The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self

We are grateful to share an excerpt from guest writer, Gil Bailie’s book “The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self.”

1 The Triumph of the Will and the Twilight of Resolve

The apostate has seen, and then denied what he has seen. Through and through, he remains branded by the image he rejects: with terrible power this image leaves its imprint on his whole existence, which blazes brilliantly in the fire of denial.

— Hans Urs von Balthasar1

Balthasar can already look ahead to his final conclusion: one day, non-Christian humanity will stand before the “yawning abyss of reason and freedom,” first opened up by Christians. . . . Staggered by the confrontation with this void, men will turn back for consolation to pagan antiquity, where a touch of true glory still bathed the cosmos. But when this fades, as fade it surely will, the decision will have to be made: nihilism or “self- surrender to the sign, in all its purity, of the glory of God’s love revealed by Christ.”

—Aidan Nichols, OP2

 

This is not a story book, but it is a collection of stories—fictional and factual—and a running commentary on them. Both the factual stories and the literary ones will be read in an allegorical key, as a clue to the overall spiritual and existential predicament we will be exploring. Taken together, these stories limn the outlines of two more elusive stories: that of the autonomous self and that of the person, whose Christian origins and Christian connotations have too often been overlooked.

The tragically mistaken idea that the incalculable moral and cultural blessings of Christianity will survive the attenuation of the faith that

 

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 524.
2. Nichols, The Word Has Been Abroad, 150.
   

gave birth to these blessings is the predicate for much that happened in the Christian West over the last few hundred years. The cultural and confessional evisceration of Christianity, should it continue, will prove the validity of Christ’s warning: “Apart from me you can do nothing” (Jn 15:5). For these words were addressed by Christ to his own follow- ers — those most exposed to the revelation of which his life, death, and Resurrection consisted— and they now apply not only to Christians but even to those whose exposure to Christ has been merely cultural, and who may think the civilization shaped by Christian faith will survive the renunciation of that faith. As we shall see below, the most salient manifestation of the nothing of which Christ spoke is the nihilism that is ever more clearly becoming the distinguishing characteristic of the post-Christian world.

It might be said that there are two prominent forms of nihilism: the epistemological one exhibited by Pilate when he shruggingly asked Jesus, “What is truth?” and the socially contagious one exhibited by the mob when it shouted in unison, “crucify him.” The proximity to one another of these two forms of nihilism in the Passion story is quite illuminating. Pilate’s shrugging and dismissive remark sanctions a moral chaos, to the terrible consequences of which the mob spontaneously responds by regressing to the most primitive of moral certainties: the guilt of the unanimously accused victim. Neither the Roman prefect nor the crowd he would soon be obliged to appease exhibited that openness to truth of which the Old and New Testaments speak: a truth accessible only to a humble and contrite heart. It was just such a heart that made Augustine aware of the link between the ideological and moral forms of nihilism when he said of the philosophers whom he had earlier studied with such diligence that they kept the truth imprisoned by their wickedness.3

1. K. Chesterton famously said that small mistakes in doctrine lead to huge blunders in human happiness. The nihilism with which we are concerned is the result of an anthropological blunder the terminal incoherence of which has been nowhere better summarized than by the opinion of United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in his 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” That so many today find this statement unproblematic is a symptom of how a soft form of nihilism has triumphed in our time. According to this doctrine, nothing

 

1. Augustine, De Trinitate, I, 13, n. 19.
   

must be allowed to thwart the self-will of the sovereign self. Maureen Mullarkey provides the apt summation: “Decomposition of the cultural ecosystem that sustains our civil society has roots in Kennedy’s precept. And the nihilism it epitomizes.”4 René Girard concurs: “No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.”5

Extending the themes of our earlier book— God’s Gamble: The Gravi- tational Power of Crucified Love — we want to argue here that what Chris- tianity has done to cultures seriously exposed to it, and by extension to culture itself, it has also done to human subjectivity. It has revealed beneath and beyond the discourse of self and autonomy the mystery of the person as such. Like the other blessings we have enjoyed by virtue of living in a culture under Christian influence, many today experi- ence degrees of interiority and social solidarity without realizing how indebted to Christianity they are for these blessings, or that these bless- ings will not long survive the waning of the faith that made them possible.

The reader might be reminded that the root meaning of the word apoc- alypse in our title is to reveal, uncover, or disclose. Thanks to the use made of this word by John of Patmos in the work that became the last book of the Bible, today it carries the implication of the end of history itself. That implication is only apropos to our explorations in the sense that the crisis of sovereign selfhood seems to be entering its final stages. More pertinent to the argument we are making is the literal translation of the Greek apocalypsis: to unveil or reveal. We want to argue that the experiment in psychological and social autonomy that is coterminous with modernity has failed because it was at odds with anthropological reality. In a roundabout and idiosyncratic way, we will inspect this failure before turning to the remarkable resources Christianity makes available for facing and rectifying this crisis.

