Jase Short
A Dialogue on Passionate Belief
Three friends walk up a great spiral staircase almost one hundred feet in width. The staircase seems to spiral into nowhere. Faint cloud formations emerge at the uppermost layers that can be seen with the naked eye. Large oval windows wind up the walls. The scenery beyond the window ledges is surreal, portraying a mixture of mythic, historical, and literary events blending in troubling and seemingly improbable ways.
GORO: But, what really is left to say of the subject? Don’t you both agree that we’ve moved past anything productive on the topic at hand?
K: No doubt, the subjects of our inquiry are themselves thoroughly exhausted at this point.
MOIRA: Sure.
GORO: I had something I wanted to ask you both about. Here, may we stop on this ledge, peer down the abyssal stairs, and be grateful for how far we’ve come thus far?
MOIRA: Oh thank you. Yes, I must sit.
K: On one condition, Goro.
GORO: Anything! I’m Esau and I’ll sell my birthright for whatever the cost if I can just rest my knees. These stairs are endless.
K: Something you said earlier had me thinking on quite a different topic. Really, I might think given the state of the world, the only important topic at hand. So the issue is as follows: Everything seems to have failed us. Every hope we have is, at best, a banal simulacrum of an ideal that died, if not in the 1960s, at least by the 1980s. Surely there’s something we’ve missed, and I think you hit on it Goro when you responded to Moira’s question about faith and discipline. You said when we’ve got nothing else to lose, we’ve got our discipline. Or, maybe, “When we have nothing, we have only our discipline.” I don’t recall the formula. But it made me think about discipline and…well, God honestly. Or gods. Or the divine. Whatever. It made me think about how maybe Heidegger is right and only a god can save us, but that maybe our world is inoculated against gods. We get grotesque fundamentalisms or religions of public virtue, but we don’t really connect in the way that religion did, say, in the Middle Ages—
MOIRA: Could you get to your point so that we can sit, if not for mine then for gods’ sake?
K: I feel I’ve stated it adequately. Only a god can save us, but we are uniquely inoculated against gods.
And this is an impasse…no need to be impatient, Moira.
GORO: Friends! Exhaustion, hunger, and labor can turn the best of comrades into factions rife with daggers. Let’s sit, eat, and let the servers bring us some refreshments while we wait and converse.
Goro, K, and Moira each take a seat around a table very low to the ground where three beverages already await them. They are positioned to look mostly up and down the vast vertical expanse and somewhat shielded from the disturbing windows by the staircase. Goro, initially excited for the serving women, is now downcast. He sees that the top halves of the serving women are decidedly caprine. They bleet as they set out plates of putrid, moldy foods with mushrooms sprouting all through them, feeding on the meals promised the interlocutors. With no other choice for sustenance, the three feast on the meal of dead things and Goro continues.
GORO: Alright then. Let’s begin this discourse with an examination of this problem of god’s eclipse or death or our inoculation against gods or what have you. What’s the source? Is it sociological? Biological, even? Is that even a meaningful distinction? Who cares! It’s irrelevant. The fact of it is what concerns us. What does it mean for us? We have no “big story,” no central meaning. Sure there’s some barely liberal, mostly neoliberal nonsense about progress. But as you said K, at best people are huddling together for warmth in harsh fundamentalisms. Wars of public virtue, both virtual and painfully physical get more and more heated because we’ve got no shared divine to appeal to. We couldn’t make a new religion even if we wanted, because the biggest consequence of us all coming together in this new “global” world is that we are now acutely aware of just how different each of us is from one another. Heaven definitely isn’t other people.
K: I’m not concerned about the big story though, just what it means for us. The three of us. Right now, as instances of this bigger pattern. This issue is rather…immediate for us, don’t you think?
GORO: Well, that is always hard to say. It’s easier to speak in generalities extrapolated from populations studied over time.
K: Goro, talk to me like you’re alive—
GORO: Well what do you want me to tell you? Some myth about metempsychosis where the just get rewarded? You know its all bullshit. In the very technical sense of the term it’s bullshit.
MOIRA: Now it is my time to intervene against irritableness. Goro, let’s take a standard track of the dialectic, like you used to, alright? Let’s proceed this way: Goro, what’s the nature of things? What do you always say?
GORO: To be. The nature of things is to be…in the full, messy, temporal sense of the term. They come into being and pass out of it. All of them arise from the great vastness of the cosmos, and all of them disintegrate back into it like tears in the rain.
MOIRA: What’s your assessment, then, of what one can hope for with all of that? Do we need to face a meaningless existence or an existence whose meaning is a death sentence imposed on us from birth?
