Postmodern Christianity

Friedrich Nietzsche: The Proto-Postmodern Christian

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessently: "I seek God! I seek God!" As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes: "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him--you and I. All of us are his murderers. ... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not become Gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us--for the sake of the deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.



This passage from The Gay Science (1887) is often used to substantiate the claim that Friedrich Nietzsche represents the precursor of modern athiesm, as his work is often cited for its supposed anti-Christian bias. This ignores the fact that on several occasions, especially in works like Beyond Good and Evil (1888), he had expressed his feelings that the Christian doctrine had been an advantage for the masses. In her biography of Nietzsche's life, Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche indicated that her brother had displayed a sincere gravitation towards individuals who had expressed their desire to live their lives in accordance with Christian doctrine. This may come as a surprise to individuals who are only acquainted with the mythological figure of Nietzsche, a figure who is 'remembered' for one famous statement, that God is dead. Ignorant of Nietzsche's true feelings, these people would suppose all believers to be the object of Nietzsche's scorn whereas, in fact, Nietzsche honored those who displayed attitudes of piety. Forster speaks of a bond of mutual affinity which quickly established itself whenever Nietzsche encountered what he considered to be an authentic Christian. In what may be taken as a moderate apology for the anti-Christian tenor of his writings, Nietzsche wrote, "My attack on Christianity is not due to any personal grievance; I have always had a friendly feeling towards earnest Christians."

Nietzsche, a man who claimed to have witnessed God in all his glory at the age of twelve, qualified his attack of religion as an attack on the teachers of institutional Christianity, its primary exponent being the Catholic church. However, the Christian ethos continued to have great appeal for Nietzsche; he felt that if it could be wrenched out of the hands of its controlling ideologues, the hierarchy of Catholic authority, it was possible for it to be rehabilitated. Up until the end of his life Nietzsche expressed bewilderment, even anguish, by the fact that he was in effect barred from entering a church as a Christian, that "the gentle teaching of Jesus had been so thoroughly distorted by the Christian fathers." Over time, Nietzsche retreated further and further away from any organized religion, while inwardly yearning to call for a transformation in the religious spirit, a re-configuration of Christian ethos from which he would be able to derive a spiritual satisfaction. Forster-Nietzsche remembers her brother often remarking that is was one of the greatest trials of his life to relinquish his faith in God. Nietzsche rendered his sorrow in prose, expressing his passionate feeling, not for the denial of the Christian God, but a lamentous ode dedicated to his passing.



Excelsior! Never more wilt thou pray, never more worship, never more repose in boundless trust--thou renounceth the privileged of standing before an ultimate wisdom, an ultimate mercy, an ultimate power,
and unharnessing thy thoughts--thou hast no constant watcher and friend for thy seven solitudes--thou livest without gazing upon a mountain, that hath snow on its head and fire in its heart--there is now no redeemer for thee, none to promise a better life--there is no more reason in that which happens, no love in that which shall happen to thee--thy heart now hath no resting place, where it needeth only to find, not to seek--thou refuseth any ultimate peace, thou desirest the eternal recurrence of war and peace: man of self denial, will thou deny thyself all this? When wilt thou gain the strength? No one ever had such strength!



However, Nietzsche regarded this denial of the religious spirit to be, ultimately, a necessity. Reconsidering his initial reaction to this phenomenon, Nietzsche grew hopefulm saying that he perceived a possibility that this denial of the religious self would someday enable humanity to deny the existence of any essential self. At this point humanity would have entered an era of ascetic self-denial which, as Nietzsche felt, would culminate in a rebirth of the religious spirit, a new era in the morphology of the spiritual self; this period of mass-asceticism will result in the production of a form of humanity imbued with all of the human energies, once flowing outward to an external God, now turned inward to give praise, continuous strength and plenitude to the male and female gods of the human world. The fatal flaw of Christianity, according to Nietzsche, which depleted the religious ideology of any significant effects, was its focus on the mystical and its attempt to prove the veracity of their mystical propositions in an empirical sense. More than anything else, Nietzsche demanded that religion requires a sense of intellectual honesty. Nietzsche felt that he was a being that could stand as a representative figure for the Christian tradition in its entirety and he saw his actions, specifically his move away from religion, as indicative of the mass exodus away from Christianity which was necessary in order to continue the process of transformation and becoming that is humanity.

Nietzsche felt that the only person equal to the perfection exemplified by the Christian philosophy was the figure of the Romantic artist. If society were to abandon these two figures, he noted, it would inevitably find itself caught in a downward slide, unable to find any spiritual satisfaction in those supplementary figures. For this reason, Nietzsche was obliged to exile himself from the world. He saw the lessons of Jesus, as expressed by the Church, a perversion of the spirit in which they were given. Converting the teachings of Jesus into the axiomatic dogmatism of the Church rendered Jesus into more an ideologue than a savior. Nietzsche saw the parables of Chirst, not as exercises in dogmatic ideology, but as the founding principles of an active concern with one's neighbors and environment. To re-align the spirit of Christianity is a perilous task, with potentially deleterious effects for that section of humanity which relies on the Christian moral code in order to bring an enduring significance to their lives, especially to those who are physically weaker as a result of sickness or disease, or the mentally impoverished. The significance carried by the Christian tradition was one which possessed the ability to restore these people to their original health conditions. Ultimately, as Nietzsche saw it, the spirit of Christianity is a life-affirming spirit, one that permits individuals from all nationalities, creeds and ethnicities to legitimize themselves as individuals; it brings them into a state of holiness, a type of being at peace with the world which, Nietzsche felt, was not attainable through other means.

Regardless of his difficulties with its ideological formation, Nietzsche nevertheless felt tremendous affinities for its founder; he felt that others, such as St. Paul, were responsible for distorting Christ's message of love, establishing it in a network of power so dense that any message transmitted from the source was inevitably precluded from having any effect; it took on a different meaning as it traveled through the dense ideological apparatus of Church-invented supplements to Christ's teachings, meant for the humble and poor in spirit. Nietzsche felt that this led to a problem, contradictory to the production of human beings. For the Church, in preaching to the congregations its desire to see Christians re-make themselves on the model of Chirst, was asking people who measure themselves according to a being who was without sin, a being who the ordinary person was never permitted to stand equal to. Nietzsche saw that this had a disastrous homogenizing effect of the self, on those huma differences which, in an ideal health society, would take on a diverse number of forms, as many forms of religious personae as there are people.

