Toward a genuine "post-liberal" political and spiritual awakening

Redefining "liberation" as a new social ontology of reciprocal relations rather than simply tearing down hierarchies

As I have emphasized repeatedly in previous columns, we are currently witnessing something of a global “apocalypse” of liberalism.  What is forcing us toward this political version of the end of days is a planetary system of oscillating, interwoven crises that are not only political and economic in nature, but also cultural and ecological.  They are also profoundly spiritual.

They demand affirmation of what human beings are at the most profound level, one that no longer can abide with embedded class, gender, racial, and religious hierarchies that have dominated over the centuries. I have myself referred to this dynamic as the “revolution of respect”.  It is also what philosopher Charles Taylor dubs the “politics of recognition”.

But so much of this revolutionary “politics” has been clouded over the confusion of the ideas of “respect”, “dignity” and “recognition” with the contentious assertion of individualistic identity in defiance of conventional assumptions, norms, and structures of knowledge – so-called “identity politics”.   Identity politics is the Götterdämmerung (the “twilight of the idols”) of liberalism. It is a testament to liberalism’s final death throes.

The transcendent promise of liberalism was always “liberty”, or “liberation” (from the Latin word liber, usually translated as “freedom”.  It derives from the proto-Indo-European construct leubh-, which means to “peel off” or “cut off”.  For this very reason the Latin term could also be translated as “book”, which in its primitive sense connoted the “bark of a tree”.

Finally, in ancient Rome Liber (“the free one”) was the god of wine and male fertility, who was patronized by the plebs or the low-status masses.  He was associated with the Greek deity Dionysus and his Roman equivalent Bacchus. 

Thus, as dramatized most forcefully in Euripides’ well-known play The Bacchae, figures such as Liber or Dionysus were always secretly feared by the ruling elites for his tendency to gestate revolt and foment public disorder as well as to undermine the epistemic standards, or structures of conventional “rationality”, that coincidentally held both society and the cosmos together.

The philosopher Nietzsche’s discovery in the late nineteenth century of the “Dionysian” as a counterfoil to the rational, or “Apollonian”, principle set the backdrop for the rapid rise of psychoanalytic theories of the “unconscious” and the growing popularity of psychotropic drugs, religious cults , and even the emergence of French post-structuralist philosophy in the years that followed.  

The countercultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s that fatefully transformed the sexual mores, political commitments, and religious inclinations of the postwar generation, effects of which remain still very much in evidence today, were in their own day often referred to as “the new Dionysianism”.   If we look back, a more appropriate descriptor might be “the new Liberianism”.

Whatever name – Liber, Dionysus, Bacchus – we might prefer in the end has little consequence. In the pre-Christian mind the names of god were interchangeable from one culture to the next.  As Courtney Friesen observes in his brilliant and thoroughgoing examination of the role of such a divinity in the ancient Mediterranean world, “Dionysiac liberation” was politically potent, inasmuch as “he delivered from imprisonment and overthrew tyranny and could thus be claimed as a champion of democracy.”

New Testament scholar Dennis MacDonald, following Friesen, observes that early Christianity itself took root and flourished in this “Dionysiac” soil.  In The Dionysian Gospel, a careful exegesis of the Johannine writings from the gospel itself to 1, 2, and 3 John as well as the Book of Revelation , MacDonald shows the striking parallels between the phraseology and symbology peculiar to this literature and the rhetoric of Euripides’ The Bacchae, which puts the traditions surrounding the ancient mysteries of the god Dionysus on full display.  One illustration quite familiar to casual Bible readers is Jesus’ declaration of himself in John 15:1 as “the true vine”, which has unmistakable Dionysian, or “Liberian”, overtones.

The ancient Dionysian celebration, which as The Bacchae itself dramatizes, was an underground, and even a nocturnal, proceeding.  It was an expression of one’s “commoner” status, which is what the Greek word demos, from which we derive “democracy”. 

The demos implied everyone who was not part of the aristoi (the “excellent” ones), who served as the “aristocracy”, as intellectual and political leaders.  It could in certain instances also imply the majority of women, slaves, and outsiders (i.e., “barbarians”) who were often exploited and had no voice at all in civic matters.  This was the constituency who were most attracted to pre-Christian practices of the Liberian, or Dionysian, sort as well as to early Christianity.

