Living When I Can, Dying When I Do

Photo by Christian Lambert on Unsplash

If I had a dollar for everytime I caught myself saying “wouldn’t it be nice if…”, I would be a rich man. Now would it not be nice to be a rich…?

…I mean…

What I meant to say was that I am a creature that habitually loves options, something that could be an alternative for that which I must face in the here and now. Luckily (or not), I do not seem to be alone.

In his The Coming of the Body, the philosopher and financial consultant Herve Juvin spoke of the production of the endless variety of options that the human body can become as a result of the proliferation of medical technologies from cosmetics to accessories to surgical procedures. In a way, this production of possibility upon possibility – possible choices, possible products, possible lifestyles – constitutes a kind of immortality in postmodernity, whereby an urban heaven is available to those with the credit lines to attain it. Options are now the cultural air that we breathe.

This emphasis on providing options constitutes just one cultural outworking of a metaphysical development identified by John Milbank in Beyond Secular Order. This development, which takes place in the middle ages, saw a reversal of the priority of the actuality over potentiality (which was favoured by the Scholastics at least up until Aquinas). Instead of favouring what was actually existing, this reversal led to a fetish of what could possibly exist.

Over time, this “possibilism” developed into a cultural form where life is to be found in the possibility of choice rather than the actual choice itself. In a world of possible choices, an actual choice ends that panoply of possibilities, and with that, actual choice, life itself comes to an end.

And here we start to get a bit of an insight into why, in our consumer culture, the thrill of shopping is not so much in the actual acquisition of the thing being bought. Rather, it is the possibility that something could be bought, or where the possibility of a relationship is seen as more primary and life-giving than the actual relationship one is in, or where the possibility of what a body can become is seen as more symbolic of life abundant than the actual body (I have explored this consumer logic at work in the porn industry with Shane O’Neill of Proven Ministries)

In a way, this fetish of the possible forms the core of the cultural challenge to the missionary, more so than the actual existence of other religions or the actual atheism we see today. The challenge is not so much to be in a position where one chooses Christ over others, but rather to encourage him or her to first see an actual choice as the beginning of life rather than the end of it, and then see that real life begins in the choice of loving Christ.

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