Seeing the role of history to consist in the production of this great multitude of forms, it was inevitable that Nietzsche singles out a seond point of Christian doctrine which, he felt, was damaging to the superior human being: the introduction of the idea that all souls are equal before the eyes of God. This principle of equality, as introduced in the context of religion, became the stimulus to the development of the ethical system of spiritual equality, a system which legitimized the power relationship which subjugates one class to another; the fact that human perception was ordered according to such a system led to a series of repercussions which touched on every field of knowledge, establishing end-directives for every intellectual pursuit. The manifestation of this type of thinking can be seen most clearly in the field of political philosophy: Nietzsche felt that the political theories of his day, the demands for socialism and democracy and, most of all, the pessimistic philosophies which were being adopted by members of every class throughout Europe in the 19th century, served as further indications that many individuals were determined to witness the equalization of civilizations. Once the superior individual came to an awareness of themselves as the representative embodiment of the supreme power, they were then obliged to act conscientiously, mindful of their position as shapers of the future, the diligent guardians and contributors to the repository of human knowledge. As this project makes clear, Nietzsche would have been very much in favor of postmodernism, in that it legitimizes the abandonment of the self and the emergence of a new forms of Christian subjectivity.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus and the Critique of Christian Morality

Although it was first published in 1922, 55 years before Jean-Francoise Lyotard announced the arrival of the postmodern age, Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus may be seen as the forerunner of those texts that are consensually acknowledged as postmodern texts, as it contains the premises on which many of postmodernism's critical thesis will be built on. Starting with the preface, Wittgenstein immediately qualifies this work as belonging to a different tradition. Although this text might ostensibly be packaged and lebeled as a philosophical text, Wittgenstein feels that such a label would be a misnomer. Wittgenstein judges the Tractatus to be an ordinary book, without burdening his text under the title of 'text-book', a signification which would position it as a work which played a central role in the production of knowledge. As Wittgenstein suggests, by freeing it from such a status, seeing it not as a book whose premises are held to be sacred or incontrovertible, the Tractatus becomes a work whose primary function is to provide pleasure for the comprehending reader.

The meaning of the book, as Wittgenstein puts forth even before we arrive at the first page of the text, stands as follows: "What can be said at all can be said clearly, and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." The Tractatus possesses a pioneering philosophical spirit, as Wittgenstein positions this work outside any mainstream philosophical intellectual framework; he problematizes the question of where to situate the Tractatus, saying that even he himself cannot be certain whether this work is 'philosophical' in an historical sense. It is my contention that this work, rather than seeing it as a philosophical text, ought to be seen instead as a text which is fundamentally of a religious nature--a key text in illustrating the way to a postmodern Christianity. For this reason, Wittgenstein believes his work to transcend the world of everyday works, where it enters a world of sacred texts, works whose significance is not be found through a direct appeal to the history of textuality.

According to Wittgenstein's conception of the world, rather than being the totality of objects, the world is seen as the totality of moral facts, all of the facts of morality, including both good and evil. The organization of these moral factors determine both that which is and that which is not. It is not that the moral order is affixed to the world of objects in a permanent sense. Instead, it is the world of objects which is imbued with this moral energy which inhabits space as a dynamic free-flowing entity. This is the new conception of morality of Postmodern Christianity, a Christian order which does not believe in claims of moral superiority. The postmodern Christian does not proscribe a particular action on what is, objectively, a normative ethical value, but sees ethical standards as emanating from a multiplicity of pivoting subjectivities.

Wittgenstein conditions this system of moral facts with the premise that, for any action, whether it is prescribed or proscribed by the moral order, the possibility of its occurrence (or non-occurrence) must be predetermined by that Being which governs the logical order, by the governing body which prevents any accidents from appearing: God, who rigorously maintains the foundations of our mathematics and geometry. That is, starting from moral facts, which are conditioned by the possibility or their occurrence, Wittgenstein reasons that if actions can be found to occur in the world, then it may be said that the creator-God has deemed it necessary for these conditions to exist. The world is ordered by a system of moral possibilities, the range of which is wider than anyone has supposed, for nothing in logic is accidental. Rather, that which is accidental is that which is isolated, that which has not been caused by the surrounding circumstances, for things which exist alone exist of their own account. All possibilities of action are to be treated as valid possibilities in a new moral universe. Accordingly, Postmodern Christianity does not expect any messiah or savior-figure to step forth and lead the world to salvation.

According to Wittgenstein, it is not possible to cognitively grasp objects apart from the possibility of their interconnectedness with other objects. However, in those instances where an object retains the possibility of its being situated in the context of a moral fact, as an element of a moral proposition, then these elements are elevated into the class of moral objects. Although the elements in the class of non-moral objects appear to exist independently of the system of moral objects, this is a false independence. All objects, both moral and non-moral, are to be viewed in a relationship of interdependence with the moral system. In this way Postmodern Christianity alters its view on the origin of morality. No longer do we see the moral system as having derived from the higher nature of humanity. Morality is now seen as arising directly from the clash of living objects in the arena of the real. In this new picture of the universe, the individual is judged not according to some innate quality of their soul, but by the characteristics they display in its actions, in their dealings with the outer world. In this way Wittgenstein switches our focus from what is often false, the surface nature of objects, to their true moral reality; he shifts the weigjt to the latter half of the inner-outer opposition.

As can be seen from the above, Postmodern Christianity brings with it a dynamic set of propositions, a conception of self-identity which is eternally in flux, as codes of morality are seen to form and collapse themselves repeatedly throughout the history of moral valuation. The individual who inhabits the landscape of Postmodern Christianity has been instilled with a questioning attitude regarding what were originally sacred truths. A personal code which centers on acting, transformation and becoming rather than the constricting code of punitive action, abstince, self-abnegation and the guilt of confession. For moral facts to contain a significant weight, so that they are considered to be self-identical with the principles of all social moralities, they must take a form other than that of an incontrovertible pronouncement from the highest authority; instead, these moral facts must be grouped in the space of a critique, a public space which each individual must have access to.

