“In the address which Professor Martensen “delivered on the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, the Sunday preceding the burial of Bishop Mynster,” a speech of remembrance it might be called for the reason that it brought to Professor Martensen’s remembrance the vacant episcopal see—in this address Bishop Mynster is represented as one of the genuine witnesses to the truth, this being affirmed in the strongest and most decisive terms it would be possible to use. With the figure of the deceased bishop, his life and the manner of it and the issue of it, before our eyes, we are exhorted “to imitate the faith of the true guide, the genuine witness to the truth”, to imitate his faith, for that, as was said expressly of Bishop Mynster, was shown, “not merely by word and profession, but in deed and in truth”. The deceased bishop is by Professor Martensen introduced “into the holy chain of witnesses to the truth which stretches through the ages from the days of the Apostles,” etc.”1

What is a witness?

When it comes down to the matter of deciding what something is or isn’t, there are often long critical debates that deal with all kinds of helpful abstractions, distractions, and retractions of various points and principles. We escape into the comfort of the ideal, the place where we can play irresponsibly with various notions that pop into our minds and arrange them in the way the child arranges blocks in the throes of play. And, much like the child, the idealist enjoys the flexibility and opportunity for discovery that this materially-devoid play affords them: as the child arranges “B”, “Q”, and “L” together in a line and joyously turns to their parent to ask “what does this spell?”2, the idealist looks around for praise having taken the (potentially) core aspects of Christianity and has made them speak to “capitalism”, “deconstruction”, and “liberalism”.

And, of course, that isn’t to say that some arrangement of letters necessarily couldn’t spell a word in the same sense that Christianity necessarily couldn’t speak to some secularly-applauded theoretical niche—but, at once, that does not reduce Christianity to a theory and does not make our theories valuable in the conversation that should keep us awake at night: “what is a witness?”

Against the Church, against the institution

Which delivers us to the first investigation of this so-called “Kierkegaardian anarchism” that haunts us: how, through the public berating of how recently deceased are held up before us, did S. K. explode into public infamy to answer this question, “Was Bishop Mynster “a witness to the truth”?”

Let us set the scene: it is December 18th, 1854, and you open your favourite journal, Fædrelandet, to find an impossibly wordy title sitting before you: “Was Bishop Mynster a "witness to the truth," one of "the genuine witnesses to the truth"—is this the truth?”3 Your eyes widen with excitement and temptation: that eccentric Kierkegaard the Younger has decided it is high time to turn his attentions directly towards the relatively recently deceased bishop4 and in the most emphatic terms. There’s something tantalising, almost sinful about this kind of writing: we are drawn in by these taunting words as the aesthetic undergirdings of our minds wonder, just wonder enough to want to peer into the unacceptable, into the notions that transgress “the ethical”, into the mind of someone who plays in that suspension of the Sittlichkeit. S. K. had become what he had set out to oppose: he played as a journalist in this Danish society of gossip, but, unlike the journalist, he had armed himself with truth for the many.5

Kierkegaard was not a tertiary figure in the hubbub of Danish bourgeois society, of course, as his lengthy and difficult literary output had made him a figure that many would rather ignore, but couldn’t. His works had produced valuable debate and battle lines across sometimes passively accepted theological camps, posing himself (often without ardent followers—which he was happy was the case—and only a handful of possibly faithful “fellow travellers”) against the institutional structure of the Danish church as it emerged from under the thumb of the Crown after the liberal revolution of 1848, before returning to “business as usual” under the newer, more aesthetically pleasing name of Folkekirke6. In the excitement of Hegelianism and the generalisation of liberal theology in S. K.’s own lifetime, he stood as a caustic figure that would not give the academics or the clerics a single laurel to rest upon. Mynster would oversee this period, always in an awkward and sometimes confrontational relationship with S. K.7, until his death in early 1854.

And here, my reader, the confrontation between S. K. and the church—now steered by Hans L. Martensen, a figure that haunts Kierkegaardian studies—plays an important part in the history of Protestant thought, in the history of Christianity at large, and in the context of our task to discover a Christian anarchism that remains faithfully Christian.

Against this I must protest—and now that Bishop Mynster is dead, I can speak willingly, but in this place very briefly, and not at all about what determined me to assume the relationship to him which I assumed.8

...I have something upon my conscience as a writer. Let me indicate precisely how I feel about it. There is something quite definite I have to say, and I have so much upon my conscience that (as I feel) I dare not die without having uttered it. For the instant I die and so leave this world (so I understand it) I shall in the very same second (so frightfully fast it goes!), in the very same second I shall be infinitely far away, in a different place, where, still within the same second (frightful speed!), the question will be put to me: "Hast thou uttered the definite message quite definitely?" And if I have not done so, what then?... There is something quite definite I have to say. But verily I am not eager to say it. On the contrary, I would so infinitely prefer that another should say it—which, however, would not help me, since (as I understand it) it was and remains my task.... For it is not a cheerful message, this definite thing, and I cannot but think that there are several persons dear to me to whom it would be unwelcome to hear it said. Above all there is a right reverend old man, a consideration which has constantly held me back, laid a restraint upon my tongue and upon my pen, a consideration for the highest dignitary of the Church, a man to whom by the memory of a deceased father I felt myself drawn with an almost melancholic affection—and I must think that to him especially it will be very unwelcome that this is said.9

Arise, Sandhedsvidne!

So, my reader, again, back to our central question: what is a witness? In a world where we are called to discern wisely, we might expect to understand some ways in which we can distinguish Christians from non-Christians in a way which is not merely resting heavily on the laurels of identitarian admission—indeed, whatever it is that is a Christian witness could be turned into something altogether different through the use of clever rhetoric.

If the word “preaching” suggests more particularly what is said, written, printed, the word, the sermon, then the fact that in this respect (to allude to only one thing) Bishop Mynster’s preaching soft-pedals, slurs over, suppresses, omits something decisively Christian, something which appears to us men inopportune, which would make our life strenuous, hinder us from enjoying life, that part of Christianity which has to do with dying from the world, by voluntary renunciation, by hating oneself, by suffering for the doctrine, etc.—to see this one does not have to be particularly sharp-sighted, if one puts the New Testament alongside of Mynster’s sermons.10

Let us attempt to avoid the problem which lay at Mynster’s feet. As a stab in the dark, someone might take “follows Christ” as a suitably broad identifier for what constitutes a Christian witness. However, as the well-trodden path leading up to this idea has already well established, this leads into the strange place where we end up identifying Muslims—with their separate and distinct conception of Christ differing to such a point where it can no longer be reconciled with Christian thought in any real way that matters11—and some Hindus—looking to Christ as a guru-like figure or representative of a universal “Christ consciousness”—as Christians. Leaving aside the theological muddiness that we would find ourselves in, presumably motivated by an overly historically-minded, post-colonially patronising desire for inoffensiveness12, we end up in a situation where it is plainly inadequate or even hateful to cast such a broad net. Fishermen don’t concern themselves with catching seabirds along with fish they desire in the name of an absent-minded tolerance.

A more theoretically robust approach would be turning to a historical document like the Apostle’s Creed. I will presume at least a passing familiarity with the creed here, establishing many of the core tenets that create the historical backbone of Christian belief: trinitarianism, the death and sacrifice of Christ, the Virgin Birth, an everlasting afterlife, etc. Within the credo, the core doctrine of Christianity is illustrated in a way which certainly differentiates it from, e.g., Islam and Hinduism. The witnesses, then, might be thought of as those who are capable of taking up this creed and professing it as such. And here, I plan to be a little controversial: while it serves its purpose of establishing what we might consider the “objective” factors of what a Christianity, this Christianity that finds its place in the world through the blood and bones of the witnesses, might look like, it actually isn’t a very useful tool for answering our core question: what is a witness?

Here, it would be helpful to clarify S. K.’s view of doctrine, something which is key to understanding how we move from a mere objective understanding of the creed to a way to recognise those who are witnesses around us. Barrett summarises S. K.’s (often overread) view of doctrine as such:

“If doctrines are abstracted from life, they become spiritually debilitating diversions, but if they are applied to life they open up new existential possibilities.”13

I plead with my more theoretically-minded counterparts: the point is not to identify the credo as in some way false—certainly, that is not the case and not a case that you will find anywhere in either my own writing or in the extensive library left by our Melancholic Dane. Rather, my reader, my point is that doctrine is an ideal category and can only be dealt with ideally; but humans are not ideal, do not exist ideally, and cannot be recognised ideally. They are real, real beings of flesh and blood that exist in the continuity of time, ugly and depraved in the passage from one state of being to another—imperfect in material reality in comparison to the perfection of the idea. As such, we might find ourselves gaining an inappropriate confidence, a bullish self-justified position whereby we take the ideal, the beautiful perfection of the Godhead in its self-revelation to humanity, and use it to beat the fallen with the theological cudgel of arky-faith. Again, to be sure, the point is not to dismiss this admission of faith as inappropriate or somehow false—no, it is merely limited in its usefulness for answering the question at hand.

What then, my reader, is to be done? Is it impossible to identify a Christian witness in a way which we can feel assured by? Is it even possible at all—or are we applying the essential to the existential in a way which is simply inappropriate?

Mynster, radical in a sense that doesn’t matter

As you might expect, this takes us back to the short yet explosive essay that opened S. K.’s “attack”.

“…the fact that Bishop Mynster’s preaching of Christianity was not in character, that outside the quiet hours he was not in character, not even in the role of his own sermons, which nevertheless, as has been said, have in comparison with the New Testament mitigated the Christian conceptions considerably—one does not need to be particularly sharp-sighted to see this, in case one who hears and reads him is duly acquainted with his sermons. In 1848 and thereafter this was visible even to blind admirers, if they were sufficiently acquainted with his sermons to know what they and the quiet hours would prompt one to expect.

So when alongside of it one lays the New Testament, Bishop Mynster’s proclamation of Christianity was a very questionable sott of preaching, especially on the part of one who was a witness to the truth. But then to my mind the genuine thing about him was that, as I am firmly convinced, he was willing to admit before God and to himself that by no manner of means was he a witness to the truth—to my mind this admission was the genuine thing about him.14

To circle back to our (rejected) categories, it is clear that Mynster did indeed follow Christ in, at the very least, a way that the person who would appeal to that kind of identifier would approve of. He also no doubt professed the Apostle’s Creed, another signifier that we have said is along the right lines, but possibly lacking for our question. So, what then did S. K. take such furious umbridge with? Elsewhere, in positive-to-neutral appraisals of the bishop’s career, some have even noted that he was a talented politician-priest, skilfully navigating an exceedingly difficult period in the history of the Danish church:

“Mynster seems to have been an uncertain and insecure youth who was not wholly satisfied by the politics or religion of the radical Enlightenment, but who was also haunted by a feeling that he was unable to give himself wholly to Christianity.”15

Caught between the rock of political-theological liberalism and the hard place of monarchist-theological conservatism, Mynster apparently succeeded in steering a path between these two factions in a way that allowed the church to maintain its place in bourgeois society despite severe sociological pressures. In an era when the dual threat of zealous liberalism and reactionary conservatism loomed at the door, there was a distinct need not for a man of mere passion or ardent tradition, but a cool head that could appease all and emerge from the other side of the conflict unscathed. However, predictably, this wasn’t necessarily praiseworthy in the eyes of a certain contemporaneous Dane. Millay continues:

“...we have a man who was neither hot nor cold. He was precisely the kind of person God spits out of the divine mouth (Rev 3:16), and it seems Mynster shared this revulsion at himself.”16

If we can understand Mynster as a radical—something that Millay does allow for, although only in the sense that it allowed him to stand apart from contemporaneous pressures—then he was a radical who was distinctly not radical enough in the sense that scripture demands. He was neither hot enough to bring about the kind of change that the “Christianity of the New Testament” promised nor cold enough to sink into the conservativism which would have allowed the church to maintain its social power: he was, on the whole, simply not a “witness to the truth” as S. K. understood the term—a Christian, but one who would have to plead before God that he was no witness at all17. And, indeed, as we shall see, the knife’s edge didn’t aim for Mynster, in the peace of having slipped off his mortal coil, but Martensen and his church’s appropriation of this term “witness to the truth”.

On Sandhedsvidne, the Witness to the Truth

Note here that S. K. provided us with the tools to demand a rigorous understanding of the term Christian witness through his qualified term: “the witness to the truth”. In many ways, this initial essay concerning Mynster was written in order to bite back against Martensen’s adoption and perversion of this Kierkegaardian term towards his own ends—while Mynster might well have qualified as a Christian in the lower-level sense, calling him a “witness to the truth” far exceeded even the deceased bishop’s own assessment of his faith. As Bukhdal notes, Martensen seems to have fallen into the trap set in Training in Christianity, leading to this Kierkegaardian attack on “Christendom” as the entirely rational outgrowth of S. K.’s life's work given existential import.18

But if from the pulpit Bishop Mynster is to be depicted and canonized as a witness to the truth, one of the genuine witnesses to the truth, then a protest must be made. I see that the Berlin News [a Copenhagen paper], which is the official newspaper, just as Professor Martensen is the official preacher, expresses the opinion that Professor Martensen (who with notable haste forestalls the interment and the monument too [which was to be erected to the deceased bishop]) has by this address erected a beautiful and worthy monument to the deceased—I would prefer to say a worthy monument to Professor Martensen himself. But in any case, the monument cannot be ignored, therefore a protest must be made, which perhaps might contribute to make the monument (to Professor Martensen) more enduring.19

After the bone-rattling opening page of the theological assault, we find that S. K. turned his hand in a nuanced way against his long-time adversary, Martensen. As opposed to launching into the thumb-biting judgement that haunts the very rafters of the modern church today, dear Søren presents us with the difficult problem that permeates his entire authorship: what does it mean to be a Christian witness in Christendom—especially when the church itself seems to have abandoned its role as the place where the Body of Christ can convene? Has Christianity merely become a cultural identifier, some aspect of “the world” that is only seen outward appearances?20 Mynster’s funeral had exposed Christendom's attempt to colonise S. K.’s own terms, themselves pulled up from the depths of scriptural study, that had attempted to break out from under the empty language of tradition21 unyoked from its historical reality—or, in another sense, the church had become a body where the holy words of the Lord had gone to die, drowned in the theoretical-technological thinking of the triumphal cleric22.

To launch the attack, S. K. holds up the image presented in scripture, in the ideal of the “Christianity of the New Testament”, and gives not one single soul—including himself—an inch to escape from the high demand, but never impossible demand, of the Lord God Almighty:

A witness to the truth is a man whose life from first to last is unacquainted with everything which is called enjoyment—and, ah, whether to you has been granted little or much, you know how pleasant is that which is called enjoyment! But his life from first to last was unacquainted with what is called enjoyment; on the other hand, from first to last it was initiated into what is called suffering—and, alas, even you who have been exempted from the protracted, the more agonizing sufferings, you know nevertheless from your own experience how one winces at what is called suffering! But to that his life was initiated from first to last, by experiences which are even more rarely talked about among men, because they are more rarely encountered in the world, by inward conflicts, by fear and trembling, by trepidation, by anguish of soul, by agony of spirit, being tried besides that by all the sufferings which are more commonly talked of in the world. A witness to the truth is a man who in poverty witnesses to the truth—in poverty, in lowliness, in abasement, and so is unappreciated, hated, abhorred, and then derided, insulted, mocked—his daily bread perhaps he did not always have, so poor was he, but the daily bread of persecution he was richly provided with every day. For him there was never promotion, except in an inverse sense, downward, step by step. A witness to the truth, one of the genuine witnesses to the truth, is a man who is scourged, maltreated, dragged from one prison to the other, and then at last—the last promotion, whereby he is admitted into the first class as defined by the Christian protocol, among the genuine witnesses to the truth—then at last—for this is indeed one of those genuine witnesses to the truth of whom Professor Martensen speaks—then at last crucified, or beheaded, or burnt, or roasted on a gridiron, his lifeless body thrown by the executioner in an out-of-the-way place (thus a witness to the truth is buried), or burnt to ashes and cast to the four winds, so that every trace of the “filth” (which the Apostle says he was) might be obliterated.23

Here we find a scorching illustration of what a “witness to the truth” is. While some of the more Mynsterian thinkers might take this as an exercise in scruplosity24, this account proceeds first and foremost from the “Christianity of the New Testament” as it is revealed to us in the life of Christ, the acts of His apostles, and the earnest self-reflection of a man concerned with becoming a Christian in Christendom. In truth, this entire passage, when read aloud in the raw admission of one allowing oneself to be judged by scripture, is possibly the greatest summary of S. K.’s radically Protestant approach to ethics, self-reflection, and creating an impetus for action.

Throughout this, my reader, of course, the point that S. K. is driving is not that Mynster is “bad” or otherwise in some way lacking as an individual—S. K. doesn’t expect to find some Pelagian justification for Mynster before we can talk about him. Rather, S. K.’s attack through Mynster is against Martensen and the Danish Church’s now inappropriate method of teaching “the many” about what Christianity is. He holds up an image of Mynster and then counterposes it against the “Christianity of the New Testament”, before simply asking “who could possibly think that these are one and the same?”

The modern danger

Is this truth ? To speak thus, is this perhaps also a way of witnessing to the truth? and by that address did Professor Martensen himself appear in the character of a witness to the truth, one of the genuine witnesses to the truth? Verily there is that which is more contrary to Christianity, and to the very nature of Christianity, than any heresy, any schism, more contrary than all heresies and all schisms combined, and that is, to play Christianity. But precisely in the very same sense that the child plays soldier, it is playing Christianity to take away the danger (Christianly, “witness” and “danger” correspond), and in place of this to introduce power (to be a danger for others), worldly goods, advantages, luxurious enjoyment of the most exquisite refinements—and then to play the game that Bishop Mynster was a witness to the truth, one of the genuine witnesses to the truth, to play it with such frightful earnestness that one cannot bring the game to a stop, but keeps on playing it into heaven itself, plays Bishop Mynster on into the holy chain of witnesses to the truth which stretches from the days of the Apostles to our times.25

Here, S. K. leaves his reader in a position where they must now jump off the fence: to some extent, even to a grand extent, there is a difference between those holy practitioners of the “Christianity of the New Testament” and those who play Christianity today. There is no reason to think that these categories don’t find a place in reality, where Christianity has often been used as a guise, as a cover for those who would work incognito against it and, as such, we should endeavour to identify the differences between the “witnesses to the truth” and those who are merely called—or, even worse, claim—the title without the ethical realisation of actually being a “witness to the truth”.

And this shall remain a theme through these essays: how can we become a Christian in the light of a church which frames Bishop Mynster as a “witness to the truth”? Has the church completely fallen or, at the very least, lost all of the categories that it needs to properly tend to the flock and spread Christians like salt amongst the nations? Has a clever rhetorical trick allowed both Christians and those who appear to be Christians to neuter this holy language and empty out the very contents of scripture in favour of a teary-eyed sentimentalism or chest-beating, self-congratulatory favouritism?

In some sense, this is the basis of a genuinely anarchic reading of the “attack”: when, in the light of triumphalist cleric rhetoric and the fallenness of the powers26, we find no solace for a Christian community in the merely objective sources that one might expect to be authoritative. Indeed, you, my reader, are in the tragic state of becoming the individual that God wishes for you to become, that you already are, and, in order for the world to see you as such, must become a “witness to the truth” that replicates the “Christianity of the New Testament” in the non-ideal, in the real, in the ugly, painful reality of this very fallen world we live in. We are in this alone—and, in that task to stand alone, we must rely on the strength of Another; to love, to be free, that is to “stand by oneself - through another's help!”27

As we sojourn on with S. K. through his musings against the very church he loved and sought to speak out on behalf of, we will find that we must discern between “speaking truth to power”28 and judging those around us. And, with that in mind, we will next to look to the postscript to this essay, the mounting pressure of the “attack”, and what it means for you and I, my reader, as individuals ready to become witnesses to the truth—or, at the very least, the kind of person who can admit that they have failed.

The evil in our time is not the established order with its many faults. No, the evil in our time is precisely: this evil penchant for reforming, this flirting with wanting to reform, this sham of wanting to reform without being willing to suffer and to make sacrifices, this frivolous conceitedness of wanting to be able to reform without even having a conception, to say nothing of a lofty conception, of how uncommonly elevated is the idea of "to reform," this hypocrisy of avoiding the consciousness of one's own incompetence by being busy with the diversion of wanting to reform the Church, which our age is least of all competent to do.29

This man, if it is not already clear, was Søren Kierkegaard, an individual largely still misunderstood by the prevailing winds of academia that doesn’t explicitly bear the title “Kierkegaardian”. His efforts, the quietist product of two long years of intense writing hidden from the gawping maw of bourgeois Copenhagen’s demand for new literature, had followed an intense and creative period—evading categorisation, he danced between literature, philosophy, and theology in a way that possibly only his atheist counterpart to the South in Friedrich Nietzsche has otherwise managed, frequently publishing multiple books in the same year (and even, occasionally, on the same day!) that often acted as a living dialectical dance between two perspectives that we might find lacking. After this retreat, his attempt to make sense of Christ’s message in the face of the “liberated church” was met with furious outrage, scorn, limited approval, confusion, misunderstanding (both willful and otherwise), and a final testament to his oeuvre that would stand as both a confusing break from his carefully crafted artworks and a radicalised intensification of a man who was in the death throes of his time.

Deontological Anarchy

While the history of his Danish and wider European reception is an interesting one, it is not the central aim for this serial study of these works. His commitment to what he perceived to be guidance at the core of Christ’s message outlives the particular environment in which he launched himself into battle—it is a radical re-evaluation of the Christian faith as captured by the paganism of Christendom, emerging from a semi-Lutheran, semi-Anabaptist position and filled with all the piss and vinegar of mid-to-late 19th-century Pietism.

In this sense, I plan to work through S. K.’s final writings in order to identify the knots—or, more appropriately, the knots—that he pulled out from under the comforting, withering corpse of bourgeois Christendom and gave them the air they needed, the air which forced that single individual in the moment of the offence to choose: either we go as we are, caught in the malaise of faith poorly understood and even more poorly practiced or we surrender all claims to Christendom and merely take what we need as sojourners out into the world.

Attack!

As such, this serial investigation begins here: as a warning.

Often, S. K.’s bloody and violent rhetoric can be mistaken for a thesis far more “actively revolutionary” than his intended meaning, far less revolutionary in the sense he did mean, and often without the accompaniment of the broader corpus. This becomes especially pernicious when we find the helpful pointers that S. K. had left—seemingly intentionally—for us to discover in his journals. As always, the collections of relevant excerpts in the Hongs editions of his work are a treasure trove of nuance and rising complexity, but always allowing us to return to the simple line of investigation that haunts S. K.’s work as a whole: “what does it mean to be a Christian in the bosom of Christendom?”

“[I]f what one sees all over Europe is Christendom, then I propose to start here in Denmark to list the price for being Christian in such a way that the whole concept—state church, official appointments, livelihood—bursts open.”2

“Radical interpreters” of S. K., i.e., those who are prepared to grant his “attack” authority inasmuch as it coincides with their own goals, have often taken him to be an ardent enemy of Christianity in this violent flurry—however, this really isn’t the case. Despite my own unashamed anarchist leanings, S. K. was altogether a conservative-if-not-occasionally-reactionary thinker who looked at democracy, the free press, and growing liberalisation as indicators of a culture of nihilism sweeping—no, successfully having swept!—across Denmark and Europe at large. In the domain of politics, it did not matter what was said, only that everyone was saying it; in the domain of thought, it did not matter what was written, only that everyone was reading it; in the domain of ethics, it did not matter what people acted out, only that someone at some point in history had acted it out and, therefore, it was possible to align one’s self with that virtuous figure and claim idealistic protection.

With that in mind, we begin our journey into the attack—S. K.’s own journal, titled Øieblikket [The Instant]. This caustic, challenging, and powerful collection of essays that came from the hand of a dead man walking3 provides us not a framework for a Christian anarchism or a set of principles to absent-mindedly adopt as our own, but a staunch and serious critique of the Christianity of modernity against the Christianity of the New Testament4. And from this, we shall plan to become judged as Christians and as Christian anarchists—not by a high-minded and self-congratulatory thumb-biter sat in the front pew, but from a man who had earnestly given himself nowhere to turn but into the uncompromising commandment of the God-Man. An essay-by-essay assessment of S. K.’s final gift to the world and the negative contours of a Christian anarchism for those of us still here today.

