How to be UnChristian: Part 5 — Goddamned Mysticism and Existential Theology Offer an Escape Route
By the time I entered the ministry, the pastoral vocation had become more like that of a CEO — the prime objective was growing the congregation’s size not its spiritual maturity. This was never said aloud. But in all the churches I volunteered at, worked at, or had friends work at the allocation of resources revealed it. Charismatic speakers and talented musicians were in high demand. Those who did the daily work of walking with and serving individuals and communities were expendable.
Nurturing spiritual maturity is almost always antithetical to growing in size. Growing in size requires an exciting Sunday morning show and an emotionally uplifting sermon — see Joel Osteen and every American megachurch.
Nurturing spiritual maturity, on the other hand, requires leaders to undergo the painful work of introspection and awareness, not only of the self but of the social structures we participate in and make possible unless we are consciously fighting against them.
It requires asking tough questions and not flinching from the truth of the answers. It requires facing the void of the beyond and hoping that by traversing it, you’ll find plentitude rather than nihil. It requires encouraging those who follow you to do the same. This is hard work. It’s much easier to tickle some ears into opening some pocketbooks — and it’s a much higher ROI.
American Christianity’s real objectives should have been no surprise to me as it left spiritual growth behind long ago. Opting instead for simplistic explanations, reality-evading certainty, and escapist experiences. Which is no surprise either.
What would benefit our nation most, spiritually speaking, is an intentional, prolonged, and concerted entering into the suffering of those in our midst — solidarity with the poor, oppressed, and exploited. A collective ego-blasting psychedelic journey would fit alongside this quit nicely.
The 60s opened this to us. The response from those in power was cocaine and television. We embraced the worst form of the later — reality TV. (And we now all run our own little versions on Tik Tock or Instagram.) No wonder we’re currently being bamboozled by one it’s greatest stars — with the passionate support of many of those who claim to follow Jesus.
I had been a fellow sucker for years. But by the time I finally found my way to the inside, I already had one foot out. I found the courage to escape with the help of many allies, but two, in particular, stand out.
Rich girls have all the fun — and meet Jesus outside of the Church
A radical French intellectual and prolific writer, Simon Weil left the comfort of a professorship to be counted among those who suffered. She worked at a factory until she was let go for being too slow. She tried her hand at soldiering but was sent home from Spain after stepping in a pot of boiling oil other soldiers were cooking with. Poor Weil. If only her incessant draw to the poor and suffering weren’t so strong, who knows what other jewels she may have left us. Back in France, she starved herself to death in solidarity with those under Nazi occupation.
Before she died, she wrote that she felt she had a deposit of gold growing in her, becoming more compact as time went on, but she was concerned there was no one to receive it. She tells her friend, Darling M:
To receive it calls for an effort. And effort is fatiguing! Some people…listen to me or read me with the same hurried attention which they give to everything, making up their minds definitely about each separate little hint of an idea as soon as it appears: ‘I agree with this,’ ‘I don’t agree with that,’ ‘this is marvelous,’ ‘that is completely idiotic’ (the later antithesis comes from my chief). In the end they say ‘Very interesting,’ and pass on to something else. They have avoided fatigue…I am convinced that the most fervent Christians among them don’t concentrate their attention much more than this when they are praying or reading the Gospel.
I imagine most writers wish readers would devote more attention to the words we foster, corral, and organize in an attempt to communicate across the void between selves. But in contrast to much of the content today, Weil’s work is deep — demanding, perceptive, revealing. Deep enough to justify her frustration with her reader’s lack of effort.
One thing she wrote about caught my attention and refused to let it go. It was her thoughts on anathema sit — the term for a formal church damnation or curse. But before we can grasp the significance of what she says, we need to understand another experience she had.
Like all true philosophers, Weil’s thoughts became contemplation. And like all who are open to the possibility, her contemplation became prayer.
She was reciting a poem by George Herbert titled “Love,” which she intentionally recited often as a form of prayer. Then it happened. As she says, “Christ himself came down and took possession of me.”
What are we to make of this statement, so straightforward and yet so vague? Surely we can psychologize Weil. She was, after all, not well adjusted. What type of person abandons money, comfort, and prestige to work in a factory, to serve on the front lines, to literally wither away in obscurity? Only a mad one. But her writing tells another story: her faculties were intact. If she was crazy, it was only because she saw another reason for being — a distant shore with a lighthouse calling her to another path.
