[Column] A Christian atheist’s eulogy for Pope Francis

Pope Francis washes and kisses the feet of refugees at a camp in Rome on March 24, 2016. (Reuters)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

The last foreign dignitary Pope Francis received a day before his death was none other than JD Vance, and we can say without exaggeration that, insofar as Pope Francis stood for what is best in today’s Catholic Church, this meeting was a meeting between the Vicar of Christ and the anti-Christ. 

The pope is a Vicar of Christ, so what kind of Christ was Pope Francis standing for? I think the Christ Francis practiced in his life was very close to the Christ I refer to in my “Christian Atheism.”

Following Padre Raffaele Nogaro’s path-breaking idea of the urgent need to liberate Christ himself, I suggest that Christ works as a vanishing mediator in every authentic love — he is here whenever there is love between humans: “For where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them”(Matthew 18:20). Christ is thus neither the subject nor the object of love, he is love itself: “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (John 4:8). 

Nogaro makes this point with full clarity: “Jesus substituted the first commandment of the Old Law ‘Love your God the Master’ (Dt 6:5) with a commandment which does not [have as] the direct recipient of love  God but the neighbor.” Nogaro then quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who goes to the end in this direction: “A Christian is not a religious man but simply a man, ‘a being for others’ like Jesus.”

But what kind of love? The dialogue between Jesus and Peter in John 21:9 uses two different words for “love” — agapaô (the verb form of the noun agape) and phileô (the verb form of the noun philia). The dialogue proceeds as follows: Jesus asked, “Do you agapâis me?” Peter replied, “I phileô you.” Jesus asked, “Do you agapâis me?” Peter replied, “I phileô you.” Jesus asked, “Do you phileis me?” Peter replied, “I phileô you.” 

I agree with those who claim that this change of the verb in question indicates Jesus’ gracious condescension to the level that Peter was prepared to respond at this juncture. “Philia” is love for another human being without Christ as a vanishing mediator.

More precisely, in the Scriptures, there are four terms for love: Eros (sexual love), storge (parental familial love), philia (asexual affection/friendship) and agape (the unconditional love that unites individuals who dedicate their lives to a Cause). At the level of agape, feelings (sexual or not) no longer matter; what remains is just the Holy Spirit, an egalitarian community of comrades dedicated to a cause.  

Terry Eagleton, a Catholic Marxist, was right: agape should be translated as political love. As a comrade, I can involve myself sexually with another comrade, I can become his/her friend, but this doesn’t really matter — if the situation of a struggle demands it, I should be ready to betray him/her because only the cause matters. And if my comrade is a true comrade s/he will fully understand me and even despise me if I allow any weakness for him/her to overcome my fidelity to the shared cause and am not ready to betray him/her. My position is here that of Louis Althusser who, in 1980, gave an interview to Italian TV in Rome where he said:

“I became Communist because I was Catholic. I did not change religion, but I remained profoundly Catholic. I don’t go to church but this doesn’t matter; you don’t ask people to go to church today. I remained a Catholic, that is to say, an internationalist universalist. I thought inside the Communist Party there were more adequate means to realize universal fraternity.”

Althusser is in good company here: Eric Satie, a devout Catholic, was also a Communist — his sense of solidarity with the people led him to join the Communist Party in 1913 after the murder of the party leader Jean Jaurès, and he remained a card-carrying member until his death. There is nothing spontaneous about such an egalitarian community of comrades — it requires hard work and full commitment. 

That’s why love should be paradoxically commanded. “My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you” (John 15:12). The key resides in the last words: “as I have loved you” —  here the vanishing mediator is located. Nogaro is right to emphasize that true love is not mediated, that it links us directly to a neighbor — I would only add that this is why Christ is a vanishing mediator. Only through Christ as a vanishing mediator can we love our neighbor directly, without mediation. 

At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling (which of course cannot be commanded), it is a practice of how I deal with others. True love is cold, not sentimental. To attain true love, we have to reach beyond humanism: even loving directly all of humanity is not enough, Christ has to be here — why? Because we are fallen. This stance was nicely summed up by Rúben Gallo, who wrote: “Human beings, regardless of gender, race, social class, or nationality, are invariably selfish, cruel, and corrupt.” Gallo’s statement is the truth of the liberal-humanist motto: “All humans, independently of their sex, race, religion and wealth, share the same rights to freedom and dignity.” This is why Nogaro is right to claim that Christ’s words on the cross, “Father, why have you abandoned me?” are “l’affermazione del fallimento di ogni vita cosciente e responsabile” — the affirmation of the failure of every conscious and responsible life. 