“Thou plain man! The Christianity of the New Testament is infinitely high; but observe that it is not high in such a sense that it has to do with the difference between man and man with respect to intellectual capacity, etc. No, it is for all. Everyone, absolutely everyone, if he absolutely wills it, if he will absolutely hate himself, will absolutely put up with everything, suffer everything (and this every man can if he will)—then is this infinite height attainable to him.”5

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With that in mind, posing the Apostle Paul as an anarchist (especially in the context of his epistle to Titus) presumably comes across as an odd move. To begin with, I can already hear the groans of resignation from the secular anarchic contingents, displeased that I have failed to slavishly agree in making world domination my goal—after all, Paul makes no reference to world revolution at all, yet we are expected to take him seriously as an anarchist. Secondly, Pauline scriptures are often pointed to as clearly showing a certain deference, maybe even reactionary ineptitude, to established authorities. Thirdly, Paul is often met with derision and hatred within certain prevalent Christian anarchist tendencies3 in favour of a far more literalist, myopic view of Christ and Christ alone—possibly because he steeled himself from turning Christ’s message into mushy slogans for unthinking many as opposed to commandments to you.

However, this is a short piece on Paul, his anarchic political stance, and the way he breathes that position into the short epistle to his dear friend and follower, Titus. While I am under no impression that I will convince the convinced of Paul’s political stance, I do believe that his complex position is largely misunderstood in favour of gross simplifications.

On the Epistle

The letter to Titus is, as with so much of the New Testament, short. It is the letter that carries the love of one man over the seas to the Cretan home of his dear friend and the communities with which he has been committed to—the titular Titus, of course. But, again, like so much of the New Testament, the Pauline mastery that proceeds from this fragmentary expression of faith shows us significant Christian themes that provide nuance and create tension with others letters found elsewhere, and, in that playful tension that adds layer upon layer to the Christian message that shines through, we find praise for good works, righteousness, example-setting, lawlessness, and the rebuke.

And, to the secular mind, keen to sigh once more with indignity, a word that conceals a significant Christian theme will jump out here when we attempt to build it into an anarchist framework: lawlessness. My reader, it seems that I have attempted to do the impossible: to reconcile the notion of anarchy with the notion of law. But with this word and with this word alone do we find the key to Paul's radical anarchic attack on the state, on the world, and on those who seek to turn Christianity into the window-dressing that obscures worldliness as false holiness by way of human trickery.4

We meet Paul in his writing with a greeting:

Paul, a bondservant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ, according to the faith of God’s elect and the acknowledgment of the truth which accords with godliness, in hope of eternal life which God, who cannot lie, promised before time began, but has in due time manifested His word through preaching, which was committed to me according to the commandment of God our Savior.5

Here, in reaching out to Titus and the Cretan Christians, Paul opens his letter by framing the scope which is important for the impertinent would-be faithful: there is truth, it is knowable, and it “accords with godliness”. This, as we later see, is the consistent theme of the epistle and something which Paul attempts to press in Titus’ mind: godliness and the importance of good works in the life of the Christian community.

This opens up the question on what precisely “godliness” might mean for the lowly creature who is all but that. But remember, for Paul, the good is that which accords with godliness—and that which accords with godliness is that which is true. In that sense, Paul has peeled something back for us: instead of “lawlessness” being in a dialectical relationship with a kind of positivist legalism, “lawlessness” stands against “godliness”—to be against God and His Word is to be “lawless”, whereas holding to Him and His self-revelation in the principle-less principle of all things6, Christ, is the mode by which we escape this problem which Paul identifies.

Of course, Paul understood that bringing people to Christ and inspiring change in their lives is not something that is done through moralising finger-wagging—indeed, instead, the path to change is found in holding up the ideal image that allows for “the offense” to possibly be invoked. As part of an image of what a series of ideal individuals might do (1:5-2:15), Paul slips in two notes concerning “good works” which should draw our attention:

To the pure all things are pure, but to those who are defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure; but even their mind and conscience are defiled. They [concerning the Cretans] profess to know God, but in works they deny Him, being abominable, disobedient, and disqualified for every good work. (1:15-16)

…exhort the young men to be sober-minded, in all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good works; in doctrine showing integrity, reverence, incorruptibility, sound speech that cannot be condemned, that one who is an opponent may be ashamed, having nothing evil to say of you. (2:6-8)

Paul, in his typical robust style, taking the notion of “speaking truth with love”7 to its very limit, set his eye on addressing what he perceived as the key failings of the Cretan churches that Titus had as of yet failed to overcome. Therefore, the matter that concerned Paul was “good works”—and the matters that concern us ought to be “what precisely does good works mean for Paul in the context of a minority church that struggles under the weight of the world within and without?”

“Trained by Saving Grace”

For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that, denying ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for us, that He might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself His own special people, zealous for good works. Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you. (2:11-15)

Here, Paul plays his hand and shows that his advice to our Cretan counterparts is not just high-minded “oughts” and “ought nots”. Good works, in Paul’s mind, are the product of the faith that “the grace of God that brings salvation” has delivered to the world—and this messages with spoken, exhorted, and encouraged through rebuke that flows from the faithful in their outward expression of faith.

At this stage, no doubt, our secular counterpart is fully ready to depart from our reasoning: the word “authority”, usually framed as the very thing against which anarchists pose themselves8, is used in a positive manner by Paul. But consider what it means to be have a law as opposed to having a law imposed upon you9—if we perceive law as how individuals are reconciled to the collective10, we can see the Christian notion of lawlessness is not one of abject anarchy (or chaos or some other similar term of derision), but, instead, a principleless approach to life which breaks through the need for outside imposition by the Powers:

“We need to be convinced that there are no Christian principles. There is the person of Christ, who is the principle of all things, but if we want to be faithful there can be no question of reducing Christianity (as too often has happened) to a certain number of principles from which implications could be straightforwardly derived. This act of transforming the work of the living God into a philosophical doctrine is the constant temptation and greatest betrayal of theologians—and also of the faithful, when they transform the action of the Spirit, who causes his fruits to be born in them, into a moral system, a new law, a set of principles to apply. The Christian life does not result from a cause but is directed toward an end. This is what changes human perspectives completely and makes the Christian life unique from any other.”11

In this way, Ellul, along with Paul, identifies law interpreted as imposition as an objective view—and, by implication, a grievous misunderstanding—of what God has given to humanity: the way to discover and achieve freedom. The law, when understood as an objective, universal directive, fails to become commandment, i.e., a personal, individual, and concrete address12. As Ellul identifies in the Christian life in modernity, Paul was all too aware that the path to change was not in thumb-biting moralism that castigates the other, but the illustration of freedom to those who are ready to become free. This is clearest in Titus, where we see Paul call his dear friend to discipline in the context of zealous adventurism:

“Remind them a to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men. For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another.”13

Our secular counterpart has no doubt left us alone at this point, dear reader, therefore we can take to entirely theological thought now—that we might be anarchists who are neither idealists nor adventurists.

Paul reminds Titus, as Ellul reached out to remind his readership, that rulers and authorities—whoever they might be—can be offered the respect that they insist their positions deserve if they so earnestly desire it, as if it achieves some lawless end that they desire. But, this is not a slavish call for weakness in the face of an overwhelming power14, but rather the recognition that the powers of the world are “foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another”15 in the same way that Christians have been, are, and will continue to be in a world where they struggle with sin, where they struggle to breathe free again, where they groan under the weight of the world where they have been, are, and will continue to be born again. Christ’s cry to the heavens on the cross, where all hope was lost and all suffering was felt, remains true and even more true for us today: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do.”16

The anarchy of Christ, then, is found in this Pauline reminder to Titus to hold up the image of the virtuous Christian community and forgive those who fall short of it. The powers themselves, instituted by God and perverted towards sin17, are still only perverted inasmuch as the idealist constructions of human mechanations against the Lord—meaning that they are just as capable and culpable of foolishness, disobedience, deception, lustfulness and hedonism, malice and envy, hatefulness, just as we have been, are, and shall be. To rage against the machine of mass politics, as if it were not a body of individuals hiding within the safety of “the Crowd”, is to rage against your brother and your sister as if they weren’t as such. In the freedom of becoming reconciled to Christ’s Law qua Commandment in the sense that overcomes the threat of lawlessness to the possibility of any freedom whatsoever, we become free from the temptation to engage with the propaganda state—fascist and totalising in character—with counter-propaganda and in the unfreedom of becoming “determined opposition”. In that sense, Paul reminds us of Christ’s mission:

All who are with me greet you. Greet those who love us in the faith. Grace be with you all. Amen.18

The mission of the faithful is to be the body of Christ against the world and abide by the grace with which we are gifted. And, in that, we are free—free from the rulers and powers, who can have their laws and their impositions as a child has its playthings; free from the temptation of the enemy, who cannot bring us into his fold as a weapon of hatred against love.

In this relation of the law-giver and the law-receiver, there is, by extension, a relation of authority and toleration that ties the two distinct parties together: one demands the other to follow its laws, the other assents that the laws handed down to them are appropriate (or appropriate enough) to their continued production and reproduction of whatever type of life they live. Here it is important to note that this governing—governed dialectic is not one that is properly distinct in the sense that philosophers usually mean: the governing emerge from the governed when we account for the temporal reality of the dual excitement and mundanity of the everyday.

As a part of this, and especially within the irrational flow of Western liberal history, this has meant that Christianity—or, rather, Christendom—has been given the whip hand. In this sense, it appeared that Christianity was taken from the position of a Christ Who handed Himself over to His soon-to-be murderers in the disavowal of all worldly authority to the figure of impositional power, the one who is known by his aesthetic display of power, over the feeble human subject. Regardless of how we feel about this historical development, it does leave us with an important series of cascading questions: is this the current relation of Christianity with the world today? Can we really say that Christians ought to tolerate their neighbours? Can we really say that was ever an appropriate relation that we could really call Christian?

Hauerwas Against Tolerance

I won't waste time illustrating the “pro-tolerance” position here. Any given liberal theologian and a great many popular apologists will give a proper account of the reconciliatory, possibly even universalist aspect of the Christian faith that must stand alone and separated from the particularities of Christ’s message. These people will give a far stronger case of their position than I could bring myself to.

Instead, I turn to Stanley Hauerwas and his opposition to religious tolerance in the age of postmodernity:

“How would you like to be the one tolerated? Tolerance is always a position for those in power and Christianity is in the process of losing its power, so one of the things that Christians have to do is not ask “how are we going to understand other faiths?”, but “how are faiths going to understand us?

…

You probably are thinking more like an American and how do you deal with religious diversity in America, rather than thinking like a Christian. How a Christian thinks is “how do we witness to people our love of God in a way that they will want as a matter of fact to talk to us because have something interest to say?” This is extremely important because I fear that, in the name of religious diversity, Christians increasingly are learning to say things like “well, I believe Jesus is Lord, but that’s my personal opinion.” What an odd grammar of speech that is that would derive from the presumption that I need to be tolerant. Christians don’t need to be tolerant, we need to be humble, and we need to be humble, that is, to have the virtue of humility, because we worshipped a crucified saviour.”

Exiting the Pagan’s Castle

For Hauerwas, a clear difficulty for the antiquated idea of “Christian tolerance” is that, even if we were to suggest that the idea is fundamentally un-Christian, we no longer exist in a world where it is possible for Christians to assume such high-minded positions prior to theological reflection. The world has changed in the challenges that it hands down to the faithful and, therefore, we must abandon the outdated schema of Christian tolerance of secularity and other faiths: in short, there is no position of authority these days for the church triumphant to enjoy1.

The problem emerges when we take the identity “Christian” (and, for Hauerwas in particular, American Christianism) to be equivalent to the ontological fact of Christian justification—or, to conflate “the world” that cries out a name with the fact of “new creatures” becoming “born again”. Contra the generalized liberal theological position of Christianity qua “civilization mission,” where the world was not revealed to be necessarily in contradiction with eschatological mission (John 18:36) but rather an unmediated idea in need of Hegelian qualification2, Hauerwas and S. K. before him remind us that these two notions are fracturously dissimilar. He notes that Christians might find themselves thinking “more like an American” than as a Christian, a bold claim in the apparent age of Christian nationalism. As our dear Dane would once note, the insanity of Christendom (and, in our case, post-Christendom) is that the tolerant (or, in our case, the intolerant) find themselves having understood the nature of the commandments, people live in a lax malaise of assuming everyone will be fine without having to do anything.3

S. K., in critical engagement with Luther, attempts to bring us back into the fold:

“There is always with us a worldliness which would have the name of being Christian, but would have it at a price as cheap as possible. This worldliness became observant of Luther. It listened, and it took the precaution to listen a second time for fear it might have heard amiss, and thereupon it said, ‘Capital! That suits us exactly.’ Luther says, ‘It is faith alone that matters’; the fact that his life expresses works he does not himself say, and now he is dead, so that this is no longer an actuality. Let us take then his word, his doctrine—and we are liberated from all works. Long live Luther!”4

Having been offered something at “a price as cheap as possible” for so long, there is a flabbiness, a laziness, an expected spiritual givenness that views the idea of a “second birth” as altogether unnecessary when the first occurred on Christian soil—a wonderful illustration, but an. Christian mothers, by the help of Christian doctors, bring Christian children into this Christian nation by way a Christian hospital built out of Christian bricks sourced from Christian soil that now only grows Christian grass for the Christian cows—how all these things become “new creatures” when some of them are not creatures at all whatsoever is beyond me, but I presume that the American theologians of neo-indulgence have already cooked up some particularly sophisticated reponse to that.

Worldliness pricks its ears at the idea of sola fide, sola Gratia becomes a tempting invitation to the world that seeks to do as it wills under the guise of God’s. Thanks to the unlimited freedom of perspective that the Lord grants us through His faithfulness that binds Him to us and us to Him, the adversary is always ready to turn the very good itself back onto itself and invert it into something new—he seizes the opportunity afforded by all commandments, produced in him every kind of coveting (Romans 7:8) whereby the law is turned into his law.

From the Castle, to the Desert

Where the call for mercy in “an eye for an eye”, the Lord calling His children to go to that limit and no further, might teach us great cares for our neighbour than the mere desire for revenge, it is inverted by the adversary into a bloodthirsty desire for this other person, abstracted from a neighbour into a mere other, to become the mode for desire to run rampant over our better judgement for how our lives ought to be—where once we might have acted mercifully and repaid for our mercy5, there is little more than presumption. This Vordenken6 rolls along from this point uncontested, prepared to invert any and all possibilities for our recognition of something from “the Wholly Other” into the impatient impertinence that God simply hasn’t kept up with the actually rather impressive march of human progress—from nowhere and to nowhere either. For this careless individual, lacking that higher desire, that higher madness of religious faith7, it is no great leap to take whatever happens to be his given desires at any given moment of his life to be equivalent to divine will. From this point, having uncritically decided that what one wants is what God desires, the movement to a position of tolerance is small. “Tolerance”, a product of Vordenken, realises itself in the casual self-assuredness and self-righteousness of “the church triumphant”.

Therefore, assuming this position of power seems off the table—as it has always been, but now we lack even the justifiable excuses for the misappropriation of faith in a world which congratulated itself on achieving a faith without risk. No longer can we justify from even a position of pragmatics that there is a role for “tolerance” in the critical thought of Christian life—indeed, such suggestions will collapse into absurdity or a bleating nihilism and, therefore, our task is to remind ourselves that Christ never offered us a way to subjugate the world to our will. Instead, our methods start with the methods that Christ showed us were possible. This, of course, isn’t a call to Christian quietism or the acceptance of evil to be evil uncontested, but, rather, turning to Barth, we might suggest that although Christ's mission is not of this world, God's grace “is in this world... for in this world God's will is to be done”8—while the church triumphant stands as a subversion of Christianity by way of its own language, you and I, my reader, now live in a world where the church militant may stand as a subversion of the language of Christendom against secular idealism: “…now truth is triumphant, as once it was militant”9 and in the twilight of the gods, it may be militant again.

The Church Militant Can Only Be Real

In a technical sense, “idealism” refers to the idea that the way we think about the world (or, at the very least, primarily the way we think about the world) is what shapes it. While this takes on a great many forms throughout the history of philosophy, an important theme that emerges from this roughly sketched “family resemblance” is the primacy of the idea prior to the realisation of the effect in reality—we can change the world merely by thinking about it in the correct way. Needless to say, there is a certain type of despair which proceeds when we think that thinking correctly about the world is the be-all-and-end-all of changing it.

For many Christians, especially in an age where the “iron cage of language” takes on an odd material reality where the “invisible church” is first invisible and a church later, this is the basic approach for understanding spirituality:

“In this era, martyrdom and persecution are just as unimaginable as they were in the church triumphant, since this would presuppose that faith is recognizable, that it might actually do something that mattered, and that anyone would care enough to persecute it. In the age of the church indifferent, the truest sign of one’s earnest Christianity is the ability to don the faith loosely, with an air of ironic detachment, and thereby blend into the rest of the (nominally) Christian crowd.”10

In an age defined by idealism, where our entire being is tied up in the declaration—especially a public declaration, for the viewing pleasure of the faceless, thoughtless crowd and replicate—that one is some way or other, regardless of whether one is some way or other. This is the underlying presumption of the “church triumphant”, a fantastical image that inspires wayward youths to traditional churches in search of “muscular” theology and right-facing “chatterers” to bleat about this or that statistical oddity or victory concerning some Christian triviality—as if God Himself would be so foolish as to be convinced of anything by the way of mere statistics, as if capturing “the numerical” is a biblical theme at all:

“But, for example, it has become a very common witticism... If Christ came again to the world now, he would be crucified again, unless the death penalty had been abolished by this time. People drop this remark as casually as they say "Good day," only with greater pretentiousness; and people find it said so aptly and strikingly, and it does not occur at all, not in the remotest way, to the person who says it to question whether he himself is a Christian; it does not occur to the person who says it to become aware of this whole mirage of Christendom. Truly this is inexplicable to me. It has become almost a saying in Christendom that if Christ came again he would meet the same fate as before, when he came to non-Christians - and yet Christendom is supposed to be the Church triumphant, which presumably, when all is said and done, would add to its triumphs the new one of crucifying Christ.”11

In the “mass object” of Christendom—or, more properly for our own age, post-Christendom, where the church is considered to be more like a failingly ill child who has managed to take three or four steps forward and is now only five or six steps behind his classmates (how surprised we are to see him do anything at all!) than an actual physical and spiritual presence of Christ, the God-Man (how surprised we are to not see Him do anything at all!)—the danger is idealism, where the church was merely a culture of triumphalism and not an engagement with “the world” in any real, meaningful sense. By placing the image of the church, as the place where coffee mornings and handshakes occur, as the church proper, we are led to this theological illusion of the church triumphant and, with that, the confused idea that the church not only does congratulate itself for conquering the world by Pelagian humanism but also should conquer the world—whether with God or against Him, but always with a slogan on His behalf.

In order for the church militant to discover itself in the actions of those expediti that march to its drum, Christianity is first and foremost concerned with creating individuals who have, in their lives, both are and are becoming a “concrete existence”, an expression of the Body of Christ in the material. This “concrete existence” is the basic belief in the possibility for and the realisation of that possibility that to love God is to be filled with a love that loves the neighbour, not merely a conception of love for the other qua object that is created by the lover.12 More than merely learning to become a Christian in the right way—an odious, paternalist attitude that makes God the brow-beating “no!”-issuer to the scrupulous figure doomed to existence—this anti-idealist notion of love is what gives the Christians in the world existence against the world itself. At once, the “invisible church” is, apparently, visible to the one who has eyes to see and ears to hear and, yet, is invisible to the one who doesn’t13—like salt in water and dissolves into unrecognisable anonymity, Christians operate under the watchful eye of the state as low-flying aircraft avoids radar detection; and like low-flying aircraft, the Christian operates by unveiling the bomb that had gone off in history14 to the offence of the world.

“…a manifest, hidden church would follow Christ in siding and hiding with and among the poor and oppressed. For all of the structural symmetry between Anti-Climacus’s high Christology and low Christology, clearly Kierkegaard considers God’s kenotic self-emptying into a poor and suffering human being to be determinative for occasioning the possibility of offense and for providing the prototype for Christian emulation.”15

On Post-Christendom

It appears, then, my reader, that some notions need to be rearranged, some wounded conception that needs to be opened up once again so that the bones can be realigned, so that healing can properly come about instead of a mere end to some temporary pain. The aesthetic indulgence of the red-bearded faux-Viking or the Byzantine Knight is little more than “playing Christianity”, an elaborate game of dress-up that lacks even the practical import of realisation of the child at play—a virtual alienation that longs for the alienation of sin, that longs for the despair of becoming a self, that longs for Christendom in a world which has decided it desires new toys and that God has decided no longer needs the repugnant, violent form of His love.

Here, in “the culture of the city” where the meaning of the city is once again obscured to us, a repetition of the same babelic tendency that lies in the heart of the one who would don the Lord’s clothes if only he could prove that he could do a better job, is where post-Christendom has already unfolded in its infancy—and the infantile disorder of postmodernity, plagued by its parody of the ones who would genuinely “play Christianity”, is found in these would-be radicals that are little more than journalists, than balconeers—than would-be toleraters, who have nothing to tolerate and no audience to tolerate before. This world no longer exists and is no longer possible—even without mentioning whether it would be desirable.

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Share Kierkegaardian Reflections

To see Hauerwas in his own words, see the video below:

Here, captured in the vortex of a world which has turned evil into entertainment and then calls for all to bring out their dead for the betterment of the viewing public, this archic Christian sees the church as a civilising mission to the unclean—a task of lifting the sword against the neighbour, performing the divine task of separating those who are worthy of neighbour-love from those who are not. Caused by the world—which, by the way, may well be aware of what is evil, delights in it, and, as such, can effectively plan the programming to encourage the outrage of “the crowd” to consistently hit a fever pitch—to display some reaction, to break the solemnity of fear and trembling’s silent, hidden hands of mercy, the vortex spins and spins uncontrollably. There is no possibility for faith here—only the archic declaration that “the crowd”, here as both educator to and executioner for the state, has declared itself the authority which will break through the veil of tears that comes from the acceptance of a biblical softness, a priority of love for the unloveable.

But, of course, as with all chaotic forces, there is a biblical ground for order that can wiggle out through the cracks of our imposed hermeneutics: Genesis 1-2 and then 11-25 shows us that there is a fundamental way-of-life that breaks up this aesthetic demand for a technical show of power. Faithfulness itself, it seems, is the thing which breaks up a fetish for “the effective” and gives us a path away from this tempered conformity to the demands of the world-historical and towards the freedom of another way.

And, as is so often the case, it appears that both S. K. and Yoder were well-aware of this and built this opposition to anthropocentric self-assuredness into their wide-reaching and expansive theologies.

The Effectiveness—Faithfulness Dialectic

Effectiveness, we should stress, isn’t a bad thing. Suggesting that we start first by dismissing “the effective” for “the ineffective” would be a strange position to take, indeed, as if there are theological grounds to say that Christians should start eating out of hats or walking on all fours. However, this type of intuition exposes a set of “clay legs” on which our current milieux stands: the presumed superiority of technical knowledge and the discourse of technology1. In that sense, as we shall soon discover, the bible aims to show us that the opposite to “the effective” is not “the ineffective”, but, rather, the dialectical pair is “the human presumption of the effective” and “the divine promise of effectiveness through faith”.

