Slavoj Žižek – eyebeleave

Žižek’s Holy Spirit: equality, love, community, freedom

Zizek occupy wall street

2002 words, 10 min read

The Post-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek is perhaps a surprising source of insights about the Holy Spirit, but I believe that his perspective is highly relevant for atheists and Christians alike. My first encounter with his thought on the subject was in a transcript of him addressing Occupy Wall Street protesters at Zuccotti Park in 2011:

“What is Christianity? It’s the Holy Spirit. What is the Holy Spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the Holy Spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols.”

Instead of being a throw-away comment of the moment, Žižek’s view of the Holy Spirit is the result of careful reflection from a number of viewpoints.

In a 2007 lecture – entitled “Meditation on Michelangelo’s Christ on the Cross” – he elaborated on how it is that the Holy Spirit is the source of the Christian community and pointed to the radicality of life that such a basis implies:

“The Holy Spirit is the love between believers; it is the spirit of the community of believers, according to the famous words of Christ: “For where two or three have gathered together in my name, I am there in their midst.” (Matthew 18:20) I think this passage should be taken literally. So what does this mean? Even today, the message is very radical. The temptation to be resisted is the temptation of meaning itself. […] I claim that Christ died on the cross precisely to reject […] attempts at finding a higher purpose or meaning. Rather the message is: “Your standards matter to me. I throw myself into creation, and abandon my place up there.” The conclusions are radical. The ultimate meaning of Christianity for me is a very precise one. It is not: “We should trust God. The big guy’s with me, so nothing really bad can happen.” That is too easy. The message is not: “We trust God.” The message is rather: “God trusts us.” The gesture of Christ says, “I leave it over to you.” Usually we read religion as the way to guarantee meaning: We are concerned with the small details of everyday life and never know what will come of it all, or how things will turn out; we can only make wagers, and we do this maybe to ensure that God will arrange things in our favor. But the meaning of the death of Christ for me is the opposite: God made the wager on us. It is really a crazy wager, where God is saying: “I leave it to you. Holy Ghost, community of believers, you have to do it!””

In the same piece Žižek also demonstrates that his thoughts on the Holy Spirit are not merely an analysis from outwith or a thinking about an other, but that they are pertinent to his own context and community:

“[The] link between Christian community and the progressive movement is crucial. And here I’m not playing a cheap game of identifying radical political movements as a kind of religious community; what I’m referring to is the idea of a radical community of believers. The ideal is neither that of blind liberal individuals collaborating with each other, nor the old organic conservative community. It is a community along the lines of the original Christian community: A community of outcasts. We need this today, this idea of an egalitarian community of believers that is neither the traditional heretical community nor the liberal multiplicity. This is why I and many other leftist philosophers, such as Alain Badiou and others, are so interested in rereading, rehabilitating, and reappropriating the legacy of Paul. It is not just a matter of private religious convictions. I claim that if we lose this key moment—the moment of realizing the Holy Spirit as a community of believers—we will live in a very sad society, where the only choice will be between vulgar egoist liberalism or the fundamentalism that counterattacks it. This is why I—precisely as a radical leftist—think that Christianity is far too precious a thing to leave to conservative fundamentalists. We should fight for it. Our message should not be, “You can have it,” but “No, it’s ours. You are kidnapping it.””

Žižek’s thoughts on the Holy Spirit have deeper roots still, which go to the very heart of the Christian mystery of the Trinity and the incarnation. In a 2004 paper entitled “Death’s Merciless Love”, he reflects on how the transcendent-immanent, divine-human gap is resolved by Jesus’ death on the cross, which finds its fulfilment in and unity with the Holy Spirit:

“[I]n order for humanity to be restored to God, [Christ as the mediator between God and humanity] must sacrifice himself. In other words, as long as Christ is here, there can be no Holy Ghost, which IS the figure of the reunification of God and humanity. Christ as the mediator between God and humanity is, to put it in today’s deconstructionist terms, the condition of possibility AND the condition of impossibility between the two: as mediator, he is at the same time the obstacle which prevents the full mediation of the opposed poles. Or, to put it in the Hegelian terms of the Christian syllogism: there are two “premises” (Christ is God’s Son, fully divine, and Christ is man’s son, fully human), and to unite the opposed poles, to arrive at the “conclusion” (humanity is fully united with God in the Holy Spirit), the mediator must erase himself out of the picture. Christ’s death is not part of the eternal cycle of the divine incarnation and death, in which God repeatedly appears and then withdraws into himself, in his Beyond. As Hegel put it, what dies on the Cross is NOT the human incarnation of the transcendent God, but the God of Beyond Himself. Through Christ’s sacrifice, God Himself is no longer beyond, but passes into the Holy Spirit (of the religious community). In other words, if Christ were to be the mediator between two separated entities (God and humanity), his death would mean that there is no longer a mediation, that the two entities are apart again. So, obviously, God must be the mediator in a stronger sense: it’s not that, in the Holy Spirit, there is no longer the need for Christ, because the two poles are directly united; for this mediation to be possible, the nature of both poles must be radically changed, i.e. in one and the same movement, they both must undergo a transubstantiation. Christ is, on the one hand, the vanishing mediator/medium through whose death God-Father himself “passes into” the Holy Spirit, and, on the other hand, the vanishing mediator/medium through whose death human community itself “passes into” the new spiritual stage.

These two operations are not separated, they are the two aspects of one and the same movement: the very movement through which God loses the character of a transcendent Beyond and passes into the Holy Spirit (the spirit of the community of believers) EQUALS the movement through which the “fallen” human community is elevated into the Holy Spirit. In other words, it is not that, in the Holy Ghost, men and God communicate directly, without Christ’s mediation; it is rather that they directly coincide – God is NOTHING BUT the Holy Spirit of the community of believers. Christ has to die not in order to enable direct communication between God and humanity, but because there is no longer any transcendent God with whom to communicate.”

