Graven Ideologies

Bruce Ellis Benson is not only one of Christianxiety’s founding Advisory Board members, but he is also one of the most import scholars exploring the intersections of theology and philosophy today. This post is a special one, as it features a review of one of Dr. Benson’s books by one of his star pupils. We are very excited to feature this writing by Donnie Boyce of Wheaton University.

“God doesn’t like that,” “God thinks that’s immoral,” and most dangerously “I have God here in this book” – we’ve all come across these kind of claims.

In his book Graven Ideologies Bruce Benson warns Christians of an ever-present tendency to conflate “God” with “ideology.” Instead of holding onto our ideas about god lightly, we worship these self-crafted ideologies as God – “we too often think that our moral ideas are those of God” (51). Benson reminds us that the second we claim to “have God” we’ve attempted to draw a circle around Him, an ill-fated Promethean attempt at being god. We cannot “have” the Word, if anything the Word has us. Drawing insight from thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion, Benson leads the reader through the phenomenological tradition’s battle with idolatry.

“While human tradition is not necessarily suspect, here the problem is that it passes itself off as something divine. Thus the move is self-exaltation: we attempt to take God’s place by devising ideas and theories (idols) that we put in the place of God. By creating our own conceptions of God, we effectively become God (for we are the source of these conceptions).” (27)

One of the most important concepts in Graven Ideologies is the idea of adaequatio – the idea that “the minds conception of an object is ‘adequate’ to the thing itself” (33). Benson points out that if it’s not even really possible for us to have a comprehensive conception of something like Westminster Abby (that is, hold in our mind every corner of the cathedral including all of the inscriptions on the monuments), then how much more is this true for our conception of God. “Of course, even standing before it [Westminster Abby] does not make it fully present to my mind” (35). For this reason even biblical conceptions of God can become idolatrous. “If, for instance, I think of Jesus Christ as ‘my good shepherd’ whose principle purpose for existing is to meet my needs, then I have seriously distorted a biblical conception for my own purposes” (26).

Benson later suggests, following Jean-Luc Marion, a kind of apophatic awareness of the limitation of our language when we speak about God – saying “God is” must always be followed by a kind of “but he is not.” For example, if we say that God is our father, we must immediately recognize that he is not the kind of father that sleeps with our mother. Marion calls this dé-nomination. While in English the word “denomination” means “to name,” by setting apart the “dé” Marion draws our attention to the unnaming that always must occur when we name God.

While Levinas and Marion go so far as to say God is “otherwise” than being or even “without” being in order to avoid making an idol out of God by reducing him to the human category “being,” Benson follows the “phenomenological inquisitor” Derrida here. The hermeneutical “as structure” is the idea that we always experience things “as” something (e.g. when I look out the window I see brown cylinders sticking out of the ground with green tops “as” tree). On Benson account, to experience God at all we need to experience him “as” God – unless we want everything to end up being God.

While it is necessary that we project our fore-structures or “as structures” in order to understand God “as” God, we must constantly allow ourselves to derive new or altered fore-structures from God’s Word as we encounter him in scripture. Just as a woman reprimands a man when he misunderstands her asking, “What kind of girl do you think I am?” so we must allow ourselves “pulled up short” by the Word when it makes us question our idolatrous conception of God. The paradox of the incarnation has to do with the fact that while God “empties himself” (that is, becomes “less”), the fullness of the incarnation (what Marion calls a “saturated phenomenon”) overwhelms us and is so rich with meaning that we cannot expect to comprehend or “have” it – doing so would mean that either we are God or that what we “have” is not God but an idol.

Donnie Boyce

Simone Weil’s Tragic Wisdom

In the previous two posts, we explored the possibility that Nietzsche’s thought was haunted by the residue of his Christian upbringing, In doing so, we took a look at his criticism of the “Christian moral order” of life. That is, the belief that distress, suffering, and transience are errors. Nietzsche emphasized that life is inextricably bound up in joy and sorrow, it is in a constant state of becoming, and cannot be rendered clearly intelligible. Thus one cannot choose what to affirm or deny about life. Every moment of life occurs as a result of, and therefore with, the moments before and after.