In this sense, “the effective” is not concerned with things that do what they are supposed to or things that are useful for achieving certain goals, but, rather, with the obsessive compulsive discourse around the necessity of effectiveness—everything, from the mobilisation of capital resources to the management of the workplace to the relationship between mother and child in the early days of life, must be managed by a technical mind, a superior method that is generalisable to all cases, all other values be damned.2

And to illustrate this, we turn to John Howard Yoder:

“...causal frameworks produce a mutually delimiting complicity between possibility and effectiveness. The only effective path is the one we can see as possible; what is impossible, or what we cannot imagine presently, becomes ineffectual. At the same time, the realm of effectiveness cuts off what is possible: what seems impractical becomes essentially impossible, and the endpoint of our political possibility is chalked up to the realm of the real rather than to the blindness and impotence of our imagination.”3

…

“Possibility is no possibility at all when it is wedded to the effective and the causal—in fact, effectiveness and causality mediate the world and the possible such that there is neither worldliness nor possibility. Effective, causal possibility knows only what it sees, it is the totality of visibility; revolution emerges from a possibility of the world outside the sightlines of causality.”4

By moving our frame of reference from the supposedly omnipotent “view from nowhere”, which both assumes that all it sees is all that is possible in this universal chain-of-causality and also that the all-seeing observer sees from nowhere in particular, we introduce a level of doubt into our judgements of effectiveness and, by extension, make it subservient to some other value. We commit high treason against the scientific cretinism of our age: we attempt to make la technique subservient to a non-technical way of thinking. Yoder, rather than dismissing effectiveness outright and abandoning it, gave it back its limited place in theology: as that which is realised in faith and is only recognised in the patience of endurance, not that which undercuts our need for faith.5

Hopefully, now, my reader, you will see that effectiveness and faithfulness are not polar opposites, but conceptually interlinked and complementary. In a world where the delay of gratification is seen as the unspeakable sin against the individual, effectiveness can be mistaken for a “discourse of effectiveness”, or, to be clearer, the idle adoption of any and all methodologies that immediately bring about certain aims and the presumption that any methodology which does not bring about an immediate change is dismissible, is a worldview which must be dismissed. For Yoder, effectiveness itself must be tempered with the patience of faithfulness and our desire to ascend to the judge’s high throne must be nobbled, given a dose of humility in learning that we must remain doubtful in our claims about effectiveness in a way that allows for the appearance of ineffectiveness to bloom in the cherishing love of faithfulness.

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Abraham and a faith open to possibility

As part of understanding this, Paul’s terrible words haunt the one who thinks they have acquired God’s will simply by declaring that they have acquired God’s will: continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling (Philippians 2:12, emphasis mine). Interestingly, outside of the text which had appropriated that name, S. K. proposed the problem that comes when people fail to appropriate this revealed assuredness in the doubt that undermines assuredness:

“Either one works unceasingly with all the effort of one's soul, in fear and trembling, on self-concern's thought, “whether one will oneself be saved,” and then one truly has no time or thought to doubt the salvation of others, nor does one care to. Or one has become completely sure about one's own part-and then one has time to think about the salvation of others, time to step forward concerned and to shudder on their behalf, time to take positions and make gestures of concern, time to practice the art of looking horrified while one shudders on behalf of someone else.”6

Time and time again, Christianity has posed it against the very archic structures, appropriating the throne-position for itself as “the voice of God” as if God speaks through the mouths of institutions alone, and presented us with the either/or choice on which “everything else” rests: will you become yourself with God’s help or will traverse out alone qua the foundation of the world you create?7 No, says S. K., no; this choice is not one which affirms a radical self-assuredness in some particular way-of-life, some particular set of propositions, some particular “ethical worldview”, as if God’s Word is not the “Wholly Other” and is only a theory amongst theories—a topic for “chatter” in search of an audience.8 In the moment where we are tempted to assume the worst of any individual, even in their lowliness of sin, and then begin to act as the sword-wielding hand of the Lord, we have presumed that we are tasked to become the executioner instead of simply doing as Christ asked us in His forgiving example.

In the moment of realisation, when Christ washes back through the faithful that search for His face in the other, the choice shall become clear to that individual, the whom who—by virtue of breaking free from the comfort, security, and authority of “the crowd”—has ears to hear and eyes to see: will you, the one of whom it is commanded, love your neighbour in their putrid fallenness? Will you, the sinner, love your neighbour when all the world has identified them as the unlovable object, the prisoner on the gallows for our entertainment? Will you, the one who needs mercy above all, simply love your neighbour when the whole world works against this simple request, this quiet whispering in the desert for the ones who know where to look? In a sense, the quiet voice in the desert has asked us: “Who elected you to become the judge of the nations, and why do you turn this judgment against God Himself in your accusation that He is a liar?” Shall we listen or shall we take up the sword on behalf of the state?

As it was for Abraham, where faith unveiled itself in the sublime horror as the possibility to transgress the very obligations upon which we build our worlds:

“With Abraham the situation was different [from the tragic hero]. By his act, he overstepped the ethical [the Hegelian Sittlichkeit] entirely and possessed a higher telos outside of it, in relation to which he suspended the former.”9

“The paradox of the cross eschatologically puts into question the legitimacy of all world-historical potestas [power] in the name of the unconditioned, the wholly other, kenotic [self-emptying] love. In Abraham’s secrecy the violence of the law of the concept – whose work is the work of mediation – is kenotically put into question, not in the name of another, albeit higher, hegemonic order of potestas, but in the name of the wholly other order of love that radically suspends all world-historical potestas.”10

“It is precisely because he knew himself to be justified by grace alone, that Abraham is deservedly the "father of faith." This same admiration for one "beyond ethics" also applies to common human sinners. We all continually "suspend the ethical" in countless unacknowledged ethical evasions of daily life. Because of this, those who knowingly "suspend the ethical" in a frank admission of sin have a deserved preeminence over those whose moral insensitivity, smugness, or pride leads them to feel justified by their accomplishments.”11

Against the ethical, that dangerous force whereby “the crowd” takes on the force of society against the individual who would dare to be otherwise, Abraham emerges from the confines of both his narrow worldview (indeed, where a fetish for “effectiveness” may have led him to assume God spoke to him in riddles and, because of that, dulled the sharp edge of his faith in the moment) and the historical structures of his received conception of order to step out “up, over, and against” the ethical when it conflicts with the very Lord God Himself Who has both commanded the slaughter and promised the reception of his dear son Isaac. This movement is, fundamentally, the affirmation of faith and passion that “God has no lied to me”.

In that moment when we can no longer rely on the received wisdom “of the age” or hide away into abstractions, but rather become exposed by this character, this thing which is fundamentally me, which drags us from the comfort of the abstract ethical question and rips us apart over the coals of real life and Other’s voice.

“Abraham... personifies the ethic of responsibility in that he transforms the negative freedom realized in the suspension of the ethical into a positive experience of responding to the call of the other.”12

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Onwards in Fear and Trembling

This role of doubt, of course, is a difficult one—it leads us into positions where “tough decisions must be made” without the adequate toolkit to deal with those decisions. In the throne-position, where livelihoods are won and lost, the Christian’s predecliction for fear and trembling may stand as an impediment to the kind of “dirty hands” of politickeering. We leave ourselves outside of the court, outside of the Pharaoh’s chamber at the heart of Empire, when it comes to the time when decisions must be made and—sadly, say the technique-practitioners, locked with the bloodthirsty, teary-eyedness of effectiveness—blood must be spilt.

However, maybe this isn’t a fault—indeed, it is the all-encompassing negation of political power in Abraham’s refusal to collapse into conformity and Christ’s “political atheism” that makes S. K.’s overarching goal, to speak into a world where Christianity hangs dead in symbols amongst us and to reinvigorate the memory that an innocent man—no, God Himself!—died on the cross before them, apparent: “Kierkegaard seeks to un-socialize the individual in order to un-deify society”13.

Against the babbling sentimentality and cowardly “chattering” of those who claim that Christianity, the story of an innocent man’s—no, God Himself!—political assassination at the hands of the ethical and the secular combined, Eller wields the uncertainty of an-arky—the conscious and passionate refusal to make oneself the centre of one’s participation in God’s world—against the world in the activity of faith14:

“...this way of thinking [about the domination and instrumentalisation of the Other] is a denial of that freedom which is worth much more than all the freedoms that may be preserved in consequence. In the first place, men are persons and will remain so regardless of how we choose to view them. Thinking of them as instruments and targets does not make them so. And war is war—nothing else—and getting more that way all the time. But to even greater point: what insult is it to the other man, what damage to my personal relationship to him and to God, what affront to that God who gave his only Son that both I and my enemy might become true persons, when I deliberately suspend my Christian understanding in order to consider men mere things.”15

While Eller mused on war and war alone, there is no reason that we can’t take the doubt that refuses to see a person—any person—as other than they are, i.e., a person, created in lightness of God’s love and discovered through the in-filling and up-building of that very love, we can no longer diminish the person in the name of “effectiveness” that aims to see them as less than that. Through the faithfulness in neighbour-love, in Christ’s paradox, pattern, and prototype16 which offends and shocks17 first the world and then the world which has found itself in the church, we find that faithfulness to the creed, to the kerygma itself, breaks up any possibility for us to take an effectiveness that allows a mediocrity of faith—an assertion that we, that herd-like behaviour where God is put on trial for failing to understand the sophistication of the oh so necessary human need for human intervention, take the throne as we ascend over creation.

No, my reader, we have misstepped—the joy, the celebration, the seal-clapping adulation of the one who gawps at the one in the stocks, the victim of the world turned out for its entertainment: this is not Christianity, but the very nihilism and dissolution of the self which Christianity stands against. In the quiet repose of dialogue, of face-to-face relationships between neighbours where propaganda and journalism become ineffective, that is where the Christian resides and stands against the world in the quiet places where it cannot reach18. Against the bitter utility of effectiveness, hidden under the vague appeals to the obligation of the non-obligated, Christ is free and in Him you and I, my reader, shall be free when we see that faithfulness is prior to all effectiveness. And, with that, the agitated and obsessive compulsive insecurity of constantly searching for “the effective” can dissolve in the knowledge that we are free from the obligation to save the world by our hands and ours alone—it is by faith that you, I, and all others shall be saved, not by the declaration of one’s archic authority.

Vengeance is Mine, and recompense;
Their foot shall slip in due time;
For the day of their calamity is at hand,
And the things to come hasten upon them. (Deuteronomy 32:35)

“When one can get men as individuals, there is much about them that is lovable; but as soon as they become the public, the crowd etc., all the detestable features appear. “The journalist” is really the corrupter; he (worse than any brothel keeper [Bordelvært] living off men’s debauchery) lives off promotion of the evil principle in man: the numerical.”19

“‘The Church’ should really represent ‘becoming’, ‘the state’, on the other hand, ‘subsisting’. That is why it is so dangerous for the state and Church to grow together and be identified with each other. With ‘the state’, even though for one or another institution it might prove less fortunate, just because it is the subsisting order one should be very wary about abolishing it, precisely because ‘state’ is part of the concept of ‘subsisting’, and one may be better served by energetically maintaining a less than successful subsistence than reforming it too soon. With ‘the Church’ it is quite the opposite, since its concept is Becoming. ‘Becoming’ is more spiritual than ‘subsisting’; the servants of the Church should therefore not be state functionaries, not even married, but those expediti [those unfettered, ready or without obstruction] who are suited to serving ‘becoming’.”1

To discuss a Kierkegaardian ecclesiology is to expect your listener to endure an intellectual death by a thousand cuts, constantly refining and reforming our image of this word church until it seems so highly qualified and highly particular that a widespread understanding seems almost impossible. Taking the bookish mode of interpreting and reinterpreting before coming to some abstracted definition is highly tempting, a humorous activity that leads to us presenting so idiosyncratic a case for what church means that it serves only to alienate and estrange the world from this particular activity—and such is the nature of communication when it comes to communicating the noncommunicable.

However, not all is lost. In fact, this exercise in intellectual jousting, slicing off and grafting together minutiae from the decorated history of the Christian tradition, possibly, ought to lead us into dead ends when we take such a scholarly approach. Something clear from the very foundations of the Christian message to those who have walked ahead of us and continue to sojourn away from the world is this:

The task of the Christian, and of all peoples who are drawn unto Christ3, is to understand that this inland journey of faith wherein one discovers God is one that one must sojourn: the view from the balcony is a failure to actually see anything because we can only see it when we are amongst it. Christian faith, it appears, is not the intellectual problem of “faith seeking understanding”—where understanding, always the tempting fulcrum on which the world could be turned around to conform to one’s will, is the efficiency-technique of the one who sees Christianity and salvation as a formula amongst formulae4—but rather the revelation of faith that changes life.5 In that sense, to build an ecclesiology is to unveil a becoming, a way of life for those on the road that constitute “the outward bound”. In that sense, the church is existential and not essential; a doing, or, even more specifically, a doing which constitutes “the caravan”.

Overcoming the Avant-Garde

The avant-garde’s mission is one which is confined by the context in which it exists, always jousting with the world and turning back to ensure that the world follows—and abandoning the “drawing” of the Spirit when it refuses. Think back to Cox’s celebration of the “outsider church” that is, in a fashion typical of the aesthete, presumes its sophistication and civilisation in comparison to the thing it attempts to be “outside” of:

The church is the avant-garde of the new regime, but because the new regime breaks in at different points and in different ways, it is not possible to forecast in advance just what appearance the church will have. It is not even possible to delineate the mission of the church “in the city.” Cities differ, and the visage of the church in any given urban environment will differ. There are, however, certain basic facts about urban secular life that will need to be taken into consideration by any church. Let us take the three elements of the church’s task as avant-garde—kerygma, diakonia, and koinonia—and see how they work out in a typical urban setting.6

Always bound to the object of “the world”, Cox’s project—a deeply important case of generalising and theologising the innovations of liberal theology for the Western Christian—seems to accidentally take on the assumption of authority, of an arky, that is derived from the Christian community an sich in relation to the world. It pulls along, influences, civilises—manipulates.

“No!”, says Vernard Eller, “we have gone too far!” As is so often the case for theological correctives, we have gone too far and allowed for a total consumption of an anti-authoritarian theology by its own authoritarian presumptions in the background; we, says the crowd gathered together at this bleeding-edge, are here to show the world how to live. It seems, as is often the case, that we have failed to escape the confines that we assumed we had smashed through. But all hope is not lost, Eller adds: contrast this avant-garde notion with the expediti, who march solely to the rhythm of their orders and are limited merely by their understanding of those orders.

“…Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish thinker of more than a century ago, spoke of the church as being made up of expediti. Expediti combines the Latin ex (“out of,” as in “exclude,” to include someone out) and ped (“foot,” as in “pedal,” to foot it around and around). Accordingly, it means “out of foot,” or more accurately, “freed feet,” or “those who are free of foot.” An “expedition,” it follows, is a trip taken by those who are free of foot. The term originated with the military machine that created and ruled the Roman Empire. It was used in reference to certain crack army corps, at the special disposition of the emperor, so organized and outfitted to get on their feet and into action effectively and fast. The American Expeditionary Forces of World War I probably would not qualify — although they were named right. Closer to the idea are some of the Special Forces and Task Forces of contemporary military and police organizations.

…

The concept “expediti’’ … includes no orientation [as in the case of the avant-garde]. Nothing is even implied about the presence of other troops. Expediti operate as a self-defined unit, independent of where the masses may be, or what the masses may be doing. But a self-defined avant-garde would be a contradiction in terms.

If “expediti” implies any orientation at all, it is toward the Emperor. The expediti are ready, unencumbered, unentangled, uncommitted (in one sense), precisely so that they can give the Emperor (who represents their one, total commitment) instant obedience. When the command comes to move, they move. There is no looking back to see whether anyone is following their lead, no need to compare their position with that of anyone else, for they are under orders. There is no temptation to take pride in their position. The most expediti can hope to achieve is the fulfilling of their orders. There is no common standard by which to measure their achievement over against the achievements of others (who knows what the Emperor wants from them?). Both the motivation and the goal of the expediti are entirely different from that of the avant-garde.7

And here is the journey of the expediti: a journey from the individual being related to the mass-object up to the individual only being related to all others as individuals8, a world totally dissimilar to anything that we have seen before and unrecognisable to the one who sits outside of it9. Much like the Roman soldiers who, in times of old, were tasked by their leader to carry out their task and their task alone, the Christian stands in relation to the wider world as a soldier with a command: “love your God” and “love your neighbour”, prior to all else.

When these individuals, in their caravan that sojourns bravely into the future, sojourn in the knowledge that they are bound only by their choice to reject “the world” and follow the guidance of their leader, they become freed from Christianity qua “civilising mission” and become the expediti. But, to understand this, we should understand two aspects of these “divine special forces”: their relation to the world and their relation to their command.

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Breaking teleologically

“...expediti are not of the world, that is, their goals and values center entirely in the will of the Emperor and bear no relationship to what the world may call good or be on the way to calling good.”10

With the full-throatedness of his Kierkegaardian beginnings, Eller reminds us what it means to move from a sphere: it is to become ingratiated with a new way of engaging and looking at reality in a way that radically reinterprets where we have been, where we are, and where we are going—or, in short, it is a shift in the basic underpinning “intuition” that frames what the individual knows and how they know it.

For the expediti, the matter of being the expediti and becoming the expediti is a matter of engaging with their Emperor’s commands, independent of what he or anyone else whosoever has issued commands to them: the independence of the expediti’s mission is not confused with some other mission or missions because those free of foot only respond to the particularity of their call. When the special forces operative is given a specialist task to “eliminate a target”11, they are not concerned with whether a more general law for the society from which they emerged and which they now populate generally disapproves of “intentional killing”—with many, if not most, instances of such a thing constituting a serious crime and taboo. No, instead, they are aware that the particularity of their charge, even though it contradicts and transgresses against “the universal law” of the broader society, means that they must teleological suspend some aspect of “the ethical”, the Sittlichkeit, the socially pervasive norm. In this election to the ranks of the expediti, the individuals engage in their task for their Emperor in a way which binds them to a law unlike the law of the land. When their task is done, they may well return to the general ranks of the army or possibly blend back into the mass society from which they were drawn; however, clearly, my reader, these individuals were set apart in a way that was clear to them and may one day be unrecognisable to the world.

Ecclesiologically, this should be clear: the church, when it is a successful church, shall be noted not by its antagonism with the world or its “trailblazing” example that it sets for the world to follow, but simply by its presence against the world qua the visible church. What should be noted, for S. K., Ellul, and Eller alike, is that “church” is not a name of a building or the collective relationship of a particular church governance, but the forward march of a particular group—or, more properly, particular groups that were, are, and will be in contradiction and disagreement with one another—through time, beginning with “a bomb going off in history”12 and constantly sojourning, erring, praying, betraying, accusing, forgiving, judging, and being judged through and over every corner of the known world. The church is not an entity defined into existence, but rather a participation in a raging river through the mere causality of time; a quiet whisper that can only be heard by the one who listens. And this presence, as a presence against the world, is itself the very aim of becoming a Christian: to surrender the “colonialisation” ambitions of the secular anarchist or the Marxist in the call for “worldwide revolution”, where personae non grata are identified and crushed underfoot in the forceful imposition of the Kingdom of Man, but rather in the simple faith that Christianity has always promised another way of life or, more properly, other ways of life that grant the freedom to do as we might hope we might do—even under the foot of evil itself.

And in order to do this, my reader, our view of the church must come from behind its veiling: we must discover what it is that each and everyone of us, by habit or by passion, engages in regularly when we attend the building that we call church and are invited to engage in the divine dance of the eternal in time, of the universal in a particular place, in the wholly other within the specifically present to us. When Paul advises us “do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” he is inviting us to step out from the mere conformity to whichever set of norms we exist within, whichever mere causality we have found ourselves “thrown” into, and to swim in this raging river that ruptures each and every attempt to find a way a swim which doesn’t simply involve getting into the water. In this way, where the “intuition”, for lack of a better word, breaks through and rearranges all other knowledge in a new way of seeing, in a new way of life.

But why? To what end does Paul call us to resist the pleasant ease of conformity? What can possibly be learned in this way? He continues: “Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2) Here, we uncover the opportunity for faith, the moment in which one can make that movement where that single individual enters into the beautiful, unearned gift of participating in the play of God’s freedom: only by doing, through the affirmation that this freedom is possible, can be we see that it is possible to do. The presence of this possibility opens us up to an alternative way of being and becoming, where the authority of the world that they laud over us is undermined: it is not the only path, the unstoppable march of “progress” is exposed as having a competitor that starts from the wreckage of that “bomb going off in history” and aims towards something that the world could never allow for; indeed, there is always a second option and to take the second path is to cast off all claims to the world and all claims that the world has on us.

And, in this presence, that the world must recognise as a challenge to its authority with the sword, is the presence that teleologically suspending the Sittlichkeit’s ethical universe is possible.

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Grasping with a new telos

When the church can become this “presence”, it is itself now the mode for free action—for possibility. But what does it mean to allow the other to be free? To allow the other to recognise that there is some other telos that they can grasp? The church unveils itself in its obedience, first through the single believer:

“...the person who is a child of the times but who wishes to fight against those times cannot do so with authority, as someone recognizable, as a prophet who wishes to lead a lost generation back to time-honored ways of doing things.”14

When, in a position where one stands without authority, the believer amongst the collective of believers chooses themselves in the act of becoming obedient, the freedom of an obedience which fundamentally rejects the dicta of the world blooms: to be free as Christ was, is, and shall be free is to recognise that one is always wrong before God, always without authority in a world which demands for evidence of power, and always already committed to some way-of-life before they are capable of choosing the way one lives one’s life. As such, in the choice between the divine and the world, that single individual finds their freedom in the kind of obedience which doesn’t necessarily understand the implications of their choice; the choice to be as one is and as one is becoming in that possibility of a life unlike anything that the world could ever offer.

Here, the “fleet of foot” understand that they step into the river that has run eternally and, yet, appeared at a point in history. In a sense, as Eller would illustrate in his analysis of “rendering unto Caesar”, the paradoxical freedom of obedience emerges because one refuses to become embroiled in the contest between God and the Emperor—because, quite simply, it is no contest at all:

“Choosing God [in “render unto Caesar”] with this sort of intensity must entail the denial that the outcome of history is being decided in the contest of the human arkys we have chosen to designate as “good” and “evil.” Consequently, Christians refuse to become embroiled in the contest, whether investing themselves in the arkys of the one side or the other. And this stance is what we have been calling “Christian Anarchy.””15

Free from the despair that comes with the attempt to make one self the arky on which all life shall rest, the expediti lay waste to their claim to the world, to the state, to the power over the other, to life itself—they have seen that they emerge into a world where they are not the basic building block of reality and, as such, must march differently. They recognise no orientation for action at all as from “toward the Emperor”. When the world would impose the product of mere inertia, the Christian can resist by loving their neighbour; when the world impose a telos, the Christian can resist by loving their neighbour.

At this point, we should remember that this “quickening” of the faithful, as if the believer has managed, finally, to get around to granting God authority over him (as is so often the way with “radical theologies”) is the fundamentally archic and Pelagian presumption of the one who sees Christianity as the change the world needs as opposed to the weaknesses which undermines the arky. No, the expediti understands that they are not there to rule, they are not there to take control of reality and bend it to its knees before God and before them; instead, they are aware that their calling is to be a presence, a presence that acts as a judgement for all of creation in its fallenness—even its own. Instead of a radical and wilful pietism that centres the individual’s choice to accept God, to grant God authority, but rather the release of the will to power and the acceptance of one’s place in the plan of the Wholly Other.

Onward, because it is asked

In that sense, my reader, it is difficult to offer you advice that gives us that foundation on which we will ground our faith without doubt. Indeed, I am, completely and utterly, without authority when I speak as a person who would join with this divine march. In some sense, I wonder if I would recognise this person—this completely free agent, who strides along in the knowledge that they don’t know God’s will, but are moved by the Spirit against the world.

Faith in the ekklesia, as far as Eller saw, was a matter of joining an already existing journey through time that is evidence that not has God loved His creation but also that we are not the first within God’s creation to be loved by Him—we must find our position in the world into which we are thrown, desperate to both find that relationship that holds us aloft over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep” and become the one who instigates that relationship, in relation to those who have loved and been loved by God and failed His plea to them: “be perfect, as your Father, in heaven, is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

Of course, not all breakthroughs are always so grand. Indeed, prior to the point where the discursive reality around us crumbles to nothing (a veritable fantasy of the intellectualists, inverting the radical political manipulator’s desire for “The Revolution”3 into increasingly grating efforts to establish new intellectual foundations, the new territory on which Babel shall be erected4—regardless of whether such a thing is actually worth such high praise), there is a question of the minimal condition on which this breakthrough could emerge: in the mind and life of that single individual who turns around to see the world in a way as to yet unrealised.

For this author, my reader, I found Karl Barth’s unveiling of Christianity as not a civilising mission to the world5 utterly liberating: it is not the task of God’s elect to conform the world to its will, so much as merely to be and become the church in the world’s presence.6 And, unlike the accelerationist tendencies of the radical extremes of the world, I’m afraid that the aesthetic desire for revolution—for the violent upturning of academy or society—misdiagnoses the path forward and, as such, can only ever continue the logic of some preexisting state.

