Faith and revolution. 4/4 The premiss of openness. Roger Garaudy, 1973

Acheter

IV/ The premiss of openness

I come now to my third and final premiss. To affirm transcendence is

to affirm that man is able to free himself from existing nature by the

continuous re-creation of that nature. To affirm relativity is to affirm

that man is able to liberate himself from existing social structures and

the alienations inherent in them by a revolutionary action which creates

new possibilities. These two premisses seem to me to rest in the last

analysis on a third, that of openness. I could also call it the eschatological

premiss, following on the utopian and the prophetie, or again,

if you like, the premiss of hope.

It was this essential premiss of ail revolutionary action which inspired

young people in 1968 to write bravely on the walls of the old Sorbonne :

'Be reasonable ! Ask for the impossible !' The sight of that old centre

of learning made it clear to them perhaps that there is nothing more

irrational than an unadventurous mind, a positivist attitude which will

not venture beyond the limits of the given, beyond the established order

of things. Here is where faith and revolution can link up again after

centuries of antagonism. When Christian eschatology lost its vigour,

when it ceased to be a ferment in history and retreated into the ghettos

of heaven or eternity, revolutionary hope took over the baton from

Christian hope. It is a historic fact that it took Marxism to remind

Christians that the future of the earth was their business. When theology

degenerates into a theodicy whose only concern is to justify or absolve

God in respect of the confusions of history ; when it is content to explain

the world instead of changing it ; when the joyful news of the Gospel

is presented as a ready-made truth rather than as a task to be accomplished;
when the history of salvation ceases to be a programme of

emancipation — then, as Jurgen Moltmann has so well shown, we find

side by side and in quite unnecessary opposition, to quote him, 'a

Christianity without hope in history' and 'a hope in history without

Christianity'. The premiss of hope, which makes it possible to bring

together and perhaps to hold together the two ends of the chain, may

perhaps be formulated thus : man is a task to be accomplished and

society, too, is a task to be accomplished.

Faith in the resurrection

This premiss may perhaps be identified with the very foundation of

faith, namely, faith in the resurrection of Christ. I apologize for venturing
to broach such a problem in the presence of so many theologians

but at least there are enough of you to correct me if I say foolish things,

which is more than likely. I would like simply to reflect on what faith

in the resurrection of Christ might imply for revolutionary action.

The historical element in the resurrection event, that which is unchallengeably

historical, is the faith of the first Christians in the resurrection.

What is quite clear is that a certain experience — even if we cannot say

precisely what it was — irrupted into their lives, transforming them as

persons and changing the course of history. The historic threshold they

then crossed may perhaps roughly be described by saying that they left

behind them a freedom which up to then had been interpreted in Greek

and Roman thinking as an awareness of necessity and moved forward

to a freedom understood as participation in a creative activity. To show

how great a step this was, compare two texts separated by less than a

century : one by the Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius, the other by

the Christian writer Lactantius. Aurelius says : 'Consider the past !

How many revolutions, how many empires ! Look also at the future

and what you see will be the same. What will happen in the future will

be in the same key and in the same rhythm as what happens today. It

makes no difference therefore whether you are a spectator of human

life for only forty years or for ten thousand years, for what more would

you achieve ?' Compare that with what Lactantius says in his Divinae

Institutiones : 'The arguments adduced by the Stoics to demonstrate the

divinity of the heavenly bodies actually prove the contrary. If they

argue that they are gods because they are regular and rational in their

movement, they are wrong because the very fact that they are unable to

depart from their fixed orbits proves that they are not gods. If they

were really gods they would be seen moving as they please here and there

just like living beings here on earth who go where they please because

their wills are free.'

