One of the themes I have attempted to articulate on this site is the contrast between the good for the person as such and the good for the person as a member of society. This contrast is known as the distinction between the good man and the good citizen. Many philosophers have made this contrast implicit if not explicit in their thinking, and I believe it is possible to see it showing up in Jesus' words and actions as well. The best known example in Jesus' life where we see him seeming to make this distinction is when he distinguishes the realm of Caesar from the realm of God. Included in this contrast is the idea that the needs of the city (Caesar's as ruler of a city) are not on the same level as the deepest desires and needs of the human person as such. For true religion, these deepest ends are met by living a certain way in relation to the highest good.

Following this line of thought, I have argued that large institutions tend to fall back onto being merely about the good for the individual as a member of the group first and foremost. That is, they are always at risk of losing sight of the fact that they are supposed to be about the deepest ends of the person. An important part of this analysis is that the self-understanding of any particular individual will have an influence on whether he stresses his good as a member of the group or his good as a human being. All true philosophy and religion will have as its primary aim the attempt to reveal 'the way' to the deepest ends of the human person, with ‘the way' itself often co-existent with the end. (Note Jesus' statement to the effect that he is the 'way and the truth.' )

When stressing the maintenance of the good for the person as a member of the group, now, as opposed to stressing the deepest ends of the person, maintenance of the common opinions will be stressed. The primary purpose of the maintenance of the common opinions is political in nature, namely, group cohesion. By 'political' I mean 'having above all else to do with the external ordering of the parts of society into an organized 'whole'. Common beliefs are a kind of glue, if you will, which hold the individuals of a society together. When operating out of a political mode, the existence of the group is given priority over the well being of the concrete individuals who make it up. While the beliefs when held by most individuals as group members may facilitate the individual in seeking the deepest ends of his/her existence as a human being simply, if organizational structure or group cohesion is stressed heavily, this will tend to result in a de-emphasis on the good for the person as such. What will be stressed is simply the maintenance of group cohesion via the maintenance of the dominant opinions. I believe that this tendency to over-stress the group is relevant to the understanding of "sacrifice" throughout human history, an issue James Alison addresses and which I briefly touch on at the end of this writing.

The point of talking about the distinction between the good man and the good citizen; the deepest ends of human existence and what are mostly "only" necessary to social cohesion and material sustenance is simply to draw attention to the issue as an issue worthy of reflecting upon. One question we might ask is: once a society has gained a certain level of material well being, does it make sense to continue to rely heavily on political and economic arrangements which were necessary when scarcity and death were prevalent but which no longer serve their purpose today? Upon considering this distinction in general, we are then to go on and see how this distinction plays out concretely in those institutions we are members of. We then can ask, now in our capacity as single individuals who may or may not be members of small communities which exist to get closer to a deep moral-spiritual good: How does the stress on any particular side of this tension, whether it be in the larger society or smaller communities, help or hinder me in moving towards my own deepest good? Two examples come to mind. If the common belief is held in our society that self-interest should be the dominant motive force for social and economic interaction, does this have the effect of making it possible for individuals with merely narrow economic ends to exert a high level of influence on the public realm, leading to, for example, excessive construction of commercial property and overuse of land? Note that if we stress the more mundane ends of our existence, we will not pay heed to the spiritual consequences of the way in which our society sanctions activities which are determined exclusively by narrow econominc motives.   This is so even as we find ourselves as a result of these beliefs overcrowding our cities and suburbs and creating an environment which is all around esthetically offensive. Another example in the realm of religion comes to mind: If I find that my religion heavily stresses certain beliefs, and I do not experience much if any relationship to a deep good in my life as a result of focusing on these beliefs as descriptions of truth, the question arises as to what the purpose of stressing these beliefs is. Again, as with the economic example, we see that those in policy formulation positions may all too easily confuse what are "only" the necessary aspects of social and political life, e.g. material well being and the maintenance of common opinions, with the deeper spiritual and moral purposes of life.

To answer the question as to what side of the above tension we live out of, we will need to have a sense for what side of the tension gets stressed in the context of our lives. This is not an abstract matter of theoretical interest only, and we will need to ask about the relative stress one side or the other of the tension gets, and not remain in the realm of discussing whether one side "is always" or "is exclusively" stressed. The very term "stress" means that there is not an absolute emphasis on one issue or another, but that we find ourselves somewhere along a continuum between the two sides.

