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This passage was particularly profound, especially as I realize that I am helping turn the gears that crush many caught up inside:
The message of the new righteousness which eschatological faith brings into the world says that in fact the executioners will not finally triumph over their victims. It also says that in the end the victims will not triumph over their executioners. The one will triumph who first died for the victims and then also for the executioners, and in so doing revealed a new righteousness which breaks through the vicious circles of hate and vengeance and which from the lost victims and executioners creates a new mankind with a new humanity. Only where righteousness becomes creative and creates right both for the lawless and for those outside the law, only where creative love changes what is hateful and deserving of hate, only where the new man is born who is neither oppressed nor oppresses others, can one speak of the true revolution of righteousness and of the righteousness of God.
(Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God, p. 178)
My most basic question, as I realize that I have to live differently, is, “What now?” The question feels like one Paul might like to answer: “If the cycle of oppression is going to be broken and both self-righteous (me) will be justified along with the oppressed and destroyed, why should I do anything differently?” He might say something like “Because the grace of God abounds!”
The law of righteousness has been overcome by the law of grace. God is graceful to men – not “repent and be forgiven,” but “you are forgiven, now turn away and be transformed.” But how do I live in light of the Easter faith when my life is mostly comfortable? How can I live in the hope of resurrection-life rather than just having a set of beliefs and hoping all will be made right in the end, and operating in mode of unprincipled self-preservation as a result?
I finally finished this book, my first by Barth – it took me months to read this short (155 pages) series of lectures delivered to a group of dedicated students at Kurfürsten Schloss in Bonn in 1959. Despite the fact that each section is at most about five pages, Barth is deceptively easy to read and thus I spent a great deal of time poring over what had been transcribed in each lecture. He seemingly wastes no words, hardly repeats himself and is almost never recorded delivering anything but the highest level of discourse. Many do not write as clearly as Barth spoke extemporaneously.
In particular, the three chapters on the structure of faith (Faith as Trust, Faith as Knowledge, and Faith as Confession) are particularly useful. The contrast between faith as trust and as knowledge was and is still difficult for me to totally understand in the context of this discussion. If reading the chapter on trust, one might accuse Barth (as some have) of fideism, but then taken as a pill with the chapter on knowledge, the waters are muddied. Knowledge rightly understood, knowledge as wisdom or Sophia rather that Scientia, Barth argues, is the sort of Christian knowledge that is related to faith (and encompasses the entire existence of man). Finally the church’s job, in faith, is to confess its faith. It must proclaim, even in ‘unedifying language’ familiar to those ‘out there’. Christian faith does not happen in a ’snail’s shell’ or in a comfortable dualism. Confession is not a weak thing that happens weekly in a church service, but in our every involvement outside of life Barth calls the Christian to confess in love, in ways that ‘Mr. Everyman’ can understand. To paraphrase St. Francis, spread the Gospel, and use words only if necessary.
By far the most moving chapter is on the coming judgment of Christ. Judgment never seems to be a fun topic, but in this case Barth points us to Christ as the one who will create order and restore what has been destroyed. (The particular university was apparently in near ruins in the post-war landscape, perhaps making this a particularly poignant point for many students as well as Barth himself). At judgment all tears will be wiped away. It won’t be a question of our faith or lack of faith – but it will be the point where “it is finished” comes into full view. Christ has done his work on earth, which holds for all, Christian and non-Christian alike. An amazing lecture that truly challenges any sort of knee-jerk reaction against Christ the Judge.
This was for me a book to savor and delight in, and it is one that I shall revisit again and again throughout my life.
Monologue I: The post-modern (yuppie) subject
“I live in the American Gardens building on West 81st Street on the Eleventh floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I’m twenty-seven years old. I believe in taking care of myself, in a balanced diet, in a rigorous exercise routine.
“In the morning if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice-pack while doing my stomach crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I use a deep-pore cleanser lotion. In the shower, I use a water activated gel cleanser. Then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face, an exfoliating gel-scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask, which I leave on for ten minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out, and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing ‘protective lotion.’
“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.”
Monologue II: The hysteric confession of guilt
“Howard! It’s Bateman, Pat Bateman. You’re my lawyer, so I think you should know I killed a lot of people! Some escort girls in an apartment uptown … some homeless people, maybe 5 or 10! Ummm … some girl I met at an NYU party. I left her body in the parking lot behind some old donut shop! My old girlfriend Beverly with a nail gun. Some man – some old FAGGOT with a dog!
