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“Why has somebody like Slavoj Žižek with his Lacanian atheism and cynicism a better purchase on the essence of Pauline Christianity? It’s because there is a tragic ground to Christianity. Tragedy and hopelessness is the prolegomena, it’s the port of entry into Christianity.”
Canadian Philosophy and Theology professor and former Catholic Monk Dr. Sean J. McGrath examines how to practice contemplative Christianity in the secular age.
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(0:01) Sean McGrath: Why is somebody like Žižek, with his Lacanian atheism and cynicism, why does he have a better purchase on, let’s say, the essence of Pauline Christianity? Well, it’s because there is something—there is a tragic ground to Christianity. Tragic—tragedy and hopelessness—is the prolegomena, you could say. It’s the entry, it’s the point of entry into Christianity.
I mean, Žižek strikes me as probably one of the most important secular voices vis-à-vis Christianity—in the last, well, in the late-twentieth century. So, I started reading Žižek as his books on Christianity were coming out, right around the turn of the millennium. He had a series of books, The Fragile Absolute: Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?; The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity; and the third one was called On Faith. And I read these books without actually knowing much about Lacan, and then I realized that one can’t understand them very well without reading Lacan. But I certainly understood what he was saying about Christianity, and he’s not—he’s unambiguously atheist, so he’s not someone who subscribes to Christianity in any Orthodox sense, but he nevertheless sees in Christianity itself an accurate rendering of the human situation, an honesty about human being. And he is particularly—in those days he was particularly critical, viciously critical, of New Age culture, obscurantism, the new religion, and also the Christian thinkers, like the postmodern Christian thinkers who were kind of fudging things a little bit, trying to make Christ a little softer on the edges so that he could become more like Buddha or something, more inclusive, and de-churched and all that. He had no time whatsoever for that. Not that he was defending a return to the church. On the contrary, he felt that was over. He’s was a death of God theologian. He is a death of God theologian. But this halfway house between Christianity and the new religion movements, the New-Age whatever, wellness culture, he found to be particularly worthy of ridicule.
So Žižek’s premise is Lacan, and Lacan’s thesis is that the human being is constitutively self-deceived. That means that there is no possibility of living in a, you know, a fully transparently honest way. Or perhaps what we should say, the only honesty we really have access to is honesty about our self-deception, that we must be deceived, or we are neurotic, by nature, you could say. That the structure of human subjectivity is ideological and there is no non-ideological subjectivity. And so that’s the pessimism, that’s the cynicism of Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Žižek’s runs with it. And he finds in the New Age, you know, what I’ve called the philosophy of human potentiality. He finds the quintessence of ideology. There’s an ideology that knows it’s ideological, and that’s what he’s advancing. And there’s an ideological ideology that is so deeply ideological that it has no clue—it doesn’t know what it’s doing. He loves this phrase from the cross, when Jesus says, “Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they’re doing.”
And this for him is the essence of ideology, to, not only to do something and not understand what you’re doing, but to refuse to understand it. So the know is active: I know not what I’m doing; they know not what they’re doing. I will not know, in the biblical sense. I will not recognize what I’m doing. I will call it, something else—it’s what Freud called rationalization—and that’s what he sees happening in the philosophy of human potentiality.
(4:39) So you have this very tragic cynical, Lacanian view, very much predicated on Christianity. I mean, Lacan is a psychologist of religion in some respects. He understands the questions far more deeply than Jung does, and he doesn’t seem to have the hang-ups that Jung has. He’s not trying to work through his father’s religious struggles or something like that. But Lacan’s context is Catholic, rather than Protestant. And, well, what’s the connection with—why does it work so well? And why is somebody like Žižek, with his Lacanian atheism and cynicism, why does he have a better purchase on, let’s say, the essence of Pauline Christianity? Well, it’s because there is something—there is a tragic ground to Christianity. Tragic—tragedy and hopelessness—is the prolegomena, you could say. It’s the entry, it’s the point of entry into Christianity.