Here are two texts which seem in direct antithesis to each other and

which mark the turning point in history produced by the irruption of

this new Christian experience. On the one hand, history is condemned

to an eternal cycle, is seen merely as an apparent development of what

is really an immobile eternity, with man as simply a spectator who looks

on while life and the world follow their deceptive course. On the other,

God and men are the lawbreakers, the barrier crossers, the great mark

of their divinity being the power of their freedom of will whereby they

are able at any moment to create a new and unpredictable order. The

chance to observe a turning point of such magnitude has rarely been

offered in human history. Thereafter, it has of course been possible

to challenge this or that detail in the life of Christ or in early Christian

history. But one thing is certain, this radical change has taken place in

human life. The fundamental and indubitable historical fact is that a

new attitude to nature, history and human relations has been introduced.

Hegel, I believe, showed in his Philosophy of History a profound

grasp of this decisive moment of history when he discerned in Christianity

the source of every vision of the world which acknowledges in

man his active interiority, and which makes man the mainspring in the

evolution of reality.

The first Christians, especially the writers who composed the Gospels

in the language and culture of their times, related every narrative, every

par able, every image, to the primary obligation to announce to us this

liberating good news : ail things are possible. It is in this light that the

resurrection takes on its full significance. Christ came, breaking through

ail our bounds. Even death, the ultimate bound set to our life, even

death itself has been mastered. This resurrection is not a miracle comparable

to, say, the raising of Lazarus. It would have been absurd for

Christ to have risen from the dead only to return to a life which once

again would end in death. That would have been no real conquest of

death but only a temporary respite. Christ's resurrection is obviously

not a return to mortal life. Neither is it a scientific fact in the sense in

which positivists understand those. If ail that was involved was an

instance of cellular regeneration, nobody's life would be disturbed by it

any more than by any other chemical reaction. Nor again is it a historical

fact if by historical we mean that which can be ascertained and tested by

material évidence or eye-witness accounts. We know of Christ's resurrection

only through the faith of his disciples in that resurrection and

not by the direct evidence of the senses.

An unprovable assurance

Here, I believe, is the key to the problem. Father Cardonnel puts it in a

way which seems to me eminently just : 'The general resurrection of the

dead has no guarantee outside the faith which I display in it, in the

general sense that the only proof of faith is faith itself.' Does this

diminish the importance of the resurrection ? On the contrary, it seems

to me to magnify it. Would the resurrection have any meaning at all

if it depended on a laboratory analysis, or a notary's affidavit certifying

that the tomb was empty, or on testimony given under oath by someone

like Thomas who had actually put his finger in the wounds — which in

any case the real Thomas did not do for he had faith before stretching

forth his hand ? If this kind of proof convinced anyone, it would hardly

make him a believer. It would simply make him a superstitious atheist

who regarded Christ as some sort of magician with the power to violate

the laws of nature. This is why it is essential to insist that the risen

Jesus is grasped by faith and not by the senses.

What is it, then, which gives birth to this assurance? Here again I

believe — more firmly than I used to since reading the books of

Fr Xavier Léon-Dufour and Fr Martelet who in their different ways

both point in this direction — that the resurrection is the reversal of

history's normal momentum. It is the decisive declaration of what

Teilhard de Chardin called 'anti-entropy' (néguentropié), a force which

could enter the structures of human life and give man the possibility of

swimming against those disastrous currents in history with which

I began.

We shall never be able fully and finally to think through the nature of

this assurance. By definition, like ail that is most important in life, it

escapes conceptualization. How could I prove to you that a picture is

beautiful ? Allow me to mention here a personal experience which has

much to say about the problem of faith. I once gave a lecture on a

picture by Poussin, Phociorfs Funeral. I explained at considerable

length why it impressed me as a masterpiece. Afterwards, an old lady

came up to me and said : 'Would you care to see a Poussin picture which

you have never yet seen because it is in my personal collection ?' I went

to her house to see it. It turned out to be indeed a fine pièce of painting,

but when I had studied it long and hard I made myself an enemy for

life by saying : 'Madam, this is a remarkable picture but it is not by

Poussin.' A remark which can hardly please a collector ! I went on :

'Please don't worry, I'm not an expert. You may well prefer to ignore

what I am saying. But this picture strikes me as being perhaps by

Stellar, or Ducasse, Poussin's brother-in-law, but certainly not by

Poussin himself. It is altogether too typically Poussin.' Every single

one of Poussin's tricks was there, put in with a sure touch and a marvellous

eye. Yet what was missing was precisely what makes a Poussin.

