The festival of life’s victory over death

A man who died for all the others. A few days ago in Padua, Italy, a sculptor and a team of university academics unveiled a 3-D version of the man whose figure was immortalised, literally, in the Turin shroud.

They have re-created his bodily appearance: a man 1.8 m tall, robust and extraordinarily handsome, with long hair and a beautiful beard. They believe that the man who was wrapped in that ancient sheet was the same man whose death, and what happened in its wake, are commemorated in the Easter festival.

The festival is a celebration of the story of the death and resurrection of a man who aspired to the grandest of grand designs: the love of, and for, all humanity.

For Christians, it is the story of how God loved humanity to such an extent that he sent His only Son to die for the sins of humanity and redeem us all from the eternal damnation consequent to the original transgression against God’s will.

For others, however, he was one of their own who sided with the rabbinical school of Hillel, which, in those days, was locked in controversy over the Law with the school of Shammai. The Shammites held fundamentalist views on Scripture and the Law; the Hillelites were more lenient and sought a balance between the love for God and the love for your neighbour.

For others still, he did not really die on the cross, as God saved him at the last, most crucial moment by sending somebody else to take his place while raising him alive to heaven. They hold him as the penultimate prophet and eagerly expect his second coming, when he will fight a false Messiah.

For the atheist, or the agnostic, it is either the story of a fool who died for lofty ideals, or of a freedom fighter, a descendant of the House of David who was executed for the political crime of sedition, having dared to claim his rightful throne by freeing his people from Roman imperialism. How else to interpret the triumphant entry into Jerusalem riding the foal of a donkey and “INRI”? The atheist or agnostic observer might even see it as a mythological story, a rehash of the Persian/Roman Mithras or the Egyptian Horus.

For yet another group, he represents a metaphor, of psychological death and psychological resurrection. After all, the belief in God is a requisite for the success of the twelve-step programme to recover from alcoholism or sex addiction, as traditionally administered by Alcoholics Anonymous and others involved in such kinds of therapy.

But it is not only a metaphor for overcoming death caused by “sin” and resurrecting to a new life. It is also an allegory for the sacrifices life asks of us, when our ego has to die for the love of those dear to us. One need not give one’s life like the French gendarme Arnaud Beltrame did a few days ago to save a hostage. That is heroism on a grand scale. There is heroism on a more mundane scale, when the ordinary does however become extraordinary. One can, and should, sacrifice – on the psychological level – one’s ego for the love of others. To borrow Freud’s intuition, there is either Love or Death. Love thus becomes equal to Life.

One need not have an addiction or be religious to understand that the Easter festival conveys a message of courage and hope, of Life/Love overcoming Death. It is probably the most positive of messages one can imagine.

Life and death

Our times are characterised by the belief in rights (often at the expense of obligations). Some scholars have tried to establish a timeline for the present rights-based culture, even going back to the High Middle Ages. Others – and I think these are right – argue that our contemporary rights-based culture came into being with the French Revolution and the revolutionary idea of the Rights of Man. (Regrettably, it took quite a while for women to be included in “Man”.)

But this flurry of rights has brought about a systemic dilution of values, and eventually disrespect for human life. Just look at one aspect of our culture: entertainment. Young people play videogames that encourage them to go back and “finish off” their virtual adversaries. They gain points for killing “enemies”. Cinema portrays violence as if it were a normal reaction to life events, and recently Hollywood has even normalised the killing of “descendants”.

This is part of a broader construct, of an ideology which has removed the sense of a higher moral authority. The aftermath has been that we have become desensitised to human life, possibly on a scale not experienced in living memory.

I do not adhere to that school of thought which idealises the past. I think passatism is wrong. There were no ancestors who “in their simplicity” lived a morally better life. Violence was always there, in various forms. But violence in the name of rights for all is a novelty, one that is not easy to unravel as we are imbibed in the ideology that a right must necessarily be right. And yet, some “rights” are plainly wrong. Just like the privileges to which rights served as antidote, were wrong.

There is, to my mind, only one thing which is always right: Life. Everything else is, and has to be, subservient to it.

Giving one’s life for another The sceptics believe that this is just medieval pious claptrap, long defeated by rationalism and science. The selfish gene makes the world go round and survival of the fittest is the order of the day. I think that much of this modern scientific claptrap is simply the projection of the liberal worldview unto the natural world, essentially liberal anthropomorphism.

The greed underlying liberalism necessarily has to demonise religion. (That greed is the archenemy is conveyed in the story of the apostle who betrays his master for money.)

One way to demonise effectively is to claim that the message of religion makes no sense either rationally or scientifically. And yet, as the Slovene philosopher Slavoj Žižek has demonstrated in Living in the End Times (2010), p.92, one finds a paradox here:

“The ‘reason’ of which the Pope speaks is a pre-modern teleological Reason, the view of the universe as a harmonious Whole in which everything serves a higher purpose. Which is why, paradoxically, the Pope’s remarks obfuscate the key role of Christian theology in the birth of modern science: what paved the way for modern science was precisely the ‘voluntarist’ idea – elaborated by, among others, Duns Scotus and Descartes – that God is not bound by any eternal rational truths. While the view of scientific discourse as involving a pure description of facticity is illusory, the paradox resides in the coincidence of bare facticity and radical voluntarism: facticity can be sustained as meaningless, as something that ‘just is as it is’, only if it is secretly sustained by an arbitrary divine will. This is why Descartes is the founding figure of modern science, precisely when he makes even the most elementary mathematical facts like 2 + 2 = 4 dependent on arbitrary divine will: two plus two is four because God willed it so, with no hidden or obscure chain of reasons behind it. Even in mathematics, this unconditional voluntarism is discernible in its axiomatic character: one begins by arbitrarily positing a series of axioms, out of which everything else is then supposed to follow. The paradox is therefore that it was the Christian Dark Ages which created the conditions for the specific rationality of modern science as opposed to the science of the Ancients.”

For the naysayers, Žižek is an atheist Marxist and Lacanian philosopher.

Happy Easter to all The Malta Independent readers!