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In this episode, Sean McGrath returns to some of the questions we initially asked in this podcast.
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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Sean McGrath: I offered some images
and concepts and themes in the
very first of our sessions that
I never really followed up on.
The first theme is that
Christ is a secular figure.
What I meant by this is that he is
someone who appears within the secular
that is, he's not a religious figure.
He's not a member of the establishment.
He's not somebody who's
supporting any kind of religious
orthodoxy, at least in his time.
He's just a carpenter and a preacher
and a healer, but he never identifies
with the established religion.
He doesn't disidentify with it either.
He has a very complex relationship
with Judaism and with the various
forms of Judaism at the time.
If we want to draw the lines, you
know, secular and clerical in the first
century, he's on the side of the secular.
So the analogy would be if he was
among us today, he wouldn't be a
member of the Roman Catholic clergy.
He wouldn't be a Protestant pastor.
He wouldn't be a Jewish Rabbi.
He'd be, with us talking on YouTube.
But to bring it a little further, I think
as a secular figure, because the Christ.
And now we move from the historical
Jesus to the cosmic Christ of Paul.
We have to remember that we learned to
the Christ first through Paul, not through
the gospel story to the historical Jesus.
So the cosmic Christ of Paul, as a
secular figure shatters the religious
frameworks of the time, he shatters
the Jewish religious expectation of who
the Messiah would be and what Israel's
place is in the history of the world.
He also shatters Roman
religious expectations.
Roman polytheism Roman emperor worship.
And shatters the Greek religious
expectation, which we probably don't
have much time to go into, but there
was a very developed sophisticated
philosophies of religion, mystery
religions in the Greek world.
And it was directly to people who
were involved with these forms of
religions that Paul proclaimed, the
Christ and the Christ in a certain way.
met the desires of those who were
participating these forms of religion,
sort of like alternative religion
of the first century, but he also
destroyed and shattered some of
the assumptions of these religions.
For example, with regard to dualism that
this world would be holy outside of the
divine, as a Gnostic might express it.
And that the thing to do
was to leave the world.
The movement of the Christ is
entirely in the other direction,
not away from this world into the
transcendent divine, but from the
transcendent divine into this world.
Identification with the world, with
the fallen world, with the material
world, with the world of time.
So this.
Destructive quality of the
Christ as a secular figure is
the point I was trying to make.
So if we are now in a secular age,
that's come to maturity, it would
be entirely misguided to assume
that the Christ has no place in it.
That would be to assume that the
Christ is primarily a religious figure
or is identified with institutional
religious structures, which no longer
have a place in the secular world.
He was never identified with the
institutions and he isn't identified
with the institutions today that are
crumbling in the face of secularity.
So it's perfectly compatible
with mature secularism.
I think I talked at some point about
the distinction between the sacred
and the profane as the fundamental
perennial religious distinction.
There's profane time
and their sacred time.
Sacred time, it's the
time of the festival.
The profane time is ordinary time.
There are profane places.
There are sacred places,
the profane places are the
ordinary places of human life.
So the market place, the marriage
bed, the household the kitchen,
and the sacred places are the
temple and the church and so on.
There are profane vocations
and sacred vocations.
The profane vocation is like, a carpenter,
a trades person or a housekeeper.
And a sacred profession would be a
profession of a priest or even a prophet.
Christ abolishes this distinction.
And in this regard, he is the
secularizing figure per excellence.
He, abolishes it not by making
everything profane and saying there's
no such thing as divinity or there's
no such thing as the sacred, rather the
reverse, he's sacralizes everything.
And there's no such thing
as the profane anymore.
He sacrifices for example, birth
because he's born of a woman in humble
circumstances and he is God incarnate.
He sacralizes the
ordinary moments of life.
And you can see this progressively
in the gospel of John.
The first sign that the Messiah
is among us is, he turns the water
into wine at a marriage feast.
What could it be more
ordinary, than marriage?
And here , he finds himself.
He, introduces himself
as the divine, among us.
In this context.
He sacrelizes moments of sickness
in his , healing ministry.
He sacrilizes, death resurrecting
Lazareth and then in the end he
sacrilizes, the most humiliating death,
the death of execution as a criminal.
So everything becomes sacred.
Nothing is profane.
He puts the lower in the place of
a higher, so the prostitute, the
thief, the tax collector are now in
a certain place in a certain way.
They're in the position of
being the Kings of this world.
They are the highest in
the kingdom of heaven.
And in this way, he shatters the
social hierarchy, which was deeply
ingrained in ancient culture.
Since this hierarchy doesn't apply,
or if, or if you wish to speak of
hierarchies, what we call the lowest
is what God regards as the highest.
C.S Lewis wrote a wonderful book
called The great divorce in which a
group of citizens of hell are given
a bus trip to heaven to see if they'd
like to change their residency.
They're various stories about how the
individuals on the bus react to the
experience of heaven when they get there.
And the great irony is that not
all of them wish to stay in heaven.
The denizens of hell, find heaven
repellent for various reasons.
But the one that stands out to me
is there's one person on the bus.
