Abstract
The central argument of this chapter is that religion is a force that makes the world, and that religious community operates best without God. This chapter investigates the meaning of religious practice in light of the developments arising from my reading of Rappaport. This chapter argues that subjunctivity short-circuits sovereignty producing a reorientation of political theology. It begins with an in-depth analysis of the term “subjunctivity.” The chapter then engages with Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Dōgen Zenji in an attempt to arrive at positive resources of the subjunctive in religion. Next, the chapter investigates two different expressions of what I take to be subjunctive, liberatory religious practice: craft and apophatic mysticism. The chapter then turns to Martin Buber and René Girard and draws atheological insights from them resulting in descriptions of how religious community might understand itself without God in its midst. This second chapter also makes the methodological claim that theology may be cleaved from any particular object of study (traditionally, God) and it should instead be understood as a way of thinking. The chapter makes the claims that religious practice and theological thinking operate best in the absence of God.
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Notes
- 1.
See The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, Volume XVII: Su-Thrivingly (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 35–36: “Designating or relating to a verbal mood that refers to an action or state as conceived (rather than as a fact) and is therefore used chiefly to express a wish, command, exhortation, or a contingent, hypothetical, or prospective event.”
- 2.
Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage, 2001), 215.
- 3.
Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. On Religion. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1964. 41–58. 42.
- 4.
See, for instance, “Religion and Consumption: The Profane Sacred,” a special issue of Advances in Consumer Research, ed. Güliz Ger, Vol. 32 (2005). http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/v32/acr_vol32_44.pdf.
- 5.
Roy A. Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1979), 241.
- 6.
Roy A. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 15–16.
- 7.
Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
- 8.
Seligman et al., 22.
- 9.
Dōgen and Thomas F. Cleary, Shōbōgenzō: Zen Essays by Dōgen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991) 64.
- 10.
Dōgen and Cleary, 68.
- 11.
Dōgen and Cleary, 65.
- 12.
Dōgen and Cleary, 69.
- 13.
Dōgen and Cleary, 64.
- 14.
Dōgen and Cleary, 74.
- 15.
Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 81.
- 16.
See Matthew 22:35–40, Mark 12:28–31, and Luke 10:25–28.
- 17.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 40.
- 18.
Jacob Taubes locates this call in Paul. In Romans 13:8–10 wherein Paul summarizes Jesus’ comments on the greatest commandment (Matthew 22:36–40), Paul argues that all of the law is summed up by the command, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Paul continues, writing “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.” On this point, Taubes remarks that Paul has taken Jesus’ dual commandment—to love God and love each other—and made them equivocal. “No dual commandment, but rather one commandment. I regard this as an absolutely revolutionary act” (Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 53.
- 19.
Tillich, 20. My emphasis.
- 20.
Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: Penguin, 2009).
- 21.
Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 24. I should note that Rappaport admits that “this definition encompasses much more than religious behavior.”
- 22.
Al-Qushayri, Principles of Sufism, trans. B. R. von Schlegell (Oneonta, NY: Mizan Press, 1990), 49.
- 23.
See Ralf Dahrendorf: “Homo Sociologicus: On the History, Significance, and Limits of the Category of Social Role,” Essays in the Theory of Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968).
- 24.
Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. C. S. Nott (Accord, NY: Pir Press, 1998), 33.
- 25.
Attar, 102. Another lovely quote on this point regards the seemingly reckless action that devoted mystics take. Attar writes, “His boldness then is good and laudable, because he is an idiot of love, on fire” (81).
- 26.
Incidentally, this also seems to relate to God’s preference for the poor—those with less power––fewer words—testified to by liberation theologians. Furthermore, perhaps this is why so many have vilified sexuality—often, traditional sexual relationships are relationships of domination and submission. As God sides with the downtrodden, a system which dominates is rendered corrupt.
- 27.
Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings, ed. Oliver Davies (NY: Penguin, 1994), 236–7.
- 28.
Eckhart, 207.
- 29.
Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Divine Names,” in Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism, eds. Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman, OSB (New York/Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001), 82.
- 30.
Crawford, 17.
- 31.
Crawford, 17.
- 32.
In Genesis 1:3, “God said: ‘let there be light.’” This “God said” becomes a refrain, repeated nine times throughout the first chapter of Genesis. The Gospel of John echoes the Creation in Genesis in chapter 1, verses 1–4: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all humankind.”
- 33.
Genesis 2:7–9 (NASB).
- 34.
Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1935 and 1963), 90.
- 35.
In his poem on Moses and the Shepherd, Rumi has God saying that “I am not made any purer by [humanity’s] praise/Their own impurities these prayers erase/And I pay no attention to their speech/But their intention and the heights they reach: Pure, humble hearts are what I seek/Regardless of the haughty words they speak.” And then the narrator continues, “The heart’s the essence, words are mere effects/The heart’s what counts, the cackle he neglects!/I’m tired of fancy terms and metaphors/I want a soul which burns so much it roars!/It’s time to light one’s heart with pure desire/Burn thought and contemplation with this fire!/How far apart the meek and well-behaved/From ardent lovers who may seem depraved!” And finally, “Lovers stand beyond religion’s hold,” (my emphasis).
- 36.
Weber, Max, Economy and Society (Berkley, CA: University of California Press, 1975).
- 37.
Albert Schweitzer, The Albert Schweitzer–Helene Bresslau Letters: 1902–1912, eds. Rhena Schweitzer Miller and Gustav Woytt, trans. Antje Bultmann Lemke with Nancy Stewart (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 24.
- 38.
Tillich, 50–51.
- 39.
Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Call to Radical Theology, ed. Lissa McCullough (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 1.
- 40.
See Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft (New York: Penguin, 2009); Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. C. S. Nott (Accord, NY: Pir Press, 1998); Al-Qushayri, Principles of Sufism, trans. B. R. von Schlegell (Oneonta, NY: Mizan Press, 1990); Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis and New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1966); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Touchstone, 1997); and Philip Hallie, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed (New York: HarperCollins, 1979).
- 41.
Buber, I and Thou; and René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).
- 42.
Tillich, Theology of Culture.
- 43.
Incidentally, the Occupy Movement––counterintuitively––may then be seen as a contemporary mystical movement, for instance, despite its lack of any language about God whatsoever and its deep engagement with––rather than withdrawal from––the world. I will take up this line of thinking again in Chap. 6.
- 44.
Buber, 53.
- 45.
Buber, 54.
- 46.
Buber, 80.
- 47.
Buber, 56.
- 48.
Buber, 92. Buber is using “relate” and “experience” in idiosyncratic ways here. By “relate,” Buber means to signify a reciprocity between those who relate to one another. By contrast, Buber understands “experience” unidirectionally. One experiences an object. The experiencer is active while the object of experience is a passive recipient of that which acts upon it.
- 49.
As quoted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, fwd. Jacques Barzun (New York: Mentor/New American Library, 1958), 352. Originally from Auguste Sabatier, Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion, 2me éd. (1897), 24–26, abridged.
- 50.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 40.
- 51.
Buber, 151. The scandal might go all the way to the greatest commandment––theology is about love before it is about love’s object.
- 52.
Buber, 171.
- 53.
Buber, 162.
- 54.
Buber, 162.
- 55.
Meister Eckhart, Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher, ed. Reiner Schürmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 218. Quoted from Eckhart’s 52nd sermon, “Beati Pauperes Spiritu.”
- 56.
Slavoj Žižek examines this idea in his inimitable way in, “If There Is a God, Then Anything is Permitted.” ABC Religion & Ethics. April 17, 2012 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/if-there-is-a-god-then-anything-is-permitted/.
- 57.
Girard, Things Hidden, 183.
- 58.
Girard, Things Hidden, 183.
- 59.
Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1966).
- 60.
