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I just finished Rene Girard’s latest.

Lots of good stuff buried among some pretty detailed early 19th century European history that I knew (and still know) almost nothing about.

I get the sense even more strongly with this work than with the last thing I read of his: this is only the beginning. There is a TON of work to be done in developing these ideas, applying them to other fields and communicating them in a graspable way to everyone else. This is top on my list of a book to write, if I can ever get my brain cells properly alligned and my act together.

One other note. I LOVE it when authors show some humility. I swear nobody does this near often enough. It would cause people to take them MORE seriously, not less.

Early on, he makes reference to several chapters of his 1970’s work Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World (the first book of his that I read) and he admits that he’s completely rethought some parts of it and tossed out some his earlier conclusions. I see writers and theologians change their mind about stuff all the time, but very few who will dare to mention it. Geesh.

In several spots he also refuses to explore a topic because of his own lack of knowledge. Girard is a huge brain, but he is hesitant to discuss Hegel’s philosphophy in much detail for fear of making mistakes. The same goes for Islam. In contrast, pundits on TV seem unfraid to spout off about, well, you freakin’ name it.

I’ll write up some more notes on this later.

Here’s the real short edition:

1. Occam’s Razor

Which answer is more simple? That the narrative of Revelations describes an intricate political conspiracy that can only be illumined through cryptic numerology from prophecies of Daniel where every time he says “weeks” it is actually supposed to mean something else (years, generations, 7 years, etc.) to make everything fit? Every few years a new full-length book comes out explaining how this is supposed to all line up.

OR

That all but the last couple chapters of Revelation describe the early persecution of the church, the folks John was actually writing to?

2. Defeatist Strangeness

I believe the gospel is the story of Jesus Christ redeeming all of creation. Letting it all go to hell for a few years in theatrical fashion just doesn’t jive with the theology of the victory of Christ, pretty much anything Jesus spoke in the gospels (check the red letters), and plenty of other more solidly grounded theologies. When you look at the big picture view of the Bible, with all it’s promises and God dealing with man, the rapture/tribulation looks like something somebody duct-taped onto the right-hand edge of a mural.

3. Recent novelty

The rapture is a young idea. It’s virtually unheard of before the 19th century. Even today, internationally, it is largely a contemporary American belief.

4. Smart guys think otherwise.

Pick your favorite apostle (they never articulated it), early church father or reformer. Origin, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, etc. Despite its popularity in some circles, plenty of smart (and completely orthodox) guys today (N.T. Wright, etc.) think it’s ridiculous.

So there you go. I’m too tired to go into details. I’m also pretty wary of ever bringing this up in real conversations. Smile and nod is the standard practice most of the time.

Man may be master of his fate, but he has a precious poor servant. It is easier to command a lapdog or a mule for a whole day than one’s own fate for half-an-hour.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome, p.299

Theologians, philosophers, and psychologists slice man in different ways, and there is no use trying to make the sections coincide.

That is a great quote and true to boot. All three disciplines and their associated words and phrases can be helpful. However…

Psychologists should be wary of dabbling in theology, lest they bite off way more than they can chew.

There have been great Christian psychologists, but not when they got their theology and psychology too mixed up.

Theologians should not be dismissive of psychology, nor scared of it.

Theology and philosophy intersect a lot, but again, they can become too mixed up. Calvin’s Institutes are pretty good when he sticks with the Bible, but can go south at times when there is too much Plato.

Philosopher’s should make themselves a bit more useful by incorporating (or at least being aware of) some psychology. They should also do their homework before talking theology. That homework would include prayer.

After this quote, Erikson goes on to comment on Luther’s theology:

The main point to be made here is Luther’s new emphasis on man in INNER conflict and his salvation through introspective perfection. Luther’s formulation of a God known to individual man only through the symbolism of the Son’s Passion redefined the individual’s existence in a direction later pursued in both Kierkegaard’s existentialism and Freud’s psychoanalysis – methods which lead the individual systematically to his own borders, including the border of his religious ecstasies.

Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.214

I found this to be a rather fascinating passage from Erikson’s Young Man Luther as it offers a window into what an astute outsider sees when examining Christianity. Some of the his observations are disturbingly accurate while in the same breath completely miss the point. Here it is with a few comments along the way.

Christianity also had its early organizational era. It had started as a spiritual revolution with the idea of freeing an earthly proletariat for victory in another world after the impending withering of this one.

Well, I don’t blame him for coming to this conclusion. Just look at where Left Behind theology has gotten us regarding the “withering of the world”. This doesn’t jive with Jesus’ message about the redemption of all creation, or the New Jerusalem in John’s vision, or the Christus Victor perspective of the early church, or the last two millenia. What he is assuming is a gnostic position that might look compatible with the 1st grade Sunday School version of Christianity, but not much else.

But as always, the withering comes to be postponed; and in the meantime, bureaucracies must keep the world in a state of preparedness. This demands the administrative planning and the theoretical definition of a double citizenship: one vertical, to take effect WHEN; and one horizontal, always in effect NOW.

