“God is not dead, He just smells funny” – Reflections on the Syrian Massacre of the Innocents

Jean-Hyppolite Flandrin - "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem"

“Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…” This paradoxical paraphrase of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:5, Jn 12:15) went through my head when I tried to ‘digest’ the news about the latest UN report on the status of children in situations of armed conflict (www.un.org/children/conflict/english/index.html). The report expressed special concern about the deteriorating situation in Syria, where a growing number of children are among the casualties of what is by now a very bloody civil war. Apparently, militia’s are killing indiscriminately, women and children no less than men. Children whose parents are suspected rebels are tortured or simply executed. Some children have been found with their heads caved in. Also there are reports about children being used as human shields, positioned on top of tanks in order to discourage enemy fire.

The need to rewrite Holy Scripture
It was this image of a child on top of a tank that reminded me of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a donkey […]. And most of the crowd spread their garments in the road; and others cut branches from the trees, and spread them in the road. And the crowds that went before him, and that followed, cried out, saying, ‘Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.’” (Mt 21:5-11)

Doesn’t the image of a child used as a ‘human shield’ on top of tank force us to rewrite Holy Scripture, as if Christ is again entering the city where his crucifixion will take place? Only this time that Holy City is not Jerusalem but the Syrian city of Hama. And the road is not strewn with garments and palm leaves but with enemy fire, with bullets singing: “Hosanna to the son or daughter of whomever!” And if we are thus rewriting Holy Scripture, we might as well rewrite the passage about the murder of the children under Herod, such that it is now not in Rama but in Hama where “a voice [was] heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not!” (Mt. 2:17-18; Jer. 31:15)

Giotto - "The Massacre of the Innocents"

“If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke”
This is what a father says about his son in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) – turned into a film by John Hillcoat. The narrative is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where due to some global disaster – whether natural, man-made or divinely ordained remains unclear – all civilization has crumbled and nature is dying. Those who are still alive are reduced to a sub-human existence of daily struggle for food and the realistic fear of cannibalism. In this world, where all hope and value is lost, this father has made it his sacred mission to protect his son: “the child was his warrant,” McCarthy writes. “What if I said that he's a god?” the father says about his boy to an old man who is amazed to see a child still being alive in the disaster zone the world has become: “When I saw that boy I thought that I had died […]. I never thought to see a child again.”

In this godforsaken world, where all faith has died, where God himself is “dead”, this father finds a superhuman faith through his son, who has for him become a divine being, indeed, Christ himself, the Incarnate Word of God. The grimness of McCarthy’s dystopian vision, however, is such that besides the father no one believes anymore. Not even the old man puts any faith in the divinity of the child: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone.” Even the living, walking and talking Word of God carries no weight anymore: the world of The Road is too far gone, too godforsaken for that. The father’s task to protect his child against rape, murder and cannibalism is indeed a superhuman task, a more or less impossible mission.

The Road

Optimistic dystopia?
In comparison the film Children of Men (2006) – based on the novel by P.D. James – offers an almost optimistic vision of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Here too the story revolves around the divinity of childhood in a seemingly godforsaken world. The premise is that due to some unknown cause – a virus or divine intervention? – mankind has become infertile and faces extinction in several decades. When the youngest person on the planet – celebrity Baby Diego, aged 18 – is killed by a disappointed fan over a refused autograph, people lose their last ounce of hope and give in to despair and nihilism, epitomized by the government-issued suicide drug Quietus. For why take care of the planet, indeed why take care of oneself if there is no future? The future after all is what a child is: the future beyond oneself. Then, miraculously, one black girl becomes pregnant, giving birth to a healthy baby amidst the brutal civil war into which the world is falling apart. Bullets are flying, bombs are exploding, people are dying on the spot, but when the mother and her newborn infant appear all falls silent, the fighting stops abruptly, people stand in awe, soldiers fall on their knees before this epiphany which can only be described as religious – underscored by correspondingly dramatic music. It’s a beautiful scene and arguably the high point of the film, far surpassing its dramatic ending when mother and baby are finally aboard the Tomorrow, the ship that will bring them to the utopian community of the Human Project.