Of course, Nietzsche’s criticism was of a certain Christian theology. In truth, there is no universal Christian theology. Evident of this is today’s post featuring the writings of one very unique Christian thinker who took an affirmative attitude towards all that life brought her.  Simone Weil was one of the most interesting and original figures of the last century. Her life story is riveting. I highly recommend diving into one of the many biographies avaiable (I particularly enjoyed Petrement’s Simone Weil: A Life).

Weil’s essay, “The Love of God and Affliction” is a sober, at times terrifying look at the the fragility of human existence. Simone Weil believed that “to be a created thing is to be exposed to affliction.” (463)  Weil’s “affliction” is a state wherein one’s whole being is destroyed through physical pain, humiliation, and distress. She calls it a “pulverization” by the “mechanical brutality of circumstances.” (462) Our flesh, soul (that is, spirit or morale), and social personality are never safe, they are constantly under threat.

Yet, for Weil, affliction is a sure sign that God wishes to be loved by us. “The universe where we are living, and of which we form a minute particle, is the distance put by the divine Love between God and God. We are a point in this distance. Space, time, and the mechanism that governs matter are the distance.” (447) Weil sees the whole of material reality as a distance created by God through the work of Jesus Christ that allows for God to desire himself. The circumstances we experience in our lives are the products of a sort of chaos machine constructed by God. Matter is perfectly obedient to the instruction God programmed into this machine. Thus it is perfectly obedient to God and a perfect example for us. When one feels the pain of affliction, one feels the obedience of creation to its Master enter his or her body. For Weil, we can feel the love of God even in this. Once all our physical strength, ambition, and personality is stripped we are very near the nothingness that we are. We are also very near the silence of God.

Weil says, “The speech of created beings is with sound. The word of God is silence. God’s secret word of love can be nothing else but silence. Christ is the silence of God.” (467) When we ask the question”why”, the answer God gives us is his silence. “When the silence of God comes to the soul and penetrates it and joins the silence which is secretly present in us, from then on we have our treasure and our heart in God; and space opens before us as the opening fruit of a plant divides in two, for we are seeing the universe from a point situated outside space.” (467) In other words, affliction helps us overcome ourselves and hear the word of the Lord.

Affliction is not the only means for a human to connect with God in this way. Awe before the beauty of his handiwork also allows us to hear him.

“The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment, and who has therefore tasted the flavor of the world’s beauty, for it is the same thing, is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time, he is the only man who has not deserved this punishment. But after all, for him it is no punishment, it is God himself holding his hand and pressing it rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentation is the pearl of the silence of God.” (468)

Unquestionably, Nietzsche would have many problems with Weil’s outlook (in a broader scope, she was a decided, but still unique, Christian Platonist) and he would certainly have some scathing attack aimed at her decadence. Still, one has to admit that Weil does say “yes” to every joy and every sorrow.  Neither does she view “transience, distress, or suffering”  as punishment for sins or errors of life. For her, the ending did not have to turn out well and in that she possessed a tragic wisdom of her own.

Michael Sapiro

Nietzsche, decadence, and eternity

Previously, we examined Bruce Ellis Benson’s excellent “Pious Nietzsche.” Among other things,  we took a look at whether Nietzsche was able to truly free himself of ressentiment. Today, using  J. Thomas Howe’s “Faithful to the Earth: Nietzsche and Whitehead on God and the Meaning of Human Life”, we explore Nietzsche’s decadence.  I’m not going to comment on the Whitehead portion of this book, as I am not familiar enough with Whitehead’s ideas to attempt a commentary. Perhaps in a future post.

Let us begin, as Howe does, with one of Nietzsche’s fundamental criticisms of the Christian worldview. Nietzsche complains that  Christians place a “moral order” on the world by viewing “distress, suffering, transience” as “in themselves undesirable, things to be avoided, and things thought to be punishments for sin.” (23) For Nietzsche, this devalues life, insofar as one cannot extract distress, suffering, and transience from life – all linger, even in moments of bliss. Thus human life, if understood in accordance with the Christian moral order, “must constantly and inevitably be in the wrong.”

