Professor Lough’s Blog

In today’s NYT Business section (“City Coffers Feel Impact As Building Prices Fall,” March 19, 2024), Alan Rappeport sheds light on a central principle of critical economic theory. Surface forms of appearance — in this case office buildings — are valued not for the substances out of which they are composed — offices — but for the abstract immaterial value consumed in their composition. Expressed mathematically: MPL = ΔQ/ΔL. Building space and the revenues cities receive from building occupancy has become prohibitively efficient for cities. So efficient that it no longer produces revenue for them. In the language of critical economics, this has produced a “crisis.” The good news is that efficiencies of this sort are often incubators of innovation. Ask yourself: how else might these surface forms generate value?

In volume one of Capital Marx noted:

Circulation bursts through all the temporal, spatial and personal barriers imposed by the direct exchange of products, and it does this by splitting up the direct identity present in this case between the exchange of one’s own product and the acquisition of someone else’s into the two antithetical segments of sale and purchase. To say that these mutually independent and antithetical processes form an internal unity is to say also that their internal unity moves forward through external antitheses. These two processes lack internal independence because they complement each other. Hence, if the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point, their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis. 

Penguin Edition, p. 209.

There is nothing in concrete, glass, and steel that naturally suits them for high end office suites. As the Pandemic taught many firms, the wood, brick, and stucco of gated community McMansions serve equally well or even better given fiber optic cables and a Zoom platform. Voila. Instant efficiency.

Socially, however, office buildings and office work “lack internal independence.” They have become dependent on one another. This means that “the assertion of their external independence proceeds to a certain critical point,” which according to Alan Rappeport they have, “their unity violently makes itself felt by producing — a crisis.”

One way to handle this crisis would be to transform these giants into low and moderate income housing and affordable shopping districts. Now there’s an idea. With the shortage of housing and all. Which would be fine if it weren’t for the revenue needed to maintain these giants, not to mention the capital lost to the investors who expected a more handsome return. Low and moderate income housing would generate spectacular efficiencies. Moreover, because the new occupants would be living in these units, it’s not likely they would pull up stakes and move on when they discover they work more efficiently remotely. They already are remote. Problem: the wrong people are benefiting from these efficiencies.

I feel confident that like all crises this one too will pass. As Marx noted in the passage sited above, “These . . . therefore imply the possibility of crises, though no more than the possibility.”

In 2013 the Russian Parliament passed a law banning what it called “propaganda of homosexuality.” It was part of a package of new laws and regulations that aimed at preventing Russia from succumbing to the widespread decadence and immorality widely tolerated by so-called western “democracies.”

The law simply made explicit the Russian Nationalist belief that the West aimed to destroy Russia by destroying the traditional family. To win support for their campaign, Russian Nationalists financed a global campaign to recruit sympathetic Christian nationalists around the globe.

“Two days after the law was passed, the parliamentary committees on the family and on foreign relations held a joint session attended by five foreign guests. Brian S. Brown, head of the National Organization for Marriage, formed a few years earlier to pass legislation against same-sex marriage in California, and French National Front activist Aymeric Chauprade were among them” (Gessen, The Future is History, 406-407). To wild applause, Chauprade addressed the gathering:

You must understand that patriots of countries the world over, those committed to protecting the independence of their nations and the foundations of our civilization, are looking to Moscow. It is with great hope that they are looking to Russia, which has taken a stand against the legalization, the public legalization of homosexuality, against the interference of nihilistic nongovernmental organizations which are manipulated by American secret services, and against the adoption of children by homosexual couples. Ladies and gentlemen, members of parliament, Russia has become the hope of the entire world. . . . Long live the European Christian civilization! Long live Russia! Long live France!

Gessen, The Future is History, 407.

To which some days later Vladimir Putin added:

Russia is facing a serious challenge to its identity. This issue has aspects of both morality and foreign policy. We can see many EuroAtlantic countries rejecting their own roots, including Christian values, which form the foundation of Western civilization. They reject their own moral foundations as well as all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even gender. They pursue policies that place large families on an equal footing with same-sex partnerships, and faith in god with satan worship. An excess of political correctness has led to the point that there is talk of registering political parties that promote pedophilia. In many European countries people are ashamed and frightened to talk about their religious affiliation. . . . And this is the model that is being aggressively forced onto the entire world. I am convinced that this is the road to degradation and primitivization, a deep demographic and moral crisis.