Children of Men

“Everything of value is defenseless”
So where do we stand now, what is the status of our own world when children are used as ‘human shields’ on top of tanks? Are we closer to the ‘optimistic dystopia’ of Children of Men? Or are we in the truly hellish world of The Road where faith in the divinity of childhood has all but disappeared? Apparently we are right in between, since the sanctity of childhood is both recognized – for otherwise children would be worthless as ‘shields’ – and violated, since they are used as shields. As the Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Everything of value is defenseless.” The supreme value and defenselessness of the child is apparently also the supreme armor, not impenetrable for bullets, no not quite, but almost impenetrable for considerations that rationalize the killing of another human being. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described the “Face of the Other” as that ultimate instance of vulnerability which calls the spontaneity of our violence into question. But what has become clear now is that this Face is first and foremost the face of a child. It is the ideal mask to hide behind. What has also become clear is that post-apocalyptic dystopia is not just a Hollywood genre, some entertaining vision of horrors predicated on the hypothetical question: “What if…?” No, dystopia is here and now: it is this-topia so to speak. The apocalypse is taking place again and again, each time an innocent child is brutally murdered, abused, raped. How can we believe in a God who lets such things happen? But then again, how can we stop believing in God if this means giving up the divinity of the child? We must have faith, then, simply for the sake of the children. This is the great strength of McCarthy’s line “If he is not the word of God God never spoke”. And therefore I say: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…”

"After Auschwitz" – On regurgitating clichés
Obviously this ‘Christological’ reading of the Syrian ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ is meant to be abysmally cynical rather than as an expression of faith in the redeeming power of (forced) imitatio Christi. Confronted with such horrors, faith crumbles in despair. To repeat: How can one believe in a God who lets such things happen? This, of course, is an age old question, a powerless cliché nowadays, incapable of causing serious religious doubt. Why? Because we have already stopped believing in the goodness of God a long time ago. Auschwitz cured us of that, to use another cliché. This is the way the world is, we sigh, and then we look away and think about something else, lest we would have bad dreams at night. And we can’t have that, can we? No, we must be rested and fresh in the morning for another productive day.

But still… Doesn’t a feeling of sacrilege encroach on us when we hear the invocation of Auschwitz being reduced to a mere cliché? Who dares to say such a thing? True, some people – especially in academia – use it as a cliché when they unthinkingly repeat claims like “After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry” (Adorno) in order to please their professors and further a nice academic career. Such claims have become clichés all right, but they are all the more painful in light of the horrors of Auschwitz. And for Auschwitz we might as well substitute any of the other disasters that constitute the history of the modern world (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”). I won’t go into particulars – that is to say: I don’t want to ‘regurgitate more clichés’ – but just think about that child on top of a Syrian tank, that instance of supreme (in)vulnerability. Don’t we encounter here, despite all clichés, something sacred and divine? Something that suggests the image of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey and perhaps even requires the rewriting of Holy Scripture in the indicated way?

Christianity and transcendental violence
Levinas spoke of a metaphysical and even religious dimension coming to paradoxical presence in the anti-phenomenon of the Face of the Other, who questions us from beyond the sphere of being and makes us responsible to the Platonic “Good beyond being”. Levinas, of course, was a Jewish thinker, who took his lead from the dialogical nature of the Judaic relation to God, who speaks to the individual through the personality (the “Face”) of the other human being – hence Levinas’ fondness of the Jewish proverb “the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs”. Yet one wonders if the metaphysical dimension he discovered – the supreme ethical authority of supreme vulnerability – isn’t more amenable to a Christian interpretation rather than a Jewish one, given the apparent necessity of sacrifice in order to bring this dimension to manifestation.

