Bad Faith
The Church, A Demon Lover: A Sartrean Analysis of an Institution,
by Roberta Imboden (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1995).
xiv + 153 pp.; $22.95 ISBN 1-895176-55-7 (paper).
The subtitle of Imboden's book reveals the theoretical approach she takes;
the Church referred to in the main title is specifically the Roman Catholic
Church. I shall suggest at the end of this review that Imboden's analysis
is applicable to the Christian Church as a whole, but it is a tribute to
her tact that she has confined her criticism to her own confession (I assume
that it still is such). I shall be bolder when the time comes.
Imboden's analysis of some of the darker aspects of the power structure
in the Roman Catholic Church is based on two texts of Sartre. The first
is the description of psychological sado-masochism in Being and Nothingness
and the second is the developed description of the evolution of institutions
and the critique of them in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. As
Imboden points out, Sartre does not link these two texts. The linkage she
establishes not only forms the basis of her argument, but is, it seems to
me, quite perceptive in relation to the progression of Sartre's thought
on the individual person and society.
In essence Imboden's argument is that Sartre's theory of the development
of institutions from the initial freedom of "groups in fusion"
through statutory groups to the hidebound end-result can be correlated with
the historical development of the Church. Moreover, the power dynamics within
the institution can be described by using the analogy of the sadistic lover
and his dominated, masochistic partner. The surrender of freedom, the loss
of freedom, and the final painful enjoyment of bondage form the thematics
of the historical scenario Imboden sketches out. Anti-Judaism, the Albigensian
crusades, the later witch-hunts, and the present attempt of the Church to
dominate women and their bodies are some of the illustrative episodes in
this history.
The way in which the Church as institution is able to assert and maintain
its dominating role is the subject of a particularly interesting analysis
of Sartre's concepts of deviation and circularity, which he applied in the
second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason to Stalin's Soviet
Union. On this view it is the inertia in the historical conditions of the
worked relationship between the material basis and praxis that brings about
the external exercise of force and the consequent limitations on freedom.
The freeing up of this "practico-inert" through the process of
dialectical reason, which exemplifies the union of thought and praxis, is
the means of overcoming the rigidity of anti-dialectical institutions such
as the papal Church.
In an interesting synthesis, Imboden develops another linkage between Sartre's
dialectic and the Trinitarian theology of Leonardo Boff. Boff emphasizes
the dynamic, perichoretic (i.e. the mutual interchangeability of attributes)
relations among the Three Persons while eschewing the "heresies"
of modalism and subordinationism. The uniting of dialectical philosophy
and Christian theology is, of course, not new: Hegel provides the most notable
example of it. In the case of Sartre, however, I do wish that Imboden had
treated rather more fully the French philosopher's objections to religion.
To what extent could the combination of his method with an exposition of
the central Christian dogma be seen as an unconscious exemplification of
bad faith? Indeed, how much of the system of Christian dogma qua
dogma may embody the resistance of the practico-inert? I really do not find
that these questions have been adequately dealt with by Imboden, and they
are very important, for one constantly wonders why the whole conglomeration
of antiquated myths, philosophically indefensible doctrines, and oppressive
institutional practices that constitute the "Church" simply should
not be scrapped.
I suspect that the reason is the unspoken side of Imboden's argument. While
she deals, as do the majority of contemporary theologians, with the New
Testament teaching on love and the mystical theology of the relations among
the Persons of the Trinity (as if either of those were clear and univocal
concepts), she omits from serious consideration the sacramental theology
of the Church. But it is just in the light of this that the Church is not
an institution, though it may be embodied in institutional forms, but the
Body of Christ, the Corpus Christi. The unique property of sacraments
is the specific way in which grace redeems nature through the union of a
particular "matter" with a particular form. One could, of course,
argue that the Church is not a sacrament in this sense, that the particular
institutional form is in nowise commensurate with the matter, just as one
could argue that even under ordinary circumstances water is not necessary
for Baptism or bread and wine for the Eucharist. And this indeed does seem
to be the general tendency of contemporary theological thought. There are,
nonetheless, certain incoherencies here. For example, Imboden finds ordination
to be one of the causes of institutional ossification in the Church; yet
her model for a new organization of the Church as a tripartite council of
theologians, bishops, and laypeople, based on the Boffian analogy of the
Trinity in conjunction with the ojective-subjective-objective movement of
Sartre's dialectic, is comprised of one-third clergy. Admittedly, these
clergy could be elected without being ordained; but as long as some intimation
of the sacramental nature of the Church remains, it seems unlikely that
this will be the case. For instance, Luther rejected ordination as a sacrament;
but because he retained a fairly "Catholic" understanding of the
Eucharist, a clerical order soon emerged and has tended recently back towards
the Catholic position with, for example, the introduction of the episcopal
order in the Lutheran Church in America. It seems to me that one needs to
be a little more consistent here and say that all the sacramental nonsense
should be chucked as so much thirteenth-century claptrap desperately clung
to by reactionaries like Cardinal Ratzinger and Co.; or, one should try
to think out seriously just what a sacramental understanding of the world
and of human beings and their relations with one another is and just what
it implies. I do not think that there are many believers who would take
seriously the view that the World Council of Churches, which bears certain
affinities to Imboden's model Church, is the Church. And probably the reason
of this is that it does not reveal any sacramental presence that even an
unbeliever could see in the way that unbelievers almost inevitably see "something"
in the Catholic Church and flee from it.
