Religious, but not spiritual

I'm not alone in feeling a bit jaded by recent attempts to engage the topic of religion over at the SpecTrib. First, there's the tired "Theist vs Atheist" debate, which is as unproductive and boring as it's ever been; then there are several worthwhile editorials on conservative Mennonites in Manitoba; and, finally, there's this piece, which nicely illustrates nearly everything that I find unconvincing and moronic about the "spiritual but not religious" (SBNR) identity-marker. Perhaps it's becoming increasingly popular to adopt this kind of apolitical view, but it's nothing new or profound, or even interesting (that is, unless you were totally into Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love!). You know the routine: religion is exclusive and repressive but spirituality is for everybody.

When we look at most religions, we see they are often defined by their institutions and the specific beliefs taught there within. In order to be a part of a religion, one is encouraged to accept those beliefs as the one and only truth. This is where religion tends to breed separation – “this religion vs. that religion” or “my God is the only real God”. Spirituality on the other hand, is allowing oneself to define their own truth and understanding that everyone else’s truth may be different. By contrast, spirituality breeds unification as there is an understanding that we are all in this together and we all have the ability to discover our authentic selves.

Whoa. Consider my mind blown.

What we have here is something that's not so far off from right-wing evangelicalism, where religious experience is socially isolated and defined by an intensely personal relationship with God (not to mention the fact that these SBNR things usually come in a testimonial, my-life-is-so-important, format). As much as I love having "an intimate relationship with [my] own unique reality," auto-affection gets boring pretty fast.

Meanwhile, religion, with all its institutional strictures and rituals, seems more attractive than ever.

Milton and the (post)secular (II)

 

In my last post, I pointed to some recent treatments of Milton (and other English poets from the seventeenth century) that argue for his relevance to current debates over religion and secularism. This post picks up on what I take to be the more convincing half of Feisal G. Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present. Mohamed opens his second last chapter with an epigraph from John Milbank (a theologian who has, more or less, sought to colonize whatever is meant by the term "post-secular"). Milbank's quote rehearses a familiar move in Christian apologetics: the biblical narrative is shown to break with sacrificial violence in favor of an originary peace. In what follows, Mohamed uses Milton's Samson Agonistes to demonstrate the limits of Milbank’s understanding of biblical narrative, a narrative of order and harmony that Western theologians characteristically impose on what they perceive as an arbitrary violence that is always traced back to the Other. 

Since John Carey’s much scrutinized article in the Times Literary Supplement in September 2002, “A work in praise of terrorism? September 11 and Samson Agonistes,” Milton’s late work in particular has generated sporadic, often reactionary, debates over the nature of religious violence, past and present. Following the religious violence of 9/11, Carey argued, interpretations of Milton’s poem must avoid condoning Samson's final massacre of the Philistines: Israel’s liberator must either be condemned for his religious violence or be avoided altogether. As Mohamed recognizes, Carey’s polemic is a covert attempt to protect Milton and his liberal legacy from its possible endorsement of terrorism, its association with religious violence. One might expect Mohamed to emphasize the ethical ambiguity of Samson’s final act; instead, he argues that Samson is a hero of faith who shows that, with the imposition of uniformity by the state church, Milton has come closer to the “far left wing of Reformed religion.” There is little doubt, in other words, that Milton comes out on the side of Samson. Mohamed’s evidence for this is based on two authorial decisions that characterize the poem. First, the representation of violence in Samson Agonistes is passed over quickly or, at best, described ambiguously, with a host of natural metaphors. Second, there is little or no remorse for the Philistines on the part of the Hebrew chorus, which immediately celebrates Samson’s “miraculous slaughter.” Because of the limited account the Milton chooses to include in his poem, “We are never allowed to forget . . . the victims’ status as Philistine political elite and the attendant association of this class with the oppression of Israel” (103). For Mohamed, the value of Samson Agonistes lies in the way that it retains and represses this ethnic violence. Equally important for contemporary readers is the characterization of Samson as a hero of faith, whose experience of the divine impulse is inaccessible. Unlike Milbank’s claims to Christianity’s original purity, Milton frustrates our attempts to narrate Christianity in such a harmonious manner; with Milton, he writes, echoing Walter Benjamin, we become aware of the barbarism that underlies all civilization.