So I took my leave, sad in myself, almost as sad as I had left the disillusioned

owner. For I realized that basically everything I had said about

Phocion’s Funeral could have been said about this picture too. I had

said all there was to say except the heart of the matter.

There will always come a moment when concepts fail and myth must

take over, or at least some more direct intuition. A horse can be brought

to the water but it must be he who drinks. So too with faith, as with

love. You can list ail your reasons for loving one particular woman,

but at the end you will still have left the crucial thing unsaid. When

you have listed ail your reasons for believing you will have left unsaid

the crucial thing which is precisely the decision that can never be fully

grasped by conceptual thinking. Myth, content to do no more than

point, is much superior to concepts, but that is another story.

If we are, then, to use concepts to talk about a reality which by definition

they cannot fully grasp, i.e. the resurrection, it will be essential in doing

so to move beyond our own familiar cultural context. We must learn

to think in other than the Greek categories of dualism and individualism

which are totally foreign to biblical thought.

The dualism of soul and body, and thus the myth — here in the pejorative

sense — of the immortality of the soul to which such dualism gives

rise, is a Platonic notion which has nothing to do with Christianity nor

with the Bible. I have been told that Hebrew has no word for the body

as apart from the mind or spirit which enlivens it. There is simply a

being which is inspired by God and then one which is not. The body is

not one part of man, the soul another. That is to import a Greek

notion, aggravated by the more recent Cartesian, mechanistic approach

for which the body is no more than physical matter. What then would

be the purpose of the incarnation? No, in the biblical tradition the

body is the whole man made visible in his outward gestures. There is

absolutely no sense in supposing that when Christ died he left his body

in the cloakroom, to be called for three days later. What could he have

done with it afterwards ? What good would it have been to him in his

Lordship of history — which is after all the heart of the faith in him

that we are invited to share ?

The second illusion we must do away with, no less characteristic of our

Western culture since the Renaissance, is individualism. Here dialogue

with the great Eastern civilizations may help us. For the path along

which they point us is that of liberation from the illusion that we are

each imprisoned in the confines of our skin. The deepest level of my

existence, the principle of my being and my becoming, is not what I

possess, nor my family inheritance, nor the story of my experiences, my

belongings, my wealth and my abilities. It is rather that which dwells

and develops in me, that which transcends me from the surrounding

world, from the culture, in the widest sense of that term, that gives me

life. As the wisdom of the East teaches us, I can only reach that depth

by divesting and depriving myself of personal possessions. Only by way

of renunciation can I attain the purity and the authenticity of the love

which dwells in me, and which has about it nothing individualist and

thus — as Christ has shown — nothing mortal. Death cannot rob one

who has thrown off ail that made him a particular individual. Only

then can we live the life of ail things and live eternally in the way that

Christ has shown in his resurrection.

He certainly lived his personal, individual life to the full, precisely in

order to show that this had meaning only in a higher life, but one which

can in turn only be realized in and through the individual. It is the

resurrection which shows this forth. As Fr Dufour has written, if I

wish to speak to Jesus as to an individual person I can only do so to

the pre-Easter Jesus. In other words, it is by his life that he has inaugurated

a new type of existence. He performed the madcap feat of smashing

the machinery of a world geared to the hunger for power and possessions.

Just as I cannot sit down and say : I am going to write a poem, but

must wait for the moment that brings a surge of poetic creativity, of

which neither I nor anyone else can be master, so with the resurrection

something indefinable happened, something broke into the lives of the

first disciples and into our history, where it continues to make itself

felt. But I cannot grasp it any more than I can grasp God as 'a being'.

To use a noun for God is almost always to start looking for the substance

behind the substantive and so to confuse oneself. For me God

is to be experienced as an act, not as something I can define. If he were

a being other than me, if I return to the old notion of transcendence as

spatially distant, then we should be stripped of some of our responsibility

for our own history, whereas what is liberating in faith is precisely

that it frees us to total responsibility for that history. It is not the lack

of définition that should worry us.