“Have you ever said Yes to a single joy? O my friends, then you said Yes too to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored.” – Thus Spake Zarathustra (IV:19)

Nietzsche wants us to be “yes-sayers.” We cannot deny any part of life, for all is inextricably bound together. He calls us to an unconditional gratefulness towards life. Howe reminds us, “an ‘in-spite-of’ affirmation is one tinged with ressentiment, with the feeling that life could and should have been otherwise.” (83)

After the “death of god”, man struggles to find meaning in life. Nietzsche famously put forth the doctrine of eternal return as his answer.

“What if, some day or night, a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’ - Gay Science §341.

This is where Howe interjects. Thus far Nietzsche’s chief objections to the Christian “moral order” has been the privledging of the static notion of being. That is, for the sake of intelligibility, life’s transience is rendered “understandable” according to the opposition of binary concepts like “good” and “evil.” Howe astutely observes that Nietzsche’s invention of the eternal return betrays Nietzsche’s inability to fully come to terms with a life of transience.

“Notice the doctrine is called “eternal return of the same,” not “live once, only once, and never more.” We are not living as if every moment, every creative achievement, were subject to dissipation.  Rather, we are living as if we must live our lives again, which gives rise to the suspicion that Nietzsche is resorting… to some form of redemption from transience.” – pg 166

Howe quotes from the Will to Power, “everything seems far too valuable to be so fleeting: I seek an eternity for everything… My consolation is that everything that has been is eternal. (WP, 1065) This brings up the question, isn’t Nietzsche still seeking redemption from life? Isn’t this Nietzsche’s decadence? The reasons for the choices one makes under the doctrine of the eternal return are similar to that of a traditionally “moral” individual. Both orient their actions toward future rewards or punishments administered according to their deeds. This also serves to further perpetuate the question, just how successful was Nietzsche at breaking free from the Christian mindset of his youth?

Michael Sapiro

Nietzsche’s religious life

For the purposes of Christianxiety, it cannot be stated enough how much Nietzsche still has to contribute to today’s religious discussion. I remember glossing over Nietzsche in my undergraduate “Intro to Philosophy” class. The handful of paragraphs in our textbook gave spurious descriptions of ideas like “the will to power” or “ubermensch” that greatly exaggerated Nietzsche’s misanthropic tendencies. I eagerly moved on to the next section. Over the course of time, I reexamined some of my conclusions. After reading through his works and supplementing them with scholarship, I now hail him as one of the great teachers in my life. During a visit to Torino, I actually felt quite a bit of emotion as I stood in Piazza Carlo Alberto, the site of Nietzsche’s mental implosion.

Nietzsche’s writings contain plenty of surprises for those willing to engage them and Bruce Ellis Benson’s Pious Nietzsche gives ones of the most surprising I’ve come across. He posits that Nietzsche remained religious to his last day. As he puts it, “Nietzsche can hardly be relegated to the realm of the ‘confirmed atheist,’ for the question of God or gods or divinity remains very much alive in his writings.”

I have firmly resolved within me to dedicate myself forever to His service. May the dear Lord give me strength and power to carry out my intention and protect me on life’s way. Like a child I trust in His grace: He will preserve us all, that no misfortune may befall us. But His holy will be done! (18)

The only thing exceptional about the preceding prayer is that it comes from a young Friedrich Nietzsche. Aside from this, it is, as Benson notes, quite typical of the German Pietism of his time. This is one of many examples Benson provides to illustrate Nietzsche’s passionate religious devotion during his youth, a devotion that he claims Nietzsche never actually managed to distance himself from. 

Certainly, the prayer quoted here, serves as an example of decadence. One should not depend on the Lord for strength. One should not want protection from anything in life. One should not trust in another’s grace. Over the course of his life, Nietzsche vigorously fought against the weaknesses of his youth. The key word here is fought. Benson reminds us that Nietzsche, to his own admission, struggled with decadence his entire life.

“A long, all too long, series of years signifies recovery for me; unfortunately it also signifies relapse, decay, the periodicity of a kind of decadence. Need I say after all this that in questions of decadence I am experienced?” – Ecce Homo

Nietzsche resisted decadence in two ways. First, he waged war, “…fighting is itself a way of resisting decadence, a part of (Nietzsche’s) therapy.”(70) Second, he practiced a “musical askêsis” as a method of self-overcoming. This “musical askêsis” is not quite like the asceticism that Nietzsche repeatedly criticizes. Benson reminds us that, in Greek, mousikê means more than music. It also carries notions of personal development and political freedom.  Instead of denial, the aim is a strengthening of the will not a surrendering of it. It is “for life” in that it understands thinking as wholly based in the body. As Nietzsche says, “body am I entirely, and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body.”