The concept of the person, wrote Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “grew in the first place out of the interplay between human thought and the data of Christian faith,”6 entering thereby into the intellectual history

 

1. Maureen Mullarkey, “Marginalia on Dobbs and Roe,” Studio Matters, July 4, 2022.
2. René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, trans. Stephen Bann and Michael Metteer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 441.
3. Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,” Joseph Ratzinger in Communio, Vol. 2: Anthropology and Culture, ed. David L. Schindler and Nicholas J. Healy (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2013), 103.
   

 

of those cultures fortunate enough to have fallen under Christian influ- ence. In bringing about this theological revolution, the theologians of the patristic age laid the foundation for a revolution in human self- understanding which has languished for lack of adequate anthropological elaboration. It is surely the special responsibility and unique privilege of the twenty-first-century Church to try to give a more adequate account of the mystery of which she is the custodian.

Arguably anxious about the issue with which we will be dealing, the distinguished French sociologist, Marcel Mauss, published his last essay in 1938 on the difference between the self and the person. In it he wrote:

It is Christians who have made a metaphysical entity of the “moral person” (personne morale), after they became aware of its religious power. Our own notion of the human person is still basically the Christian one.7

As distinctive as was the mystery of personhood that came to light in Christian thought, however, intimations of it can be found in the Old Testament, most strikingly in the prophets. Pope Benedict XVI observed, as the word is used in the Old Testament, the category of prophet is “something totally specific and unique, in contrast to the surrounding religious world, something that Israel alone has in this particular form.”8 The renowned Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad captured this when he wrote of the prophets:

These men became individuals, persons. They could say “I” in a way never before heard in Israel. At the same time, it has become apparent that the “I” of which these men were allowed to become conscious was very different from our present-day concept of personality.9

As for the “present-day concept of personality,” it now largely con- sists of anything anyone might decide about himself. As recently as 1967, when the German edition of von Rad’s book on the Old Testa- ment prophets appeared, even the “present-day” concept of personal- ity retained at least the aura of objective reality and anthropological

 

1. Marcel Mauss, “A category of the human mind: the notion of the person; the notion of the self,” in The Category of the Person, ed. Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins, Stevens Lukes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 19.
2. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration, trans. Adrian J. Walker (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 1.
3. Gerhard von Rad, The Message of the Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1965),

146. Emphasis added.
     

coherence. As for the disappearance of a shared understanding of the person, the observation of von Rad’s German contemporary Romano Guardini is most apposite.

Personality is essential to man. This truth becomes clear, how- ever, and can be affirmed only under the guidance of Revelation, which related man to a living, personal God, which makes him a son of God, which teaches the ordering of his Providence. When man fails to ground his personal perfection in Divine Revelation, he still retains an awareness of the individual as a rounded, dignified and creative human being. He can have no consciousness, however, of the real person who is the absolute ground of each man, an absolute ground superior to every psy- chological or cultural advantage or achievement. The knowledge of what it means to be a person is inextricably bound up with the Faith of Christianity. An affirmation and a cultivation of the personal can endure for a time perhaps after Faith has been extinguished, but gradually they too will be lost.10

As we shall see in the later chapters of this book, the word person entered the vocabulary of Western culture only after Christian theo- logians, in speaking of the three Persons of the Trinity, gave the word persona a philosophical profundity never before associated with it. In bringing about this theological revolution, the Church fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries laid the groundwork for a radical reassess- ment of human subjectivity which has yet to be fully appreciated and which it may now be the special responsibility of twenty-first-century Christian thought to reconnoiter.

The British social anthropologist Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955) saw the rough outlines of the issue that we want to explore:

If you tell me that an individual and a person are after all really the same thing, I would remind you of the Christian creed. God is three persons, but to say that he is three individuals is to be guilty of a heresy for which men have been put to death. Yet the failure to distinguish individual and person is not merely a heresy in religion: it is worse than that; it is a source of confusion in science.11

 

1. Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World, trans. Joseph Theman and Herbert Burke (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 1998), 98–99. Emphasis added.
2. Alfred Radcliffe-Brown, “On Social Structure,” in Structure and Function in Primitive Society (London: Cohen and West, 1940), 194.
   

We may quibble with the eminent anthropologist about the relative dangers of religious heresy and scientific confusion. Inasmuch as we are awash in both in this time of trial, however, we might welcome an alliance of all those who have recognized these perils from their own fields of interest. The point is that Christ has altered man’s psychological circumstances as much as he has altered man’s cultural and historical situation. In both cases man’s freedom is called into play in a far greater way than was the case prior to the Christian revelation. This increased freedom has come with its obvious corollary: a heightening of the perils associated with the misuse of that freedom.