In a 2009 book entitled “The Monstrosity of Christ. Paradox or Dialectic?” and co-authored with the Anglican theologian John Milbank, Žižek challengingly draws the identification of the community of believers with the Holy Spirit and of the Holy Spirit with the crucified and risen Christ to its ultimate conclusion, which is a life at the end of history, a life of “ethical extravagance” and “permanent revolution”:

“There is, however, a third position between these two extremes, that of the Holy Spirit, of the apocalyptic community of believers, of the self-organization dialectical clarity versus the misty conceit of paradox of believers who drew from Christ’s nonreturn after his death the correct conclusion: they were awaiting the wrong thing, Christ already had returned as the Holy Spirit of their community. The very meaning of Christ’s death is that the work to be done is theirs, that Christ put his trust in them. Once we accept this, Eagleton’s reading of Jesus’ “ethical extravagance” also becomes problematic:

“What one might call Jesus’s ethical extravagance—giving over and above the measure, turning the other cheek, rejoicing in being persecuted, loving one’s enemies, refusing to judge, non-resistance to evil, laying oneself open to the violence of others—is . . . motivated by a sense that history is now at an end. Recklessness, improvidence and an over-the-top lifestyle are signs that God’s sovereignty is at hand.There is no time for political organization or instrumental rationality, and they are unnecessary in any case.”

But is this “extravagance” really constrained to the end-of-time atmosphere in which all we can do is wait and get ready for the Second Coming? Is it not that, in an apocalyptic time—the time of the end of time, as Agamben put it—we have both aspects, “ethical extravagance” as well as political organization? The specificity of the Holy Spirit, the apocalyptic emancipatory collective, is that it is precisely an organization which practices these “ethical extravagances,” i.e., which lives its life in an apocalyptic “state of emergency” in which all ordinary legal (and moral) commitments are suspended, practiced in the mode of “as if not.” The problem with the Church is that it betrayed original Christianity not by its organization, but by the type of this organization: the apocalyptic community of believers which lives in the emergency state of a “permanent revolution” is changed into an ideological apparatus legitimizing the normal run of things. In other words, with the Church, we are not active enough: the pressure of the Second Coming is eased, all we have to do is to lead our daily lives following the prescribed ethico-religious rules, and Salvation will come by itself.“

In summary, Žižek’s Holy Spirit – like all of Žižek’s Trinity – invites to a life of radical commitment in the present, to a life lived with and for others and therefore in God, a life steeped in freedom:

“So what I claim is that something absolutely unheard of happens with Christianity which is that Christ, the death of Christ, means something very radical. It means, in all other religions we trust God, we believe in God. The death of Christ [instead] means, God trusted us. It means, “I give you your freedom, it’s up to you.” The Holy Ghost for me is — and I take it literally when it says in the Bible “Whenever the two of you are there, I will be there, I am there.” — it means the gift of freedom. It means, God doesn’t want to play that “up there a guarantee,” it means God entrusts the fate of creation, his own fate, into us. It means what happens here is part of, as it were, the history of God. And […] à propos iconoclasm […]: the prohibition to make images of God in Judaism does not mean this gnostic way “oh it’s too mysterious, we cannot paint it.” It means the exact opposite! It means God is alive not in your stupid deep meditations of up there, but how you act and react with others. And that’s why you shouldn’t make images because it’s not an image to be made up there. And I think, if anything, even more this holds for Christianity. That’s for me what the Holy Ghost is. God is no longer the substantial master up there, God is — to put it in this way — the spirit of our community, the gift of freedom.”

Ideology

Coke ideology

2254 words, 11 min read

One of the fundamental questions of human existence is the basis on which we interpret reality, make subsequent decisions and perform resulting actions. How do I know what is happening in the world, how do I react to that reality and what actions do I take on the basis of these reactions? These questions have been at the heart of philosophy, theology, economics, politics and many other forms of human endeavour for millennia and remain open problems to this day, to which many answers are offered but which each one has to answer for themselves, or that each one will at least have unconscious answers to that drive their choices.

In the above context, a particularly negative role is played by ideologies, which are injected between a subject and the reality they inhabit and which distort their choices. Instead of a subject engaging with reality and deriving choices on its basis, an ideologised subject takes the tenets of their ideology as a source of decision making. Instead of their own understanding of reality, which ideology suppresses, distorts and supplants, the ideologised subject derives decisions and actions from their ideology. An ideology that taught the impossibility of fire would see its followers proclaim it while burning to death in blazing house.

If ideologies are at odds with reality, why would anyone follow them though? Why would anyone act on a basis disconnected from reality? I believe there are several reasons for this: First, it is increasingly difficult to tell reality from ideology, both because of the inherent challenges of knowledge that epistemology has been grappling with since antiquity (e.g., the ultimate impossibility of going beyond my own experiences) and because of the growing complexity of global interconnectedness and the impossibility of experiencing all relevant events for oneself. Second, even a direct engagement with reality (as far as epistemologically possible) that would seem free from ideology would not be free from some a priori conceptual framework of beliefs not derived from reality (e.g., repeatability, causality, falsifiability), which leads to the obvious question of what makes one set of beliefs an ideology while another set is a valid conceptual apparatus necessary for engaging with reality.

In other words, how do we recognise ideologies so that we may avoid them ourselves and so that we may help others not become entrapped by them.

In fact, the original intention of the French philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, who coined the term ideology during the French Revolution, was to devise a rational system that could counter what he saw as the irrational mob rule of the day, i.e., precisely not what is understood by ideology today. However, already Tracy’s initial opponent, Napoleon Bonaparte, used the term ideology in a derogatory way. Karl Marx then picked up Napoleon’s use of the word and directed it against the ideological patterns employed by the capitalist bourgeoisie he challenged. Ideology has since been a mainstay of marxist analysis, in particular by thinkers like Louis Althusser, Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek, who see ideology as a means of control, effected by imposing a set of action-oriented beliefs whose scrutiny is prohibited and which are placed above experience.

Eagleton presents a variety of definitions of the concept in his 1991 book “Ideology: An Introduction”, starting with the most widely-held one, formulated by John B. Thompson:

“A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalising and universalising such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification.’, as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. In any actual ideological formation, all six of these strategies are likely to interact in complex ways.”

While the reference to a “dominant power” may render the above definition too narrow, as Eagleton and other have argued, its focus on the denigration of challenging ideas, the exclusion of rival forms of thought, the obscuring of reality and the offering of imaginary resolutions can readily be recognised in ideologies regardless of whether or not they come from a position of power.

