A Saving Face

You’d have to have been vacationing on Venus not to notice that something quite cataclysmic is happening to public Christianity. There are the doings and sayings of Pope Francis and now a rumble of unhappy murmurs about his populist style and broad-minded language, going all the way to full-blown right-wing questioning of his orthodoxy (“Francis is founding a new religion, opposed to the Catholic magisterium.")

This is a story that’s going to run and run, given the structural faults afflicting the traditional patriarchate of the West. Aside from the anomaly of two popes who seem to operate as colleagues or equals, there are the open wounds of the role of women in that organization; and then there is the way the method of mass communication, which has always been the forte of the R.C. church, is now upstaged by the universal effect of social media. The Vatican may have a Twitter account but half a billion others have one too. There can be little doubt that the R.C. church is on a crisis search for its identity, and that search can only have two opposed outcomes: on the one side a fresh opting for rigid vertical control, on the other a radically devolved, local and perhaps newly prophetic organization.

But it’s across the pond, in both the geographical and denominational senses, that perhaps the greatest drama lies. The Protestant Reformation established “the freedom of the Christian man” producing a revolutionary new basis for relationship to God. Within the sanctum of the soul a contract was forged in the blood of Christ and in consequence nothing could shake the fortress of the justified self. Allied to the ruggedness of the American landscape this “justification” produced the classic U.S. phenomenon of extreme Christian individualism. It has now reached monstrous proportions in what is known as Dominionism, a belief system underpinning the current shut-down in government and threat of debt default.

The prospect of a small group of zealots bringing the whole world to its knees is nothing new, but what’s different is that this could happen in the name of Jesus. No matter he said "blessed are the peacemakers," threatening economic collapse and, with that, the possibility of further wars channeling the resulting frustrations, all is warranted to bring about his kingdom. Nevertheless, this could well be a decisive overreach.

It is through such extreme moments in history—when the violence of a movement is fully revealed—that profound shifts take place. In this case the ferocious cancer that Christian individualism has become is now showing itself clearly, and the journey out of this false construct will become an exodus.

Many more will join the "nones," the religiously unaffiliated who are on the rise in the U.S., especially among the under thirties. But others will continue to search, and the place of promise they may well reach will be a revolutionary new sense of self not founded in individualism but deeply linked to others. Contemporary mirror theory of the self, based in mimesis and mirror neurons, has brought an entirely new intellectual ground for Christian identity, one that is much more consistent with the Sermon on the Mount. The philosopher Merleau-Ponty anticipated the phenomenology of these developments when he said "I live in the facial expression of the other, as I feel him living in mine.” We are wired directly and visually to each other, producing the possibility of jealousy and violence, but also of peace. Jesus is the one who created the possibility of genuine new humanity in imitation of his face of radical forgiveness and love. The key thing is that this is not simply a reflective or moral imitation but one that goes to the root of our being in a primary imitation.

An example would be Jesus' teaching of turning the other cheek: exactly as I adjust my face before my enemy's attack, his own face and self are brought to live within a world of nonviolence. And if my face can transform the existence of my enemy, how much more will sisters and brothers in communion do so for each other? But the very first face at the origin of all these transformations is that of Christ himself. “But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor. 3:18)

Empathy, therefore, is the new medium of saving grace, rather than law and the isolated self. Because of our deeply human power of immediate imitation we are enabled to live in the transformed face of the Christ. And here is the real change in contemporary Christianity: from the supreme individual to self-and-other in communion.

 

 

Tony Bartlett

JESUALITY

JESUALITY

 

The following are summary notes of the presentation to begin the Wood Hath Hope course in spirituality (10.4.13).

In the past spirituality has been understood in Greek terms: spirit as a separate and separable part of the self which does not belong to the material universe. Because our spiritual experience is borderless and invisible—it puts us in felt intimate connection with things other than ourselves and very often we cannot see, we quickly believe there is another realm to reality, an immaterial one. The classic instance of this is death and the dead. It is very hard for us to disconnect from our deceased parents and ancestors, because they are so much part of our memories and who we are. They continue to receive a life from us as the mimetic "other." This spiritual realm was made intellectual and structural in Platonic thought. By making the realm of death also the realm of intellect (the world of eternal or heavenly truth) the die was cast on the meaning of spiritual in the West.

But today contemporary thought is showing how we are connected to each other and indeed the whole universe by means of material imitation.