Gessen, The Future is History, 408-409.

Russia’s Christian Nationalists are the leading funders of the World Congress of Families, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, but which Christian nationalists laud as a bulwark for family values.

Christian nationalists love Putin because Putin speaks their language — the language of hate, of anti-democracy, and opposition to republican values. If Republicans in Congress are having a hard time opposing Putin and Putin’s Russia it is because, at heart, they hope that Putin wins.

Think about that. Republicans want Russia to win.

For those driven to read, but lacking the time, Covid-19 came as a godsend. I read more in three years than I had since graduate school. Among the gems that came into my hands was Catherine Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe (New York: Zone Books, 2015). As a historian of modern Europe, it was rare for me to step so far back into history, and even rarer to step back and find what I was looking for: indisputable evidence that not very long ago Christians everywhere had sought and found God in things. Walker Bynum’s Christian Materiality quickly assumed a prominent place on my shelf next to Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais, Donna Spivey Ellington’s work on the androgenization of Mary’s body, Peter Widdecombe’s research on the disappearing wounds of the glorified Christ, Jane Marie Law’s collection of religious reflections on the human body, and Sarah Cokley’s collection of essays on religion and the body. All are fine works. But Walker Bynum’s holds a special place. It offers visual proof of the challenge Thomas Aquinas faced in Part III of his Summa (1274). Thomas’ challenge was not showing how God could be present in things, for this was obvious. Thomas’ challenge was explaining why God wished to be sought and found in seven things alone: the Church’s official sacraments. Across its more than four hundred pages Walker Bynum gave visual testimony to Thomas’ challenge. Christian materiality was everywhere. Then it was nowhere. Why?

The answer often given to this question is, to put it bluntly, humanity grew up. Science, industry and free thinking banished superstitions regarding divine materiality. No divine materiality, no Christianity. Right? If God cannot be in bodies, God surely cannot be any body. That’s the end of “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.” But, no. That only applied to Jesus’ immaterial spirit, not to his body. Right? No. That would be Docetism, among the heresies named and rejected by the Council of Nicaea (325 CE).

To manage this little problem, Protestant reformers found an elegant work-around. God did not really mean to appear in flesh. Instead God meant in Jesus to show that God was not in flesh by appearing to appear under the cover of God’s opposite: flesh. God did not appear in Jesus. God dis-appeared in Jesus. No less an authority than Martin Luther called the God revealed in Jesus Deus absconditus, “the hidden God.” Seemingly overnight half of Christendom denied what for ten centuries they had affirmed. God cannot be present in things.

Science, industry, and free thinking? Hardly. Two and a half centuries before Luther tacked his ninety-five theses to the doors of Castle Church in Wittenberg, the abbot of Saint-Pierre in Ghent “instructed his fullers to install a bell in the workhouse newly founded by them near the Hooipoorte, in the parish of Saint John.” It marked the first time anywhere that the value of human action was measured not in the substances of the products it produced but in the abstract units of time consumed in their production. The abbot’s innovation quickly spread throughout Europe. Where previously Christians had measured the value of things in the substances out of which they were composed, they now measured value abstractly, immaterially, in equal, abstract, units of time. The good abbot could not have known that his simple instructions would give rise not simply to a religious revolution, but to a social and economic revolution. The year was 1324, the year capitalism was born.

Three things are worth noting about capitalism. First, it is inseparable from what economists call “marginalism.” Marginalism measures economic success (or failure) by plotting the change in outputs (goods, services, terabytes) against change in inputs (labor, capital, bitcoins). For the mathematically inclined, it looks like this: MPL = ΔQ/ΔL. More for less. If history prior to the fourteenth century appeared to be going nowhere that is because it was going nowhere. This is the second thing about capitalism worth noting. Marginalism is what leant to the modern historical epoch its directional dynamism. In the modern epoch individuals are rewarded for making more with less. But, note: “more with less” is morally and ethically agnostic. More what? This is the third thing worth noting about capitalism. The marginal product is not a thing. It is a ratio. It measures a marginal increase (or decrease) in abstract value. Back to our main story.