With such a broadening of the scope of ideology, and given the challenges of distinguishing it from other sets of ideas or beliefs, it is no surprise to see Louis Althusser argue that we are all “ideological subjects”, that being ideological is inherent to being a subject and that “man is an ideological animal by nature”. Althusser also points to a particularly insidious pattern employed by ideologies, where fictitious relationships are presented as real, to further ulterior motives:

“But it is by an apprenticeship in a variety of know-how wrapped up in the massive inculcation of the ideology of the ruling class that the relations of production in a capitalist social formation, i.e. the relations of exploited to exploiters and exploiters to exploited, are largely reproduced. The mechanisms which produce this vital result for the capitalist regime are naturally covered up and concealed by a universally reigning ideology of the School, universally reigning because it is one of the essential forms of the ruling bourgeois ideology: an ideology which represents the School as a neutral environment purged of ideology (because it is … lay), where teachers respectful of the ‘conscience’ and ‘freedom’ of the children who are entrusted to them (in complete confidence) by their ‘parents’ (who are free, too, i.e. the owners of their children) open up for them the path to the freedom, morality and responsibility of adults by their own example, by knowledge, literature and their ‘liberating’ virtues.”

Kaustuv Roy then takes Althusser’s theory and identifies a pattern in ideological beliefs which is that of being lacunar, of leaving “holes” in the legitimacy and truth of the discourses constructed from them:

“The proposition “modern education promises equal opportunity for all” is not, on the face of it, a false or untrue proposition. It is, after all, one of its basic premises. At the same time, we know that existing property relations, differential schooling, elite behaviour, and social prejudices all falsify this “true” proposition. Again, consider the proposition “the law takes precedence before anything else.” This is not untrue in its purely rational form, yet, we know that many things including social, political, and financial power often determine which way the law moves. […] In other words, they are pre-aligned toward certain effects. The above are examples of “lacunar discourse,” meaning that they cover up or hide a lacuna. A number of propositions which are not untrue suggest or lead up to other propositions which are operatively and pragmatically untrue. In other words, the former cluster create an aura of “truth” that point toward and suggest legitimacy for another set whose assumptions are simply not true. In a restricted and more useful sense, ideologies can be seen as lacunar discourses that offer legitimacy to a wide range of assumptions by starting off from reasonable propositions.”

Slavoj Žižek uses a similar example of falsehood admixed with truth as a starting point of his analysis of ideology:

“[T]he starting point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to lie in the guise of truth. When, for example, some Western power intervenes in a Third World country on account of violations of human rights, it may well be ‘true’ that in this country the most elementary human rights were not respected, and that the Western intervention will effectively improve the human rights record, yet such a legitimization none the less remains ‘ideological’ in so far as it fails to mention the true motives of the intervention (economic interests, etc.).”

While most critiques of ideology see it as a mechanism of manipulation that some impose on others, Žižek thinks of it in a rather different way:

“[I]deology is not simply imposed on ourselves. Ideology is our spontaneous relation to our social world, how we perceive each meaning and so on and so on. We, in a way, enjoy our ideology. To step out of ideology, it hurts. It’s a painful experience. You must force yourself to do it.”

Given such ubiquity of ideology and its being a constituent part of human nature, the question becomes not one of how to avoid ideologies that may be coming my way from afar, but to strive for a recognition and avoidance of ideological patterns in thought and action. This realisation is present already Eagleton’s analysis, who, as a Marxist, sees the danger of ideologisation even in movements close to his own world view, instead of only in the capitalist system that is opposed to it.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the recognition of ideologisation and attempts to counter it can arise in all contexts, even the one that Althusser used as the ideological case study par excellence – the Catholic Church. This is a strong theme in the thought and actions of the current pope, Francis, who has frequently spoken about and decried ideologies both outside and within the Church.

Looking at the Church, Francis’ homily from 23rd October 2013 is a particularly cutting critique:

“Faith passes, so to speak, through a purifying apparatus and becomes ideology. And ideology does not attract. In ideologies there is no Jesus: his tenderness, love, meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Always: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of ideology, he has lost faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought, of that … And this is why Jesus says to them: ‘You have taken away the key to knowledge’ [Luke 11:52]. The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and even moralistic knowledge, because they closed the door with so many prescriptions.

Faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases people away, drives people away and takes the Church away from people. But it is a serious disease, this of ideological Christians. It’s a disease, but it’s not new, is it? Already the Apostle John, in his first Letter, spoke of this. Christians who lose faith and prefer ideologies. Their attitude is: to become rigid, moralistic, ethicist, but without goodness. The question may be this, right? But why can a Christian become like that? What happens in the heart of that Christian, of that priest, of that bishop, of that Pope, who becomes so? Simply one thing: that Christian does not pray. And if there is no prayer, you always close the door.

They do not pray, they abandon faith and turn it into a moralistic, casuistic ideology, without Jesus. And when a prophet or a good Christian reproaches them, they do the same thing they did with Jesus: When he came out of there, the scribes and Pharisees began to treat him in a hostile way – these ideologues are hostile – and to make him speak on many subjects, trying to ensnare him – they are insidious – to surprise him in a few words out of his own mouth. They are not transparent. Eh, poor things, they are people soiled by pride. Let us ask the Lord for grace, first: do not stop praying, so as not to lose faith, remain humble. And so we will not become closed, we won’t close the way to the Lord.”

If you are reading the above and are not a Christian, it is worth saying something about prayer, lest is may sound like something archaic or even ideological. Prayer here is, I believe, to be read as a conscious attitude of being close to God and of seeking to love in every present moment. This is consistent with how Francis speaks about it and also with Jesus telling his disciples to pray always (cf. Luke 18:1). Prayer here is an attitude seeking closeness with and responding to reality, i.e., a fundamentally anti-ideological attitude.

Another key to countering ideology according to Francis is to place the encounter with others ahead of ideas or ideologies. E.g., during his trip to Cuba in 2015 he said: “Service is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people.” In fact, this reminds me of the suggestion Eagleton makes about how one might become freed from an ideological belief, where he too points to the power of evidence and of encounter with other persons: “If someone really does believe that all childless women are thwarted and embittered, introducing him to as many ecstatic childfree women as possible might just persuade him to change his mind.”