Not only Greek but also Roman civilization, which built proudly and self-consciously on its Greek antecedents, had an even stronger, was endemically suspicious of these “demotic” cults and practices, which in the words of Michael Jameson extols the “concept of liberty” and “subverts ail hierarchical relationships in society”.   

Classical Mediterranean society, as various authors have emphasized, was not only hierarchical but intricately class-ridden and status-obsessed”.  The “Dionysiac” spiritual underbelly of this society, which included early Christianity, fostered a radical sense of universal equality and the dissolution of hierarchies.  

But early Christianity, especially after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by Roman legions in 70 C.E., differed by significant metrics from its pagan predecessors.  The Christian “savior” Jesus was much different from myth-shrouded cult deities such as Dionysus, insofar as he was perceived then, as well as today, as an actual historical personage who his adherents professed was the true Jewish mashiach, or “messiah”.  Thus, in the development of the Christian iteration of the ancient “Dionysiac” counterculture the Jewish dimension prevailed over its ecstatic, or “manic”, pagan analogues.

Whereas pagan Liberian, or Dionysian, cultism simply provided a ritualized outlet for the oppressed underclasses to give expression to their futile quest for significance in an oppressive, immutable, hierarchical matrix of power relationships, early Christianity with its Judaic insistence on social justice created an entirely new “social ontology” that radically challenged, at least from an ethical standpoint, the ancient system of status-defined politics.

The early Christian one was a spiritual one that both directly and indirectly galvanized the democratic politics of the early modern era, as famed political theorist Michael Walzer has done in his book The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics.  But what made both early Christianity and early modern liberalism “radical” in Walzer’s sense was not its preoccupation with marginalized “identities” but the idea that the resurrected Christ had inaugurated a new eon of universal dignity and equality.

The famous French radical philosopher Alain Badiou regards the resurrection “event”, whether it actually happened in a material or historical manner of speaking, as the “foundation” of the modern secular belief democracy as the highest good and in the kind of radical universalism that becomes attenuated in such bureaucratic shibboleths as “diversity, equity, and inclusion”.

For the early church the transition can be found in the story found in the 10^th chapter of Acts of the Roman centurion Cornelius’ summoning the apostle Peter into his presence on account of an angelic visitation. The story is complex, but it offers a simple and dramatic justification for the conviction of Paul’s followers, in contrast with Peter and the Jerusalem church, that salvation in Christ Jesus was not merely for Jews, but for all the Gentiles.

In the narrative Peter himself has a vision of an array of creatures which are considered forbidden or “unclean” by traditional Jewish standards, but which a divine voice commands him: ““Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” (verse 15, NIV). 

Later in his address to Cornelius Peter construes this message not as referring to Hebraic dietary laws, but as a repudiation of Jewish ethno-nationalism in matters of salvation. “I now realize”, Peter proclaims in verses 34-5, “how true it is that God does not show favoritism but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right.” 

The Greek idiom in this passage, translated as “show favoritism”, occurs four times in the New Testament, and in each instance connotes the radical equality of every single believer in the eyes of God, one which both ontologically and eschatologically (that is, “in the end”) renders null every status-demarcated social or political order. 

Employment of the word “clean” (katharos) in this context in Acts to characterize egalitarian status as well as universal redemption comports with its cognate usage in John 15:3, where Jesus as the “true vine” says everyone who “remains” in him “are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you”.

In other words, “cleanliness” or “purity” has little to do with moral behavior or personal hygiene but rather concerns a unique kind of radical relationality that is derived from surrender or “submission” to the active power of the Holy Spirit, which itself reveals the fullness of God’s dwelling in the body of all Christ-followers.

Modern political liberalism, therefore, emerges from the modern secular, or politicized, sentiment of ethical egalitarianism and mutual “recognition” that was found in early Christianity, but its trajectory has mirrored not so much the spiritual communitarianism of the early Church as the “libertarianism” of the pagan, Dionysiac cults.

In our final installment we will turn to what radical relationality might look like in the kind of “post-liberal” future, which Patrick Deneen in his current, popular critique of liberalism misses out on.