The Church (fragment of a thought)

[...] One is reminded here of Jesus’ reinstatement of Peter. Jesus asked Peter three questions regarding whether Peter loved him or not, which were then quickly followed by the statement “feed my sheep/lambs.” Here community love is inseparable from the call to action, to “come follow me.” It is perhaps no accident that when Peter was about to follow Jesus and asked about one of his comrades who lingered behind Jesus responded with “what is that to you,” somewhat reminiscent of his response in the incident with the man who wanted to bury his dead relative but was quickly told by Jesus that the “dead can bury their own dead.” It is as if he was saying “Do not forget your task. Your subjectivity is not composed of worrying about another’s status, but your fidelity to the mission.” Here then is the proper way to understand communitas: not as an intimate community in which we get to find out each other’s deepest feelings and personal life stories, eliminating every perceived distance between one another. Communitas must include Jesus’ “what is that to you” element... Is this not also what many community churches and communist totalitarianisms have in common: the similar drive to know each other’s private thoughts, a refusal to grant any private “inner” space, making every personal idiosyncrasy or desire part of the commons (and then often collectively punished in some way)? The Christian subject’s proper response to the injunction to confess or share some inner part of oneself is therefore: “what is that to you?” The greater truth here is the task of the Church, i.e. the task set before the emancipatory collective.

Is it possible to detect here the difference between a kind of outward objective truth and a more inward subjective one? In other words, is the striving for “understanding-each-other” not a reflection of the recognition of the truth of subjective inner experience, versus another understanding of truth not located primarily in subjective experience, but in action and in an Idea? I wonder how much the former is a reflection of a kind of Schleiermacherian influence on religious subjectivity, and indeed post-modern culture, forced no doubt by the Enlightenment and modernity, and as such is more of a symptom perhaps than an influence. When the conception of an objective yet personal God was being severely called into question by science and modern reason, the move inward was a logical one. One should, however, refer to Wilhelm Dilthey here who suggested this inward move was already present in Christianity from the beginning, against the objectification of truth by the ancient Greeks:

For the Greek mind, knowing was mirroring an objective thing in the intelligence. Now [i.e., in Christianity], experience becomes the focal point of all the interests of the new communities; but this is just simple awareness of what is given in personality and in consciousness of the self.... With the enormous interest they generate, experiences of the will and of the heart swallow up every other object of knowledge.... If this community faith had immediately developed a science perfectly appropriate to it, that science would have to rest on the foundation ultimately resting on inner experience.

It was only the necessary institutionalization of the Church for the sake of administering a fallen Roman Empire and preventing anarchy that led to the suppression of this inward move: “Indeed the remnants of the ancient social institutions, and the culture they expressed rested on the shoulders of the Church.” What if, however, one were to read this situation from a Zizekian perspective? What if this outward rigidity of the Church was indeed its very necessary political expression? It is not that “oh no, the early Church lost its true inward character, exchanging rich inward experience for cold institutional control,” but rather that the institutional Church was the direct expression of Christianity’s kingdom self-understanding. Here the Church made precisely the move from “social movement” to Universal Singular, seizing the opportunity to relate to the social totality. For this reason the Church could never make the “Cincinnatus” move and dump the Empire at first opportunity after restoring security. Its program was total and all-encompassing. It could only be forced out by other political players, and indeed it slowly was, until finally succumbing at the political level at the very moment its objective foundation was greatly undermined: i.e. the Enlightenment and the death of the objective God, the Schleiermacherian move towards inward authenticating religious experience.