Is that why the church was increasingly institutionalized? The “delayed parousia”? That explains most of it I think.

The man who first conceived of and busily built the intersection of the horizontal and the vertical was St. Paul, a man converted out of a much too metropolitan identity conflict between Jewish rabbi, Roman citizen, and Greek philosopher not to become an empire-builder and doctrine-former.

Though it may not be accurate, I love that introduction to Paul. What other conclusion about the personality of Paul could a non-believer come to if he were to take a close look at the NT?

His much-traveled body reached Rome only to be beheaded; but his organizational testament merged with that of Christ’s chosen successor, the sturdy Peter, to eventually establish in the capital of the horizontal empire of Rome a permanent anchorage and earthly terminal for all of man’s verticals. (Luther, in his first theological restatements, was identifying with Paul’s evangelical identity: he did not know, until it was to be foisted on him, how much he was preparing to identify with Paul’s managerial fervor, his ecclesiastic identity, as well.)

Here, secular Erikson sees Peter as Jesus’s “successor”, which if you see Jesus as a political or social figure (Erikson also wrote a biography of Ghandi) then I guess that makes sense. Even if you believe Peter was meant to be the first pope, I don’t think this is the language you would use.

The sacrifice, in whose blood the early gnostic identity had flourished, was gradually sacrificed to dogma; and thus that rare sublimation, that holiday of transcendence, which alone had been able to dissolve the forces of the horizontal, was forfeited. Philosophically and doctrinally, the main problem became the redefinition of the sacrifice so that its magic would continue to bind together, in a widening orbit, not only the faith of the weak and the simple, but also the will of the strong, the initiative of the ambitious, and the reason of the thinking. In each of these groups, also, the double citizenship meant a split identity: an eternal, always impending, one, and one within a stereotyped hierarchy of earthly estates. For all of these groups an encompassing theology had to be formulated and periodically reformulated.

-Erik Erikson, Young Man Luther, p.180

The double-citizenship, bringing together the weak and strong in submission to Christ – he’s hitting on so many important features but the hammer is slipping off the head of the nail.

“the main problem became the redefinition of the sacrifice so that its magic would continue to bind together” – This is another outsider view, this time looking at the mass in particular and other Christian dogma in general. Could this phrase not be used to critique our contemporary “worship experience” church gatherings as well?

At the same time, Erikson doesn’t really believe in the magic behind the “magic”. He is treating Christianity as an interesting social phenomenon, not something earth-shaking that really happened. He denies that it has any real power beyond that “binding together” of community and the psychological impact inside the individual. But we say those things are in fact, secondary to Jesus’ originating action.

Going on a journey to “find yourself” and discovering nobody is home sounds like a gag Chesterton would make frequent use of. In fact, he did! And it’s opposite, which he preferred: the man boards a ship to far off adventure, only to find himself at home.

Without self-respect, one runs away to find oneself and finds no one at home

-Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, quoted by Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.321

For us protestants and evangelicals who are dismayed at how worship services have often been turned into circuses, Rome can sometimes look appealing. Ah, but they a lot of the same trouble, and the same reactions!

My husband used to describe himself as “a member of a church that no longer exists.” Having been raised a Roman Catholic in the pre-Vatican II era, he was disoriented by wedding or funeral services in the contemporary Church. He heard the Mass as a not particularly inspired translation from the Latin, and was indignant that a gender bias had sometimes been imposed in English where none existed in the original. He was glad to see altar girls alongside altar boys, but in annoyed him that many of the kids could not recite the Nicene Creed from memory. The schmaltzy hymn tunes, some lifted from Broadway musicals, made him laugh. At times he would remark, “My mother would not recognize this place as a Catholic church.”

-Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.238

Several of my RC friends attend a traditionalist perish where the mass is said in Latin, the women wear head-coverings, and they sing each part of high mass. Pushing a bit further out, there is a rather large SSPX community not far north of here. There is certainly some common ground on which to relate.

Idleness, in the medieval view, means that a man renounces the claim implicit in his human dignity…He does not want to be as God wants him to be, and that ultimately means that he does not wish to be what he really, fundamentally, IS… The contrary of acedia is not the spirit of work in the sense of the work of every day, of earning one’s living; it is man’s…affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God – which is to say love.

-Josef Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, quoted by Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.309

Introspection is very useful, to a point. Then you just have to get off your butt and do something, even if you don’t have all the answers or details. This is why a determined simple-minded person can often get more done than the next guy who may be quite a bit smarter. I’m preaching to myself here – on who is not stranger to lacking brains AND motivational energy.

Psychoanalysis is good at explaining things, but it is not an efficient way to change them. When I hear of psychoanalysis being used to ameliorate depression, I think of someone standing on a sandbar and firing a machine gun at the incoming tide.

-Andrew Solomon, Quoted by Kathleen Norris, Acedia & Me, p.267