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.”