The Relevance of the Distinction between the Good Man and the Good Citizen for True Religion

The issue of the tension between the good man and the good citizen is a central one for all true religion. This becomes even more the case when the religion has become institutionalized. For once any ideal whose purpose is to be of direct assistance in helping the human person attain their highest good becomes institutionalized, the numbers of individuals involved in the endeavor will increase. Once the number of individuals reaches some point along a continuum, the institution will begin to act more like a "city" and less like a small community in which it was easier to maintain the "eye on the prize" so to speak, namely, the highest end of human life. My point here is that the deepest ends of the human person can generally only be seriously, sincerely, and consistently sought in relatively small communities. What matters again is not abstract numbers, e.g. this or that community has x numbers of individuals and they thus exclusively focus on one of the other side of this tension, but rather how the individuals who make up the community interact with each other as influenced by the relative stress on one side of the tension. For example, do they generally interact only through the intermediary of the umbrella institution, or are they broken up into smaller groups and experience the concrete effects of the ideas being lived out in each others' lives? Another example comes to mind: When I have been on retreats with Jesuits, I have found that I have not been influenced to change the way I live my life by what might be called 'religious ideals' or 'beliefs' isolated from lived experience. Rather, what has effected me is observing how particular individuals live and act; how they relate to themselves and others.  In particular, it is certain traits displayed in action and interaction which have influenced me most to think about how I might also live in a new relation to the deepest spiritual and moral ends of my life. These traits have been: i) a way of interacting with me that avoids for the most part talking about the formal beliefs or doctrines of the religion; ii) generosity, and finally, iii) acceptance.  Unless they say otherwise, we can presume that the other as adult knows what they need to know about the theory of the religion or its formal beliefs. What I know I do need is to experience mercy, forgiveness and acceptance.  I believe strongly that the reality of acceptance is the key to understanding the meaning of Christanity. When we put pressure on this notion, we will find ourselves coming face to face with the contrast between the law and the heart. The individual will live out the truth of the law of Christianity only as a result of first experiencing the transformed heart in the example of concrete others. But to experience this, we need to have concrete individuals who have gone through the process which leads to acceptance of self. This is much harder than most realize, especially in a culture which has heavy residual elements of Manicheanism, Puritanism, and Jansenism, which many conflate with Christianity.  In sum, what has influenced me the most to actually change the way I live in relation to my true self, God and others in my life is the manner in which individuals have reflected, in their treatment of me, the beliefs they say they hold.   I cannot imagine that I would have the same reaction in a large religious organization which makes its self very public. If I found myself in the midst of a large religious context, e.g. a mega-church, I would imagine that I would experience much more pressure to simply claim that I adhere to the dominat beliefs of the group. I would probably also experience a wide gap between the words and actions of the members and perhaps leaders. I imagine that there would be much less, if any stress, on how these beliefs change the way I live in relationship to myself, God and other particular individuals in my life, and if there were, I would bet that the stress would be almost exclusively on a change in external behavior. The stress, in short, would be, I assume, on the maintenance of the group.

If the religious structure retains itself in the form of dispersed units, there is a higher likelihood that the institution will remain truer to its calling, or that is, remain truer to striving after its proper goal, namely, the deepest end of human existence. If on the other hand, the institutional aspect is stressed, and this includes the formalized belief system, and the concrete members who make it tend to act in relation to each other through the intermediary of the umbrella organization, there will be a higher likelihood that the functioning of the organization will increasingly reflect that of a "city" or a large society. In that case, we can expect it to focus not on the ends of human existence, but on what are properly understood "only" as means to the ends of human existence. I put "only" in quotes because the point is not to minimize taking care of the needs of the society, or that is, maintaining social cohesion and economic sustenance. The point is that this is not the proper function of any organization whose self-understanding is to be a true religion. This is, rather an explicitly political function. Specifically, when an organization stresses the formal beliefs which constitute its public message, they will tend to focus on the maintenance of common beliefs and group cohesion. The institution is at risk of confusion in its self-understanding when it comes to stress the latter over the former, or that is, group cohesion over the deeper spiritual and moral ends of the soul. It is subject to the risk of undermining its reason for being when it confuses what are only at most necessary conditions of striving after these deepest ends for the ends themselves. I end this paragraph by noting that such confusion seems to be built into the structure of human existence. I suspect that they are also sustained, as I will argue below, by a pre-Christian understanding of sacrifice and all that goes into the need to maintaining this understanding as a dominant social opinion.