For two centuries the value of productive human action in Western Europe was measured in equal units of abstract time. During this same period debates over the value of things grew increasingly fierce: debates over the value of precious metals, the value of noble blood, the value of visual evidence, but also the value of relics, candles, incense, altars, pilgrimages, the bodies of the Holy Virgin and her divine Son, and, yes, also debates over the value of the Bread and Wine of the Eucharistic Feast. Science, industry, and free thought? No. Capitalism.

It will surprise no one familiar with the writings of Immanuel Kant to learn that he was raised in a strict Pietist household. Every moment of every waking hour the young Kant would have been reminded that God is not and cannot be in things. As the Pietist Philip Jacob Spener told his readers in his wildly popular Pia Desideria (1675), Christians could not meet God anywhere: not in hymns, not in creeds or confessions, not even in the Bible. They could only meet God in their hearts. It was a lesson Kant learned well. His three critiques form a masterpiece in the radical, qualitative, difference between the transcendental realm — the realm of freedom and God — and the phenomenal world of cause and effect, where (by definition) freedom and God cannot be.

Kant’s writings were so spectacularly popular (they still are) not only because he was a powerful thinker and writer. Kant translated the social world where everyone lived — the capitalist world — into concepts and language that instantly rang true. (If you don’t believe this, do a little digging in communities not yet or no longer dominated by commodity production and exchange.) Which brings us to Hegel’s heresy and (perhaps) our own.

Hegel was among a handful of early nineteenth century thinkers who read, understood, and disagreed with Kant. Hegel couched his disagreement in theological terms. Surely Kant must be aware that God has been active in history, in time, in things, from the beginning of the world. How could it be otherwise? What Kant counted as irresolvable antinomies — spirit/flesh, freedom/necessity, God/world — Hegel counted as essential elements of the Christian religion. God creates, establishes, and maintains relationships with creatures who are genuinely independent from God’s self. Their actions are not God’s actions. Their thoughts are not God’s thoughts. And, yet, they are in relationship. This relationship is what we call history. It unfolds over time. It reveals who God is and what creation is, over time. The absolute, qualitative difference between the transcendental and phenomenal worlds may make sense on paper, but history is not made up of paper. It is real. It is living. It is changing.

How is this heretical? It is heretical because it mistakes the driving force behind directionally dynamic change in the capitalist world — the immaterial value form of the commodity — for God the Creator. And the clearest evidence for this heresy is the fate at Hegel’s hands of God the Son.

I will admit, there is a macabre attraction to Hegel’s crucified God. This God finds echoes in late medieval and early modern representations of the beaten, mocked, crucified, dying and then lifeless body of the Lord. We therefore have to remind ourselves that under the conditions of early capitalism, this crucified God appears against the backdrop of the unblemished, no longer wounded, androgynous image of the risen and glorified Christ — the Cosmic Christ, we might say. These form two asymmetrical moments in the life of God. In Hegel’s story the sacrifice of the unblemished Lamb of God is necessary, but mercifully brief. Occupied Palestine, Roman guards, widows, orphans, lame, sick, and demon-possessed quickly retreat from view. What is revealed in the crucified God is the fate of every surface form of appearance under the conditions of commodity production and exchange. Every surface, including this divine surface, makes its brief, tortured, appearance only to be consumed and drawn back into a never-ending cycle of production, reproduction, consumption, and return.

We know this was Hegel’s reading, because he tells us it is. Here is what he wrote in a section of his Lectures on Aesthetics, a section critical of Kant’s interpretation of the divine.

This outward shaping which is itself annihilated in turn by what it reveals, so that the revelation of the content is at the same time a supersession of the revelation, is the sublime. This, therefore, differing from Kant, we need not place in the pure subjectivity of the mind and its Ideas of Reason; on the contrary, we must grasp it as grounded in the one absolute substance qua the content which is to be represented.

GWF Hegel, Aesthetics (Oxford UP, 1988), p. 363.

