War Without End, Amen
My guilty pleasures are manifold, and one of them is listening to the Parcast podcast series Secret Societies. In my most recent conference trip to the Pneumatology at the Beginning of the Third Millenium conference (organised by the University of Notre Dame Australia), I listened to a two-parter on the neo-nazi satanist group, the Order of Nine Angles (ONA).
There are a number of aspects of ONA ideology that warrant attention (imagine an amalgam of National Socialism, the occult and Star Wars), but the aspect of the group that the public became most familiar with were the frequent acts of violence perpetrated by the group.
At one level, inciting violence was a means of disruption against what they saw as a false order imposed upon by a civilisation that was infected with Capitalism, Communism and Christianity. In this context, violence was a reaction against an external force.
At another level, however, violence was more than a mere reaction. Even when unprovoked, the ONA still resorted to violence as a means of expressing the superiority of Aryans over other races. In many respects, the ONA manifested one of the central tenets of Nazi ideology, in which conflict was not epiphenomenal, but expressive of the most fundamental condition and most natural state of things, where things became truer to themselves.
You can see this echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s view that violence was integral to the dynamic of history and thus integral to a person’s true identity. Set against this backdrop, order is not fundamental to the condition of things. Instead, there is a fundamental absence - a form of nihilism - and order as a regulated system was considered to be unnatural, and a hindrance to the proper development of persons. To borrow from Hegel (who wrote a better part of a century before Nietzsche), dialectic and struggle do not undermine order, but instead are the constitutive elements of it.
Many of us, including many of us Christians, might rightfully balk at the racism and the violence. That being said, what I have noticed of late is the tendency among Christian commentators to, even if unintentionally, work off the same Hegelian and Nietzschean presumption of violence as the most fundamental constitutive reality. In other words, there are Christians whose comments betray a tendency towards the same nihilism as those of Nietzsche.
At the most extreme end of this, I have been privy to comments that what Christians need to revive the faith was not the spread of the Gospel, but another war of religion, which laid the seedbed to the flourishing of the faith in the counter-Reformation. Such comments at this extreme end of the spectrum are not frequently espoused.
More subtly, and more frequently espoused are tropes from the Christian commenterati who, in the same breath as they speak of the spread of the Gospel (and perhaps even before that), describe a state of conflict that is so fundamental that remains, even when the Gospel is preached and accepted. Usually, these comments emerge in contexts where political committments are treated as more fundamental committments to the Gospel. Progressive voices in this vein may speak of structures of exclusion, patriarchy and so on, while conservative voices in this vein may speak of the “culture war” as an ongoing state of affairs (apropos to this is a Church Life Journal podcast on the “culture war mentality” that might be helpful). Against this backdrop, little mention is made of the Gospel as an event, something that cuts across and undoes the dialectic. Instead, what is more frequently heard is the exhortation for the Gospel to enter into the conflict, become but one party in that conflict, play by that conflict’s rules, and ultimately become the most dominant belligerent in that conflict. Then, and only then, can the light of Christ shine through and the life of faith revived.
While I was wary of such statements, it took a long time for me to work out the reason why. What helped me in greatly in this respect was a remark by Rene Girard in his book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World.
At the heart of the problem, Girard argued, is the fact that civilisation, even ones that profess to be Christian, have never been adequately converted to Christ. Among the many fruits of this lack of conversion to Christ, key among them was the inability to imagine a condition that is free of any rivalry or conflict. By contrast, an important aspect of Christ’s work of salvation was providing a way for humanity to imagine a path out of rivalry. In Girard’s words:
Christ plays this role for all who remain scandalized by the wisdom embodied in the text. His role, though understandable, is paradoxical, since he offers not the slightest hold to any form of rivalry or mimetic interference. There is no acquisitive desire in him. As a consequence, any will that is really turned toward Jesus will not meet with the slightest of obstacles. His yoke is easy and his burden is light. With him, we run no risk of getting caught up in the evil opposition between doubles.
In other words, for Girard, Christ undoes rivalry because Christ has no rivals, and he has no rivals because he has no desire to acquire things that other rivals would also want (among the things we can include “power” to this list). The life of the Christian, therefore, is the following of Christ’s renunciation of rivalry, by simultaneously renouncing the things that lead to rivalry.
The extent to which we as Christians presume rivals are an ever-abiding condition, in a way exposes the extent of our holding onto the things of this world that we will fight our rivals over, and ultimately exposes the extent of our lack of genuine conversion.
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