Looking at the above I have the impression that, instead of thinking that there are some specific, well-delineated ideologies that need to be avoided and countered, I need to recognise that I too am steeped in ideology and that I may not even be aware of that being the case. What can I do about it? Having seen ideological patterns of discourse laid bare, I can strive to recognise them and counter their closed, narrow and restrictive mode by contrasting them with evidence and experience. And, I can direct my attention to those around me so that I may relate to and discover each person instead of letting ideologies become filters through which I see them. As Žižek says though, it will be hard and painful, but it strikes me as a fight worth fighting.

Holy Saturday: the logic of freedom

1864 words, 10 min read

A highlight of the Easter Triduum has for me always been Holy Saturday, when the tabernacle’s emptiness, the stripped altar and the absence of the Eucharist are all stark reminders of what a world without God’s incarnation as a fellow human would be like. It is, for me, a day for being particularly close to atheists and agnostics and for reflecting on the gift of Jesus’ friendship, whose enormity is heightened by its apparent absence.

I have, for some years now, had a feeling that there is much more to Holy Saturday than I am aware of, that Jesus’ participation in death is saying more than I am hearing. Against this background, I have come across Hans Urs von Balthasar’s “Mysterium Paschale: The Mystery of Easter”, whose 4th chapter is dedicated to Holy Saturday, and I would here like to give you a sense of the beautiful line of thought he sets out there.

Von Balthasar starts by tracing the origins of the idea of Jesus’ participation in death to the New Testament and argues for this being a consequence of redemption’s scope extending beyond the living. Jesus’ death here is a “being with” a “solidarity” with death as a human condition:

“‘[G]oing to the dead’, an expression justified, in our opinion, by I Peter 3, 19: ‘he went, poreutheis, and preached to the spirits in prison’—preached, that is, the ‘good news’ as I Peter 4, 6 adds by way of a self-evident clarification. […]

There is no difficulty about understanding this ‘going to the souls in prison’ as, first and foremost, a ‘being with’, and the ‘preaching’ in the same primary fashion as the publication of the ‘redemption’, actively suffered, and brought about by the Cross of the living Jesus—and not as a new activity, distinct from the first. For then the solidarity with the condition of the dead would be the prior condition for the work of redemption, whose effects would be deployed and exercised in the ‘realm’ of the dead, though that work itself would remain fundamentally finished (consummatum est!) on the Cross. In this sense the actively formulated term ‘preaching’ (I Peter 3, 19; in 4, 6 it is passive, evēngelisthē) should be conceived as the efficacious outworking in the world beyond of what was accomplished in the temporality of history.”

More important even than his descent and the being with the departed, is Jesus’ ascent from the dead, as a paving of the way for the resurrection of all:

“It is not the going to the dead which is important here—that is taken for granted, and identified, simply, with what it is to be genuinely dead—but rather the return from that bourn. God has not ‘left’ (or ‘abandoned’) Jesus ‘in Hades’ where he tarried; he has not let his Holy One see corruption. The accent is placed on the whence—the phrase ek nekrōn occurs some fifty times in the New Testament—a whence which implies a point of departure, namely, being with the dead. Death here is characterised by ‘pangs’, by ‘pains’ (?dines), and by its lust to seize and hold (krateisthai): but God is stronger than death. The only thing that matters is the facticity of the ‘being’ of the one who is dead in ‘death’ or—for this amounts to the same thing—in Hades, whose character is (objectively) referred to by the term ‘pains’. It is from thence that Jesus is ‘awoken’. […]

[I]n the Cross the power of Hell is already broken (down), the locked door of the grave is already burst open, yet Christ’s own laying in the tomb and his ‘being with the dead’ is still necessary, so that, on Easter Day, the common resurrection ek tōn nekrōn—with ‘Christ the first-fruits’—can follow.”

Von Balthasar then turns to the motivation for Jesus’ descent and again ascribes it to solidarity with the “unredeemed dead”, relying on St. Augustine who insists that Christ’s descent extended not only to the as-yet-unredeemed, but redemption-worthy, but also to those considered unworthy:

“The fact of being with the unredeemed dead, in the Sheol of the Old Testament, signifies a solidarity in whose absence the condition of standing for sinful man before God would not be complete. This is why Sheol must be understood in the classic Old Testament sense […]

Augustine distinguishes between a lower infernum (where the ‘rich man’ lives) and a higher (where Lazarus dwells, in the bosom of Abraham). The two are separated by a chaos magnum, yet both belong equally to Hades. That Christ descended even to the lower infernum, in order to ‘deliver from their sufferings tortured souls, that is, sinners’ (salvos facere a doloribus) Augustine regards as certain (non dubito). The grace of Christ redeemed all those who tarried there: adhuc requiro¹. […]

This ultimate solidarity is the final point and the goal of that first ‘descent’, so clearly described in the Scriptures, into a ‘lower world’.

Looking at what the Early Fathers of the Church have written about Holy Saturday, von Balthasar presents the descent into hell as a matter of logical necessity, following from the incarnation. To become fully human, Christ had to participate in death too. Without this, his incarnation would have been incomplete, as would his redemptive action:

“And so, in order to assume the entire penalty imposed upon sinners, Christ willed not only to die, but to go down, in his soul, ad infernum. As early as the Fathers of the second century, this act of sharing constituted the term and aim of the Incarnation. The ‘terrors of death’ into which Jesus himself falls are only dispelled when the Father raises him again. According to Tertullian, the Son of God adapted himself to the whole law of human death: Huic quoque legi satisfecit, forma humanae mortis apud inferos functus². The same affirmation is found in Irenaeus: Dominus legem mortuorum servavit, ut fieret primogenitus a mortuis.³ He insists on his own grounding principle, namely, that only what has been endured is healed and saved. Since above all this is a matter of penetrating into the realm of the inferi, so for Ambrosiaster in the Quaestiones ex Novo Testamento, Christ had to die so as to be capable of this step. Christ willed to be like us, says Andrew of Crete, in ‘walking amidst the shadows of death, in that place where souls had been bound with chains unbreakable’. All that only expresses the law of human death, thought through to its logical conclusion.”

Von Balthasar then draws our attention to a seemingly paradoxical aspect of Christ’s being among the dead – i.e., that is was a “solitary [being] with others” that did not come with a subjective experience:

“To the extent that the experience of death was objectively capable of containing an interior victory and thus a triumph over hostile powers, to that extent it was in no way necessary that this triumph be subjectively experienced. For precisely that would have abolished the law of solidarity. Let it not be forgotten: among the dead, there is no living communication. Here solidarity means: being solitary like, and with, the others.”

