Messianic Weakness
From the Sketches in Messianism series...
As a frame for human experience, messianism is a bitter pill, because it speaks to one of the great unreconciled pains of history: that the story of human civilisation cannot aright itself by power. This hurts especially, because power is perhaps the first subject of histories, written, as they commonly are, by the victors.
Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History are the most vivid messianic critique of such histories of power and progress. Regular readers will forgive me for quoting his Angelus Novus once again:
“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees on single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”
This image of progress, caught up in its triumphant march toward a better world while disaster reigns in its wake, hums in attunement with thought of Ivan Illich. Illich believed the destructive powers of modernity could be traced back to the church's managerial compulsion to turn Christian ethics into institutions that would force betterment onto the world. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” as he famously said.
Power is a problem that power cannot solve, but history knows no other language. It is at a loss. Are we really powerless? Shall we then do nothing?
Yes, I think we are, in a sense, powerless. And no: there is so much to do, if we are willing to learn other languages of being.
“Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed,” says Benjamin, “with a weak messianic power.” This phrase reminds me of what Illich described as “a scaffoldless hope,” that exists without recourse to the controlling systems and patterns that reassure the Modern imagination.
Here I will peer through one particular window into another world. In non-violent action, a person willingly and purposefully positions themselves in the place of friction, without violence. By the logic of so much written history, non-violent action is simply non-action. There is almost no scope here to comprehend what is happening. Meanwhile, from the place of subjection, non-violent action may well appear both wastefully foolish and offensive to the brutalised experience which rightly calls for justice. And yet, there is a messianic power in this weakness, in such acts that perplex the histories of the victors. These acts create thin places, where new worlds may take root, where ulterior visions become flesh. They do so by a mystery of gentle presence: they show up, always; they force through, never.
This pattern of creaturely abiding, of weak messianic power, of gratuitous presence, of friendship as the eternal possibility, pulses through the language of the First Century messianics who spoke of “the weakness of God:”
“God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are… it is not a wisdom of this age, or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.”
Illich wrote that we should know that we’re “a flame in the dark.”
Perhaps the ‘weakness’ of messianism is akin to the image Cormac McCarthy repeated throughout ‘The Road’: “Keep a little fire burning; however small, however hidden.”
Where is the fire? Is it real? …
“It’s inside you. It always was there.”
I wrote this in 2006 in response to a question posed at a dinner party: "What do you see when you look ahead?"
------------—
What do you see when you look ahead? The question echoes the White King, who asks Alice to "look along the road" and tell him whether she can see the two messengers, who have gone to town. '"I see nobody on the road," said Alice. "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked in a fretful tone. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!"' [Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, Ch. VII, "The Lion and the Unicorn"]
Looking along a road is one way of looking ahead. But what if we are not traveling? If we stay put, we may still look ahead, in time. Either way, the act of looking posits the notion of change: whether we stay put or travel, time and space change. The road brings changes even to those who stand aside and look. In this sense, the question "What do you see?" merges with the question "Where are you going?", and both encompass "What is happening?" These together point toward yet another question: "What are you doing to prepare?"
If I could look ahead and see nothing, I think I would be close to the Zen master's counsel to "live completely in each moment, without expecting anything…." [Shunryu Suzuki, not always so, "Express Yourself Fully"] Anticipating the last question, he adds, "When you are involved in an idea of time—today, tomorrow, or next year—selfish practice begins. Various desires start to behave mischievously. You … worry about what your next step will be."
Alice, seeing nobody, is the butt of the King's joke. The King, seeing nobody, is the joker. The Zen monk, seeing nobody, expresses "true being." Which of these am I?
What do I see when I look ahead? I see life and death, trials and tribulations, opportunities and celebrations, repetitions and permutations of what I see behind. How can I not acknowledge these hopes and fears, straining toward the desirable and away from the fearful? All in all, I become captive of my vision. My looking and my preparation become obsessive. My present is occluded by remembered pasts and imagined futures. I forget my presence, my true being.
My way out of this impasse is whimsy—the high way, and the low—the joker and the butt. I embrace the mystery of ever-present past and future, and I joke with them as a madman or a fool. I pretend I am strong enough to carry the past, and that I am bringing the future with me. I strive to meet the road with joy, and I recite the Navajo Beauty Way: "Before me, behind me, above, below me, all around me, it is completed in Beauty."