand to the sky “over the desolate earth…[and] traced in space the sign of the dollar” (Rand 1069), was so painfully crucified (exploited) for all to see? It was the ideal of selfishness.
The narrator of A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Wheelwright, offers some insight into this matter, stating that the Messianic Owen Meany “is the reason I believe in God” (Irving 1). However, even as a child, John constantly teased Owen by picking him up and “pass[ing] him back and forth” (Irving 3) with other Sunday school kids or locking him in a “secret” passageway, but is this not the very definition of exploitation? Using a person to gain some kind of perverse pleasure? Likewise, in Christian theology, in order for Christ to be the darkly ethical “hero” of the Bible, did he not require Judas’ sanctity to be exploited and used as a human catalyst for salvation? To this end, it was Judas who made the ultimate sacrifice, not God. God only sent his Son who died and was then resurrected; Judas, on the other hand, relinquished not only his life, but his second life, and was forced to suffer eternal damnation. Furthermore, Christian monotheism is the only religion that demands the betrayal of worshipers in order for God to actualize Himself, but more importantly, it is the only religion that demands God betray Himself (“Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”). And what implications does this have for God? This, then, makes Christianity the only religion with a violent passion for erecting differences, “a gap in the order of being, to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others” (Zizek 33).
This notion, however, that of intolerant love, is not to be confused with the Balkan proverb: “If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me!” because violence is already the love choice as such, which tears its object out of its context, and elevates it to the Platonic “form”. In Montenegrin myth, a lascivious woman is the origin of evil: she makes the men around her lose their balance, she, quite literally, destabilizes the universe, and shades all things with a tone of partiality. This is the defining moment of Christianity. Christianity is the symbol of partiality, and Eastern philosophies and religions are the symbol of impartiality. Buddhism, for instance, renders the Self worthless and replaces the concept of individual with the Whole. This lack of individual motives, then, is quite the contrary of Christianity. In fact, an aseptic sense of Self results in the penultimate stance of impartiality (second only to death, itself) – suicidal consummate. Ill-fated moths entranced by the halogen glow of Unity are only unified at the bottom of the lantern. This is not to say Christianity has any different results, but that it does not deny the Self, it does not incarcerate our minds. It is to say, however, that Eastern philosophies are essentially cult suicides under the veil of religion.
Christian violence, then, is the only way to experience a true “love” (which is, after all, only the absence of hate). If we are to experience love through Zen, we are not truly experiencing love, because we are Impartial to each other—everything is relative, and nothing really matters other than the fact that you surrender yourself to the Whole even though it, technically, doesn’t need you to survive. Jesus (the Christ Messiah) said in Luke 14:26, “if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple.” This is ponderously dark until one realizes the small difference in love and hate. Case in point, you can’t love someone without hating them, because they do not change when you want them to; we may love ourselves, but only change when we find something we hate, and in order to find something we hate we must first love ourselves enough to care. Buddhism, on the other hand, does not care about the individual and his personal flaws, so long as he is giving himself up to the Whole.
So, then, John Wheelwright’s exploitation of Owen for personal amusement is not only an enabler for Owen’s Christly actions but also a required part of the Christian totality of self. Christianity, of course, is no better than Buddhism in the sense that we are all toys for whom God “saves” from ourselves and our inherent evil. G.K. Chesterson states that parts of Christianity are “more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss” (Chesterson 139). This can not but lend itself to the creation of mankind; we all “sin” and there are things about each of us “more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss.” In this sense, religion is and relative to the Self. When God created man, he was prohibited to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, but why would God put it in Paradise in the first place if he did not already have a calculated move? That, namely, of “saving” his creations from “themselves” when it is really He who caused our Fall from Eden. If we are to step away from this view and attempt to analyze the Fall from Eden in another way, the only viable conclusion is that in man’s search for truth, he would sacrifice Eden. Apparent (or not) is the idea that the Fall is the Salvation, and not the other way around. We should not strive for a realm of potentialities (eternity), where we can never actualize ourselves in any way or form. I mean, yeah, let everyone else think they should be a unified, amorphous blob of souls and divinity, but let us think to Hegel’s dictum that Evil is in the gaze which perceives Evil: the true Fall is in the very gaze which misperceives the first move as a Fall. It is not that things went wrong, downhill, first with Adam, and were then restored with Christ; the simple truth is that Adam and Christ are one and the same.
