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The Changing View of God’s Will – or Witches and Doctors and Priests, Oh My

The Changing View of God’s Will – or Witches and Doctors and Priests, Oh My

“You have no power here! Begone! – before someone drops a house on you too!”

Long, long ago there were healing women, women wise with the knowledge of herbs, of sound and smell and taste, of birthing and guidance and support. Their various mindsets are probably not ones that we can fully understand or inhabit today, although an undeniable hunger for their possible stories is evident in our fictions. History may be written by the winners, but speculative imagination is open to all.

Such women had an important role in small communities, until their role was re-interpreted. A strong patriarchal movement, armed with the authority of a monotheistic God, saw women with any sort of power as a threat. Their own stories cast women as inferior and sinful and subordinate to men. Women were no longer allowed to own their own land, and their bodies were to be thought of – and treated accordingly – as property. Powerful women, women with any sort of unapproved education, were to be disempowered: by making them seem subhuman (and/or superhuman), by cutting off ties to their kinship networks, and by casting doubts on their existential right to exist, such that communities would feel that it was wrong to “consort” with them. Women, and especially intelligent women, became the enemy (All our “wars” do the same thing – “othering” the human as less-than-human).

The outcast has power, too, of a sort, but after such events as the Inquisition and the infamous Witch Hunts, the burnings at the stake (how much worse than a crucifixion), the drownings of “water tests” and the like, much of the understanding and knowledge that might have been accessed later – through whatever methods of succession they might have had – was probably lost. Women seeking to reclaim the figure of the goddess, latter-day herbalists, Wiccans and witches, and all the overlapping seekers who blend them and other perspectives in their own attempts to balance the spirit, all have in common a yearning for the denied and nearly exterminated appreciation of the female principle, whatever that might look like. Because of this yearning, and the inherent oppositional and defensive position, there is sometimes a reversion to awkward and unfair gender binaries, but how can there be spiritual balance and integration and movement of all, even now, when male and female have been out of touch for so long and in such alienating ways?

I start with the ancient healing woman who became cast in the role of the witch because I don’t think we’ve come to terms with gender, knowledge, and healing. Our cures are poisons, our poisons are cures. It’s all in the amount, it’s all in discernment, it’s all in complexity. It’s hard to convey, and our stories are inadequate. Our mythos doesn’t function. Our logos is a weapon. And so, the vision of the ancient woman is a comfort to me. It carries things that cannot be conveyed otherwise, like music does. Like art.

Spiritual traditions, despite their wings of the horrible, all have a heart, no matter how it might be eclipsed, in the love and compassion that is the wellspring of all insight and communion. Every sacred book has its wisdom in this deep truth, no matter how its other pages may incite cruelty. It is the choice of each community and of each person to decide whether to take the paragraphs of the ancient libraries as an excuse for their dark side to oppress and to kill, or to read them as stories that illustrate the truth of the dangers of the human soul, in order to propel consciousness into a different space – the space of empathy, and discernment. Perhaps there’s more than one reason that you never hear the story from the point of view of the Canaanite.

Science and medicine have had moments of confrontation with religious communities – even when they have been members themselves. I think of Galileo, Mendel and Darwin – all of whom proposed understandings that seemed to undermine established teachings and were seen as a threat. On the other hand, the churches have had times of amazing institutional support – founding universities, building and supporting hospitals. The religious world is not monolithic of course, but eventually it seems that scientific discoveries are incorporated into religious understandings in some way – and the hanging sense that religious views don’t change is an illusion. The very existence of all the subgroups and diverse views among just the American protestant wing of the christian religion exemplify that, but even the more ancient religions include a spectrum of views, ranging across flavors militant, orthodox, literal, evangelist, conservative, scholarly, social-activist, meditative, welcoming. To me, the religious brand is less important than this kind of sub-grouping. From what I can tell, the fanatical haters are much the same across all religions, as are the compassionate lovers.

If God’s will is understood as something that is so fragile as to be easily undermined by human knowledge, things get dark. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” as the poet W.B. Yeats succinctly put it. Those who believe they are representing God’s will seek to impose it as though it required their assistance. In this view, there is suspicion towards the cosmos, and paranoia about non-members.

