Thursday Theology: Wrestling Jacob and a Series of Tubes:  How the Passive Life Gets Things Done  (part 3)

Co-missioners, 

We continue through Adam Morton’s presentation on the “passive life” Christians, this time with part three (section IV), my favorite, in which he compares the Christ-trusting person who becomes a passive conduit for God’s grace to “a series of tubes”. I find this observation to be not only funny but also brilliant as a way to emphasize as strongly as possible the gift and joy of NOT being the agent in God’s saving and reconciling work.  

When I look around at the various versions of Christianity represented in the conversations and controversies of our time, I see a plethora of “cooperative” visions of the faith, according to which it is our calling to work with God to accomplish God’s vision for the world: phrases like “building the kingdom”, joining God in what “God is up to,” and “living into” the “way of Jesus” abound. Notably, all of this fashionable and omnipresent language puts the onus on US. Ultimately, we are told, it is up to us to make God’s dream become a reality. I can think of nothing more overwhelming and discouraging and nothing more contrary to the way the Gospel is announced in the Book of Acts as something God has done! Adam redirects us to our true calling: to be conduits of grace, to be tubes… 

Another thing I appreciate about Adam’s piece is that he draws on (apparently) secular philosophy, pointing out how it often aligns more closely with Luther (sometimes even directly inspired by him) and with the Gospel than many Christian theologies. I have found the same to be true in my reading. And isn’t this just like God, to surprise us and speak to us in unexpected places? 

Peace & joy, 
Co-editor Robin Lütjohann 
for the Crossings Community

Wrestling Jacob and a Series of Tubes:  
How the Passive Life Gets Things Done  
(part 3) 

by Adam Morton 

IV. Unexpected Help and a Series of Tubes

Quite by accident, I stumbled upon a loose intellectual tradition that agrees with Luther on this passivity, and sheds some useful light on it. It’s barely a tradition, but it is a current, a bubbling, a few connected voices. Where? Believe it or not, in 20th century French philosophy. Not everywhere there, not by a long shot. One could hardly be more of a free-willer, self-creation enthusiast than Jean-Paul Sartre. But before Sartre or Camus, before even Heidegger’s influence hit France, there was a very strange fellow named Lev Shestov, or Leon Chestov as the French call him.  

He wasn’t born with either of those names. He was born Yehudah Lev Schwartzman, to a successful Russian-speaking Jewish family in Kyiv, in 1866. They weren’t very practicing, but they were Jews. Lev Shestov is a more Russian-sounding name adopted not only as a nom de plume, but in all of life, by this young radical. Blocked from a legal career due to his politics, he began to write—literary criticism, philosophy, whatever you want to call it.  

I encountered Shestov because of our own Matt Metevelis, who came upon a book of his called Athens and Jerusalem on the shelves of, I think, the public library in Henderson, Nevada, and told me about it. Probably not coincidental that there’s a significant Jewish community in Henderson. Shestov is only available in English—otherwise, almost entirely in Russian and French—because of an American rabbi named Bernard Martin, who translated a chunk of him in the 60s and 70s and then died young. So why is Shestov important? What’s he got for us?  

Si Léon Chestov noong 1927
From Wikimedia Commons

Shestov is intense. As a younger man he follows Nietzsche’s thinking, at least, in his own way—which is not Russian Orthodoxy or orthodox Judaism, certainly, but bears little of Nietzsche’s hostility to Christianity or the Bible. Through personal tragedy and struggle, he emerges in his own way—anti-rationalist, fearless, unwilling to bend the knee to anyone or any abstract principle, never far from the Bible. Call him an existentialist, call him whatever you want. He is a singular thinker of the sort that has exactly one thing to say, no matter how many ways he might find to say it. The more I learn of him, the more I realize that even most English-speaking philosophers have a hole in their accounts of how the 20th century unfolded, and how deeply theological—unchurchly, maybe even heretical, but theological—it all is.  