Deriving the concept of the moral fact from the philosophy of logical atomism, Wittgenstein goes about logically re-configuring the moral order of the universe. Seen in these terms, Wittgenstein can be seen as proposing a new conception of the universe where the world is made up of moral facts, facts which can be studied apart from their placement in the moral order. Atomic facts call for the interdiction of a new moral order and a new foundational (non-Aristotelian) logic, a logic structed according to the signs that are in play. Wittgenstein poses before us a conception of a new moral universe where the propositions of morality are composed from the world in which we live, not from an idealized picture of the world which is non-existent, the world as it ought to be. Postmodern Christians conducts their lives in the full knowledge that morality is not a strict code which prescribes a certain action for any given situation, but sees moral codes of a community as being derived from the surrounding social body.

By de-legitimizing the claims to morality one individual has over another, the Tractatus reveals that which has long been known, but has yet to be fully accepted: ultimately, it cannot be determined from mere observation of the conditions of an individual's life whether or not they are deserving of salvation. The conditions of one's salvation are determined, not according to the figure of the creator-God; instead, one's salvation must be ascertained according to a locus of intersubjectivity which is derived from a differentiated regime of (non-heirarchical) moral values. When Wittgenstein writes that "There is no picture which is a priori true," he makes a statement which summarizes his critique of the Christian moral order. In his view, there is no truth that can be obtained either prior to one's judgment or prior to one's experience of the situation. There is no escape from the process of decision-making, as the individual is at liberty, existentially, and must be held responsible for directing their own lives. In effect, the self generates its own non-hierarchical truth, the truth of one's existence and nothing more. Accordingly, a Postmodern Christianity recognizes there can be no original judgment, that there is no original sin, and would dissuade us from believing in the existence of a final judgment.

In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein supplies us with an extra dimension for our thought, one which allows us to supercede the limits imposed on thinking by the contemporary Christian tradition. He shows us how the logic of Christianity structures our thought, the extent to which our destination is predetermined by this structure, how we are rooted in this tradition we so boastfully claim to have proceded beyond. Through his critique of language, Wittgenstein strips away and discards all that which is dead, empty and meaningless. In this way he is preparing humankind for its journey into a new mode of religion. Philosophical perspectivism is a false farce necessary to conceive of this road to thought. Postmodern philosophy attempts to win us over to a new mode of truth, the truth of our own perspective.

"Colloquial language is part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it." Postmodern Christianity employs a simple language to communicate with clarity, order and intelligence; language that is in everyday use is better suited to discover the mystery of Being. The language of Postmodern Christianity does not employ metaphysical terms like spirit, sin or God, seeing these terms as potentially causing a great deal of confusion. "If a god creates a world in which certain propositions are true, he creates thereby also a world in which all propositions consequent of them are true." No longer will the negative correlation of a proposition be constructed in direct opposition with the positive; rather, these two propositions are seen to be complementary in nature. The positive is seen as being contingent on the negative, it presupposed the existence of the negative proposition, and the same may be found to occur conversely. This is why the world is constructed on the basis of an interdependence of logical moral values, as Wittgenstein reveals the hidden complementarity of positive and negative; this is also why the postmodern Christian believes in a God who has created a world where all the propositions contain an element of truth.

In addition, Wittgenstein tries to show that there is no such thing as a soul, the subject, as it is conceived in contemporary superficial philosophy. Here he explicitly states the ambitions of his project, the destruction of the metaphysical self. Wittgenstein seeks to convince us that the notion of a hierarchy of forms is an untenable position for the modern thinking individual; the only hierarchy that exists is the social hierarchy of present-day civilization. Again, Postmodern Christianity turns our attention to the world as it is actually experiencedm refusing to permit oneself to conceive of a next world to come after one's death and abandoning the after-life experience that the Christian doctrine suggests. It is only in the life-span of one's existence that one will be able to take part in the world; there will be no life after death, there will be no resurrection, there will be no final judgment. By questioning the existence of metaphysical phenomenon, such as the soul, Wittgenstein conceives of postmodern Christians as people who see themselves both as being part of the world in a macrocosmic sense and as a being whose existence comprises the totality of the world in a microcosmic sense. There is, in fact, no part of our experience which we could term as having existed previously, there are such such a prior facts.

Postmodern Christianity is only a sigle member in the class of religion; it is a Christianity which has abandoned the desire to realize a totalized truth, a Christianity which has realized that the world is not something to be conquered in Christ's name.

Jacques Derrida, Logocentrism and the Ethics of Deconstruction

If Postmodern Christianity has a new conception of Christian morals, does it also have a new conception of ethics as well ? There is an ethical aspect to Postmodern Christianity, as evident in Jacques Derrida's writing which, although it is highly important, has not yet been made clear. In this section I will attempt to render this dimension with the clarity it deserves. The Christian doctrine developed under the influence of Greek philosophy, Derrida makes clear to us, falling into logocentrism in its attempt to relate the practice of inscription with the Word of God or the Logos of divine presence. Derrida looks to break this pact which was established between word and truth for once and all.

Derrida targets logocentrism as one of the main philosophical obfuscations he intends to eradicate, for it postulates a certain approach to the world, and a specific manner of thinking about language, truth and reality. In Derrida's work the concept of the originary genesis of the world is consigned to the history of mythology, for Derrida believes that humanity has long outgrown this belief. It may even be said that such a story as the one from the Book of Gensis is responsible for the alienating effects of present-day society, a society of repetition and endless reproduction; a society locked in a permanent state of fallenness, having failed to find the original thing-in-itself, having failed to recapture the original heavenly kingdom in either one's actions or in one's art.

The basic tenents of logocentrism are as follows: writing exists strictly outside of living speech/full self-presence and, because of its lesser ranking, the opposition between inner and outer must be maintained at all times, for it is seen that writing may do damage to speech, or the divine word located within it. In this way, God's word has been given a privileged position, as something which is separate, standing outside of the words of humanity. This is related to the belief system which sees writing as a form of secondary speech, displaced from the site of divine reality and the belief that humanity's only legitimate legacy in the world being that of fallibility and original sin. In these terms, then, was the divine world conceived of as existing in a state of purity, a notion which legitimized the establishment of discriminatory social barriers between individuals, to keeping out all those who were unwanted: the debased, the useless, the alien, the non-moral, the marginal, the non-Christian.