Isn’t this the gist of Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” where he criticizes Levinas for ignoring the fact that the otherness of the Other – and hence his ethical authority – can only become manifest through the violence perpetrated against her? Thus Derrida spoke of a transcendental and pre-ethical violence as the condition of possibility of the ethical relation to the Other: “For this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other.” (Derrida 2002: 160) Hence the intimate relation – which is more than etymological – between sacrality and sacrifice: only through the violence of the latter is the former truly revealed. But this transcendental violence as the precondition for the sacred authority of the Other – isn’t this first and foremost the crucifixion, as the violence that reveals the divinity of Christ? Derrida himself does not investigate this suggestion, despite the fact that “Violence and Metaphysics” shows a strong Christian undercurrent in the reciprocity envisaged by Derrida between (the transcendental violence of) Greek logocentrism and (the ethical authority of) Jewish heteronomy. For isn’t it clear that Christianity is this reciprocity as a historical ‘synthesis’ of Hellenism and Hebraism? Derrida suggests as much when he writes: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek […].” (Idem: 191) For this, of course, is not just an allusion to Joyce’s Ulysses (“Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.”), but ultimately refers to St. Paul’s statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek […], for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The divine emptiness of God's grave

The presence of divine absence
Paul’s meaning, of course, is that such parochial distinctions are no longer relevant in light of the universality of the Christian revelation, which addresses humanity as such (see Badiou 1997). Yet we might also interpret his statement more creatively as pointing to the special nature of Christianity as being between Greek philosophy and Jewish religiosity: it is “neither Greek nor Jew” since it is both, as the impossible excluded middle between these contradictories. Christ as the incarnation of God is both ‘Greek’ insofar as He is the veracious presence of the divine logos, yet He is also ‘Jewish’ in that this presence manifests a constitutive absence of the divine, of God as “wholly Other” who as such cannot be made present – and the attempt to do so can only kill him. Hence the Incarnation of God is only truly fulfilled in the Crucifixion: the moment when God dies – that is the moment when He is truly present/absent, when his absolute authority is truly manifested in his absolute (in)vulnerability. As I said, Derrida doesn’t investigate these suggestions, although they are clearly implicit in “Violence and Metaphysics”. One wonders why he remained silent…

Be that as it may, the suggestion with which I want to end is that the Syrian child – put as a ‘human shield’ on top of a tank – manifests this Christological dimension of sacrifice. Doesn’t this child force us to rethink our (post-)modern disbelief vis-à-vis the divine? “God is dead,” we say following Nietzsche, and we say so especially “after Auschwitz”. But doesn’t God die again in that Syrian child? And how can He die again if He was already dead? Shouldn’t we say then that God is not (yet) dead but rather dying, continually dying in all the innocent victims of human violence? To paraphrase Zappa’s famous statement on the status of rock music: God isn’t dead, He just smells funny… And it would indeed almost be funny if it wouldn’t be so horrific.

-Alain Badiou (1997), Saint Paul et la foundation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris.

-Jacques Derrida (2002 [1964]), “Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas”, in: Derrida, Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, pp.97-192.

Some Theses on Christo-Marxism

The following theses have been written only for the sake of self-clarification. They are part of an ongoing project which I hope will culminate one day in a more systematic and comprehensive presentation. Feel free to comment and criticize. Also see: Introducing Christo-Marxism

Vanishing mediator
The central principle of Christo-Marxism is the vanishing mediator, the medium that brings us together by vanishing between us, thereby establishing our “mediated immediacy” (Hegel).

Capitalism as accumulation of the mediator
What Christo-Marxism objects to in capitalism is that here the vanishing mediator – in its socio-economic form as money – is not allowed to vanish but is accumulated in capital. Thus the redemptive function of the vanishing mediatior (reconciliation) is frustrated: the mediator does not reconcile divergent interests but rather comes to stand between them as their stumbling block.

Liberal communism
The aim of Christo-Marxism is to re-start the redemptive process by enabling the vanishing mediator to vanish again. In the socio-economic register this implies the necessity of liberal-communist action: breaking the power of capital in order to re-establish the flow of money as vanishing mediator. Christo-Marxism, then, is a form of liberal communism: free markets yes, capitalism no. Liberal communism maintains that the level playing field required by the free-market mechanism is incompatible with the inlimited accumulation of power. Hence the free-market mechanism must be protected against itself, ie. against its tendency to result in antagonism between 'winners' and 'losers'. In other words: a market can only function as truly free market (that is, with a level playing field) in a communist state, where the institution of the market is publicly owned as the common medium of our economic exchange. Money is an integral part of that institution.