Sometime around 1911, in middle age, Shestov discovers Luther—and thereafter Luther becomes I think the most important ally for him outside of scripture itself. He’s encyclopedic on the history of philosophy, but discounts nearly all of it next to Luther. He relocates to Paris after the Russian Revolution and makes a splash on the Parisian philosophical scene, and you can find odd imprints of him all over the next generation or so, despite his lack of students—there was one real disciple, a Romanian Jewish poet/philosopher named Benjamin Fondane. Shestov died in ’38. Fondane died in Auschwitz. But the imprint is real. He’s been forgotten in English, if he was ever known. (There’s a weird Nottingham connection here, because his first book to come out in English had an introduction written by DH Lawrence, who is a Nottingham boy. But that’s before his Luther turn. The book is called The Apotheosis of Groundlessness, which sounds terrifying. For English translation they gave it a much more optimistic sounding title: All things Are Possible.) In any case, in Russian and French his influence on philosophy is still known, and in France it was massive. 

Shestov is a puzzle to many—Christian and Jewish and atheist—because he positively exults in contradiction. He accuses philosophy and theology both, for all their searching and intellectual rigor, of constantly selling out at the critical moment, of being unwilling to face the reality that is beyond their own reason, and so beyond rational or logical necessity, beyond the law. That is, they bend the knee to the constraints of their own reason, and will not hear the words of the prophets. But for Shestov human reason is in the end only constraint—it pretends to and it promises freedom and blessedness, but curls up into a ball and hides before the truth.  

He’s constantly accusing philosophers of not struggling hard enough with the most terrifying, most difficult, most pressing questions. They want to know “the good,” but Shestov has no interest in “the good.” He doesn’t want it as the philosophers know it. He wants God. Because he knows—he’s read it somewhere—that knowing the good in the way we mean it really means knowing good and evil—and this is sin itself. We do know the good—the law tells us. And this has not made us good. It has not helped. We are not free because of it. Or in Luther’s language, “The law, the most salutary doctrine of life, cannot advance man on his way to righteousness, but rather hinders him.” 

For Shestov, the meaning of the scriptures—Old Testament and New, for he sees no disagreement—is that the God who creates everything out of nothing is beyond every constraint. Even the law of noncontradiction crumbles before God. That which is most necessary of all, fixed, unchangeable, is what has already happened. But just this comes untrue. Here he loves to quote Luther in the great Galatians commentary, that Christ becomes the greatest and only sinner—Peter the denier, David the adulterer and murderer, Paul the persecutor. And if that’s so, then that which has been will not have been. Let me say that again, with attention to the grammar—that which has been, past, will not have been. Now how often do you encounter a negative future perfect? But it’s amazingly useful here. God the omnipotent who raises the dead cannot be constrained by the law, even by the law of reason. He overcomes it at the most basic level, transferring that which is immutably yours—your history, your life, your sin, your you—to his own Son, which no law can conceive. So faith is well and truly apart from the law. The meaning of Jesus’ death and resurrection is in this way simple—the law of sin and death, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fall, the tragedy of human history which we are utterly powerless before, and the secret tragedies of our own lives which drive us—come apart.  

Again and again Shestov calls for freedom, and if one misses the Luther in his thinking, this freedom is bound to be misunderstood. Because the last thing he means is a hypothetical ‘free will’ which could sit back and choose the good as if it were something on a menu. He sees this rightly, explicitly agreeing with Luther. Freedom is not the mythical “free choice,” but liberation from the bondage of sin and death. And that liberation is, simply, God, and God alone. So naturally faith is completely passive—and how could anyone really live except by faith? All else is under a death sentence. 

Let me go on further about just one more magnificent weirdo who seems to have taken Shestov to heart at key points—and who, almost without realizing it, has taken Luther on board. This is Michel Henry, a respected French philosopher who died about 25 years ago. In his youth, he was trained by the generation who had interacted with Shestov, and you can feel it in his writing if you know where to look. He writes about all sorts of things—Karl Marx, psychoanalysis, art, universities, Jesus, and more—but he’s especially concerned with the question of our action and how it happens in the first place. How it is that we act, that we perceive, that we do anything. Where our life comes from.  

For Henry, action isn’t just something I do, that is, which I mechanically produce. It can’t simply be described from the outside. He uses an example of a man running on a track. You can watch a person run around a track. You can see his movement relative to other things, but that’s not the real work. That’s not what’s actually happening. It’s a completely different thing to be that man and feel the movement of your limbs, the exhaustion of your body, and the pulsing of energy. It has no relation at all to what you see from the outside. There is something here which can never be objectively described. 

Life is something I feel, something that happens in me. I am not a pool ball or a machine. This is not cause and effect, which don’t really explain the internal dynamics at all, or my sense of effort, of striving. It might seem I am affected by my action—but this isn’t correct either. This would make me the creator of my own action, and my selfhood through it, and leaves both those things mysterious as a result. (We could perhaps get near Aristotle that way). No, life happens to me, in me, through me, to me else it doesn’t happen at all. 