I think it's a woman.
She was a member of
the aristocratic class.
She, she belonged to the
best circles of society.
She practiced her religion.
She was a member of the upper class and
she gets to heaven and she finds out that
her serving girl is a queen in heaven.
There's a great entourage of people
praising someone in heaven and they're
walking through the pas and she's
wondering who is this great person?
And she looks more carefully, she
finds out that it's her serving girl.
And she thinks to herself, I can't,
I don't belong here at any place
that would put someone like her
in a position of being a queen.
is not a place fit for me.
So she goes back to hell.
It's a wonderful point,
but it's deeply gospel.
And it's this shattering
of social hierarchy.
We don't typically associate social
hierarchy with the distinction between
the sacred and the profane, but
it's deeply bound up with it in the
ancient world the shattering of the
hierarchy is the secularizing gesture.
And so secular culture gets going
really as the politics of equality.
The politics of the distribution of power.
But there's another point we
need to touch on too, because I
see that the whole discussion
is going towards the individual.
And we spoke about church at the
very beginning, and we said that
there must be a secular church.
And this was a very
mysterious thing to say.
But the point here is, first of
all I don't know what it looks like.
I don't know what it is, but I know
that wherever the Christ is, there
will be church in the most fundamental
primordial sense as community.
There will be a community.
Christ creates community.
And he says this in many places, so
wherever two or three are gathered in my
name, there am I, in the midst of them.
That means there will be a
gathering where he appears.
It's not to say, of course there's no
individual experience of the Christ.
Of course there is, Christ is the
great advocate of solitary prayer.
And has a special relationship with the
father, which is so intimate that it
can hardly be shared with his disciples.
And he says, every one of you, each
one of you will have this experience.
So there's an individual path
here, but this individual path as
Kierkegaard puts it, an absolute
relationship with the absolute.
This individual path does not produce
social isolation and individualism,
it results in a new form of community.
And that's what authentic church.
I haven't read anything from
scripture on this podcast.
I've thrown a few things out there, but
I would like to read just one passage
from scripture to make the point.
And this is from the first letter of John.
It's the very first
paragraph in this letter.
So we're talking about something
that was written probably towards
the end of the first century.
"It was there from the beginning.
We have heard it.
We have seen it with our own eyes.
We looked upon it and felt
it with our own hands.
And it is of this we tell.
Our theme is the word of life.
This life was made visible.
We have seen it and bear our testimony.
We here declare to you the eternal
life, which dwelt with the father
and was made visible to us.
What we've seen and heard we declare
to you so that you and we together
may share in a common life, that
life, which we share with the
father and his son, Jesus Christ.
And we write this in order that
the joy of all may be complete."
The passage clearly is a
echo of the prologue of John.
In the beginning was the word
and the word was with God.
Here the writer expresses it
in terms of the word of life.
The life that becomes visible in
the Christ and the effect of this
life is to establish a common life.
This is the point I wanted
to make a common life.
The point of the coming was to
produce a new form of community.
The word enters into the world, not
only so that we should each have a
personal private relationship with
him, but so that we should have a new
form of relationship with eachother.
And this new communal life will be, not
an image of the life of the Trinity.
It will be a continuation
of the life of the Trinity.
The common life of the father and
the son, and the holy spirit will now
be broken, open such that the human
community redeemed, shall be part of it.
Well, that's the question and I'm
looking hard and I have a couple of
suggestions, but they're just sketchy.
So this new form of common life is
not identical with any institutional
church and we don't want to rehearse old
prejudices against institutional churches.
Institutional churches have played
their role and they still do, and
where would we be without them?
But this idea of an established social
institution with property with rules
with hierarchy is not identical to
this community clearly that he has
established and by the way, the Catholic
theologians no longer argue that as well.
So it is something other than that.
And I think if we look to
the first century, we get an
example of what it looks like.
It starts with micro communities,
small groups of people living
together in a form of life that is
so radically self-sacrificial that
is so radically oriented towards
charity, towards one another, that
it inaugurates a kind of equality,
which seems almost other worldly.
And then these micro-communities
become centers of quite resistance
to the logic of the world.
And the logic of the world is
not equality, but hierarchy.
It's not, self-sacrificial love, but
powerful self-assertion and control.
This is what the church does.
Well, we'll go with pandemic metaphors,
it's viral in the sense that it, it
enters into the body of the world, which
is organized according to this logic
of power and domination and it effects
the whole thing it breaks it down.
And so wherever we see forms of
community breaking down the logic
of the world there, I think we
see the Christ, regardless of
whether he's even named as such.
He is himself everywhere.
And so he isn't in a sense invisible,
but his form, I think, is discernible.
Jakob Lusensky: Do you see that,
and do you find that somewhere?
Do you see symptoms, do you find, you
say sketches, of something like that?
Where would you see that?
Sean McGrath: I think we could point
to concrete examples, but I think in
order to recognize these examples as
forms of a community of life, that the
first letter of John is proclaiming,
we need to first look at what it isn't.
And this is another point that we picked
up and that I would like to pick up,
with the point concerning antichrist.