“The revelation of the person,” writes Paul Evdokimov, “is the event of Christianity,” and human desire is simply “the inborn nostalgia to become a ‘person’.”12 If this is so, then there is no more urgent ques- tion than the one Kenneth Schmitz asks. “Can such a call to spiritual personhood be made today in such a way that it might be heard?”13 This book is an effort to answer that question in the affirmative. The key will be to show how anthropologically sound is the uniquely Christian understanding of personhood, and the work of René Girard can play a significant and salutary role in bringing this to light.

In place of a formal introduction to Girard’s work, we will simply allude to its most familiar features and leave to subsequent pages of this book the task of drawing out its subtler implications. Suffice it at this point to say that in the eyes of this writer and of many of those famil- iar with it, Girard’s work represents an indispensable anthropological resource for meeting the cultural and spiritual challenges facing us today, not least the challenge posed by the shockingly rapid de-Christianization of Western culture.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the scriptures that served to Christianize cul- tures continue to offer the most cogent analysis of the price that would have to be paid for their cultural repudiation. This price is nowhere more clearly stated than in this salient passage in John’s Gospel:

I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. If a man does not abide in me, he is cast forth as a branch and withers; and the branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned. (Jn 15:5– 6)

 

1. Paul Evdokimov, The Sacrament of Love (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Sem- inary Press, 1985), 53.
2. Kenneth L. Schmitz, “The Geography of the Human Person,” Communio 13 (Spring 1986): 203, 204.
   

Again, the “nothing” of which Christ spoke is today the nihilism that is the final phase of the sterile form of the putatively autonomous self and its exaltation of the will. That this willfulness should prove in the end to be withered branches finds an echo in the warning of John the Baptist: “His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Lk 3:17; Mt 3:12). The withered branches of Jesus’s discourse and the chaff of which the Baptist spoke have their contemporary analogue in what Henri de Lubac called “the waning of ontological density” and what Gabriel Marcel termed the loss of our “ontological moorings.” The Scriptural treatment of chaff is instructive: it will either be scattered to the wind or gathered and burned in a fire. These outcomes could be both conflated and transposed into an anthropological key by saying that the alternative to the kind of genuine solidarity that Christ offers is social alienation fitfully— and all too temporarily— relieved by the fire and faux solidarity of collective animosity and mob violence. For just as the gospel throws down a radical challenge to conventional forms of cultural life, so it challenges with equal audacity the conventional forms of human subjectivity, calling familiar psychological adaptations into question and revealing a startling new form, namely the person properly understood with all its specific Christian meaning and theological overtones.

Glenn Olsen has observed that “the liberal self, replicating as it does a social order from which the idea of a common good and any hierarchy of public goods has been largely evacuated, is intrinsically disordered and dysfunctional.”14 It is this same symbiosis of self and social order to which the authors of Gaudium et spes alluded in insisting that “the progress of the human person and the advance of society itself hinge on one another” (§ 25). This reciprocal relationship between the human person and human society means that distresses in one of these spheres will be accompanied by distresses in the other and that whatever their short-term practical advantages, attempts to remedy distresses in one sphere which take for granted the erroneous presuppositions in the other sphere will exacerbate and prolong the crisis common to them both. As we have moved from the cosmological to the anthropological age, argued Balthasar, a change has taken place in mankind’s religious topography, the principal consequence of which is that “men can no longer love each other without God.”15

 

1. Glenn W. Olsen, “The Role of Religion in the Twenty-first Century,” Communio

         2 (Summer 2004): 303.

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The God Question and Modern Man (New York: Seabury Press, 1967), 143.
   

The burden of our exploration will be to argue for a Christocentric recovery of the mystery of the person. If in so arguing, attention is focused on the mature expression of this mystery, that is in no way to suggest any affinity with or sympathy for those who would attribute human status only to humans who have acquired this or that level of functionality—an unconscionable and ethically monstrous position. No one would argue that a four-year-old has taken full possession of the talents which, with time, he will develop and express. Similarly, a child one moment after conception, though a biological human person of inestimable worth, will only much later have an opportunity to fulfill the promise implicit in his personhood. There is, however, another debate about the person that deserves our attention, and that is the debate as to what it is about personhood that Christ reveals and that without Christ the world is incapable of recognizing. That is the question we will be exploring in the later chapters of this book.

It is a lot easier to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to Christ and His Church than it is to fashion a post-Christian alternative to them. The latter task, in fact, is impossible. As Malcolm Muggeridge famously pointed out, the choice before us today is Christ or nothing. Both for- merly Christian cultures and those individuals shaped by the overarch- ing Christian tenor of the cultures in which they live will remain— in subtle but indelible ways — Christ-haunted. The entry into history of Christ and his Church represents a watershed which demands a decision for or against, and those who reject it often sometimes understand the inevitability of that choice better than do Christians.

