Kristeva’s Declaration of Dependence: On JP2

Kristeva in Assisi

The only thing better than exposing famous atheists as believers as I did with Sartre and Camus is enlisting the help of atheists in unpopular ecclesial causes.  I sense the tide has turned, especially for Neo-Cons, on John Paul II.  Their attempts to baptize capitalism and every American war with the aid of JP2 have fallen short.  A surprising number of them now busies themselves taking the same sorts petty pot shots at Wojtyla they once hated from liberal Catholics (I won’t stoop to linking their attacks).

I would argue being in the crosshairs of both sides of the theological spectrum is a good place to be.  But don’t let me make the argument.  I’ll let Julia Kristeva, an atheist, feminist, and psychoanalyst make it for me. (She also appeared at the 2011 World Day of Prayer for Peace in Assisi.  You can read her call for peace between humanists and religionists here.)

Why is John Paul II significant according to her?

“‘Don’t be afraid of Christianity, and together we won’t fear religions!’ I find myself wanting to say to my agnostic, humanist, atheist friends. We hail from the same continent of thought, we often rise up ‘against’ each other because we are in reality ‘right against’ one another; let us continue our analyses . . . And I have a dream: may true complicities, essential in our face to face with the rise of barbarity, be woven not only, and to my way of thinking less, between Christianity and the other religions today tempted by fundamentalism, but between Christianity and this vision to which I adhere that grows out of Christianity, although it is detached from from it today, and has the ambition to elucidate the perilous paths of freedom. In his person and his acts John Paul II made this possible. Far more than sainthood, this pope has shown us his universal dimension.”

She made this statement in reaction to the pope’s passing and after re-reading his phenomenological treatise Person and Act, which is unfortunately only available in a botched translation entitled The Acting Person (which still might be available somewhere online).  However, Kristeva forgets how the “continent of thought” she’s talking about was created by the Christian revolution and cannot be detached from it so easily.

Let’s not get bogged down in the details, but it is true that without the fundamental Christian revolution we wouldn’t notice whole classes of people.  The Greeks, Romans, the Enlightenment (we should remember on the Fourth of July), and Nietzsche didn’t make much of the weak and dependent other than sporadically wanting to eliminate them.

And so it’s important to note Kristeva also thinks the greatness of John Paul II consists in his witness of weakness:

“[I’m never sure whether the original French or the translation is jumbled when it comes to Kristeva.  But I’m sure you’ll get the point, ed.] On that day, and up to his death, we saw a handicapped man expose himself.  All those handicapped citizens, their families, and those with whom I work to have the rights of these excluded people, not like the others, recognized, know the difficulty, or even the impossibility of ensuring that the dignity of the most vulnerable, those who make us face up to deficiency and psychic or physical death, was respected.  Whereas society, dogged by the cult of performance, of excellence and enjoyment, makes manifest the shortcomings of this culture of mutual assistance and, beyond, of the identification with the suffering of Christ on the Cross or the ease in Christian sadomasochism that John Paul II successfully maintained even on his deathbed, the body of the handicapped pope was and remains and invitation to know life up to its limits.  And to develop this solidarity with people who are dependent–the handicapped or the aged–which modern humanism has so much difficulty doing.”

You can read more of her thoughts on Catholicism, especially John Paul II, in her collection of essays, This Incredible Need to Believe.

“Ecce homo,” says Kristeva

Famous Atheists Who Weren’t Atheists 2: The Christianity of Camus

like atheism

Albert Camus was nearly as unfaithful as Jean-Paul Sartre . . . to atheism.

This should not be especially surprising to any semi-conscious reader of his novels.  Despite his good existentialist intentions Camus could never really get beyond good and evil.  Most of his literary works collapse under the weight of trying to cover up their origins in, and direct debts to, classical Christian doctrines, especially Original Sin.

It’s as if he keeps trying to roll a rock to seal off the tomb, only to find it rolled away every darn morning.  Just look at the plots of The Fall, The Plague, and The First Man and tell me God shouldn’t sue for copyright infringement upon the biblical narrative.

The connections go even deeper as a recent memoir reveals.  The book is entitled Albert Camus & the Minister.  It is written by the (Methodist) minister, Howard Mumma.  Mumma hailed from Ohio and met Camus, was actually hounded by him, during a stint as guest minister at the American Church in Paris.