When Jesus had risen from the dead, his first words to the apostles were: “Peace be with you” (John 20:19). Today, when we fear death from natural disasters, wars and social catastrophes, one should be very careful and precise in how to refer to these simple four words. The term “peace” has at least two very problematic uses today. First, military aggressions are, as a rule, declared to be interventions to secure peace — Russia wants peace in Ukraine, Israel wants peace in Gaza, etc. Peace as a goal is not enough, it should not be used as a direct justification for brutal military acts. Second, it is also not enough to reduce “peace” to inner peace, certainty and confidence. From the ancient times of the Bhagavad Gita and Zen, military doctrine advises soldiers that they must act with inner peace and distance from external reality: avoiding direct subjective engagement, not identifying with one’s own acts, is the key to success. 

This distance is becoming a direct reality today when more and more military operations are done from a safe distance: the soldier is sitting far from the front and just pushes buttons or moves a joystick in front of a screen to direct a rocket or a drone. It is against this background that “Peace be with you” should be read today. When Jesus said it, it was as a simple greeting of his comrades, the apostles — “peace” is here a social category, a way of being-with-others here and now, not an inner stance or a distant goal. “Peace” is a mode of existence of the Holy Spirit.

A scene from the end of “A River Runs Through It” (Robert Redford, 1992) makes this clear. Rev. Maclean gives a sermon about being unable to help loved ones who are destroying themselves and will not accept help: all that those who truly care for such a self-destructive person can do is to give unconditional love, even without understanding why. This is the Christian stance at its purest: not the promise of salvation but just such unconditional love whose message is: “I know you are bent on destroying yourself, I know I cannot prevent it, but without understanding why I love you unconditionally, without any constraint.”

Do these lines not evoke the enigmatic scene in Gethsemane from Matthew where Jesus tells his disciples who lay tired around him: “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me” (Matthew 36-38)? Liza Thompson pointed out that Jesus is here “asking for solidarity. Not followers or crowds to listen to his teachings but an act of togetherness. And it comes from a place of such radical vulnerability that it disrupts notions of Jesus as some kind of hierarchical leader.” Jesus himself is here on the path to his self-destruction (knowing next day he will die in terrible pain), and the only thing he asks his followers is to give him their unconditional love, even without understanding why.

This is also why the genuine dimension of Christian doubt does not concern the existence of God: its logic is not “I feel such a need to believe in God, but I cannot be sure that he really exists, that he is not just a chimera of my imagination.” (A humanist atheist can easily respond to this: “Then drop God and simply assume the ideals God stands for as your own.”)  An authentic Christian is indifferent towards the infamous proofs of God’s existence. 

What the position of Christian doubt involves is a pragmatic paradox succinctly rendered by Alyosha in Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”: “God exists but I am not sure whether I believe in him,” where “I believe in him” refers to the believer’s readiness to fully assume the existential engagement implied by such a belief. 

“The question of the ‘existence of God’ is not really at the heart of Dostoyevsky’s labors,” writes Rowan Williams. “Alyosha’s uncertainty about whether he ‘believes in God’ is an uncertainty about whether the life he leads and the feelings he has are the life and the feelings that would rightly follow from belief in God.” It is in this sense that every theology is political, confronting us with the question of our social engagement. That’s why I fully endorse Nogaro’s motto: “We don’t have to believe in Jesus, love is enough.”

Yes, I agree with Nogaro that “effectively, although without knowing it, all people wait for Jesus and desire to encounter him,” but I would not read this statement as an assertion of direct teleology — in my view, there is a subtle retroactivity at work in it. The arrival of Christ was an unpredictable absolute event, and after this event happened, we are compelled to read the entire preceding history as announcing it. In a similar way, one should also understand why Immanuel Kant claims that, in some sense, world was created so that we can fight our moral struggles in it: when we are caught into an intense struggle which means everything to us, we experience it as if the whole world will collapse if we fail; the same holds also when we fear the failure of an intense love affair. There is no direct teleology here; our love encounter is the result of a contingent encounter, so it could easily also not have happened — but once it does happen, it decides how we experience the whole of reality. 

When Walter Benjamin wrote that a big revolutionary battle decides not only the fate of the present but also of all past failed struggles, he mobilizes the same retroactive mechanism that reaches its climax in religious claims that, in a crucial battle, not only the fate of us but the fate of God himself is decided. This is why I, as a Christian atheist, find it profoundly appropriate that Francis died on the day before Resurrection: he resurrected and continues to live in us, in our struggle for justice and solidarity.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]