A further aspect of Christ’s being with the dead is that it is both an act of ultimate obedience and an act of the Trinity, where the self-noughting of its persons is enacted here in creation. This is also reminiscent of Slavoj Žižek’s concept of God taking into himself the gap that may otherwise be between Him and humanity:

“His being with the dead is an existence at the utmost pitch of obedience, and because the One thus obedient is the dead Christ, it constitutes the ‘obedience of a corpse’ (the phrase is Francis of Assisi’s)⁴ of a theologically unique kind. By it Christ takes the existential measure of everything that is sheerly contrary to God, of the entire object of the divine eschatological judgment, which here is grasped in that event in which it is ‘cast down’ (hormēmati blēthēsetai, Apocalypse 18, 21; John 12, 31; Matthew 22, 13). But at the same time, this happening gives the measure of the Father’s mission in all its amplitude: the ‘exploration’ of Hell is an event of the (economic) Trinity.”

Finally, von Balthasar brings his line of thought to its pinnacle, by presenting Jesus’ being among the dead as a logical consequence of his having received the power to judge from the Father and from Hell being the “supreme entailment of human liberty”. Without participating in it, and to do so as a human entails death, the transformation he brought about by his resurrection would have been incomplete.

“If the Father must be considered as the Creator of human freedom—with all its foreseeable consequences—then judgment belongs primordially to him, and thereby Hell also; and when he sends the Son into the world to save it instead of judging it, and, to equip him for this function, gives ‘all judgment to the Son’ (John 5, 22), then he must also introduce the Son made man into ‘Hell’ (as the supreme entailment of human liberty). But the Son cannot really be introduced into Hell save as a dead man, on Holy Saturday. This introducing is needful since the dead must ‘hear the voice of the Son of God’, and hearing that voice, ‘live’ (John 5, 15). The Son must ‘take in with his own eyes what in the realm of creation is imperfect, unformed, chaotic’ so as to make it pass over into his own domain as the Redeemer.”

To my mind, von Balthasar presents a beautiful insight into the events of Holy Saturday, whose coverage in Scripture is scant, by returning to a close reading of those passages, by understanding what the Early Church and the saints have written about it and by connecting it with the drama of salvation, which entails a transformation of creation as a whole. Only by being with the dead could Christ’s incarnation be complete and his redeeming power extend to the full scale of the consequences of human freedom.

¹ “I yet enquire.”
² “He also satisfied this law, enduring the form of human death in Hell.” De Anima, Chapter LIV.
³ “The Lord observed the law of the dead, that he would be the first-born from the dead.”
⁴ This is a reference to the following passage from St. Francis’ The Mirror of Perfection:

““Tell us, Father, what is perfect obedience?” To which he answered, speaking of true and perfect obedience under the figure of a corpse, “ Take a dead body and place it anywhere you please, it will not murmur at being moved, it will not change its position or cry out if you let it go. If you seat it on a throne it will not look up but down, and to clothe it in purple but makes it more pale. This is the type of perfect obedience, that asks not why he is moved, minds not where he is placed, nor insists upon being sent elsewhere. If he be promoted to office he still keeps humble, and the more he is honoured the more he counts himself unworthy.”

Echoes of Jesus’ forsakenness in secular thought

1127 words, 6 min read

A central aspect of Christianity is Jesus’ suffering on the cross, to the point of calling out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) shortly before his death. This moment of utter abandonment shows God making himself one with each one of us even in our darkest, loneliest, most desperate moments – a realization that gives us a glimpse of the extent of his love. It also invites us to look for him and encounter him in the suffering of others and ourselves, in the hope of joining him in the resurrection that follows.

Since this belief is in God’s presence in suffering being universal, it raises the doubt of whether those who do not share that belief nonetheless experience what Christian’s would recognize as a relationship with the forsaken Jesus. In fact, my own experience has been very much one of a resoundingly positive answer to this question. As I read the writings of agnostic or atheist thinkers, or those who follow other religions or philosophies, I keep coming across passages in which echoes of Jesus’ cry of abandonment can be heard. By this I certainly don’t mean to ascribe beliefs to their authors that they do not hold, but simply to say that their accounts are like those I would give of my relationship with the forsaken Christ.

Instead of an annotated reading, I would just like to offer a selection of my favourite such “echoes” next.

Jorge Luis Borges, Paradise, XXXI: 108:

“We have lost those features, just as a magic number made up of ordinary figures can be lost; just as an image in a kaleidoscope is lost for ever. We may come across the features and not know them. The profile of a Jew on an underground train may be that of Christ; the hands that give us our change over a counter may echo those that some soldiers once nailed to the cross. Perhaps some feature of the crucified face lurks in every mirror; perhaps the face died and was erased so that God could be everyone.”

Ted Hughes, letter to his 24 year old son:

“It’s something people don’t discuss, because [they] are aware of [it] only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, […] or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them.

Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable […] eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances.

And when we meet people, this is what we usually meet [and we] end up making ‘no contact.’ But when you develop a strong divining sense for the child behind that armour, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that everybody becomes, in a way, like your own child. It’s an intangible thing. But they too sense when that is what you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.”

Slavoj Žižek, God in Pain:

“The crucial problem is how to think the link between the two “alienations” — the one of modern man from God (who is reduced to an unknowable In-itself, absent from the world subjected to mechanical laws), the other of God from himself (in Christ, in the incarnation) — they are the same, although not symmetrically, but as subject and object. In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with it and positing itself as the I = I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance, has to “humiliate” himself, to fall into his own creation, “objectivize” himself, to appear as a singular miserable human individual, in all its abjection, i.e., abandoned by God. The distance of man from God is thus the distance of God from himself. […]

In Christianity, the gap that separates God from man is not effectively “sublated” in the figure of Christ as god-man, but only in the most tense moment of crucifixion when Christ himself despairs (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”): in this moment, the gap is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from God the Father; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God.”