GORO: You may look at inevitability as a death sentence. I look at it as a birthright. It is my right to be, to come into this world, and to pass out of it. I, a part of this world, become aware of myself, individuate from it, and pass back into it when my inner clocks cease ticking. My harmony fades into the broader harmony of the universe. Yes, yes, we’ve all read my works. What are you getting at?
MOIRA: This. All of it. The stairs. The servers. The wine. The food. The windows—
K: God damn the windows.
GORO: I’ve told you both that you can’t look out the windows. They look back into you. It’s the way of the universe. We’re winding up its kundalini. It will take us a long time to make this ascent and there will be many scenes out that window. I advise you to just ignore them. They mean nothing. They’re jumbled. Hopelessly scrambled data.
MOIRA: Then what, Goro? What’s the point? Might we just as well go down as go up?
GORO: Certainly.
K: Just as I suspected.
MOIRA: OK. At least you’ve admitted it. We’re going nowhere. Progress is very, painfully relative. So let’s talk it out.
…
K, earlier you spoke about becoming a Christian and now you are saying we are perhaps inoculated against gods, gods which are necessary to save us…why did you become a Christian anyway?
K: I thought I made it painfully obvious in our earlier discussions, and that’s why I was goading Goro to listen to why I thought my worship of Christ makes the most sense with how he wants me to approach death. OK, I will lay it out again…
…
I tried to live a different life a long time ago. Unreflective. I was some kind of non-practicing pantheist. I believed it the most likely answer to things. Some cross between pantheism and deism, maybe. An all intelligent everything that gives birth to forgetful mortals who return to its warm, infinite memory upon death. I rather liked the idea of waking up into being the All. But then in real life I had my heart broken and what’s worse: I learned I was the cause and her rejection of me was wholly justified. It upended who I thought I was. I saw ways I had acted—less than ethically. I hit a bottom. It was a double grieving, for my love and for the person I had been. And so I found the image of a being like me, bleeding, torn apart, forced from the heights to the dirt, a murdered god eaten to sustain its creation…compelling. It made sense. And above all it concerned something deeply moving and upsetting: love in the face of certain death.
GORO: K, don’t you see you’ve just projected your compulsive attachment issues onto the sky and called it God?
K: Maybe. It felt more like the bleeding God corpse looked at me and smiled. That’s what I saw, in my head. Not clearly. I don’t have the faith for that. I’m frightened of harming myself—physically anyway, and that seems to be a prerequisite to become a saintly mystic, does it not? I’ll challenge my courage, sure, within limits. But I’m no beguine holy woman. But yes. I think it’s possible you’re right and I don’t…care? Because why should I care? Its meaning for sorting out who I am is vastly different than its truth content.
MOIRA: Thank you K, but Goro are you not incensed at this display of sophistry? Clearly our beloved K has fallen into some sort of error, embracing a divine that she thinks could possibly be nothing more than a projection of her emotional problems. Now, I’m prone to overlook such things, but haven’t you written entire texts devoted to refuting such positions in the name of Philosophy with a “capital P”?
GORO: Here’s where I am interested, K. Tell me, is your Christ a god?
K: Yes. A god that became flesh.
GORO: Hold yourself back for a moment on the catechism. Is a god something…immortal?
K: Yes.
GORO: A god is something immortal. That’s what makes a god different than a human, or any other mortal thing. Yes?
K: Yes.
GORO: Then—
MOIRA: Dammit, Goro. We can always see where you’re going with these things! Can’t you engage without—
GORO: —then an immortal is something which cannot die?
K: Of course.
GORO: Then to be a god means that one…cannot die, yes?
K: It follows, yes.
MOIRA: Jesus Christ—
GORO: Then, if Christ is a god, then he is a thing which cannot die. And therefore your entire faith in him is a contradiction.
K: Perhaps, but isn’t life a contradiction? Or at least ridden with them?
GORO: Perhaps life is, K, but reality itself is made of thicker stuff than that. The underlying reality is described best by mathematics, which describes the underlying structure of things. The language of ontology is mathematics, you see. And that is why mathematics are so strong. And the math says the universe is infinite and therefore all things which are possible are. But not all things are possible. And therefore not all things are. And the god you believe in, K, is just not possible. Therefore, he just isn’t.
K: “Credo quia absurdum.”