Writing, too, has been seen as a realm governed by a functioning principle of repetition, as alphanumeric language has been seen as a mimetic device for knowledge, that 'true knowledge is not contained in books'; however, Derrida insists that there can be no thinking back to one's source of origin. He takes up the concept of writing as being the apotheosis of the fragility of humankind, which looks to compare their all-too-fallible understanding of God with God's omnipotent incomprehensibility. Looking over the course of philosophical history, Derrida sees that writing has been conceived of as an implement for knowledge, as a representation of knowledge and not the knowledge itself. With writing one could attempt to inscribe, in a primitive form, the divine Word which lay hidden in the soul, the word which has originally emanated from the higher Logos. As a result of focusing on the points in the texts of Greek philosophy which could be reconciled with in, the Platonic system which proselytized for the existence of a life of spiritual truth after one's passage through the physical plane, the existence of a life after death, came to be incorporated into Christian doctrine. Writing itself can only be understood in relation to its physical imprint, for it is to be abandoned after death; as a result writing was devalued as an instrument through which one might appreciate one's understanding of the mysteries of God: knowledge that could be attained through writing came to be devalued. As a result of our highly concentrated focus on the Word, the power of the Word was lost.

From the pre-Christian era to the modern period, literary critics have constructed a technique of analyzing the relatioship between text and criticism which is analogous to the hermeneutical principles through which the early Christians interpreted the Bible; and just as any written commentary, and interpretation, is inherently found to be wanting in comparison with the Word of God, so historically, any literary criticism has been consistently judged as a product derived from the creative work and not something which stands on its own merits, but as a derivative, supplementary form of thought. In this way, always, writing is cast under a cloud of doubt and suspicion because any text is only a supplement to the sacred texts that are necessary in a logocentric world. This primal psychological fear that we may lose the ability to see the original form through too rough a contact with the human world, through an all-too-intimate contact, is something which Derrida hopes to subvert.

As a result of the opposition which places speech over writing, the creation of literary criticism as an institution is forced to enter a position of subjugation to the more authentic literary text. All critical texts, including all commentary on the Bible, are consigned to secondary, less importat roles. Christianity exhibits the principles of logocentrism, the prejudice which has, according to Derrida, manifested itself repeatedly throughout the historical thought of the West. Derrida's philosophy contains a host of traces from the philosophy of the Jewish tradition, even more than those traces which derive from the Christian tradition. Derrid'a project is also similar to Wittgenstein's project of the destruction of hierarchies: in attempting to dissolve those boundaries which position a primary text from a secondary text, he is looking to establish a non-hierarchical regime of literary values. Derrida calls our attention to Christianity's hold over the written word, to that logocentric bias so firmly entrenched in our thinking, a bias which accounts for speech's entrance into a world of privileged signifiers such as presence and origin, whereas writing is consistently obliged to perform the duties of speech. Derrida employs the term 'play' to indicate his desire that texts should remain as they are first written, highly unstable, formless, in a dynamic state of flux. A text, either literary or critical, is not a series of static, precise calculations implemented in order to gain control over the literary work. Derrida sees the history of Christianity as being predetermined by its historical lineage in the philosophical texts of ancient Greece, the Greek lexicon of intelligibility. He views the terms employed by these ancient Greek philosophers as a structure which is analogous to the Christian tradition, and constructs his own lexical system in keeping with these two superannuated regimes of signs.

Each of these three systems move in a similar direction, that is, they seek to move us to a plane where, by grounding us historically, we are able to take responsibility for our own existence, rather than being dependent on the ideologies of others. In this way, Derrida conceives of Christianity as a terrain the individual can traverse without having to fear that, because he is dissociated from a social network, they lose their authenticity as a Christian. To position God's presence of the truth--and nothing else--is to actively confine oneself to a limited number of states of being in the age of human becoming, to blind oneself to the complete range of moral possibilities. Derrida calls our attention to the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who felt that the primary quest of Western philosophy is to provide absolute answers to our various epistemological miasmas; so, too, does Derrida suggest that it has been responsible for promoting a type of thinking which has led to the isolation of the individual subject as, in the quest for absolute knowledge, the individual is obliged to become familiar with the sinfulness of the self.

Historical Chrstianity has played a fundamental role in the marginalization of alternate discourses, proscribing an interactive dialogue between the self and other. This discourse which is repeated in the form of moral maxims seeks to limit its movement by sedimenting itself in the constricting system of ethical values--a self-regulating construct as it imposes an order from within on the outside world. Deconstruction is the dissemination of texts; the practitioner of this process may not be able to reveal and crucial points in these texts without first training oneself in the history of Western logocentric thought; only by first laying the historical foundation to one's thought can one leap ahead, beyond the current tradition and into an entirely new paradigm of Christian thought: this is precisely what Derrida intends to do. In constructing his post-modern philosophy, he seeks to legitimize the Christian tradition for the present age.

According to Iddo Landau, although they like to stress the differences which mark it as a new order, nevertheless, post-revolutionary conditions often bear significant traces of resemblance to the regime prior to the time of the revolution; these traces often have effects which suggest that the revolutionized state is more similar to the pre-revolutionized state than these revolutionaries might suggest. Landau poses the postmodern revolution as such a case of this 'false' revolution. Specifically, he suggests that the 'revolutionary' work of Jacques Derrida, which has played such a significant role in postmodern history, may be seen as merely a disguise. As we shall see, Derrida's work may be thought of as a reactionary attempt at legitimizing the Christian paradigm; this stands is stark contrast with the typical view, held by many postmodern philosophers, who see the work of Derrida as forming a significant break, a definite rupture with the philosophical tradition; these self-proclaimed 'postmodernists', seeking to establish a unique foundation for postmodernism, latch onto Derrida's criticisms of the philosophical tradition. In this way postmodernity is legitimized as a mode of thought which transcends the history of the Western world.