'

Babies as young as 36 hours, and even 42 minutes, can be seen to imitate facial gestures. There are more than two dozen accepted studies of early infant imitation. (See "Mimesis and Science," Scott Garrels, 58-59: "exteroception" and "proprioception" use the same code, they are "bound together at birth.") This means we perceive ourselves at the same time and by the same means as we perceive others.

And if our first meaningful world is our mother then forever after our perception of the world will have a personal sense. This explains the constant response in people, “Why me?” when something goes wrong, or “Someone up there likes me” if they go right. This also explains the Girardian thesis that natural disasters become the occasions for community crises in which someone is mythically blamed. It's very difficult not see things in personal-meaningful terms.

Showing of PBS informational short on mirror neurons at http://video.pbs.org/video/1615173073/

All this means there is something spiritual about our root imitation code. Or rather, our neural coding is the spiritual: I am you, and you are me, and I have a self-other relation to the whole world. Neural receptors, therefore, are not material in the usual sense, located in one spot and one sequence of causes. They belong also to the other, the other human. They are effectively in two places at once and are so from our birth. A 42 minute old baby couldn’t possibly judge and decide the other human face was important to imitate. It is already logged into the other before it opened its eyes for the first time. Think about a child’s eye, a neonate, the way it seeks you out and uploads you, receives you, it means we are internally programmed for and to the other, or the other already is us. In the past this would have been called an immortal soul which already knows eternal truth, coming to earth and recognizing stuff it already knows. But from a science point of view we have simple dual function neurons, you move I move. In fact at the earliest stage you and I are not differentiated enough to say "you" or "I", it’s  really a “we move” thing. Effectively an electronic discharge of energy does not switch on inside of me until an external source tells it to do so. Part of my electronic/chemical structure is coded to something other than myself. Like a photoelectric sensor switches when it sees a shadow etc. it switches. Except this shadow is highly specific and complex, matching the complexity of the human sensor.

If this is the case then empathy is foundational: “self-other connectedness” exists at birth. Empathy is the word we use for the continuing power of this connection. According to Iacoboni there is a connection between mirror neurons and the limbic system, i.e. our emotions also switch on when we imitate the other. This explains the power of the other to move us emotionally, and especially the way compassion is activated by another's vulnerability. See Iacoboni, "Mirroring People" 119.

The point then is that the soul is not a separate part of the human being. The body is the soul, the soul is the body, in its neural complexity. What does this mean then for "salvation"? The soul is not a commodity, an item I possess, to be saved by some kind of a deal, like personal property or privilege. Instead it is the way I interact with others.  That’s the issue.

My global interactions, their sum or totality, is what is governed by religion, with God as the final authority of this spiritual order. But Christianity does not start with God, it really starts with a man. If we learn the totality of this man’s responses and above all his final response on the cross, then our humanity is saved. It becomes radically human.  And this is not something we do, but something we receive from the Christ.

Christianity also has Holy Spirit, a discovery of the first church through empathy with the Crucified and Risen one. It is both a human event and a divine Spirit, a tuning of the neural human to the frequency of God, so we become functionally one. “The Spirit testifies with our spirit…” (Rom 8:16).

Glossalalia is a great illustration. I am not sure if it surfaced before in other communal religious contexts. Effectively in the New Testament it means the connections, the strings or relays of verbal meaning have been completely scrambled by the impact of Jesus, resolving into a raw sound giving expression to new human meaning. Instead of old meaning originated in violence, a completely new order of human meaning is born.

Through Jesus we are imitating a God whom we can only discover through this imitation. If and when you imitate perfectly is there a difference in kind? There is in fact adoption to the nature of God. But this is happening at the cellular level!

John’s gospel sets the emphasis on the "word made flesh," not salvation. A word is a unique event of human neural processing, in a chain with other words. When I say “tree” a whole series of images and associations are let loose inside your head, all connected at one remove or another to our total view of the world. Words are world and they are learned along with mother’s milk. My son's first word was "draw" because that contained the world for him. We have interpreted John's "In the beginning was the word" in absolute metaphysical terms, i.e. the divine logos/word. This may indeed be valid, but it’s also valid to see it in simple human terms—this is the "word" that changes all our human meaning. It’s the new holistic language we are asked to learn in imitation of Jesus' new human/divine meaning. It is the new way of being human in a humanly constructed world, reconstructed by Jesus.