1、Only a Suffering God Can Save Us Slavoj ZizekSection 1: HegelThe key question about religion today is: can all religious experiences and practices effectively be contained within this dimension of the conjunction of truth and meaning? The best starting point for such a line of inquiry is the point a
2、t which religion itself faces a trauma, a shock which dissolves the link between truth and meaning, a truth so traumatic that it resists being integrated into the universe of meaning. Every theologian sooner or later faces the problem of how to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of shoah o
3、r similar excessive evil: how are we to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and good God with the terrifying suffering of millions of innocents, like children killed in the gas chambers? Surprisingly (or not), the theological answers build a strange succession of Hegelian triads. First, those w
4、ho want to leave divine sovereignty unimpaired and thus have to attribute to God full responsibility for shoah, first offer (1) the “legalistic“ sin-and-punishment theory (shoah has to be a punishment for the past sins of humanity or Jews themselves); then, they pass to(2) the “moralistic“ character
5、-education theory (shoah is to be understood along the lines of the story of Job, as the most radical test of our faith in God if we survive this ordeal, our character will stand firm); and, finally, they take refuge in a kind of “infinite judgement“ which should save the day after all common measur
6、e between shoah and its meaning breaks down, (3) the divine mystery theory (facts like shoah bear witness to the unfathomable abyss of divine will). In accordance with the Hegelian motto of a redoubled mystery (the mystery God is for us has to be also a mystery for God Himself), the truth of this “i
7、nfinite judgement“ can only be to deny Gods full sovereignty and omnipotence. The next triad is thus composed of those who, unable to combine shoah with Gods omnipotence (how could He have allowed it to happen?), opt for some form of divine limitation: (1) first, God is directly posited as finite or
8、, at least, contained, not omnipotent, not all-encompassing: he finds himself overwhelmed by the dense inertia of his own creation; (2) then, this limitation is reflected back into God himself as his free act: God is self-limited, He voluntarily constrained his power in order to leave the space open
9、 for human freedom, so it is us, humans, who are fully responsible for the evil in the world in short, phenomena like shoah are the ultimate price we have to pay for the divine gift of freedom; (3) finally, self-limitation is externalized, the two moments are posited as autonomous - God is embattled
10、, there is a counter-force or principle of demoniac Evil active in the world (the dualistic solution).This brings us to the third position above and beyond the first two (the sovereign God, the finite God), that of a suffering God: not a triumphalist God who always wins at the end, although “his way
11、s are mysterious,“ since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who like the suffering Christ on the Cross - is agonized, assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with the human misery. 1 It was already Schelling
12、who wrote: “God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. /./ Without the concept of a humanly suffering God /./ all of history remains incomprehensible.“ 2 Why? Because Gods suffering implies that He is involved in history, affected by it, not
13、just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: Gods suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of the real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bon
14、hoffers deep insight that, after shoah, “only a suffering God can help us now“ 3 a proper supplement to Heideggers “Only a God can still save us!“ from his last interview. 4 One should therefore take the statement that “the unspeakable suffering of the six millions is also the voice of the suffering
15、 of God“ 5 quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any “normal“ human measure makes it divine. Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Juergen Habermas:Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpabil
16、ity, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost. 6Which is why the secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like shoah or gulag (AND others) is experienced as insufficient: in order to be at the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed,
17、something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophy in which the world itself is “out of joint“ - when one confronts a phenomenon like shoah, the only appropriate reaction is the perplexed question “Why did the heavens not darken?“ (the title of Arno Mayors book). Therein
18、 resides the paradox of the theological significance of shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology which can provide the frame enabli
19、ng us to somehow approach the scope of this catastrophy the fiasco of god is still the fiasco of GOD.Recall the second of Benjamins “Theses on the Philosophy of History“: “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past genera
20、tions and the present one.“ 7 Can this “weak messianic power“ still be asserted in the face of shoah? How does shoah point towards redemption-to-come? Is not the suffering of the victims of shoah a kind of absolute expenditure which cannot ever be retroactively accounted for, redeemed, rendered mean
21、ingful? It is as this very point that Gods suffering enters: what it signals is the failure of any Aufhebung of the raw fact of suffering. What echoes here is, more than the Jewish tradition, the basic Protestant lesson: there is no direct access to freedom/autonomy; between the master/slave exchang
22、e-relationship of man and god and the full assertion of human freedom, an intermediary stage of absolute humiliation has to intervene in which man is reduced to a pure object of the unfathomable divine caprice. Do the three main versions of Christianity not form a kind of Hegelian triad? In the succ
23、ession of Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism, each new term is a subdivision, split off of a previous unity. This triad of Universal-Particular-Singular can be designated by three representative founding figures (John, Peter, Paul) as well as by three races (Slavic, Latin, German). In the Eas
24、tern Orthodoxy, we have the substantial unity of the text and the corpus of believers, which is why the believers are allowed to interpret the sacred Text, the Text goes on and lives in them, it is not outside the living history as its exempted standard and model - the substance of religious life is
25、 the Christian community itself. Catholicism stands for radical alienation: the entity which mediates between the founding sacred Text and the corpus of believers, the Church, the religious Institution, regains its full autonomy. The highest authority resides in the Church, which is why the Church h
