Last evening's conversation touched on payback, or paying back. Also, belief.
Does belief blind? Is it possible to live without belief? Why would one want to?
And what does this mean? “Disorder is simply the order we are not looking for.” (Henri Bergson)
Who owes whom what? And why?
New issue of Journal of Religion arrives. From first article:
Over the past few decades, Anselm of Canterbury’s late-eleventh-century text Cur Deus homo(Why God Became Man) has become a fixture in discussions of the relationship between theology and economy.1 Breaking with so-called ransom models of atonement, Anselm’s description of Christ’s sacrifice remains perhaps the single most influential account of human redemption in Roman Catholic Christianity and serves as a key point of departure for many of its Protestant inheritors. Famously, Anselm presents the Christian drama of redemption as an accounting problem: a transaction played out on the books of a divine creditor working on behalf of his delinquent debtors. According to Anselm all creatures owe God a debt of honor and obedience, and with the exception of the heavenly host, all are in a state of structural default.2 A debt left unsettled, he claims, will continue to hold the borrower in its sway.3 And so, rather than simply forgive and forget, God must find a way to settle the deficit that humans cannot settle for themselves. Taking on the coincidence of humanity and divinity, God makes himself both a means of payment and a measure of value, converting himself into a kind of “divine currency” in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, ontological tender for all debts public and private.4 God, in effect, pays the past-due balance of human merit and restores humanity to solvency by paying himself with himself on humanity’s behalf.
In the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, a great deal of critical attention turned toward the question of the moral economy underpinning the idea that debts must be repaid.5 Debt, after all, entails a relationship in which it is difficult, even impossible, to decide in advance whether the lender approaches the borrower as a friend or an enemy.6 Credit offers borrowers access now to money they expect to make in the future; it offers the promise of liquidity.7 But credit also threatens to turn predatory. If the interest on a loan outstrips borrowers’ ability to pay it, borrowers may find themselves in a position where they will have to reorganize their lives around the demand to service the loan; the loan term may even threaten to extend itself into perpetuity. Anselm’s choice to portray God himself as constrained by the necessity of paying down the debt thus seems to bend the moral arc of the universe to the side of the predatory lender. As a result, some have argued that Anselm’s theological drama foreshadows—perhaps even prepares the way for—the “neoliberal” common sense that it is debtors, rather than creditors, who bear final responsibility for their debts and that it is thus debtors, rather than creditors, who must be made to bear the costs of widespread credit collapse.8
This reevaluation of Anselm’s economy of redemption has drawn attention to important and underappreciated implications of his text. But in the rush to establish homologies between Anselm’s economy and our own, the full significance of a crucial feature of his presentation has often been obscured. Unlike the subprime borrowers that serve to underwrite this analogy, the figure around which Anselm’s economic imagination turns is not the “free” debtor but the fugitive slave or serf. Rather than as parties to contract who have taken on a loan voluntarily, Anselm depicts humanity on the model of people held as property: bound to the land on which they live and obliged to furnish rent in cash or in kind.
(--in, On the Fall of the Angels: Economic Theology after the Middle Passage* by Sean Capener, Journal of Religion, vol.104, no.3, July 2024)
I temporarily take the stance that belief is unnecessary. What is necessary is clear gaze. To see what is there -- without prejudice, illusion, or belief.
Perhaps to merely observe, to appreciate, and to practice.
A few of the men we converse with at prison are studying economics. It is an alien universe to me.
Still, as debtor people, someone always owes someone something. (cf John Wick marker.)
So our philosophers and theologians posit a God who is owed something by God's creation, especially the human-kind, following the mythic narrative of apple-biting.
Hence pain and suffering. Hence Godly second-thoughts. Hence ransom/redemption by Jesus, the Christ, sacrificing himself (with quick follow-up resurrection) for the good of creation, if not specifically, humankind.
It cheers me that such a narrative has become nearly impossible to affirm. It is a good story. But, hard to affirm.
Given the landscape of religious folklore over the centuries, I nod my head, and say, "Yup, I see the thinking there."
But the belief in the thinking escapes me. It goes around the curve, down the hill, and off into the thick unfollowable silage, airtight and packed away in dense fields.
In prison on Friday morning, then again on zoom Friday Evening Practice, we looked at the following about the Mahamudra:
In the following verses, tantric yogini Niguma (10th-11th century India) writes about Mahamudra as empty bubbles in a translucent ocean.
‘The Natural Abiding’
By Miranda Shaw, PhD
Don’t do anything whatsoever with the mind—
Abide in an authentic, natural state.
One’s own mind, unwavering, is reality.
The key is to meditate like this without wavering;
Experience the great reality beyond extremes.
In a pellucid ocean,
Bubbles arise and dissolve again.
Just so, thoughts are no different from ultimate
reality,
So don’t find fault; remain at ease.
Whatever arises, whatever occurs,
Don’t grasp—release it on the spot.
Appearances, sounds, and objects are one’s own
mind;
There’s nothing except mind.
Mind is beyond the extremes of birth and death.
The nature of mind, awareness,
Although using the objects of the five senses,
Does not wander from reality.
In the state of cosmic equilibrium
There is nothing to abandon or practice,
No meditation or post-meditation. Just this.
—Niguma, translated by Miranda Shaw
◆
(--Excerpted from Passionate Enlightenment: Women in Tantric Buddhism by Miranda Shaw, in Tricycle, June 2024)
When "just this" is what is here, does it fall to us to practice the integrity internal to what is emerging into appearance, perhaps God-Self, wherein no debt is recognized, and what is free is the nature of reality when seen, loved, and compassionately engaged?