To expose this misdiagnosis, however, like exposing all misdiagnoses, is often a difficult task. As such, I start via negativa: how ought the church be, if not a civilising mission?

Harvey Cox and Bourgeois Authority

In a sense, this distinctive severing of state and church—or, more properly, world and church—delivers us into a position within the broadest possible understanding of the liberal theological tradition. However, as all good theologically homeless meanderers, this position is not an affirmation of the liberal position and, in fact, should be considered the critique from within it in order to break out of its archic claim to authority over the world. And, to do this, we must consult one of the great liberal theologians and radical political theologians of the 20th century: Harvey Cox.

For those who might be unaware of Cox’s work, he is a prolific and voracious interpreter of the Western theological tradition by way of wielding liberation theology back against the stifling presence of conservative thought. This radical attack on theological conservatism was, first and foremost, aimed to uproot the fundamentalist tendencies which would want to turn “Christian faith” into the excuse for an irresponsible reactionary turn against modernity and towards some imagined genealogical myth of “the good old days” where Christianity reigned supreme from on high. As the radical “avant-garde of God’s kingdom” that comes “from below and the edge”, Cox’s reorientation for theology was by identifying the broken and the oppressed as the ones who bear the face of Christ7:

The church is the avant-garde of the new regime, but because the new regime breaks in at different points and in different ways, it is not possible to forecast in advance just what appearance the church will have. It is not even possible to delineate the mission of the church “in the city.” Cities differ, and the visage of the church in any given urban environment will differ. There are, however, certain basic facts about urban secular life that will need to be taken into consideration by any church. Let us take the three elements of the church’s task as avant-garde—kerygma, diakonia, and koinonia—and see how they work out in a typical urban setting8.

At this point, we should be clear that Cox views the church as the avant-garde to the secular city—it is the kerygmatic function that “broadcasts the seizure of power”9 to the world, signalling a way for change that is not merely a Christian excuse for reactionary power-politics.

The Coxan position, granular and delicate in the way that all good theologies are, places the reality of Christian life outside of the received structures of Christendom and post-Christendom, i.e., outside of official state churches, bureaucratic church organisation, and also the church drawn into complicity with the state despite legislative separation. In the context of the apparent realisation of God’s liberatory mission to save humanity qua the secular city, it is the church that operates as a kind of “holy invisible dictator” (per Bakunin)10. From below and the edge, the church emerges in an environment of practice—of praxis—where the faith of the individual within a community and the community around the individual is the real expression of faith. Against the might of the church, the ekklesia appears.

We have seen this position taken over and over again in the history of theology, which might bring us to say that Cox is on the right track. Indeed, as is so often the case for the theological liberal, there is actually a great deal of value in these ideas: the recognition of faith, not the declaration; the importance of the individual believer, not the abstracted number of congregants; the position of a self-sacrificial faith as below the powerful, not the sword to wield against the world. In many senses, you, my reader, might even assume that I am an avowed fan of Mr. Cox and his liberationist theology.

Identifying the liminality of faith

However, before we get carried away, let us stop to consider what it means to take on this Coxan character qua “the avant-garde”:

“...in order even to be avant-garde, attention must be paid to which way the world is going, so that one can stay in front. The avant-garde continually must look back to see whether the world is following.”11

Much in the fashion of the beret-wearing, cigarette-smoking diletente, Cox poses the Christian avant-garde as the trend-setter of a world which is continuously marching in some direction—into the apparent unknown possibility of the future, where our present ways-of-life come under the strain of being abolished and realised through change and repetition, the Christian “vanguard” of human reality beats the drum and sets the pace. However, quite like everyone who has led a march before, there is an element of chaos that proceeds from the procession behind the leader; it is a process that draws the leader, this trend-setter, into conversation with the led and, by way of sheer force, the leader can become inverted into a mere figurehead at the mercy of the marchers.

In the same sense that the liberal “marketplace of ideas” is an open attempt at manipulating those drawn into it by way of promoting the authority and celebration of “chatter”, of life qua consumable content, is an assertion of bourgeois authority, Cox proposes that the church enter into debate with the world: it is the avant-garde, it is the oh so sophisticated bleeding edge of human knowledge—all it needs to do is to present itself as itself and the world will surely follow!

From the subversive liminal to the unknowingly subservient

But where precisely do we draw this image of the body of Christians—or, really, even Christ—as the teacher to the world that is constantly looking over its shoulder to ensure the world follows it? If there is such a claim, possibly in scripture or possibly in the developing body of Christian thought within the faith-community that gathers and has gathered together since that blessed point in history where the Christianity of the New Testament became possible, we would presumably find clues in the guiding hand of the spirit—or, in the example of Christ. Yet, Christ’s life is possibly better understood as an absolute indifference to the world in favour of living out what it means for the Son of Man to become the figure that best reflects the holy, holy, holy nature of God that shines into humanity from the point of contradiction and allows us to participate in the light of His freedom.

For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery (Gal. 5:1)12

“...Matthew 6:3 should never be taken as a guarantee that if you seek first the kingdom, God will give you any specified item out of the “all the rest”.”13

“Yes, social justice, equality, and help for the poor are involved in the simple life; yet keep them where they belong, not as its motive and rationale, but as a “plus,” a gift, a freedom, a grace out of the “all the rest” that will come to you as well.”14

It appears, as far as Eller was concerned throughout his illustrious yet quiet career, that the Christian teaching is freedom from the world in toto—not one that starts from the presumed authority to abstractly teach the world how it ought to act, but rather one that exists in opposition to the world through its own positive statement of existential goodness. There is a danger when we take such a high-minded and congratulatory view of the world that we lose the freedom of Christ: in complete obedience to God’s law, the individual becomes “free to achieve the simplicity and singleness of his own authentic existence.”15

Cox’s view of Christianity begins to sound a little less Christian when we identify an air of sophistication and perfection of the emergent elite that sits in relation to the world: it is, very much in both theoretical and real senses, Christendom trading its claim to authority from the hands of vox civitatis and handing it over to a more universal vox populi—yet, still, it receives its marching orders, submitting God to an arky amongst arkies.

“...the avant-garde is very much of the world in the sense that its goals and values are determined totally by its relationship to the world—by trying to place itself where the world will want to be. There should be little question as to which of the roles complies with the call of Jesus and the model of the New Testament church.”16

Captured by the wandering, invisible hand of world history (which, of course, I don't suppose is a random, unknowable path, but rather not the object of a science in the sense that a Marxist or Cox might accidentally imply), the church is then bound to the world and caught up in the logic of its opposite. In an absolute relation to the state, the church has given itself over to the world by way of allowing the world to dictate what constitutes faith—for the Protestant, this may even rise to the absolute crisis of standing against the papal magisterium by way of preferring submission to the bourgeois elected official of vox populi17. The church, captured by the world, lacks the freedom that the apostles promised was really there.

Against progress, against reaction

At this point, I should be clear: a reactionary turn against the present state of things by way of a reunification (if there was ever a real severing) of the church and state is no answer here—it would be a rather “slack” dialectic that would only allow for church-domination and state-domination, especially when neither notion is granted more than holy indifference in the gospel message. For both the state-churchman and the Coxan avant-gardist, the relation between the world and the church is one in which they are absolutely tied to one another—one holds the other as its primary value, from which all other values proceed. In the medieval church, this realised itself as the church's domination of society via the state; in modernity, it may be a fun little exercise to consider how the church has become the victim of the state's domination today. But, of course, this is a part of how the church is manipulated today: in an effort to keep up with “progress”, the church accepts that there is a progress that is appropriate for Christianity, which we find outside of the bounds of what constitutes Christianity.

When the church and state exist in a way which presupposes that one decides the values that the other holds and the other merely marches to the beat of that drum, it doesn't matter if this absolute relation is one where the church dominates the world or the world dominates the church—it is a fundamental error to take up this relational connection because such a connection denies that the ontological fact of the church's existence within and through the world could ever transcend above the mere material which constitutes the fact itself. There is only causation, there is no possibility for the freedom promised in scripture. The avant-garde, sophisticated to a tee, is bound by the thing it opposes by electing itself as the leader of the world, as the arky towards which the world should navigate.

This is, in effect, the disappointing position to which Cox leads us: having understood that we are not contemporaries of Christ's earthly revelation in ancient Palestine, he illustrates that the God Who would make the world good and good for His creations would not abandon them to the forces of world-history. This, of course, seems like good theology—and it is, if we remove it from Cox’s grander claim regarding the divinity of the secular city. This notion that the church, having its role as the discoverer and avant-garde edge of God's liberatory “clearing away” of immediacy and the false arkies of human idealism, is degredated by then blurring the lines between God's exodic revelation in time and the mere events of history—or, to be clearer, the progressive church self-elects itself to this position by way of dismissing the one-two punch of divine negation and liberatory revelation and appropriating the world's conception of goodness.

Against the tit-for-tat bludgeoning of “chatter”

I have little interest in outlining the particular failings of the progressive church or the ironic mirror-image of conservative failings opposite it. However, I do applaud Eller for long ago recognising this to-ing and fro-ing across the matter of worldliness by conservatives and progressives meant that worldliness was always accepted as the axis along which the theological world spins:

“Conservative churches tend to be very sensitive to the worldlinesses of the liberals, liberals tend to be very sensitive to the worldlinesses of the conservatives, and each tends to be blind to its own worldliness. But as with commissary/ caravan, we contend that the avant-garde/expediti distinction will not begin to correspond to the traditional theological categories.”18

Until we can navigate to a position where the world does not dictate to us the allowed categories of analysis—or, even worse, where we fall into the arms of the world in order to accept the “myth of progress” as not only true but also Christian!—we cannot begin to explore what genuine Christian progress might be. It may, of course, possibly mean reversing out of the dead-end we find ourselves in19.

A path forward

Of course, in Eller's mind, there was more to the church than merely becoming “the avant-garde”. Indeed, the church is not the effete body that stands before the society and receives its marching orders on how it ought to travel onwards—the notion of leadership to the world should be dismissed at this point, if you have not already had the good sense to do away with the notion yourself, my reader—but rather something altogether rather different. It is an organ of freedom, a freedom that comes about through the responsibility of indifference: learning to take what is important as actually important and to dismiss what isn’t as actually unimportant20.

Instead of ideological capture, my reader, I see that the unusual theological minds of Kierkegaard, Ellul, and Eller saw a path through the false dialectic of world-dominating and world-dominated. There is a thread that we can pull on, a thread which leads to the delicate balance of freedom in the body of Christ within the context of the world—neither as educator to those without the eyes to see or the ears to hear nor as a quaint artefact of history that allows for silly trivialities such as “community” or “increased birth rates” (utterly aesthetic values when they come from the mouths of faithlessness). No, there is a way to march which does not propose that we demand the world follow us; there is a way to establish the church, which is already established and to which we can offer not a single iota, that is free from the technique-efficiency21 of community-building and the bourgeois demand for the numerical22.

And to understand that difference, we must explore the march of the expedite.

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This is part of a short excursion through Eller’s The Outward Bound, particularly the second chapter on his view of the church qua existential body of Christian faith. It might be as short as three pieces, it might as long as six—such is the joy of Eller’s wandering mind, both imprecise in its theatricality and laser-guided in its dialectical insights. For anyone who would like to join me on this journey through Eller’s conception of journeys, you can find his book for free on the House Church Central website in a charmingly garish HTML format:

“In a little while,
I shall have won,
Then the entire battle
Will disappear at once.

Then I may rest
In halls of roses
And unceasingly
And unceasingly
Speak with my Jesus.”1

It’s very easy to always say too much on sad occasions. A tasteful epitaph or eulogy can quickly turn into an aesthetic display of excess, an exercise in the self that totalises the audience and the other—stealing from both the choice to grieve and possibility to be grieved over. Without the ability to “hold one’s self back”2, it becomes impossible to grieve, impossible to reflect, impossible to think at all—indeed, life becomes trapped in chatter and prattle, like the invocations of the ancient pagans for either binding souls to the earth or to expel them from immediacy as quickly as possible.

In that sense, remembering dear Søren on the anniversary of his death is an event which should be marked by what he preferred: silence. A time for reflection and a time where reflection gives way to repetition, to life itself.

“But what does this silence express? It expresses respect for God, for the fact that it is he who rules and he alone to whom wisdom and understanding belong. And just because this silence is respect for God, is worship—as it can be in nature—this silence is so solemn.”3

“Goldschmidt recognized sagaciously that [S. K.] died opportunely at the moment when his attack upon the Established Church had made him again a popular figure, for the last thing he could endure was popularity.”4

And this, of course, was most brutally realised against those “left-facing” theologians and philosophers, the intellectuals of France's heady academic heights, who had, through their intellectualising and nit-picking, lazily picked up enough of the great theories to fulfill their desires and cast away the rest with a flick of the wrist—not realising that the carcass of the beast is there to provide support to the structure, not merely deliver the meat to the one who consumes.

As was so often the case with Ellul’s curious and almost schizophrenic oeuvre, the short piece that has most recently grabbed my attention was one that first rose up in defence of Karl Marx against the consumptive habits of the intellectually desperate, shortly before turning back against the German to both critique from within and through him. In this way, we discover a way to act Christianly by way of abusing both the liberal opportunist and the Marxist theorist—much as Paul had abused his Greek interlocutors in antiquity.

“Irony differs from humour in calling for collective support. While irony can make fun of the world, humour makes fun, privately, of what will save it.”1

Marxian Praxis

If you have spent any amount of time amongst Marxists, anarchists, or social democrats2, you will doubtless have heard those most ready to raise their voices about the swell of the crowd float this word around with great impunity: praxis. After the first or second time, when one can be forgiven for mistaking this rhetoric for the radicalism of the great theorists of history, this term might become a better signifier of the ones to avoid than a sign of some theoretical and practical wayfinder.

And this problem isn't new: indeed, Ellul himself had seen the abuse of the particularly Marxian term praxis through overly literal translations and overly hasty application of those overly literal translations. Ellul took aim at Belo, the confused Stalinist theologian who still finds praise today3:

Similarly, Belo offers an astonishing definition for practice, taken over from Althusser, but after eliminating its economic aspect. Marx’s “praxis” is identical with this “practice”; but the fact that Marx held to the term “praxis” shows that he meant something quite different from mere practice. Belo reduces Marx’s “praxis,” a difficult and rigorous concept, to “any process of transformation of a determinate given raw material into a determinate product, a transformation effected by a determinate human labour, using determinate means” (p. 7). Thus Belo enlarges Marx’s concept beyond the economic sphere and the production of value.

On the contrary, in Marx, praxis, related to theory, is the means of transforming the world and of making history, through work of a technical and economic sort. Once Belo has redefined “practice” so vaguely, he can speak blithely about “political practice” or “ideological practice.” These terms mean something in ordinary and journalistic language, but not within the rigorous sphere of Marx’s thought. We can say the same for Belo’s “messianic practice” and “subversive practice.”4

Firstly, I advise that you read Ellul’s prophetic critique of Belo—along with the broad Marxist and “Christian” Marxist milieu of the period. However, my interest is in the fine point that Ellul criticises Belo for not recognising as a Marxist conception nor as a matter of importance for Christianity. In that sense, against the overeager syncretist, I suggest a point of contact for Christ and Marx: in the emphasis on praxis proper.

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Understanding praxis

Ellul notes here that praxis is not merely another word for “practice”—despite Belo’s abuse, mirrored by ardent and lackadaisical Marxists alike since the conceptual genesis—but rather the mode by which one is “transforming the world” and “making history”, i.e., engaging in class struggle which actually brings about some change, even if that change is only slight. For the Marxian, there will be various types of actions which can be gestured to here, e.g., assembling the crowd under the guise of the party, seizing the national crown of power, reorganising the economy towards proletarian concerns, etc. What these mean, of course, my reader, is always a point of contention, a matter for the clerics of the new messianism who strike us as an almost charming fragment of history that has refused to disappear—and we will not waste our time with these things. We shall leave the cloistered scholars to the “chatter” on their balcony, where their stomping sounds rather dull from the hubbub of the road.

What is interesting, though, is that in a world where all actions are possible to us, Marx understood that some actions and only some actions are helpful and edifying. While we can while away the days imagining some beautiful utopia that serves us every desire that we could possibly long for or performatively sabre-rattle when engaging in the most basic of human actions, Marx, much like Christ, had realised that a proper approach must be one that to understood to continue this “unfolding” of history, a continuation of the journey into which we are thrown, where we are forged in the fire of intersubjective responsibility, where we simply live life5.

To believe the forgiveness of one’s sins is the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit; one who does not believe this is not spirit. Maturity of the spirit means that immediacy is completely lost, that a person is not only capable of nothing by himself but is capable only of injury to himself. But how many in truth come in a wholly personal way to understand of themselves that one is brought to this extremity. (Here lies the absurd, offense, the paradox, forgiveness of sins.)

Most people never become spirit, never experience becoming spirit. The stages—child, youth, adult, oldster—they pass, to their shame, through these with no credit to themselves; it is none of their doing, for it is a vegetative or vegetative-animal process. But they never experience becoming spirit.6

“...S. K. was saying precisely that a peson needs to become individuum, undivided, at one with himself, and not that he should cut himself off from the race.”7

Marxian thought generally suffers, when put under pressure, due to a rather apparent teleology which sits possibly unjustifiably and certainly romantically at the heart of Karl Marx’s musings. When an agent—or, more appropriately, the collective of agents tied together by “The Party”—engages in a particular kind of activity, this activity allows for the progressive change in the process of production and reproduction which constitutes the Marxian conception of “History”. While not necessarily inevitable, Marx certainly did argue himself into a corner by suggesting that there were non-humanist values that hang high over society, which can become realised by the strength of humanist struggles alone.8 In this sense, praxis unfolds through action in the world when we seize upon history and drive the humdrum of production and reproduction in a particular direction—which, of course, has certainly appealed to many theorists, Christian and non-Christian alike, since its conception.

However, this “march of history” seems almost foolish to us today—in a world gripped by pessimism-cum-nihilism, where the only permitted principles handed by down the world are the valuing of a long, unremarkable life and the self-abstraction of party politics, to discuss the now infamous illustrate of history proceeding from the lower to the higher sounds more like superstition than critical analysis. “The myth of progress”, liberalism par excellence, haunts Marx’s writings and the hopeless hopefulness of each and every student strongarmed into selling newspapers in the name of “The Revolution”. As characterised in the foreword to Ellul’s The Technological Society, Merton characterised this self-abstraction and faithfulness not as the bold march of those who peer into the fires of tomorrow, but rather “the systematic dehumanisation of humanity”9 appropriated as liberatory language.

But, for S. K., this was no problem—at least in the sense of it being a theoretical problem. As a practical problem, it was the very cauldron in which we find all life occurring and, as such, the most difficult thing each of us will ever do. By way of identifying the need to “become human” in a sense where we are not reduced to merely the one who reflects our ability to produce, S. K. opened up the possibility for a concrete conception of the self: we both are ourselves and ought to be ourselves. Dalfreth, framing S. K.’s conception of liberation, drags us back to the Christ-centred and God-centred epistemology that S. K. clarified to us in an effort to undermine all idealisms:

“...we cannot be a potential self without having been created as such by the one whom Christians call ‘God,’ so we cannot become true selves without being changed from a sinful self-centeredness to a liberated God-centeredness by the same God.”10

In that sense, Christian praxis is concerned with destroying Christendom, paganism, secularism, and all other “isms”11 that would hang over the free expression of faith which is both possible and edifying. The phrase “we are closer to salvation now than when we become believers” becomes meaningless as the task of situating oneself in relation to salvation hasn’t begun; Christendom—or any other reinvention of the messianism which is subverted and turned-around by the one who would wield it towards their own ends—tricks us out of both finding “where we are” and where we should go12. Contrary to the impositional idealism of the Marxian or the rootless helplessness of the Sartrean13, S. K. delivers us with the task of becoming a human self in the context of other human selves—but limited to neither a subjective nor an objective teleology which would allow us to slip into received patterns and mechanical processes which undermine our task to both be and become ourselves. In this particular world, where I am a particular individual within a particular context and standing at the precipice of a particular collection of particular possibilities, all things are possible, but not all things are edifying. And what does it mean to become a human self? What form can we apply to all human “endeavours without collapsing into the pagan dictatorialism of old? Of course, grins S. K., it is in the neighbour:

The individual must become a neighbour to the neighbour: “The one to whom I have a duty is my neighbour, and when I fulfill my duty I show that I am a neighbour. Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbour but about becoming a neighbour oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbour just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy.”14

Like Marx, who saw through the attractive veneer of the liberal promise that we both can and ought to live however we want, S. K. finds himself posed against the conception of freedom which merely reduces the individual to a choice amongst choices—or, more often, a series of choices, each attempt an effort to find the “authentic” and the “true” and attempting to correct the now apparent inauthenticity and untruth of the proximally prior choice—that attempts to stand against life itself solely by way of identifying a point of contradiction to wall up in. But, unlike the Marxians, who place “the march of history” into the hands of an idea, an imagined proletariat that takes up the academic musings of the intellectuals like hungry dogs that steal from the table and promise—authentically! class consciously!—to die in their place, S. K. reasserts his place in history and his place in his society that makes the hands of the “Small Way”15 the only mode by which history shall unfold: by way of that individual amongst other individuals, completely dissimilar and completely similar to him, taking up the mantle that drives one necessarily against the way of the world, even if that world has been all too ready to take the language of the disjunct and turn it towards its own purposes:

“That means for Kierkegaard the task of introducing the radical disjunction between the eschatologically oriented secrets of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) and the profane order of the world-historical politics (Weltgeschichte): Christendom “reduces sacred history to profane history.””16

In that sense, we find the Christian notion of praxis is not all that dissimilar to the “chatter” of the Marxians. However, Christianity, in its eternally offensive breaking-through of the very source of Goodness itself, would never allow the individual to escape into the crowd, to surrender the gift of one’s power over oneself.17 No, the Christian finds freedom, as that individual, to escape the impositional authority—whether clerical, monarchial, bourgeois, or proletarian—of the gnashing jaws of world-historical politics by way of neighbour-love.

From this point, I find myself at an impasse, my reader—there is a temptation, having pulled the world’s trousers down when it reinvents the Nuremberg rally, to begin “politicsing” again. Having discovered the Christian promise is a promise of freedom from the oppression of the world in all its capitalist, activist, moralist, fascist, warist rhetoric, the danger would be to assume that now is the time for the “presumption”18 of a Christian ethics, a Christian sociology, or—perish the thought—a Christian economics, this would indeed be simply a variation of a world theme which seizes the freedom and power of the Law by reducing it to just another human idea amongst other human ideas (II John 9). In that sense, I leave this open-ended—open for you, my reader, to discover what you are and ought to be at once within the particularity of your life in your reality. However, as some helpful notes, we return to Ellul, first on “necessity” and then exploring it through the world’s favourite necessity—violence:

Christian realism leads to the conclusion that violence is natural and normal to man and society, that violence is a kind of necessity imposed on governors and governed, on rich and poor. If this realism scandalizes Christians, it is because they make the great mistake of thinking that what is natural is good and what is necessary is legitimate. I am aware that the reader will answer at once: “You have shown that violence is inevitable and necessary in undertakings of any kind; therefore violence, is legitimate, it must be used.” This is anti-Christian reasoning par excellence. What Christ does for us is above all to make us free. Man becomes free through the Spirit of God, through conversion to and communion with the Lord. This is the one way to true freedom. But to have true freedom is to escape necessity or, rather, to be free to struggle against necessity. Therefore I say that only one line of action is open to the Christian who is free in Christ. He must struggle against violence precisely because, apart from Christ, violence is the form that human relations normally and necessarily take. In other words, the more completely violence seems to be of the order of necessity, the greater is the obligation of believers in Christ’s Lordship to overcome it by challenging necessity.

This is the fixed, the immutable, and the radical basis of the Christian option in relation to violence. For the order of necessity is the order of separation from God.

…

In the Old Testament, man shatters the necessity of eating by fasting, the necessity of toil by keeping the Sabbath; and when he fasts or keeps the Sabbath he recovers his real freedom, because he has been found again by the God who has re-established communion with him. The institution of the order of Levites likewise shatters the normal institutional order of ownership, duty, provision for the future, etc. And this freedom is fully accomplished by and through Jesus Christ. For Christ, even death ceases to be a necessity: “I give my life for my sheep; it is not taken from me, I give it.” And the constant stress on the importance of giving signifies a breaking away from the necessity of money.