From Catholicism to capitalism
In contrast to historical materialism, Christo-Marxism emphasizes the equal importance of 'spiritual' and 'material' factors in explaining historical change. Thus with respect to capitalism, Christo-Marxism emphasizes (in contrast to Weber) its continuity with the mind-set of Catholicism. The original perversion of Christianity in Catholicism – namely, the accumulation of Christ as Mediator in the hands of the Church – prefigured the perversion of money in capitalism, its accumulation in the hands of the capitalist. Weber was right in pointing to Protestantism as a spiritual force behind capitalism but only insofar as Protestantism shifted the Catholic attitude to the socio-economic realm. That is: Protestantism dis-intermediated the self-enriching priesthood but only to re-install its perversion (the accumulation of the vanishing mediator) in secular life. Protestantism, then, was not a real break with the mind-set of Catholicism but only its deflection onto another terrain.

Radicalizing the Protestant revolution
Christo-Marxism therefore proposes a radicalization of the Protestant revolution, which – although it dis-intermediated the priesthood – did not proceed to the logical conclusion of Christianity itself: the dis-intermediation of God as such. The unique contribution of Christianity is the conception of God as vanishing mediator – or alternatively: of the vanishing mediator as God. Christianity is the religion where God Himself – incarnated in Christ – dies in order to open up op the Holy Spirit as the reconciled community. God as Christ, in other words, is the vanishing mediator of the Holy Spirit. Christo-Marxism aims to take this “Death of God” to its logical extreme, up to the point of atheism. It sees modern atheism – and in particular Marxist atheism – as the logical culmination of Christianity. This atheism, then, is not opposed to religion: it is religion in the mode of its self-negation, parallel to God's self-withdrawal from His creation. Thus the hyphen in Christo-Marxism can also be read as an arrow (Christo→Marxism) designating the historical culmination of Christianity in Marxism. Yet this historical transition is never complete: Marxism remains bound to Christianity as its vanishing mediator, just as every form of community remains bound to the vanishing mediator that establishes its “mediated immediacy”. The Death of God, then, must be understood as an ongoing process: God is not yet dead but eternally dying, eternally disappearing further away from us. It is precisely by thus withdrawing that He performs His divine function. To paraphrase Frank Zappa: God is not dead, He just smells funny.

The vanishing mediator as Heideggerian Being
Christo-Marxism maintains that God let's everything be precisely through His disappearance. For by thus disappearing, God forms the background of non-being or nothingness against the backdrop of which beings can first appear as beings. In that sense God is simply what Heidegger meant with “Being”. Where Heideger went wrong was in his rejection of onto-theology. To be sure, Heidegger was right in maintaining the ontological distinction, which emphasizes that Being is not a being. What he ignored, however, was the possibility of conceiving Being as an infinitesimal, a vanishing being on its way to nothingness. As an infinitesimal, the vanishing mediator does not violate the ontological distinction, for as such it is no longer a full-fledged being but rather an almost nothing, a nothing-to-come. Christo-Marxism, in other words, stresses the irreducible ontic trace – or the trace of the ontic – in the ontological: Being (qua Nothingness) is only thinkable as the (self-)negation of a primordial being, who is nothing but this self-negation. It is in this way that Christo-Marxism aims to understand the personality or subject-hood of God: His “self” consists only in self-negation. This self-negation is intrinsic to God's nature as vanishing mediator. In short, Christo-Marxism maintains the compatabiliy of the onto-theology of the vanishing mediator (ie. Christianity) with Heideggerian ontology. 

The ego as vanishing mediator of the critical subject
The ethics of Christo-Marxism is an ethics of imitatio Christo, the imitative following of Christ. Its main injunction is: become a vanishing mediator, sacrifice yourself as medium for the reconciliation of others. Not only is this the way to contribute to the Good of community, it's also the only way to become a subject (in more or less Badiou's sense of the term). By becoming a vanishing mediator, one approaches the pure self-hood of God. Critical freedom, qua independence from all immersion in natural positivity and substance, is only attained by withdrawing or subtracting oneself from the world. Yet this withdrawal is never fully completed in life but only in death. As long as the subject lives, then, he (or she or it) is still particularized by the ontic traces (like the ontic trace in the ontological) of his former, empirical ego. The ego is just an object in the world: it is an image, the product of the narcissistic mirroring with others (Lacan's imaginary). The subject is the self-negation of the ego, the empty place left behind as the ego vanishes. Yet, to repeat, this vanishing is never completed (only in death). Thus the subject is always conditioned by the ever vanishing contingency of the ego. This is what individualizes the subject.