The “one absolute substance” that Protestant reformers mistook for Deus absconditus we can now appreciate as the abstract value form of the commodity. In it the surface of the Second Person of the Trinity makes a brief, tortured, appearance before retreating again into this self-moving substance that is subject. This is Hegel’s heresy. Is it also ours?

Every time I hear a report about cryptocurrency I feel depressed. Here’s why.

Currencies, including cryptocurrencies, are commodities. Under capitalism commodities derive their value from abstract labor time. Abstract labor time is not reducible to the specific labor spent producing a specific commodity. Abstract labor time counts labor too as a commodity, a commodity whose value in each specific instance takes its value from the other commodities for which it can in turn be traded. Abstract labor time is not aggregate labor time, but labor time irrespective of the specific labor performed or product produced. Its value arises from and is shaped by all of the trades among commodities within an integrated market. Since currencies too are traded within these markets, their values are calibrated to the values of all the commodities against which they are traded, including cryptocurrencies.

But individuals and institutions that trade in cryptocurrencies either feign ignorance of the underlying values of cryptocurrencies as commodities or, more likely, they are genuinely ignorant. Which means they represent that cryptocurrencies are just like official currencies, but without political interference, i.e., regulation. They are not. Here’s why.

Both cryptocurrencies and official currencies are commodities. It is also true that some currencies behave like cryptocurrencies. That is, some currencies hold values not pegged to aggregate wealth within an integrated market. In healthy economies, however, the currency is exactly equal to the aggregate wealth within the economy. This means, for example, that decreasing the volume of notes by half doubles the value of notes in circulation. Those notes are still equal to the aggregate wealth, even though their volume has been halved.

The same cannot be said of cryptocurrencies, which, like official currencies, are commodities, but not the universal commodity; i.e., the commodity exchangeable for any other commodity within an integrated market. Moreover, no currency can ever achieve this status outside of a rigorous regulatory apparatus. (If you don’t believe me, go back to your high school history textbook and read the section about the failure of US currencies (there were many) between 1783 and 1887.) So, why do so many smart people fall for cryptocurrencies?

Doubtless part of it can be chalked up to the hope that they will cash in on a bullish market. Some investors have. And part of it can also be chalked up to not exactly grasping what a currency is. But there is a small, yet loud and influential minority who more or less consciously hate the 1887 US Constitution, the Constitution that handed the regulation of the US currency over to the federal government; that authorized the federal government to regulate interstate commerce; that placed states and their constitutions under the authority of the federal government and its Supreme Court. When this small, but influential minority pillory the “nanny state,” they are lining up behind the anti-federalists, the folks who opposed the 1887 US Constitution, primarily because they felt it endangered their rights to “private property,” i.e., slaves, but also because they believed they could do better by doing it alone. That is to say, they were anti-republicans (they were against res publica, the wealth we hold in common; i.e., commonwealth).

Anti-federalism and anti-republicanism very nearly sank the US republic during its opening decade. They were based on many of the same myths as militant defenders of cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is a commodity. Its value is whatever it can be traded for within an integrated market. Today it commands some fraction of this market’s abstract labor time. Today it can be traded for some small fraction of its wealth. But it is by no stretch a universal equivalent. Nor do its defenders want it to be.

I mentioned in my last post that I am struggling with the final chapter of a manuscript titled Christ the Commodity. A close friend gave me a gentle tongue lashing about why death was not the end. This is surely the case in one of my favorite texts, First Corinthians chapters 1-2, where Saint Paul counts the foolishness of the Cross wiser than the wisdom that scoffs it. What happens when God dies? In that case, God’s intention is τὰ µὴ ὄντα, ἵνα τὰ ὄντα καταργήσῃ, to bring to nothing the things that are through the things that are not.

But reflecting on this passage led me to another. Ἔστιν δὲ πίστις ἐλπιζοµένων ὑπόστασις, πραγµάτων ἔλεγχος οὐ βλεποµένων. Hebrews 11:1. Which brings me to the substance (ὑπόστασις) of things hoped for, the evidence (ἔλεγχος) of things not seen.

The Christian argument for hope is not against evidence. It is not Kierkegaardian. It is not romantic. But nor was it a prefiguration of class analysis.

God is in the god-forsaken. That is where God is.