The Contrast between the Good Man and Good Citizen in American civilization

American political and social culture has attempted to answer the question as to the what ought be the relation of the individual to the group in a radically new way. In contrast to the usual set up where the individual is subordinate to the group, or in our terms, the good for the concrete individual is made subordinate to and dependent on a certain way of structuring the group or society, American civilization has taken certain Greek and Christian ideas and done something like an experiment: It has attempted to take a certain insight and practically applied it to social and political life. That insight is this: The deepest ends of human existence are only "seen" or "grasped" by one individual at a time. Moreover, when such insights are grasped, the individual who "sees" is often placed in a relationship of tension to the larger group. To say that the ends of human life are grasped by a single individual at a time can be understood as a consequence of the fact that the "ways" to the deepest ends of human existence are subjectively experienced, or "felt", or "intuited". They are not and can never be articulated in theoretical form or language in the way we use language in our everyday interactions. This is something that English language culture and especially of the Protestant variety has difficulty grasping. In short, it seems that the truth is "accessed" by one person at a time. This can occur at most in small groups or communities, but even here the actual "experience" of the truth finds its locus in the single person as such. These individuals will get the content of their intuitions from a prior existing culture, and would not have experienced these intuitions if they were say alone on Mars. Individuals who experience such visions can, in turn, form groups and support one another in living out of their vision in pursuit of these truths, but ultimately these truths are not experienced by the group per se, of any size. Kierkegaard impresses upon us the fact that the individual as such must take active responsibility for the reality of truth in his life, suggesting that we fear this responsibility, wishing to be placed into what Kant calls an analytic, or external, relationship to the truth. We want to be told the truth once and for all and to be in a relation to it not unlike the relation between a machine and its fuel source. And in indulging in this desire, what Fromm calls an escape from freedom, we are in fact negating our own spiritual good. Science fiction often alludes to this dark side of the modern mind, and when we look closely we see it is the true nightmare.

All of this suggests a certain kind of relationship between the deepest truths of human existence, on the one hand, and how this truth gets conveyed, as it were, to the group and the individual. This kind of relationship is not, then, like the relationship between human reason and modern scientific truths, or the truths that the founders of the United States are speaking of when they claim "these truths are self-evident". No such self-evidence exists concerning the deepest spiritual and moral truths of human existence, and it would be an error to think that we should speak of the truths of true religion and spirituality as if it were or ought to be! Entailed in the structural relationship of the deepest truths of human existence to humanity itself seems to be the fact that some concrete individuals come to be, based on concrete experience, the "conveyors" of deep insight into human existence. While these individuals required a prior existing culture to gain these insights, as noted above, this is not experientially or spiritually significant, for in relation to the issues at hand, it is meaningless to talk about a time when there is no society. In short, there is, then, a kind of symbiotic relationship between the individual and society when it comes to the relationship of truth to human existence. Modern western society is based, then, on the deep insight that the concrete individual is the subjective locus, if I may, of the experience of the deepest truths of human existence. The individual is not the source of the truth, but as it were the point of intersection between the mind of God and humanity. The experience of truth, then, is essentially subjective, or inner, and occurs one person at a time. It is not objective in the way the term is usually understood, e.g. present as some fact of the universe outside of my being. Ironically, however, the insight that the form of truth for the human person is subjective has, owing to that Achilles heel of the modern thinker - the attempt to get a god's eye perspective of reality in general - tended to decline in into the commonly held opinion that "truth itself is subjective", which is taken to mean "not objective" and thus "not real". Behind this decline of a deep insight into a common and here false opinion, we see a simple confusion between an object of belief and the form belief, or that is between the subjectivity of perception and the possibility that the object of this perception exists in some deeply true way, a way which is perhaps not recognized by reason or our modern framework but yet real. This common way of mis-interpreting what was originally a depth analysis of man's subjective, or inner, relation to truth and society came about due to the scientific revolution but also for political reasons. In short, science tends to support the belief that the truth of human existence is objectively existent and knowable in the way the facts of science and math are. While Catholic culture has generally been resistant to what I term the "fundamentalist temptation", the tendency in English speaking Protestant culture to hold the opinion that the highest truth of human existence is valid in the same way as the truths of physics and modern political thought are, there is pressure in English speaking Catholic culture as well to treat the truth as "objective" in the way the laws of physics are objective, or likewise, to hold that the self-evidence spoken of by the founders is a trait of religious and metaphysical truths. More exactly, there is a psychological drive in certain portions of Catholic culture to cultivate public opinions which allow the purveyors of those opinions to have the experience of certitude about the truth that the scientist has of mathematical and physical laws. We observe the psychological significance in the propagation of an opinion to the status of "dominant opinion" when we note that whether or not a large group holds a certain opinion does not change whether or not that opinion is true. The hint that we might be witnessing a drive to make some psychologically comfortable is given whenever there is a high level of passion attached to the propagation of this or that truth claim.

