Human beings have built in psychological mechanisms that initiate a certain semi amnesia about fundamental realities of their existence. The truth of the matter is, of course, that we are material beings, in the world, with other human beings and other things. We don’t forget that do we? Well, kind of. If someone asks then we might say that only someone who was ill would deny that they exist in the world with other things and people. But on a much more intuitive level we can form a sense of ourselves as essentially, first of all inside our heads, the real me or you is ‘in here’ not ‘out there’. In other words we are not so much a material body existing existing in the world, as we are some psychic thing in our heads. We are, we might say, our ego: a self contained, self possessed, delimited ego thing. We are like any other object, with spatial dimensions, except made of some psychic energy, mind stuff.
This is not to suggest that in some sense an important part of us is indeed inside our head. But it is as though we have a sense that we were always us, a person, a subjectivity, before we entered into social relationships, language and culture. Traditional religious notions of the soul and modernist (post 17th centurnot philosophical notions of the internal subject self, are expressions of this basic human intuition, but as we shall see below in recent times these have been called very much into question.
But if we are not essentially minds, or souls with bodies that are in some sense superfluous to who aNd what we really are, why do we invent such a fiction for ourselves? Well, you see there are difficulties attached to admitting that we are first of all bodies that exist in the world, and in time and space. Admitting that we ate in time means that perhaps like everything else in time we all simply come to be and in the end pass away: time leads us through various stages of growth and then decay and, of course, finally death. In other words we would have to take on board the reality of our own extinction which, it is fair to say, is a terrifying and obnoxious idea for most of us. To live in space means we move with other things and other people, we exist in a space that we share, in which we have to allow for others, are dependent upon others (things and people), and are vulnerable to what other things and people may do.Sartre once said that hell is other people, a more positive soul might also have said that heaveto could be other people as well, but it does at least point us to the possibility of our intuiting the potential threat of other things and people. We need these, we cannot exist without them, but we cannot control them ultimately and cannot always predict correctly what they might do. In order, then, simply to be able to get on with life without dissolving into an anxious gelatinous mess, the mind makes the ego, the ego becomes intuited as some internal, atemporal psychic object, and we are affective lot set at a distance from all this existential threat.
Our social structures, language, symbols, meanings all can help to reinforce this by offering things for the ego to identity itself with and solidify itself. From names through to titles, to characters, we attach ourselves to these as though we (our ego self) are every bit slide lid, present thing, arresting all movement and change as any external object (though of course even the sense of external objects as not moving or changing in time and space is an illusion). Sartre (a little unfashionable these days but I think he’s still got some interesting things to say about how we are), called this tendency ‘bad faith’, making ourselves, to ourselves, thing like just like, say, a stone is a stone, and denying the reality that we are a moving, changing flux.
The religious expression of this tendency to discuss the human individual as some kind of internal thing is, as has already been mentioned, the notion of the soul. The body is one thing, it comes to be and passes away. But the soul, well this which has psychic/spiritual wholeness and completeness aside from material reality. It is not in time and space and from at least Greek pagan thinking to now is considered to be immortal. The Christian notion of the self is a little more complicated than many people often imagine. When Jesus rose from the dead, the gospels tell us, he had a tangible body which also could enjoy a good barbecue on the beach (Though it could also pass through doors and walls which somewhat confuses the issue). Christian orthodoxy tries to avoid some kind of body/should duellist with talk of the individual as essentially incarnate. In other words we cannot be us without bodies. Nevertheless there has always been a tendency to slip back into pre-christian, pagan dualistic thinking.
Part of the problem is that despite having at the centre of their faith the notion of an embodied divinity, Jesus the God-man, they often would still rather envisage God as somehow ‘behind’ or ‘above’ Jesus, a detached spiritual, super-individual. Perhaps instead of us made in the image of God we make God in the image of the delusionary ego thing as a way of substantiating our sense of ourselves as ego things detached from spatial temporal reality? With this way of thinking our spiritual life becomes a matter of the relationship between some abstract, internal psychic self, and an abstracted,outside of time and space, purely spiritual God. God is a separately spiritual thing looking in at the world from the outside like a divine voyeur and impervious to its pains, just as we are essentially internal, spiritual things hoping to be sealed off from the mess and threat of external, material reality. In this way of thinking humanity and God relate to one another ‘behind-the-scenes’ .