The antichrist is probably more
easily recognized than the genuine
Christ, because he brings death.
He brings slavery.
He brings evil into the world.
But the first point of course, is
that the antichrist doesn't look
anything like a devil with horns.
He is the antichrist.
He is the other Christ is the pseudo
Christ, which means that initially
he's attractive, he's compelling.
He seems holy.
He looks like the Christ.
He espouses Christian values in a
certain way, but in a twisted form.
He tricks the lovers of the Christ, the
followers of the Christ into following
him rather than the genuine Christ.
And he takes different
forms than every age.
This figure doesn't presede the
Christ, this figure accompanies
the Christ into the world.
We spoke of this as, Christianity
bring new forms of evil into the world.
This is, this is, you could say
these new forms of evil constellate
around this figure of the antichrist.
And I think he's quite active at our
age and many people from different
perspectives and in different communal
contexts are opposing him because they
recognize that what he brings is death.
Even if they're not
calling him antichrist.
And so in this opposition, we
can, I think, see something
like the, the, anonymous secular
Christ constellating communities.
Jakob Lusensky: What type of death
does he bring to the followers?
What type of death you mean?
Sean McGrath: He destroys hope.
He brings a culture of death
rather than our culture of life.
And he destroys community.
If the Christ comes to establish
a new form of communal existence,
a new form of love among the earth
community, the antichrist abolishes it.
He either breaks the communities
apart into competing individuals or
he instills despair in individuals
that such communal love such communal
existence, such human happiness is even
possible, which then enables the task.
That is the individuals, the despairing
individual is not one who's going
to give their time, their energy
towards building human community.
For me, at least the obvious place
to look is in a form of life which is
living out of Christian virtues gone mad.
I'm quoting G.K Chesterton here.
Chesterton writes, the modern
world is full of the old
Christian virtues gone mad.
Because the antichrist is not going
to be working with some materials that
have nothing to do with Christianity.
He's going to be taking a Christian,
something that is properly and originally
Christian, and is going to be arranging
it in some perverse way that it's going
to produce the opposite form of life.
It's going to become destructive.
If we're going to go back to that
pandemic metaphor, it's going to
be the antiviral, that's going
to demolish, the Christ virus.
I know these, these metaphors are all
upside down, but I think it's correct
because, because what we're talking about
in the Christ is something that actually
doesn't naturally belong in this world.
It actually is experienced as
infection in a certain way, but it's
the infection that brings life and
hope and new forms of community.
And so the antichrist
attacks the Christ virus.
So he's got something
of the virus in him.
He's got to be matched to him.
There's going to be some kind of
expression of the Christian virtues.
For me, the most obvious place
to look is consumerism, because
consumerism is, I think the ersatz-
spirituality of the developed world.
We can no longer just call it the Western
world, because now it's gone everywhere.
Now there's a very successful form
of Chinese consumerism, which is
sweeping across Asia, Indian consumers.
But all this world consumerisms
share some very basic commonalities.
So what's basic to consumerism is
universal in a certain way, like
the freedom of the individual
to shop, for example, or the
emancipation of the individual
from any kind of communal context.
So they're not answerable to their past.
They're not answerable to their, to
any kind of social context, but they
can invent them however they wish.
And this self invention is to be pursued,
not in any kind of metaphysical sense,
but in a material sense through shopping.
Very simple: for me,
consumerism is a spirituality.
It's not materialism.
What the consumer is shopping
for is not stuff, but a new self.
And what they get when they get stuff,
that brings them a sense of a new self.
What they get is a hit of transcendence.
And this is the false transcendence.
, it's a false transcendence cause not
a genuine transcendence, but it gives
us a kind of sugar rush of having
transcended our present state of
existence and moved into something higher.
But what we see here.
and we see this in the successful
marketing of any product, is an appeal
of the marketer to an authentically
religious desire in the individual.
A religious desire, a desire for
transformation, a desire for the new.
A desire for freedom.
Transformation through clever
marketing becomes an insatiable
need for self- variation.
But what they're shopping
for is a new self.
Just getting variations on the
same, but it has to be marketed
in such a way as to give a kind of
eschatological experience of the new.
And that's precisely
what the Christ promised.
He said, "all things shall be made new".
He pointed our attention away from the
past either, you know, the romantic
past, the past that we were attached
to, or even the cynical neolistic past.
Which was much more the attitude of
the ancient world, that the past just
brings back over and over again,
forms of evil and tyranny that we
cannot emancipate ourselves from.
The Christ says, no, this shall all
end and something new will begin.
You are made for the future.
You are made for joy, a joy that
has never yet been on the earth, and
now you need to live for the future.
So this future oriented existence, I
take to be one of the most essential
psychological features you could say
of Christianity and it's manifestly
missing in many other traditions.
So this desire for the new is, faith hope
and love, and it becomes twisted into
a desire for, or a consumer craving for
novelty for endless variations, or as
one author put it the cycle of desire,
acquisition use, disillusionment,
disillusionment, and renewed desire.
This endless cycle of consumption.