Briefly, Derrida's break with philosophical thought include the following: disbelief in the progressive advance of history; anti-narrative sense; dissolution of essentialisms; and the willingness of philosophical discourse to adopt a sense of playfulness. In this way, these similarities between Derrida's work and the Western philosophical tradition (which has its roots in Greek philosophy/Christian Gnosticism) are ignored, thus blurring the interdependent relationship between these two textualities. While critics such as Christopher Norris have spoken about postmodern texts as being like nothing else in modern literature, for they represent a challenge to the tradition of the discipline, Iddo Landau, taking an even more extreme point of view, feels that Derrida's work contains, in a sublimated form, a multitude of tenents to which Derrida lends a central significance, thus reproducing the same framework which is associated with the standard tradition of Western-Christian philosophy. As one might guess, this position--which goes against the grain of how Derrida is most usually perceived, that is, as a philosophical iconoclast--is one which endangers the entire philosophical tradition. Iddo sees Derrida as throwing away the old idols of thought and replacing them with a shifting multiplicity of philosophical values; by preaching a philosophy of bad faith and by breaking with history in such a radical way, Iddo sees Derrida as deliberately setting out to confuse our sense of historical-philosophical continuity. Through his methodic deconstruction of philosophy, Derrida carried out a re-working of the philosophy of Christianity, reconstructing its foundation for the postmodern age.

Specifically, Derrida is more traditional than he is usually considered to be, in that his philosophy is centered on theories about appearance and reality as other philosophical systems. In particular, the philosophical view which holds that behind appearances there is something essential which directs a person and the actions they commit is something that carries over. The appearance may be understood as the result of the principle that works behind it, and may be conceptualized as a veil which separated the person from the realization of the principle. The ability to perceive into the true state of things, the ability to perceive the reality which lies behind appearance, requires a special ability which may only be attained through the effort of an educated and knowledgable expert. This notion, the idea that there is a world of higher reality which lies behind the world of appearances carries over into Derrida's thought. As seen in such works as Of Grammatology (1967) and Writing and Difference (1968), Derrida's most central task is his attempt to discern the true reality behind the texts of such authors as Saussure, Rousseau, Freud or Descartes. Through a process of literary dissemination he calls deconstruction, Derrida reveals that these authors have produced texts which, like the authors themselves, are constricted by their "deeply dichotomous nature". These texts indicate, by means of a central oppositional relationship where one terms is positions over another, where one term is preferred at the other's expense, the establishment of a hierarchy of philosophical valuation.

Derrida's work contains an insistence on the necessity of reforming the present for the betterment of the future; this, too, may be seen as having derived from Christianity: the concept that one is obliged, because of some innate 'chosenness', where they have been selected to carry out this reformation of ethical values and, in so doing, they will heal the breach between this world and the next world. In this way Derrida singles out the necessity of repositioning human consciousness in relation to this world and not to 'the next world'; we should take root in the present world, rather than investing ourselves in this false ego-structure in which the self does not, in fact, exist. To carry out this role, to fulfill the duty one has been selected by God to perform, this healing of the world, make it necessary to promulgate one's healing discourse by swaying the beliefs of others in order to get them to appreciate the ultimate responsibility of their mission. This drive to reform the present in preparation for the advent of a new world of glorious Christianity has taken many forms throughout the history of Christianity: it antedates the drive for religious reform, asceticism and missionary work. Derrida emphasizes the need to institute a new order of human consciousness: a life-style of efficiency, where people are able to exercise their reason, the necessity to attain precise, practical knowledge, to live without any constraints, whether these be in the form of prohibitions on their physical liberty, or a damaging type of cultural prejudices. In fact, Derrida's postmodern Christianity goes beyond a contemporary Christianity which would exclude homosexuals and women (as well as other minorities) from raising their voices, from making their presence known in the general social body.

Derrida's philosophy is, primarily, a call to change, a call to action which bears significant similarities to the work of the Christian missionary. Derrida's tripartite reform, then, is basically a re-institutionalization of the method of social action as practiced by Christians: Derrida attempts to change the individual in society, changing the way we think about ourselves, write about ourselves and conceptualize the world around us. He calls our attention to the inherent logocentrism which appears throughout the culture of Western-Christian thought in an attempt to make us consciously aware of this process, in order to give us the intellectual strength necessary to resist complying automatically with this process. This can be seen in Of Grammatology, where Derrida proposes, in place of the metaphysical philosophies offered by the logocentric tradition, a method of deconstructing these oppositions.

Like the missionary who proslytizes for the acceptance of Christianity, Derrida, too, has a mission: to witness the ends of logocentrism's hold on humanity; through his writing, he preaches in the name of this cause. His philosophy petitions for a new kind of universalism, reconceiving the human world as one immense family, just as Christian missionaries had once preached that the rational spirit will one day come to bring the world to goodness. His pluralistic philosophical methodology reveals that the Christian is, essentially, a revolutionary. In addition, his theories are shaped by his desire to cleanse the world of those theories which stands opposed to his own brand of desconstruction. There are several other Christian beliefs which are expressed in Derrida's work, beliefs which represent a fundamental change in our thinking. What had been taken for granted, the close relation between knowledge and virtue, the idea the one's outside reflects one's inside is significantly altered by Derrida's re-conceptualization of the text, which has neither outside nor inside. With this new textual model, appearances are not to be construed for moralities, for he presents a philosophy which allows one to go deeper. On the whole, Derrida is performing what is, essentially, a reworking of our religious-philosophical language, clearing it of those elements which have lost significance due to their constant handling; he is re-establishing a foundation of significance with the purpose of enabling the human world to connect with the religious components of language, with the spiritual dimensions of life, with the divine presence in the contemporary, postmodern age.

Derrida is interested in many of the same social goals as those than can be found in Christian doctrine, the desire to see an end to the world's hunger, disease and poverty; the wish to help to poor; to convince people to abandon their prejudices. Derrida's arguments do not state explicitly his interests in altering our religious beliefs in an immediate way: unlike a strict social theorist, he does not call for change in the sphere of politics, nor does he critique our system of moral values, as a traditional Christian missionary would. Nonetheless, Derrida's work contains serious moral and social disruptions in its potential for affecting change. For example, in his granting legitimacy to the pluralistic culture which has abandoned discriminatory practices that are based on one's association of difference with threatening behavior, in his dis-location of the human center, the self, in his petitions for the extension of respect to the other: all of these qualities promise the oncoming of a system of universal empathy, a social contract which can be extended to all of humanity.