The tendency of religious people, Christian, church people amongst others, to split apart the spiritual and the material in their imaginations, and the way they envisage the relationship between God and human being as in terms of a relationship between these abstract spiritual substances, means they can talk about salvation very often without mentioning what’s going on in the world around a person. Some Christians can talk about a man or a woman as having been ‘saved’ just because of some declaration concerning their internal state of faith – because they have declared faith in God through Jesus Christ as the one that died on the cross for that individual’s sins. The individual in question can still live in a world where, say, their employment is fragile, money is scarce, there is little political representation of that person’s class and so this allows the rich to dominate political life and to shape legislation in their interests often as against his – all of this can still be true and yet the individual can be thought of as ‘saved’.
However, from its beginnings a central strain of Christian thinking has worked against the tendency of the religious imagination toward soul/body dualism, and a prioritisation of the ‘hidden’ behind the scenes’ spiritual relationship over being in the world and finding a Christ imitating identity In time and space with other things and people. There has als, from the beginning, been those who have worked, at least in part, toward encouraging an opposite way of thinking and the history of the church is haunted all along its progression by the tendency to want to rid the spiritual dimension of its messy, dirty, material encumbrance. Nevertheless more incarnationally minded theologians have emphasised the centrality and importance of working to follow out the life of love, after the example by Jesus, as physical humanity in the world, as ineradicably embodied, fallible, perspectivally limited, and morally ambiguous entities. We find our relationship and salvation in God as weak vulnerable and dependent beings of flesh, and not by being released from the realities of the world and the flesh. The meeting with God and the notion of salvation is one that is realised within these circumstances, not by some supernatural extraction from them .
What is not quite as often emphasised is that any notion of salvation that follows out the logic of this way of thinking could be argued to involve political and economic restructuring. Contemporary thinking, modernism and so called post modern philosophy and theology amongst other disciplines, as I have alluded to, has worried whether there can be any sense of a stable, complete and self-possessed internal self at all. It certainly questions some notion of a soul capable of being parted from the body especially upon death, or even secular philosophical speculation on the self as some complete subject thing inside the body and a complete identity prior to social forces and so on. Instead the emphasis has come to be on language, culture, social forces and their role as prior to, and crucially formative of, whatever the internal self is. Sometimes it has been a case, not so much of saying that the sense of an internal self is a complete illusion, as saying that what comes first is social, linguistic, cultural structures and that is is out of these that the internal self is formed and reformed, inverted and again. Again it means that the illusion is odd a detached, or potentially detached, stable as self. The self is made externally, and what is more is always ecstatic, which is to say it is first of all intentionally focused outward, on things and people, in action, reaction, engagement and reign agreement externally. Only secondarily toes it become internally, inwardly focused using material gathered externally in social interaction.
Coming back to the Christian emphasis upon the body, if these notions of the ‘prior external’ reality are fully taken on board then at the very least we could end up saying that traditional religious concerns for the internal spiritual state must eventually begin to translate into a concern for the workings of the mechanisms of the world order – how we live and work with each other and things in the world, social, political and economic working. A concern for salvation might then start to spend less time worrying about abstruse religious nit picking about about formulas of belief, patterns of liturgy, whether a church leader is a women or your priest likes sex with his or her own gender, or more pest needs of the body in its world with other people and things are finally satisfied. In this there is there comes magnificent scope for elaborating notions of the kingdom as the realm of perfect political and economic justice; as a place where there is ample for everyone leaving all with the freedom to develop their life, powers and potential with one another in the world to an infinite degree. It means notions of the kingdom that can be at least discussed in social, political and economic terms, in terms that involve notions of living and working together in peace and fulfilment in time and space . we are talking about God’s will being done on Earth as it is in heaven.
Theology from a Fenland Backwater 