Jesus the undefined banner
6
MADNESS
We still have not exhausted this subject of the leap. There are other areas where it shows itself. A recent book by Michel Foucault called Madness and Civilization1 is important here. In a review of the book in The New York Review of Books (November 3, 1966), entitled “In Praise of Folly,” the reviewer Stephen Marcus of Columbia University comments, “What Foucault is finally against, however, is the authority of reason. . . . In this Foucault represents an important tendency in advanced contemporary thought. In his despair of the transcendent powers of rational intellect he embodies one abiding truth of our time—the failure of the nineteenth century to make good its promises.” In other words, the heirs of the Enlightenment had promised that they would provide a unified answer on the basis of the rational. Foucault maintains correctly that it has not fulfilled its promise. The reviewer continues: “This is partly why he turns at the end to the mad and halfmad artists and thinkers of the modern age. . . . Through their utterances the world is arraigned; mediated by their madness, the language of their art dramatizes the culpability of the world and forces it to recognize itself and reorder its consciousness. One cannot, in good conscience, deny the force and truth of these observations; they catch a reality of the intellectual situation of the present moment—a moment that is coming to think of itself as post-everything, post-modern, post-history, post-sociology, post-psychology. . . . We are in the position of having rejected the nineteenth and twentieth century systems of thought, of having outworn them without having transcended them with new truth, or discovered anything of comparable magnitude to take their place.”
In other words, the rationalists have not found any kind of unity or any other hope of a rational solution. So we find that Foucault follows Rousseau’s thought to its conclusion: the ultimate in autonomous freedom is being crazy. It is a fine thing to be crazy, for then you are free.
THE NON-RATIONAL—THE REAL FREEDOM IS MADNESS
THE RATIONAL—MAN IS DEAD
It may be objected that this is a unique idea which Foucault and the reviewer have had, and it is therefore unimportant as totally extreme. And yet serious drugtaking is a self-imposed and, it is hoped, temporary mental illness. The results of drug-taking and schizophrenia are remarkably parallel, and this fact is understood by many drug-takers—and there are literally thousands taking drugs today. Newsweek (February 6, 1967) tells of hippies in San Francisco using the tune of “We Shall Overcome” to the words “We Are All Insane.” Foucault is not too far removed from Aldous Huxley. He is not to be thought of as too isolated to be of importance in understanding our day and in understanding the end of duality and dichotomy. The logical end of the dichotomy, in which hope is separated from reason, is the giving up of all reason.
THE “UPSTAIRS” IN FILM AND TELEVISION
This almost monolithic concept can be felt in the cinema and television as well as in the other areas to which we have already referred. The gifted cinema producers of today—Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, Slesinger, the avant-garde cinema men in Paris, or the Double-Neos in Italy—all have basically the same message. People often ask which is better—American or BBC television. What do you want—to be entertained to death or to be killed with wisely planted blows? That seems to be the alternative. BBC is better in the sense that it is more serious, but it is overwhelmingly on the side of the twentieth-century mentality. I happened to hear that program on BBC television when the four-letter word was used. Such usage is obviously a serious departure from old standards, yet I would say if we were given a choice and had to choose, let us have ten thousand four-letter words rather than the almost subliminal presentation on English television of twentieth-century thinking without the four-letter words. The really dangerous thing is that our people are being taught this twentieth-century mentality without being able to understand what is happening to them. That is why this mentality has penetrated into the lower cultural levels as well as among the intellectuals.
Bergman said that all the first films he made were intended to teach existentialism. He then came to the view, like Heidegger before him, that this was not adequate. He therefore made a film—The Silence—which showed the radical change. The Silence is a statement of the belief that man is really dead. It introduced a new kind of cinema—the camera eye simply looks at life and reports it as meaningless in non-human terms. The film is a series of pictures with no human statement connected with them.
This outlook appears too in the “black” (nihilistic) writers of our day. This was also the importance of Capote’s In Cold Blood. One of the things almost all the reviewers noticed concerning Capote’s book is that there is no moral judgment made. It simply reports—he picked up the murder weapon and did this—the same kind of statement a computer, hooked up to a camera eye, would be able to make about it. Many people looked to The Silence and In Cold Blood, as well as to the works of other avant-garde writers, to open up a whole new area of cinema and literature. But what kind of cinema and literature is it? It has no judgments, no human elements, only statements that a camera or computer could make. Here is a vivid statement that the downstairs man is dead.
However, the most startling cinema statement today is not that man is dead downstairs but the powerful expression of what man is above the line after the leap. The first of these films was The Last Year at Marienbad. This is not my guess. The film’s director explained that this is what he wanted the film to show. That is the reason for the long, endless corridors and the unrelatedness in the film. If below the line man is dead, above the line, after the non-rational leap, man is left without categories. There are no categories because categories are related to rationality and logic. There is therefore no truth and no non-truth in antithesis, no right and wrong—you are adrift.
Juliet of the Spirits is another of several pictures of this kind. A student in Manchester told me that he was going to see Juliet of the Spirits for the third time to try to work out what was real and what was fantasy in the film. I had not seen it then but I saw it later in a small art theater in London. Had I seen it before I would have told him not to bother. One could go ten thousand times and never figure it out. It is deliberately made to prevent the viewer from distinguishing between objective reality and fantasy. There are no categories. One does not know what is real, or illusion, or psychological, or insanity.
Antonioni’s Blow-up is the latest statement of the same message, the portrayal of modern man upstairs without categories. It underlines the vital point here: the fact that there are no categories is the reason that once the dichotomy is accepted, it is immaterial what one places upstairs.
UPPER STORY MYSTICISM
The mysticism with nobody there, as we have termed it earlier, is therefore a mysticism without categories, so it does not matter upstairs whether you use religious or non-religious terms, art-symbol systems, or pornography.
The same principle characterizes the New Theology—not only is man dead below the line, but below the line God is dead also. The “God is Dead” theologians say very clearly—“What is the use of talking about God in the upper story when we do not know anything about him. Let us say quite honestly that God is dead.” With the background we have traced in general culture you can now see why these theologians are tired of the game. Why bother with all these godwords? Why not just say it is all over, we accept the rational conclusion of the downstairs that God is dead.
So current liberal theology can be set out like this:
NON-RATIONAL
JUST THE CONNOTATION WORD “GOD”—NO CONTENT CONCERNING GOD—NO PERSONAL GOD
RATIONAL
GOD IS DEAD
MAN IS DEAD
Upstairs, with the vacuum we have been talking about, they have no idea that there is anything that is in real and true correlation with the connotation borne along with the word “god.” All they have is a semantic answer on the basis of a connotation word. Up above, the New Theology is left with the philosophic other, the infinite, impersonal everything. This brings us in Western thought into proximity with the East. The new theologian has lost the unique infinite-personal God of biblical revelation and of the Reformation. Liberal theology of the current thinking has only god words as a substitute.
T. H. Huxley has proved to be a discerning prophet in all this. In 18902 he made the statement that there would come a time when men would remove all content from faith and especially pre-Abrahamic scriptural narrative. Then: “No longer in contact with fact of any kind, Faith stands now and forever proudly inaccessible to the attacks of the infidel.” Because modern theology has accepted the dichotomy and removed the things of religion from the world of the verifiable, modern theology is now in the position grandfather Huxley prophesied. Modern theology now differs little from the agnosticism or even the atheism of 1890.
So then, in our day, the sphere of faith is placed in the non-rational and non-logical as opposed to the rational and logical; the unverifiable as opposed to the verifiable. The new theologians use connotation words rather than defined words—words as symbols without any definition in contrast to scientific symbols that are carefully defined. Faith is unchallengeable because it could be anything—there is no way to discuss it in normal categories. Hundreds of years before, Aquinas had set up autonomous sections in his theological-philosophical system. The New Theology today is the result.