If God’s will is understood more as “how it’s going to be” regardless of human decision, free will and action, then that is not threatened by much of anything, much less by better understanding our universe and our own niche within it. In this view, there is trust in the cosmos, and acceptance of both our sufferings and our various beings – whether in the form of women, of doctors – whether in extending the life of the aged, or by treating addiction or depression or a heart condition, or using birth control to better plan for thriving families. How do we know God’s will isn’t for humans to learn to make better decisions? Jesus was a healer. There is no reason in this perspective not to try, and no reason to throw away the gifts that we have been given.

If people believe both these at once, or in a syncopated rhythm, then odd things start to happen. They sometimes take on the role of God for others. Preachers and politicians believe that they speak for God. Doctors become arrogant, scientists mistake the model for the reality, communities project both good and evil onto the “what is” such that they cannot accept either the strengths or the weaknesses of science and medicine and religion and politics. Science becomes another “faith” and scientific method is considered discardable – or science becomes a perfect totality rather than a self-correcting and evolving set of theories (narratives that attempt to explain replicable experimental results). Religion inserts itself as scientific description and loses the deeper truths of its narratives. Some people become fearful and defensive, others violent. Lies become more acceptable. Truths lose the “scene” in which they have meaning, and are used as weapons.

H.L. Mencken describes the “inferior man” as one who (among other things) lives in fear: “The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, and the inexplicable.” Such a man – or woman – will always fear anyone that that is perceived as different. He/she feels others must be dominated, controlled, and forced to be predictable, to follow commands, so that his/her own inferiority remains concealed, even from himself or herself. I was careful here to include both genders, but…

It’s especially disheartening to me that many women can’t see the various attempts to put women back in the box for what they are, but I have hope and confidence because of the many women (and men!) who observe injustice and who work, each in their own way, to be themselves and to encourage others. I think that despite our regressions here, we will continue to move ahead – onwards and upwards. We could have been much more. Maybe we still will be.

In some ways, it all goes back to how comfortable a community is with the idea that humans are allowed to explore knowledge, to ask questions, and to act on their current understandings. Some seem complacent about having knowledge of good and evil – or at least their internal definitions of such are rarely questioned – but the return of the repressed haunts them. Who do they have to control to maintain their community? Are women who use birth control witches? Sluts? Good way to rein them in, but go big! Shouldn’t insurance companies control them? Shouldn’t employers tightly define coverage?

But why should an employer define coverage for a person on “moral grounds”? What a nasty mess. First of all – the implicit ideology that it implies – that the worker has taken the previous role of the woman-as-property – is about the best evidence for the reality of the class war (and the rise of the dominionist theocrats) that I’ve seen. Beyond that, if you know anything about the extremes of non-intervention against a fixed idea of “God’s will,” you are aware of the many deaths resulting from refusing blood transfusions, and from childbirth, and from replacing medical treatment with prayer, and – in extreme cases – all of the injuries and deaths resulting from various pathologies centered on delusions about what God might want someone to do or not do (assuming for a moment that all claims about God are not delusional or at least inadequate). All armies claim that God is on their side, after all, don’t they? As George Carlin noted, someone has got to be wrong. Could it be – ALL of them?

Suppose your insurance company or business is owned by someone who thinks that your health issue is a punishment from God, and that in his/her/their judgment you don’t deserve treatment? Do you honestly believe this wouldn’t happen? We can vote with our feet by not working for such employers – if we’re in a position to do so – not everyone is. Over half this country is currently living in poverty, or very close to it. The “job creators” are still much more likely to skim the profits off the top and take them off to the Caymans, or Dubai, or to invest in global pursuits outside the American economy. In America, consumer rights across the board is the only fair position. If a religious community doesn’t want members of their flock to use science – however the subset of “wrong” medicine and science is currently defined, let them convince each to their own conscience. Sure, some will be condemned to an early and perhaps unjustified death, but at least then it was their own choice.

The roles of doctor and priest and priestess and healer and witch are intertwined. Each uses psychology. There are placebo effects. There is authority, and there is scapegoating. Sometimes overblown claims about power take hold, and abuses are legion. But each also draws on the will of the wounded, the will to live, the will to heal.

