A Critique of Religion

A theological rant (trigger warning)

One of the virtues of “apophatic” or “negative” theology is its utility as a critique of what often passes for “religion,” but is really no more than a collection of human projections. In this function, as I have written elsewhere on this blog, the apophatic dimension of theology actually bears some resemblance to many atheistic critiques of religion, such as those in the post-Hegelian tradition (e.g. Feuerbach, Marx, Kojève, et al.). What atheists so often identify as a form of ideology, built upon the shaky foundation of human consciousness, may equally and for similar reasons be identified by theologians as something approximating idolatry. If, as Feuerbach might have it, much of what is called religion is in fact no more than an elaborate projection of human sentiments, then such religion may and should be discarded by the orthodox Christian believer as narcissistic idolatry.

More concretely, it is easy to identify such forms of religion in practice. If one is Catholic in today’s day and age, one has only to go to church to hear such religion preached from the pulpit and sung from the choir loft. Reduced to a few inspiring catchphrases meant to inculcate good feelings, and accompanied by music that could have been copied from a Disney film, such religion is distorted by human projections, a reflection of human sentimentality with a pious veneer. Packaged with clever slogans and catchy jingles, it is designed to “sell”—bearing all the fetishistic qualities that Marx attributed to the commodity, around which all of life under capitalist society is organized. Just as the commodity fetish puts consumers into a vegetative stupor, making them heedless of their enslavement to a less-than-human way of life, this “religion” likewise puts its adherents into a complacent state of apathy regarding the transcendent heights and depths that are their true calling. They are content merely to be affirmed in who they are, made to feel good about themselves as they are, no longer called to transformation.

The “pure theist” recoils from such a religion no less than the pure atheist. Whatever God is, he is not that. And whatever the moral, ascetical, and religious practices of worshiping God entail, they certainly do not license the self-indulgent sentimentality that piously goes by the name of religion. On the contrary, the practical application of apophatic theology, which is what we call asceticism, consists in precisely the purification and deconstruction of all our self-made images and conceptions around God, which (as Feuerbach believed) are often no more than projections of our own selves; and therefore, it requires nothing short of the deconstruction of who we imagine our own selves to be.

In the ancient liturgical and dare I say theurgical practices of the great religions, this deconstruction of the self was often performed by means of ritual. Ritual forms of death and rebirth were understood to embody the very movement of deconstruction, followed by a kind of “reconstructive” or “resurrective” movement in turn. Yet the latter of these movements was not the reconstruction of the old familiar self, who had undergone ritual death only to be reconstituted in a new and improved form. The self rather arose as the deity, having given itself over as a kind of sacrificial immolation, and returned to its primordial source in the divine first principle of all things.

Of course, it is always possible that this latter reconstructive act be distorted by new or reinvented projections of the “old self” that was supposed to have ritually died. The god that rises may still be a fetishistic self-projection. There is thus always the risk of human, all-too-human “impurities” in religion. Some religions have taken especial care to weed out such impurities—Buddhism being perhaps the most obvious example, where no clear “reconstruction” after ritual death is offered at all. By contrast, one might suppose that Christianity is an especially easy prey to such impurities, given that two of its central tenets are that God became man and was raised from the dead. And yet this is perhaps also the central paradox of Christianity: that in the death of Jesus Christ, it professes that even God may die, thereby offering a vivid example of ritual deconstruction in which the deconstructed self is none other than the Absolute. If even the Absolute can be deconstructed, then it is all the more impossible to say what it is when it is subsequently reconstituted or resurrected. How can we possibly name the Absolute when it has transcended even itself? Buddhism’s radicalism lay in its refusal even to speak of an “Absolute” or a “God.” For this reason, it has sometimes been confusingly identified as an “atheistic religion.” Yet in this refusal there is much wisdom, for even according to a Christian apophatic theology God is properly speaking unnameable by us—all the more so after he has transcended himself by death-and-resurrection. All the names we use to refer to God—even “Being Itself”—are ultimately no more than placeholders. At the end of all our speaking, our silence is as profound as that of the Buddhists.