Whatever the exact contours of her experience of being “possessed” by Christ, if we take her statement at face value, it’s enough to say she had a mystical experience. Something along the lines of what other mystics have called Union with the Divine. And yet, when it came to embracing the Christian religion, she wrote to her friend Father Perrin, a Catholic Priest:
…there is an absolutely insurmountable obstacle to the incarnation of Christianity. It is the use of two little words anathema sit. I remain with all those things that cannot enter the Church, the universal repository, because of those two little words. I remain with them all the more because my intelligence is numbered with them… The proper function of intelligence demands total freedom… In order that the present attitude of the Church might be effective and that she might really penetrate like a wedge into social existence, she would have to say openly that she had changed or wished to change… After the fall of the Roman Empire, which had been totalitarian, it was the Church that was the first to establish a rough sort of totalitarianism in Europe in the thirteenth century, after the war with the Albigensians… And the motive power of this totalitarianism was the use of those two little words anathema sit. (26)
She had been taken hold of, possessed by Christ, and still, she refused to enter the Church, choosing instead to remain outside, in freedom (and damnation?) with all who could not enter for whatever reason. She saw beyond the veil of the Church’s piety and claims to universality, and into the heart of the matter — the Church sought to dominate not only the outer actions of humanity but humanity’s interiority too, and as such, it was a totalitarian organization. When she was writing this, under the shadow of Stalin and Hitler, there could be no harsher words.
But was her location of the Church’s fall from grace correct? That is, did the Church become a totalitarian organization in the 13th century or before? Or, possibly, after?
The churches I attended growing up all fetishized the early Church.
In seminary, I read many theologians that did the same.
A common tendency among these theologians was to locate the Church’s fall from grace in the 4th century CE when Constantine turned Christianity into a state religion. The problem with this theory is that Christianity wouldn’t exist without Constantine. It’s one thing to say Christianity is bullshit — or, at least, not at all what Jesus intended — because of its imperial bastardization under Constantine. But if you want to believe in the Christian shebang in one form or another, you have to swallow the pill of the Constantinian takeover of Christianity, no matter how bitter.
Sometime later, however, I read the Existentialist thinker Paul Tillich’s lectures on Church history and discovered a different angle that seemed more plausible to me. For Tillich, the key change happened later — during the Enlightenment.
An existentialist exit
In presenting his case, Tillich makes an important distinction between autonomy (self-law) and heteronomy (foreign-law). He follows the philosopher Immanuel Kant in suggesting that true autonomy is the submission of our entire being to our own inner rational structure. In this sense, autonomy is the opposite of arbitrariness and willfulness, because these are both lawless.
In opposition to those who find autonomy a dangerous concept (such as the Catholic Church in the beginning of the Enlightenment, Reformed theologians like John Calvin and Jonathan Edwards 🤮, or, to give a contemporary example, Stanley Hauerwas) autonomy does not stand over against the divine law (theonomy). This is true for a very simple reason. The divine law (theonomy) is our own inner nature. Our rational inner law is our memory of our own created goodness. (Yes, he gets a bit Platonic here, but every Christian does in their own way — thanks to Platonis and Augustine, Plato’s spirit is strong.) Our own created goodness recognizes the truth when it hears it because there’s a resonance between the truth outside of us and the truth within our own inner being.
The problem, however, is that we in the modern age function through heteronomy — we follow a foreign-law. This is true of the religious and non-religious alike. But why?
During the Middle-ages, the Church informed the mass of man through its dogmas. While this was a law from the outside, it functioned as theonomy, since the mass of humanity was not mature enough to guide itself. However, the meaning of humanity changed with the Enlightenment. We realized our capacity to question not just as a collective but as individuals. If the Church had been what it claimed to be, the Body of the Resurrected Christ on earth, it would have responded with joy — finally, humanity was reaching maturity by embracing its capacity for critical reason! Instead, the Church offered something quite different — the Inquisitions.
Rather than rejoicing that humanity’s growth toward autonomy would allow it to obtain a higher theonomy — a deeper resonance with ourselves, God, and Being — it reacted against this growth with fear. This reaction caused a fundamental shift in the relationship between the Church and world — its dogmas were no longer theonomy but became heteronomy. Paradoxically, this resonated with many. For while all humans have the capacity for critical thought, many refuse to exercise it.