Traditional moral values are inherent in Derrida's philosophy, influences most precipitately by the Christian tradition, which sees the weak, the poor, the suffering the world to be the ones who are considered as 'good', as those which are most worthy of assistance. In this way Derrida is found to be in keeping with Christian tradition, which prescribes a conception of an ideal society wherein there reigns a spirit of equality in liberty and freedom, and in terms of political and ideological perspectives. Derrida vaunts the equal validity of differences, conceivingof the ideal state by affirming the Christian tradition through his thought. In Derrida's view, the ideal state is one in which there are no privileged and underprivileged, no deprived or preferred classes; it is a state which holds no strate which is prescribed as the proper position for any epistemological (or moral) underclass.

It would be incorrect to suppose that he wishes to restructure the heirarchy, replacing that which had been below with that which had been above; rather, he wishes to establish a non-heirarchal structuration of social bodies where each member of the community would have a place, a position from which they could commence any discursive activities; a site through which they could make their voices present, rather than be continually stunted in the structure of silenced absence, theoretically disbarred from estrances into a political or social commentary. The Derridean vision is one which predicts a society where there are no inequalities, offering a non-hierarchical alternative structure instead of the highly territorialized, hierarchial structure of the present world; a society free from the systems of dominance and subjugation.

As can be seen from the above, Derrida shares a variety of characteristics with the Christian tradition and is very much a part of the Christian philosophical heritage. For several years now, he has been engaged in his projects, surreptitiously re-legitimizing this tradition without notice by the philosophical community or by the general population. This chapter makes it clear that Derrida is inaugurating a new mode of Christinaity, a mode which, curiously, has been always already present throughout the history of Christianity; a paradox which takes shape in a true Derridean form.

Schizos, Nomads and Desiring Machines:

the Neo-Gnosticism of Gilles Deleuze

In his Anti-Oedipus (1972), Deleuze conceives a new form of subjectivity, the desiring machine, which I propose has resemblances to the sect of early Christians, the Gnostics. Mary Barrie describes Gnosticism as one who possessed the knowledge of the Mysteries of the Kingdom of God, the wisdom which is hidden behind the parables, a momentary look at the glory of God. It is this glimpse, this all too brief flash of comprehension which compels a person not to rest until he able to return to this vision again. Most western intellectuals find Gnosticism to be a confusing muddle, filled with obvious contradictions. It is on of the main theses of the Gnostic doctrine that comprehension cannot occur without soul-illumination, an experience which resembles the expansion of consciousness, now extending into the realm of mystical thought. For most present-day writers, Gnosticism is a form of syncretism, an discrete mixture of Christianity, Judaism, Platonism and the religious cults of the Egyptian and Babylonian cultures. Barrie sees Gnosticism as an inheritance of the past which could throw light on the future.

It was the iconoclastic spirit of the early Fathers which drove the Gnostics into the secret places of the earth. Beginning as a sect of Christianity, the Gnostics attempted to solve the problems of religious systems by passing directly to the Gnosis of things unseen. This power, formerly possessed by only a few, is now coming to birth in the human race as a whole. Gnosis is more than a system, or a series of thoughts; it is a way to salvation. The Gnostics see knowledge as a way to salvation; they do not hold to the idea of salvation through faith as prescribed by the Church; however, the Gnostic conception of knowledge is not a type of science or mathematics, it is associated with magic. The idea of magical knowledge remains associated with Gnosticism even today. Yet the Gnostics were not magicians, they were people who felt that each individual must work out his own salvation and, after freeing himself from the bonds of matter (a task the required a rigid self-discipline), this person may finally enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Gnostics developed a keen, powerful mind which was able to go beyond the appearance of things, to see and understand how man fit into the great scheme of things. The Church writers distorted Gnostic thought so thoroughly that much of the Gnostic tradition has been lost; however, the Gnostic period is considered to be on the richest periods of human development. Under the Gnostic doctrine every aspect of life, no matter how great or how small, was part of One Life; religion stood for this unity and art and literature were inseprarable from it. The Gnostics were men who, growing weary of the world, became reclusive, seeking the knowledge of what lay behind the mortal veil of flesh and material sense, behinds these outer forms and the allegories of religion. The Gnostic community was composed of individuals who subjected themselves to a life of simplicity in dress, food and personality. Having given up all of their worldly possessions, these individuals possessed nothing more than two robes, one for work and one for worship. The dominant spirit in the community was one of silence and contained reverence; there were no unnecessary words of conversation, even meals were eaten in total silence. People interacted with each other only to listen to other members of the community speak about Scripture. Above all else, the central focus of their lives was purity, grace and love.

This atmosphere of solitude and simplicity was quite appropriate for a population who had renounced all worldly wealth, dedicating their lives to God. The Gnostics emphasized the social virtues, as the idea of justice played a role in directing all of their actions. Practicing a strict inner discipline, the Gnostics regulated themselves strictly. Public areas were to be avoided always and each Gnostic checked himself according to a strict self-examination, overpowered by the desire to attain a complete purity through the mastery of one's emotions. Through ascetic purification and disciplining the body, through the denial of all self-becoming and through adhering to a strict code of morality which kept the body in exile from reality, the Gnostics sought to cleanse the mind so that the soul could reveals the principles which inhabited it. Their code of self-discipline centered on mathematics as a means through which the mind could become free to experience the world.

In the Gnostic community little emphasis was placed on mental birth; instead, the Gnostics focused on the need to obtain ecstatic visions through purity of heart or through one's liberation from sexual desire; such liberation can only be attained through a renuciation of one's world existence. The Gnostic code entails the rejection of the body, as it is the body which causes man to enter into all kinds of sinful activities; it is the vehicle for his desires. The Gnostics saw the body as a mere disguise which must be dissembled as the individual becomes wiser and more skillful in the magic arts.