I think we spoke about how I realized the as a young man that only sinners are called to understand what the cross is about. If you don’t have an experience of hopelessness, despair, and your own complete incapacity to redeem yourself, then the cross is meaningless. Now, in Paul’s context, it wasn’t Lacanian cynicism, obviously, but it was Greek tragedy, the hopelessness of the ancient world. It was very much a part of the Hellenistic world that Paul was so successful in converting: people who had felt that paganism had produced nothing but this cynical cult of the emperor. As you know, they were compelled to recognize the emperor as a divine being and everybody knew that he wasn’t, that he was just some bloated tyrant. And the emperor himself knew that, so it was classic ideological structure: “I know that you know that I know that this is a lie, but we will nevertheless refuse to recognize it explicitly.” So it’s this jaded paganism. Think of the Hellenistic schools that were active in the first century of the church: Cynicism, Stoicism, Epicureanism. These are schools that advocate a kind of retreat from a world that really no longer has anything to offer, a world that is not fresh in any way, a world in which relations between individuals are purely power structures.
So this is the world in which Paul’s gospel of human emancipation strikes a chord. This is where the fertility happens, right? People hear Paul’s message of hope, of human freedom, and his revelation of a God who is love. They hear this from a place of deep despair and darkness. It’s a very Dostoyevskian thing, you know, Dostoyevsky writes about these characters who discover Christ only because they have descended into the worst possible spot of despair. You know, they see Christ from a pit. Dostoyevsky’s Christ viewed from a pit, from a hole in the ground. And I think that without some kind of positioning of oneself in the lowest possible place, the place of God forsakenness, if you want, without an experience of that hopelessness, the cross and the Christ are just meaningless. Or else purely—they’re misunderstood. They’re understood in some other kind of mythic terms.
(8:36) Jakob Lusensky: Say a little bit on Žižek. You have spoken of how excellent he is in certain regards, but how do you look at him? What’s missing?
(8:39) Sean McGrath: Well his is the philosophy of unredeemed poverty. There is the redemption didn’t happen. So he’s made the decision against, you know, we said that the Christ forces a decision: “Blessed is he who is not offended at me.” Kierkegaard writes a whole book on that passage from the gospel. Christ is always potentially offensive. That is, those who have decided, who have not decided for him will decide against him. They will be either offended or attracted. It’s an either–or situation. And I think, you know, I think that—I’m certain—that Žižek has decided against. And so what he’s trying to do now is a kind of hopeless task of deploying the Christian symbolic for the sake of—for a social-political end which has no possible hope.
So I think Žižek is essentially a cynic, but he likes to pass himself off as somebody who’s still attached to the revolutionary project of Marx. There’s still an emancipation. There’s still something to be hoped for, we can still break through, we can have our post-ideological society.
But if you understand the Lacanian subtext you realize that that’s not the case. The only real hope is for the ideology that knows itself at such. And this is why I’ve said in writing that Žižek really, like Lacan, is a Gnostic.
You know the Gnostics, early Christian—well, they weren’t exactly Christian. But it’s group of, let’s say a group of, um—how do we call Gnosticism—people mistake Gnosticism for an existing religious body in the ancient world, but it was just a trend that appeared in all the various religions and philosophies. So, there was a Gnostic Platonism. There was a Gnostic Judaism. There was a Gnostic Christianity. There was no church of Gnosticism as such, but the Gnostic was situating himself /herself exactly in this position of recognition of human poverty. So, it was a tragic philosophy of life. And resolving it quite differently, let’s say, than Paul does.
Because there is really no hope for us and it would be better if we had never been born, there really is only one thing to aspire to, which is knowledge of this situation, or Gnosis. And so, you end up with a distinction between those who know that there’s no hope for us—it would be better if we had not been born—and those who don’t, and are mucking along deceived that things might turn out better.
And so, this distinction is the distinction between the elect, the ones who have the Gnosis, the illumination, and the non-elect, the ones who are deceived and ignorant. And I think Lacanian psychoanalysis is very close to this, because if you look at what Lacan is offering, [it] is his understanding of what Freud called “the cure,” which is to turn neurotic suffering into ordinary unhappiness.