Of the revelation on Golgotha, Balthasar has insisted: “From this point on, true, deliberate atheism becomes possible for the first time, since, prior to this, without a genuine concept of God, there could be no true atheism.”16

What then if man, no longer accustomed to taking his standard from the cosmos (now emptied of the divine), refuses to take it from Christ? This is post-Christian man, who cannot return to the pre-Christian fluidity that once existed between man and the cosmos but who, in passing through Christianity, has grown used to the heightening of his creaturely rhythms and

 

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Love Alone is Credible, trans. D. C. Schindler (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2004), 91–92.
   

wants to hold on to them as if they are his personal hallmark, a gift that now belongs to him entirely. This will be the general characteristic of the post-Christian era, however manifold and contradictory its concrete expressions may be.17

It has become increasingly obvious that the myth of autonomous individuality flies in the face of anthropological and psychological real- ity, but once the West had made protecting the rights of the individual the engine of its historical reforms and reconfigured all its institutions accordingly, it was understandably in no mood to quibble over the psychological plausibility of what had become its moral lodestar and organizing principle. After all, Western culture parleyed its solicitude for the rights of the individual into some of the most impressive moral and political reforms in history. It takes a lot more than mere misinterpre- tation to destroy the historical power of the revelation which the myth of individuality misinterprets. Overlooking the psychological naïveté of the premise that produced these historical marvels would have seemed a tolerable price to pay for their political utility. But, like the national debt, the price to be paid for this anthropological miscalculation compounds rapidly and falls most heavily on subsequent generations, and today’s youth are now visibly staggering under the burden of it.

Sooner or later, the social and psychological invalidity of the individualist myth was bound to lead to problems. As soon as everyone became an “individual,” and every social grievance was challenged as an infringement on the individual’s rights, the moral force once marshaled to protect the rights of the individual lost its clarity. As Simone Weil put it during the dark years of war, Nazi concentration camps, and the aerial bombard- ment of cities: “The notion of rights, which was launched into the world in 1789, has proved unable, because of its intrinsic inadequacy, to fulfil the role assigned to it.”18 Not only did the notion of rights present no formidable barrier to the campaigns of mass slaughter that were rippling through the modern world, but the notion was problematic even at the level of ordinary human relations. We can expect only a paltry form of justice, Weil argued, from a justice system as dependent as ours is on the need to “agitate for our rights.”19

 

1. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. II, Dramatis Personae: Man in God, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1990), 417.
2. Simone Weil, “Human Personality,” The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas (New York: David McKay, 1981), 314.
3. Ibid., 315.
   

The “rights rhetoric,” according to Tracey Rowland, “is ideological. Its objective is to secure a social consensus in circumstances where there is no commonly accepted moral tradition by construing all human relations in contractual terms.”20 The Catholic philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre concurs: “The dominant contemporary idiom and rhetoric of rights cannot serve genuinely rational purposes, and we ought not to conduct our moral and political arguments in terms derived from that idiom and rhetoric.”21

The Christians who wrote the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights and the Christians who enthusiastically adopted it could hardly have foreseen that they were embracing by default a jurisprudence of “rights” that would one day be used to enforce “rights” like “reproductive rights”— a paper-thin euphemism for the “right” to kill children in the womb — or a myriad of other purported “rights” deeply antithetical to the moral tradition for which the rights discourse seemed at first to be the closest secular approximation.

Hans Urs von Balthasar has argued, correctly in our view, that “all ages after Jesus will be marked (perhaps increasingly) by a Yes or No to him.”22 We live at a moment when this alternative stands before us in all its starkness and promise. The words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel have lost none of their concrete pertinence.

And when he drew near and saw the city he wept over it, saying, “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days shall come upon you, when your enemies will cast up a bank about you and surround you, and hem you in on every side, and dash you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you; because you did not know the time of your visitation.” (Lk 19:41–44)

To better appreciate the challenge we face, we turn now to a series of parables by which we hope to bring to light the underlying spiritual crisis of our age.

 

1. Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (New York: Rutledge, 2003), 63.
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Community, Law, and the Idiom and Rhetoric of Rights,” Listening, XXVI, 2 (1991): 96–110, quoted in Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition, 148.
3. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Vol. I, Prologomena, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1988), 30.

About the Author – Gil Bailie

Gil Bailie is the founder of The Cornerstone Forum, a founding member of The Colloquium on Violence and Religion, a member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and the College of Fellows of the Dominican School of Philosophy & Theology. As he did in God’s Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love, in this book he brings René Girard’s anthropological contribution to human self-understanding into dialogue with the theological tradition exemplified by Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar.