One of the principal objections to religion turns on exclusive truth claims seemingly embedded in the main world religions, and the consequences these claims entail for peaceful coexistence. Yet the concept of truth, and the concept of falsehood, emerged in a very late phase in the development of religious consciousness, and cannot be predicated of religion in general. Moreover, the concept of truth is a two-edged sword wielded not only to confound the worshippers of idols, maybe by exemplary violence, but also to establish the idea that there are criteria, including criteria that can be turned critically and prophetically against those who expound them. The issue is important because these criteria relate to kinds of truth and falsehood very different from those in the natural sciences, even though there may be a genealogical connection between the late emergence of the idea of religious truth and the even later emergence of the idea of scientific truth. It is a paradox that the critics of religion present themselves as exponents of the unequivocal truth of the established findings of natural (and biological) science to the exclusion of other modes of truth-telling. They too rejoice in exclusive truth claims and in a self-image as warriors, heroes and martyrs in the cause of an aesthetically satisfying beauty inherent in the truth of things as they really are. In recent times religious people have suffered a great deal from the zeal of those who restrict truth-telling to the type of truth represented by the natural, biological and social sciences. The concept of truth is a two-edged sword in every context, not just in the context of religious affirmations.
I have earlier suggested there is a multiplicity of kinds of truth and of non-naturalistic chains of consequence, for example in literary narrative, especially tragedy, and in history, as against the missionary zeal of those committed to the univocity of truth. The kind of non-naturalistic truth-telling found in Christianity, as well as in Buddhism and to some extent the other axial religions, runs against the grain of the realities exposed in particular by biology but also by social science. These sciences show that the struggle for dominance and its associated codes of honour and face constitute the default position of human society, alongside and as a consequence of the imperative of social solidarity.
Christianity distances its followers, particularly those who pursue its precepts consistently, from the empirical givens of ‘the world’ understood as a realm governed by what the New Testament calls ‘the principalities and powers’. The chronic disparity inherent in a world temporarily under the government of ‘Satan’ generates the concepts of temptation and evil: hence ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil’. Curiously enough this borrowed concept of evil is central to the moral judgements passed against religion by Richard Dawkins. The ‘New Atheists’ extract the concept of evil from its religious matrices, without noticing either its origins or its blatant incompatibility with their own philosophical positivism. Moreover, they have located a prime source of evil in the very prophetic tradition which initially exposed it through the embrace of transcendence. They naively suppose things would be so much better were the evil of religion removed and the natural benevolence and happy consciousness of man allowed to express itself and to flourish, even though according to their own scientific premises man is driven by the struggle for survival and haunted by religious fantasies that infect his consciousness with all the power of a destructive virus. This makes sense of the moral excoriation of religious believers. It also makes sense of the implausible optimism of the ‘atheist bus’ travelling around London with its message ‘There probably is no God – now relax and enjoy your life’, and of an optimistic programme of material redemption secured by the power and technical domination of science worthy of Auguste Comte.
Non-naturalistic discourses are not based on hypostasised entities like religion but on the impacted richness of the verbal sign according to particular historical and cultural contexts, and on the internal ‘logic of the situation’. I now turn to the modes of truth-telling embedded in these discourses, including the discourse of Christianity. I look first at truths relating to religion and violence embedded in the story of the Passion central to the Christian Gospel. Christianity embodies its ‘truth’ in dense signs within impacted and multilayered narratives, for example, the cross understood as a dense sign at the heart of the story of the Passion. At issue here is the kind of truth exhibited in the kerygmatic narratives of a faith like Christianity. Truth of this kind does not conform to those kinds of mutually exclusive truth based on a discourse centred on discrete empirical entities and their properties.
Christian truth is based on a narrative (and its associated signs) that exhibits a moral centre of gravity generating a more immediate and organic spectrum of interpretative potentials and a more remote and incidental range of appropriations according to different situations and types of society, of which feudalism is one, early modernity another and industrial capitalism yet another. The distinction between organic and incidental cannot be demarcated by abstract and rational criteria, but only by tracing the courses of different socio-moral logics and their mutual relations and elective affinities. And what that means can only be made clear by concretely tracing the ‘logic’ of the organic potentials, and then the logic of the incidental appropriations. That is a delicate task quite different from stipulative definitions of what is to count as real or true Christianity.
We are not dealing with true or false in that irrelevant sense, but with overlapping logics – some of which are tightly related and others much less so. Once you understand what is meant by a centre of moral gravity you realise that these comprise a limited set and that they overlap in a manner that is far from mutually exclusive. The very notion of mutual exclusivity belongs to an alien kind of truth, and that means it really is very simplistic to argue that the field of ‘religion’ (meaning here the specifically axial religions) is inherently rife with incompatible truth claims. Alternative centres of moral gravity such as we find in Islam and Confucianism are indeed markedly different from each other, but they nevertheless overlap and interpenetrate.
Within each of the different centres of moral gravity there are varying articulations of the space between timeless Being and of Becoming as experienced by humans under the pressures of time, especially shortness of time and expectations of eschatological judgement. The major traditions contain elements of both, and one may perhaps point to a maximum difference between a Christianity concerned with moral trajectories of Becoming under the pressures of shortness of time and modes of Chinese thinking that arrest time in the pleasures of moral and aesthetic contemplation. The Christian tradition oscillates between anticipations of a kingdom achieved by the power of God and very occasional attempts to eliminate structures of hierarchy and power through the exemplary violence of revolution, whereas Chinese traditions seek simultaneously to control and legitimate hierarchy and violence through a concept of harmony which requires the hidden compulsions of self-control. This creates different balances between Being and Becoming within these two traditions. In the Christian case there are interim resting places for the experience and exploration of benevolent Being which may either take the form of aesthetic contemplation or the devotional techniques of the ascetic tradition. These visits to what in The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) Bunyan calls ‘the delectable mountains’ are not final resting places but refreshments and assurances about what may be attained when the spiritual warfare of the earthly pilgrimage comes to its final conclusion. The pilgrimage of faith and hope will involve tragic encounters with despair, guilt, pathos and bathos over the distance between what is aimed at and what is achieved, generating a drama of judgement and forgiveness, and chronic falls into the abyss of non-Being. This kind of spiritual drama of Becoming is relatively rare in Chinese civilisation.
What is crucially different about the centres of moral gravity comes out most clearly in relation to discourses of power and violence. These discourses lie so deeply embedded in human society that the contrast between them and ‘non-naturalistic’ centres of moral gravity such as we find in the New Testament will yield the maximum illumination of the problems at issue. I now turn to the Christian centre of moral gravity in the Passion narrative to elicit the relations it generates, organically and incidentally, to discourses of power. I have a particular interest in the tension between everything implied by non-violence in the Sermon on the Mount, as that is realised in the Passion narrative, and the honour code at the heart of feudalism and, of course, at the heart of many other types of society. The explicit prohibition of an honour code in Christianity can be rephrased as its distinctive understanding of the integrity of the non-violent Christian subject. The integrity and consistent moral responsibility of the non-violent Christian subject embodied in Jesus makes the relation of Christianity to societies where ‘honour’ is central particularly tense. The tension demands strategies of negotiation and interim reconciliation.
This goes beyond the Weberian account of tensions within the economic, political, aesthetic and erotic spheres to explore the pressures on self-fashioning exercised by shortness of time and imminence of judgement. According to the Gospel (John 9:4), ‘the night is coming when no man can work’, but in the meantime we work furiously to give an account of ourselves to redeem ‘the waste sad time/Stretching before and after.’1 Clive James in his poem ‘Dreams Before Sleeping’ summons up his losses and disasters in lapidary accounts of how you may lie on ‘the bed of nails you made’ and transfigure your tragedies and failures into lasting poetry.2 This is the aesthetic solution some people pursue for the whole of their lives. The logic of these silken threads of moral consequence is quite different from the hard chains of material causation found in natural science.
Art and literature in Christian civilisations are chronically concerned with the deteriorations that follow from lapses in consistent moral responsibility and with the apparently trivial and inadequately motivated first steps that eventually stumble into a moral abyss where the Christian self becomes alienated from itself and God. Interim bargains are made that appear to exact limited immediate costs but imperceptibly accelerate into monstrous moral debts that can neither be faced nor sustained. Classic instances include Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus where Faustus cries out in despair, ‘See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament’; Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust; and the career of Tom Rakewell in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. The chronically indebted ‘Christian’ lives in two worlds with incompatible frames of reference which cannot be brought together and create a condition which might be described as ‘moral osteoporosis’. It is precisely here that the dramas of confession and restoration take place. In many modern versions there is only waste without redemption, a form of tragedy without catharsis anticipated in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and Troilus and Cressida.
Let me move on to re-present a crucial turning point in the narrative of the Passion: the kiss of Judas. This cameo is not a statement about relations between entities summed up in the dictum rerum cognoscere causas, but an encounter we understand according to the logic of the situation. In sociological terms this is the deployment of the classic Weberian method of verstehen, except that ‘understanding’ is not at all specific to sociology. We understand in precisely the same way when we scrutinise what is involved in dramatic representation, for example Shakespeare and Ibsen, and in the representations of religious narrative. We ‘understand’ whether we consider the data of sociology or the closing scenes of King Lear and Antony and Cleopatra, or Titian’s last painting of the Pietà or the final chapters of the Gospels. Sociology is affiliated in a profound way with the humanities, including theology. Some sociologists reject any such affiliation, perhaps for reasons connected with status anxieties about the nature and purity of their scientific intentionality as understood from a natural scientific perspective. This status anxiety complements the reluctance of natural scientists to enter into the problems and practices appropriate to social science.
The kiss of Judas represents an act of treachery consummated through the act of love. It also represents the arrest by night of the non-violent innocent by the corrupt forces of state violence ‘with swords and with staves’. The arrest of Jesus is a turning point in the narrative because the range of options available to Jesus is drastically reduced. The exercise of the integrity of the non-violent Christian subject has to accept the likelihood of its own total negation and destruction rather than compromise its integrity and thwart redemption by exercising the will to power and calling on material force. The imperative of non-violence is announced and proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount and realised in the Passion narrative, which means that Bernard Shaw’s distinction between Christianity and Crosstianity misses the intrinsic connection between word and action, between the Sermon on the Mount and the moral and existential drama of redemption.3 The drama of redemption is one of descent into limitation without which there can be no ascent into glory: no crucifixion, no resurrection. Both Creed and Scripture agree that ‘He that ascended is he that descended.’ Humility and glory are as closely related as Sermon and Atonement.
The distinction between different kinds of truth is intimately related to the distinction between different kinds of causation: there are relations of cause and effect belonging to the realm of physical nature; and relations of intention and consequence that belong to the moral causes we embrace, the ends we seek and the means by which we seek them. The chronic confusion between the discourse of cause and effect and the discourse of intentionality reaches back to a more fundamental confusion in the late medieval period associated with Duns Scotus between God understood as a factor within the ensemble of causes and God understood as the transcendent ground of all being which we encountered in the debate between Richard Dawkins and Rowan Williams. The logic of causation is constantly misapplied in the realm of intentionality, and the resulting confusion has distorted the practice of all the humanities in the modern university to the point where the defence of theology is the defence of the humanities, and vice versa. The paradox of sociology, of course, is that it has to take the former into account while needing to understand the latter.
Five key passages in the Passion narrative exemplify the consistency and purity of the purposes of Jesus while at the same time facing quite directly the temptation of an appeal to force. They are the rejection of the option of the two swords in Luke 22:35–8 with the words ‘It is enough’; the healing of the wound inflicted by Peter on Malchus, the servant of the high priest; the rejection of an appeal to ‘twelve legions of angels’ in the exchange with Pilate; the silence of Jesus in the Judgement Hall when confronted by the question ‘What is truth?’; and the cry of desolation from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ The cry of desolation represents the uttermost limit of self-negation freely accepted as the cost of non-violence: the plumb-line of redemption reaches to the very bottom to redeem the full range of human experience, including the absence of God. The significance of the silence of Christ when faced with the question ‘What is truth?’ lies precisely in the kind of truth Jesus represents, which is the truth that sets you free under constraint. It belongs to the category of existence and the freedom of the spirit, as in the saying ‘I AM the Truth’, rather than the category of causation where truth is a property inhering in fixed chains of causation.
All our life choices belong to the category of existence and the freedom of the spirit, and are therefore beyond empirical truth without contradicting empirical truth. They are subject to costs and benefits that operate according to a moral calculus which includes all the discourses of tragedy, whether historical, literary, psychological or theological. No one can dismiss these discourses as ‘superstitious’, given that superstition is generated by the category of mistaken causation, whereas tragedy is generated by life choices circumscribed by consequences, dilemmas and limits. Sociology is as much the analysis of limits as is theology. Moreover, existential truths are made urgent and demand resolution under the pressure of shortness of time, which in the Gospel narrative takes the form of eschatology and the imminence of divine judgement, but which in human experience takes the form of the mortal dangers of contingency and the uncertain interval between the present moment and death.
This condensed and paradigmatic narrative, with its dense and impacted signs, above all the sign of the stripped and humiliated body at the hands of state power and corrupt justice, was infiltrated into societies dominated by codes of face and honour such as feudal society at the time of the Crusades. The ‘countenance divine’ encountered societies where the maintenance of face by the arbitration of violence is written into every social relationship, including negotiations between heralds over the proper occasions of war and the domestic relations of one sex to another. That is why insult is the trip-wire initiating violent operations on the body to the point of castration and extraction of the guts of the offender, and why adultery is the trip-wire activating murder. The tension between these two moral systems is bound to require strategies of negotiation and partial reconciliation.
The prime paradox will be one which provides a major exhibit for those who present Christianity as a key actor in the theatre of war: the Crusades were concerned with taking holy territory by force in the name of a faith whose paradigmatic discourses reject both territory and force. It is entirely correct to note the paradox but mistaken to miss its significance as the fulcrum of a negotiation between a non-violent discourse and the exigencies of a warrior code, between blood given in the course of personal sacrifice to establish a brotherhood of peace and the blood of enemies shed by the blood-brotherhood of arms.
We can trace the negotiation and amelioration of the tension between the non-violent discourse and the patriarchal honour code in the Renaissance realisation of feudal relationships and knightly honour found in Shakespeare’s Henry V and other early modern classics of representation. In Henry V the king is represented as choosing between different moral strategies, many of which crucially involve negotiations between the feudal codes of honour and war and the very different imperatives of Christianity, as well as somewhat more compatible moral models in the Old Testament. We find the Old Testament invoked after Henry has triumphed over the French at the Battle of Agincourt when he gives thanks to ‘the God of battles’ and commands Non Nobis Domine be sung attributing victory to God rather than to English valour. Elsewhere, Henry displays a calculating version of Christianity to the citizens of Harfleur by promising them mercy if they submit, but unrestrained violence if they do not. Henry also veers between a utilitarian ethic designed to secure compliance with English rule because it endeavours to pacify by justice and mercy, and an ecstasy of violence against prisoners, stimulated by fear of a French counter-attack.
Perhaps the tension between Christianity and the early modern moral code emerges most starkly when monarchs appropriate different biblical images and exploit analogies between the biblical past and the early modern present. It was, for example, easy enough for Henry VIII to represent himself as King David, or for Edward VI to understand his Protestant reforms as allowing him to assume the role of the biblical reformer King Josiah, or for Oliver Cromwell to be portrayed with politic ambiguity by Andrew Marvell as Gideon and as the bramble who agreed to be king of the forest (Judges 9:8–14) in his poem The First Anniversary.
However, it was much less easy for monarchs to imitate Christ. A non-violent preacher condemned and executed by properly constituted authorities had scant appeal to the Renaissance ‘Godly Prince’, ruling jure divino. Richard II as depicted by Shakespeare and Charles I as depicted in contemporary iconography appropriated discrete elements in the narrative of the Passion rather than Christ crucified. In the case of Shakespeare’s Richard II the king in his last extremity complains melodramatically that he is pursued by more traitors than Christ, and claims each of them is much worse than Judas. (Queen Elizabeth saw Shakespeare’s representation of Richard as mimicking her own precarious situation and was far from pleased.) In Eikon Basilike Charles I is represented as Christ in Gethsemane, but the martyrdom of Charles is hardly a ‘passion narrative’ freely accepted.4 These exempla bring out the profound incompatibility between the non-violent sacrifice at the centre of the Passion narrative and feudal and early modern discourses of power. The early modern monarch exploited an analogy with Christ crucified only when under duress, and even then only at a tangent. Stuart kings expected and required non-resistance to monarchs by God appointed, but did not for a moment contemplate non-resistance to rebels. They understood the reciprocity of violence as part of the natural order of things, whereas the mutuality of non-violence belonged to a ‘kingdom not of this world’ represented by Christ under questioning by Pontius Pilate.
The Gospel narrative from the Sermon on the Mount onward pursued the logic of human mutuality in a way indifferent to the logic of power, though it proved sufficiently threatening to the powers that be in ‘synagogue and state’ to bring about the drama of the Passion. It triumphed over everything implied by the corrupt lust for ‘great possessions’ depicted in the story of the ‘rich young ruler’. The mutuality incarnate in Christ challenged the organisation of society into social hierarchies by demanding its disciples ‘call no man father’ in order that they might ‘all be one’ as Christ was at one with his Father in the mutual love animating the Godhead. Christ reversed the natural order of precedence at the Last Supper when he enacted the radical sacrament of washing the feet of the disciples to show that ‘the Lord of all’ is ‘the Servant of all’. This was appropriated by both Church and state through the liturgy of feet-washing on Holy Thursday, though the English monarchy successfully extracted even the residual sting of the implied reversal of roles by turning it into a royal disbursement of money. George Fox well understood the mutuality demanded in the Gospel in defiance of all the demands of settled power, but even his movement was partially appropriated by the imperatives of economic power, for example in the more recent history of a great Quaker foundation, Barclays Bank.
Through all vicissitudes the radical version of Christianity remained embedded in the iconography of power: for example in the Pietà; in the Last Judgement of the Romanesque tympanum; in the Dance of Death that includes high and low, Pope and peasant alike; and in the devotion to Mary Magdalen as the outcast pardoned and accepted on account of an extravagance of love. It also manifested itself in the communitarian movements that planted unexploded bombs within the structure of Christendom that had to await auspicious openings, strains and social fissures to exert their latent power, often outside the confines of the Church. It should surprise no one that even the radical tradition bred its own pathologies, for example in the long-term consequences of what Charles Taylor has called ‘the turn to the self’.5
From time to time, and perhaps increasingly in the course of the eighteenth century, the appropriation of exemplary figures from the past included classical mythology as well as biblical figures – though they could be merged, as they were in Handel’s oratorio Hercules or in the iconography of ceilings as in the monastery at Benediktbeuern. A major mutation occurred when the English Puritans adopted the anti-monarchical strain in the covenant between God and the people of Israel. The American revolutionaries adopted this covenant relationship, under the auspices of a moderate and semi-Christianised Enlightenment, imitating classical models. The gap between classical virtue and the pragmatic necessities of realpolitik is far smaller than the gap between the Passion narrative and each and every discourse of power. No wonder classical virtue proved so attractive to the Renaissance prince and the early modern monarch. An idealised portrait of power to which rulers were subtly encouraged to conform through techniques of flattery was far less threatening than the reversals and ‘the transvaluation of values’ found in Christianity.
The incompatibility between discourses of power and the action of the Passion can be illustrated from the poem The Dream of the Rood, composed in Anglo-Saxon England (roughly) in a period when Bede first identified Saxon England as a New Israel. Christ was assimilated to the ‘man of mettle’ climbing the tree of redemption with the heroism of a warrior. More than a millennium later, in the Surrey town of Guildford at the time of the 2012 Olympic Games, an Evangelical church displayed an image of Christ, ‘Champion of all nations’, as a muscle-bound Olympic gymnast in what is technically known as ‘the crucifix position’ directly echoing The Dream of the Rood. Similar identifications occur throughout European history and beyond, for example the representation of Mazzini and Garibaldi, and indeed all the young men who fought for the Risorgimento, as Christ figures willing to sacrifice themselves for the nation and their comrades.6 This theme was pursued globally in representations of figures as different as the Fascist dictator Mussolini, the bandit-hero Che Guevara and the hero of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi, though Gandhi also exemplifies a rather different ‘axial’ narrative of non-violence. Gandhi equals Garibaldi equals Christ, and the first two are placed together on account of their role in national liberation and collective national redemption analogous to the ‘salvation history’ of the Old Testament and its current Zionist appropriation.
Figures of this kind illustrate the role of non-empirical and non-rational categories like Charisma and Founding Fatherhood in religion, nationalism and revolutionary political ideology alike. ‘Secular’ discourses and ‘religious’ discourses both appeal to non-empirical categories. At the same time the comparisons of later historical figures with Christ are far more likely to appropriate the aspect of self-sacrifice than the central story of non-violent redemption by the abandonment of the love of possessions in favour of possession by love. The appropriation of that narrative, and/or of the radical critique of possessions and hierarchy in the Gospels, is left to voluntary groups in the ‘sectarian’ tradition, like the Lollards and the Mennonites. More recently, in the wake of the First and Second World Wars, commemorative iconography turned to the text ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends’, but that clearly refers to the blood-brotherhood of arms rather than the peaceable fraternities of early Christianity.
1 T.S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1945).
2 Clive James, ‘Dreams before Sleeping’, in Nefertiti in the Flak Tower: Collected Verse 2008–2011 (London: Pan Macmillan, 2012, pp. 46–7).
3 George Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005, Preface) (original copyright 1907).
4 Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (eds), Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012). See especially Chapter 3: Erica Longfellow, ‘“My now solitary prayers”: Eikon Basilike and Changing Attitudes to Religious Solitude’, pp. 53–72. I am very grateful to Jessica Martin for directing my attention to many examples from early modern England.
5 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6 Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (London: Yale University Press, 2008).