My reading of Paul is that he insists on the resurrection of the death-in-life inherent to normal egoic existence. The spiritual moment overcomes the separation from the deadly splitting from nature which sees us alone in the universe of dead matter, and opens upon the perspective of universal being. This may be tied to the saying of Jesus: “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). And it presupposes the faith in a living God.
The emergence of Jesus Christ as the intermediary between the human and divine, and hence as the essential configuration of spirit opening upon a radically new path of human existence needs to be evoked here. I do not claim that Jesus is the only authentic path of spirit: that sort of sectarian splitting and chauvinism is precisely the anti-spiritual way. I do claim that his emergence was the sort of thing that could only have happened at a certain moment in history—and that such a moment has most definitely not gone away, although the forces that would hold it back—dare we call them Satanic?—are presently in the ascendant.
The Jesus phenomenon occurred as the expansion of Rome’s empire into Palestine destabilized the existing Abrahamic religion and introduced new class configurations into traditional Judaic society. The quisling King Herod and the quisling elite-priesthood of the Sanhedrin represented the infiltration of a foreign body into the command structure of Judaism. This was accompanied by severe dislocation and dispossession in the countryside and it reached its grim apogee in the introduction of money exchange into the Great Temple. I see Jesus as a peasant revolutionary who emerged in dialectical reaction to this and conceived of a transformation in the spiritual sphere that could also nonviolently transform the secular sphere. The key passages bearing witness to this in the Gospels are Jesus’ magnificent and soulful imprecations against the money power. Non-violent to living beings, he actively throws over the money-changing tables in the Temple, and thereby seals his fate on the Cross.
From another angle, this core spiritual event is also a critique of idolatry: that abiding propensity of humanity to make false gods out of its own productions and submit to them. Without this insight we fall victim to the shallow view of spirituality which sees it as something missing in contemporary materialist life—which is by and large, true—and concludes that what we need is more spirituality—which is both stupid and dangerous. How can we forget that some of the most malignant features of modern history—Nazism, for example, or the various fundamentalisms that blight our landscape—have many of the essential hallmarks of spiritual experience, in particular, the breaking down of ego boundaries and the sense of reunion with some larger whole? In fact it may be said that right-wing movements energized by pseudo-spiritual power are much more dangerous than the stodgy and prudent secular right.
No, we do not need more spirituality as such; indeed there is no such thing but only spiritualities mediated by their social vision and relations. We need more authentic spirituality: not just a simple breaking of egoic chains but also an overcoming of the corruptions of idolatry. This occurs in context of a righteous striving toward justice and universality, beyond the strictures of racism and gender oppression. In respect to this we should bear in mind that money power is the pure form of idolatry: money power, that is: not the simple form of monetary exchange but the endless expanding of value, dissolving the integrity of nature and human being. The word for self-expanding value is capital, of course; and the struggles of Jesus against the money-changers initiate not only a new moment in religious history, but were the first, anticipatory, instances of an anti-capitalist campaign, when capital was only lying nascent in its cradle. Today, capital has become hegemonic and world-destroying at the same time. Its society of rampant egoism—because the ego-form is the only model of self suitable for capitalist relations of production—along with the astounding panoply of idolatry known as consumerism, poses the greatest threat of all history to the survival of our species and innumerable others. It is this massive weight that burdens spiritual existence today—and demands that we find new ways of spiritual realization.
Jesus and the first Christians have been called the first communists—that is, in class society, in contrast to the primitive communism that graces original, pre-class and pre-state society. We are now in another context requiring a spiritual revolution. Will a renewed power of soul resurrect us from the abyss?
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