The iota of difference, again and again

Went to church for the first time outside the context of a memorial service or a 12-step meeting for a very long time. Honestly I can't tell you when it was. I remember trying to go to church back in July of 2009 when I was alone in Princeton getting our house organized to move and Mary and the kids were in Larchmont while her dad was dying. I tried to go, but I got there and somehow I had gotten the time of the service wrong. Maybe my feelings about going were more mixed than I let on to myself.

In any case, I went. I'll probably have a separate post about the overall experience of going later. 

For today, some thoughts. The first striking thing was in the reading from the Gospel of Luke: "When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. Then Jesus said, 'Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing'." And my brain popped, being reminded that Marx alludes to this when articulating the process by which commodity fetishism and reification proceed through the concept of value:

If men relate their products to one another as values insofar as these objects count as merely objectified husks of homogeneous human labour, there lies at the same time in that relationship the reverse, that their various labours only count as homogeneous human labour when under objectified husk. They relate their various labours to one another as human labour by relating their products to one another as values. The personal relationship is concealed by the objectified form. So just what a value is does not stand written on its forehead. In order to relate their products to one another as commodities, men are compelled to equate their various labours to abstract human labour. They do not know it, but they do it, by reducing the material thing to the abstraction, value. This is a primordial and hence unconsciously instinctive operation of their brain, which necessarily grows out of the particular manner of their material production and the relationships into which this production sets them.

Again, Marx goes back to the Bible for his words (the difference here is in the translation, the German rendering of the passage in Luke is "sie wissen nicht, was sie tun", which Marx lifts. Slavoj Zhizhek, by the way, has a whole book riffing on this). This process of forgetting the individualness of human labors through their equation through value (objectified of course in money) is likened to Christ's crufixion. That Christ's sacrifice on the cross is not a tragedy for all mankind but in fact the act that make's mankind as a whole's salvation possible (at least to the Christian way of thinking) seems largely lost on Marx.

So that was fun.

Anyhoo, the preacher said that after the service Boykin Bell would be talking about the Nicene Creed afterwards in the social hall or whatever they call it and I was like, woot, Boykin! I had been delighted to have seen her husband Greg on the way in. The preacher noted that the Nicene Creed was turning 1700 this year, which made it even more auspicious.

So I went to hear Boykin talk. It was mostly old folks (not youngsters like me) but I stayed nonetheless. And Boykin sets to talking about the Nicene Creed and the arguments with the Arians (who argued that Christ was of like substance with the Father homoiousios instead of one substance with the father homoousios) and I found myself once more right at home. Somewhere in there she used the word "cosubstantiation" in reference to the Arian debates and I was reminded of the great Reformation tussle between the Catholics who believed in transubstantiation (turning bread and wine literally into Christ's flesh and blood) as opposed to the alternate theories of consubstantiation (in which the substance of Christ's body and blood are considered to be present alongside that of bread and wine -- still doctrine in high church Anglicanish) and the idea that there is a "sacramental union" between the bread/wine and body/blood, more a symbolic thing. That's how most Christians think of it today, I think.

The point is, the same things are being argued. The word made flesh. On the one hand we're back at the magical basis of religion. On the other, as with Marx's shift from Christ's sacrifice to reification and exchange of value via money, the movement is towards ever greater abstraction. 

OK. This ended up taking longer than usual and came out a bit of a jumble, but the point is: it was interesting.

One last bonus point. In the course of Googling the German of the quote from Luke ("for they know not what they do") I discovered that the German "...denn sie wissen nicht, was sie tun" was actually made the title of the classic James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause. A baffling transition if ever there was one, from the sublime to the utterly ridiculous. I never quite understood that film and why it was significant though Dean was certain a striking dude. How "they called me a Chicken, dad" has anything to do with Christ on the Cross I will never know.