Likewise, the same goes for “abstract” and “concrete” universality: in a first move, universality has to be asserted in negativity, as exclusive of all particular content—that is to say, not as an all-encompassing container, but as the destructive force which undermines every particular content. One should not oppose to this violent force of abstraction, of tearing-apart the concrete fabric of reality, concrete universality as the totality which mediates all particular content within its organic whole; on the contrary, “concrete” universality is the very movement of negativity which splits universality from within, reducing it to one of the particular elements, one of its own species. It is only at this moment, when universality, as it were, loses the distance of an abstract container, and enters its own frame, that it becomes truly concrete. Adam and Christ also relate as “negation” and “negation of negation,” but in the above-mentioned precise meaning—Adam is Christ “in itself,” and Christ’s Redemption is not the “negation” of the Fall, but it’s accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.
Religion is, of course, the most obvious way to repress as many people as possible. With the modernist autonomy of religion, it no longer applies solely to regional locations, but can be practiced by anyone, anywhere in the world. That is to say, religion is no longer integrated into certain cultures, but instead has globalized itself. With this, however, comes the price of the reduction of religion to the epiphenomenon with regard to the secular functioning of social totality. As such, it can only have two possible functions: therapeutic or critical. In regards to the former, some people use religion to function better in society, while with respect to the latter, religion tries to (through its members) assert itself as a critical agency of the modern world—establishing world order and universal morals, and religion is therefore a heresy, of sorts. Still, there is no point in having a bunch of freethinking, liberal-minded loons running around concocting new theories to explicate the meaning of life. Besides, someone has to pick up the trash. In an alternative essay, “Pontius Pilate Spares Jesus,” Josiah Ober entertains the hypothesis that Pilate did not yield to the pressure of the mob, and spared Christ, who survived, and thrived to a very great age as a successful preacher, supported by the Roman authorities against the Jewish establishment; his sect eventually became dominant, and also became the Roman state religion, albeit in its more Jewish version, without the Cross and Redemption by Christ’s death. The coincidence of Fall and Redemption makes this hypothesis stricto sensu beside the point.
The point of those paragraphs, of course, was to say that there is an unknown dimension to Christianity. When Christ dies, what dies with him is the secret hope discernible in “Father, why hast thou forsaken me?”: the hope that there is a father who has abandoned me. The “Holy Spirit” is the community deprived of its support in the big Other. The point of Christianity as the religion of atheism is not the vulgar humanist one that the becoming-man-God reveals that man is the secret of God; rather, it attacks the religions hardcore that survives even in humanism, even up to Stalinism, with its belief in History as the “big Other” that decides on the “objective” universality of our deeds. In what is perhaps the highest example of Hegelian Aufhebung, it is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and, even more so, of its specific religious experience). The gap here is irreducible: either one drops religious form, or one maintains the form, but loses the essence. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity would emerge. Finally, Christianity is most definitely worth keeping around, considering its long-standing history of sending literal translators out to their death (i.e. Crusades).
On a lighter note, the eau de Beaumont is somewhat nauseating, isn’t it? Wait…what am I talking about? Uhm…yes, well, forget that statement. Ahem. The postmodern view of society is that we are nothing but fragments in a vacuum, and our memory only reveals fractals of our thoughts and desires (Id). It is this very decomposition of society, however, that verifies our existence. “I think, therefore I exist.” What a stupid idea, right? The only thing that proves our existence is a name on paper, and besides, if we don’t exist, then what do we do? Every man is agreed that life is better when it is in books, anyway (Dostoyevsky 90), so why should we think about “real” life as though it is something we must achieve? Is there any way to really fill a void?