Perhaps each could help the other because of this, if they ever would. If healing has physical and spiritual aspects, and if psychology helps, and if there are different constellations of knowledge with overlapping themes and recurring narratives, maybe science can learn to tell better stories, maybe religious groups can embrace the totality of the human to a better spirit, maybe there can be better integration, better education, better cooperation, to promote the general welfare for the betterment of all.

But the power corruption is deep, deep, deep. I don’t forget the witches burning, the lynchings and the attempted genocides, especially when I read the comments of our contemporary brownshirts, fascists, and inquisitors, our bigots, our smug self-righteous, our haters.

I stand against the haters, in the way of the statue crying. It is almost impossibly sad. The utter, utter waste of it. The ignorance and greed and insecurity that it represents is such a huge loss to us all.

We’ve all come a long way, baby. Women and men, of all religions and races and kinds. But the backlash is severe.

In politics, the framing is always about our choice – but the choice is deeper than who we think might be best at representing our country’s values or our interests. The choice is really much more about who we choose to be – given our scientific knowledge, our spiritual path, our understanding of the human, our hopes for the future. Do we bother to seek a deeper understanding? Are we more comfortable with being told who we are and what God expects us to do, or not do, or do we see the acts of questioning about our meaning and constructing our character as life’s continuing project? Are we arrogant and oppressive and destructive, or are we working alone and together to try to make our communities, our nation, and our world a better place for thriving? For…all…the people.

When the healers and the knowers and the questioners become the enemy, it’s a dark dark place to live. That’s why I light a candle, and write, and smell the flowers, and commune with the trees – in hopes that a slight echo might come back across the ethereal plane to give me strength. Perhaps in turn my little spark might help to jump the gap in our country’s synapses, and echo forward to our daughters and sons of the future.

Think deeply, and just as hard as you can. Appreciate. Pay attention. Ask questions. Love.

Remedial Reading for So-called Christians

Remedial Reading for So-called Christians

I might be alone in my interpretation of the unforgivable sin, the sin against the spirit. I’ve always taken it to mean something like invoking God/spirit to authenticate and make authoritative a view or action that directly expresses everything of its opposite. My journey is still very much in process, but it does seem even to me as though some of the people claiming to be christians might really take a new name for themselves. I think “Pharisee” doesn’t even go far enough, since the Pharisees were authentically attempting to be righteous. “False prophets” gives them too much importance. The more authentic followers of Jesus must grieve to see it.

For the misled, some remedial reading. Can you continue in your present path and still honestly try to claim to be of the spirit, if you believe these to be sacred texts?

1 Corinthians 13:1-13: If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known. 13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

Romans 12:9-17: Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil; hold fast to what is good. 10 Love one another with brotherly affection. Outdo one another in showing honor. 11 Do not be slothful in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. 12 Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer. 13 Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality. 14 Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. 15 Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. 16 Live in harmony with one another. Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly. Never be wise in your own sight. 17 Repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all. 18 If possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.” ‎

Matthew 25: 31-45: When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? 39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ 41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’

Phillipians 2:1-7: So if there is any encouragement in Christ, any comfort from love, any participation in the Spirit, any affection and sympathy, 2 complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. 3 Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. 4 Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. 5 Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, 6 who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, 7 but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Galatians 5: 22-26: ‎22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law. 24 Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25 Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. 26 Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other.

Col 3:12: Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.

P.S. For thinking through belief from a spirit-centered view, turn off the hate and start reading. Here is one attempt to talk about beliefs from a conservative Christian point of view, but not a hateful conservative Christian point of view. The difference is clear: http://www.facebook.com/ThruWayChristians (thanks to John Shore).

Quotations Train

Quotations Train

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are but princesses that are waiting to see us act just once with beauty and courage.
Perhaps everything terrible is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that needs our help.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke

“Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.”
~ Viktor Frankl

“Spirit borrows from matter the perceptions on which it feeds and restores them to matter in the form of movements which it has stamped with its own freedom.”
~ Henri L. Bergson

“Spiritual energy flows in and produces effects in the phenomenal world.”
~ William James

“In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.”
~ Hermann Hesse

“There is no intensity of love or feeling that does not involve the risk of crippling hurt. It is a duty to take this risk, to love and feel without defense or reserve.”
~ William S. Burroughs

“It is very hard sometimes to know how intensely we are loved, and of what value our presence is to those who love us.”
~ Anthony Trollope