Chiastic metaphysics after the "Death of God" (Part 2): On the trail of the lost centre

The following text continues the investigation begun in: How to think like a moth - Thought after the "Death of God" (Part I)

As the movement of the moth's wings depends on the muscles in its thorax, so the conceptual movement of the chiasm depends on the power of its middle. What, then, is the grounding middle in the chiastic reversal from the loss of transcendence into the transcendence of loss? And aren't we here simply over-stretching our analogy with the moth, moving by mere metaphor from its body as the enabling middle of its wings to some hypothetical middle of the chiasm as the ground of its truth? Not quite. For the middle as the ground of truth really has deep roots in western philosophy, reaching from Parmenides and Aristotle, through medieval theology (Boventura), to Kant and Hegel. In general terms: the middle is that which holds everything together and which as such justifies the binding of predicates to subjects in judgements, thus grounding the “is” in any true judgement “S is P”. The turning of the periagoge in western philosophy is therefore to a large extent a turning to the middle, a spiralling of thought, turning around the middle in ever smaller circles. In that sense the philosophical concept of the centre can – with another chiasm – be called the central concept of western philosophy. A short overview:

The metaphysical logic of the middle

Parmenides invented philosophical idealism by founding the unity of thought and being in the middle that holds everything together in the sphere of the One. Aristotle then gave this Eleatic thought a more scientific form by thinking the middle as middle term, that is, as the conceptual bridge between subject and predicate in any true judgement, where this conceptual middle is conceived by Aristotle in terms of essential or substantial being (ousia), which for Aristotle is ultimately God, the Unmoved Mover as the final cause of the universe. Bonaventura, thinking in the Christian Middle Ages, harked back to Parmenides by conceiving God as “an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”. Kant, in contrast, harked back to Aristotle but under the sign of modern subjectivity, focusing on the “third term” underlying the synthesis in any judgement, which he conceived as grounded in the transcendental apperception that binds concept and sensation together. For Kant, then, the transcendental subject played the same role that God played for Aristotle as the highest middle, underlying all true judgements. Of course, due to his critical limitations, Kant could not own up to this parallel with classical metaphysics, but Hegel had no such qualms. Hegel synthesized Aristotle and Kant by equating the transcendental subject with God as the final cause of the universe, adding the dialectical twist that this divine middle grounds not just the unity of subject and predicate but also their differentiation, as this is presupposed by their unification in judgement (thus judgement as Urteil is also arch-differentiation, Ur-Teilung). In that way Hegel was able to think God, the absolute subject, as self-mediating through negativity, as the self-moving middle between itself and the non-self.

I realize that this short history of the metaphysical logic of the middle is all too short and in need of serious elaboration if the traditional idea of the grounding middle is to be fully intelligible. I am sure that such an elaboration would reveal many important lacunae in the overview above (one interesting question, for example, is how Heidegger's view of the “open middle” as the place of Being relates to the metaphysical view of the middle as the locus of God as the ultimate guarantor of truth). Nevertheless, I do think I have shown that there is some point to my question for the middle of the chiasm (“the loss of transcendence is the transcendence of loss”) as the ground of its truth. One could say that in asking for that grounding middle I am in illustrious company and in line with the metaphysical tradition of western philosophy.

The loss of the centre as the centrality of loss?

