Conscience and Redemption
Eros transformed by Christ brings to Birth Hope
“To be a full-fledged human being is a risky condition because of our freedom and what secures that freedom, namely, the fact that we are alert to a voice that seems to come from beyond ourselves and make a demand upon us. Conscience is an active force, a kind of violence that expresses the will to power and the instinct for freedom; it is man's capacity to give form to himself, like the way an artist imposes form on his materials” Matthew Crawford, Bad Conscience and the Ascetic Ideal, Archedelia
The impulse towards life that surges within our hearts lives at the very heart of contemplative prayer and spiritual theology. At St. Patrick’s Seminary and University, my colleagues Mark Shiffman and Adrian Walker are hosting together with Matthew Crawford this amazing seminar on vitalism - a sort of study of how this drive to excellence shapes human existence. The seminar follows an amazing series of articles sometimes presented by the authors themselves as guest lecturers. Then, there is the discussion. Each session has been intense, demanding, and insightful. And this, in turn, is followed by a flurry of email exchanges and some good writing, including here on Substack. This article is my first response to the beginning of these discussions.
Vitalism crosses the frontiers of freedom and conscience. Failures to take up the concerns of vitalism have thwarted the mission of the Church. It is not that Catholic doctrine says nothing about the impulse to live and the surging toward greatness that ought to unfold not only in the heart but also in the whole of society, but without the right questions, we never quite propose doctrine in a compelling way. For me, this study is about finding the questions that speak into the ideologies and mindsets, including the technocratic ones, that face us today. We worship machines that promise something great but provide only the comfortable and convenient. The empty promise needs to be seen for what it is for the contemporary heart to have the freedom to pursue what is meaningful. Yet we cannot prick a conscience except with a humble appeal to the truth. So, what is the truth of vitalism?
The answer begins with an unlikely source, at least for a seminary seminar. John Paul II once proposed that one of the great prophets of this new kind of atheism is Friedrich Nietzsche. Jordan Peterson admires him as a personification of the spirit of his time, the one who announced the great problem in a way that made it stark, clear and horrifying. The philosopher’s observation that “God is dead” simply confirmed for his contemporaries what they already believed (even if he goes on to help them see the implications of this that they were not willing to face). The answer was to find another way of unifying the human person in a world that does not have the sacred to unify it anymore. His thoughts on vitalism fit in here somewhere. But was his a good answer? For John Paul II, Nietzsche’s project (along with those of Marx and Freud) contributed to a culture of death, one that leaves little room for contemplation of the good, the beautiful or the true.
The irony is that Nietzsche wanted to lift up the impulse for human thriving over and against the Christian culture that he believed betrayed it. A suspicion lives in contemporary consciousness, even among those who are drawn to religious life or the priesthood, that Christianity restricts human thriving and its faith fails to answer the deeper impulses that drive one’s existence. Because of his prophetic role in raising a question that still has not been adequately addressed, his Genealogy of Morals, the first and second essays, make an important point of departure for our explorations.
I will focus on two ideas that triggered some personal memories. Specifically, he sees that freedom and conscience flow from and ought to support the surge toward excellence that human existence suffers. He proposes an explanation for the emergence of conscience and freedom in terms of the ability to promise something that will not change in the changing circumstances of the world. Mircea Eliade might identify this with the sacred but Nietzsche in these essays confines himself to commercial transactions. HIs point is that it takes inner strength to keep one’s word, that keeping one’s promises expresses one’s vitality. Conversely, not to keep one’s word is a weakness, a kind of sin against human thriving.
How does the impulse to strive for excellence overcome a broken promise? Basically, Nietzsche’s complaint against the Christian ethos (perhaps better understood as the popular self-understanding of Christianity dominant at his time) is that it thwarts the innate impulse of human striving for excellence specifically in relation to broken promises. For Nietzsche, the only way to lift up human vitality in the face of its betrayal is through retribution and even cruelty. Christianity subverted this axiom and the striving for human excellence when it held up the “weak” victim as the hero rather than the “strong” who sought to re-establish social order. Instead of shaping the world and advancing human thriving, he argues that this “Christian” ethos promotes pious pusillanimity before the challenges of life even to the point of mediocrity.
Do we not see the tendency that Nietzsche saw still at work in our post-Christian culture today? The status that we give to victims in our society is perhaps a sort of vestige of what got under the craw of the German Existentialist. We have whole University programs designed to induct future cultural leaders into a worldview of shame. Others have already observed how parents pay universities big bucks to have their children taught to self-identify as victims of a system of which the parents themselves are participants and of which they themselves are beneficiaries. Why? It is presumed that to be a victim endows one (and those who speak for him) with a moral legitimacy before which all others must submit in order to maintain social standing. Yet, this is something that is inculcated much earlier in our education system.