GORO: Any reference to Tertullian ought to be immediately suspect. He was the hack of Church Fathers. But sources aside, that’s an absurd statement. More a provocation than a credo
K: Certainly, Goro. But don’t you see that we’ve got to communicate these things, as it were, obliquely? They can’t be stated directly. We need aesthetics to say them, not episteme. Provocations. References. Phrases which simply upset common sense. These are tools, they are words which do something to us, in the very J.L. Austin sense of performative utterances, nothing more.
GORO: It’s just sophistry then. It’s back to Gorgias with you. You would submit all truth to the excellence of deception.
K: But of course. The truest things are those which are wrapped in deceptions. The deceived is in a better position to face reality than the one with perfect knowledge. If you remembered everything, you’d certainly die in paralysis. What if you recalled a memory of a wild animal attack while out in the jungle, and experienced it directly, without any forgetting? Without any lies? Isn’t that just what trauma is, remembering too well? We have to forget well though. Not just any old way. We’ve got to know how to respond to a wild animal attack without freezing up. We’ve got to incorporate those truths through convenient lies, lies based in forgetting. That’s what worshipping a bloody god corpse is all about…a very convenient and effective way to act appropriately and yet forget what horrors came before.
GORO: So you think, what? That we should give up on episteme and slowly regress into the dark ages? The picture you paint reminds me of the crudest of Ayn Rand’s tales, the mythic one, what’s it called?
MOIRA: Anthem. It’s actually her only good piece because its self-consciously mythopoetic, unlike her crude attempts at literary fiction.
K: That’s a leap, Goro. Can you not see that the “leap” between science and embracing the dark god of death is already made daily? Basically all of NASA’s old astronauts believed in God and even prayed.
MOIRA: To be fair, K, basically all of the cosmonauts were atheists.
GORO: Fine. You’re right. I can imagine humanity’s first interstellar mission being a vast colony ship of Mormons setting off on a hundred year voyage to a nearby star system. That actually seems the most likely way we’re going to get anywhere. So yes. Your point is conceded, K.
K: Then does the question of whether my faith is a meaningful response to my situation not seem to be wholly separate from the question of whether or not it can be empirically established and whether it takes a progressive stance on politics? Why should I bother establishing it empirically? I’m willing to concede it is probably completely of my own doing. It might be artifice. I’m preparing myself for death, after all. I experienced social death…I realized I was not who I thought I had been. That person died. And so did the love. The sweet, soft love. She eventually ran out of patience with me. And no amount of rainbow flag birthday cakes can bring her back to me.
GORO: So you say it could be that your god is merely your projection, and yet you still…believe? How is that so? In what sense do you believe something you know to be false?
K: Some things just are hard, Goro. Impossible even. Accepting that they are impossible, that you are doomed and yet you must go on and do the thing that you know will doom you…it’s just how we are. I don’t know why. But I know that after all of that I just die. And life is torture. So… a tortured god who dies, and who I consume in a feast of cannibalistic excess to live on…what’s not to like?
MOIRA: You always were decidedly gothic, my dear lady.
GORO: Perhaps I’m too old to get the appeal. I want my god in everything. I want to be it. A part of it, anyway. I want to feel the connection and the harmony and the bliss.
K: Maybe that’s because that’s your life situation. But I’ve been through the mill, my friend. I’m not a wise old gadfly, wandering the earth, a cosmopolitan Cynic loved by all (the only Cynic who bathes), I’m just another angry woman who wrote dark poetry and died sad and lonely.
GORO: Well, past tense seems to be the confusion here. We don’t seem to be in the past or present. The windows are most disorienting. Their images…so unlikely. I think I see the Bank of England and something ghastly happening behind its desks.
K: Well to be fair, ghastly things happening behind the desks of bankers is probably the most ordinary thing to happen out those windows.
MOIRA: The Kundalini is distorting the fabric of space-time. It’s like a snake coiled up a spine…so, you know, we slither up the stairs, it grows, we keep slithering. I guess forever? We keep going even though the conditions of our subjective experience are being constantly undermined—that is, space and time, and internal categories of our perception have a hard time coping with rapidly dissolved and recombining timelines smashing together like particles in an accelerator. It’s what it’s like to die, I guess. So as we ascend…or maybe even descend…these steps, we are performing these distortions. At least that’s how I’ve been able to make sense of these images.
GORO: Maybe. But I think we are just losing our sense of it. We are drawing nearer to death, so all sorts of brooding demons seem reasonable at this, our final hour.
K: I just got there a little earlier than you, Goro. Life is hard. It was harder for me earlier. I got a sneak peak at death and got used to the idea. You covered it in roses and now they’ve all withered and you’ve got to look at the cracked, dead soil. Spinoza’s god, too, gets sick, and passes.
