Sunday, November 20, 2005
(10:42 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Deconstruction of Christianity
Since it's Sunday, we might as well have some old-time religion here.When I was reading the Church Fathers, I was really shocked by the fact that Clement of Alexandria knew about Buddhism and Hinduism, even if he might have had a distorted picture. No one else seems to have talked about those religions at such length, but others did know about them -- for instance, in his Against the Heathens/On the Incarnation, Athanasius uses an Indian firewalking practice as an illustration, and even refers to it a couple different times by (presumably) the Sanskrit term. (Even Athanasius!)
Even though I found Clement's project of placing the Hebrew Scriptures at the source of every cultural achievement of every nation quite dubious, I was convinced by the purely critical portion of his argument to abandon an unconscious assumption that I had long held and that I assume a significant proportion of educated people hold: that is, that something like the "Greek miracle" model was actually true, that the Greeks had just suddenly come up with all these amazing cultural achievements all by themselves with no outside input. And in reality, the "Greek miracle" model doesn't really fit with the Greeks' own self-presentation -- even a relatively late figure like Celsus describes the Greek achievement as being basically the most skilled adapters of the best aspects of every other culture. Indian religions/philosophies seemed to be at the source of some of their achievements (for instance, Pythagoras seems to have been heavily influenced by Indian sources, leading in part to Greek mystery religions and to philosophy); Egypt was another source; certainly Hebrew culture would be another source.
I read a book this weekend on postcolonial criticism that particularly reinforced the Indian aspect of this "multi-source theory" -- emphasizing the high level of cultural interchange between Rome and the East, showing how Buddhist models might have influenced interpretations of the resurrection, etc. "Cool," I thought. Then, inevitably, that one step too many was taken: all of a sudden, India was the privileged source of all religious traditions ever. (Perhaps I'm not being totally fair here -- the author himself didn't explicitly take this step, but he quoted with approval many Indian interpreters who did.) Finding a new privileged and originary site does not seem to me to be the answer -- first of all, because empirically it can't possibly be true; second of all, because presumably the whole goal was to deflate the West's self-perception as the source of all value and therefore as the rightful educators and rulers of the world. Is the goal really to find another "race" (and some of the figures in this book really did seem to be deploying concepts of race and claiming that they had some closer kinship to Jesus by virtue of being Asian) who can be the educators and rulers of the world?
Just as with Clement's argument, I find the critical, deflating half of the argument to be brilliant and productive and even liberating -- but then once cultural privilege is asserted anew, I'm completely turned off. With Clement, it was displaced somewhat because the Jewish cultural privilege was really deployed in order to assert that Christians (i.e., explicitly and stridently not a racial group, at least not at first -- although the anti-Semitic stuff really does start up a lot earlier than I wish it had) are privileged, thus leading to a kind of de-centering effect -- though not de-centered enough in practice. My goal would be a more thorough-going cosmopolitanism, where certain groups could be custodians of certain cultural artifacts without being sole proprietors -- and I would find the Pauline move of attempting to share the Jewish cultural heritage with the nations to be a model of this, despite the fact that the nations then imperiously tried to claim that heritage as "their own."
Now that Christianity has become a cultural heritage unto itself -- and, I must say, a fascinating and complex cultural heritage with a lot to share, more than enough to support many lifetimes of study -- I try to encourage and enact a dissemination of that heritage, through my study and advocacy of "secular" readings of Christian texts (even if those readings are not unprecedented and even if they do not always conform to the strictures laid out by the biblical studies establishment), for instance. I support and hope to participate in enacting a "deconstruction of Christianity" on all fronts -- through finding unacknowledged sources as much as unacknowledged potentialities. And even as I marginalize myself more and more in the eyes of the established arbiters of the Christian culture, I still arrogantly presume to to say that I hold out hope that "all the church will be saved."
