Why Christians Need Stand-Ins

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

In The Life of Brian, the titular protagonist gets mistaken for the Messiah, while Jesus of Nazareth goes about being some random rabbi in the background.

As the crowds start to hail their new saviour Brian, ever the reliable liberal, wants to remind everyone that “we are all individuals”. Because of that, nobody needed to listen to him or be an extension of his will. Brian then articulates one of the central pillars of Liberalism: we are all individuals. We are all fundamentally self-contained monads, with no ontological link with anyone else except via contract.

To this, the crowd shouted with one voice: “Yes! We are all individuals!”.

In spite of the inherently Enlightened protestations of Brian, postmodern culture seems to be saying something rather different. Since Michel Foucault’s conception of the “technologies of the self“, there has been  a growing recognition – at least theoretically – that individuals, even in their conception as individuals, is mediated by something outside the individual self.

This something could be clothing, uniforms, bureaucracies, social media profiles or even another person. So intimately connected are they to the conception of who we are that even articulating who we are is not possible without something or someone to stand in for us.

This is particularly acute in advertising, where our identity as consumers is up in having logos and in the images of the lives of the models on whom these logos are slapped. We desire, not just the acquisition of a the material object, but also to become the model associated with the thing.

Underneath the subtlety, however, there is a deception at work. This deception is laid by Aaron Riches and Creston Davis an essay entitled “The Theological Praxis of Revolution“. According to the essay, the kind of mediation that a consumer seeks through the model and the logo is deceptive because, metaphysically, this mediation is all occurring in the same level of immanent being. This might sound tangential, but what it means is that the kind of identity the consumer seeks in acquiring the logo and the life of the model can only come about when the model replaces the identity of the consumer. Paradoxically, in seeking to articulate our own identity through that immanent stand-in, we seek to erase our own identity, to make way for the model’s voice to speak on our behalf.

In other words, the kind of identity the consumer creates through the acquisition of goods, signs and lives, is a manufactured identity made up of a thousand prostheses. What is more, it is a manufactured identity that hundreds, if not thousands more want to emulate. Through this manufactured mediation, we paradoxically seek to assert our individuality, just like everyone else.

The kind of mediation that we see in the advertising model both articulates and fails to meet a fundamentally human need. It is a fundamentally human need to have one’s identity expressed through another because, made in the image of a Triune God who is both one and a communion, we are ontologically made for and in communion. Because of this, our identity will always be mediated through another, and the notion of expressing our self-contained, unmediated self will always be a fiction, one that advertisers and scores of other peddlers would be willing to disseminate for a price.

At the same time, this expression of one’s self through another is occurring on a different metaphysical register from advertising. While mediation via advertising presumes there is only one layer of existence, mediation in communion is sacramental. As a sacrament, the metaphysics of mediation presumes multiple layers of existence are operating at the same time. Thus, mediation does not have to – and does not – occur on the same layer of existence, and this means that mediation will not take place by the erasure of our particularity. We express our selves qua ourselves whilst simultaneously acknowledging our anthropological need to express ourselves – our logos – through the Divine and Incarnate Word.

This divine mediation is done most excellently in the Eucharist, where this union between the planes of being come to be fully expressed and present, in Christ, in the form of bread and wine. The Eucharist is a symphony of planes of existence that transcend our own, which is why when we receive the Eucharist, we can, as Augustine once said in Book VII of his Confessions, we can be absorbed by Christ and still not be obliterated in the absorption. In consuming the Eucharist we are, in the words of Christ’s voice in the Confessions, “changed into me”. The Eucharistic Christ is the divine stand-in for our own self, expressing our own self on our behalf. As he does this our own particularity, far from being obliterated, becomes more expressed than we can ever fully express ourselves, which is why Augustine described the Eucharist as both the “Body of Christ” and “what you are”.

It is because of this divine mediation, articulated in the Eucharist, that allows us to express our identity as Christians, not individually, but only through the mediation of the Body of Christ, in the Church, in the Sacraments, and in the community of believers present before us, who have gone before us, and whose presence yet lie before us.

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