In attempting to analyze the relationship of the individual to the group and the group to the truth I have gone off on a tangent. Allow me to get back to the main issue I mean to focus on here: While modern western society is based on a deepened insight into the relation of the human person to the truth, the paradox is that because of the scientific revolution and for political tranquility, one of the highest ends of modern political thought, our western culture tends to see the truth of human existence as "subjective", which is then generally interpreted to mean "not real" and thus "not valid". We can see the incoherence of this common opinion when we reflect on the dismal concepts of truth that prevail as common opinions in the west. Our culture basically adheres to a cafeteria approach to truth, with no criteria for determining truth or ranking moral claims. On the other side, as a reaction to this problem, among those dismal notions of truth, or more exactly, of our understanding of the relation of the individual and society to the truth, is that belief that spiritual and moral truths are objectively "fixed essences" and "knowable" in the way the truths of science and math are seen to be. This we can call the "fundamentalist, or orthodox, temptation". The "orthodox" temptation will stress the group over the individual and tend to fall back on the repeated assertion of various truth claims which are metaphysical in nature. The point we are interested in here is the motivation for the repeated assertion of the truth of these claims as well as how the assertions of these claims is experienced by those individuals who participate in making them. I want to suggest that this is a kind of fetish, in this case, a kind of intense "staring at" an Idea one has gotten into their head which has no clear relationship to the way we do or ought to live. I alluded to this issue above. We ought be suspicious as to the correlation between public proclamations of this or that truth and the ends of true religion if we observe a general focus on metaphysical truth claims side by side a noticeable absence of focus on inner experience or concrete qualitatively distinct ways of living. In other words, if a certain changed way of living attendant upon a changed spirit does not follow upon public proclamationns about the truth, then with Kierkegaard, we can only view this truth as empty of meaning and soulless. At most, such activity serves group cohesion. For such a speaker, it has not been shown to lead to spiritual or moral truth. What I am suggesting is that when metaphysical claims are heavily stressed, this will usually entail a "decline" to a stress on the good for the individual not as a human being but as a member of the group only.

Stressing Group Cohesion as the Primary Good of the Group, or the Deepest Ends of Human Existence: A Litmus Test of True Religion

When the stress on the group becomes paramount, by some admixture of logic and human nature, it becomes necessary to also talk about those who are outside the group. This apparent deep need to talk about who is not in the group seems to be a practical element in the creation of the common opinions and the maintenance of group cohesion. As soon as there is any but incidental talk about those who do not share certain common opinions which are metaphysical in nature, we can be suspicious that those doing the speaking have left the arena of the good man and entered the realm of the good citizen. If this move occurs within an organization whose self-understanding is religious in nature, this move must be defined as a decline. In Jesus' own language, those who make this move have risked moving from a focus on the realm of the Kingdom of God and towards a focus on the realm of Ceasar. The point of the contrast is not, notice, to say that focusing on the city is bad, but that the stated purpose of the individual as well as the organization should determine the words and actions of the individuals who make it up, and not simply what might be called by Jesus himself bad group psychology or perhaps better put, bad faith.

Those who make the move from a focus on the good for the human person to the good for the person as a member of the group in modernity, however, especially English speakers, will not usually experience this move as a decline or as an existential error, because as moderns they will see their focus on metaphysical claims as essential to the deepest ends of human existence, or in religious language, salvation. When they stress making truth claims, copying the form although not the content of the hard sciences in the process, they are not paying much attention to the fact that prophets do not focus on metaphysical claims, but on action and a certain qualitatively distinct way of living. They have eyes to see and ears to hear, or that is, they have the basis of experiencing truth in a certain qualitatively distinct way, but choose to focus on abstractions which have no concretely discernable relation to the person's deepest good. It is worth repeating: the stress on truth claims is a reaction whose purpose is to function as a wall preventing a barbarian invasion, of sorts. But Christianity as a way of being in a certain sort of relation to spiritual truth cannot maintain that relation if its self-defined participants are spending a great deal of time or energy on beating off the bad, even if the percieved badness is real. This is not its reason for being, and neither necessary or helpful to its true purpose, which again, is to help people discover and experience a new way of living. If and when we put our passion into the latter, taking care of the bad will occur as a by-product.  Relatedly, the purpose of true religion is not to propagate theoretical truths, e.g. its purpose is not to focus on metaphysical speculation. Those who heavily stress theory over practice; metaphysical speculation over lived experience of grace and goodness also are perhaps insensitive to the role that a heavy stress on theory in modern western civilization has most likely played in the cultivation of their own strongly held belief that "objective certitude" is both needed and good. The lack of nuance and sensitivity here is odd since Jesus himself stressed faith over the subjective experience of certitude in rebuking Thomas for needing proof of Jesus' real existence. As if the real existence of Jesus was the issue in the first place and not a spiritually and existentially specific way of living. The final problem with a stress on the assertion of this or that truth claim is that such assertions are only meaningful when they are universally true. And it is here where the stress on metaphysics gets acceleration power from modern science. Once such claims are made before large groups of people or society in general, the belief must "decline" to the level of a common opinion and thus decline also to filling the role of maintaining group cohesion. In short, an important insight we might discern from these kinds of analyses are that the relation of truth to the human person is mysterious, and those who care about the propagation of moral and spiritual goodness ought not be putting too much stress on public assertions of this or that truth claim, especially if the claims are just that, words, rather than a certain qualitatively distinct way of living. We don't change hearts and minds with the assertive use of words, but with the example set by concrete individuals who have a particular vision of the deepest truth of human existence. We do ourselves and others spiritual harm when we heavily stress a transforming of this vision into a formalized set of metaphysical beliefs, in the process losing sight of the only thing that matters: a good way of living.