“The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity.”
~ Erich Fromm

“Learn to watch your drama unfold while at the same time knowing you are more than your drama.”
~ Ram Dass

“In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is essentially the same as the belief in God, in God’s existence, God’s justice, God’s love. The love of God is essentially a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.”
~ Erich Fromm

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
~ Carl Jung

“Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard’s rustling, a breath, a flash, a moment – a little makes the way of the best happiness.”
~ Frederich Nietzsche

“Life is not meant to be easy, my child; but take courage: it can be delightful.”
~ George Bernard Shaw

On Evil

On Evil

I was re-reading a dissertation exam question, and I was somewhat surprised to discover that there has been no real transformation in my views on evil in more than a decade.

Question: Compare the language of cause, analysis, description, and solution to evil in Augustine, Nietzsche, Schüssler-Fiorenza and one author of your choice (Buber). Identify juxtapositions, similarities, opposition, etc., amongst the authors, and situate your own view.

The text of Augustine’s Confessions constructs an aesthetic metaphysics from within a post-Manichaean narrative of his intellectual and spiritual autobiography. Augustine modified (from Plotinus) the aesthetic idea of “plenitude,” in which the best creation is the creation that allows every possible kind of existence. For Augustine this implies a vertically-scaled hierarchy that I think of in terms of a ladder. God is both outside and at the top of this ladder, and God’s perfection of being and goodness stands as the immutable authority of measurement. Goodness is equated with being (or existence), since both go hand in hand up and down this ladder of the cosmic hierarchy. The gap between the separated top of the ladder and the rest describes the initial difference between God and God’s creation. Since Augustine believes that God created everything out of nothing (ex nihilo), the parts of creation “neither altogether are, not altogether are not, for they are, since they are from Thee, but are not, because they are not what Thou are. For that truly is which remains unchangeably” (VII, 17). As created, humans do not participate in God’s being.

In order to argue against the idea of evil as a positive force or substance in opposition to the good, the order of goods and the order of being for Augustine are in terms of proper measure at each level of the hierarchy. Augustine employs the language of “privation” and “corruption” to describe both the proper tincture of being and non-being and the order of goods proper to the perspective of each level. “Privation” is a “taking away” (privatio), a lack, an absence, a loss – especially of something necessary to the functioning or flourishing of life. To Augustine, evil is “nothing but a privation of good, until at last a thing ceases altogether to be” (III, 12). This conflation of being and goodness allows him to describe a dynamic at each point of the ladder, in which the initial proper measurement is, again properly, sucked away. The violence of death, or even of privation as an act of depriving one in want or distress is not addressed in terms of any detraction from God’s perfection. Augustine’s interpretation of the Genesis narrative also authorizes him to place women in a state of greater “privation” than men (XIII, 47). However, privation is an optimistic term in the sense that it implies a sense of not-yet-realized potential and the possibility of replenishment. Since humans are twice-removed from God’s perfection, by creation and by the “fall,” our degree of goodness and existence has to do with staying on the proper rung and looking upwards. There is good on every level, but the measure of our loves should be in proportion and in priority to our God-given position. Sin is committed through an “immoderate inclination towards those goods of the lowest order” in which “the better and higher are forsaken” (II, 10). When we love in the wrong order, we are indirectly punished by God: “For Thou hast commanded, and so it is, that every inordinate affection should be its own punishment” (I, 19).

“Corruption” carries more negativity, suggesting the broken pieces of something that was whole. Only things that are mutable can be corrupted, and insofar as things of creation are in a state of “privation” of God’s perfect immutability of goodness and being, creation is corrupted by its mixture with non-being (voidness) as lack of goodness. Evil is not a substance, because a substance can be only insofar as it is good. In so far as a thing is corruptible, it is good, or else there would be nothing to corrupt (VII, 18). This suggests that humans need some form of metaphysical rust-proofing. But there is another sense in which “corruption” pertains, and for that Augustine has to rely on the Adamic “fall.” In this sense, evil consists in the self-originating act of pride of turning away from the highest good. Against the original turning away (down) from God in the context of free will, Augustine posits a genetic-spiritual transmission (literally, for Augustine, via the semen), in which we inherit this tendency. As a kind of contagion or infection, sinful pride (a misdirection of the will) is parasitic in a more thoroughgoing way than oxidation and the like might indicate.