In his work Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze speculates on the dawn of a new type of individual in the modern world, an individual which surfaces because the postmodern age calls into existence a new form of subjectivity. Deleuze's name for these new subjects indicates his view of their status as non-territorialized subjects in the Cartesian sense: the desiring-machines. It is these schizophrenic individuals who are able to decode the structures of modernity and, by taking positions as denatured subjects, are able to reconstruct themselves as itinerant individuals who are controlled by their machine-like desire. Unlike ordinary human beings who are born from the mother's body, these desiring-machines are born as the end-products in the cycle of capitalist production. The presence of desiring-machines continues to grow, unless the institutional order of modern bourgeois society is re-aligned. The ceaseless production of desiring-machines in modern capitalist society is a result of the proliferation of those types of discouse which seek to codify the human subject under a specific intellectual framework, such as the ones constructed in the age of philosophical structuralism. To be produced as a desiring-machine may be seen as an act of rebellion against all normalizing institutions, whether those be social standards, ethical values or moral systems. It is my contention that through their stress on discipline and other techniques of self-subjugation, these desiring-machines come to resemble these early Christian Gnostics. The progression from a Gnostic to a desiring-machine can be seen as a record of humankind's personal transformation into a type of individual who, blind to all forms of social morality can only view one desire--their own. According to Deleuze, it is the role of the desiring-machine to act in accordance with this personal will, a drive which he likens to Wilhelm Reich's conception of desire as what is, essentially, a Revolutionary force. It is through their actions that these desiring-machines are able to liberate humanity by reversing the process where desire is enslaved to the service of the social body.

Does Deleuze's concept of the desiring-machine resonate with the earlier picture I sketched of the life of the Gnostic early Christian ? Specifically, what comes through most clearly in both concepts is the desire to regulate oneself, allowing the compulsion for self-regulation to go unchecked, so that one becomes a tyrant over one's self, a fact which causes us to love the very thing which dominates and exploits us. It must always be remembered that Anti-Oedipus is a book about ethics, a book about the proper way to conduct one's life. This book contains the principles essential for achieving a state of complete purification, ridding life of all forms of fascism. It lauds the individual's freedom from all unitary and totalizing ideologies as its highest state of actualization and the withdrawal of all ties of filiation from those categories which presuppose the existence of a negative other, which Western thought has historically held to be a sacred institution. Postmodern Christianity, as Deleuze sees it, prefers the positive over the negative, differences over uniformity, multiples over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. These postmodern religious subjects, the desiring-machines, believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. A proposition which marks Anti-Oedipus as being a representative of neo-Gnostic doctrine is that, with this text, true revoltionary action is located in one's drive towards reality, not in the loss of the self in forms of representation; the postmodern Christian sees both the concept of the soul and this notion of the originary site from which we derive as equally untenable in the present period.

The postmodern Christian knows politics have nothing to do with the truth; they do not fight wars in the name of Christian morality. Rather, they use holy scripture to intensify their thoughts about God, to arrive at judgments which are augmented by this intense concentration of their mental energies. There will be no more holy wars, as postmodern Christians do not attempt to use Christian morality to legitimize violent actions in the name of others. Instead, a de-individualization is required, for the individual is the product of the discourse of power which is organized throughout society. The church, the family, the school, all must be de-hierarchized; only in this way, Deleuze predicts, is it possible to return to a structure where individuals act as missionaries, setting out to bring new converts to de-individualization. These postmodern mission-workers, in seeking to prevent individuals from becoming so enamored with the divine presence, often themselves become blinded to this divine presence.

The model of which the desiring-machine is based on is the schizophrenic who inhabits the modern world. This is an individual who, having been confined by religion, breaks free to find himself lacking any position in human society and lacking, too, any position in the structure of the bourgeois family. Without God, without children, without father and mother, this individual finds himself in a universe which is inhabited by machines: here we have the desiring-machine. He lives, not alongside Nature as an organic component of the natural kingdom, but as a process of production. In an attempt to suppress the emergence of these desiring individuals, the figure of Oedipus has come to dominate our bourgeois ideology as it helps to preserve the status quo. Making no distinction between man and nature, the desiring-machines work only when they break down, and by continually breaking down.

Like the Gnostic early Christian, the desiring-machine views himself as an exile from reality, as a victim of his own body, which is a tomb, a prison in which he has been cast into the world. He must find a way out; existence is an ill. As the Gnostic recognizes himself as a spark of divinity, cast into exile as the result of a cosmic plot, so does the desiring-machine feel like a prisoner in a sick world. It is difficult to avoid seeing a Gnostic inheritance in many aspects of contemporary culture. Umberto Eco claims to find a Gnostic origin at the root in all types of human relationships, especially in romantic love-relationships, which are oftentimes governed by renouncement, a sense of loss, where individuals would often praise a purely spiritual relationship which excluded any sexual connection, for there is a Gnostic root the principles of romantic idealism. The desiring-machine and the Gnostic each celebrate evil as an experience of deep revelation, and go about searching for experiences through which they can realize the destruction of the body by means of sex and ecstasy, through drugs and delerium, through Gnosis and an interminable desire.

The Lexia of Roland Barthes: Relocating the Divine Presence

Through his voluminous writings, the semiotician Roland Barthes established himself as one of the founding presences of postmodernism. Barthes spent his life deconstructing our society's use of signs, symbols, texts, fashions and cultural institutions. This section reads the work of Roland Barthes as a re-evaluation of our religious beliefs; specifically, I will be looking at his concept of the lexia, a textual block which serves as the central site for the relocation of the divine presence in the postmodern age. Before I commence on his radical interpretations of the Barthesian ouevre as a contribution to theology, it will be necessary to define the discursive context in which he developed his theories.

Barthes, one of the leading figures of French Marxism, analyzed a variety of elements and institutions in contempoary culture, finding how each of them represented a manifestation of our desire to elevate these elements to a level of eternal signification. As Barthes suggested, these iconic presences, whether they are objects (novels, detergents, toys), events (cooking, criticism, wrestling matches) or figures (Einstein, Garbo, Gide), as component pieces of bourgeois culture, as representations of bourgeois ideology, all come to represent, in a mythical sense, the bourgeois desire to achieve a metaphysical state of full presence; in this way, the bourgeois individual is allowed to transcend their being by liberating themselves, allowing themselves to experience a level of reality which is beyond the real world. The mythologizing of bourgeois culture may be seen as an attempt to compensate for the death of God which Nietzsche had ironically announced. In a verification of the Nietzschean thesis, Roland Barthes' Mythologies (1957) was written with the project of revealing how the divine presence had been disseminated through the commodity-logic of bourgeois society. These iconic presences in contemporary culture share a common significance in the sense that they have all been appropriated into a mythic sign-system. In this way these sign have been elevated by the dominant social groups for the express purpose of reinforcing the ideology that keeps them in power. This type of signs, signs that are used to legitimize the social structure, is known as an ideological sign.

