mönchsleben

[fehlgeleitet]

ja ich zumindest bin gespannt

[Tarvoc]

The death of the Roman Empire on the cross of history, and its rebirth as the Holy Spirit

Hegel once famously argued that in Christ, God himself dies on the cross, and that therefore, Christianity was essential to opening the door to the development of modern Atheism and Enlightenment. In a similar vein, albeit with different (namely, Catholic) intentions, Gilbert Keith Chesterton has argued that in Christ and his outcry – "Father, why have you forsaken me" – God himself for a brief moment is not only king of the world, but also a rebel. In his work The Puppet and the Dwarf, Slavoj Žižek takes up these two arguments to bring to light what he calls the "subversive" side of Christianity – the side of it which is, according to Žižek, capable to disturb the social order. However, Žižek's argument stays oddly confined within the framework of Christian theology. In particular, Žižek fails to apply to it the two most important theoretical resources of his own critical thought – Psychoanalysis, and Historical Materialism. Bruno Bosteels has already filled in one of these gaps by giving a critique of Žižek's argument from a psychoanalytic point of view in his book Freud and Marx in Latin America. With this brief essay, I want to fill the other gap.

In the history of thought, there are rare moments when theory manages to overrun history and conceptually anticipate social realities that will come to existence only later. Christianity's belief of God's death on the cross and his subsequent rebirth in the Holy Spirit is such a moment. The death of the Roman Empire and its rebirth in the Roman Catholic Church executed in the real world what the tale of God's death and rebirth had anticipated in the realm of ideas. It is an adequate description to say that the Roman Empire took over Christianity (not the other way around) as its main ideological vehicle, and later, when it finally transubstantiated itself into the Roman Catholic Church, even as its main principle of organization, thereby ensuring its survival apparently "for all eternity". However, it is inadequate to describe this takeover as a "corruption" of the original idea of Christianity by Roman Imperialism, like some Christian renewal movements have done in the past. On the contrary, I want to argue that being taken over by the Empire and serving as its vehicle for an ideological rebirth was what Christian theology itself anticipated all along, and that this is explicit in its own mythology of the death of Christ on the cross and his rebirth. From the very beginning, Christianity spelled out its intentions for the whole world to see. At the very moment when the old Empire was on the precipice of death, Christianity would serve as the ideological (and later organisatory) vehicle for the Empire's own rebirth, therefore serving to ensure the Empire's eternal continuation in the form of the Holy Spirit, i.e. the church. It is possible to (in a variation of Chesterton's idea) see this as an Empire rebelling against itself. However, Bruno Bosteels has already pointed out that the core phrase in Chesterton's argument is "for a moment" – God only turns into a rebel in order to bind even the rebels to his eternal rule. His rebellion is therefore just as meaningless as Louis XVI.'s gesture of taking up the blue and red cockade of the French Revolution while at the same time conspiring behind the scenes to subject France to his own rule again. A revolution that is incited by the king himself in order to ensure the restructured continuation of his own rule simply isn't a revolution proper. Žižek tries to weasel around this point by giving the (pseudo-)Hegelian argument that the Substance that has come to itself in the dialectical process is not the same Substance that started this process in the first place. [[The reason why I believe this argument to be not properly Hegelian is because it relies on a non-Hegelian understanding of identity. What it fails to see is that in the dialectical process, identity and non-identity are both sublated into the identity of both – which would be properly trinitarian in this context, but would of course also confirm the argument that the rebirth of Christ in Christianity is not truely a break of God's divine power over man.]] Interestingly enough, Žižek's argument is strangely un-Christian – to the point where it could easily be called an Arian heresy, because it essentially amounts to saying that the Holy Spirit is another God, a different and distinct entity from God the Father. No Christian, whether catholic or protestant, would ever claim something like this. To them, the Holy Spirit is the same substance as God the Father, only in the mode of a different economy. Giorgio Agamben has given a more substancial immanent critique of Christianity than Žižek by turning these two categories from head to toes. Once again, Christian theology spelled out the truth of its relation to the Roman Empire for all the world to see. Christianity had successfully taken up the task of preserving the "substance" of the Roman Empire after the transition of the economy of western civilization from antiquity to medieval feudalism – a different economy indeed, in the literal sense of the term. It wasn't a task that it took up reluctantly at some point in history, or which it was tricked into taking up. It was the historical role for which it was created, and which it had explicitly spelled out from the very beginning. Despite what some liberation theologists claim, Christianity itself was never a revolutionary movement. It was, from its very beginning, an ideological pacifier for the revolutionary movements that developed on a regular basis in the late days of the Roman Empire, collecting them and leading them in directions that allowed the Empire to integrate them seamlessly until it could find a way to transubstantiate itself so as to survive its own death. It was back then what it still is today: the opiate of the people.

[fehlgeleitet]

ohne schwarz-rote fahne wäre ich eben von zigeunern ausgegangen.

jetzt verstehe ich was du mit verarmungsprogramm meinst. oha, so möchte ich nicht leben.

ich frage mich grad was wichtiger ist: Wasser, Strom oder Gas?

Ich sage Strom, außer wenn du erfrierst oder verdurstest.

[Tarvoc]

Internetzugang natürlich.

Kleiner Scherz. Kommt auf die Situation drauf an, würde ich mal sagen...

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