Yet, this also indicates the trouble I am in. For it is precisely the crisis of the metaphysical tradition with which we are trying to come to terms here. The loss of transcendence, the “Death of God”, signifies precisely the falling away of the divine middle as the ultimate ground of truth. Thinking after the “Death of God”, we no longer believe that there is some transcendent centre of existence, some ultimate Substance or/and Subject that guarantees our access to The Truth, binding everything together into one meaningful whole. Thus the loss of transcendence, the “Death of God”, can be reformulated as the loss of the middle. And thus our chiasm can be reformulated as: the loss of the middle (centre) is the middle position (centrality) of loss. In other words, it is precisely the loss of the transcendent middle of the metaphysical tradition that must itself be thought as the new grounding middle, as the axis of the chiastic reversal that resurrects metaphysics in the moment of its fall, as the axis of the periagogic turning after the “Death of God”. But how is this possible? How can the loss of the middle be itself the new middle for thought to turn on?

The case of Christian conservatism
One interesting thing to notice here is that the “loss of the middle” is a well-known topos of Christian conservatism. Here the “loss of the middle” obviously means the modern loss of faith in Christ as the mediator between God and mankind, a loss that supposedly leaves society rudderless as it robs traditional authorities (e.g. kings and churches) of their religious mandate and undermines the moral substance that binds us together. According to conservatism, the loss of the Christian middle condemns society to what Adorno called “mediation without a middle” (although, of course, Adorno himself was by no means a conservative: he precisely accused conservatism of not being able to “hold out” the contradictions of modern life, so that conservatism regresses to pre-modern modes of thought and action). Without collective faith in Christ as the transcendent centre of society, social oppositions – like the one between labour and capital – can no longer be mediated by a reconciling middle but clash im-mediately, plunging society into chaos. This apocalyptic sentiment in the conservative lamentation of the loss of the middle is quite explicit in Yeats's famous poem The Second Coming, where the loss of the middle appears in the centre that “cannot hold”. The specifically Christian meaning of that centre for Yeats is of course obvious in the title of his poem, which indicates the longed for return of Christ as the living centre of society. Here is the first stanza:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Here, in the vision of Yeats's poem, the turning of the periagoge derails completely, moving in ever widening spirals (“Turning and turning in the widening gyre”) away from the transcendent middle, deeper and deeper into illusion and evil, constantly further away from the True and the Good. Society (the “falcon”) no longer hears the call of its centre (the “falconer”), so that the centrifugal forces gain the upper hand, dissolving society into “mere anarchy”.

What does this conservative jeremiad about the loss of the Christian middle mean in the light of our attempt to think the loss of the transcendent centre chiastically as the transcendent centrality of loss? Doesn't this precisely mean that we are moving in the opposite direction, away from conservatism? And is this also a moving away from Christianity? Does this mean that we deny the social problems pointed out by conservatism? Of course, society is in serious difficulty: on the one hand shocking self-enrichment, on the other hand poverty, hunger, war, alienating individualism, loss of self in drink and drugs... The “ceremony of innocence is drowned” indeed. But is this due to the loss of the centre? 

The empty throne of the God-man
Let us, to gain more clarity here, take a closer look at the conservative topos of the loss of the Christian middle. One informative locus classicus in this regard is the book Loss of the Middle (Verlust the Mitte) by the art historian Hans Sedlmayr, published in the war ravaged Germany of 1948. In this book Sedlmayr analyses how the central position of man – religiously founded in the divine status of the man Jesus – slowly disappeared from modern art. Sedlmayr begins by pointing out how, until the 18th century, every art form used to be part of a sacred Gesamtkunstwerk in which divine man occupied the central place – a Gesamtkunstwerk formed by the complex of church and palace. In the following centuries, however, the various art forms gained a life of their own, becoming ‘autonomous’ by breaking away from the sacred and humanistic context of Christianity. Harking back to Blaise Pascal – who said “Leaving the middle means leaving humanity” – Sedlmayr analyses this development as a dehumanization of art. The inhuman comes to the fore in modern art: the indifference of nature and matter, the rapacious development of technology and industry, the self-reflective and abstract forms of autonomous art. In this way, Sedlmayr says, art reflects a broader social process of loss of centre, the downfall of Christian humanism. Art is not able to reverse that process (with respect to underlying social processes, art is powerless). Nevertheless, according to Sedlmayr, art still has a task here. In all its inhumanity, modern art has the crucial task of keeping the memory of the lost centre alive for future generations: “Then at least the awareness must stay alive, that the lost centre is the throne left empty for the perfect human, the God-man.” (Sedlmayr 1948: 248)