Seen in this way, these signs may be understood as agents which struggle to maintain the hegemonic order, strengthening a particular ideological viewpoint and keeping proponents of other viewpoints under control. The ruling class, desiring to impart an eternal character to the ideological sign, calls a halt to the struggle within the sign itself. This is an important step in maintaining social order, for if signification can be eternalized instead of being in a continual state of flux, then the ideology will adhere to the status quo, thus ensuring the continual dominance of the ruling powers. Therefore, signs and ideology may not be taken in isolation, but are permanently connected to one another.

In his work S/Z (1970), Barthes turned his attention to the manner in which modern authors constructed their texts, implicitly revealing a desire to transcend the banal textual sphere of the human world; for this reason their texts can be read as articles of faith. As Barthes saw it, the structural relationship corroborates with an ethical ideology; this reveals how the hierarchy of values encoded within these texts derives from the religious tradition of Christianity. Through a process of cultural archeology, Barthes shows how the same war of signification (good vs. evil, God vs. Satan, spirituality vs. sinfulness) retains a complicit relationship with the religious tradition which had been supposedly rejected in the writings of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and others during the 19th century.

By analyzing texts produced at the vanguard of literary realism, authors such as Balzac, Zola and Flaubert, Barthes reveals how, in each of these works, the author created a hierarchy of moral values. These values, Barthes shows, derive their prime signification from the fixed position society ascribes to the divine. By attempting to convey a sense of naturalism through language, these authors seek to transcend the textual limits which had been imposed on their works, in this way indicating the limits society had imposed on the text itself. It is a unique feature of the realist text, Barthes claims, that it is able to transcend the limits of signification and point to the underlying movement of our religious nature, encoding in it that plane of signification which has been acknowledged as belonging to the realistic school of literature. Postmodern Christianity recognized that, if humanity ever had access to a level of spirituality through language, that path has since been lost; for by being used over an extended period of time, any signification that language once possessed has been eroded. Our spirituality now has to be approached from another direction, as our modern approach to literary texts demonstrates, no single text can be said to impose its power over the full range of the canon.

Barthes' critical enterprise consists of representing the literary work through a series of textual divisions, dividing a text such as Balzac's Sarassine into as many as 500 lexical units. In this manner Barthes attempts to enter into the very site of textual production, as a way of examining the structures of signification themselves, how textual significance is distributed, the concatenation of significance along lines of textual development, how the realist text is constructed with what is, fundamentally, the mythological-mystical foundation at the basis of these 'realistic' texts, as these authors come to be seen as being responsible for the installation of the divine presence in the modern period. This postmodern equivalent of the divine presence is conditions by this development of significance which is organized and constituted by Barthes' reconfiguration of the divinity. In postmodern society the presence of the divinity is not qualified as a supplemental proposition, for it serves to add to the presence of the real, which is itself manifested by the order of signification found in the text of a realist writer such as Balzac.

This mystical foundation is central to the social production of the literary text, as the text is constituted, not by the unseen hand of a prime mover, but is formed through the imbrication of textual layering, forming a network of complex relationships which are in constant flux. In this way, Postmodern Christianity announces from a revolution in language, the emergence of a poetic writing which implicitly acknowledges the divine presence. But from where, one wishes to ask, does this divine presence emanate? This new location for the divine presence does not issue forth from a sphere of private language. The divine presence in Postmodern Christianity has been relocated throughout the inner workings of the realist text, in the space which is 'behind the scenes' of the literary text, into that textual seam where text both directs and is directed by signification; this is the space that Barthes called "the structure of structuration." This postmodern divinity is, according to Roland Barthes theory of textuality, a divinity whose nature is not fixed, but is changeable. Postmodern Christianity realizes that, because religion was first organized as a creation of human consciousness, it cannot remain fixed; like any systematized body of knowledge, it is subject to being re-organized according to the spaces which have developed in the modern period.

Barthes' new conception of the text presents us with a new model of presence and a new model of divinity as well. This new vision serves to nullify those texts which are overtly dogmatic and didactic; it de-stabilizes the ideological position these texts look to instill on a permanent basis. Postmodern Christianity is a time when one is not required to adhere to a systematized faith; the reader of divine text himself becomes a divine textual being. No longer simply the reader (the decoder) but now also the writer (the inscriber) and truly the receiver of holy language. In this way Barthes' analysis of the realist text explicates an idea of this text as re-generative, and divinely organized, full presence. For Roland Barthes, writing is the manifestation of pure consciousness, the corporealization of presence. It is an ideal medium for the preparation of the ideological ground on which meaning is to be installed, the position from which meaning is to be disseminated throughout the system.

As conceptualized in S/Z, the lexia represents an ideal form of textuality; this concept resonates most accurately with the newly developed technology of computerized hypertext. The hypertext document is composed of blocks of words (or lexias) linked electronically by multiple paths, chains and trails in an open-ended, unfinished form of textuality. In such a document, it is the lexia which serves as the dominant form of textual composition, as it allows individuals to position themselves in relation to language in such a way that, although they remain situated in the singularity of their perspective, they do not become the central point through which all language is transmitted; rather, reading becomes a process whereby the subject is de-centered. The lexia becomes a point in space which contains all other points simultaneously. The concept of the lexia can be seen as an evolution of textual theories which are developed to accompany the advent of the electronic age. However, Barthes' theory is far from being merely theoretical, as these concepts have already been actualized as working components of our postmodern society, the electronic medium of hypertext as well as the computer-controlled World Wide Web can be seen as a technological response to this evolution of textual theory.

Even with the age of electronic information, the text finds its referential basis in a type of textuality which has been present since antiquity -- the parable. Like Jesus' method for instructing his followers, this facet allows individuals to choose their own center for experience. The Barthian-structured postmodern text, the hypertext document, functions as a traveling parable. The high degree of mobility of this model of textuality allows any number of individuals to take an active role in the reading/writing process, linking together segments of text and creating different reading pathways. The parable-like quality inherent in this method of exposure to various forms of textuality has a consequence which will affect society greatly.

As I see it, this model of a computerized society of readers will further prepare the ground for the advent of the Postmodern Christian world. By exchanging the stories of their lives in the form of textual parables, individuals will experience the opening-up of horizons for discursive intercommunication, which will have significant ramifications for the acquisition/sharing of moral attitudes and religious principles. This will serve the Postmodern Christian well....

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