Violence is inevitable, but so far as concerns society it has the same character as the universally prevailing law of gravitation, which is not in any way an expression of God’s love in Christ or of Christian vocation. When I stumble over an obstacle and fall, I am obeying the law of gravitation, which has nothing to do with Christian faith or the Christian life. We must realize that violence belongs to the same order of things. And so far as we understand that the whole of Christ’s work is a work of liberation—of our liberation from sin, death, concupiscence, fatality (and from ourselves)—we shall see that violence is not simply an ethical option for us to take or leave. Either we accept the order of necessity, acquiesce in and obey it—and this has nothing at all to do with the work of God or obedience to God, however serious and compelling the reasons that move us—or else we accept the order of Christ; but then we must reject violence root and branch.19

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In the moment of the messianic recallibration of reality, the slate is cleaned of its impurities and the totality of existence is reanalysed in the context of this new “breaking through” that takes whatever came before, reorganises without destroying it, and presents something new to the world. The constant danger sits on the periphery: the cry for a messiah imposes the craving for power of the individual onto the perfect image in order to justify any and all acts towards any and all ends.2

When this object becomes yoked to the individual as a mere aesthetic object, an “other” that pulls him from his position and tears up the foundations of his world, it becomes a desire that breaks through all walls and runs roughshod through all enemies that stand between the convert and his salvific object: the Maoist struggler, the liberal resister, the Islamist terrorist—all of them are captured by the basic logic of secularity. If not for the particular, world-inverting presence of a messiah, there would be little to stop the Christian call to opposition against the world from descending into an anthropocentric, domineering philosophy that sharpens ploughshares into swords and salivates at the thought of “an eye for an eye”. The very mode for us to recognise the good becomes inverted by human ingenuity—Vordenken3 allows for the very good to become a temptation4.

Labadie against Marxist “Science”

Laurence Labadie had little time for Christianity in the same way that slugs have little time for salt or that Richard Dawkins has time for writing philosophy worth reading. As was appropriate for a thinker swept up in the “demand of the times” in a world different from ours, the threat of Messianism had become a reinvented problem that needed to be understood in a newer, deprecated form: the threat of state socialist Marxism, especially in the totalising realisation of a particular Marxist theory as the stateful imposition of a Soviet flavour, the new variation of a theme now stripped of its eschatological baggage and reduceable to a science.5 As part of this science, of course, there is the strange value-judgement of the impending doom of the adversary—an almost mystical collapse of the one who opposed my desire.

Labadie wrote:

“Like Seventh-Day Adventists they have continually expected each business depression to be the messiah of the revolution which was, of course, always just around the corner like Hoover prosperity. They continually expected some vague monster called The Capitalist System to crumble to the ground. At this time the wise men should stop in with the blue prints of the cooperative commonwealth and show the people how to produce for use instead of profit. Pie was to be had, not in the sky, but here on earth, by and bye.”6

Brought about through the “Adventist-like” gawping ambition of predicting the coming revolution, the state socialist finds themself in a never-ending cycle of doom-and-lust: each individual moment must be an inevitable step along the path to the inevitable eschaton, just as the ancient scriptures predicted7.

“One thing may be well to keep in mind: Every movement resorting to the State as a way out of man’s predicament is but accelerating a drift the resultant of which is what is currently termed Fascism. And I believe the road is not hampered by misguided humanitarians who deem collectivism a solution and who expect to achieve their aims through a “revolution” in which they expect to “take over the means of production”. Without well-defined aims for the immediate future, yet tempered by expediency, the present turn of events becomes highly problematical. For while there is always a possibility for the better, history shows also a possibility for something decidedly worse.”8

In a sense, Labadie offers a deconstruction in that tart Kierkegaardian-Derridean flavour: underneath the pomp and prigmarole of scientific façade, the sand foundation is exposed to sunlight as little more than an inversion of the liberal lust for power over the other, for violence against the identified enemy of the “in-group”, that first and foremost wishes for a messianic clearing-of-the-slate without the commitment to some grander thought beyond it. Or, to put it another way, their science floats at the mercy of some irrationalism hidden from the publicly-acceptable discourse.

But, we might ask, how can this happen? These are scientific socialists! How does their science collapse?

The Salivating Science

When we engage in political thought—or, for the Kierkegaardian, similar fields that require the active engagement of the individual's life is an essential aspect of thinking itself, e.g., ethics, theology—the possibility of analysing “from nowhere” is an essentially obfuscating desire that covers over the cracks of the wayward messianist. In hiding from the reality of one’s desires when a proposal is offer, often hiding behind “straightforwardness” as a method of communication and “objectivity” as a method of thought, we find that the individual who would become “the One”9 that wields the crowd is often little more than a manipulator, a moulder and justified of the authority of “common sense”—a thing that was always altogether uncommon and altogether nonsensical prior to the point it took on its new guise. The liberal agent, exposing a desire for power in the hungry maw hanging agape at the thought of dictating oughts and ought nots to the scattered populace, uses the malleability of language to destabilise all categories and assert a selection from amongst them as the objectively best—but this desire on which all is built, as is all desires, is still merely a subjective desire.

In this sense, we find the idealism at the heart of both the liberal project which Marx had criticised and also the Marxist project10 which Labadie had criticised: there is a form of society, an image of “what may be”, which must come about in order for freedom to be realised. Hidden inside the language of the professor, of the dialectician, these sworn enemies fight over the right to seize the object of the same theme. Sitting on the horizon, “the Revolution”, this mythical event of messianic justice, attempts to seize the Christian crown and obfuscate the source of its reality: the rupture will serve our purposes, says the idealist, who has elected that their idea of reality is, indeed, actually reality itself.

Bring Labadie Back to Ground

Labadie’s position, overlooking “all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time” and threatening to “throw himself down”, is a tempting one. We find, firstly, an analysis that brings us to the point of doubt about what kind of socio-political claims we can feel confident about—and what others we complement as being outstanding examples of speculative philosophy, beautiful and defined by their fiction.

His adversary tempts him to view this fumble, this final misstep of the obviously muddleheaded bourgeois, as the very opportunity which allows Marx's thought (or, more appropriately, the flag-waving, utopian inversion of Marx's thought) to finally emerge from being mere philosophy and blossom in the full-blooded, teeth-gnashing reality of opportunism. Labadie refuses: the blueprint of a perfect society, the very central notion of utopianism that Marx himself saw as the creeping heart of humanity's desire to dominate the other, is a complete fabrication that hides a more fundamental desire to capture society and subject it to one's stipulations that, all the while, happily parades itself as science to the scientifically-minded eyes of the gawping crowd.

Much like Vigilius Haufniensis, S. K.’s pseudynmous atheist assessor of the notion of sin qua object of psychological inquiry11, Labadie's temptor does not fool him by way of programmatic and systematic language—no, the very language which can be used to transform the One's desire to control into the very entertainment that the controlled adore does not hide that basic desire from the sceptical eye. As Barrett notes, while “Vigilius often does sound clinical and disengaged, his voyeuristic fascination with sin is palpable.”12 Such is the way of humanity’s ever-present slyness13—there’s always a way to misinterpret and misunderstand the viewpoint that demands our detachment when the object of our desire draws out the subjective desire for power and for the power to turn the neighbour underfoot.

The thing that Labadie failed to recognise is that the papers he poured over, the ink he spilt, the endless rejections from editors and those even less worthy to judge the artistic and radical merit of a piece of writings—they are little more than that. While a particular book might uncover that embarrassing earnestness in us that turns out the “locked jam” of our inwardness to the world or a particular article might expose some radical nerve, now twinged, in our backs that drives us to action—they are dead and inert and little more than that. A book is merely a book, a selection of papers in a binding; without a human touch, without the human decision to lend it authority, it’s merely papers in a binding. Ink is merely ink, black and blotted

“The Christian language uses the same words we men use, and in that respect desires no change. But its use of them is qualitatively different from our use of them; it uses the words inversely for Christianity makes manifest one sphere more or a higher sphere than the one in which we men naturally live, and in this sphere ordinary human language is reflected inversely.

…

And so we let Christianity talk away—and afterwards preach it in our own language and call it Christianity. As in music we speak of transposing a part to a key different from that in which it was originally written, so the Christian language is wholly and entirely qualitatively different from our language at every point, even though we use the same words. Christendom’s great feat was to transpose Christian language back into the old wretched gabble—and in this way we all have become Christians.”14

For Labadie, there is no particular object that draws us out into the wide-eyed gawp that legitimates our unsettledness with life. For S. K., there is One Who “draws unto Him” (John 12:32)15. The distinction in these opposites comes from the understanding that this thing, the me that I have in some way, is not mine to do with as I might; it floats in the groundlessness of reality, neither bringing itself into this state of existence nor deciding to be such-and-such a thing that achieves such-and-such a goal. Only by recognising that this groundlessness is the opportunity for existence and that existence must constantly travel forward, must be pulled from the passive intellectualism of political philosophy—that is when we overcome Labadie’s nihilism, through sojourning in a way which surrenders our right to make our ideas the source of our plan for society.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.1

“Where, then, is the hope? Is the hope in hardship’s rushing gales? Ah, no, no more than God’s voice was in the rushing gales but was in the gentle breeze... But what, then, does hardship want? It wants to have this whisper brought forth in the innermost being. But then does not hardship work against itself, must not its storm simply drown out this voice? No, hardship can drown out every earthly voice; it is supposed to do just that, but it cannot drown out this voice of eternity deep within. Or the reverse.”2

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In 1927, a young woman embarked on her journey to take up the Catholic faith. In some ways, this is rather unremarkable: people join the church—Catholic or otherwise—every day for a variety of reasons with a variety of expectations and a variety of goals (or, even, a total lack thereof). However, alongside the remarkable miracle of an individual turned towards God, there was another, lesser remarkable event: a sinner, in her sin, had recognised her need for God in a turn brought about by the responsibility of a child, a life that reaches out in the need for a companion and a sojourner. This life was marked by sin—most notably, her profession as a journalist—and by saintliness, by love and by struggle; by very much only those things which are possible for a self. And, of course, it is only a self which can doubt without merely becoming a caricature of a given actuality.

Of course, Dorothy Day herself was aware of the struggle that emerges for an intellectual and passionate individual emerging from the chaos in the shattered carcass of Christendom. In her readings of Marx, where she had broached the infamous passage regarding religion’s place as the “opiate of the people”, she made a brave movement that the faithful rarely do—she agreed with him. In the dark night of the prole, it is absolutely true that those who live and have lived and will continue to live underfoot do indeed grasp for religious mysticism in an effort to escape their condition, to escape the cruel reality of being less than they might be and more than they would prefer they weren’t. Understanding all too well that faith is something that a person has and not something that the crowd can have, she agreed that religion is the opiate of the masses and was concerned, even if only momentarily against the backwash of eternity, that her prayers merely made her feel better.3

Now, here in this tantalising realisation, we are placed onto the dangerous knife-edge, onto the dangerous tightrope that faith demands by virtue of offering us no objective grounding on which to right ourselves—or, at the very least, to pretend we have righted ourselves upon. How can I tell if my prayers and the reflections of my prayers are genuine in that they move me towards God and turn my hands from mere flesh and bone into instruments that may do His wonders? How can I discern the working of the Spirit from my mere ideal musings on some fleeting desire or other? But, as Wittgenstein once noted, faith is indeed that holy tightrope which seems impossible to walk upon—and, yet, so many are held aloft.

As always, it appears that Day’s worry, that holy angst that acts as a blaring siren to the world that searches for a sign that saints do indeed walk amongst them, had played a part in the ideal musings of a loafer in Northern Europe 100 years prior. In the quiet concern for the fealty of one’s praying, there must be a position that we can occupy between scrupulosity and a conscious and upbuilding sense of self-judgement—otherwise, as Schleiermacher would accidentally have it, prayer is mere fiction in a determinist universe4. Scandalously in an age of consumption, our melancholic loafer furiously notes in his prophetic vision: it is possible that life itself may need a *brake*—a gadfly, a presence that turns the horse from its feed bag in that refusal to be swatted.

Prayer changes the prayer

S. K., in his youth and under the tutelage of his would-be rival Martensen, came across Schleiermacher’s infamous notion of “total dependence”—the sensation of relying upon God for all things in order was an aspect of faith that burned in the individual. However, this posed somewhat of a problem for the young Dane. Firstly, so to speak, as this meant that prayer seemed to be utterly pointless:

“...whereas Schleiermacher sees this as disallowing any element of activity on the part of the dependent self (which is why it is absolute dependence), Kierkegaard suggests that such a state would not negate activity but should involve both activity and passivity. This relates to the possibility of prayer since if there is no activity on the part of the self in relation to God, ‘Wouldn’t prayer have to be regarded as a fiction?’”5

In this obscure note on the notion of prayer, we find S. K.’s most stunning insight: that the particular and the universal are not divided, but are rather dialectical partners6. Consider the church that both is posed against the world and signifies to the world that it is as such, whilst at the same time existing within the world as a product of it. The individual is not in a total dependence upon God and subject to the capriciousness of His will, but rather in a position of total dependence on God’s power and gifted a modicum of it to do His wonders. In the apparent passivity of our condition, activity emerges as the difference-maker for the individual on the backdrop of his universal reality—when I do, I do become a self in relation to the One Who gives every good and perfect gift7 and the other who is the object of my attention.

For S. K., the evidence of Christianity's reality is that, when engaged in the imitatio Christi and giving the interiority of faith an externality in active practice directed at the other, one finds the unexplained appearance of “the wounded consciousness”8—the rupture of the self over the stumbling block of “the offense” (Matthew 11:6), the seeping-in of externality where the internal is first moulded.

“You Changeless One, whom nothing changes! You who are changeless in love, who just for our own good do not let yourself change-would that we also might will our own well-being, let ourselves be brought up, in unconditional obedience, by your changelessness to find rest and to rest in your changelessness! You are not like a human being. If he is to maintain a mere measure of changelessness, he must not have too much that can move him and must not let himself be moved too much. But everything moves you, and in infinite love. Even what we human beings call a trifle and unmoved pass by, the sparrow’s need, that moves you; what we so often scarcely pay attention to, a human sigh, that moves you, Infinite Love. But nothing changes you, you Changeless One! O you who in infinite love let yourself be moved, may this our prayer also move you to bless it so that the prayer may change the one who is praying into conformity with your changeless will, you Changeless One!”9

At the break of Day

Day’s concern, of course, is not an easy one to dismiss: how can I discern my own private self-torturings from the intervention of the spirit’s pruning—if such a thing is there at all?

In part, this was why S. K. asserted so consistently that there couldn't be a given Christian politics or, really, any objective and imposed Christian system of thought which rose above some humanly grounded piece of Vordenken10. When religious faith is merely the creation and recreation of religious ideas—a feckless engagement with fleeting opinions as if they were revelatory—then the Marxian is correct, but only partially; these people have cried from the suffering and retreated into the imagination which subverts their perception of the Lord, an idealist par excellence who thinks he can think himself (or, even worse, his neighbour) into freedom, whilst also basically unaware of the despair that tears up the soil in which their fruit might have thrived11.

Becoming a Christian, becoming a self, requires first to accept that the self that I am is not merely an idea that I have for my limited time on this planet, picked as an idea amongst ideas and an accident of history—power is found not in creating plans that grate against creation, but rather requires that I accept the life that I find myself in and the movements which ripple through me as me in the moment of participation in the universal12. “I am dynamite!” cries the aesthete, discontented with the realisation that contours of his life are indeed contours—and attempts to resist in an explosion of expression against finitude muster little more than the final destruction of self outright. “No!”, I respond, it is the quiet acceptance that becoming a power that breaches the imposition of the limit first comes in accepting that dynamite may be the most powerful when the fuse is wet:

“For Kierkegaard, the “night” of religious experience appears only “as the purely negative horror of darkness or the dazzling nature of the ‘sunlight of eternity’ ‘in the hour of death.’” However, for genuine “Catholic night-mysticism,” the way of the “night” issues in an earthly blessedness. In short, Kierkegaard preserves “a final residual effect of the Lutheran denial of gratia inhabitans, [a denial] of the inner possession—and not just the touching—of redemption.””13

No, dear Karl and dear Friedrich, it is not the earnestness of a young mother, aware of the sin transgressed in a life from which she emerges and now striding forward in the freedom of faith: that “wounded consciousness”14 is the evidence that we can indeed be broken over the working of the spirit, moulded again into something new, into what we always already are and what we always already ought to be. The realist, fellow traveller to neither the idealist who only deals in self-assured fantasy and the authority of the mind's baronian castle nor the vulgar materialists who deals only in the measurable, the quantifiable, the limiting of the possible to dirt in front of him. In recognising the movements that we are moved to play a part in, always already had in the opportunity for faith, always already situated for the broken neck of faith’s merciful grace—that is the sign which breaks open reality and hands the keys to the kingdom into the meek, the poor, the weary, and the hungry.

Day, dear faithful sojourner, fear not a second longer! Against Marx, we are moved to confess: I am moved to faith by that which is both beyond me and totally within my grasp. It is no opium which runs in my veins—it is the reality, the undoubtable realness of my very blood and bones, my very subjectivity itself against the object of my struggle, which grants me my faith and assures me against the scoffing of the Flammenzeichen who retreat into the petty intellectualism of vulgar materialism when that individual, that single individual, rises out from amongst them and, in the blink of the eye, disappears once again. In the quiet assurance that the aesthetic demand for a display of power, a show amongst shows for viewing pleasure of a society of spectators, is undermined by the repose of the simple prayer that moves more than the scholar's pen or the policeman's baton ever could. There is something caused in me when I pray in earnest that saves me from the panic, the dizziness of the fad and the insecurity and yokes me to a path altogether different from merely what I would desire—let this revelation be all that is needed to know that Marx stood on one side of the boundary and I the other.

Perhaps there is a flair of blood and guts, fire and brimstone, which is altogether a little too impolite for the middle-class comfort of postmodernity; perhaps a story which seems to catch the jagged edges of the congregation’s subjectivities, such is the earnest held there within; perhaps it is merely a presentation of the word without chatter or pomp, disappointingly short for the one who arrived in order to see the show. There is a great deal of variance here, of course, and I have no doubt that you are perfectly capable of bringing your own stories of such a thing to the fore—and, of course, your own stories of the inverse. However, there’s something present within the presence of the real orator that should bring us to pause: how does one exalt the ideal that raises the temperature of a sermon from the comforting churchiness of the preacher-entertainer to the fever pitch of “the offense” (Matthew 11:6) without invoking the temptation to engage in judgment? What would it mean to judge the other qua sinner when engaged in the often poorly-conceptualised act of “correcting” or similar? In a way, what separates judgement from what Paul lays out in Galatians 6?

If we are to take Christ seriously—and this is usually accepted by even the most cantankerous of Christians—when he guides us on the path to freedom from the desire to judge the other, how does one hold up the mirror1 without collapsing into stone-chucking (John 8:7)?

As a preliminary, the words of a saint:

By this phrase “armed neutrality,” especially as I explain it more and more precisely, I think I am able to characterize the position I intend to take and have taken in throwing light on Christianity or what Christianity is or, more accurately, what is involved in being a Christian. Naturally, this cannot mean that I want to leave undecided whether I am myself a Christian, aspire to it, fight for it, pray about it, and trust to God that I am that. What I have wanted and want to prevent is that the emphasis would in any way be that I am a Christian to an extraordinary degree, a distinguished kind of Christian. This I have wanted and want to prevent. But what I have wanted and want to achieve through my work, what I also regard as the most important, is first of all to make clear what is involved in being a Christian, to present the picture of a Christian in all its ideal, that is, true form, worked out to every true limit, submitting myself even before any other to be judged by this picture, whatever the judgment is, or more accurately, precisely this judgment—that I do not resemble this picture. In addition, because the task of producing this ideal picture is a work in which emphasis falls upon differential qualifications for being able to do this, especially since it is to be done in relation to the manifold confusions of modern times, I have chosen for purpose of designation the words: neutrality and armed.2

S. K. stressed at length that the image of the “extraordinary Christian” is not one that he sees himself as embodying—so, therefore, he is not the one to cast judgment against the other or reform the church, but rather only to hold up “this ideal picture” that offers to intercede on his behalf. Indeed, the very presence of “the offense”3 itself, hanging in the ugly beauty of an unremarkable man that was slaughtered at the capricious hands of the state, is enough to do more than any windbag en gros ever could.4

But where is this extraordinary Christian? Who is this person who can cast the first stone? Let us consider this universal question in the mode of a particular particularity—the monastery:

“It is a special sort of a retreat we should make. Back to the monastery—the question must be brought back to the monastery from which Luther broke out (this is probably the truth) [...] The monastery’s error was not asceticism, celibacy, etc. No, the error was that Christianity was reduced by allowing this to be regarded as pertaining to extraordinary Christians—and then all the purely secular nonsense as ordinary Christianity. No, asceticism and everything belonging to it is merely a beginning, a condition for being able to be a witness to the truth. Therefore the swing Luther made was in the wrong direction [...] Consequently the error in the Middle Ages was not the monastery and asceticism but that basically the secular mentality had conquered in the monk’s parading as the extraordinary Christian.”5

S. K. seems to be leading us in the direction so as to suggest that a person cannot possess faith “in an extraordinary degree, since the ordinary degree is the highest,”6 and, when one is in possession of this ordinary degree, one would be aware that power is not exercised in the thirsting desire to cast judgment against the other.

At this point, we can pause for the hilarious self-exposure of the play-Christian: if the notion that one should not judge the other as an existential expression of faith proper brings about anger, fury, calls for practicality and realism by the upset counterpart of our loafing musings, then it appears that one falls short of the ideal—“it’s not my Christianism if I can’t throw stones”, if you will. However, already here, we should be aware that this is also judgement: this sets the boundaries for Christ’s love, where I, my reader, have misled you down the garden path in (falsely) taking up the mantle of the “extraordinary Christian” (oh so very falsely) in order to drop my little stones onto the heads of those below the balcony, as if sin were not to so impolite as to reach up into my baronial castle that fails to protect me from secularity. No, my reader, I’ve misled you—I have misstepped and you would be wise not to elevate the footprints in the sand that I have left for you.

Maybe, then, there is something more for me to do: somewhere else for me to go and another path that, whilst obscures, has surely been trodden before. Instead of, perhaps, grasping that delicious aesthetic temptation of the will to taunt the other with a false judgment, just perhaps I am being drawn unto some point where “chatter” is not the aim at all: it is the reception of the word that only finds practical expression.

Here, my reader, we find ourselves learning to praise the characters that we have so often heard gone without a single word of praise in the services that haunt the background noise of our thought: the Ancient Israelites, sinful, impudent, and occasionally faithless as they were. This is not to praise sin—the work of liberal theology has already been done—but, rather, to recognise that the vessel is as important to the quenching relief of water for the man in the desert as the water itself: the sinful backdrop of the Hebrew stories, those people “living life”, is itself a signal to the faithful to maintain faith even in the times where faith seems to be even more vanishingly invisible that it already is.

While Christ shines as the transfigured contingent arrival of a necessary truth, the mode by which God’s eternal goodness came into being by way of a man, we are first handed figures who either sin bravely against the Lord or participate in their upbuilding by ways which the external world sees as sin: for all the crowd that would have turned against a father ready to sacrifice his son and forced him to turn back, the one sanctified in the fire of the Lord recognises their particularity in a way that the other may not (Genesis 22); for all the despair that fell upon the Hebrews in Egypt, the one who bolstered to guide them out into the desert himself was an impertinent and disobedient leader (Numbers 20:11); for all the sin that seeped into the society of the Israelites, they had survived to walk sinfully God’s path of liberation from sin7. The notion of goodness that shines through the sinful as is illuminated in the fractured glass of the sinful social life is the necessary corrective for our arrogance: we are, like shards that insist they remain a pane, those same sinners—and our first task is to discover that qua the infinite qualitative difference as our lives—as my life—in comparison to God—my God, my Saviour, the One Who died for me. To first turn to the other and accuse him of sin is an error in thinking that I am “extraordinary enough” to offer the final judgement against the one that God has not and, indeed, lends power to in the way that only One Who is omnipotent could.

In the quiet repose of the one turned towards God in prayer, that same emergence—of the individual realising themselves qua self for the first time in the way that they always already ought to be and always already are8—occurs again: the sinner can begin to swim alone through my own power and, by way of God’s help, I am pulled from the water to breathe again.