GORO: It is hard, isn’t it? Just to go on? My knees ache so much. The food burns through me. I always have to piss but there’s no acceptable place to do so here. I’ve gotten too old to get it in bed with anyone. Maybe not a crucified Christ, but chained Prometheus. That I would worship!
MOIRA: You’ve both drawn nearer to what I was telling you to begin with. That it’s all just what we hallucinate in the dark. All the gods and demons and souls and legal systems and identities are just hallucinations in the dark, in the gap between spaces. That’s what chaos meant originally, did you know? A literal translation is just “gap.” In the gap all kinds of things emerge and then fight and die and subdue. In the darkness of your life, Goro, you hallucinated a happy Spinozistic divine, and K you’ve gotten yourself deep in a grotesque and sad mix of Lovecraft and Marguerite Porete.
K: I aspire to Julian of Norwich though. I’m not ready for the mirror until his pains become my pains. That’s what I want. The god died for me, so I want to die for it.
GORO: Yes but…no. Not that. I don’t go for that. I want to live! To thrive! I worship the beauty of life!
K: But death is the beauty of life. And that’s what we celebrate in the dark with our lips made bloody by the Eucharist.
MOIRA: So you’ve just stopped referring to the wine of communion as wine and have just decided to embrace the literal cannibal meaning to Christianity, is that right K?
K: Yes. Because what I’ve experienced, it seems to me now in death as well as life, is that being a body matters. A god that is not extended is not a god at all. A god needs to be a totem, a beast beyond the tree line, a presence you feel when a hundred million insects make their music in the night. A god has to be sinewy and bloody, because we are meant to eat the divine. We are meant to eat god to become like god.
GORO: Well if you’re going to be a Christian you might as well be—whatever class of heretic it is you seem to be on about.
MOIRA: You’ve spoken a lot of poetry, K. Can I ask you something…in the manner of Goro?
K: You? The very epigone of those who despise dialectical dialogue?
GORO: We should record this moment for posterity!
MOIRA: Don’t you think that’s in poor taste, Goro?
GORO: Oh, yes, you’re quite correct. We are dead, and so our children cannot hear us any longer.
K: Go on, launch into your Socratic attack! I’m all ears.
MOIRA: What you have, would you call it faith?
K: Yes, that is accurate.
MOIRA: Would you say faith involves belief?
K: Certainly.
MOIRA: And belief, it entails a claim about…the world, yes?
K: No, it would seem to me at any rate, it would only entail a claim about my internal state.
MOIRA: But what then is the internal state itself about? Is it not about something in the world? If nothing else, articulated by language, which is itself an intersubjective object out in the world, external to us?
K: Well…I would say, I employ language to communicate the belief, to try and understand it. The belief is really the ensemble of linguistic expressions, or the point at which they intersect, which are about the experience that I’ve had interacting with the symbol of Christ.
MOIRA: So then, the belief is not the central thing, but the experience of your encounter with a longstanding cultural symbol.
K: Yes, it would seem to follow.
MOIRA: Ergo, this is about your belief in something about the world. You’re making a judgment about the world and then evading critique by retreating in bad faith to the position, “Well I’m making no claims that can be verified or interacted with, it is a wholly singular thing.” You’re making an evasive argument depressingly common among North American Protestants. Stop it!
K: Well…I do not wish to be lumped in with them. So yes. I am making a judgment about the Christian religion and its relationship to my life.
GORO: And what is that judgment then, K? Have at it. Tell us!
MOIRA: Yes. We wish to hear something intelligible, no more stories. Give us an argument. Now our wrists outstretched, we beseech you, one wraith to another. Drink our blood and tell us, finally, what it is you are claiming about the world. Is the truth of the cannibal religion something true about the world, or simply a fiction you have invented to comfort yourself?
In response K gazes out the window at upsetting montages of nonsense. The others turn away, clearly bothered by what they see. Her skin, nearly luminescent, glows from the colors leaking in from beyond the windows. Her eyes mirror the inky expanse, a zone of empirical overload in the darkness, where permutations become more and more absurd only proven possible by their appearances. After a long pause, K answers them.
K: No, I don’t think so. I don’t think there was a literal god man. I think maybe—I think maybe I’ve made a mistake.
GORO: The comforting arms of Philosophy await you, as you turn from error to true and proper use of your understanding.
MOIRA: Maybe there is a way to synthesize the therapeutic aspects of this belief with its non-existence, K?