Marina Abramović, Tate Talk (25:47 – 27:19):

“We are always afraid of pain, of dying, of suffering. They are the main concerns of human beings. Many artists deal with these themes in different ways. I was always interested in how the different ancient people work with ceremonies and with the ritualization of inflicting very large amounts of pain on their bodies, even to the stage of clinical death. And the reason for this is not any kind of masochistic reason. The reason is very simple: to confront yourself with the pain, to confront taking this kind of risk, in order to liberate yourself from fear, to jump to another state of consciousness by doing it. I could never do this with my own private life, but if I stage the situation where it is painful, in front of the audience, the stage situation is dangerous in front of the audience, I take the energy of the audience and I can use it to give me strength to go through that experience. So, I become like your mirror. If I can do this in my life, you can do it in yours.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Love:

“In a deep relationship, there’s no longer a boundary between you and the other person. You are her and she is you. Your suffering is her suffering. Your understanding of your own suffering helps your loved one to suffer less. Suffering and happiness are no longer individual matters. What happens to your loved one happens to you. What happens to you happens to your loved one. […]

In true love, there’s no more separation or discrimination. His happiness is your happiness. Your suffering is his suffering. You can no longer say, “That’s your problem.””

Tracey Emin, Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon 2009:

“To sleep

To sleep
not sleeping
To wake
not wanting
Night time comes
with feelings mixed
I want to drown myself
in my pillow
Force myself
through another world
I want to wake up
feeling love”

Žižek: what separates me from God, unites me to him

1389 words, 7 min read

Jesus’ cry of forsakenness on the cross is by some considered to be the pinnacle of his suffering and therefore of God’s self-emptying and self-giving love. It is a moment in Jesus’ life that has attracted many and that many have reflected on and meditated on. Among the latest of these is the atheist philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who, in a book co-authored with the Lutheran theologian Boris Gunjević and entitled “God in Pain”, presents a particularly insightful analysis.

Žižek approaches Jesus’ forsakenness on the cross by first posing one of the most perennially challenging questions in Christianity, and in any religion that posits a loving God, which is that of evil and suffering:

“Every theologian sooner or later faces the problem of how to reconcile the existence of God with the fact of the Shoah or some similar excessive evil: How are we to reconcile the existence of an omnipotent and good God with the terrifying suffering of millions of innocents, like the children killed in the gas chambers?”

After dismissing two unsatisfactory answers (the first being an argument from mystery and the second from God self-imposing limitations that effectively lead to dualism), Žižek proceeds to present a, to his (and my) mind, credible response:

This brings us to the third position […]: that of a suffering God — not a triumphalist God who always wins in the end, although “his ways are mysterious” since he secretly pulls all the strings; not a God who exerts cold justice, since he is by definition always right; but a God who — like the suffering Christ on the cross — is agonized, who assumes the burden of suffering, in solidarity with human misery. It was already Schelling who wrote: “God is a life, not merely a being. But all life has a fate and is subject to suffering and becoming. … Without the concept of a humanly suffering God … all of history remains incomprehensible.” Why? Because God’s suffering implies that he is involved in history, affected by it, not just a transcendent Master pulling the strings from above: God’s suffering means that human history is not just a theater of shadows, but the place of a real struggle, the struggle in which the Absolute itself is involved and its fate is decided. This is the philosophical background of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s deep insight that, after the Shoah, “only a suffering God can help us now” — a proper supplement to Heidegger’s “Only a God can save us!” from his last interview. One should therefore take the statement that “the unspeakable suffering of the six million is also the voice of the suffering of God” quite literally: the very excess of this suffering over any “normal” human measure makes it divine. Recently, this paradox was succinctly formulated by Jürgen Habermas: “Secular languages which only eliminate the substance once intended leave irritations. When sin was converted to culpability, and the breaking of divine commands to an offense against human laws, something was lost.”

Which is why secular-humanist reactions to phenomena like the Shoah or the gulag (amongst others) are experienced as insufficient: in order to reach the level of such phenomena, something much stronger is needed, something akin to the old religious topic of a cosmic perversion or catastrophe in which the world itself is “out of joint”—when one confronts a phenomenon like the Shoah, the only appropriate reaction is to ask the perplexed question “Why did the heavens not darken?” (the title of Arno Mayor’s book). Therein resides the paradox of the theological significance of the Shoah: although it is usually conceived as the ultimate challenge to theology (if there is a God and if he is good, how could he have allowed such a horror to take place?), it is at the same time only theology that can provide the frame enabling us to somehow approach the scope of the catastrophe — the fiasco of God is still the fiasco of God.

I believe that Žižek makes two key observations here: first, that God’s suffering is born of solidarity with human suffering, in other words, that it is the result of mercy, and, second, that it is God’s suffering that is a key to beginning to understand the suffering of others and suffering itself.

Furthermore, Žižek also sees Jesus’ abandonment on the cross as the key to man transcending his animal origins and as a bridge over the otherwise insurmountable abyss between God and man:

“The crucial problem is how to think the link between the two “alienations” — the one of modern man from God (who is reduced to an unknowable In-itself, absent from the world subjected to mechanical laws), the other of God from himself (in Christ, in the incarnation) — they are the same, although not symmetrically, but as subject and object. In order for (human) subjectivity to emerge out of the substantial personality of the human animal, cutting links with it and positing itself as the I = I dispossessed of all substantial content, as the self-relating negativity of an empty singularity, God himself, the universal Substance, has to “humiliate” himself, to fall into his own creation, “objectivize” himself, to appear as a singular miserable human individual, in all its abjection, i.e., abandoned by God. The distance of man from God is thus the distance of God from himself.”

Žižek then argues that Jesus’ abandonment is the key to union with God since in that moment God makes what separates man from Him part of Himself. The gap that separated us from Him becomes part of Him and makes us immediately adjacent and no longer at a distance:

“In Christianity, the gap that separates God from man is not effectively “sublated” in the figure of Christ as god-man, but only in the most tense moment of crucifixion when Christ himself despairs (“Father, why have you forsaken me?”): in this moment, the gap is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from God the Father; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God.”

Finally, Žižek claims the forsaken Jesus for himself by conferring on him his own atheist identity and he does so also through the words of G. K. Chesterton:

“[I]n Christianity, when, dying on the cross, Christ utters his “Father, father, why did you forsake me?”—here, for a brief moment, God himself does not believe in himself—or, as G. K. Chesterton put it in emphatic terms: “When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 145.)”