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Share Kierkegaardian Reflections

As a part of this, this also involves the creation and management of the counter-crowd as well—developing respectable avenues for protest that give malcontents ways to engage with the state in a way which absolves them of considered thought on their own part and, instead, can pick up the pre-approved notions that allow for suitably respectable protest.

Of course, whilst we occupy the balcony, my reader, it would be appropriate to note that these malcontents, malcontent in their malcontented ways-of-life, are defined by their inability to “fit into” society and the role that it allows for them—in some way, as a product of some particular meeting of the ideal and the material, they have found that they exist outside of the social order1 and compelled by the conditions of their existence to take up arms against it. Indeed, a great many political debates have circulated around what constitutes the acceptable bounds of the “in-group” and the acceptable “out-groups” which sit at the bounds—or, as we begin in leisurely descent onto the Road, the development of the shape of the crowd and the signifying of both the “anti-crowd” and “the favoured oppressed”2. NaTo illustrate, my reader, think about the kind people who sit at the periphery of “friend” and “enemy”, often in a warring situation: the Russian forced conscript, the Ukrainian Nazi; the reluctant IDF enrollee, the Palestinian Islamist extremist. Hopefully, my reader, at least one of these examples has raised your hackles in realisation of some “other” that sits outside of the acceptable narratives we are handed by the psychopolitical structures of our lives. If you should ever want to quickly bring a party to an end, playing your own version of this little game is usually an excellent first step on how to lose friends and alienate people. Without this presumption of a friend who wields the authority to dictate to us our enemies, though, it appears that these figures—reluctant and blameless or willing and guilty—may merely be our friends, our neighbours, who have been turned against us without reason. Navigating around this, my reader, then is the ordeal that besets us all—and such was the hardship of the Samaritan.3

In that sense, I offer a different hypothesis to the one that circulates around the creation and destruction of these groups: the soothing balm of Christ’s love, as prototype and pattern, actually a response to a state which only offers a call to arms—with Christ, there is only a call to alms in the offence of the world (Matthew 11:6).

If you have followed me so far, my reader, you will be aware of the contours that haunt our partially ironic, partially provocative declaration for the anarchic cause. In the effort to become a Christian in a world typified by its broken Christendom, there is a constant threat that our aims can become subverted by a desire for the display of aesthetic power and the possession that our possessions might have on us. These anarchist-aesthetes, while notable in their actions and their ability to do what they said, cannot play the role of inspiration to us: indeed, not as anarchists, as Christians, or as Christian anarchists.

To navigate our way out from amongst the crowd, who would willingly allow themselves to shed their responsibility to self and other in the readiness to use violence, we shall turn to three men in particular who have stood out from the malaise of their contemporaneousness and assert what needs to be asserted: I know that it is not I who knows all.

Paul against the arkys

Of course, a fine place to start this would be scripture. Indeed, why not start with 1 Corinthians, the piece that most notably took to the task of undermining those who would erect themselves as the foundation of the world:

Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world through wisdom did not know God, it pleased God through the foolishness of the message preached to save those who believe. For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. (1 Corinthians 1:20-25)

It is a wonder, my dear reader, how we have so long mistaken the problem of the Ancient Christian use of Plato and Aristotle as an affirmation of their content as opposed to a leveraging of their language towards his own purposes. A flit of irony, where the master’s tools are wielded against him, so to speak. Here, Paul clears away the ground on which this world—whether it be exemplified through the acts of the Greek pagan philosophers, the anarchist-nihilist, or the “play Christian” playing Christianity—wishes to erect its own plan for how things ought to be and how things ought not to be, quickly before dressing it up in the language of a greater metaphysics.

Note that Paul makes the point that, at the root of the Christian teaching lies the revelation that Christ—God Himself—was crucified and died in the form of the human subject in the midst of human society at the hands of human authority. Instead of offering us “first things” or “basic assumptions”, he makes the grand declaration which rips apart all prior, respectable thought of the serious scholar: indeed, it appears that Paul, in his impudence, is forced to revere the revealed where others would have it distorted to an object of science. The Jews, hearing this, find it a stumbling block; the Greek, hearing this, find it an exercise in foolishness. And yet—

On Pagan authority and intellectualism

Here, my reader, is where we find the radical reinterpretation of what came before within Paul’s thought that puts the bleating scoffs of “Platonist” and “pseudo-Stoic” to bed—he does not merely adopt these Greek positions in order to erect his own predilections on top of their carcasses, but rather he subverts their pre-propositional assumptions by way of abusing their language and turning their positions inside out. And, all along, leaves the language untouched, thereby allowing for him to claim the power that the syllogistic form has over the pagan muser and turn it back against its greatest proponent. For the Greek, in particular, the argument is the mode for understanding the truth of reality and, therefore, everything outside of the argument form can then be presumed to be false by this metric; however, this both fails to appreciate that there is a reality which exists outside of our perception of it, that may sit on the periphery of what we know and what we have yet to discover.

But this can only be true if one thing is presumed: that is possible to become the ground of truth (or, a foundation) that can accurately assess whether the objects of thought that float in the epistemological slush of our uninterrogated presumptions are true or false—if that even makes sense to believe. “No!”, says Paul to the Greek: only by sacrificing oneself at the altar of the self, in the quiet admission of finitude and limitedness, can we admit that there are things which may sit outside of our ability to make an assessment. Or, in short, the inconclusive nature of a Greek-style argument for the existence of a God or any particular thing at all about Christianity can show no more than that the argument doesn’t work—hence why the Corinthians, in their desirous arrogance to take the place of God as the ground of truth, have failed to understand the offense and the shock of the Crucifixion, the Incarnation, and revelation outright4.

What does it mean to look at the world and find only foolishness, as did Paul? It is to look at the world and declare that all things, without God, are impossible to understand as they are and as we should be: as individuals attempting to become selves from within the position of untruth against truth5. Only by way of God’s help in identifying us as against truth by the notion of revealing the individual’s condition from within sin against the good can we recognise the basic need to reject ourselves as the ground of truth.

Paul—Anarchist against Foundationalists

Presumably, this possibly doesn’t seem very “anarchist” or even political at all. Yet again, you probably think, my reader, the Christian anarchist has fallen into the trap of indulging in Christianisms and devotionals to the point where the leap to anarchism is a jarring shock, an arbitrary desire that has found its way onto the page. However, Paul’s protest has important practical implications that turn the fusty, abstract reading of his work by the academics and the critics—where the great sojourner, most notable for fostering the early seeds of the Christian church in his mission to be lifted up by God from his fallen condition and shown that roots can indeed function above the soil, is reduced to a “premise thinker” who has little to say beyond a set given brief6—attempts and fails to invert the man that not only strode down the road with purpose and power, but was also the one who had trailblazed ahead to reveal the path that had always been.

We turn to Vernard Eller, a man who saw that what Paul opposed was all arkies against the One Who “is the head of the body, the church, who is the beginning [arky], the firstborn from the dead, that in all things He may have the preeminence.” (Colossians 1:18):

“Arky faith is that enthusiastic human self-confidence which is convinced that Christian piety can generate the holy causes, programs, and ideologies that will effect the social reformation of society.”7

In our awareness that the temptation of the world, sly as it can be, can even subvert itself into seemingly holy words and sanctified deeds, Eller wields Paul against the one who will take up the Holy Mantle for his own cause: “No!”, this self-confidence, rooted in your determined grit that, above all, you are right and your neighbour shall suffer for this reason, is little more the insertion of Christ’s image into your cause in order to reach your cause’s ends. If we are to learn anything from Kant, we might say that Eller has exposed the human willingness to take the very Lord God Himself, the One Who Weeps, and made Him a means to our ends—a basic position of willful abuse of the other, let alone the One Who is “Wholly Other”. Whether Right or Left—if we are childish enough to let these cracks of the whip be enough to turn us from the path that God laid out in His blood and His love—these individuals view themselves as messianic and that they’re God’s anointed social agents of redemption.8

Eller implores us to read Paul again and again without ceasing to understand the message which turns theology from the mere expression of one’s self-confidence into a theology contra the one who believes he has forged the arky proper by his own hands. As Climacus would note, it appears that faith is “[a]n objective uncertainty, held fast through appropriation with the most passionate inwardness, is the truth, the highest truth there is for an existing person.”9 By inserting this “objective uncertainty” into our methodolgy and remembering that all “ours” are, indeed, “mine”, we find ourselves in a place where we can understand the distance between those best laid plans of vice in men and the object of their veneration—that distance, of course, being sin, the qualitative difference between man and his Maker10. This “anti-arkys” approach to theology, where we first of all and last of all reject that we are the ground of truth in all senses, leads us to the perniciously “realist” kernel of both Paul’s and S. K.’s thought: in receiving the teaching the we are first and foremost to love God and love the neighbour against the background that we, quite simply, have spent some parts of our lives not loving God and not loving the neighbour11, we can become born-again in the knowledge that Spirit has been the one taking us on this journey towards becoming aware that we are on a journey.

Kierkegaard against the arkys

When we become aware that not only is it possible for us to engage in the self-renunciation of doubt and not only is it possible for us to will to engage in the self-renunciation of doubt, then we can recognise that the fundamental need for love is the calling of our deepest desires, our primordial desire to become a self, the rooted existence that cries out to become a self before God—then we can see that, first of all and last of all, learning to become a self as God shows us is possible means learning to cast out what has already been cast out and draw in what is already drawn in for us. That thing which we are moved to do as opposed to merely decide to take up. But what is a faith that looks like this?

“Faith no longer treats Jesus as a piece of cognitive content to be studied and mastered, but as a person to whom others must have a relation. By virtue of faith, true knowledge of God and the self is first made available to a person because only through faith does a person come into relation with Jesus the source of such eternal, essential truth that sets a person free.”12

Here we come to the crumb that S. K. had left on the forest floor for us, that ingenious aesthetic frill which turns his artful prose from the mere appearance of another Christian author who had a little too much to say for themselves before they set to work into the revelation of Paul’s that rips the living individual asunder and allows for more:

“Imitation, the imitation of Christ, is really the point from which the human race shrinks. The main difficulty lies here; here is where it is really decided whether or not one is willing to accept Christianity. If there is emphasis on this point, the stronger the emphasis the fewer the Christians. If there is a scaling down at this point (so that Christianity becomes, intellectually, a doctrine), more people enter into Christianity. If it is abolished completely (so that Christianity becomes, existentially, as easy as mythology and poetry and imitation an exaggeration, a ludicrous exaggeration), then Christianity spreads to such a degree that Christendom and the world are almost indistinguishable, or all become Christians; Christianity has completely conquered—that is, it is abolished!”13

S. K. sets the challenge which brings Paul’s critique of the Corinthians into the full-blooded, full-fleshed demand of care that God has issued to humanity: if to understand is to do and if to do is to be, then it is not enough to know that Christ’s life and death—that God was born as a child, lived in poverty, and died on the cross—is the basic offense to the nihilistic malaise of antiquity, modernity, and on into the unknowable future.

Rejecting the temptation of arky-dom through participation

We must live as if that is the case before we can understand that this foolishness, this stumbling block, is actually the case. Against the romantic-idealists of his contemporary European bourgeois society, S. K. carves out a realist theology of action, a theology that tears the tolerant academics who would open up the sphere of what Christianity is so that it would include those who use its very name for untruth, that rips up the intolerant fanatic who would close down the sphere of what Christianity is so that they can reign as king supreme over their arky forged in the fires of their hatred of the neighbour—so that Christianity itself becomes a play thing, a trifle and passtime in the hands of the passive ones who do not even value their own lives enough to grasp it outright. “No!”, the cry calls, “This will not do.”

“...for the divine refuses “at any price [to] be a kingdom of this world; on the contrary, it would be that the Christian might venture life and blood to prevent it from becoming a kingdom of this world.”14

When one knows that the divine, in its “infinite qualitative difference” from humanity, rejects the very basic assumptions that humanity would make against it, the individual brought to radicalism may actually find that their most radical lashing-out against society, against the world that wrongs them, is really more of the same and a mere inversion on a theme that has haunted human history: the self-confidence to assert that I and I alone hold the keys to the kingdom that will unlock the door that obscures Christ and His salvation for us (Revelation 3:8). It appears, then, that a break from this theme would come only by way of refusing foundationalism outright—in declaring one’s uncertainty, in one’s inability to become the foundation on which the world is built. Only in the uncertainty—the objective uncertainty—of a life lived in the deliberation between what one does and what One did, does, and will do clears away the idea that we would need a ground on which to stand before we can take up the call to faith and live life as a self before God.

“Christian heroism... is to risk unreservedly being oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being alone before God, alone in this enormous exertion and this enormous accountability.”15

By stepping out from under the canopy of aestheticism and violence, whereby what we want is merely a thing and what we shall do is merely compel those who stand between us and that thing, we can identify the undergirding hope which breaks up the possibility of an anarchism of violence and a liberation of imposition: only by way of surrendering to the prime arkys of the universe, the One Who bears authority by virtue of His power, and through His power granted us, you and I, my reader, the power to even topple the very Great and Good Almighty Himself by way of a declaration that He doesn’t exist whatsoever16—this is the way to avoid the very danger that attractive calls to the crowd, those tempting shouts that stir the rebellious and sly mechanations of the human subject into action in the state of untruth: by becoming a self who sees, first and foremost, His God in the face of the other and the other as the neighbour who cries out to him.

And, of course, my reader, it must be noted: this willingness to join the caravan that does rove through time may extend to the willingness that we lie down and accept the world’s power in the self-sacrifice of the lamb to the secular wolf. How else could we propose such a thing but by the knowledge that vicit angus noster?17

On Malatestans and Escaping Their Trap

We have made a great deal of fuss about the need to sheer anarchism of the woolly coat of violent secular power if we are first to tread lightly enough that a phrase like “Christian anarchy” would make much sense at all. In a way, this exercise has been an indulgence to myself, a corrective against the notion that I am the rock on which I shall build my house and that maybe, just maybe, I could take up these mantles of the world—worldly politics and violence—and use them in a way which all those other silly Christians in the past had failed to do so. In the mistaken wondering as to whether it was me, really just me, who God had loved first and, therefore, I was the one to correct the alms of a scattered Christendom into a new union of Christian arms that would bring about salvation, it was always good to walk through the offense and take assessment of the ones who had fallen—secular or otherwise—at the feet of temptation and to clear away the footprints that they had left over the ones of He Who walked in freedom.

For that indulgence, I can only apologise. However, we should be sure to say that we are not quite done: firstly, we shall demonstrate where we have corrected ourselves from the path of the Malatestans; then, and only then, we shall reorient ourselves back to where we had begun and notice how this path, in the radicalness of its orthodoxy, may now appear a little different, a little more palatable, a little more walkable for those who desperately search for footprints. As is so often the case, I pray that the words of Vernard Eller do a little more to help me navigate my way out of this bind. Undergirding it all, as always, is that dialectical mastery whereby the believer’s inner relationship with God finds outer expression.18

Nachdenken against Aestheticism

First, the temptation for power:

The secular anarchist, it should be clear now, lives downstream in a genealogical chain of the would-be ethical thinkers who cannot escape their aestheticism. They are, in S. K.’s terms, the “negative unity”19 of desire and principle that arises when the unity of means and ends is divorced, when one’s aims qua consequentialist despair become frayed from one’s means qua increasingly violent isolation. Such a position, I say, my reader, is a failure to imbue the radical with the necessarily subjective: it doesn’t matter if love is recognised by all (the world will never allow for such a thing to become universal), but the lover must be able to be recognised by his fruits.20 When the anarchist, in its remoreless turn to violence, was unmasked in his shame that mere failure to be the one who would hold the crown of power was enough for him to abandon the good and view it as a temptation, it becomes clear that the apparently ethical nature of this radicalism is accidental and the aestheticism of its desire unstable21. His slavery to technique, in the Ellulian sense22, sees no possibility that the right idea might fail merely because the wrong agent or the wrong environment has not yet cleared to allow its realisation. In truth, the anarchist wishes to fail: if he does not fail, then his desire for power finally reaches the place where he could refuse power—and, with that, he ceases to be.23

This will for power, then, is one which rises up form the depths of the human agent and causes one to seize the other qua thing in an act of domination. Not only that, this act of domination is often the product, the calling card itself, of a despairing instability in the mind of the one who seizes—in an attempt to exert power, any power, into the world, it appears even the “bomb-chucker” is aware that they can assert themselves into life and history through the death of the other. But is this the life that we shall lead? Is this the freedom of Christ promised to us—bound up in the aesthetic presence of the other who is little more than the “will be dominated” to our fleeting desires?

Eller stops us short—and offers obedience, that obedience to the Word that is freely chosen, as the balm for the caustic presence of this Nietzschean will:

“If I do everything he has in mind but do it because I happen to agree that what he has suggested is the intelligent and appropriate thing to do, then in actuality I am not obeying him... this is not putting God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else; it is putting myself first, my judgements, my ideas of good and bad, of right and wrong.24

While the scoffer would like for us to think that obedience, that obedience to the Word that is freely chosen, is a surrender of freedom, it appears that it is first and foremost a freedom from this unstable desire to erect oneself as the ground of the truth, the foundation to the universe itself—that choosing to place a preeminent value on God and the God-relationship25 by way of choosing to respond to His love in the way the lover responds to the will of the beloved is itself a freedom which guards us from the temptation to use violence against the other.

But how? Obviously, Christians have been amongst those who have used violence, often under the banner of the faith. Are we merely engaging in this silly game of declaring everything I like correct! and everything I don’t incorrect!—or, as it were, electing myself to be judge, jury, and executioner on the part of the Lord? Not quite.

“The order of priority cannot be reversed; and the Christian simple life always is a positive doctrine of the enjoyment of God before it is a negative doctrine concerning the evil of the world.”26

Because, when I find faith, the faith that grips those who would have it and turns them from what they have been and makes them again into what they are and always have been, I will see that the positive enjoyment of God means that I cannot displace those Greatest Commandments: love God and love the neighbour. In the obedience to God’s Word, where I freely choose to remember that God has asked for my love and given me the tools to accept or reject it and then asked me to turn that love out into the world towards the person who calls out to me in despair qua my neighbour, I am freed from the pressure to become the ground of truth, the metric of success, or one who will clear away sin in the end of days.

In the “deferred pacifism”27 that does not allow for us to claim the authority to know that the other should be punished in the name of God and, instead, that they will be offered forgiveness and a path to salvation, we err away from claiming the other as the evidence of our power—we choose to turn the other cheek away from those temptations that drive us to think on God’s behalf (Vordenken) and, instead, take the option which would allow us to foster the seeds of healing in the soil of the sinner by way of “thinking after” (Nachdenken)28. Always, we all the hands that God uses to work in this world: and that willingness to work only with His guidance is the willingness to admit that even God may be correct when He offers the universal possibility for redemption.

The Possession of Possessions

Secondly, the temptation of ownership:

“When the object of our desire, the thing itself that either “draws” us or tempts us, becomes understood as a merely rational, a merely intellectual objective that sits in relation to some consequentialist goal or as the product of “common sense” that proceeds from whichever position the “common sense” thinker emerges from, here the danger of the will to possess and subjugate comes to the fore. When those Italian anarchists stormed into Letino and set to turning the world to their goal, their overarching aims to bring about an anarchist society through their objectivising, political mechanications were little more than an idealism given flesh—they had taken actions to allow for a “liberated” relation between subject and object, but they had not ascended beyond the need for a mere possession-relation with their objective reality.”29

Possession is often thought of within legal categories, therefore assumed to amount to a kind of contract that exists between various parties—knowingly or otherwise. However, this can’t be the mere extent of possession, because we can possess things without the law enforcing that possession. Therefore, we should recognise that there are certain things which fall into our “realm of control” which fall outside of the realm of the other and vice versa. But what does it mean for the Christian to possess something and how does that defend against this kind of power-grab where the anarchist is reduced to a moth that flutters by the burning ashes of the city he desires to see destroyed?

Eller, again, offers us a path out through his notion of “simplicity”: simplicity proper can only flow from the desire to “enjoy God”, allowing for lesser concerns to be cleared away30. Although the Christian ideal does indeed call for both the personal eschewing of wealth and the social organisation of justice in the name of worshipping God, it does not frame these things in the context of them being outright goods on their own. Taking the story of the young, rich man who speaks to Jesus, Eller notes:

“Yes, social justice, equality, and help for the poor are involved in the simple life; yet keep them where they belong, not as its motive and rationale, but as a “plus,” a gift, a freedom, a grace out of the “all the rest” that will come to you as well.”31

Christianity is not a religion of asceticism, whereby the individual can assert power over their life by way of eschewing the world around them. Indeed, such a thing seems to spit in the direction of Genesis, which takes such a strong stand on suggesting that creation is still fundamentally good—even in its imperfect nature. To eschew wealth and work for social change is not to assert those things as basic goods in a way which becomes self-referential—no, it is to express the love for God and the love for the neighbour in obedience to God’s loving commandments in a way which allows for the sloughing away of the desire for material wealth or societal authority which would undermine one’s God-relationship. In the story of the rich man, he was not being ordered to sell his possessions, but asked to sell his possessions in order to fulfil the important part: following Christ.32

From this point, our understanding of possessions, then, must become one where we are aware of how possessions can possess us and turn us away from our better interests. Instead of asserting that aesthetic desire to burn the town to the ground or to take up arms against the neighbour who sees you as the enemy, we are reminded to do one thing and one thing alone33: love God in a way which allows for that inner life to spill out into the world.

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More than that, however, is that a muted response from the crowd shows that one is seemingly free and capable of operating without merely collapsing into causative chains of necessity—neither pushed by what came before nor pulled by what is to come, the author asserts their ability to become themself in a world where they can properly, even contently, possibly, publish into the void where that individual might find it and appreciate the use-value therewithin as opposed to baying to the crowd’s calls for “the demand of the times” or cower into the assurances of cannibalizing the corpses which brought the world to be such-and-such a way.

Interestingly, as is so often the case, this desire to “hold oneself back”1 finds itself realised through the pen of our dear Melancholic Dane—or, rather, from under the guise of Johannes Climacus. Note, those who only wish to appease the baying crowd:

Rarely, perhaps, has a literary undertaking been so favored by fate in accord with the author’s wishes as has my Philosophical Fragments. Doubtful and reticent as I am with regard to every private opinion and self-appraisal, I do without any doubt dare to say truthfully one thing concerning the fate of the little pamphlet: it has aroused no sensation, none whatever. Undisturbed and in accordance with the motto (”Better well hanged than ill wed”, the hanged, indeed, the well-hanged, author has remained hanging. No one—not even in sport or jest—has asked him for whom he did hang. But that was as desired: better well hanged than by a hapless marriage to be brought into systematic in-law relationship with the whole world. Relying on the nature of the pamphlet, I was hoping this would happen, but in view of the bustling ferment of the age, in view of the incessant forebodings of prophecy and vision and speculative thought, I feared to see my wish frustrated by some mistake. Even if one is a very insignificant traveler, it is always hazardous to arrive in a town at a time when everyone is most excitedly and yet most variously expectant—some with cannons mounted and fuses lit, with fireworks and illuminated banners in readiness; some with the town hall festively decorated, the reception committee all dressed up, speeches ready; some with the dipped pen of systematic urgency and the dictation notebook wide open in anticipation of the arrival of the promised one incognito—a mistake is always possible. Literary mistakes of that kind belong to the order of the day.