Mohamed’s last chapter continues his discussion of terrorism by focusing on the silencing of Samson at the conclusion of Milton’s poem. Rather than following the account of Judges, where the captive Samson cries out for God’s assistance in his revenge on the Philistines, Milton obliquely describes Samson’s as bowing his head “as one who pray’d, / Or some great matter in his mind revolv’d” (1637-8). Some critics have suggested that this instance evacuates Samson of his divine status, thus leaving readers with an ambiguous hero, but Mohamed suggests the opposite. With this silencing of Samson, he writes, Samson is removed from the sphere of human motivation. In the same way, the Israelites insist that their hero’s death is not a suicide but an “accident,” which allows him the identity of a martyr. For Mohamed, however, these distinctions, which tend to distance the religious violence of Milton’s time from that of our own, “are the distinctions typical of religious violence, which distances its martyrs from motives of personal vengeance and emphasizes their divine calling.” We thus witness “a consonance with the culture by which those attacks are immortalized” (121). If Milton can remain commendable for the way his poetry effects interpretive ambiguity, it is because of the parallels it draws with modern terrorism. The performative violence of Samson Agonistes, which strains against Restoration triumphalism, unsettles the illusory peace of the nation even while it affirms the progress of human liberty.

Milton and the (post)secular

Over the course of my thesis research, I've come across two rather sexy books that treat Milton alongside contemporary critical theory. Both are part of Stanford UP's excellent series Cultural Memory in the Present, and offer different responses to contemporary debates over the legitimacy of a so-called secular age by focusing on seventeenth century English poetry.

In Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism, Regina M. Schwartz understands Reformation iconoclasm as a necessary critique of Church officials who sought to control the domain of mystery and instrumentalize the sacred. But by upending the sacramental tradition, she argues, radical reformers enabled “a new instrumentality—not of the Eucharist by the Church, but of the sacred by the state” (29). Like the Reformers of early modern Europe, she writes, “we are [today] witnessing a shift in emphasis again, away from the figure of the modern Self and toward the figure of the Other, a shift that . . . is inflected both philosophically, as given-ness, and theologically, as gift” (139-140). Rather than falling into the temptations of identity politics and empty, but no less violent universalisms, Schwartz urges her readers to imagine another possibility for identity: “a particular that honors other particulars, one that opens out toward a potential universal without coercion” (Ibid.). Like other postmodern theologians, she models her vision of harmonious difference on the Eucharist, the performance of which preserves the irreducible mystery of the divine through the real presence of Christ’s body and blood. 

In the post-Reformation poetry of Donne, Herbert, and Milton, Schwartz locates a hunger for the divine, “a poetry that signifies more than it says . . . through image, sound, and time, in language that takes the hearer beyond each of those elements,” thus compensating for the loss of sacred liturgy (7). Milton’s contribution is found in the way Paradise Lost approaches debates surrounding the doctrine of Real Presence. In prelapsarian Eden, Schwartz locates a “transubstantiation” that infuses all matter (“All ingests All”), thus blurring the distinction between material and spiritual substance. The Garden’s continuous rehearsal of the Eucharist serves as a critique of theological and ecclesiastical representations of the sacraments. If Schwartz resurrects Milton out of a nostalgia for pre-modern transcendence and “its realm of justice,” Feisal G. Mohamed’s Milton and the Post-Secular Present considers Milton’s writing and biography as a corrective to contemporary debates over politics, ethics and terrorism.