"Hey Paul!"
“I killed another girl with a chainsaw. I had to, she almost got away. There was someone else there – I can’t remember…maybe a model or something. But, she’s dead too. And, uh, Paul Allen! I killed Paul Allen with an axe in the face! His body is dissolving in a bathtub in Hells Kitchen. I don’t want to leave anything out, now. I guess I killed maybe…twenty people. Maybe forty!
“I’ve got tapes of a lot of it. Some of the girls have seen the tapes. I even…I even ate some of their brains. And I tried to cook a little. Tonight … I just HAD TO KILL ALOT OF PEOPLE! And I don’t think I’m gonna get away with it this time. So…I guess…I guess I’m a pretty sick guy. Well … if you get back tomorrow … I’ll meet you up at Harry’s Bar so … keep your eyes open. Bye.”
Monologue III: Guilty of … well, you (should) know!
“There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain in constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this there is no catharsis.
“My punishment continues to elude me and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.”
Postlogue
“[A]ccording to Saint Paul, the Law itself generates the desire to violate it. Along the same lines, in contrast to the Law’s precise prohibitions (“You shall not kill, steal …”), the true superego injunction is just the truncated “You shall not!” – do what? This gap opens up the abyss of the superego: you yourself should know or guess what you should not do, so that you are put in an impossible position of always and a priori being under suspicion of violating some (unknown) prohibition. More precisely, the superego splits every determinate commandment into two complementary, albeit symmetrical, parts – “You shall not kill!,” for instance, is split into the formal-indeterminate “You shall not!” and the obscene direct injunction “Kill!” The silent dialogue which sustains this operation is thus: “You shall not!” “I shall not – what? I have no idea what is being demanded of me! Che vuoi?” “You shall not!” “This is driving me crazy, being under pressure to do something without knowing what, feeling guilty without knowing of what, so I’ll just explode, and start killing!” Thus killing is the desperate response to the impenetrable abstract superego prohibition.”
(Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 105)
When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?’ which means, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, ‘Listen, he is calling for Elijah.’ And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, ‘Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down.’ Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. Now when the centurion, who stood facing him, saw that in this way he breathed his last, he said, ‘Truly this man was God’s Son!’
(Mark 15:33-39, NRSV)
G. K. Chesterton, in response to the above passage:
It is written, “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.” No; but the the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed himself for an instant to be an atheist.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, p. 145 (Image | Doubleday edition)
Zizek, in response to the above Chesterton passage:
Chesterton is fully aware that we are approaching ‘a matter more dark and awful that it is easy to discuss … a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific rule of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but also through doubt.’ In the standard form of atheism, God dies for men who stop believing in Him; in Christianity, God dies for Himself. In his “Father, why hast thou forsaken me,” Christ himself commits what is, for a Christian, the ultimate sin: he wavers in his Faith.
(Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf; the Perverse Core of Christianity, p. 15)
Let us recall the example of a (’straight’) sexual relationship. The success of Peter Hoeg’s The Woman and the Ape indicates that sex with an animal is today’s predominant form of fantasy of full sexual relationships, and it is crucial that this animal is as a rule male: in contrast to cyborg-sex fantasy, in which the cyborg is, as a rule, a woman (Blade Runner) – that is, in which the fantasy is that of a Woman-Machine – the animal is a male ape copulating with a human woman, and fully satisfying her. Does this not materialize two standard common daydreams: that of a woman who wants a strong animal partner, a potent ‘beast’, not a hysterical impotent weakling; and that of a man who wants his female partner to be a perfectly programmed ‘doll’ who fulfils all his wishes, not a living being? What we should do in order to penetrate the underlying ‘fundamental fantasy’ is to stage these two fantasies together: to confront ourselves with the unbearable ideal couple of a male ape copulating with a female cyborg, the fantasmic support of the ‘normal’ couple of man and woman copulating. The need for this redoubling, the need for this fantasmic supplement to accompany the ’straight’ sexual act as a spectral shadow, is yet another proof that ‘there is no sexual relationship’.
(Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? p. 59-60)
Slavoj Zizek s(h)itting
Does God exist? I used to stress about this sort of thing. Now I think that the answer is. I remember learning St. Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence in Philosophy 100 and feeling disappointment when I learned shortly thereafter that it doesn’t actually work. I’m not really too concerned with these proofs anymore, though I do admit I really enjoy Pascal’s Wager; in spite of obvious flaws as an argument for God’s existence it is rather creative to propose that gambling is the right approach to answer a question that was always officially answered in the absolute affirmative.
What does Barth have to say about these proofs about God’s nature and existence? “God is He who, according to Holy Scripture, exists, lives and acts.” God is “unsearchable – that is, He has not been discovered by any man,” but “makes Himself known.” Is he going to prove it?
Note well: in the whole Bible of the Old and New Testaments not the slightest attempt is ever made to prove God. This attempt has always been made only outside the biblical view of God, and only where it has been forgotten with whom we have to do, when we speak of God. What sort of attempts were they, after all, where the attempt was make to prove a perfect Being alongside imperfect ones? Or from the existence of the world to prove the ordering Power? Or the moral proof of God from the face of man’s conscience? I will not enter into these proofs of God. I don’t know whether you can at once see the humour and the fragility of these proofs. These proofs may avail for the alleged gods; if it were my task to make you acquainted with these allegedly supreme beings, I would occupy myself with the five famous proofs of God. In the Bible there is no such argumentation; the Bible simply speaks of God simply as of One who needs no proof. It speaks of a God who proves Himself on every hand: Here I am, and since I am and live and act it is superfluous that I should be proved. On the basis of this divine self-proof the prophets and apostles speak. In the Christian Church there can be no speaking about God in any other way. God has not the slightest need for our proofs. (Dogmatics in Outline 38)
God is immanent in life and action and transcendent in revelation. God is transcendent “by being the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost in His work in Jesus Christ.” His existence is proven by His immanence, His being with us; in “His descending into the depths, He is Merciful, who gives Himself up for His creature to the utter depths of the existence of His creature – He is God in the highest.” He is not transcendent despite His immanence, despite His existence and incarnation in Jesus Christ, nor is He transcedent in paradoxical/dynamic tension with His immanence. He is transcendent because He is immanent: “the Highness of God consists in His thus descending.”
“By the very nature of the Christian Church there is only one task, to make the Confession heard in the sphere of the world as well. Not now repeated in the language of Canaan, but in the quite sober, quite unedifying language which is spoken ‘out there’. There must be translation, for example, into the language of the newspaper. What we have to do is to say in the common language of the world the same thing as we say in the forms of Church language. The Christian need not be afraid of having to speak ‘unedifyingly’ as well. If a man cannot, let him consider whether he really knows how to speak edifyingly even in the Church. We know this language of the pulpit and the alter, which outside the area of the Church is as effectual as Chinese.” (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline p. 33)
Critical to the confession, Barth argues, is proclamation into the public sphere. How does one live the confession? Barth notes that in 1933 the church in Germany did a wonderful job within itself of making a serious and strong Confession but failed miserably to engage politically to provide the resounding ‘No!’ to National Socialism that its internal Confession should have mandated. The problem is one of the translatability of the confessions – one any current or former churchgoer is aware of. Let’s look at the Apostle’s Creed:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Maker of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
born of the virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, dead, and buried;He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
and sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.I believe in the Holy Ghost;
the holy catholic church;
the communion of saints;
the forgiveness of sins;
the resurrection of the body;
and the life everlasting.Amen.
While this is a historic and orthodox proclamation of the Christian faith, in fact the very confession about which Barth is writing his exposition in Dogmatics in Outline, it is not complete easy to understand, as attested by the many volumes that exist to better explain and explicate its doctrine; it is even difficult for the initiated to understand. Barth has described what he considers to be the task of the church, to make its loud proclamation, and directs us to do so in a way that continually engages the outside world.
What does this mean? Does it mean that Christians should litter bathrooms and airports with Chick tracts or wear obnoxious sandwich boards on the street corners? Does it mean that our Confession should be about ’soul-winning’ evangelism tactics and ‘always-ready-with-an-answer’ apologetics that I once knew as a younger evangelical? In the famous 1963 TIME magazine article about Barth, he says that forty years prior he advised young theologians to “take your Bible and take your newspaper, and read both. But interpret newspapers from your Bible.”