However, Christianity’s apophaticism is somewhat unlike Buddhism’s insofar as it first permits us to say everything we can say about God, including that God is the one and only Absolute, and then it subjects even that entire discourse to rigorous deconstruction. In other words, Christianity’s radical apophaticism is dialectically intertwined with a cataphatic excess of theological discourse—compared to which the discourse of so much contemporary “pop theology” and “pop spirituality” is intolerably rationalistic, sentimentalistic, and, for lack of a better word, domestic. Christianity’s apophasis is the negation of a certain anarchy of affirmative discourse about God—affirmative discourse pushed to its most paradoxical limits, beyond the comfortable zone of “what makes sense” or “what feels good” to us on a rational or sentimental basis. Thus, Christianity neither leaves the affirmative side of discourse to stand alone on its own two feet, without transgressing boundaries of common sense and decency, nor absolutely refuses such discourse in the name of an irrationalist preference for silence. Rather, its apophatic silence is precisely in the unreserved negation or deconstruction of an excess of speech that is deliberately pushed to its limits. Its apophasis is the deconstruction of that excess of speech which alone is appropriate to describe the Absolute. And if every act of deconstruction is followed by a higher reconstruction or resurrection, then it is only more impossible to name what is reconstituted after the death of the Absolute. Beyond the negation of all affirmations there can be no more reaffirmation: only the negation of the negation.

This is what is demonstrated in a narrative form by Christ’s death and resurrection, and it is in order to demonstrate this that God had to become man—that is, God had to visibly assume the form of the most perfect of his earthly creatures, the creature that sums up the whole universe in its microcosmic nature. This is a narrative symbol of cataphatic excess. However, as man, Christ’s death is the means by which we Christians also die—this is the act of apophatic deconstruction. It is in his death—the death of God—that we ritually participate, over and over again in the liturgical course of our spiritual growth, as a process of ongoing deconstruction followed by unnameable reconstitution. With Christ, we accept the cup of death in an act of self-renunciation (“not my will, but Thine”), negating and unraveling rather than reaffirming and amending the inner tapestry of created self-desire and its comfortable accompanying sentiments. In the presence of the Nameless Absolute, we die like Christ, in whom that Nameless Absolute is absolutely present; and we die like Isaiah, who died in some manner when he beheld the Absolute (“Woe is me!”). We die like God, who contains death within himself, because he is his own perfect and absolute self-negation. And just as the Absolute can no longer be named in any affirmative tongue after it has transcended death, neither can we.

This is all quite opposed to the obsessive cult of self-affirmation that permeates modern Christianity—which in this respect shares much in common with the more narcissistic and secularist forms of atheism (I make this qualification because, believe it or not, some atheisms are indeed the opposite of secularistic). In Christianity, this phenomenon sometimes manifests as a desire to jump ahead to the resurrection without adequately confronting the finality of death with respect to this life. It jumps ahead to a reaffirmation of a life that is still too nameable, still “human, all-too human,” because it has not died enough—has not undergone the rigor of apophatic negation, denial, and deconstruction. As a Catholic, I have to witness many funerals celebrated according to the ritual of the post-Vatican II liturgical reforms, where celebrants and bereaved family members reassure themselves that the deceased is already in heaven—practically canonized already. A traditional Catholic perspective would criticize this practice for seeming to overlook the necessity of praying for the suffering dead; but I want to add another critique: such an approach to commemorating the dead seems to betray a hidden discomfort with the fact that this life ends. We reassure ourselves, “Surely, this is not the end! This life must continue even after death!” As I have argued, eternal life is not this life in any respect that we can define or identify. Our vocation to blessedness requires absolute detachment from this life, just as our discursive ascension to the Unnameable Absolute requires the ultimate negation of all our discourse about that Absolute. Resurrection itself requires this. Anything less is rationalistic sentimentalism, even if dressed up as religion.