Against those literary critics who would downplay or secularize Milton’s religious fervor, and those radical theorists who are attempting to think beyond the current order of liberal democratic capitalism, Mohamed’s Milton teaches us that “messianism is the language of particularization, not a hearkening after internationalism” (36). As he writes in his conclusion, Milton’s work can alert us to how “The lack of sociality in the believers adherence to truth will pay no heed to worldly institutions, or to fellow citizens, perceived to oppose truth, finding its most extreme political expression in the endorsement of religious violence” (131). Though it first appears more nuanced, Mohamed’s opposition to a secularized Milton has mostly to do with his desire to retain those moments of explicitly religious violence within the English poet’s career. Milton thus becomes an example of how the liberal subject’s attachment to individual truth claims can open a path of violence toward the Other. The first chapter, which suggests a parallel between Milton’s plain style in Paradise Lost and Alain Badiou’s theory of “evental” truth procedures, criticizes Badiou  for precisely this reason. “Who more than Milton,” gleefully asks Mohamed, “resembles [Badiou’s] view of Paul, with its iconoclastic sweeping away of laws and institutions conflicting with a truth secured by the declaration of an enlightened subject?” (39-41). Against this rendering of a universal via the particular, Mohamed suggests that Milton’s implicit critique of the human subject—the uncertainty of inner promptings, the reader’s inability to access the conscience of Milton’s protagonists—draws into question what Badiou sees as the founding of the universal subject.

Relying on Zizek's Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Mohamed suggests a parallel between the US government’s public strategy for justifying the invasion of Iraq—overwhelming its audience with an excess of reasons—and the rhetorical excesses of Milton’s Areopagitica. The “kettle logic” of Areopagitica, he writes, is “a cover for its ideology of the hegemony of an emerging reforming class” (54). Milton’s tract reflects what Marxist historians identify as a possessive individualist quality, where, as C. B. Macpherson writes, “Political society becomes a calculated device for the protection of . . . property and for the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange.” In what follows, Badiou, along with Zizek and Derrida, is again faulted for his preoccupation with an “evental site” that exists apart from pre-existing knowledge. Such a focus, argues Mohamed, only reproduces "the ideological grounds of determining the good apparent in the ethics of Areopagitica” (61). Following Gayatri Spivak, who grounds the possibility of an ethics in the as yet unrecognized Other, Mohamed ends up endorsing a familiar form of humanist education where “Reading is not only an ethical activity, it is the ground of ethical activity in its initiation of the call by which positive political change can occur, because it is only through the kind of reading sometimes fostered in the humanities that we are invited to imagine alien subjectivities” (62). 

Although I find the first part of his book unconvincing (especially when it comes to his critiques of Badiou and Derrida), Mohamed's emphasis on hegemony (whether based in class or race) is a good reason for maintaining Milton's religiosity within critical discussions of his poetry, one that I find somewhat more useful than Schwartz's theologizing. I should say, however, that Milton and the Post-Secular Present is more focused in its final chapters, which deal explicitly with religious violence, contemporary terrorism, and the poem that, currently, seems to generate the most debate among Miltonists: Samson Agonistes. I'll be dealing with these chapters in my next post.

Dead ends: William Cavanaugh and the limits of consumer-centred critique

The American Catholic theologian William Cavanaugh was in Edmonton last week for a small conference on faith, economics and social justice at King’s University College. Given how influential Cavanaugh’s work was for my friends and I during our undergrad degrees, I felt obligated to go and hear him speak. I should mention that it was a conference aimed undergraduate students; his delivery was light and his argument familiar. It arises out of an Augustinian understanding of right living, the validation of all material (read: created) things with an emphasis on the proper ends of human desire. While I've appreciated Cavanaugh’s various attempts to align theology and politics, over the course of his lectures last week, I grew increasingly skeptical of his critical project.

In his first lecture, Cavanaugh narrated our culture as one of progressive detachment. Against commonplace accusations of “materialism” (which somehow explains our consumerism) he described the West as a place of increasing dissatisfaction with material goods, and thus increasing detachment from producers, the ground of production, and from the products themselves. Throughout the lecture images of scandalous magazine ads were projected onto a large screen. Some induced gasps from the audience, others pointed out how advertising has infiltrated every corner of human life. In Cavanaugh’s hands, this weak cultural analysis paved the way for an Augustinian prescription: for classical theology, the argument goes, all material things bear a spiritual restlessness because all of creation is predisposed to its eternal source—the only place where this constitutive trauma ends. Like other theologians in the "post-secular" school, Cavanaugh rebounds from this negative critique of a secular economy to another standard trope: the Eucharist. Participating in Christian model of consumption known as the Lord's Supper, we are not consumers, but are instead the objects that are consumed by God through the church. Thus, rather than an atomistic community based on the clash/coexistence of individual wills, our very subjectivity is transformed into sheer relation: the distinction between what is yours and what is mine is thrown into question [I was slightly confused by this aspect of his model, as Cavanaugh had made a passing remark, earlier on, that “we need private property so people will take care of their possessions”]. From this perspective secular versions of charity don’t go far enough because they rely on a model of violent consumption, rather than this apparently radical inversion.