See René Girard, “Mimesis and Violence: Perspectives in Cultural Criticism,” Berkshire Review 14 (1979): 9–19; Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 36; and Things Hidden, 26–27, 93–94, and 338–347.
- 61.
Girard, Things Hidden, 422.
- 62.
Girard, Things Hidden, 287. The recent celebrations of Osama bin Laden’s death could not be more blatant and appropriate evidence of this claim.
- 63.
Emmanuel Levinas, “The Pact,” in The Levinas Reader, trans. Seán Hand (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 220.
- 64.
As the celebrations in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s death demonstrated, the American public seems not to have noticed that Christ illuminated the emptiness of the scapegoat mechanism. Either that, or it noticed, but doesn’t care. We have moved beyond the imitation of each other. We are a step removed, just like God. The first step for Girard was to remove the object of our rivalry from the mimetic equation, but we’ve since moved beyond that simple removal. Girard might be surprised that we’ve become absent from our own mimesis . We are now imitating what we think the other will imitate. We are imitating as if . This was Obama’s problem regarding the Egyptian Revolution in 2011. He wouldn’t actively take a position. His mimetic rivalry didn’t result in direct competition. Instead, it attempted to react to some then-unseen actor. It was a subjunctive, predictive mimesis, not a reactive one. Incidentally, this is also how we ended up with a housing bubble when no one thought houses were a good investment: we didn’t think houses were a good investment, but we assumed everyone else did think so. We invest in that in which we think others will invest. See “Ranking Cute Animals: A Stock Market Experiment,” NPR: Planet Money, accessed August 18, 2012, http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/01/14/132906135/ranking-cute-animals-a-stock-market-experiment?ft=1&f=93559255.
- 65.
Girard, Things Hidden, 286.
- 66.
Girard, Things Hidden, 291.
- 67.
Žižek, “If There Is a God, Then Anything is Permitted.”
- 68.
Girard, Things Hidden, 399.
- 69.
Girard, Things Hidden, 398.
- 70.
God is both of these things.
- 71.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor, ed. Anne Fremantle (New York: Continuum, 2003).
- 72.
Girard, Things Hidden, 297.
- 73.
Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture, ed. Robert C. Kimball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 4–5.
- 74.
Tillich, 5.
- 75.
Tillich, 5.
- 76.
Tillich, 7–8.
- 77.
Walter Sobchak, John Goodman’s character in the 1998 Coen Brothers’ film, The Big Lebowski , expresses nicely just how tight our bonds to religion are. He cannot fathom a world in which his religious commitments would no longer apply. His religion is an integral component of his identity. When Jeff Bridges’s character, the Dude, suggests that Walter should break the Sabbath since he is no longer married to his Jewish ex-wife, Walter responds, shouting, “So what are you saying? When you get divorced you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?!” Like our driver’s licenses, it is religion that gets us through the day. It is integral to our very identities, not simply some consumable object we may choose to use or not.
- 78.
Tillich, 25.
- 79.
Tillich, 27.
- 80.
Tillich, 28.
- 81.
James 2:14–17 (NRSV).
- 82.
Tillich, 41.
- 83.
Tillich, 42.
- 84.
Tillich, 47. Also, earlier on 42 and 43, Tillich explains: “…language is the basic cultural creation. On the other hand, there is no cultural creation without an ultimate concern expressed in it. This is true of the theoretical functions of man’s spiritual life, for example, personal and social transformation of reality. In each of these functions in the whole of man’s cultural creativity, an ultimate concern is present. Its immediate expression is the style of a culture. He who can read the style of a culture can discover its ultimate concern, its religious substance.”
- 85.
Tillich, 47. Emphasis added.
- 86.
Tillich, 47.
- 87.
Genesis 11:6 (CEB).
- 88.
See the previous section.
- 89.
Matthew 19:26, Mark 10:27, Luke 1:37 (NRSV).
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Miller, J.E. (2019). Subjunctivity. In: Resisting Theology, Furious Hope. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17391-3_2
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