If one believes, as Christians must believe, that God does not abandon what God has created, it follows that we find God in what is dying. We find God at the Cross.

But, I am trying to think the social logic that leads to resurrection. And that is where I am stumped. I get it in Rome. The resistance to Roman occupation, the movement Jesus joined, with John and others, was eager to build up martyrs. Martyrs helped their cause. But translating this meme into the 21st century is taxing me.

I grasp all of the negative dialectical themes. Death is life. Death is the passage, not the wall.

But, I am actually thinking pragmatically about social action, legislation, and what leads us from abstract value to substantive value. I’m stumped.

Two hundred pages in, I find myself at a loss for words. Most of the readers of this blog can recite the argument up until this point by heart.

• From the 12th through the 13th century the Chinese escapement made its way into the Benedictine communities of Europe;
• In 1324, the abbot of the Saint Pierre, in Ghent, directed his fullers to move the clock from the chapel to the workhouse;
• The value of the textiles in the parish of Saint Jean were, from this point forward, measured in equal units of abstract time;
• All parishes soon adopt the policy of the parish of Saint Jean;
• The values of all goods throughout Europe quickly come to be measured in equal units of abstract time;
• If value is abstract and immaterial, then what is the value of the Body of the Lord?
• From the quattrocento through the 16th, the spiritual value of materiality comes into question;
• In the 16th century it is determined that Nicaea and Chalcedon are null and void — the Body of Christ is not divine;
• Navels are removed from icons; Mary’s breasts are exaggerated or removed; the crucified Jesus is brutalized; the risen Jesus is androgenized (secondary sexual characteristics removed);
• Faith is rendered immaterial: Kant, Hegel, Marx.

Christ the commodity was born when Christians in large numbers could no longer fathom how “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (Chalcedon, 451 CE) Jesus Christ was both “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God” and “true Man” (Nicaea, 324 CE). They could no longer fathom divine materiality. In this moment, Christ became a commodity, subject to the same social forces that shape all commodities and their value.

In summary chapters 2-6 document the expansion of Christ the commodity. Insofar as a commodity is a surface form of appearance whose value arises from its abstract value form, chapters 2-6 document how Christ the commodity comes to occupy the center, the core, of imperial expansion, ethno-religious nationalism, racism, sexism, and officially-sanctioned mass death. Anyone the least familiar with the New Testament will recognize how preposterous this association is. But when, in commodity societies, the Body of Christ is isolated and separated from his value form, it quickly becomes possible and necessary to fetishize the “Body of Christ” and endow it with the abstract value form of the commodity.

It is the last chapter that has me stumped. In Marx’s reading, crisis arises from the disparity between surface form and underlying value form. This is most clearly represented to us today in the climate crisis. Abstract value pulls away from its material form of appearance. And, yet, insofar as abstract value governs social relationships, we are ill-equipped to grasp, much less resolve, the climate crisis. Abstract value dominates us. For Marx the solution to this problem entails decoupling abstract labor from abstract value; essentially turning the clock back to 1323. Value does not need to be calibrated to equal units of abstract time expended. For 2.4 million years value was understood in a wide variety of different ways. Now, however, as we near the end of the story, how do we move from crisis — the ever-widening gulf between surface form and value form — to emancipatory practice?

For Christians the stakes could not be higher. They are nothing less than Nicaea and Chalcedonian Christology. This should be a cake-walk. And, yet, because the vast majority of Christians serve Christ the commodity, most Christians will fight to the death to defeat the Christ attested to at Nicaea and Chalcedon. Which makes chapter 7 a very sad story.

I need some help here. Where is hope?

Divine violence is grounded in the antagonism between the two dimensions of the commodity form: its surface form of appearance, which, under capitalism, enjoys no substantive value; and its abstract value form, which has no body, but is the force driving the reproduction and expansion of the commodity. Among Pietists this tension between surface form and underlying value form expresses itself in self- and other-violence directed against bodies; or, in the alternative, a faith that is abstract and immaterial. As a reflection of his deep piety, Immanuel Kant formalized this experience of divine violence first in his radical isolation of phenomena from the transcendental subject, and second in his analyses of the sublime. The sublime, both for Kant and for Edmund Burke, captures the consequences of infinite magnitude entering time and space. But these are all at best attempts to come to terms with living in a society structured around the production and exchange of commodities. Since the violence the value form executes against its own body establishes and validates the priority of abstract value over its body, it is deemed good.