The terms privation and corruption both place the blame for certain kinds of suffering on human will. Each individual has an inherited tendency and a free choice to will the inappropriate thing, thereby placing him or her in the “bondage” of sin. The solution to evil for Augustine is to turn to God for grace and salvation, to love God more than your own private good. In privation, turn to God for replenishment. In corruption, let God clean you and loose you from your chains. It is by the grace of God that the will is liberated from its servitude to sin. The only alternative to that choice is this: to the extent that we bring excessive non-being upon ourselves, we are subject to punishment (both at the time and in the life thereafter). While Augustine relies on an optimistic language, he requires the idea of hell to balance the results of human free-will against the totalizing economy of creation.

Nietzsche is not a Christian and offers no god’s-eye view since for him there is no absolute objective structure of the world existing independently of human apprehension. While Augustine can rely on a sense of extra-human authority, Nietzsche maintains that we construct value and meanings from particular perspectives and through our own actions. His analysis aims to be historically and linguistically genealogical, asking how ideas about morality have arisen. He describes evil primarily in terms of strength and weakness, or master and slave moralities (with frequent, somewhat Darwinian allusions to differences of function in the animal world). Although theses terms appear oppositional, Nietzsche stresses that they are more often expressed in terms of gradation and interpenetration, both in communities and in the same human being (Beyond Good & Evil, sec. 260).

Genealogically speaking, “evil” has been framed in terms of power that is sought by both the weak and the strong, but only exercised by the strong. Moral designations are first of all applied to human beings. The difference between good and evil – or good and bad – depends on one’s position. A master morality depicts itself as “noble” and therefore good in that it experiences the construction of its own values. Against its “triumphant affirmation” of itself in action (power and will), it sees weakness (flattery, humbleness, liars, doglike people who allow themselves to be mistreated) as “contemptible” (“bad” rather than evil). The “noble” has power in self-relation, has no need of pity, and honors others over a long run with gratitude or revenge (BGE, sec. 260). Ressentiment (resentment) arises from the slave morality, where slaves depict themselves as morally good, but dominated by evil masters who rule by fear. Their morality depends on a hostile external world against which they react with blame and a sometimes hidden imaginary of revenge (see On the Genealogy of Morals, first essay).

The conventionally Christian idea of “evil” for Nietzsche represents a slave morality since it is based on the fear of the power of others—a façade whereby the weak make of their weakness a moral strength and spread mediocrity while waiting for their revenge when their kingdom comes. Nietzsche’s criticism is more generally aimed at the illusion of absolutes, which for him inevitably revert to their opposites; what is framed as “immoral” is what happens. Christianity’s “morality” in no way increases actual sensitivity to others, but rather impoverishes instincts and drives. His assertion of “the death of God,” is not only an announcement of the end of metaphysics or of the effective function of the absolute. As Baudrillard reads Nietzsche (and I agree with its tenor), Nietzsche’s announcement also acts as a provocation and a challenge to God (or human ideas about God) to exist against the Christian image of God (supposing that there was only one such image).

The solution is a dismissal of the conventions of absolute terms, and a “transvaluation of values,” where the superhuman (Übermensch, which also includes the action of the subhuman “blond beast” or bird of prey) exercises willful power in a complex state of delight and love of fate—an individual Dionysian affirmation of the sovereignty of the self in the world. In sum, Nietzsche claims that we need to liberate ourselves from all conceptions of “morality” in order to be free to experience the constructions of our own sense of what morality might be outside the regulatory framings of power relationships.

Buber’s Images of Good and Evil (published as the second part of Good and Evil) performs a phenomenology of structures of consciousness through readings of the Hebrew-biblical and Zoroastrian myths. Each account represents a different kind and stage of evil for human consciousness. He interprets both narratives, finally, in terms of differences in the language of decision, and although both kinds of evil are represented in each, he focuses on the Persian (Iranian) battle of the warring gods to describe the structure of evil as the decision to do wrong instead of right, to be false instead of true.