In America where public religious discourse is fairly common and it has been intermingled as a supplement to support political ideology it seems that Barth’s advice was either misunderstood or just overused. Bush’s campaing was bolstered with evangelical language including (unfulfilled) promises about reducing abortion. The Bush administration also validated public debate about the use of torture as a legitimate ‘enhanced interrogation tactic’, a huge step away from the enlightenment principle of human rights. The language of faith can be manipulated to justify indecent action to the believing public. Rather than taking Barth’s advice about interpreting the newspaper with an open bible in hand too far, I would argue that when the public is fooled by ‘faithy’ language it is actually doing something closer to the opposite: letting an open newspaper interpret the Bible.
A possible remedy: using “unedifying” language to make the proclamation. My start was in a Baptist Church and ‘crap’ was as far as it went. Even ‘piss’ was a bit questionable (obviously they didn’t read the KJV) and reading Paul write about ‘dung’ was as close to ’shit’ as anyone could come (“In modern language, this would be more like a ‘bad word’ than dung”). But it seems silly to think that Barth means that Christians just need a cooler presentation and a bible with more cursing (the bible is already full of curses!). I think that what he is doing here is encouraging Christians not to be afraid of the Other and its ‘worldly ways’ and concerns and interests completely foreign to the Christian, and not to be afraid of speaking in ways that are not specifically intended to uphold and build the Church.
Today there is a whole ghetto of Christianity with its own special products from bad music to annoying bumper sticker slogan t-shirts and all manners of kitsch. My personal favorite shirt says “They will know we are Christians by our t-shirts” because it allows the wearer to both make fun of the subculture while being an obvious and active participant in it. It is the same sort of bad irony that makes 80’s dance parties and March Moustache Madness funny to some people. The Christian alternative to irony is, of course, Christian irony!
This subculture a form of dualism. Its products are designed for the Christian consumer. It isn’t trying to be ‘in the world but not of it’ but instead to be ‘in the church and not in the world’, or worse yet, ‘against the world and away to heaven’. The message is that the “world” produces garbage so Christians need a “safe” alternative. Much of the language I learned as a Baptist spoke to those who already held the same assumptions I did. But it felt good and secure, and I had my scene and a sort of rebellious feeling against my parents and the students in my high school. Perhaps this sort of thing really does speak to people looking in, but why then are the results of the programs so seemingly irrelevant to anyone not initiated? I think Barth is simply arguing that Christians can and should and must truly be in the world. I’m sure that this is dangerously close to invoking Godwin’s Law, but Barth points out that this dualism and inability to speak clearly into the world helped the Nazi regime take power. Where is the artist? The prophet?
“May every individual Christian be clear that so long as his faith is in a snail’s shell, in which he feels comfortable, but which does not bother itself with the life of his people, so long, that is, as he lives in dualism, he has not yet really come to believe! This snail’s shell is not a desirable residence. It is not good to be here. Man is a whole and can only exist as such a whole.
“[...] What would it avail a man, if he should speak and confess in most powerful language, and had not love? Confession means a living confession. If you believe, you are challenged to pay in person, payer de sa personne. That is the crucial point.” (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline p. 34)
“Christian faith is not irrational, not anti-rational, not supra-rational, but rational in the proper sense. The Church which utters the [Apostle's] Creed, which comes forward with the tremendous claim to preach and to proclaim the glad tidings, derives from the fact that it has apprehended something … and wishes to let what is has apprehended be apprehended again… [Rightly] understood the act of faith is also an act of knowledge. Faith means knowledge.” (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 23)
Yesterday I looked at the structure of belief and specifically how true belief exists in spite of all that is contradictory. I wrote about belief in the general sense of the term and without regard to the content of these beliefs. Some people that were with me yesterday are going to wonder how I could come back after seemingly opposing faith and knowledge with a post called “Faith as Knowledge”. Did I simply misread Barth and assume too much? Perhaps I was sloppy in my use of the word knowledge, and I will explain why in a moment with a bit more help from Barth.