George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was no Pietist. He roundly faulted Kant for depriving bodies of substantive value. “We must grasp [the sublime] as grounded in the one absolute substance qua the content which is to be represented,” wrote Hegel in his Aesthetics. Hegel was no Pietist. But nor was he a materialist. For Hegel it is vital to account for the directionally dynamic logic of history. He did so by crediting the Spirit with a longing to differentiate and objectify itself in such a manner that the object itself became a subject. The Spirit longed for creation. Initially, according to Hegel, creation is composed of benign particularities. Gradually over time however these particularities become conscious of their relationship with each other. They become aware of their mutual interdependence. The violence implicit in their knowing and coming to know arises from their being shaped by the other as they progress toward their full realization. This process is what we call natural and cultural history. Kant had argued that divine violence was purposive because it makes us aware of a world that is superior to embodiment. Hegel by contrast argued that divine violence is purposive because it is the process through which the divine comes to be embodied.

In our view these are but two different ways of talking about the two-fold form of the commodity. Here is how Marx put it:

[Value] is constantly changing from one form into the other, without becoming lost in this movement;  it thus becomes transformed into an automatic subject. If we pin down the specific  forms of appearance assumed in turn by self-valorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucidation: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming  the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off  surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. . . . But  now,  in  the  circulation  M-C-M´,  value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a  process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there  is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were.

Capital, I.iv.

What many readers of Marx do not know is that this is very nearly a word for word reproduction of Hegel’s description of the “Self-moving Substance that is Subject,” i.e., the world-creating Spirit:

Further, the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject, or, what is the same, is in truth actual only in so far as it is the movement of positing itself, or is the mediation of its self-othering with itself. This Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity, and is for this very reason the bifurcation of the simple; it is the doubling which sets up opposition, and then again the negation of this indifferent diversity and of its antithesis [the immediate simplicity]. Only this self-restoring Same-ness, or this reflection in otherness within itself — not an original or immediate unity as such — is the True. It is the process of its own becoming, the circle that presupposes its end as its goal, having its end also as its beginning; and only by being worked out to its end, is it actual. Thus the life of God and divine cognition may well be spoken of as a disporting of Love with itself; but this idea sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labor of the negative

Phenomenology §§18-19

Even Hegel’s coda, his description of God’s self-pleasuring, works its way into Marx’s description of the commodity. “[Value] differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form.” Yes. But, no.

The implications of this homology are irresistible. Insofar as Benjamin’s divine violence arises out of the tension within the value form of the commodity, there is more than a mere formal similarity between it and the violence Jonathan Edwards provoked in Abigail Hutchinson. Neither Edwards nor Benjamin bear responsibility for the appearance and spread of commodity production and exchange. Neither bears responsibility for the two-fold form of the commodity.

At the same time, so easy is it to mistake this social form for a divine being — it is a god, not the God — that both a devout Puritan and a Jewish mystic can credit their respective gods with acts and capacities that in fact should be credited to the two-fold form of the commodity. Any modern critique of violence must begin with this quasi-transcendental, quasi-personal, social substance, the commodity.

Over two and a half centuries have passed since Immanuel Kant formalized our experience of freedom. Freedom is the absence of constraint.

Should . . . freedom be a property of certain causes of appearances, then that freedom must, in relation to the appearances as events, be a faculty of starting those events from itself (sponte), i.e., without the causality of the cause itself having to begin, and hence without need for any other ground to determine its beginning.

Prolegomena 4:344

From this vantage point, any action that is not spontaneous — is not its own cause — is compelled by force or power (der Kraft) of another. Is it therefore the subject of violence (die Gewalt), under the power (die Macht) of another?