Here I shall focus on his readings of the Hebraic bible accounts, which suggest that the soul has an urge that is “evil,” which is passion, and an urge that is “good,” which is directionality. Buber recasts evil as the sundering of these urges. Evil, or sin, is the “way” which fills the earth with violence as a result of a passionate, but directionless products of the “imaginary”(GE, 91). To Buber, every imagined possibility entices the soul. The demonic danger that “lies in wait” when passion and direction are sundered is the “tension of omnipossibility” that exists as a result of the “vortex of indecision” of one’s soul.

Buber’s “demythologizing” interpretations of the biblical accounts are noteworthy in that he avoids the problems of Augustine’s fall-before-the-fall and condemnation of sexual desire. Passion and direction together are “very good.” His solution is not to extirpate the evil urge passion, but to reunite it with the good urge direction: to “yoke” the urges of evil and good back together in the service of God. This will “equip the absolute potency of passion with the one direction that renders it capable of great love and of great service” (GE, 92-97). He suggests a personal phenomenology in which you would meditate in a complete way upon an occurrence in which you seriously acknowledge, for yourself and not as a result of societal taboos, that you were bound up in the actuality of evil, either through decision or indecision. He suggests that when you really remember what it was like, you will see that in the “vortex” of possibilities were not “things,” but “possible ways of joining and overcoming them” (GE, 126). When the soul affirms the one direction in relation to which the soul is crystallized, it affirms its best in relation to God. Only the good of yoked passion and direction can be done from the position of this self-affirmation of decision. For each, this good is different, because we are all called differently by God.

Schüssler-Fiorenza does not describe evil, not even by a performance of its differences from conventional uses: the term itself disappears from the discourse. I see this absence functioning in different ways. It signals a refusal to re-invoke all conventional associations (especially as other, scapegoat, alien) on anything other than feminist terms. In this way, it also functions as an acceleration of the essential non-evil to which each of the other thinkers have subscribed.

In her biblical interpretations, Schüssler-Fiorenza theorizes (and practices) a feminist hermeneutics of evaluation in response to patriarchal structures of oppression, and a feminist hermeneutics of liberation that affirms the bodies and voices of women. There is an implicit language of description of evil in the former, and a language of solution in the latter. Androcentric language, phallogocentric representations of ultimate reality and authority, racism, colonial exploitation, sterotyping, and the like are all evaluated negatively in the context of a vision of freedom for women. The ultimate “litmus test” for invoking Scripture with authority “must be whether or not biblical texts and traditions seek to end relations of domination and exploitation” (BNS, xiii). Her writing is social, political, and pragmatic.

Her book Bread not stone: The challenge of feminist biblical interpretation describes a re-naming of God, church, scripture, and language. The structures of oppression and dehumanization that patriarchy has constructed in the metaphor of permanent “tablets of stone” is transformed to the image of bread that “nourishes, sustains, and energizes” women (there may be an implicit anti-Semitism in this transformation, but her point is the change in functional metaphor). Likewise, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation argues – through the words of the “resident alien,” expressed in the figure of the Syro-Phoenician woman who interrupts Jesus’ retreat to argue for her daughter – for the disruptive and “incendiary power” of the Word to transform discourses of “objectivist scientific or ecclesial doctrinal ethos into a critical rhetoric.” Her hermeneutic center is the notion of the ekklesia, taking from the ancient legislative assembly of citizens “called out” by the crier “the practice and vision of a discipleship of equals as the women-church”. The women-church collectively describes the men and women who struggle for liberation from patriarchal oppression and who are affected by biblical discourses.

Her critical theology of liberation attempts to take responsibility for discourses in the recognition that “all language about the divine is incommensurate with divine reality” (BSS, 6) and that interpretation is historical and framed by varying imperatives and conditions. She focuses on a metaphorical space between the “logic of patriarchy” and the “logic of democracy” where emancipatory practices of interpretation might be engendered in biblical interpretation, by exploring not only what the text excludes, but also how the text constructs what it does include by tracing the “rhetorical moves, spaces, silences and crevices” of these two logics. Schüssler-Fiorenza’s constructions of affirmative possibility against kyriocentric (master-centered) readings of Scripture are already a practice of the solution that she describes.