According to Barth, “Christian faith is concerned with an illumination of the reason” (23). The idea of reason being illuminated is similar what what he says above about faith being “rational in the proper sense.” Specifically, Barth argues that God “cannot be known by the powers of human knowledge, but is apprehensible and apprehended solely because of His own freedom, decision, and action” (23). Man does not think his way to a belief in God, Barth argues. At best, man can think his way into a knowledge of “something like a supreme being, an absolute nature, the ultimate and most profound” which he claims “has nothing to do with God” (23). Barth has no time for apologetics (what he calls Christian anxiety about the victory of the Gospel) here. By no means, by no strength of argument whether from design, ontology or Kant or Descartes will someone think him or herself into the knowledge of God.
“Knowledge of God takes place where there is actual experience that God speaks, that He so represents Himself to man that he cannot fail to see and hear Him, where, in a situation that he has not brought about, in which he becomes incomprehensible to himself, man sees himself faced with the fact that he lives with God and God with him, because so it has pleased God. Knowledge of God takes place where divine revelation takes place, illumination of man by God, transmission of human knowledge, instruction of man by this incomparable Teacher.” (23-24)
At the top Barth claims that knowledge of God is possible and that faith means knowledge. Before anyone might think that he turned around his argument (in fact it is more likely that I am completely misunderstanding him here and that I am turning his argument on its head) we read a statement that this knowledge comes by revelation. Now forget the concept of revelation that some people have – I don’t think Barth was in favor of a “voice from the clouds” sort of revelation.
“For the understanding of Christian knowledge of faith it is essential to understand that the truth of Jesus Christ is living truth and the knowledge of it living knowledge. This does not mean that we are to revert once more to the idea that here knowledge is not basically involved at all. It is not that Christian faith is a dim sensation, an a-logical feeling, experiencing and learning. Faith is knowledge; it is related to God’s Logos, and is therefore a thoroughly logical matter… And the truth of Jesus Christ is also a matter of thoroughly clear and, in itself, ordered human thinking; free, precisely in its being bound. But – and the things must not be separated – what is involved is living truth.”
Here is the real meat as far as I can tell – living truth. And Barth goes on to make the critical distinction between two antiquated terms referring to different sorts of knowledge:
“The concept of knowledge, of scientia, is insufficient to describe what Christian knowledge is. We must rather go back to what in the Old Testament is called wisdom, what the Greeks called sophia and the Latins sapientia, in order to grasp the knowledge of theology in its fullness. Sapientia is distinguished from the narrower concept of scientia, wisdom is distinguished from knowing, in that it not only contains knowledge in itself, but also that this concept speaks of a knowledge which is practical knowledge, embracing the entire existence of man. Wisdom is the knowledge by which we may actually and practically live; it is empiricism and it is the theory which is powerful in being directly practical, in being the knowledge which dominates our life, which is really a light upon our path.” (25)
What concerns many Christians in the commentary and bickering I frequently hear is what Barth identifies as scientia. Everyone recognizes the word immediately as a root for the word science. Scientific knowledge is not enough for Christian knowledge, which is wisdom and in fact encompasses theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge. Instead the Christian truth is living, and more importantly it is lived.
I would like to end by mentioning that this has been one of the more challenging portions of the text for me to deal with so far and I am fairly confident that there is far more to it than I am comprehending. I have obviously quoted heavily because I am trying to give Barth the room to breath. Barth’s understanding of knowledge is far more multidimensional than mine. The scientia of the Gospel is indeed order and logic of what is written, but the sapientia of the Gospel encompasses the logic and order of the records in scripture and puts it into terms that can be lived – this is the place where theology and ethics are found along with the whole of human knowledge and synthesized into what we call wisdom. In a way, I think I am just too young to be wise. I’ll let Barth conclude.