In Zur der Gewalt Benjamin presents us with two alternatives. One is Georges Sorel’s anarcho-syndicalism. Only if and as political violence is self-caused is it free from the bad faith implicit in means and ends. Only if and as political violence has freedom as both its source and its goal can it be said to be, in the truest sense, divine. This is because only in this case does political violence aim not at imposing — forcing, compelling, enforcing — a new law. Rather does it aim at eliminating force, power, and compulsion; not by force or threat, but by the supremely violent act of renouncing violence (power, force, causation). The other alternative is the pernicious law-making and law-enforcing of men.

As Benjamin put it at the conclusion of his critique:

Only mythical violence (Gewalt), not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power (entsühnende Kraft) of violence (Gewalt) is not visible to men. Once again all the eternal forms are open to pure divine violence, which myth bastardized with law. It may manifest itself in a true war exactly as in the divine judgment of the multitude on a criminal. But all mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, administrative violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence.

“Critique of Violence,” Reflections, p. 300.

Here it becomes clear that “divine violence” for Benjamin occupies Kant’s transcendental sphere, which means it is “not visible to men.” Or, put differently, divine violence has itself as its beginning and its end, sponte, as Kant put it; which means that it cannot achieve and is qualitatively different than the “pernicious” means and ends of legal violence.

There is a direct line from the Christian experience of conversion to Benjamin’s “divine violence.” The Christian compulsion to violate the law for no other reason except that it is the “law of men,” not the law of God — to break the speed limit, to oppose public institutions, to intervene in and attempt to overturn due process — exemplifies “divine violence” in Benjamin’s sense insofar as it is its own cause and its own end.

For Benjamin as for Kant, this sponte is by definition unmediated. As we will see, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel strenuously disagrees with this characterization of divine violence. The object of divine violence is the constrained world of time and space. But, contrary to Kant, Hegel claims that the constrained world of time and space is not not God. It is God differentiated.

Notwithstanding Benjamin and Kant’s mischaracterization of divine violence, they nevertheless accurately capture the anarcho-syndicalism, the fury and anger, Christians bear for a world that is, by its very nature, not transcendental.

In his study of fundamentalism and American power (The Family), Jeff Sharlet examines the ministry of Jonathan Edwards as a case in point. Edwards is interesting because he uses empiricism as a means of grasping the mechanics of the divine spirit in the process of conversion. In his study of conversion, published in 1737, Edwards’ scientifically proves conversion to be an exceedingly violent process. The association of violence with divine action is far from unusual. Both Edmund Burke (1757) and Immanuel Kant (1803) credited the experience of the sublime to the entrance of infinite magnitude into time and space. When the infinite enters the finite, the finite is endangered and often is destroyed.

Among Edwards’ most touching accounts of conversion is that of Abigail Hutchinson. In the course of her conversion, Hutchinson comes to the realization that it is her body as such that presents the greatest obstacle to her conversion. Her conversion parallels the decimation and eventually the death of her body. It is taken, both by Edwards and by others, as an especially compelling instance of divine violence. When the infinite enters the finite, the finite is destroyed. There is to Hutchinson’s conversion-death something of the spectacle. The community watches her convert-die and cannot help but be attracted to her conversion-death.

Edwards detailed description of Hutchinson’s conversion-death, the Christian attraction to it, begs a question that Sharlet did not examine. To what do we owe this fascination? Burke and, later, Kant attributed it to the sublime. As Kant put it:

[While] the beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest; the sublime [prepares us] for esteeming it even against the interest of our senses.

Kant illustrated human attraction to what can destroy them by asking his readers which is more sublime, the statesman or the military general:

Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrate all the virtues of peace – gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person – precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. Hence, no matter how much people may dispute, when they compare the statesman with the general, as to which one deserves the superior respect, an aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the general. Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. A prolonged peace, on the other hand, tends to make prevalent a merely commercial spirit, and along with it base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the way of thinking of that people.

From this vantage point, Christian attraction to conversion-death stories, much like Christian attraction to the gallows, should be credited to its divine origin: to the sublime.

In his critique of violence, Walter Benjamin makes a similar observation.

consider the suprising possibility that the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law. The same may be more drastically suggested if one reflects how often the figure of the “great” criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This cannot result from his deed, but only from the violence to which it bears witness.