JESUS THE UNDEFINED BANNER
The God is Dead school still uses the word Jesus. For example, Paul van Buren in The Secular Meaning of the Gospel says that the present-day problem is that the word “god” is dead. He goes on to point out, however, that we are no poorer by this loss, for all that we need we have in the man Jesus Christ. But Jesus here turns out to be a non-defined symbol. They use the word because it is rooted in the memory of the race. It is Humanism with a religious banner called Jesus to which they can give any content they wish. You find, therefore, that these men have made a sudden transference and slipped the word Jesus as a connotation word into the upper story. So notice once more that it does not matter what word you put up there—even biblical words—if your system is centered in the leap.
This emphasizes how careful the Christian needs to be. In the Weekend Telegraph of December 16, 1966, Marghanita Laski speaks of the new kinds of mysticisms which she sees developing and says, “in any case how could they be shown to be true or false?” The sum of her point is that men are removing religious things out of the world of the discussable and putting them into the non-discussable, where you can say anything without fear of proof or disproof.
The evangelical Christian needs to be careful because some evangelicals have recently been asserting that what matters is not setting out to prove or disprove propositions; what matters is an encounter with Jesus. When a Christian has made such a statement he has, in an analyzed or unanalyzed form, moved upstairs.
NON-RATIONAL—AN ENCOUNTER WITH JESUS
RATIONAL—ONE DOES NOT SET ABOUT PROVING OR DISPROVING PROPOSITIONS
If we think that we are escaping some of the pressures of the modern debate by playing down propositional Scripture and simply putting the word “Jesus” or “experience” upstairs, we must face this question: What difference is there between doing this and doing what the secular world has done in its semantic mysticism, or what the New Theology has done? At the very least the door has been opened for man to think it is the same thing. Certainly men in the next generation will tend to make it the same thing.
If what is placed upstairs is separated from rationality, if the Scriptures are not discussed as open to verification where they touch the cosmos and history, why should one then accept the evangelical upstairs any more than the upstairs of the modern radical theology? On what basis is the choice to be made? Why should it not just as well be an encounter under the name Vishnu? Indeed, why should one not seek an experience, without the use of any such words, in a drug experience?
Our urgent need today is to understand the modern system as a whole and to appreciate the significance of duality, dichotomy and the leap. The upstairs, we have seen, can take many forms—some religious, some secular, some dirty, some clean. The very essence of the system leads to the fact that the type of words used upstairs does not matter—even such a well-loved word as “Jesus.”
I have come to the point where, when I hear the word “Jesus”—which means so much to me because of the Person of the historic Jesus and his work—I listen carefully because I have with sorrow become more afraid of the word “Jesus” than almost any other word in the modern world. The word is used as a contentless banner, and our generation is invited to follow it. But there is no rational, scriptural content by which to test it, and thus the word is being used to teach the very opposite things from those which Jesus taught. Men are called to follow the word with highly motivated fervency, and nowhere more than in the new morality which follows the New Theology. It is now Jesus-like to sleep with a girl or a man if she or he needs you. As long as you are trying to be human you are being Jesus-like to sleep with the other person, at the cost, be it noted, of breaking the specific morality which Jesus taught. But to these men this does not matter because that is downstairs in the area of rational scriptural content.
We have come then to this fearsome place where the word “Jesus” has become the enemy of the Person Jesus and the enemy of what Jesus taught. We must fear this contentless banner of the word “Jesus” not because we do not love Jesus but because we do love him. We must fight this contentless banner, with its deep motivations, rooted into the memories of the race, which is being used for the purpose of sociological form and control. We must teach our spiritual children to do the same.
This accelerating trend makes me wonder whether, when Jesus said that toward the end time there will be other Jesuses, he meant something like this. We must never forget that the great enemy who is coming is the anti-Christ. He is not anti-non-Christ. He is anti-Christ. Increasingly over the last few years the word “Jesus,” separated from the content of the Scriptures, has become the enemy of the Jesus of history, the Jesus who died and rose and who is coming again and who is the eternal Son of God. So let us take care. If evangelical Christians begin to slip into a dichotomy, to separate an encounter with Jesus from the content of the Scriptures (including the discussable and the verifiable), we shall, without intending to, be throwing ourselves and the next generation into the millstream of the modern system. This system surrounds us as an almost monolithic consensus.