I can’t produce my life. Nor can I just explain it scientifically. Life isn’t just a process that I can consider objectively, but above all what I experience, or that I experience anything. I don’t create it; I receive it, and not by choice. Life is passive, at its root, and just so it is the opposite of inert. It is passivity that lives, that is living. In other words, Henry agrees with Luther on the passive life; he agrees with Luther on the bound will; he agrees with Luther that what he philosophically calls “absolute Life” is before all else, gift—the gift of everything, even myself. He even goes so far as to give an analysis of the law as opposed to life, as that which is peculiarly unable to produce what it commands. It is not clear to me he ever read Luther. But some 650 pages into his monstrous brick of a doctoral dissertation, Henry wrote this:  

“Actually what interested Luther, as much as the principle we have just stated, namely the immanent determination of action by affectivity, is its immediate consequence and what this means concretely for man: his radical impotence to save himself, namely to change his Being by his actions.” (Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation, p.649) 

Here Henry makes the ethical significance of his analysis clear enough. Because our lives are not self-determining, we cannot save ourselves, cannot change who and what we are by our actions. Aristotle is wrong. Luther is right. To do something, I have to already be it. And since I can’t “be” as if it were a verb I do—since I can’t get back behind my action to an original decision, to do good I must somehow already be good. Activity is real, but only because it follows from and emerges out of passivity. Activity depends on passivity. 

U.S. Senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens, as chair of the Appropriations Committee, in 1997.
From Wikimedia Commons

Do you remember Alaska Senator Ted Stevens? He died fifteen years ago, but the internet remembers him, and will probably always remember him. Because Ted Stevens did us a great service. Way back in 2006 in a debate about net neutrality, he dared to use very humble language to describe technical matters that were, generously, a bit beyond his expertise. “The internet is a series of tubes.” Never mind the internet, I love this quote. Not about the internet. About us. We are a series of tubes. We try to talk about humanity, about life, about ourselves by focusing on what we are, on our own essence or internal composition or soul or whatever. About what is in us, as if we could dig around inside ourselves and find the truth. But if the Christian life is passive, then there isn’t anything in us to find. We do not have life in ourselves. The Son has life in himself—I’m pretty sure somebody said that once before. We are tubes, pipes, and there’s no paradox in the water leaving the pipe depending entirely on the water entering the pipe. Its being a good tube is exactly what makes it, well, a good tube—taking in so that it puts out. But it doesn’t make the water. That comes from the spring. That’s how we are good. (Surely the baptism of Jesus fits in here somewhere.) 

So that’s action, in Christ, that rests on passivity. But we do need to talk about the law. Does the law not also move you? Well, yes, we have to admit that it does. It has a power. It can drive you. (A hammer to the skull or a swift kick in the rear can also drive you.) But just what is that power it has? The trouble is simply and wholly that the law says, ‘DO this’, and it is never done. Saying it does not do it. Knowing good and evil does not make us good. The law’s accusation can generate some actions in the world—but just so, they are born out of terror and accusation, not of good will. So this is never the good work really demanded. 

A good will is a will that already wants the best for its neighbor, that gives no regard to itself, that loves and acts in love spontaneously, freely, joyfully without a second thought. It has a singularity of purpose and action that we only marvel at when we look at nature—the cat crouches, eyes fixed on its prey, and springs into action. The horse runs. It’s the perfect unity, the freedom we sometimes hear the greatest athletes aspire to. 

Bust photographic portrait of Muhammad Ali in 1967.
World Journal Tribune photo by Ira Rosenberg.
From Wikimedia Commons

In the words of Muhammad Ali, “Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.” Ali had prefaced this by saying, “It’s just a job,” but the things he describes are not jobs, because a job is a thing you do for money, for a reward, out of an external expectation—a job is a thing of the law. Grass grows because that’s what it is, what it’s meant to be, what it’s been given to be. Birds fly because flying is their glory, the life God gives them. Waves pound the sand because that’s just what it is to be a wave, to be moved in that wavy way. And whatever willing these things do is, in this sense, good, because it is perfectly at one with the life they have been given. The wave does not try to hit the shore, and sometimes succeeds as if it were merely very good at following a rule. It isn’t following a rule. It just is, because that’s how God has made it.