26、as the right to interpret the Text; the Text is read during the Mass in Latin, a language which is not understood by ordinary believers, and it is even considered a sin for an ordinary believer to read the Text directly, by-passing the priests guidance. For Protestantism, finally, the only authority
27、 is the Text itself, and the wager is on every believers direct contact with Word of God as it was delivered in the Text; the mediator (the Particular) thus disappears, withdraws into insignificance, enabling the believer to adopt the position of a “universal Singular,“ the individual in a direct co
28、ntact with the divine Universality, by-passing the mediating role of the particular Institution. These three Christian attitudes also involve three different modes of Gods presence in the world. We start with the created universe directly reflecting the glory of its Creator: all the wealth and beaut
29、y of our world bears witness to the divine creative power, and creatures, when they are not corrupted, naturally turn their eyes towards Him Catholicism shifts to a more delicate logic of the “figure in the carpet“: the Creator is not which directly present in the world, His traces are rather to be
30、discerned in details which escape the first superficial glance, i.e., God is like a painter who withdraws from his finished product, signaling his authorship merely by a barely discerning signature at the pictures edge. Finally, Protestantism asserts Gods radical absence from the created universe, f
31、rom this gray world which runs as a blind mechanism and where Gods presence only becomes discernible in direct interventions of his Grace which disturbs the normal course of things.This reconciliation, however, only becomes possible after alienation is brought to the extreme: in contrast to the Cath
32、olic notion of a caring and loving God with whom one can communicate, negotiate even, Protestantism starts with the notion of God deprived of any “common measure“ shared with man, of God as an impenetrable Beyond who distributes grace in a totally contingent way. One can discern the traces of this f
33、ull acceptance of Gods unconditional and capricious authority in the last song Johnny Cash recorded just before his death, The Man Comes Around, an exemplary articulation of the anxieties contained in the Southern Baptist Christianity:Theres a man going around taking names and he decidesWho to free
34、and who to blame every body wont be treatedQuite the same there will be a golden ladder reaching downWhen the man comes aroundThe hairs on your arm will stand up at the terror in eachSip and each sup will you partake of that last offered cupOr disappear into the potters groundWhen the man comes arou
35、ndHear the trumpets hear the pipers one hundred million angels singingMultitudes are marching to a big kettledrumVoices calling and voices cryingSome are born and some are dyingIts alpha and omegas kingdom comeAnd the whirlwind is in the thorn treesThe virgins are all trimming their wicksThe whirlwi
36、nd is in the thorn treesIts hard for thee to kick against the pricksTill Armageddon no shalam no shalomThen the father hen will call his chickens homeThe wise man will bow down before the thorn and at his feetThey will cast the golden crownsWhen the man comes aroundWhoever is unjust let him be unjus
37、t stillWhoever is righteous let him be righteous stillWhoever is filthy let him be filthy stillThe song is about Armageddon, the end of days when God will appear and perform the Last Judgment, and this event is presented as pure and arbitrary terror: God is presented almost as Evil personified, as a
38、 kind of political informer, a man who “comes around“ and provokes consternation by “taking names,“ by deciding who is saved and who lost. If anything, Cashs description evokes the well-known scene of people lined up for a brutal interrogation, and the informer pointing out those selected for tortur
39、e: there is no mercy, no pardon of sins, no jubilation, we are all fixed in our roles, the just remain just and the filthy remain filthy. In this divine proclamation, we are not simply judged in a just way; we are informed from outside, as if learning about an arbitrary decision, if we were righteou
40、s or sinners, if we are saved or condemned - this decision has nothing to do with our inner qualities. And, again, this dark excess of the ruthless divine sadism excess over the image of a severe, but nonetheless just, God is a necessary negative, an underside, of the excess of Christian love over t
41、he Jewish Law: love which suspends the Law is necessarily accompanied by the arbitrary cruelty which also suspends the Law.Martin Luther directly proposed an excremental identity of man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of Gods anus. One can, of course, pursue the question into how the deep cr
42、ises that pushed Luther towards his new theology, he was caught in a violent debilitating superego cycle: the more he acted, repented, punished and tortured himself, did good deeds, etc., the more he felt guilty. This made him convinced that good deeds are calculated, dirty, selfish: far from pleasi
43、ng God, they provoke Gods wrath and lead to damnation. Salvation comes from faith: it is our faith alone, faith into Jesus as saviour, which allows us to break out of the superego impasse. However, his “anal“ definition of man cannot be reduced to a result of this superego pressure which pushed him
44、towards self-abasement there is more in it: it is only within this Protestant logic of mans excremental identity that the true meaning of Incarnation can be formulated. In Orthodoxy, Christ ultimately loses his exceptional status: his very idealization, elevation to a noble model, reduces him to an
45、ideal image, a figure to be imitated (all men should strive to become God) - imitatio Christi is more an Orthodox than a Catholic formula. In Catholicism, the predominant logic is that of a symbolic exchange: Catholic theologists enjoy dwelling in scholastic juridical arguments about how Christ paid
46、 the price for our sins, etc. no wonder that Luther reacted to the lowest outcome of this logic, the reduction of redemption to something that can be bought from the Church. Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in his act of Incarnation, freely ide
47、ntified Himself with His own shit, with the excremental real that is man and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.“It is in this sense that, with regard to Christ, Hegel points forw
48、ard to some key Kierkegaardian motifs (the difference between genius and apostle, the singular evental character of Christ) with his emphasis on the difference between Socrates and Christ. Christ is NOT like the Greek “plastic individual“ through whose particular features the universal/substantial c
49、ontent directly transpires (as is exemplarily the case with Alexander). What this means is that although Christ is Man-God, the direct identity of the two, this identity also implies absolute contradiction: there is NOTHING “divine“ about Christ, even nothing exceptional if we observe his features, he is indistinguishable from any other human individual:If we consider Christ only in reference to his talents, his character and his morality, as a teacher, etc., we are putting him on the same plane as Socrates and others, even if w