K is silent for a long while. Her comfort with the windows chaos and her comfort with her own crisis of belief seem to converge in her eyes. Ignoring the words of the others, she steps onto the ledge and dives into the abyss, leaving Goro and Moira aghast.
Postscript
It would be foolish to explicate the thematic content of the above dialogue, or to provide interpretation (what worse form is there than to produce art and then produce one’s own critical interpretation?). Nonetheless, it is incumbent upon me to reflect on questions of mysticism in a more straightforwardly philosophical manner.
We can begin by circulating around some definitions without falling too far into an analytic approach. Mystical writing is on one account an attempt to articulate an experience which cannot be articulated. This leads us back to the skeptical trappings of Gorgias: the “object” of mysticism does not exist, and if it exists it cannot be known, and if it can be known then it cannot be communicated. Perhaps because of this impossible burden the writers of mystical texts are compelled to spill more and more ink in an attempt to capture this sensibility—for the experience in question has fundamentally transformed them, and so they work through this salvation with fear and trembling, putting into words that which resists all symbolization.
There are, as it were, two main roads travelled in this mystical encounter. The negative, dispassionate one is often identified with names like Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysus for whom extinguishing passions frees the intellect for “higher” comprehensions. The other road cannot quite be described as positive (in contrast to the negative), but rather as the passionate. The holy fool, the happy idiot, the masochistic saint, all names for this figure. The character of this mystical experience is, on the whole, less dignified and defensible in everyday life. One can respect a sage retiring to a vast, empty landscape to find the absolute, but the impassioned madness of one who finds the absolute on the street corner seems suspect (and off-putting).
The Apostle Paul identified this sensibility with the very potency of the gospel. The sign of the indwelling spirit was precisely this willingness to make oneself a passionate fool for Christ. That otherwise upstanding, ethical people could take on this seemingly base appearance in order to testify to the greatness of their message became, for him, precisely the kind of “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” logic that made the ministry of Jesus so powerful in the first place.
As this movement became Christianity with a capital “C,” such sensibilities became troublesome, but were never fully stamped out. Attempts to control this energy without choking it off entirely characterize much of the history of Christianity in its Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant manifestations. White evangelicals in the United States were drawn to the figure of the “Jesus Freak” in the late 1990s in a manner consistent with this ancient tradition. Emotive, expressive, and passionate worship has become the hallmark of the evangelical and charismatic protests against mainstream religious practice in Christianity.
Passion then is vital for this form of religiosity. It is the passion at work in Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon Christendom in which he suggests that the upstanding bourgeois subjects of Europe ought to gather all of their New Testaments in a public square and in one voice request that God take the text back—for they are not interested in a passionate commitment to a difficult message. The message is a σκάνδαλον or it is not a message at all. This blind passion is indefensible in standard ethical terms. Indeed, Kierkegaard saw this in the disconnect between the ethical subject and the knight of faith. The ethical subject must submit their propositions to objective standards for external review, but for the knight of faith this is impossible. A savage interiority is necessary for this kind of passionate leap of faith, a leap which blots out the ego with far more flare than any gradual negation by rational critique.
It is this mode of subjectivity that binds the ecstatic mystic to the cruel fanatic. Polite society has been scandalized that, at the end of history, there are still those who dare to feel things deeply and unironically. It was long thought that liberal society had been inoculated against such passions—its brief collapse into the war between fascism and communism could be seen as the last gasp of a dying form of subjectivity now outmoded. But the 21st century was inaugurated with the figure of the fanatic—9/11, and the response of many within the United States itself, reopened this possibility. The current spectacle of passionate support for a political figure without concern for standards of behavior and truth is experienced by polite society as a shock—and indeed, it does lead one to question the such arational passion as it seems to have been mobilized for particularly cruel ends.
But this moralizing is a dead end. There is nothing to the passionate fanatic that suggests we ought to be paralyzed before their display. On the contrary, it is merely a reminder that not all things can be resolved by rational discourse. The dream of communicative competence as the solvent for all intractable social contradictions is put to rest in the face of the passionate fanatic—whether they be externally oriented towards a political figure, or internally oriented towards the numinous within. Perhaps the antidote to a holy-fool-for-a-demagogue is not calm, reasoned discourse, but a more authentic passion for something more powerful and more captivating—a divine radiating from each particle of nature, an obsessive intolerance of cruelty, or a vision of rainbows and communes. If we are to move beyond the impasse of the hyper-reflexive and ironically-detached subject we must engage with the figure of the passionate in a serious way that does not reduce this form of subjectivity to mere delusion.