None of these comments are meant to gloss over the very real wrongs committed
in the past and present by the Church and which Imboden so eloquently catalogues.
(To paraphrase Newman: the Church may be infallible, but it is not impeccable.)
The problem, as I see it, is far more complex than analysing the situation
through a set a theories and formulating new agendas. It is rather like
trying to come to terms with the circumstances of one's life and the satisfactory
or not very satisfactory relationships in which one finds oneself. It is
also a matter, especially in the present time, of living through contradictions,
such as knowing rationally that religion is purely a matter of mythologies
and yet continuing to pray quite specifically and concretely to God, the
Mother of God, and the saints. Somehow one does live through, and this is
a matter far more complicated than any dialectic or dogmatic or systematic
theology. It is more like what actually happens in the sacraments and should
happen ideally in the Church as the place and the universal form of the
sacraments.
While I greatly admire Imboden's innovative argument and the clarity with
which she presents Sartre's ideas, I have a couple of more specific reservations
about her overall thesis. First, I am sceptical of a certain nostaglia about
groups in fusion with which Imboden associates the Church of the New Testament.
On the evidence of the Letters to the Corinthians, things were pretty much
of a mess in the church at Corinth and the Apostle Paul comes across as
not exactly a tactful and sympathic adviser to early Christians who are
trying to cope with the new-found freedom that he elsewhere so strongly
advocates. And while the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles are later
than the Epistles of Paul, the picture they present of a rather fanatical
sect, strongly rejecting its mother religion and involved in a good deal
of infighting, even at the beginning of Christianity sets the stage for
the intervention of, on the one hand, fairly wealthy patrons who can control
to a large extent the incipent churches meeting in their houses and, on
the other hand, sadistic and power-hungry leaders who like nothing better
than bossing people around. It is probably only sanctimonious overfamiliarity
with the New Testament that prevents the reader, usually, from seeing this.
A rather better view can be got from the apocryphal New Testament documents.
Of course there is another side to all this: Jesus' teaching on the Kingdom
that involves a radical reversal of values; but even that has to be interpreted
within the violent apocalyticism of his times. If all of this makes the
Church of the first century sound a little like the Church at the end of
the twentieth century, that is merely to express my scepticism about evolutionary
historical schemes of whatever dialectical stripe. It was probably as bad
at the beginning as it is now.
The second reservation I have about Imboden's argument may sound like a
contradiction of the first, though I do not think that it really is. Probably
because of its reliance on Sartre's theoretical construct with its basis
in historical dialectic, Imboden's interpretation of the Church as institution
seems to me to be overdetermined. After all, as Imboden freely admits, there
is another side to the picture that presents a community of love, freedom,
and equality. I would say, however, that these are not just characteristics
of groups in fusion, whether at the origin or in the present, but rather
attainments that can always be achieved in spite of the institution. (And
I would say also, in spite of the "group" or the "community"
or the "family" or whatever other controlling or dominating structure.)
It may be that Imboden and I have quite different views of freedom in this
regard. For me, freedom, in the meaningful sense, is something that is attained,
whereas I suspect that for Imboden it is something that is initially given.
The latter position is quite Sartrean as well as being orthodoxly Christian,
in their radically distinct understandings of givenness, but it may make
things descriptively too easy. Imboden appears to realize this in her last
chapter when she sketches out a model of the Church that would retain the
characteristics of a group in fusion and yet hold out the promise of a greater
kind of permanence. One also wonders there why she did not consider the
possibility of the statutory group rather than the sharp opposition between
group in fusion and institution.
It would also have been useful to have a comparative perspective on the
question of the institutional Church. As I suggested at the beginning of
this review, it is not only the Church of Rome that suffers from a hierarchical
or institutional malaise. Among Eastern Orthodox Christians it is something
of a joke that the Roman Catholics are lucky because they have only one
pope to deal with. And if one had to choose between John Paul II and the
gaggle of American political evangelists, I suppose that one would immediately
think of the lesser of two evils. Nor should the well-heeled Protestant
moderators and so forth get off the devil's hook - those who preach liberal
values and social justice while currying the contributions of bank presidents
and directors of multi-national corporations. In the face of this sort of,
often unconscious, hypocrisy, things do not look so bad on the other side.
Richard Cooper
Montreal
26 March 1996