A new quality of this present life

This then is perhaps what eternal life means : not another life in time

or space but a new quality, a new density or intensity of this present

life when lived by the love I have mentioned, as the best and only way

to struggle against death. By his death — a real death, where he threw

off even any assurance or guarantee that could come from his parentage:
'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?' — Christ

showed that death need be no more than a threshold, akin perhaps to

the thresholds between inorganic and organic matter, or between life

and consciousness, the threshold between the illusion of individualism

and the unitive life of the entire universe.

I do not believe that this is a mere metaphor. I do not believe that

Christ lives in us as a Mozart devotee will say that Mozart lives in him

each time he listens to his music. This would still be the relationship

of one individual to another. It is quite different. It is a matter of

common participation not in some higher but still outer reality but in

the only real reality, that which is composed exclusively of human

initiative, human decision, human creativity.

Every liberating and creative act thus implies this premiss of the resurrection,

above all I would say the act of revolution. For to be a revolutionary

means to believe — my premiss ! — that life has meaning, a

meaning for all men. How could I speak of an encompassing goal for

mankind as a whole, of a meaning to be given to that history from which

millions of human beings have been shut out in the past, whose living

and dying as slaves or as soldiers seemed to have no meaning at ail?

How could I look to still more lives being sacrificed for the birth of this

new reality if I did not believe — whether I am aware of it or not —

that this new reality in fact already contains and furthers them ail?

In other words, either my vision of the socialism to come is an abstraction

by which a future chosen few may win out over the annihilation

of countless multitudes down the ages, or else my action, all my actions,

must be based on my faith in the resurrection from the dead. This is

the implicit premiss of all revolutionary action, indeed of ail creative

action.

For the resurrection from the dead, no more than Christ's, is not the

affair of distinct individual beings. How could the resurrection of

Christ be that of a single ego ? If it is still today a summons to each of

us then this is because he was not raised for himself, as an individual,

but for ail of us, in ail of us and in order to take ail of us with him.

He does not save us from outside, as if giving us a present, but from

within, since it is our deciding which saves us. Have you noticed that

each of the actions that the Gospels présent as a miracle has this characteristic?
Christ never appears as a magician or wonder-worker acting

on men as if to transform them from outside. Everything happens in

the minds and wills of men. He doesn't say T have saved you' as one

might on fishing out a drowning man. He says 'Your faith has saved

you', which is rather different, and which reminds us that the entire

drama of God, without residue or exception, is played out in our

human lives.

V/ Conclusion

These then are to my mind the three premisses of hope, the premisses

of all revolutionary action and the evangelical premisses of the Bible.

No faith aware of these can be an opium of the people. Any blow

struck against such faith is a stroke against the revolution whose mainspring

it is. For revolution is not simply a plan of action worked out

by scientific means. It is also, indeed far more truly, the will to draw

up that plan or to be associated with it. The driving force of that fundamental

decision is no logical or experimental necessity but a pure act

of faith in what the world, by our efforts, can become. Faith frees

because it is not only, as Paul Ricoeur has so well said, an extra level of

meaning but above ail an extra level of action. That is why, it seems to

me, the revolutionary can welcome this faith in order to counter his

own under-development and to play his full part in creation.

Roger Garaudy

THE ECUMENICAL REVIEW – 1973 - JANUARY-  pages 59 to 79
 A lecture, transcribed from a recording, given at the Ecumenical Centre, Geneva, in

October 1972 on the occasion of an exhibition of books and journals in French (see

E c u m e n i c a l D i a r y , below). ROGER GARAUDY is Professor of Aesthetics in the University

of Poitiers, France. His books include F r o m A n a t h e m a to D i a l o g u e (English édition :

London, Collins and Co. and New York, Herder and Herder, 1966) and L ' A l t e r n a t i ve

(Paris, Robert Laffont, 1972). The lecture was translated from the French by the WCC

Language Service. The original is published in the Bulletin du Centre Protestant d'Etudes,

Geneva, 1973.