Under capitalism, Christians are notoriously attracted not only to military leaders, but also, more generally, to criminality. Whether it is flaunting speed limits, gerrymandering voting districts, violating the rights of other citizens, or opposing public control over public institutions for public ends, Christians everywhere praise the violation of the law. They celebrate violence.

Whether human beings are or are not naturally attracted to violence I cannot say. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Hegel, in his critique of the Kantian sublime, faults him for ascribing human attraction to violence to their being human as such, rather than, as Hegel felt, to the divine formation of the condition for such attraction. In Hegel’s view, the divine is not only in the absolutely large, but also in the finite. When the infinite enters the finite, it enters a domain that is not at odds with, but is instead a dimension of the divine.

As we will see later, this was what Benjamin referred to as “divine violence.” Karl Marx, by contrast, referred to it as the two-fold form of the commodity. If Marx’s analysis holds, this could suggest that Christian attraction to conversion-death accounts is compelling evidence that their form of spirituality in the modern epoch is structured around that same social form: the commodity.

I have just been party to one of the oddest exchanges on FB I have encountered in recent months. Its participants were debating the merits of publishing information respecting the decline of church attendance in the Episcopal Church. The debate was not substantive, but affective. Should we want to know such information? Should we publish it? Should we share it?

Is this a case of crying “fire” in a theater that is not on fire?

I will return this Saturday from a brief visit to New York during which I happened to catch a play in review by Tracy Letts, “Minutes.” Its themes bear on the FB exchange.

The action takes place in a City Hall in a small, post-industrial, fictional city, Big Cherry, in the present. A newcomer to the City Council returns from his mother’s funeral to find that another City Council member has been removed in the two weeks of his absence. No one on the Council wishes to discuss the matter. The minutes of the meeting during which the other member was removed have not been published.

SPOILER ALERT. It turns out the city’s founding was predicated on a horrendous crime against the native American community that once occupied the valley. Around this horrendous crime a counter-myth was told, filled with heroic acts, decorated soldiers, and the rescue of a small child. Grade school children reenacted the play, High School students wrote reports on it. But when the missing Council member investigated the story, he discovered that it was a total fabrication. When he moved that the myth be stricken from the public record and that the true story be told and memorialized, the other Council members removed him.

The play’s exchange that bears on the FB discussion has the Mayor asking the Council newcomer which story he wants his little girl to grow up with: the story of Native American mothers, girls, and elderly being murdered in cold blood, or a story of heroism, rescue, and security.

In a couple of weeks, a study I wrote, “End of Seminary,” will appear in a collection on theological education edited by Joshua Davis and Deirdre Good. It makes several observations that I will not review here. Three points bear mentioning. The first is that the fate of the Episcopal seminary follows a trajectory that is nearly identical to self-funded non-religious institutions of higher learning; which means that the fault lies not in our hearts, but in the stars. As macro-economic indicators go, so goes the Episcopal seminary. The second point is that not all seminaries follow this same trajectory. Indeed, some denominational seminaries thrive and expand during times of economic turbulence. Others, including the majority of Episcopal seminaries, follow the secular trajectory. The third point is that during this period of decline (in enrollment, program size, faculty size, etc.) the investment portfolios of Episcopalians have performed exceedingly well; better, in fact, than when our seminaries enjoyed their greatest growth (1938-1980). So, if our parishioners are doing so spectacularly well, why aren’t our seminaries?

There is no simple answer to this question. Superficially, everywhere, investors (including Episcopalians) shifted the assets they chose to place their wealth. But Episcopal seminaries were never a central part of anyone’s portfolio. At a deeper level, when Congress appropriated the $4.2T to defeat the Japanese and Germans (beginning in 1938), most of this money ended up in the bank accounts of working families, many of whom sent their sons and daughters to college, some of whom went on to seminary. When the public monies dried up, private investors, it is true, could have stepped in. But they didn’t.

By contrast, other denominations view the work of seminaries differently. As need grows, as it did among those at the bottom of the income hierarchy, these denominations are thrown into high gear. Deacons and ministers sprout like wildflowers. Ministries expand. Seminaries expand to meet the growing need. They admit more students, hire more faculty, expand programs. At such times, local churches come alive. And those who have little, give more, not less.

Should we tell this story? Or is it too negative?