The reason why is precisely what the first Weil quote above highlights: critical thinking is hard.
Critical thinking is not only physically and intellectually taxing. It also takes an emotional toll. The beginning of critical thought is the willingness to admit you might be wrong. Accepting you might be wrong is already a wound to the ego. Discovering you are wrong is an even bigger blow.
But even more than this, discovering you are wrong about one thing often leads (as it should) to the knowledge that you could be wrong about other things too: possibly even your most cherished beliefs and commitments.
Question: Who likes being in existential abeyance? Answer: No one.
Instead of dealing with the pain of critically thinking, many would rather someone else tell them how to practice their capacity to reason. For Tillich, when the Church’s heteronomy began to crack through the attacks placed on it through the exercise of humanity’s autonomy during and after the Enlightenment, the mass either blindly submitted themselves to it, ignoring their capacity for critical thought, or looked for other laws to place themselves under, laws like positivism, totalitarianism, or the free-market. Once the door has been opened to more, this blind submission is a form of suicide. No wonder American Evangelicalism today is a death cult.
Those of us willing to admit the obvious — that the Spirit moves within the critical thought of individuals — must also be open to the Spirit moving individuals away from the Church.
Reading Tillich, I saw a clear resonance between Weil’s refusal to enter the Church and Tillich’s understanding of autonomy. For Tillich, the Spirit is essential. It’s the Spirit that allows the authority of Church structures — whether tradition, the Scriptures, or the history of theological thought — to be connected to the inner light inherent in man because the Spirit is in both. (Yes, not only Plato but Hegel too — but isn’t Hegel basically just Plato updated for the modern age?)
But this connection is a process, a communal and historical process that continues to develop — the Spirit has a history. And, more crucially, the Spirit moves freest in the realm of individual human thought. Church structures may house the Spirit, too, but they don’t contain her. Unless, that is, you think slavery should still be Church-sanctioned, women shouldn’t be allowed to speak in Church, or you’re a big fan of priests molesting children. In fact, the only type of Christian who can consistently claim the Spirit doesn’t erupt disruptively from within the structures of critical human thought is a conservative Catholic or Eastern Orthodox. And I’m talking conservative — as in pre-Reformation not just pre-Vatican II.
And those of us willing to admit the obvious — that the Spirit moves within the critical thought of individuals — must also be open to the possibility of the Spirit moving individuals away from the Church.
Is it not the case then that Weil’s refusal was the Spirit within her refusing to be stifled? Was not the most Christian thing to do in her time, as was Kierkegaard’s in his, to refuse to be a part of Christendom? Was Weil not more Christian than Christians in her refusal to be a Christian? Could I not be too?
Whatever you think of my reasoning (and I’ll admit that as laid out above, there are some leaps), I was convinced. This worked out nicely for me since I was no longer attending church anywhere and was becoming more and more persuaded the whole thing was a bunch of bullshit.
Allow me to clarify. I’m convinced Jesus didn’t physically rise from the dead. Why? Because no one ever has. While Jefferey Epstein and others too rich and narcissistic to see past their own foolishness invest in cryogenic freezing with the hope of someday being resurrected themselves, they won’t be. Entropy is a bitch. And she gets the last laugh — at least in this cosmos.
But I also realize resurrection from the dead could possibly happen. The cosmos doesn’t appear to be closed if we accept the more speculative theories of contemporary physics. It may be merely a hiccup from another universe, which was a hiccup from another, and another, and another. What came first? Maybe nothing. There is no first outside of time, so maybe the universe is it’s own becoming. This sounds fantastic. But logically speaking, it’s possible. It’s also possible some uncaused first-cause started it all. Or that the whole thing is a real-fancy computer simulation. Whatever the relation of our cosmos is to whatever is outside, it’s possible the Divine (whatever that means) could inject some form of energy into Christ’s body through some unknown fissure in space-time-matter-energy. I doubt this, based on the world I know and live in and what we currently know from science, but it’s possible.
But this form of doubt, skepticism, was never my real issue with Christianity. The doubt that drove the final wedge between the Church and me came from another route, suspicion. It’s this that opened up the possibility of something other, something more. And I’ll explore it in the sixth and final post to follow.
Books referenced:
Siân Miles, ed., Simon Weil: An Anthology (Grove Press, NY, 1986)
Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought: From Its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism (Simon & Schuster, NY, 1968)