The Role of Creating An "Out Group" in the Maintenance of Group Opinions and Group Cohesion with Text from James Alison's "On Being Liked".

I have found that James Allison offers us a way of thinking about the some of the core issues I have attempted to discuss above. In his book "On Being Liked" he thematically discusses the tendency of large groups to create "out groups". In relation to my own discussion, this task will be in the service of the maintenance of group cohesion. The individual in their capacity solely as good citizen is unlikely to be neutral in regards to any "out group", and Alison suggests that he will be motivated to contribute to the marginalization of those in the "out group" in order to avoid being caught up in it himself. This analyses personalizes what in my analysis is the more theoretical description of the dynamics of social and individual life. In Alison's view, shame has played a significant role in human history and is central to the role of Jesus' own sacrificial self-giving. He argues that it is a mistake if we view Jesus' death from a meta-perspective, defining his death as pre-determined by God's will. From a theoretical perspective, or that is, an objective one along the lines of a scientific approach, it may be the case that God pre-determined Jesus' death. The relevant spiritual point is that if we hold this notion as objective truth, or in Alison's language, as a description of an event that happened long ago and far away, we destroy the very meaning of his death. I suspect that ultimately, the deep drive to transform what is properly conceived as an inner faith in Jesus life, death and resurrection into something we can remain distant from through objectification is itself another way that human beings keep themselves once removed from the deepest truths of human existence. These truths are not knowable or describable in the way the physical world is. The form concealment takes in modernity is paradoxical to the core: heavy theoretization of truth appears to the modern mind to be the peak of the expression of truth, while in fact it keeps us distant from those truths that matter to us as spiritual beings. For his death to have any sacred meaning, an event that can not be merely theoretically described or objectively real but always first and foremost subjectively held in my heart and mind as ineffable truth, Jesus' death had to be freely chosen. We cannot both hold that Jesus experienced his death as freely chosen while also holding that his Father forced him to die as he did; that his death was part of the objective make-up of the cosmos. If we believe that Jesus death was from his perspective caused by the Father, we must also hold a deterministic account of the universe. This would be to say that we do not believe in free will, and thus in moral responsibility. Such a stance is not consistent with the Christian faith, and shows a serious misunderstanding of that ideal, not as a Platonic essence now but as a way of living. It shows a lack of understanding of the central meaning and role of personhood for our culture.

Now what Alison does is to suggest that the interpretation of Christ's death as objectively imposed on him from external forces fills a particular social and political purpose, consistent with but more probing than my own stress on the utilization of certain opinions to maintain group cohesion. Specifically, Alison argues that a particular notion of "sacrifice" has been central to the maintenance of group cohesion throughout human history. One of the central meanings of Jesus' death is that he overcomes or transcends this usual way that mankind has felt it necessary to sustain itself, or that is, to feel safe. Stated another way, Alison is suggesting that Jesus' freely chosen death changes the relation of the individual to the deepest truth of human existence. No longer is social cohesion and political interaction in general to operate in such a way that the individual finds himself, as a reflection of a presumed cosmological truth, in a subordinate and fixed relation to a kind of Manichean universe. In this non-Christian view, some concrete individuals must and always will find themselves being sacrificed to the gods for the always already existing evils of the larger group, while others are saved. Note that we speak of this as already having happened, for from the perspective of the non-Christian culture, the argument is that such a sacrifice of some individuals will happen as surely as the sun will rise. Now, consequent to Jesus' life, the whole set of presumptions underlying this social and political dynamic is overthrown, or better, transcendended. No longer can any particular individual find his "salvation" by gaining access to the already and always existing dominant group, but rather must seek his own salvation in fear and trembling.  To accurately understand Christianity, not now as a set of truth claims about cosmological truth "out there", but as a prescription for how one must live to gain a new kind of salvation, Jesus becomes normative for our lives, or that is, our daily living. On the foundation of a faith in Jesus' life, freely accepted death and resurrection, the individual can and must take freely chosen action to transform his relationship to the deepest truth of human existence and thereby to "gain" salvation. While certain core beliefs must be present to the consciousness of the individual as a member of any Christian culture for him to gain insight into these possible truths, these truths are not to be stressed for their metaphysical validity or their "theoretical truth". They are always and "only" to be focused on as articulations of means to ways of living which bring me into a closer relation to my true self, God, and other concrete human beings. Salvation is to be understood less as a noun than as a result contingent upon a qualitatively changed way of living each day of my life. Of course, the striving after this way of living is central to this undertaking, and we do not do this perfectly. Moreover, salvation does not happen "all at once" and for all time or as a result of uttering a set of words, such thinking closing off mystery and relying instead on magic. If it is possible to speak of the mystery of eternity, it is applicable perhaps in the relation between our daily living and salvation above all else, for while we experience our lives as discrete minutes, hours, and days, perhaps it is the case that our salvation is or is not happening, from our perspective as beings in time, each moment of my life consequent to the free decisions I am always in the process of making or avoiding.  Salvation, if the concept is to have a concrete meaning, must refer to being transformed on the basis of a new understanding of and thus new relationship to truth that happens as a result of continual transformation.

An important component of the historical self-understanding of human being as subordinate to the larger society, then, is that some individuals must "pay the price" for the "sins of mankind". While one would think that this belief would not be dominant in Christian culture, Alison suggests that there are heavy residual accretions of the belief still present in the west. I would add that these accretions are especially present in English speaking nations. The social sign of the continued existence of this belief is the presence of the bad form of shame. In my limited understanding, I want to suggest that the following are concrete cultural sources of the bad form of shame which in turn contribute to the heartfelt opinion on the part of some members of a defined social group that some concrete individuals must be "sacrificed" for the good of the group. Tentatively stated, these sources are: Manicheanism, which had seen a fixed and static quantity of evil in the world over and against a fixed and static wholly separate quantity of "good"; Gnosticism from Plato and other pre-modern sources, characterized for our purposes as the belief that evil is instantiated in the physical world and that this physical world is as such fallen and over and against an "opposite" spiritual realm; Calvinism, which heavily stresses the sinfulness of man, focusing on the notion that this sinfulness in man is "fixed", thus implying that no transformation is possible experientially speaking; English language Puritanism, and finally Irish/French Jansenism. For those in the know, the latter two in particular are terribly close for comfort for us Americans in 2006. It is the case that a very high percentage of parish priests in the US up until the early 1960's were trained in Jansenism, even though this was a formal heresy! Note that the declaration of a belief system as a heresy did not wipe it out. The significant gap between the actual practices of a large institution and their stated beliefs supports my argument that there are residual elements within the belief system as a culture which are in the service of the maintenance of the bad form of shame which in turn is in the service of group cohesion, and not the truth primarily. If I am correct here, this suggests that a radical turn inward is required as a part of a necessary subjective cleansing of those self-defined religious groupings in which these accretions reside and manifest themselves.

My purpose in writing this article is not to argue for a change in the public assertions of the church as a large institution regarding how it functions in relation to truth claims in general or homosexuality in particular.  My purpose rather is to hopefully bring some individuals to seek insight into the kinds of issues I have discussed above, as well as those brought up by James Alison in his book "On Being Liked", which I excerpt below . I will finish this article then with a section from from Alison's chapter titled "The Strangeness of This Passivity", titled "Understanding Salvation". The remainder of this article is then from the book. I will add interpretive notes at various points.

Excerpt from James Alison's "On Being Liked", chapter title "The Strangeness of This Passivity", section title "Understanding Salvation"

This brings us from psychology to the understanding of salvation. More than anything else over the last years, in which I have found myself talking about redemption and forgiveness to different groups of people, I have found that the shift which is required for sense to emerge is exactly the same as the one I have been describing. Any account of our salvation at the hands of Jesus which is a description of something that has happened, or happens, but told as if by a spectator or an onlooker, is fatally flawed.(1) And what is fatally flawed about it is that it is not told as an undergoing of something which is happening to me and which is turning me into a different sort of teller.

In other words, it is not being told by someone who is fundamentally passive to, patient of, something enormous happening which includes them and which is actually altering not only the words they say, but their capacity to uttering words at all. For when we talk of salvation, rather than describing something happening ‘out there', we are in fact allowing ourselves to be ‘contaminated' by what we perceive in and behind the regard of one coming towards us.(2) Let me try to illustrate this.

A straight friend of mine from South America wrote back to me after reading the chapter on the Gerasene demoniac in my book Faith Beyond Resentment to tell me what a revelation it had been for him. It had brought back to him a series of incidents when he was at secondary school. He and his classmates had lighted upon the class ‘maricon', the class ‘fairy', and had teased and bullied this guy remorselessly. Eventually, the pupil in question had managed, no doubt after much beseeching his parents, to go off somewhere else, to another part of Venezuela, and my friend described to me how completely bereft he and his classmates had been left by this guy's absence, how they had found themselves lost as a group without their class ‘maricon'. So, not apparently needing to read Girard in order to understand what to do next, they managed to find another class fairy in a different class, and settled on him instead, and so shored up their group.(3)

It had come as a revelation to my friend, some years later, that this is what he had been doing. And I imagine indeed that he was engaged in that persecution in all ‘innocence', not knowing what he was doing. But I do not suppose that all the pupils in the group were equally ignorant of what they were doing. I suspect that the members of the group who would find it most difficult to analyze what they had been doing in the same clear and clean way as my friend did would be precisely those who had experienced some sense of relief at the time with respect to the treatment of the class fairy ‘because it was not me'. In other words, someone else was occupying the place of shame, and I am deeply relieved that it is they and not I who am there, half-aware how arbitrary it is that it should be they and not I. And that means that whereas some people in the group, who are less insecure in their own status as ‘one of the lads', don't really attribute much importance to the creation of the victim, just going along with it, there are others whose contribution to the building up of group membership over against the ‘fairy' is, let us say, motivated by a curious personal enthusiasm, who have developed, let us say, firmer reasons than most for considering the other guy to be ‘evil' or ‘not one of us'. [emphasis added]

Now, let us suppose that our class ‘fairy' suddenly comes back to the school from elsewhere in Venezuela, free, happy, with no sense of revenge, delighted to see his former classmates. Let us begin to imagine what it is like to be in their shoes. Especially for those who were to some extent half-aware of how important it was for them that this guy occupied the place he had in their own constellation of emotional and social life, the return of the class fairy might be seriously destabilizing. If he came back breathing threats and vengeance, that wouldn't be so destabilizing, because he would still be occupying the place of shame which they had given him, but would be merely occupying it as one trying to turn the tables with an inversion of strength.(4) But if he comes back entirely free of vengefulness, and with no desire to turn the tables on anybody, this is much more destabilizing because it completely removes the place of shame. The person who can occupy the place of shame without caring what the group thinks of him is of course a particular threat to those who have most at stake in maintaining the group identity, which is to say, those for whom the place of shame is felt to be something close to them, something that they especially fear to occupy themselves, and thus for whom the enthusiasm with which they keep alive the group structure is strongest and most personally felt.

We can imagine how some of these people might be not at all pleased to see their former class fairy back if he was free of revenge, and thus, from their point of view, in contempt of their sacred order. It is the pits of their stomachs above all which will feel him as a threat. That is step one in my reconstruction: something happened that was destabilizing, and is perceived to have something to do ‘with me' in exactly the degree to which I am bound in, with greater or lesser awareness, into both needing a place of shame, and also needing to avoid being the person who occupies that place. The ‘Other' is just there, as destabilizing.(5)

Step Two is the perception, which dawns gradually, that the other is not there, occupying this space, by accident. It is as if it begins to dawn that the class fairy was perfectly deliberately occupying that space in the first place.(6)  It's not just that he ‘got over' awful treatment which he received, thus putting into doubt the ability of the awful treatment to create, sustain and define a world. Far worse than that. It begins to become apparent that he had chosen freely to occupy that space and for a very curious reason: He knew how much the class needed there to be a place of shame in order for them to feel good; yet he also knew what a terrible diminishment of any of their capacity to be free and happy the need for that sort of group belonging leads to; and he decided to occupy the ‘place of shame' himself, not so as to attract attention to himself, not even ‘as a substitute', letting someone else off the hook, but with a far richer project in mind than that. He wanted to create the possibility that people he liked should be able to live free and happy without a place of shame and without ever needing to create one again.(7)

Here we are beginning to come to grasp that strange passivity once again. What salvation looks like is the perception of a hugely powerful loving project as having come towards us and caught us unawares, where we fitted him into our scheme, unaware that he was deliberately occupying that place in our scheme so as to let us off having to live in a way run by such schemes. In other words, we thought we were in control, but we weren't. And what is bizarre, and destabilizing, and perhaps the most difficult thing to grasp about the Good News is that we have not been ‘caught out' by someone who confronts us.(8) What has been ‘caught out' is the unreal, fear-bound ‘we' which we took to be the real we. But the one coming towards us is not coming towards us in the first instance as a confrontation. Much more bizarre and slower to develop than this is our perception that in order to have decided to come among us at all, and to occupy our place of shame, he must actually have really known and liked us all along....