The focus of Cavanaugh’s second lecture was the “free market,” a term which he questioned by holding up the liberal theory of American economist Milton Friedman alongside that of Augustine. Again, the content of this lecture was quite familiar. The free market system of contemporary liberalism is based, at least theoretically, on the assumption that all market transactions are acceptable so long as they are voluntary. Here, the argument goes, there are no common ends and thus there is only brute force: it’s essentially the same argument we get from RO theologians against what is disparagingly called “a metaphysics of violence” (as though the secular theorists who are lumped together in these critiques actually endorse violence as such). Where there is no objective standard, continued Cavanaugh, the one with the most power wins. While this understanding of freedom is “negative,” Christian theology offers a “positive” view of freedom: not freedom from interference, but freedom for the collective pursuit of human flourishing. Here, the ability to sin is not understood as an index of individual power, but as a weakness. We have true and false desires, the objects of which are either good or bad. For Cavanaugh, secular models of economic exchange fail because their appeal to voluntarism allows for exploitation; Christian models, on the other hand, can set a price on goods that contributes to flourishing on both sides of the exchange.

Of course, this sort of diagnosis begs some pretty obvious questions: Who decides which ends qualify as “good” or “bad,” and what constitutes an “objective standard”? Doesn’t Christianity already espouse some form of voluntarism, and how does one decide where human freedom ends and violent coercion begins? Second, how do objective ends emerge if not through power—how else do we account for the rise of the capitalist market as our only real objective touchstone? Surely, Christianity (and not simply secularism) has also helped to spread the global reach of capital. And it’s just lazy to say that there’s any clearly defined separation between the two, given our history of colonial expansion. 

What really discouraged me was the answer Cavanaugh gave to a student who asked what he should do. “You have two choices,” replied Cavanaugh. “You could run off and become a Marxist revolutionary, which would be to participate in and condone violence; or you could make more of an effort make good purchases (buy fair trade, organic, local when you can) and get more involved with your church. You see,” continued Cavanaugh, “Marxists believe that everything has to change all at once and, therefore, they think that what is necessary for transformation is a violent disruption of everything.” According to Cavanaugh, this logic stems from a narrow view of history that runs counter to the Christian tradition. Christians believe that God works slowly, on the margins, through His elect.  What frustrated me most about this throwaway answer wasn’t how reductive it was – of course Marxists are going to be caricatured by politically moderate theologians, but I’m tired of hearing that going to church and buying better products is the only option available to Christians who are dissatisfied with global injustice; I’m not sure I can accept the argument that church ritual is the proper end of all social and economic life, and that we can only ever change the objects/ends of our consumption. While I do think questions of ends and objectivity are on the right track (a track that hopefully leads to a critique of production, labor conditions and exploitation), I'm more interested in examples of how this shift in what Cavanaugh calls "spiritual discipline" leads to the empowerment of the dispossessed.

Is it really so hard to accept that the church doesn’t have a monopoly on the proper “ends” of human flourishing? Surely the church is not immune from this critique as it more often than not represents the interests of an increasingly paranoid middle class. What bothers me most about Cavanaugh's line of critique is that its focus on consumerism (which disingenuously steals most of its valuable insights from Marx) never seems to move beyond a simple reorientation, a change of buying practices, which are currently no more than a diversion that is just as often reinscribed by the market. This is bound to happen when our focus is on the symptom (and questions of individual morality) rather than the system, and when the work of historicization (a glaring weakness in much contemporary theology, which regularly tries to protect the church and what it considers to be “true” theology from any kind of historical necessity) is dismissed as a form of totalitarianism.