“sitting on a mountain of negations”
I must admit that I find this a beautiful, fascinating image: the lost centre in modern art as an empty throne – a throne that by its very emptiness refers to the missing king. But it is also this image which for me manifests the paradox of Christian conservatism. For the lost centre as the empty throne of the divine man? Is this not par excellence the empty cross, referring to the removed, dead body of the God-man Christ? Is this divine throne not Golgotha, the “mountain of skulls” on which the crucified Jesus throned, crowned with a wreath of thorns? I am reminded here of the negative theology of the Indian logician Adi Shankara, who painted a picture of Brahman as a God without attributes, sitting on a mountain of negations. Isn’t Golgotha that mountain? Isn’t the cross of Jesus precisely the cross of negation, referring back to the crossed out being of his mortal flesh? A picture means a thousand words, they say. Is this not true here? Doesn’t the picture of Golgotha make clear in one stroke that the centre as the throne of the divine man must be empty, that this emptiness necessarily follows from the core of the Christian doctrine? For was the sacrifice of Christ as Mediator not necessary to reconcile man with God and thereby with his fellow man? Is the loss of the centre in this sense not precisely the precondition of the unity of the Christian community, its unification in the Holy Spirit? In fact this is precisely what Christ himself said according to John: “it is better for you that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Holy Spirit [Paraclete, Comforter] will not come unto you, and if I go, I will send Him to you.” (John 16:7)

Hegel on the vanishing mediator
In this regard Christian conservatives should have listened better to one of their heroes, namely Hegel (who could sublate all earthly contradictions in the thought of the Absolute Spirit, thereby in practice leaving everything as it was, to the delight of the Prussian regime). In the Spirit of Christianity Hegel explains that as long as Jesus lived among his followers, he formed a “dividing wall” (“Scheidewand”) on the one hand between the followers themselves, and on the other between them and God:

“As long as he lived among them, they were only believers; for they were not based on themselves; Jesus was their teacher and master, an individual centre on which they depended; they did not yet have their own, independent life; the Spirit of Jesus ruled them; but after his removal this objectivity, this dividing wall between them and God, also fell away; and the Spirit of God was able to revive her whole being.” (Geist des Christentums, p.384)

In this regard Hegel was undoubtedly one of the German children of Luther, who deprived the Catholic priest of his mediator function in order to make the relationship between believer and God im-mediate. In this Protestant sense, Jesus is portrayed by Hegel as “the good priest” who makes himself superfluous and disappears into the relation between God and man (in other words: the only good priest is a dead priest, or in terms of Yeats: the only good centre is a dead centre). But one would underestimate the importance for Hegel of Jesus as vanishing mediator if one sees here only the influence of Luther. In fact, the concept of the vanishing mediator is an intrinsic part of Hegel’s dialectic, which is after all the atoning mediation of opposites. To truly bring opposites together, the mediator must – like Jesus – disappear from their midst. This is clearly argued by the Hegel scholar Herbert Scheit, who notes concerning the above passage of Hegel on the necessity of Jesus’ disappearance:

“This applies to every mediation, if it really wants to earn that name: mediation implies not just a third, a middle, it sublates itself in the unit of the mediated ones, which is then a “mediated immediacy”.” (Scheit 1973: 183, n. 207)

For Hegel, then, the goal of every mediation is what he calls “mediated immediacy”, the synthesis of opposites between which the mediator has disappeared. In that sense one can say, referring to Hegel, that the vanishing mediator is a universal given, or rather a universal absence, a disappearance that is ‘active’ in every process of mediation.

More about chiastic metaphysics and the loss of the middle next time. Apparently, I have to postpone kicking Hegel's but to some future occassion.

References
-Sedlmayer, Hans (1948), Verlust der Mitte. Salzburg/Wien, Müller.
-Scheit, Herbert (1973), Geist und Gemeinde: Zum Verhältnis von Religion und Politik bei Hegel, München und Salzburg, Verlag Anton Pustet.