When considering Nietzsche’s resistance against decadence, particularly in the form of Christianity, we must understand the specific type of Christianity Nietzsche grew up with. Benson describes it as a Lutheranism “deeply mediated by German Pietism.” Nietzsche’s father’s Lutheranism was mediated by his mother’s Pietism. This mediation ended up producing a Christianity that emphasized praxis over doctrine. As Benson puts it, “from the Pietistic perspective, Christianity is primarily a way of being, one characterized by a childlike trust in God rather than doctrinal correctness.” Over time, one could see a shift from this trust in God to a “childlike trust in life” …to amor fati. Benson also notes how Pietism wholly embraces God’s will. There is a “yes-saying” to God, that one again can see transposed in Amor Fati.

Eventually Benson arrives at the point where he sees Nietzsche develop his own sort of Dionysian Piety. Worshiping Dionysus, the god of life, allows Nietzsche to find a faith that reconfigures “transcendence into a kind of ‘immanent transcendence.” Dionysian ekstasis allows for self-overcoming in one’s immediate physical life. This path leads to a return to innocence, to a second childhood.

“The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred ‘Yes.’ For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred ‘Yes’ is needed.” – Thus Spake Zarathustra

However, Benson ultimately wonders if Nietzsche truly becomes Dionysian, or if he remains “caught up in the logic of ressentiment?”

In the Gay Science Nietzsche tells us to what extent he ultimately wants to resist decadence and affirm life, “some day I want only to be a yes-sayer – I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation.” Benson already told us that Nietzsche resists no-saying, ressentiment, decadence, with two strategies. First, warfare. Second, a musical askêsis. Regarding Nietzsche’s askêsis, Benson writes “to the extent that Nietzsche’s askêsis ‘allows’ him to be changed and live by the rhythm of life, it is nonreactive in nature and thus does not reinstate the logic of decadence.” However, Benson writes to the extent that he “makes war with decadence is the extent to which he is likewise guilty of merely altering decadence’s expression.” In other words, there is a passivity in Nietzsche’s askêsis that avoids being reactionary, thus avoiding also avoiding ressentiment. Warfare is by nature reactionary.

Could a child even wage war? When Nietzsche doles out alternate readings of his own life, (Benson uses as example Nietzsche’s claim that he is of Polish ancestry and his insistence that he has never held a “presumptuous and bombastic posture”), he is not giving the “yes to life” that a child would. Benson asserts that his multiple perspectives turn out to be a series of “no’s.”  I wonder if Benson is walking on thin ice here,  as this criticism seems to imply that there is an actual Nietzsche to say “no” to. That is, that there is a truth of Nietzsche’s past that can be denied. Yet, the point is still taken. From what we know, and following the logic of Nietzsche’s own system, it does seem that Nietzsche is reacting to his own past. The truly affirmative way of dealing with this would be a lighthearted “yes and amen” that blesses the past while going on its own way.

“In outbursts of passion, and in the fantasizing of dreams and insanity, a man rediscovers his own and mankind’s prehistory… He who, as a forgetter on a grand scale, is wholly unfamiliar with all this does not understand man.” – Daybreak

So how could Nietzsche escape himself without ressentiment? Is this even possible? In the end, Benson wonder’s if Nietzsche’s mental decline was actually a divine ekstasis whereby he truly became initiated into the cult of Dionysus. Nietzsche’s final moments are often described as containing a sort of rapturous beatitude. He appeared so transformed that he became “literally outside” himself. There are probably many who would roll their eyes at this and suggest Benson is merely romanticizing a case of syphilitic dementia. I am not one of those. Whatever the cause, I will end this review as Benson ends his book, quoting (in its entirety) a letter Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast:

“Sing me a new song: the world is transfigured and all the heavens rejoice.” – The Crucified.

Michael Sapiro