Žižek’s “God in Pain” is a book that I wholeheartedly recommend to read in full, since it is a rich source of profound reflection on a variety of questions, from among which the above are the highlights of his insights into the forsaken Jesus. Personally, I find his perspective very enriching in that it provides a view from a vantage point that is close to the event of Jesus’ abandonment and that spells out aspects of what that experience might have been “from the inside.” Žižek’s insight that Jesus’ taking on what separates God from man is what builds a bridge is particularly striking and also an invitation to radical dialogue. By emptying myself to receive what separates me from you, we become one.

I can’t not mention another outstanding feature of “God in Pain”, which is the deeply beautiful re-telling and analysis of St. Mark’s Gospel that Gunjević presents in the book’s final chapter, entitled “Pray and Watch — The Messianic Subversion.” It alone is worth the price of admission.

In continuous search of the other

Just under a month ago, from 17th to 19th November, the Humanum conference on the “Complementarity of Man and Woman” took place at the Vatican, hosted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. There thirty speakers from around the world belonged to various religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam and Christianity of various kinds, and the talks were wide ranging in the aspects of the family they addressed, reaching far beyond the titular question of complementarity.

In this post I would, however, like to zoom in on things said specifically about complementarity itself (even at the expense of leaving out other, also very interesting content), since that is a topic close to my own heart. The following will therefore be a look at the highlights of what has been said there about how men and women relate, using the hermeneutic of complementarity.^{1, 2}

Right at the start of the symposium, Pope Francis set the scene by rooting complementarity in the words of St. Paul and by panning out to show that it is a profound attribute of God, instead of only a device for thinking about men and women:

“You must admit that “complementarity” does not roll lightly off the tongue! Yet it is a word into which many meanings are compressed. It refers to situations where one of two things adds to, completes, or fulfills a lack in the other. But complementarity is much more than that. Christians find its deepest meaning in the first Letter to the Corinthians where Saint Paul tells us that the Spirit has endowed each of us with different gifts so that-just as the human body’s members work together for the good of the whole-everyone’s gifts can work together for the benefit of each. (cf. 1 Cor. 12). To reflect upon “complementarity” is nothing less than to ponder the dynamic harmonies at the heart of all Creation. This is a big word, harmony. All complementarities were made by our Creator, so the Author of harmony achieves this harmony.”

Having set the scene, Francis then bridges God’s intrinsic harmony and its being the modus operandi of the family, also projecting out its consequences:

“This complementarity is a root of marriage and family. For the family grounded in marriage is the first school where we learn to appreciate our own and others’ gifts, and where we begin to acquire the arts of cooperative living. For most of us, the family provides the principal place where we can aspire to greatness as we strive to realize our full capacity for virtue and charity.”

And finally, Francis warns against an oversimplification and a misunderstanding of complementarity, which, I believe, have plagued thinkers both aligned with the Church and opposed to it:

“When we speak of complementarity between man and woman in this context, let us not confuse that term with the simplistic idea that all the roles and relations of the two sexes are fixed in a single, static pattern. Complementarity will take many forms as each man and woman brings his or her distinctive contributions to their marriage and to the formation of their children — his or her personal richness, personal charisma. Complementarity becomes a great wealth. It is not just a good thing but it is also beautiful.”

The sketch presented by Pope Francis was then fleshed out by Cardinal Gerhard Müller, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose analysis departs from the question of (in)completeness:

“One’s own male or female being is not sufficient to oneself. Each one of us feels needy and lacking in completion. [… W]e do not complete ourselves from our own selves, we are not totally self-sufficient. This simple consideration, clear to all, would suffice to demonstrate the inadequacy of the markedly individualistic trait so characteristic to the modern mentality.”

This inbuilt individual self-insufficiency is, Müller argues, positive, since it impels us to go beyond ourselves and since it is in this way that we are in God’s image:

“[I]n the Bible difference is the place of blessing, the exact place where God will make present His action and His image. In this way, we can comprehend that in Scripture, each of the two, Adam and Eve, are measured not only according to their mutual relation but above all from the starting point of their relationship with God. Indeed, in the singularity of each and not only in their union as a couple, we find inscribed the image of the One who has created them. Here, man and woman share the same humanity, the same incarnate condition, and sexual difference does not imply subordination one to the other: “both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created in God’s image” In this vein, Saint John Paul II said that male and female are as “two incarnations of the same metaphysical solitude before God and the world as two ways of being body and together [hu]man, who complete each other reciprocally.””

Next, Müller argues in a surprising twist that the union between man and woman has an unexpected consequence:

“[I]n the book of Genesis the union of man and woman does not lead to a fulfilment, does not close them within themselves, for it is precisely in uniting with each other that they open themselves to the greater presence of God. One might well say that in the very union of the two, man and woman render themselves needier, which makes increase in them the thirst of the mystery in the measure that their radical reference to the Creator God is revealed more clearly. The union sets off, therefore, a dynamic, a movement, as the Song of Songs recounts, in which the lover and beloved are at the same time in continuous search of the other and of God.”

Müller then arrives at considering the profound nature of complementarity and underlines it being anything but a polar stereotype:

“It is precisely the presence of God within the union between man and woman that helps us consider the meaning of their complementarity. This cannot be understood in a polar fashion, as if male and female were opposed realities who complete each other perfectly: active and passive, exterior and interior, so as to become a closed unity; rather, it is a matter of different ways of situating themselves in the world so that, when they come together, far from closing themselves in, these open the path towards the world and others, a path that leads above all to the encounter with God.”

The reality of children too can be seen from the perspective of incompleteness and of being directed towards God:

“The union of male and female is complementary not in the sense that from it ensues one complete in him or herself, but in the sense that their union demonstrates how both are a mutual help to journey towards the Creator. The way in which this union refers to itself always beyond itself becomes evident in the birth of a child. The union of the two, making themselves “one flesh,” is proven precisely in the one flesh of those generated by that union. Hence, we see confirmed how complementarity also means overabundance, an insurgence of novelty. From the presence of the child comes a light that can help us describe the complementarity of man and woman. The relationship of the parents with the baby, where both open out beyond themselves, is a privileged way to understand the difference between the man and the woman in their role as father and mother. Complementarity is not understood, therefore, when we consider man and woman in an isolated form, but when we consider them in the prospective of the mystery to which their union opens out and, in a concrete way, when we look at male and female in light of the relationship with the child.”