The two talked about Christianity constantly and it got to the point where Camus asked to be re-baptized, only to be turned down. Today’s Methodist ministers are nothing like the hardcore Methodist ministers of yesteryear!

Camus was still actively courting the Christian faith when he was cut down in a car accident.  We don’t know how things would have turned out if Camus had lived, however, as this book recounts, he thought he was heading for a reversion.  Actually, he was already there.

I don’t believe in an interventionalist God (see video below).

Famous Atheists Who Weren’t Atheists: Sartre’s Crossover

This story will leave you confused.

Almost everyone will agree that Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is rightfully recognized as a major figure of 20th century atheism.  Fewer people will agree about his stature as a philosopher.  Even fewer people will testify to the staying power of his novels and plays, although he still inspires some good poetry written against his philosophy.

However, it’s still not general knowledge that Sartre was not only unfaithful to Simone de Beauvoir, but also to atheism.  With the help of his secretary Benny Levy (no not that one) Sartre wandered into Judaism late in life.  And so the late-late Sartre said things like these:

“The Jew lives. He has a destiny. The finality towards which every Jew moves is to reunite humanity . . . It is the end that only the Jewish people [know] . . . It is the beginning of the existence of men for each other.”

Edward Said had an encounter with the Sartre-Levy duo and wasn’t entirely impressed:

“Lévy (then still known as Pierre Victor) seemed to Said to be: ‘a sort of station master, among whose trains was Sartre himself. Aside from their mysterious interactions at the table, he and Victor would occasionally get up; Victor would lead the shuffling old man away, speak rapidly at him, get an intermittent nod or two, then the pair would come back.’ When Sartre made a platitudinous closing statement that failed to mention such burning issues as the Palestinians, disputed territories or Israeli settlements, Said assumed it had been written by ‘the egregious Victor’ himself.”

Read more about Sartre’s Judaism here.

Just to make things even more confusing, carnivaleseque, and Rabelaisian, Sartre wrote a Christmas play, in which he gushed about Jesus, when he was interned in a German POW camp.

 

Sartre walking away from atheism.

 

  

 

Debunking Science & Religion Myths: The Copernican Revolution Wasn’t a Demotion

Whoa, he’s Polish!

The science and religion debates are chock-full of ideological myths.

Nowadays the scientific side usually has the upper hand in the construction of history.  This position means its stories should arouse healthy suspicion and invite demythologizing.

Everyone has rehearsed all those terribly touching stories, perhaps even with a tear in the eye, about the persecution of the brave scientific martyrs by the ecclesiastical Grand Inquisitor(s).  Let’s ignore the fact the Inquisition had more respect for due process and evidentiary rules than the Bush-Obama White Houses and explore something more moving.

The shifting of the Earth from the center of the universe, coupled with the setting of the planet in motion around the sun, is usually presented as a real cosmic bummer from which we’ll never recover.

John Hedley Brooke, in Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, says nothing could be further from the truth (if you take 16th century cosmology into consideration),

“Even if men and women were removed from the center of the cosmos, this was not necessarily to diminish their status.  The center of the geocentric cosmos had not been salubrious.  It was the point to which earthly matter fell, the focus of change and impurity, the physical correlate of humanity’s fallen state.  To be placed on a planet was to move upmarket.  It was to be delivered from a dump that was, in reality, diabolocentric.  Galileo was certainly conscious of this, rejoicing that there was an escape from the refuse.  Kepler, too, spoke of an enhanced status for the earth.  At last it enjoyed legal citizenship in the heavens.  Not surprisingly, John Wilkins was to say that a prevalent objection to the Copernican system was not man’s dethronement but an elevation about his true stature.”

Oh merde!

Feel free to annoy your starry-eyed science-geek friends with these newly-learned facts.  Why not also pass along the story I published here and the conclusion to the one here while you’re at it?

By the way, the above passage from John Hedley Brooke was cited by Larry Chapp in his groundbreaking tome The God of Covenant and Creation.  You’ll be hearing about it a lot more in the near future.  I’m still reading it (with great enthusiasm).

I could only find an untypically modest-sized picture.