For instance, a WonderBall, a candy popular in American culture several years ago, was a hollow ball of chocolate replete with small candies and toys inside. A child purchasing this product can be observed cracking the chocolate to reveal their prize, not even bothering to eat the chocolate. Is this candy/toy not a prime example of Lacan’s l’objet petit a at its purest, the small object filling the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure, at the center of thing we desire? The material void at the center, of course, stands for the structural gap on account of which no product is really that, no product lives up to its expectations. In other words, the candies and toys are not simply different from chocolate (the product we bought); while it is materially different, it fills in the gap in chocolate itself—that is to say, it is on the same surface as the chocolate. As we know from Marx, a commodity is a mysterious entity full of theological caprices, a particular object satisfying a particular need, but at the same time the promise of “something more,” of an unfathomable enjoyment whose true location is fantasy—all advertising addresses this fantasmatic space (“If you drink X, it will not be just a drink, but also…”). So the toys and candy are the results of a risky strategy actually to materialize, render visible, this mysterious excess: “If you eat our chocolate, you will not just eat chocolate, but also…have a (totally useless) plastic toy.” Thus the WonderBall provides the formula for all the products which promise “more” (“Buy A DVD player and get five DVDs for free,” or, in an even more direct form, more of the same—“Buy this toothpaste and get a third extra free”), not to mention the standard trick of the Coca-Cola bottle (“Look on the inside of the bottle cap, and you may find that you are the winner of one of our prizes, from another free Coke to a brand-new car”): the function of this “more” is to fill in the lack of a “less,” to compensate for the fact that, by definition, a product never delivers on its promise. In other words, the ultimate “true” product would be the one which would not need any supplement, the one which would simply fully deliver what it promises—you get what you pay for, nothing less, nothing more.
Let us get back, however, to the small child clawing away at the chocolate on the WonderBall to get to his candy—is he not the symbol of totalitarianism, which also wants to get rid of the inessential historical contingent coating in order to liberate the essence of man? Is not the ultimate totalitarian vision that of a New Man arising out of the debris of the violent annihilation of the former corrupted humanity? Paradoxically, then, liberalism and totalitarianism share the belief in “X,” the worthless toy in the midst of the human chocolate coating. The problematic point of X is that it makes us equal in spite of our differences being clear: beneath the deep humanist insight that, “deep within ourselves, we are all equal, the same vulnerable humans,” is the cynical question: Why bother to fight against the surface differences when, deep down, we already are equal?—like the proverbial millionaire who poignantly realizes that he feels that same passions, fears, and loves as a destitute beggar. Perhaps the most important ethics lesson for the twentieth century is that we should all abandon ethical arrogance, and acknowledge how lucky we are to be able to act ethically. Or, to put it in theological terms: far from being opposed, autonomy and grace are intertwined—we are blessed by grace when we are able to act autonomously as ethical agents.
My personal beliefs on the matter are that despite a perhaps innate equality, the capitalist society I live in inflates my ego and therefore forces me above everyone. Furthermore, he who is reading this essay finds himself above me because of a piece of paper (that is flammable, you know?) awarding him a Ph.D. While the annihilation of ethical arrogance would certainly be charming and oh-so salutary to our obviously depraved society, the likelihood of such an event is slim, and the cretins who attempt to eradicate their own ethical arrogance wind up subjugated to the whims of everyone else (After all, isn’t a group of altruists really just a group of fascists?), and/or dead in a ditch after getting high. So when given the opportunity to choose between potato-sack and satin, I will always choose the latter, despite their own innate equality. Why? Because it offers more, it further completes my fantasmatic desire for more, l’objet petit a.
So, ultimately, the point to be found in this essay is that we’re all here for each other’s exploitation, and when we aren’t being exploited, we don’t exist. So what is the meaning of life? It’s that we are supposed to pin ourselves up across satin bedsheets for each other to rape while eating WonderBalls and reading an Old King James Bible. Duh.
Works Cited
1. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, 1069.
2. John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany, 1, 3.
3. Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 33.
4. G.K. Chesterson, Orthodoxy, 139.
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