Fate be praised, therefore, that it did not happen. Without any commotion whatever, without the shedding of blood and ink, the pamphlet has remained unnoticed—it has not been reviewed, not mentioned, anywhere; no literary clangor about it has increased the ferment; no scholarly outcry has led the expectant host astray; no shouting about it from the outpost has brought the citizenry of the reading world to their feet. Just as the undertaking itself was devoid of all witchcraft, so also has fate exempted it from every false alarm. The author qua author is thereby also in the fortunate position of owing no one anything. I am referring to critics, reviewers, intermediaries, appraisers, etc., who in the literary world are just like the tailors, who in civil life “create the man”—they set the fashion for the author, the point of view for the reader. With their help and art, a book amounts to something. But then it is with these benefactors as, according to Baggesen, with the tailors: “In turn they slay people with bills for the creation.”2

With that in mind, I offer a reminder to that individual who can see what I mean—that individual who has the wherewithal to resist the interlocutor who greets the call to “turn the other cheek” as cowardice on a Monday and fascism on a Sunday; to resist he who would declare all struggles good because they are struggles against those unlike him, e.g., the rich, the poor, the foreign, the local, etc.; to resist those who would identify all causes against them as irredeemably evil merely because the cause does not march carefully in step to “the demand of the times”, to gnashing teeth of the very hell that is other people—because if I can reach you, my reader, then I have done more than I ever imagined was possible:

To be sure, my reader, we must understand how ideas have come to be before we can begin to move around them. With this in mind, we must sketch the failures of the “pro-violence” anarchist position—indeed, only ever collapsing into the terroristic lashing-out of personal grievances raised to the position of faux revolutionary acts in the mind of the terrorist and then justifying any and all acts of violence which rise out of the malaise and do, indeed, taunt the malaise into taking its revenge—if we are ever going to make a case for a Christian anarchy which doesn’t fail in merely becoming an identitarian anarchy by Christians. As Karl Barth one wisely noted, the left can all too often appear closer to the Christian ideal, making their apostacy all the more seductive3.

Now that this is done, let us take the failures of those plucky anarchists who saw revolution as merely staking a claim to a piece of land or setting fire to a particularly evil person and season them with some much-needed salt.

“A thinker on the balcony is the patron of truth, a thinker on the road becomes truth’s servant. And what truth needs is not patrons but servants, servants in whose life, thought and action, theory and practice are one, thinkers who think not concepts but things... The man who makes truths for himself on the balcony is a pure impressionist in his thinking and a pure opportunist in his living. The man who has been made by a truth which has met him on the road will be ready to die for the truth that found him.”1

Another week has passed away, another murder has occurred. From the balcony, I see my fellow balconeers—they cannot help noticing, they cannot help chattering. Like all mortal beings, caught in the necessity of their finitude, the event that captures their interest, sets them to work, gives them something to chatter about. Something to muse on, something to reflect on, something to issue oughts and ought nots over.

The road sits underneath them, opposite them; at very least, they are protected from the road by the comfort of the balcony.

All good and perfect things, delivered into the mouth of the journalist, are those things which immediately set the culture of chatter to action at the hands of something beyond their control. “I am not a man! I am dynamite!”, says the radical—and, like dynamite, he longs for his fuse to be lit, something to set him into action; something beyond himself to capture him, twist him, turn him into a chatterer, give him purpose in the form of eye-catching headlines and that terrible gawping desire for bloodshed and broken bones, twist him into a journalist, turn him into the chatterer who produces and reproduces the contagious condition of the culture of chattering by way of a clever turn-of-phrase, an insightful reflection to the applause of those sitting besides him. Nothing is offensive, everything is entertainment; nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted. The journalist is like the jellyfish, given life by that which lies beyond him and forced to feed on the corpse of whatever befalls him by way of the uncaring, capricious turning of the tides around him; some foodstuff or other presents itself and the jellyfish can do no other but feast; some tragedy befalls the neighbour and the individual can do no other put stare in horror; some tragedy appears before the journalist and he can do not other but turn it into shit for the crowd to gleefully feast upon. All things are consumable, all things must be consumed; the production and reproduction of everyday life is little more than providing the crowd the means by which it will eat itself to death, raised on a diet of death and wonder.

The balconeer, loafing in his lackadaisical reflections, looks one way and then the other. He recollects the moment of entertainment, the aesthetic beauty of the life of the animal—now exsanguinated to the point where it can be prepared for the feast—spilling out onto the floor in front of us in an act of power, and is again ready to survey the balcony as it extends outwards the left and right (although, it occurs to him, that this distinction is rather arbitrary and often descends into little more than which way we can signal to the audience a collective code than any real division) and he begins again—he now knows the position he has chosen for himself, in the same sense that the alcoholic leisurely browses the selection of gourmet beer available to him in his shakes and his sweats. He notices to the right that the formerly brash and boisterous have taken up the façade of the preening moralism of the elderly woman in the front pew—“how dare you”s and “how could you”s ring forth. He notices to the left that the formerly preening and moralising have taken up the façade of the brash, boisterous agent of chaos, satisfied by the spilling of blood for his purposes. On a different day, the loafer would no doubt find himself noting the once again switched positions or even the back-and-forth volley which would leave the less well-practiced neck-craner with a nasty case of whiplash. It appears, then, that these united opposites—preening and moralising contra brutishness and boisterousness—are enjoyed in the free play of desire, in the random chain of events that produce events, in the capricious turning of the tide. The problem isn’t one which can be given a simple solution: indeed, the problem is that the balcony is overwhelming, totalising, and appropriating of all it can touch. It is, fundamentally, a culture of journalists, a culture of chatter that produces and reproduces those who can’t help but share their thoughts with the crowd—creating and recreating it towards whatever end is vogue—and produces and reproduces those who can’t help but read, watch, oggle with the ravenous hunger of the cannibal. When self-abstraction is the first mode of action—indeed, the only mode of action in that it allows us to retreat into the ideal, the glassy-eyed, the cowardly fawning or critical, the overly familiar or distant, the merely imaginary—then no faith or morality is possible; only humans, only that single individual, can be faithful or moral, but no such person can be found in the crowd of gawpers, reflectors, balconeers, academics, and cannibals.

Maybe it is wrong that I have chosen today to pray for grace to extend to someone that strove for discord and thrived on controversy. But a father died in view of his children and all that I can do is exploit the event for my own ends. I can pretend that I am providing a service, that I am offering something useful for those stuck on the road or those who idle on their balconies, but I know that it isn’t the case; I am a cannibal that feeds on the flesh of his fallen neighbour, that turns his life into a source of death and his death into a source of life. I do not sit outside the culture of journalists, judging it and correcting it towards my nobler, greater ends—I am one of them, I am one of the sick in need of a doctor. The ancient pagan cowered before the gods, offering blood sacrifice in order to protect his life; the writer today—no, me, me today—bristling in the arrogance that he is—I am—oh so ever sophisticated in comparison with his—no, my—temporally-separated counterpart, fails to see he is—me, damn it, I am—little more than the faithlessly fearing who still requires blood sacrifice so that life comes alive in him—in me. From the balcony, I struggle to find a way down onto the road, some way to leave this realm of ideas and again rejoin the realm of life. For that, I am a sinner who cannot avert his gaze from sin, requiring the death of my neighbour to operate at all—so help me God.

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When this will to power became frayed from the delicate moral life that held it in control, that steered the horses of power under the control of the delicate but determined reins in the hands of carriage driver, the secular anarchist movement descended into the aesthetic demand for power—and the complete collapse of the ability to hold oneself back. Eager to liberate by way of violence, violence plays its dreadful trick and moralising reaction of Ravanchol and Henry, it appears, became captured and enslaved to that very committment to and worship of violence that had driven them to that form-of-life: having turned anarchy from a vision of the sublime creeping into politics, like the beauty of the very divine unfurled in the dissolving flesh of the salted slug, to a call for total against all, their terrorism for terrorism’s sake was their own self-damnation. Analogous to the anxious militarism of the fascist and the insecurity of the Stirnerite, the anarchist became little more than an agent of power that sought to attain power of what he perceived to be his property—all of it. Against the ideal of the unity of means and ends, the only end justifiable was the aesthetic and the means could be any flavour that would satisfy the desire for desire once again. All flavours, of course, but salt.

The possession of property

For the Christian anarchist, as a corrective to these secular wayfarers standing in the shadows of the quiet men of faith in times gone past, the unity of ends and means remained as an important corrective. First, to the possible risk of temptation and its poisonous effect on the desire to become the kind of person that could love God and the neighbour without the threat of a theological structure hanging over them; secondly, towards the end of building a world which would allow this flower of “holding one's self back” to bloom. As a part of the unity of means and ends, of course, there are also visible signs of success: the increase of faithfulness, the emergence from the crucible of despair and temptation as faithful agents that both assert that the church is and identify where the world begins, and so on. The always already possible ethical need, against the consequentialists who push their goals out of the realms of possibility in order to absolve themselves from responsibility, is to establish a church which produces Christians—the individual who, in faith, can “stand by oneself—through another’s help!”1 The will to power, we might suggest, exists in tension with the will to control one's power and direct it towards actions that produce the kind of life that one wants to lead and that one sees oneself, as one actually is, reflected in.

Contrary to this, of course, is the temptation of property. In the spirit of—but not wholly accepting the tradition of—ascetism, S. K. offers us an insight into the notion of possession, in the broad sense:

"The world can be possessed only by its possessing me, and this in turn is the way it possesses the person who has won the world, since one who possesses the world in any other way possesses it as the accidental, as something that can be diminished, increased, lost, won, without his possession being essentially changed.”2

Here, the world must be understood in its biblical sense, as in the contradictory element that stands against the divine in immediacy. S. K. was aware that not only did possession constantly bring about the risk of creating “wayward desires” in our fundamental views of the world, but also that no particular objective organisation of those possessions would liberate us from the cold claim that the world places on hearts of deadness and minds of the machine: all forms-of-life3, whilst granting the possibility of passionate, directed living, also carry the danger of being reduced to the mechanical, nihilist passivity of the person who is but fails to exist4.

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Existence in the world, where things must happen and possibilities must be realised whether we like it or not, we are at constant risk of being exposed in weakness to “the catastrophe of dispossession”5, i.e., the possibility for us to cede our “right” to material possessions in order to “let go” of our claim on the reality that we choose for ourselves and sets to enforcing reality to fall in line with our idealism. But what undermines this possibility? How do we identify the potential weakness that allows for the retreat into the freedom that is granted by God’s omnipotence?6

Identifying the object of desire

When the object of our desire, the thing itself that either “draws” us or tempts us, becomes understood as a merely rational, a merely intellectual objective that sits in relation to some consequentialist goal or as the product of “common sense” that proceeds from whichever position the “common sense” thinker emerges from, here the danger of the will to possess and subjugate comes to the fore. When those Italian anarchists stormed into Letino and set to turning the world to their goal, their overarching aims to bring about an anarchist society through their objectivising, political mechanications were little more than an idealism given flesh—they had taken actions to allow for a “liberated” relation between subject and object, but they had not ascended beyond the need for a mere possession-relation with their objective reality.

Here lies the fundamentally “political” character of secular anarchism, where it fails to move beyond the recognition of a sceptical position on the usefulness of political ideas by way of continuing to absent-mindedly make political actions that assume the politician’s objective relation to the unwashed masses: regardless of what the people want or do, they are now in the “correct” objective relation to their surroundings and, as such, are liberated! All life is a great puzzle which merely needs the correct solution, so why not start by playing the little game of anarchist solutions?

But think back, my reader, to S. K.’s warning about possession: not only can we not possess the world in a sense that implies some essential change in our very being, but that, in our accidental possession of the world, we are at constant risk of becoming possessed by the world itself. The thought goes as such:

1. When we are in relation to external objects, these relations are always in relation to some relative factor. As objects appear within particular relations to particular agents, they can only ever be relative. As such, the most that an external relation can ever be is the absolute relation to the relative.

2. When my relation to the external is objective, i.e., it is not preceded or in line with a similar movement of the internal, then I am in an objective relation with some relative factor of reality and this relation itself becomes the grounds for action—for as long as the relation is maintained, I find that I can become motivated to pursue some related goal as if caused by the ghostly causative qualities of externality.

3. When my relation to the external, objective in character, is severed, i.e., I fail to achieve some particular relation of possession with the object, my absolute desire for an absolute relation to the object brings about changes in my relation to the object. Failure to possess the external, so to speak, in the same way that I can possess my internal processes leads to an intensification of my desire for the object and a new consequentialist aim.

4. When this relation to the external, objective in character and severed from my possession, collapses into “the catastrophe of dispossession” against my will, my desire to find the security of an absolute relation is revealed to be merely related to the relative and the absolute relation itself, now undermined, is exposed as a relative relation.

In this way, the secular anarchist is not merely immoral for their actions (and addressing the problem at this stage no doubt leads to the detached and shrill moralism of particularly bulldogish thinkers) but, rather, they are engaging with the necessarily insecure as if it were secure—and the fallout from this epistemological collapse in the unveiling of the world's “clay legs”, doomed to crumble into the Heraclitan confusion of halfway rigorous thinker in the crashing waves of liberal society, is that there is no relation to the ideal at all and, indeed, all things are permissible. Whereas Christian terms relate to something lofty and “other” to our understanding through the very words of our understanding, their aestheticism leads it back to its worldly function.7

On the Eternity of the Creed

The point of departure from the secular anarchist, then, my reader, is one where we find ourselves in a different world from Errico Malatesta, Carlo Cafiero, and, even, Benjamin Pauli: we are very much in the realness of reality and posed against the adversary1 in its new, modern, contemporaneously impressive way. Now at an arm’s length from the great anarchist thinkers of early liberal society and an even further length from the great Christian thinkers of antiquity, the temptation to look back and adopt more of “the same” repackage as “the interesting” is one that could overwhelm the one not practiced in fear and trembling. The new challenge rears its head, just like the new sun rises over a new day—yet God asks for consistency from the Christian, understanding that this new sun sees nothing new under it.

There is something to be said for why these individuals failed in playing a part in God’s exodromic plan for the liberation of humanity from sin (possibly only in the sense that charges were brought against Israel’s faithlessness in Jeremiah 2) and where their worldly methods could inform—but not undergird—the Christian anarchist. Without “salt”, these efforts would always descend into the bland and flavourless architectures of domination: the very architectures that our Italian counterparts, separated by creed and time, failed to recognise in their overarching desires which undermined their goals.

On anarchist-aestheticism

For the secular anarchist, aestheticism is “the demand of the times”. The somewhat incoherent and multifaceted history of anarchist thought, constantly adopting new ideas into the bloated carcass of their political perspective as “everything is political” (especially when we interpret everything as solely political before we have encountered it in a meaningful way!), is one of constantly being invented and reinvented by some external force, some adversarial undermining factor, that takes anarchism’s sometimes tenuous foundations and rips them up with great ease. Under the pressure of the anarchist’s necessarily oppositional relation to his adversary, the pressure of negation—for example, in retrospective assessment of perceived theoretical failures or in reflective ressentiment of the world’s crushing reaction against those who oppose it—has continually led anarchists into intellectual deadends, ungrounded leaps, and outright capitulation. For one example, we turn to the “bomb-chuckers” swimming in the once surging river and now trickling stream of Malatestan thought.

Having largely abandoned the powerful insights of Proudhon into economics and sociology, the slush of theoretical musings renders itself the perfect aesthetic political position: aimed at total freedom, the secular anarchist immediately undermines their goals through their methods. In pursuit of conceptual and intellectual clarity, as a kind of intellectualist service to the oppressed, the unsettled position of the anarchist—a constant reaction against the world, constantly set in motion like a jellyfish pushed by externalities2—the thinker finds that their goals are quickly isolated from the particularities of life and abstracted into the object of consequentialist imaginings. Pulled from the state of being in which they find themselves by some desirous object that sits oh-so-tantalisingly close yet oh-so-tantalisingly far away, the aesthete is defined first and foremost by his desire for change, excitement, and “the interesting”—whatever externality draws him out into the world is whatever is good.3

With a little philosophical footwork, it is easy to see that the political aesthetic—realised in the actual—is that desire for power, the desire for the display of power which tantalises the senses, which undergirds the ambitious movements of the anarchist determined to find ground in the material. When the good, however it is defined, is determined merely by how one desires for the world to be, the methods for achieving that particular state are perilously frail: not only will the heightened desire, whatever it may be, potentially allow for any and all methods to find the blessed catharsis in which the desire is realised, but the purely immanent worldview of the secular mind doesn't allow for some greater beyond which brings about the sublime qualitative shift4.

"...mediation is not something a subject does to an object, internalizing its other and thereby overcoming its otherness. It is rather something that happens to or within the subject as it is overcome by its other."5

The ironic endpoint of the anarchist, then, is one obsessed with world domination because there is nothing else that they can aim their obsession towards: the desire for a new universal order, brought about through the particular actions of the particular agent, creates a necessarily contradictory teleology which the agent doesn’t so much strive for as merely elects the theoretically-justifiable choice of utopia from amongst the choices of utopia. Like the abstracting philosopher of old who assures us that universality and particularity are two dishes of absolute distinction and, as such, applies the logic to his menu for his soon-to-be-enlightened guests, we might wonder how success his musings are when the poor manners of one guest—failing to appreciate the value of the elected universal, possibly due to some morally relevant intellectual failing—lead to a particular anaphylactic shock from a universally-valuable peanut. Having set out to liberate the world by the way of expanding spheres of influence, both political and ideological, the anarchist turns into a variation on a theme, a coda for the individual sitting in the inconvenient “outside” of the theory’s imposed categories.6

The consequentialism of the anarchist, who, like Malatesta, Cafiero, and those following in their footsteps, means the object of the struggle, “anarchist domination”, is both contradictory in nature and also impossible to achieve—the individual anarchist has no power, within or without the collective, to ensure the success of his goals. Yet, his goals are all that he has in order to maintain his desirous steps forward, having elected the material as the totality of his theoretical bounds and those theoretical bounds being constricted by the particular life of the particular theorycrafter. This life, he thinks, is all that there is—as such, having experienced life purely as a matter of “holding back death”, as solely defined by the fear of death and death’s forgetful nature (oh so ready to forget the dead and oh so ready to help us forget them with the cathartic exhaustion of grief that buries the memory of the dead in a tearful cry into the abyss!) and, therefore, incapable of providing something that could ever be meaningful for this life. If there is some particular aim which cannot be realised within the extent of a single life, then that particular aim cannot satisfy the desire for a seemingly achievable, unachievable consequentialist end.

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Paul against the aesthetic

However, not all is lost. The aporetic endpoint of the secular anarchist is not the dead-end that you and I, my reader, must drive ourselves into. Indeed, a man who recognised that his sin weighed on him terribly understood that the error was completely avoidable—although, not by exchanging “the aesthetic” for “the ethical”, but rather by laughing at the idea that this was the only choice available to those free in Christ.

Without the Apostle in mind, it appears that the anarchist finds himself at a standstill and unable to step forward in repetition: if the only thing that can be accounted for is biological life restricted to immanence, then life is subordinated to death.7 Whether the Malatestan method was correct or not8, the unsettling factor of reality’s imposition onto the individual, the causation of disappointed utopianism, dismisses it to the scrap pile without a second thought because—like the child, having first impressed his carers by drawing some shape that elucidates a knowing response of “square”, grins when the second, manic shape produces confusion that could only mean this drawing has outwitted them—if the theory does not immediately produce some desired affect in reality, then it must be false and it must be false for me in my life. Having presented something as if it were objective, it is dismissed with an indignant, groundless subjectivity. The crowd would laugh if it were in on the joke.

As noted by Pauli, the emergence of increasingly terroristic methods in the wake of the Malatestan revolt in 1877 shows an uncertainty, an intellectual to-ing and fro-ing, that allowed the collective strength of those radicals to dissipate into vapour. Regardless of whether they were right or wrong in their political insights—such a notion was unimportant to the unimpressed spectators, unimpressed that the consequences they had been promised had gone unrealised—the fractures appeared. Having ascended to a point of alienating terrorism, the anarchists had nowhere to turn but back against themselves. It would require a total reinvention of the position in the form of anarchist-syndicalism, and particularly the pacifist anarchist-syndicalism championed by Bart de Ligt, to give the anarchist heartbeat that had romantically pulsed throughout history some crumbs with which to rebuild itself.

While we might refuse to allow ourselves to slink away into “the ethical” and, instead, continue to recognise the danger of allowing ourselves to be tempted by “the aesthetic”, we need not fall off the wagon at this stage. In a sense, Christianity offers us an out here—one that de Ligt recognised. Despite the “pull” of Christ calling us unto Him out from over our groundless existence, we are not merely engaged in aesthetic desire; indeed, even Johannes de silentio could recognise that faith “not an aesthetic emotion but something far higher”9. The Christian has the possibility of recognising life’s existential nature, where, as a self, they step out from the ever-present, ever-potential capacity for nihilistic despair and asserts through repetition that the desire to love the neighbour, to love God’s creation, and to bear the suffering that may come—should it so come—are all fundamental, formative goods that build this fractured self from the aimless floating of the jellyfish into a Christian who sojourns. Whereas the Malatestan, concerned with worldly expansion and defining positions through signs of power over creation, is necessarily tied to the material which defines the full extent of his thought, the Christian finds that it is possible to go beyond this—that it is possible to endure through hardship and failure, even when the world shows that it is opposed to the holy; that it is possible to be a Christian, even when the world seems completely lifeless.

Even in the oppression of Letino or worse, it is possible to make a shift in thinking, a leap from one mode of thought to another: “a shift away from thinking of creation in the past tense to thinking of creation in the present tense.”10 Instead of seeing the world as something handed onto us and merely the object of our reckoning, the very goodness of creation can deliver us something that is deontological good—the genuine unity of means and ends.

“The communication is far from being the direct paragraph- or professor-communcation; being reduplicated in the teacher by the fact that he ‘exists’ in what he teaches, it is in manifold ways a discriminating art.”11

In seeing the Teacher is the teaching, the Christian is protected in his retreat into the Body of Christ: that it is possible for what one does to be good as a “movement of infinity”12 that is good qua expression of Christian character and only defined, contoured in that expression. In the deliberation between the self and the Teacher, it is possible for means and ends to be united. The world does not turn by virtue of our self-elected radicalism, but as a movement towards God and the part we might play in His plan—a plan that preceded us and will outlive us. At no point can the Christian ever make himself the centre of the universe or his politickeering the centre of his life as we must always be aware that God loved others before us, loves others besides us, and will continue to love others when we have gone.13

The tension of the in-between

The secular anarchist, it should be clear now, lives downstream in a genealogical chain of the would-be ethical thinkers who cannot escape their aestheticism. They are, in S. K.’s terms, the “negative unity”14 of desire and principle that arises when the unity of means and ends is divorced, when one’s aims qua consequentialist despair become frayed from one’s means qua increasingly violent isolation. Such a position, I say, my reader, is a failure to imbue the radical with the necessarily subjective: it doesn't matter if love is recognised by all (the world will never allow for such a thing to become universal), but the lover must be able to be recognised by his fruits.15 When the anarchist, in its remoreless turn to violence, was unmasked in his shame that mere failure to be the one who would hold the crown of power was enough for him to abandon the good and view it as a temptation, it becomes clear that the apparently ethical nature of this radicalism is accidental and the aestheticism of its desire unstable16. His slavery to technique, in the Ellulian sense17, sees no possibility that the right idea might fail merely because the wrong agent or the wrong environment has not yet cleared to allow its realisation. In truth, the anarchist wishes to fail: if he does not fail, then his desire for power finally reaches the place where he could refuse power—and, with that, he ceases to be.

My reader, remember: there is nothing new under the sun—and, yet, there are more in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in this radicalism. Before we set off, sojourning from the safety of the camp into the valley, pulled by the sublime beauty of a future not yet known, i.e., the very concern of ethics in a world which mistakes the field for abstracted calculi and exercises in imaginary probabilities, the need to “cut to the bone” and remember on whose shoulders we stand and to what we owe them. The will to drive on into the blackness of an as-yet-empty future is the realisation of that anxiety which could make the life of the bomb, the ravacholier18, all the more tempting in the face of failure, the assurance and promise that this can work as this has worked that streams forth from Christ’s twin faithfulness, first in the love for Father and then in the love with the neighbour, like a raging torrent that flows through the arteries of that individual who understands that freedom requires discipline and discipline requires responsibility. In this way—or, rather, the imitation of this way—the proclamation rings out.

When the flabbiness of aesthetic rhetoric and objective ritualism is stripped away, the core is exposed: “faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior.”19

The historical anarchist movement, of course, was not unfamiliar with this. According to one researcher, Benjamin Pauli, in fact, there was a post-war turn towards pacifism and pacifist-adjacent tactics and overarching worldviews across the globe. But can the anarchist wield this position faithfully or does it devolve into the comfortable security of a “radicalism” that asks nothing of the world? Could the Christian, in this context, faithfully endure towards pacifist-like ends or will they collapse into the secular degradation that litters history? For this, we start first with those anarchists who were not so ready to wield peace against evil—and how these thinkers, when we follow their bloodied letters downstream, have affected secular peace in a secular world that marches according to the “ontology of violence”3.