I think that there is no Christian discourse of any sort at all that is not one undergoing this loss of ‘I' and the being discovered with a new ‘I'.(9) And I think that this is exactly what we mean when we say ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins'. What I think is meant by that phrase from our Creed is: ‘It is as "being forgiven", as undergoing, finding myself strangely passive, towards someone who is unbinding my previous way of belonging, that I am given to believe in one who knows and loves me. And this power of another, lovingly taking away the place of shame and our dependence on it, can be resisted.(10) Ever since the Gospel was first preached it has been possible to refuse the consequences of God occupying the place of shame, thus rendering it null, so that there is no longer a place of shame. It has been possible to insist on trying to maintain a place of shame, on recreating one, on refusing the collapse of the (false) sacred.(11) And this has led to families being against each other, children against parents, and vice versa. This is why the one who inaugurated it knew that he would bring not peace but a sword, but also why he knew that once done, it could not be undone, and that fighting against it is futile, sad and irrelevant. Sad for those caught up in it, because it is the definition of that which cannot be forgiven, since it is what refusing the offering of forgiveness looks like. This necessarily puts into question all our mechanisms for controlling forgiveness, which means, for ring-fencing the place of shame, which is why it is religious professionals who are the most greatly at risk since it is so easy for us to re-create a place of shame, making it seem that we have the power of forgiveness, rather than finding ourselves caught up as multipliers of the divine annulment of the place of shame. But this is irrelevant, something rather like blowing against a hurricane. There is no place of shame, and all attempts to re-create it partake of futility, refuse to dwell in the strange passivity being brought to the fulness of creation. (pp. 137-142 in "On Being Liked", by James Allison.)

1. By "description" Alison is referring to the tendency of many to assume that our task is to explain the truth in the way that modern science gets at truth: as a fact which has no essential relation to the inner subjectivity of the person. In this case, the dominant opinion is that "description" is good because it is "objective" and thus "real" while a focus on inner subjectivity is merely psychological and not real. This understanding of the meaning of subjectivity applies the wrong criterion to the task of seeking human truth, which does not come in the same form of the truths of physics and math or economics.

2. Note that the stance towards the term "describing" is that this approach is misguided. By using the word "contaminated" Alison seems to want to make the reader look twice, for it seems we are to assume that the referred to event is bad. Yet he is talking about being transformed. I believe he is anticipating the issue of shame that he will suggest is brought up inwardly when we allow ourselves to become really open to another, in this case Jesus. The experience of shame feels not unlike being contaminated, or made dirty and bad. Note the paradox.

3. I take Alison's point in saying the ostracisers did not need to read Girard to be that this phenomenon is a fundamental tendency in social life, a kind of "default" position, if you will.

4. There are two points to note here: Alison's stance towards this attempt to 'inverse the strength' is that it is bad, and the reference to inversion of strength seems to be an allusion to Jesus' command that we 'love our enemy'. When we love our enemy, we do not attempt to turn the tables, as it were.

5. Here I want to make a reference to Heidegger's notion that a fundamental trait of being (Da-sein) is that it always seeks to conceal itself. I might say something like "the self always attempts to keep a distance between its own consiousness of itself and its true self." The forms these attempts at concealment will take are relative to the constellation of stances which are dominant in any given cultural context. For us, we can be suspicious that being will conceal itself, or that is, that we will prevent our consciousness from coming into contact with our true self, in a twofold manner: by holding and cultivating the false opinion that our proper task is to ascertain the objective truth of human existence, and to attach the bad form of shame to any attempt to do otherwise, namely, seek to become senstive to and aware of inner experience of a truth which is wholly ineffable.

6. In terms of my analysis above, note the shift from experiencing this phenomenon as part of a Manichean/Jansenist/Gnostic universe to one in which free will is actually playing the dominant role. Note, too, how the reality of free will forces us to accept the responsibility for our the state of our souls in a way which is radically different than focus on fixed metaphysical claims, to which freely willed actions have little if any concrete relationship.

7. Note that the project Alison refers to is has little to do with another project, the kind that stresses theory and metaphysical truth claims. The latter may be important to the maintenance of the tradition over time, but they are not to be treated as ends in themselves. If they do not facilitate the person in the experience of his true self and the truth of human existence, they have no spiritual signification.

8. What may be an obvious point: I take "caught out" here to be like being caught off base in baseball.

9. In terms of my discussion, the focus on theory and metaphysics serves to lower the likelihood that this new understanding of self can come about. Such a focus functions as a a means of keeping the true self at bay, or distant from conscious awareness.

10. It can be resisted by us, subjectively, and this inner stance matters spiritually.

11. Here I believe Alison is alluding to that notion of sacrifice discussed above, a notion which is non-Christian.