(11:58) So whereas Lacan offers people’s ordinary unhappiness, which he thinks is better than neurotic suffering. Well, what does that mean? What’s the difference? Ordinary unhappiness would be a knowledge that one’s neurosis is inevitable and a necessary strategy for dealing with a reality which is so deeply absurd that it really cannot be thought of, cannot be directly encountered. So, we need to lie to ourselves, and there’s the distinction between those who know that and those who don’t, and the Lacanian cure is coming to recognize that all one’s ego projects, or rationalizations, or—what do they call it?—subjective placations, you know, ways in which we turn suffering—make the suffering of life meaningful for ourselves, by creating a narrative about our journey or whatever. All of that is self-deception, but—and it’s necessary, because the alternative is psychosis, which means you cannot work, or love, you end up in an institution—but when you know this self-deception, you’ve traversed the fantasy and you’re in a different place with respect to it. You know that you are constitutively self-deceived. That’s all Žižek has to offer, and that is certainly not redemption.
(13:24) Jakob Lusensky: Well, certainly not, but I’m also thinking as you speak of Žižek and Lacan and Freud. I mean, Freud also says that the cure is love, and psychoanalysis is also, yeah, a cure of love, where we’re trying also overcome our narcissism, no?
(13:42) Sean McGrath: Yeah.
(13:42) Jakob Lusensky: To see the world and the other as she or he or it is. So there is—there is also the love cure and that aspect, I would say, I mean, I don’t know enough about Lacanian, but about at least in psychoanalysis, that would maybe also be, yeah, included in this description.
(14:03) Sean McGrath: Yes, but we always have to keep in mind how deflationary Freud and Lacan are on terms like love. What does Freud mean by love? It means simply the capacity to relate to other people without all kinds of strategies of avoidance or projections or reactions, right? But the deflationary quality of Freudian love, it’s simply—it’s nothing particularly mystical or beautiful. It’s just the capacity to relate to other people without projection.
(14:36) Jakob Lusensky: But when you say “just,” isn’t that something very beautiful?
(14:40) Sean McGrath: It is beautiful, but it’s certainly not what Christianity calls love. You know, Christian love is not simply the capacity to relate to others in a direct way. Love and Christianity, agape, is the capacity to lay your life down for the other, to transcend the natural logic of power, to upset the apple cart entirely, to reverse the hierarchy of being, in a certain way, and make the lower the higher and the higher the lower, and give yourself for the other. So—
(15:15) Jakob Lusensky: Well, isn’t the beginning of that seeing the other? Like—
(15:17) Sean McGrath: Yes, yes . . . yes . . . yes . . .
(15:17): Jakob Lusensky: Like what we discussed over. Like, this is not the end of the road psychoanalysis, psychology is good, it can be good. It can break the illusions. It can take away some defenses. You can start to see the other in order to walk towards—
(15:30) Sean McGrath: That’s right—
(15:31): Jakob Lusensky: —maybe the idea that you’re describing—
(15:30) Sean McGrath: That’s right—
(15:31): Jakob Lusensky: —or the truth that you’re (inaudible)—
(15:30) Sean McGrath: Well there’s a lot, there are a lot of Christian thinkers and theologians who have chosen Freud as their entry point into this psychological rather than Jung. And I remember one in particular who told me that Freud was—Jung was far more dangerous on religion than Freud was. Because where Freud is pretty clear that he thinks it’s just an illusion, Jung mixes everything up, psychology and psychological health become fused with enlightenment and holiness and so on.
So, the idea that the future could be completely different than the past. This is a revolutionary impulse completely missing in the ancient world, because it has—it presupposes a different concept of time. Žižek gets this clearly. So, there is no revolutionary politics prior to Christendom, because there is no concept of time which could accommodate a politics which anticipates the future which will be wholly other than the past. The ancient model of time, we could say the perennial model of time—and find it in India—ancient India, and the Vedas—[?] in China and so on, and in Greek philosophy—is that time is simply, as Plato puts it, the moving picture of eternity. What comes up and appears to be new is really just something very old, maybe the ancient. And so this return is return to archetypal structure.