Against all of the above thinkers, one could claim—and this would be my own tendency—that there is evil, and that evil and goodness exist in a very interdependent and interpenetrating relationship. A modified Manichean position such as this would be perspectival without complete relativism, where each temporary resting-place of constructed identity defines its own evils (usually in the process either of creating or being assaulted by them – or witnessing either). With Schüssler-Fiorenza, I would agree that evil and goodness can only be framed in terms of problematic subject-positions and institutional or communal conditions. A metaphysics such as Augustine’s is not possible. Efforts to imagine what a God’s-eye position would look like (such as Borges’ “The Aleph” or “The Library of Babel”) are interesting simply through the vertigo they induce. The God perspective, whatever that might mean, is not human nor does it translate easily to the human niche in the cosmos.

I think that there can be a will toward evil (in everyone to a greater or lesser extent at different times) in a predatory human agency that takes active delight in the observation and infliction of the suffering and pain of others. There can also be evil where there is not a specific will to evil or malicious enjoyment taken in the suffering of others, but where there is profound misunderstanding of the effects of what they do – particularly with the person who in a position to give aid and succor or at least kindess and compassion and refuses to do so. More generally, there is an ongoing dynamic of permeations of violence in active, passive, and complicit forms (with greater and lesser degrees of defensive rationalization or acceptance of responsibility for them). Any attempt to place them in a stable hierarchy has to fail, since space, place, temporality, and form are in states of reversals and metamorphosis.

Although I confine myself to notions of humanly-constructed (human, all too human) evils and systems of evil when theorizing, I am also fascinated by representations of inhuman evils in the American popular imagination. In the late twentieth-century, Americans seem to require more and more images of evil. What might this signify?

Buber’s phenomenological readings, like all other readings, simply re-mythologize what they intend to demythologize, in more or less convincing ways, to different communities, classes, genders, and so on. My objection to Buber’s Images of Good and Evil is that he claims to have described universal stable structures of consciousness from specifically-located myths. He assumes their influence on himself and his communal structures, but he does not show how these influences operate, nor is he conscious of the narrativity of his narrative. Against Buber’s claim that the soul can only crystallize in one direction, I suggest that it is fairly difficult, if not impossible to find just one direction, although two or three are sometimes possible. In my own experience, an additional problem is that any such crystallization tends to provide some of the conditions for the next problem. In this, I partly agree with Nietzsche, and am also influenced by Baudrillard’s notion of the “fatal” strategies of the object.

Schüssler-Fiorenza’s sense of ethics in biblical scholarship runs the risk of a “slave morality” in Nietzsche’s sense. To counter this, new perspectives and strategies for speaking with power and authority are required that do not simply re-instantiate the same old problems. When liberation discourse becomes authoritative, something is lost – the core of liberation and freedom without which the discourse is meaningless. Power itself is a metamorphizing mixture of good and evil. For example, the powerful uncovering of patriarchal oppression through the incendiary word can generate effects that uncover certain truths, while in a Heideggarian sense also serve to cover over the power relations between women: to separate those who fight for liberation openly from those who not, to separate believers from unbelievers, to assert supremacy of one community over another while pretending not to do so, to control the use of language, to encourage conformity in the very valorization of the claim to embrace difference, and so on.

A search for causes for evil seems to me – ultimately – futile, since causes are everywhere and nowhere. Only evil effects can be named with confidence. In a way, Heideggarian “thrownness” and “dasein” are inflected in the American sayings “you had to be there” and “wherever you are, there you are.” This is not to say that one has to inhabit a particular subject-position in order to describe it, but it does suggest that a better description might result from listening to the people who are “there.” This suggests something like a hermeneutics of multiple attentiveness.

There are also multiple methods of analysis that can be constructed, and each construction tells a more or less convincing narrative for a different group of people. As part of the dissertation project, I intend to explore some of changes in literary representations of evil in twentieth-century America. My method of analysis will be a somewhat postmodern eclectic one in the sense that it will that picks up theories as a bricoleur, as they seem pragmatically useful in the process of religious readings of literary texts. I do not subscribe to one particular discipline in isolation, or even to one theory in exclusion to all others, but am by nature and inclination intellectually interdisciplinary (although yes, I am well aware that this may be destructive to my future flourishing. As Martin Luther did, I can only post the note on the great door and state, “Here I stand. I can do no other.”). I am suspicious of communal demands, but I welcome a deeper understanding of multiple social locations.

I have no idea what the solution to evil might look like, or if such a thing as a “solution” to evil is possible (I do most seriously doubt it).