On the Degradation of the Deed

In reflecting more on the broader history of anarchist radicalism, Pauli’s article, “Pacifism, Nonviolence, and the Reinvention of Anarchist Tactics in the Twentieth Century”4, lays out the historical development of Brousse’s “propaganda of the deed”5, i.e., to do is greater than merely to write. Pauli writes:

Propaganda of the deed sought to render abstract concepts and ideals concrete, enabling everyday people to confront them in a tactile, empirical way. Carrying out propagandistic actions was a practical means of communicating with people who were unable (because of illiteracy or other limitations) or unwilling to absorb ideas in written form. Even if an action failed to attain its stated goals, it could still have an educative effect.6

The context of this particular stance, in a world which did and continues to prioritise the aims of the Sittlichkeit as a socio-economic political structure in the form of overlapping but ultimately similar modes of governance, is the shift from the radical communalism inspired by those Romantic heroes of the Paris Commune and the thought that trickled downstream from Joseph-Pierre Proudhon, where the city could be captured and turned into “beacons” of radical action and inspiring reality to those within their non-impositional “sphere of influence”, to one forced into the villages and, then, subsequently, the countryside in order to find particular ground. This shift, brought about by the failures of anarchist revolutionaries such as Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero to understand, deal with, and ultimately overcome their evolving adversaries, was fundamentally caused by the now discordant relationship between anarchist objectives and the technological advances of the adversary. Pauli contextualises:

Brousse “envisioned the establishment of communes in cities throughout Europe” that would act as beacons of revolution, inspiring “local demonstrations, insurrections, and other forms of collective direct action” elsewhere. It was clear to most would-be revolutionaries after the fall of Paris, however, that insurrection was increasingly ill suited to urban environments, as militaries developed more powerful weaponry and governments learned to structure urban space so as to erect structural impediments to sustained collective resistance. This explains, perhaps, why Errico Malatesta, operating in the relatively backward country of Italy, became the figure most closely associated with the theory and practice of propaganda of the deed during its insurrectionary phase. In 1877 in the Italian province of Benevento, Malatesta offered the world a paradigmatic example of propaganda of the deed. Accompanied by Carlo Cafiero, the Russian anarchist Sergei Stepniak, and a band of fellow revolutionaries, he entered the town of Letino “on a Sunday morning, declared King Victor Emanuel deposed and carried out the anarchist ritual of burning the archives which contained the record of property holdings, debts and taxes.” Although the locals initially supported the insurgents, who were able to spread their insurrection to the nearby town of Gallo, government troops soon reclaimed the liberated territory.

When Malatesta’s revolt was stymied prematurely, it was merely one in a long line of similar failures. But one of the most attractive aspects of the notion of propaganda of the deed was precisely its ability to accommodate failure.7

Here, in the humble townships of Letino and Gallo, the anarchist impulse ran up against the might of the state. In terms of laying claim to an area and setting out to dominate the political backdrop that underlay the lives of those living there, it appears that the state would win out against the record-burners and propagandists that had flooded the scene with their promises of freedom.

While initially a collective effort, the aesthetic desire for revolt pulled into unison by each individual within the collective, filled with the fire for rebellion and the anxiety-inducing nothingness for change, marching onwards towards the collective τέλος, this tendency became undermined by the splintering and fraying of the anarchist movement into various anarchist tendencies into various anarchist agents. Alone, against the tide in their subjectivity, there was nothing to stop them from becoming smashed against the rocks.

“When early examples of propaganda of the deed involved violence, it was as a component of a larger struggle or symbolic display. As reaction set into most European countries in the late 1870s and 1880s, however, there were fewer opportunities either for collective uprising or for peaceful demonstration. Radicals impatient for revolution began to channel their energies into ever narrower and more individualistic acts of revolt. Group insurrection gradually condensed into isolated cadres of clandestine conspirators and finally into the lone revolutionary wolf, whose plans might not be known to any but himself. So began an era of spectacular assassinations—the high point, perhaps, being the dynamiting of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881. Anarchists were not responsible for that particular success, but in the same year the breakaway Bakuninist faction of the First International officially endorsed such tactics, urging anarchists to educate themselves in the latest methods of bomb making. Violence was moving from the margins to the center of propaganda of the deed, for it provided the most obvious means by which an individual or small group of conspirators could create a big impact. When directed at people like tsars, kings, presidents, and police captains, violence of this sort not only garnered attention for the revolutionary cause but took the fight straight to those in the upper echelons of the political elite who were usually insulated from the consequences of the suffering they inflicted upon others.8

While Pauli frames this in positive terms, I’m not quite so ready to take such an optimistic—almost utopian—position on what was the decomposition of radical anarchist action into increasingly individual acts of terrorism9. If there had been a time for the anarchists to win out over the state, it had passed: the state had repositioned itself and overcome the immediate threat of anarchist rebellion. While the state would still need to contend with the bursting sores of anarchist violence, it was easier to erect a monument to the scapegoats—itself a successful form of counter-propaganda, leading to individual acts of violence such as the assassination of Franz Ferdinand being turned into supporting factors in the world-upturning development of WWII—than to deal with the effective anarchism that challenged the state’s right to dominate over a population.

In a fit of irony, the error comes from the anarchist’s own dispositions: indeed, a disunity of means and ends, of character and action, of being and becoming.

“…he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-psychical, because he lives in sensate categories, the pleasant and the unpleasant, waves goodbye to spirit, truth, etc., because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit.”10

A Christian Response—in short

The Christian anarchist has a response—indeed, two responses—to this problem of the disunity of means and ends that characterised the somewhat (supposedly) deontological character of the anarchists. It proceeds on two fronts: first, the aestheticism of anarchist politics, which must be understood first and foremost as politics and not the sceptical negation of politics, leads them into a situation where their goals are necessarily despair-inducing; secondly, the role of material possession in the philosophies of crude materialism, which must be understood as an appropriate descriptor of these early anarchists on account of their crude understanding of the material and their cruder rejection of the ideal, leads them to becoming possessed by an objectivising, ironically abstracted vision of life that leads to political goals and the inevitable re-emergence of politics in the hands of those would-be anti-politicians.

To expand on this takes time and space, however—as such, we shall explore both counts in good time, where the unity of our goals and ends must first endure the temptation to fall away into fracture. After that, we might see how “the propaganda of the deed” can be inverted and gain the flavoursome salt it requires qua “the proclamation of the creed”.

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There is much to admire in these men, even if only from an aesthetic perspective. But, we can’t find ourselves becoming too weighed down with the weight of hagiography—after all, these men ultimately failed to reinvent America into something compatible with their utopian idealising. Indeed, their unembarrassed belief in the goodness of humanity and the possibility for progress from under the oppressive iron fist of the state would seem almost childishly naive to those who had followed in their footsteps and had to both witness the horrors of secular society in the early 20th century and also then assert that there was this as yet untapped potential for human flourishing merely by way of removing all stateful functions—for some, it was too much.

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Laurance Labadie—iconoclast against hope

Anarchists, as a breed of creature, have tended to be filled with this glassy-eyed optimism that believes in the universal goodness of the human race, this ability to implement a particular system or structure which would allow for this goodness to appear and thrive, this wherewithal to resist the reaction into “pre-anarchist” society, and other similar highfalutin ideas that sit just on the inside of our own current epistemological horizon—seemingly beyond the realm of believability, but not quite so due to a heavy dose of liberalism, shorn off it's woolly half-promises and grim realism and spun into a yarn of many colours, severed from its tenuous connections to the material. While we might read that as a distinct criticism of anarchist thought—and, indeed, many have throughout the history of radical thought, including liberals, Marxists, their reactionary counterparts, and other anarchists that differ by a trick of the light—there is also something admirable in the willingness to step out over the “70,000 fathoms of the deep”3 with the “hope against hope”4: an earnest belief that a life better than this is possible.

However, not all anarchists have been quite so optimistic: by way of contact with Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and H. L. Mencken, a young Laurance Labadie (wayward son of notable “individualist” anarchist and labour organizer, Joseph Labadie) found that his anarchist instincts were better suited towards a pessimistic, if not nihilistic, view of the world as necessarily antagonistic to the human condition, a world filled with cruelty, suffering, and idiocy, as well as beyond the scope of salvation through some messianic inversion of the hopelessness, whether that be dressed in the robes of a Palestinian carpenter or in the quasi-bourgeois musings of a German radical5. He was, in all senses, a thorough-going pessimist who was unimpressed with the moralising, pearl-clutching retorts of “elitist” and “misanthrope”.

This work bears a great deal of similarity to the communist-anarchists he opposed, holding close to a line that the likes of his father and Benjamin R. Tucker had, was deeply concerned with the anarchist frailty in “self-subjection (the psychology of subservience) and the essential brittleness of collectivist (particularly, communist) organisational conceptions”6. Until anarchists could learn to deal with these problems, they would flounder in obscurity and moralising nothingness—and, of course, they always will due to the fatal combination of liberal optimism and “herdlike idiocy” that haunts the halls of the liberatory left. Without necessarily condoning this critical perspective, it is one worth picking up—especially in the context of S. K.’s own critique of communism and communist-like thought7—in order to explore how pessimistic overtones could collapse liberatory movements when the yoke to the eternal, as mediated in the life of Christ, is broken. Likewise, we mustn’t merely flout our holiness over the ungodly venom that Labadie spewed forth—especially in the context of S. K.’s own critique of a lack of humility around religious claims8—but, rather, engage with these perspectives in order to steel ourselves against the critique of the world, to temper our words against a world which aims to miscontrue them, and to guide our actions in a way which holds tightly to the eternal as the solution to Labadie’s nihilistic despair.

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The point of this initial engagement, which by no means is meant to serve in any way as comprehensive, is to set the stage for a novel conversation which has, to the best of my knowledge, never occurred: bringing Laurance Labadie, the pessimist anarchist, into conversation with Søren Kierkegaard, the pessimist Christian who I repeatedly see as flirting with a socio-political perspective that borders on something that can be intelligibly referred to as anarchic. This engagement is not one intended to show a set of “kindred spirits”, separated by time, space, and faith to pass one another like ships in the night. Nor, of course, am I intending to wield one against the other, as a cudgel which flatters those who want to arm themselves before scoffing at anarchism, Christianity, or pessimism—with there being few things more embarrassing than to make oneself a source of ammunition for the debate, a prostitute to the quasi-academically minded.

No, the goal is to take Labadie as a shell to begin a conversation about the kind of anarchism a pessimist might advocate and then to offer this sketch a “corrective” in the Dane’s politics of indifference9 and passionate pursuit of the pre-constituted and de-constituted dynamic of the self as it emerges in repetition10. While I don’t intend to hide my biases, my reader, this engagement is made with the intention of pulling the golden thread from Labadie’s Schopenhauerian elitism, the seemingly earnest call for those “above the crowd”, that could inform the contours of this political theology. We are, in a way, exercising our dialectical skill in exploring the delicate unity of opposites: Kierkegaardian-Ellulian hopefulness against Schopenhauerian-Labadian grimness.

And yet, my reader, there is no other possibility for us unless we want to merely erect a new politics that takes up the mantle that these two men had attempted to smash on the cold floor of modernity. To say anything stronger—or, possibly, to even conclude anything stronger in the free-floating nothingness of imagination that doesn’t find a way to these pages—would be to proudly show to the whole world that we have engaged with two potent thinkers and, smug grin agape, learned nothing whatsoever.

“In a theater, it happened that a fire started offstage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed-amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.”11

Jesus said to him, “Again it is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.’” (Matthew 4:7)

I. What is the basis of philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, present propositions together in order to reach some particular conclusion that follows on from said propositions and the logical form applied to them. When presenting ideas in the propositional form, the philosopher assumes the worthwhileness of “approximation-knowledge”1 and is open to challenge and counter-challenge.

II. What is the basis of faith? Proceeding from the Absolute, the Lord God, faith is the fullness of time2, the ultimate content-giving content of all contents3, the wrestle with “the absurd”4—the “salt” to Christian character5.

III. What does the propositional form lend to the discussion of faith? Nothing at all whatsoever.

IV. What does the propositional form lend to the discussion of life? Little at all, but plenty in the eyes of the aesthete—exhausted by the categories of his exhausting imagination.

Philosophers are, as a breed, an immodest bunch. While the scientist accepts that, in their production of scientific approximations, there is a certain “limit” to their methods and what they could show, the philosopher might be quite so ready to think that there can be some undemonstrable notion that sits outside of their expertise. The problem, it seems, arises from the type of content that the expert deals with: the biologist must deal with living things, the architect must deal with housing things, but the philosopher is doomed to wrestle not only with ideas but also directly through the mode of his wrestle at once—that is to say, he must think of ideas and the idea of ideas without falling into conflation and philosophical incoherence.

As a part of this, the propositional form, i.e., the ability to express certain facts (or would-be facts) about reality as statements which can be assessed as either true or false, is often assumed as being the point of contact between the philosopher’s grasp and their target area of inquiry. When we engage in reflection on the world, we take the content of that reflection from direct experience or some other piece of knowledge otherwise gathered from the inquiries of others. For many philosophers throughout the history of the bloodsport, this form has been either sufficient for discussing whatever matter is at hand or superior to other forms of knowing, e.g., mere belief, faith, revelation, “hunches”, tradition, etc.—if they are seen as containing any knowledge whatsoever. Of course, this mode has emerged in a variety of ways through the likes of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, but the central point is the same: philosophy deals in arranging knowledge in such a way that we can arrange the content of “the sciences” into a systematic and possibly even complete totality of knowledge. Here, we move from the mere abstractions of historical reflection to a figure in particular: Hegel.

Before we begin to bring the dance to an end, my reader, a note on framing: this piece, as all good collections require, is a corrective for that which came before. It may sit unkindly or even obscurely with the other pieces in this series; however, it is here for a purpose and that purpose is, in part, to encourage you not to—ironically—hold up this compilation as an objective truth that must be lashed onto any particular life in order to bring about the results. We leave those kinds of half-baked conclusions to our consequentialist-minded friends. No, this is a call to subjectivity that recognises and is recognised as it is: as the believer within the caravan, sojourning within the Body of Christ towards eschaton.

Hegel and the abstraction of faith

Here, my reader, we have elected our sacrificial figure, our scapegoat that we will sacrifice to the gods in order to absolve us of our sin and force the divine to make itself good with us—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, the systematic thinker par excellence.

“The term system is often misunderstood. It does not denote a philosophy, the principle of which is narrow and to be distinguished from others. On the contrary, a genuine philosophy makes it a principle to include every particular principle.”6

Hegel set out to systematise all existing knowledge into a form that would elucidate the interconnectedness of everything and illustrate the very joints of nature; something that would appear to be a kind of 19th-century “compendium of everything”, but also using philosophy to provide the appropriate links and turns—providing our ideas a way to become qualified notions and providing those notions a place with which to understand them properly. To some extent, this image of philosophy isn’t quite dismissed to the dusty annals of historical investigation.

Muddled conceptualisation

However, there is a clear problem here7: Hegel appears to be building his house upon the sand, rendering it—should S. K. be correct in this assessment—no better than a thought experiment, but a thrillingly interesting one8. The very notions on which the system is erected: “the universal”9, already a “notion” far too impersonal to ever really broach the claims of Christianity10, is presented as if we have some mere idea of God Himself that philosophy helps us to tease out and refine. From this perspective, we might say that philosophy is the thing which gives Christianity its form and shape, allowing a better type of Christianity to emerge.

This perspective, for S. K., is deeply worrying on two fronts:

i) In order for philosophy to provide Christianity with a “better version” of itself, it would need to explain Christian ethics—however we would like to frame that—in a way that is superior to Christ’s explanation. But, before we can even make some kind of comparative study of these things, it appears that Hegel has no real system of ethics to appeal to whatsoever: indeed, the analogical study of ethics is nothing more than a relativist study of “whatever happens within the social order is just” and this Sittlichkeit is then fumbled in place of an ethics in any real sense of the word11.

ii) In order for philosophy to provide Christianity with a system on which to rest, it would need to be able to explain God, Christ, and everything in between those two points—however, this would imply that God’s absolute “otherness” and Christ’s existence as that holy contradiction of the Man-God must then be compatible with a immanent metaphysics. To suggest that such a thing is possible, S. K. notes, is to draw God into merely the immanent and, much like Spinoza and Kant before, Hegel collapses any possible idea of God into the limits of his thought. Completely idealised, Christianity can no longer accept something which is “Wholly Other” and, instead, is reduced to the gentlemanly play of approximation-facts and propositional wrestling. Like the great Greek heroes of antiquity, Hegel ascends Olympus to fell the gods—this time, by a ladder of syllogisms instead of by the sword12.

“A thinker erects a huge building, a system, one that encompasses the whole of life and world-history, etc.—and if one then turns attention to his personal life one discovers to one’s astonishment the appalling and ludicrous fact that he himself does not live in this huge, high-vaulted palace, but in a store-house next door, or a kennel, or at most in the janitor’s quarters. If one took it upon oneself to draw attention with but a single word to this contradiction, he would be insulted. For so long as he can complete the system—with the help of his error—being in error is not what he is afraid of.”13

Putting the muddle-headed “back on his feet”

The danger proposed in our opening discussion, my reader, becomes apparent with Hegel: having pulled the ideas of Being and Nothing from, amusingly, nothing, it appears that they lack an object in reality—or, more importantly, they might lack an object in reality and Hegel would have no mode by which to identify this problem. We could be, as such, tricking ourselves into thinking that we are “developing concepts” or similar when, really, we are doing little more than playing with “floating signifiers”. Lacking the “criterion of verifiability”14, the pursuit becomes impossible. When we take to this kind of high-concept metaphysics, the content of our reflections might be little more than linguistic conventions and historical (and potentially rootless) debates, not the very thing that we are attempting to investigate. Indeed, we lack the proper equipment to really begin with philosophy, let alone to reduce “living life” to a string of propositions that beats the interlocutor into submission.

It is worth bearing in mind that this is not solely a Hegelian problem, though, my reader (and some would venture that this “Hegelian problem” wasn’t actually a problem for Hegel due to S. K.’s uncharitable and sarcastic misinterpretation15). In truth, my reader, the particular interpretation of Hegel’s work isn’t of central importance: the larger point is that Hegel, like those before him and those after him, made the task of faith a matter of relating to God and of understanding Christianity a matter of objectively relating to some relative collection of propositions amongst propositions, a matter of debate, a matter of intellectualist musing.

“Philosophy and Christianity can never be united, for if I’m to hold fast to what is one of the most essential features of Christianity, redemption, then of course for it really to amount to anything it must extend to the whole man. Or am I supposed to consider his moral powers defective but his cognition unimpaired? Certainly I can conceive of such a philosophy after Christianity, or after a person has become a Christian, but then it would be a Christian philosophy. The relation would not be one of philosophy to Christianity but of Christianity to Christian knowledge, or, if you absolutely must, to Christian philosophy—unless one is willing to have it that philosophy has to conclude beforehand, or prior to Christianity, that the riddle of life cannot be solved.”16

Subjectivity—the resistance against abstraction

The idea that this riddle of life—and, by extension, the riddle of the life of the church—cannot be given objective meaning is truly one of those great Messianic proclamations come manifest: blessed is he who is not offended because of Me (Matthew 11:6). In a moment where the conventional, almost absent-mindedly demand for objective proof comes to the fore, as all being at the fore and under the spotlight of the age must come if it wishes to be taken seriously, where the lazy half-thinker who has taken to the task of understanding the matter of his very life and the relations of his very life as an object worthy of objective propositional jousting, Christ stands against the “demand of the times” and says: no! First seek the kingdom of God! (Matthew 6:33)—something that only a subject can do and that only a subject can do subjectively by way of finding the God-relationship17.

“Far from espousing Cartesian or even Kantian dualism, Kierkegaard seeks to find a place for subjectivity within the seamless spatio-temporal chain by exploiting (in a fashion exceeding that philosopher’s own account of ‘the soul’) Aristotle’s problematic admission of ‘possibility’ and ‘becoming’ (kinesis) within the embrace of ‘Being’, which would seem hospitable only to ‘the actual’. Thus he contends that the real exhibits infinitely many transitions from rest to motion, and from possibility to act, and that these transitions, despite the regional operation of habitual causal patterns, have the character of positive ‘leaps’ which display no logic outside that of their own occurrence.

This kind of transition, which, not being a ‘state’, is an invisible vanishing point for thought (doomed to the effort of representation) he names ‘the Moment’, and claims that the Moment is the site of specifically human, spiritual existence—‘spirit’ being that which binds soul (thinking possibility) and body (living actuality) together.”18

First, brought out of the malaise of common existence, the individual finds themselves confronting the utterly beyond, “the Wholly Other” reaching out towards them qua universality breaking through and identifying particularity—the existence-communication19; secondly, the confused image of self-assurance in secularity is broken up in this moment and is replaced by the sublime, the transcendent tearing up old soil in the apocalyptic realisation of possibility—the thoughts that wound from behind20; and thirdly, when the desire for the safety and approximation of propositional thought is surrendered and dismissed, the fullness of time rips through and allows for the complementary nature of particularity and universality—not the Platonic fallacy of their mutual opposition!—reconciles in the life of the believer who, in particularity, discover the universal through the particularity of a particular faith in the universal love of the universal God that is—reliance not on good, but sola Gratia21. These three things, the process by which the individual makes an “about turn”22 in the broken neck change of qualitative change, should not be considered sequential or normative—only indicative inasmuch as they become blurred in their subjectivity and subjectivity in their blurring.

In this spiritual moment of existence, where “living actuality” is found in the meeting of material bruteness and spiritual “pulling”, where the idealist position of Descartes or Kant is inverted into a profoundly anti-humanist surrender of the self to the “Wholly Other”, to the One Who simply affirms that He is, to the One Who weeps with His creation, the individual rises up against the fallen self and finds that the Knight of Faith, so firey in his faith in S. K.’s Fear and Trembling and twice so in Christian Discourses, understands that to receive everything that one must first surrender all—self and other—to the Lord God23. The plea for rest can only be found in the retreat to God, but the retreat to God is always companion with the yes! of faithfulness: the earnest belief of the divine that humanity is worth loving and, as part of that, you, my reader, the fractured you across time, is worth loving. Fractured and invigorated, caught between actuality and possibility, we find the Christian acting as the Christian sojourner:

“It is by no means the case that the fiction is a lens we must use to enhance our sight, although it also distorts it. On the contrary, the manifestatory expression-through-possibility belongs wholly within ontology, and does not merely mediate between Being and Knowledge. No abyss sunders us, the knowing subjects, from reality, but rather reality is itself incessantly fractured between the actual and the possible, and within this rift ‘subjectivity’ comes to be/becomes possible.”24

In this fracture, the caesura of the self and the caesurae of the church, the possible is given life as that essential “salt”—from mere ingredients to the finest bread to share in eschaton25; from mere individuals, plural and distinct qua subjects subjectively relating to one another, to the particular servants of God arranged against and found within the absolute relation of His wonderous universality. In the “negative space” that the world cannot bear to broach, where subjectivity becomes subjective against the pressure to fit into the objectivising and arbitrary lens that “the One” attempts to impose upon creation, that, my reader, my friend—that is where the Christian emerges.

Only with the brutalist realisation of the “Wholly Other”, the terrifying Transcendent, the beautiful sublimity are we given the shape of the individual and of collective of individuals to be what they might be and only with this brutality, this terror, this beauty, in this risk of living life26 do we find that ideas—no! spirit! truly and completely—can move the dead material of a fallen creation when it is exposed to becoming “born again”, a “new creature” who is capable of becoming—no! commanded to become perfect! (Matthew 5:48) Together, never one or the other, material and ideal are united qua Spirit—first, capable of becoming more than merely the aesthete or merely the ethical man; secondly, in realising that one is both more than that and also, against the universal, at once, finite and infinite qua the human self that walks amongst human selves:

“To believe the forgiveness of one's sins is the decisive crisis whereby a human being becomes spirit; one who does not believe this is not spirit. Maturity of the spirit means that immediacy is completely lost, that a person is not only capable of nothing by himself but is capable only of injury to himself. But how many in truth come in a wholly personal way to understand of themselves that one is brought to this extremity. (Here lies the absurd, offense, the paradox, forgiveness of sins.)”27

In this space, where the involved participation of first the individual and then, together, the collective is required to both recognise and then act within the caesura, then we can start to act with the faith that fills the totality of reality with the particularity of subjectivity—then, we see creation as it might once have been, as it “as it actually is”, and how it will be once again in eschaton28.