I learned in High School that if I were to defend an unborn baby, my voice would be instantly de-legitimized because I was male. Without finding the right words in the heat of the battle (I am a poor debater) I sensed that the womb was made for vitality and not death. The false ethos of victimhood, however, made it very difficult to assert anything of the kind. Too vain to make more of a scene than I already had, I compliantly shut my mouth. I have no idea what Nietzsche would say about an ethos of victimhood in this non-Christian context. He saw a horrifying problem, to use Peterson’s words, that his polemic against Christianity does not quite address.
In this case, unknown to my peers but certainly apropos to Nietzsche’s analysis, abortion suggests a breach in contract, a break in an implicit contract, the one between mother and unborn child. Vitality according to Nietzsche must respond to this in restitution even to the point of cruelty. Yet this breach between mother and child is deemed justifiable because the mother is dubbed, not as a vital actor, but a powerless victim. Both agency and guilt are attributed to the embryo. Because the mother is agency deprived, no one has the right to question her behavior.
The irony is overwhelming but in social circles we are restrained from saying so. Who exactly restrains us from pointing out this obvious fact? What was the un-named social force? It is not, as Nietzsche proposes, the Christian God. This means the phenomenon that Nietzsche attributed to the Christian faith has gone beyond, way beyond, what is Christian. For cultural and social purposes, the Christian God is not shaping this kind of moral ethos at all. Here, something has usurped the place of God. Perhaps, the god that he thought was dead buried itself in different bureaucratic trappings to arise as the living dead? Whatever that monster was, it swims in the storm of secularism amongst the flotsam and jetsam that was once Christendom, and consumes a dehumanizing form of homage.
Everyone worships something, even those who believe God is dead. Whatever it is that people worship today is something very different than what Christians profess. This technocratic faith does not require a living and personal god of any kind. If they do not believe it is alive, they do not believe it is dead either. Yet this god uses a victim mentality to restrain vitality far beyond anything Nietzsche could have blamed on Christianity. Whatever our peers are centering their lives around, however they are trying to hold on to order in the midst of chaos, their profession of faith is in something monstrous, more like a zombie, or the idea of one. Just as zombie is controlled by a mysterious force, the social engineers behind technocracy manipulate this religious consciousness, not to build up supermen but to nudge the masses into compliance: And their makers shall come to be like them (Psalm 115:5).
At this point, the seminar is going in a very different direction, but if you would patiently consider one more corollary. Obviously, when we speak of victim in a religious sense, we attribute a spiritual value to the victimhood. Normally, the victim in an act of worship is not saved from his plight but suffers it to the end. Such an act of worship is no random act of cruelty, but a very sophisticated activity involving sacrifice and the sacred. When done properly, in a way that is right and just, this sacrificial worship expresses the highest and most beautiful acts of human vitality. In the secularity of my public high school classroom, a less beautiful form of worship was proposed: a baby needed to be sacrificed to protect the mother, and to question this was taboo, a sacrilege against the sacred status afforded the mother, not as mother, but as victim of her own vitality.
Does Christianity promote mediocrity when it proclaims Christ crucified? To be sure, there are also approaches to Christian spirituality that are insipid and mediocre. We do live in an era of broken promises, and most of these are excused and accepted. These broken promises are only symptoms of a social disorder, what might be considered a crisis, an abdication of fatherhood. It involves a loss of heart, a loss of thumos, social courage. The will and inner strength it takes to endure the loneliness and misunderstanding that goes with marriage and family life as well as the priesthood goes beyond anything one’s own vitality can account for. But the new man, Christ, has raised up human vitality, and endowed it with a power that rises above the exigencies of time. Our promise to him is mutual: We pledge to Him our sins against vitality, and He gives us His this new vitality. If before the chaos of changing circumstances, we keep our word because of His faithfulness, something good is born into the beauty of the world. Christ came to give the power that sanctifies this impulse, not to restrain it, but to set it free as a new life giving force.
A father, a husband is in the image of the Crucified Christ, a living icon of a sacrificial love that has fundamentally transformed human history in way Nietzsche could have hardly guessed. His strength serves his wife especially in her unspoken covenant with each child she bears until she realizes the excellence of her own vitality. Analogously a priest lays down his life for the Church to help her realize the excellence of a new vitality, a new birth of something good in the beauty of the world, something so good, it redeems and sanctifies beauty itself. As long as it proclaims the truth about Christ crucified, Christianity is not the source of the obstacle to vitality, but a source of a new kind of vitalism.
Classically, another name for vitalism is what the ancients called eros. Talbot Brewer, who teaches philosophy at the University of Virginia opened up Plato’s Timaeus last week to help us unpack this connection and better understand how the ancients dealt with it. His insights confirm the direction of this essay but I will get to that in my next post. Here, I will give my colleague Dr. Adrian Walker the last word which he sent in the form of an aphorism:
If the upsurge of vital energy is going to be a will, or will-like, it has to be an upsurge towards a worthwhile end. It has to be teleological aspiration towards some good.