Finally, and only after an ample emphasis on the complexity, richness and God-centeredness of complementarity, does Müller speak about male and female characteristics, while again insisting that “male and female are dimensions that interconnect and exchange”:

“One might add that the female aspect is characterized by a constant presence, which accompanies always the child. Indeed, in German, when a woman is pregnant, we say that she “carries a baby beneath her heart” Contemporary philosophy has spoken of the feminine as a dwelling place, as presence that envelops man from the beginning and accompanies him along the way, as singular sensitivity for the person as gift and for his affirmation.

On the other hand, the male is characterized, in terms of the child, as the presence of someone “in the distance,”in a distance that attracts, and, therefore, helps in walking the journey of life.

Both male and female are necessary to transmit to the child the presence of the Creator,both as love that envelops and confirms the goodness of existence despite all else, and as a call that from afar invites one to grow. In this way, male and female are dimensions that interconnect and exchange, such that the woman enriches man and man the woman, because one participates in the property of the other and may transmit together to the child being in the image of God.”

In many ways, listening to Cardinal Müller reminds me of an, at first perplexing, but upon further reflection profound quote by the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves.”

Another speaker at the conference whose words shed light on complementarity is Henry B. Eyring, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His words have great beauty and can also be seen as a lived experience of the concepts Müller presented:

“Most remarkable to me has been the fulfillment of the hope I felt the day I met my wife. I have become a better person as I have loved and lived with her. We have been complementary beyond anything I could have imagined. Her capacity to nurture others grew in me as we became one. My capacity to plan, direct, and lead in our family grew in her as we became united in marriage. I realize now that we grew together into one—slowly lifting and shaping each other, year by year. As we absorbed strength from each other, it did not diminish our personal gifts. Our differences combined as if they were designed to create a better whole. Rather than dividing us, our differences bound us together.”

Wael Farouq, Visiting Professor of Islamic Studies at the Catholic University of Milano, extends the generative role of the male-female relationship to meaning and likens it to linguistic mechanisms:

“We can say that the complementarity of man and woman is an encounter which generates life and meaning not only in terms of children, but life and meaning which is at the heart of every encounter of man and woman in daily living.

The greatest danger the family faces today is its being emptied of all meaning, being turned into something that can be possessed, bought, and sold. […]

In Arabic, there is no word “to be” or “being” in the absolute. For this reason, one single word has neither meaning or grammatical function, unless it is located in a sentence. You can only understand this verb in relation to the other elements of the sentence. The word in a sentence is like the person in a family: is nothing, unless within a relationship.”

Finally, Lord Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, delivered an extraordinary speech, reflecting on a broad range of issues to do with the family. Focusing in just on the concept and role of complementarity, Sacks too emphasizes the importance of the relationship, of conversation:

“[T]ruth, beauty, goodness, and life itself, do not exist in any one person or entity but in the “between,” what Martin Buber called Das Zwischenmenschliche, the interpersonal, the counterpoint of speaking and listening, giving and receiving. Throughout the Hebrew Bible and the rabbinic literature, the vehicle of truth is conversation. In revelation God speaks and asks us to listen. In prayer we speak and ask God to listen. There is never only one voice. In the Bible the prophets argue with God. In the Talmud rabbis argue with one another. In fact I sometimes think the reason God chose the Jewish people was because He loves a good argument.”

Sacks then proceeds to revisit the value and purpose of otherness that Müller also emphasized, by providing a close reading of Genesis 3 where he links it to the desire for immortality and to the recognition of equal personhood:

“If we read [Genesis 3:19-21, the end of the story of Adam and Eve] carefully, we see that until now the first man had given his wife a purely generic name. He called her ishah, woman. […] For him she was a type, not a person. […] What is more he defines her as a derivative of himself: something taken from man. She is not yet for him someone other, a person in her own right. She is merely a kind of reflection of himself.

As long as the man thought he was immortal, he ultimately needed no one else. But now he knew he was mortal. He would one day die and return to dust. There was only one way in which something of him would live on after his death. That would be if he had a child. But he could not have a child on his own. For that he needed his wife. She alone could give birth. She alone could mitigate his mortality. And not because she was like him but precisely because she was unlike him. At that moment she ceased to be, for him, a type, and became a person in her own right. […]”

Finally, Sacks presents the consequences of man recognizing in woman a person in her own right, bound to him by love:

“At that moment, as they were about to leave Eden and face the world as we know it, a place of darkness, Adam gave his wife the first gift of love, a personal name. And at that moment, God responded to them both in love, and made them garments to clothe their nakedness, or as Rabbi Meir put it, “garments of light,” [since] the Hebrew word for “skin” is almost indistinguishable from the Hebrew word for “light.”

And so it has been ever since, that when a man and woman turn to one another in a bond of faithfulness, God robes them in garments of light, and we come as close as we will ever get to God himself, bringing new life into being, turning the prose of biology into the poetry of the human spirit, redeeming the darkness of the world by the radiance of love.”

Looking at the above thoughts in their totality – from Pope Francis’ broad strokes, via their profound elaboration by Cardinal Müller, through the personal witness of President Eyring and the Muslim perspective of Prof. Farouq, and being brought to fruition in the words of Rabbi Sacks – a picture emerges where complementarity is tightly linked to God Himself, more so than to men and women. Instead of having its roots in the differences between the two sexes, complementarity propels one person outside themselves and towards an other, towards a dynamic harmony. Instead of deriving from static differences between two parties, complementarity subsists imperfectly in the interpersonal and is fulfilled in the relationship between our finite selves and the infinite love of God. As such, instead of confining differences to their original owners, complementarity engenders their becoming gifts for the other – a mutual enriching and transfer of all that is good, beautiful and true. And while relationships between men and women are particularly suited for the coming about of complementarity, I believe that complementarity is a principle that acts in all human contact. Each one of us has distinctive contributions to make in our relationships with others, that can engage with what they lack and what they seek on the way to fulfillment, completeness and communion.

¹For completeness sake, it is worth noting that, in addition to the speakers, whose thoughts on complementarity are covered here in detail, Sister M. Prudence Allen also spoke about it and did so in terms of four aspects of complementarity: equal dignity, significant difference, synergetic relation and intergenerational fruition.
² Please, note that the following is not the order in which the talks were given.