The P. and the D. continued

Chapter 1: When East Meets West

Eastern religions appeal to many people in the post-Christian West; in this chapter Žižek gives a couple of reasons for sticking with trinitarian monotheism (atheist though he is). The first is the superiority of the Christian concept of love over that of the East. He sees the Incarnation as the ultimate statement that "true love is...forsaking the promise of Eternity itself for an imperfect individual," whereas Hindus and Buddhists aim at a generalized compassion without personal emotional attachments. (Think of the character in "An Enduring Chill" whom Flannery O'Connor described as "bland as the Buddha.") These different ethical ideals are given appropriate metaphysical backing in their respective traditions, Christians believing in individuality to such an extent that, not only are souls distinct from each other, but God is, in the Trinity, distinct from Himself; Hinduism and Buddhism, on the other hand, obliterate all personal distinctions by adhering to variations on pantheism. Žižek is probably the first person in history to compare C. S. Lewis to a Buddhist, noting that the conversion experience in Surprised by Joy is remarkably unemotional compared to the "ecstatic pathos in the usual style of Saint Teresa [with her] multiple-orgasmic penetrations by angels or God." Anyway, I think Žižek is basically right; sure, there are strains of medieval Catholic mysticism which sound Buddhist (e.g. St. John of the Cross saying that one must eliminate all desire to attain union with God), but since I'm sticking with Protestantism for the time being, I'm free to reject later developments in favor of the original teaching. Check the New Testament: Jesus said there was no higher love than that a man would die for his friends, and wept over the fate of Jerusalem--can you imagine Buddha crying for anybody? St. Paul, too, felt "much anguish" over the state of the churches.

But this Christian elevation of the passionate love of the individual over the passionless love of the universal is problematic for Žižek, since he claimed in the introduction that the founding of Christianity as an institution occurred only because St. Paul so strongly emphasized its universal features: "When one reads Saint Paul's epistles, one cannot fail to notice how thoroughly and terribly indifferent he is toward Jesus as a living person (the Jesus who is not yet Christ, the pre-Easter Jesus, the Jesus of the Gospels)--Paul more or less totally ignores Jesus' particular acts, teachings, parables, all that Hegel later referred to as the mythical element of the fairytale narrative...What matters to him is not Jesus as a historical figure, only the fact that he died on the cross and rose from the dead." In this way, says Žižek, Paul is as much of a betrayer of Jesus as Judas.

His solution in chapter 1 is to make a difficult, paradoxical argument that the highest act of love towards an individual is a betrayal of the person for a universal cause. (To be continued...)