“We exist not apart from [Jesus Christ], but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apart from Him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word. To know Him is to know all. To be touched and gripped by the Spirit in this realm means being led into all truth. If a man believes and knows God, he can no longer ask, What is the meaning of my life? But by believing he actually lives the meaning of his life, the meaning of his creatureliness, of his individuality, in the limits of his creatureliness and individuality and in the fallibility of his existence, in the sin in which he is involved and of which hourly he is guilty; yet he also lives it with the aid which is daily and hourly imparted to him through God’s interceding for him, in spite of him and without his deserving it… The believer confesses this meaning of his existence. The Christian Creed speaks of God as the ground and goal of all that exists. The ground and goal of the entire cosmos means Jesus Christ. And the unheard-of thing may and must be said, that where Christian faith exists, there also exists, through God’s being trusted, inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things; there man lives, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, in the peace that passeth all understanding, and which for that very reason is the light that lightens our understanding.” (26-27)
The glory of faith does not consist in our being challenged to do something in having something laid upon us which is beyond our strength. Faith is rather a freedom, a permission. It is permitted to be so – that the believer in God’s Word may hold on to this Word in everything, in spite of all that contradicts it. It is so: we never believe ‘on account of’, never ‘because of’; we awake to faith in spite of everything. Think of the men in the Bible. They did not come to faith by reason of any kind of proofs, but one day they were so placed that they might believe and then had to believe in spite of everything… When we believe, we must believe in spite of God’s hiddenness. This hiddenness of God necessarily reminds us of our human limitation. We do not believe out of our personal reason and power. Anyone who really believes knows that. (Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, p. 20, emphases mine)
Today I listened to part of an interesting conversation between “public intellectuals” Slavoj Zizek and Cornell West. Zizek spoke for a solid eighty or so minutes before taking a breath. The content of his talk was on the nature of belief, particularly in the context of secular Europe. He made a point similar to the one Barth does here: where the so-called fundamentalists read the Bible as a series of facts, the person who really believes can see and appreciate the inherent absurdity and continue to believe in spite of it.
The difference is as simple as working to understand ‘knowledge’ as opposed to ‘faith’ or ‘belief’. Faith does not mean coming to understand something by the direct powers of reason or adopting a new scientific worldview to support whatever it is that you claim to believe. True belief happens in the space where a person realizes that despite everything leading to the contrary, or as Barth would have it, despite ‘God’s hiddenness’, you believe without having the need to rationalize and reason your way out of a the impossibility of it all. This is the space where faith is “a freedom, a permission”. As G.K. Chesterton once put it is his typically pithy way: “Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism. I think Mr. McCabe a slave becuase he is not allowed to believe in fairies.”
As I was browsing around for some photographs to publish here I searched for “in spite of everything” on Google (I know, that is a really odd search phrase) and the very first thing that popped up was a quote by Anne Frank that Zizek used as a prime example of true belief in his talk. Here is the quote, which I am sure is familiar to many:
“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”
Regardless of whether you agree with her philanthropic view, the point is clear – despite the fact that her entire family was at risk of being killed by a crazed regime, that she was holed up in her uncle’s office building hiding from Nazis who had killed her friends and family, despite the obvious horror that she was surrounded by – literally, it is in spite of everything that she must believe.
For any curious readers that don’t know me personally, I am an undergraduate studying physics at the University of California, Davis. I am down to the last weeks of my degree and have only taken eight units this quarter. Naïvely I assumed this meant I would have time to read a whole stack of books totally unrelated to physics, and in particular I thought it meant I would have time to audit a graduate seminar in critical theory dealing with the first volume of Marx’s Capital.
I forgot to mention that I am getting married in May and I am currently unemployed. I do have some prospects and interviews coming up. Interestingly enough, as a student of physics you learn (surprise!) how to solve a variety of problems in all sorts of fields, including computer science. I just have to convince prospective employers that I can indeed solve the same problems that engineers can, and in fact I have a deeper understanding of the theory behind most of them. I also have to be sure to describe my ability to learn quickly with a book and a bit of time, because I don’t necessarily have the same tools as my competition. I have a particular interview next week on Wednesday with a small web design company, and I really want, not to mention need, the job.
I actually feel a deep sense of guilt every time I pick up a book that is not Java related or a study aid for whatever big interview might be coming up. Capital? I read two-hundred and fifty pages of it and did my best to engage in the seven person seminar, but there goes the guilt again. Alas, Marx shall have to wait until after I secure a position at a job, which will, assuming the best case scenario, generate capital. I have a completely full bookshelf now (thanks Christmas!) which rather than giving me full and satisfied feeling leaves me wondering how and when I will have time to actually read my new books! (What a bourgeois stress that is, sounds like a page from Stuff White People Like. Life is good).
While I am not normally prone to stress, there are some obvious and I would assert good reasons for me to feel this way right now (i.e. economic downturn financial crisis and etc.).
So its been a good while since I have even logged into my WordPress account over the last couple of months, but I hope to settle into a regular blogging pattern by not expecting too much of myself as I go.