And this sets up the pattern for the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Here’s another point that Žižek gets clearly, that, you know, religion, archetypal human religion, hinges on this distinction of sacredness and profanity being two things. You know, there are holy places in holy times and holy people. And there are profane places, profane times, profane people, and this distinction is fundamental. And so, you know, non-Christian religion—maybe all religion is non-Christian, if we follow Barth and Bonhoeffer—has rites in order that are necessary for transitioning from the profane to the sacred, or elevating the profane to the sacred. So in Hinduism, for example, when a woman comes of age, when she menstruates, there will be a special rite that will happen. Or when people are married, or for everything that happens, a rite which elevates the profane event to the sacred—by and very much symbolically enables a participation of the individual in the eternal. And the eternal, the timeless, the changeless, because time is a circle.
Now in Christianity, the distinction between the sacred and the profane is abolished. This is basic to our discussion in ways that we haven’t really touched on. But God, when God is no longer identified with a specific time and place, but with everything, the sacred and the profane, the distinction is abolished. This is also the first disenchantment of the world. So you can spin this in two different ways. You could say that nothing is sacred anymore. You know, God himself now becomes a baby defecating, nursing at his mother’s breast, dying on a cross. And so all these ordinary quotidian events are now identified with the infinite, with the divine, and this means either that, you know, nothing really is sacred anymore, or everything is sacred. But in any case, there’s no longer a distinction. There’s no longer this sharp divide, which is why there’s no longer a hierarchy of priesthood, you know, of layperson, priesthood, king, and divinity. That whole hierarchy, which is very stable and kind of the architectural keystone of ancient cultures, is abolished by Christianity. So Christianity—this is what we said in the very beginning—far from being threatened by the secular world, with its leveling of hierarchies, is the very condition for the secular world. Christianity levels all hierarchies. Žižek gets this because of his Marxism.
Which is and it’s, you know, it sounds like a wonderful freeing thing, and it certainly is. But as we said also, it’s got a perverse other side. You know, that this is also the ontological condition of capitalism. This is the root of the ecological crisis, as Lynn White Jr. said way back in 1967, absolutely correctly. You know, it’s one culture who has created the technological attitude which has wrecked the earth by creating a kind of hyper-development of humanity. One culture, which was a Christian culture. So it is there. This is why Christianity is an ambiguous legacy. It’s an eco-disaster and it’s a human emancipation at the same time. And I—my understanding is that this too is anticipated in the New Testament, in the figure of the twinning of Christ and Antichrist. The identification of the infinite with a finite doesn’t simply bring redemption. It also brings a new form of evil into the world. And this new form of evil is precisely what we’re struggling with right now.
And that is why I think the Christian legacy is so essential to solving social-political issues which appear to have nothing to do with Christianity, like the demise of liberalism, or, you know, the ecological collapse, struggling towards an environmental civilization, that kind of thing. It’s the old idea that, you know, the medicine can be a poison.
(21:43) Jakob Lusensky: I’m also wondering, you know what, you know, if you would have him here, actually, what questions would you ask him? What would you want to ask him?
(21:50) Sean McGrath: Well, I would tell—I would accuse him of Gnosticism, as I did, see what he says in defense. I would also acknowledge that, you know, had he decided otherwise, he would be one of the great secular Christian voices of our time. One of the greatest theologians of our age, because of his penetration, his understanding. I would—yeah, see the thing is I started as a critic and he just won me over. This has happened many times in my life. I start up by criticizing somebody who really agitates me, usually because they’re getting to the point. And I was wanting to defend Jung against his criticisms of New-Age obscurantism and so on. And I just found myself kind of won over. But, you know, he’s—at the end of the day, I’m not a cynic, and his cynicism I find to be hopeless. Like, I think he’s got nothing really to offer. So he likes to pretend that there’s still a revolution to fight, but there’s nowhere to go when you get it. When you destroy one ideological structure, you can only land in another. There’s no other place for us.
So yeah, pick your ideology, you know, and whether it’s communism, capitalism, or fundamentalist Islam. You’re going to land up in one, and the only hope for us—there isn’t really a hope, it’s just to be constantly disidentifying from whatever ideological structure we happen to be inhabiting because there’s nowhere else to live. And that creates this kind of elite quality, this Gnostic quality of knowing better than the others.