Theological Reflections on the Spirit of Capitalism
Garry J. Deverell (June 12, 2007)
Introduction
According to the federal Treasurer, Peter Costello, Australians are living in economic
paradise right now. Apparently the times we live in are completely unprecedented in the
history of our nation. Average household income is at its highest level ever. The rates of
both unemployment and taxation are at the lowest they has been in forty years. The
community, in other words, is absolutely awash with money and jobs, money and jobs that
allow us to exercise our potential as free individuals on a scale never before seen in this
country. Surely there can be no doubt that the Prime Minister ¢â‚¬â„¢s vision of Australia as a
¢â‚¬Ëœrelaxed and comfortable ¢â‚¬â„¢ nation has been fulfilled. Capitalism, the economic system based
on the exchange of goods and services in a (mostly) free market, is finally delivering what
Adam Smith (the modern theorist of capitalism par excellence) promised it would deliver: the
kingdom of God on earth!
What you will not hear Howard and Costello talk about, however ¢â‚¬”except with great
reluctance ¢â‚¬”is the miry underside of all this apparent wealth and freedom. In his very
sobering book, Affluenza, Clive Hamilton points out that while average weekly incomes are
indeed higher than they have ever being, Australians are also more indebted than they have
ever been. So while our houses are four times the size they were in the fifties (when our
families were four times the size they are now), and while we increasingly drive what used to
be called ¢â‚¬Ëœprestige ¢â‚¬â„¢ cars, most of this expense is met not from our savings, but from scarily
huge bank loans. Add to this the stubborn persistence of genuine poverty in Australia.
According to the Australian Council of Social Services, a massive 13% of Australian families
live in poverty, with the most vulnerable groups being Aboriginal people, people with
disabilities or chronic illnesses, and the persistently under-employed. Of course, many of
those who live in poverty are members of more than one of these groups. Like my father, for
example, who is a member of all three. I could go on to talk about the psycho-social
significance of the fact that we are at war with ourselves in the figure of the Middle-eastern or
Muslim ¢â‚¬Ëœother ¢â‚¬â„¢, and that we disown our own moral failure in the shape of off-shore
processing-centres for asylum seekers, but that is a story for another time.
1
This paper was originally delivered at the Auburn Forum in Melbourne on June 12, 2007. 2
Suffice to say, for now, that what we are dealing with here is the very nature of capitalism as
a system that works off the phenomenon of surplus value. You will recall the classical
description of Marx in Das Kapital: capitalism is that system by which a surplus-value is
generated through the exchange of goods and labour which, precisely by that exchange, is
alienated from its origin and reinvested for the sake of creating yet more surplus value. In
strictly Hegelian terms, then, Capitalism ¢â‚¬â„¢s inexorable drive towards the ever-greater
accumulation of surplus-value inevitably incurs various figures of loss or alienation as its
underside or anti-thesis. Like monetary debt or poverty. Like the depletion of natural
resources. Like the effects that are usually referred to as ¢â‚¬Ëœanti-social behaviour ¢â‚¬â„¢. All of this is
well-trodden ground. But what I would like to discuss with you tonight is a somewhat more
disturbing effect of this dialectic: that the insatiable hunger for surplus-value necessitates not
only the exploitation of existing resources but also the exponential production of the very
hunger that creates these debts. Capitalism, in other words, thrives on the production of an
ever increasing desire for a phantasmal ¢â‚¬Ëœreal ¢â‚¬â„¢ that it can never actually deliver. Which means,
for the purposes of tonight ¢â‚¬â„¢s theological investigation, that the usual description of logic of
capitalism as essentially materialistic is quite mistaken. Because the only substance that
capitalism actually delivers is a disembodied hunger or desire, the real terminus of capitalism,
its ¢â‚¬Ëœreal-referent ¢â‚¬â„¢ if you like, is actually nothing, nothing material, nothing real, but a
phantasmagorical geist which, finally, has nothing to do with the salvation of this world.
What I shall finally argue, then, is that the spirit of capitalism is the most modern form of the
ancient Gnostic heresy, which sought to transform the essential materialism of the Christian
gospel into an other-worldly spirituality of escape and this-worldly negation.
The materialism of the gospel
That the gospel made known in Jesus Christ is essentially a materialist gospel may, perhaps,
come as a surprise to some of you, especially if you are accustomed to thinking about the faith
as a kind of inner orientation or attention toward a disembodied personality or presence called
¢â‚¬ËœGod ¢â‚¬â„¢. You will forgive me if I take a moment to disabuse you of that understanding by
summarising what I understand of the primitive Christian community ¢â‚¬â„¢s understanding of the
matter.
First, there is a recognition in the New Testament that the God of Jesus Christ is not a
different God than that of the Jews. The first Christians were, as you now know, Jews. They
therefore inherit from the Jewish people an understanding of God as one who has promised to 3
be with and for God ¢â‚¬â„¢s people always ¢â‚¬”down amongst it, in the nitty-gritty of their very
fleshly, material lives ¢â‚¬”even if they often fail to do the same for God. What Christians then
add is this: that the clearest embodiment of the covenanting God of Judaism is the particular
life of Jesus of Nazareth. Here the often mysterious God of the Hebrews comes to dwell in
human form and flesh. What Christians learn, in Jesus, was that God was not only with and
for us in spirit, as it were, but that God was also with us in the flesh, living the very life that
we live, respecting its limitations and yet showing us how those limitations may be
transcended. What Christians learn from Jesus was that the God of the Jews has a human
face, that this God does not abandon us to the tragic consequences of our greed, our pride, or
our lust for power over others, but comes to remonstrate with us, passionately, in the form of
a very human life that is able to encounter and experience exactly how powerful these forces
can be.
Second, the God of Christians is a God of love. Perhaps you have heard that before. But let
me pause for a moment to reflect something of what a Christian means by love, for love in its
modern and post-modern incarnations is seldom the same as Christian love. First, in the
Christian lexicon, love is first an imitation of Christ ¢â‚¬â„¢s radical form of friendship, the
willingness to lay aside one ¢â‚¬â„¢s own life in order that another ¢â‚¬â„¢s life may flourish. It is, in the
words of Paul Ricoeur, the apprehension that the other person has a claim on me, and that I
am no longer responsible only for myself, but that I share in the responsibility to insure that
the life of my brother or sister is able to flourish as well, to become what God intends that it
may become. Second, the language of laying down one ¢â‚¬â„¢s life refers, of course, to a particular
history: the real, materially tanglible, event of Christ ¢â‚¬â„¢s crucifixion. It should be remembered,
however, that the crucifixion represents not just the love of a singular man at a particular time,
for a particular community. The crucifixion is a sign in the world of the communal love of
God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit for every single creature, in every time
and place. The cross enacts in human history what the event we call ¢â‚¬ËœGod ¢â‚¬â„¢ has been like, and
will be like for eternity: love. A third point is this, that Christian love is not a spiritualist
ideal, hanging in the heaven like the ¢â‚¬Ëœplatonic love ¢â‚¬â„¢ of the Greeks. It has form and shape and
a particular history in the world. And that is really what the language of ¢â‚¬Ëœcommandment ¢â‚¬â„¢ is
about, in the New Testament. Christians are commanded to love not because God is a bully
and they are his slaves. On the contrary, as the Jesus of John ¢â‚¬â„¢s gospel says, Christians are no
longer slaves of God, but friends; but this is only the case insofar as they are willing to love
particular, that is real, others. The command to love, you see, is also (and somewhat
paradoxically) the means by which God frees us from our bondage to self. If Christians did 4
not love, they would still be slaves to all that our selves are apart from Christ ¢â‚¬”a series of
basic, and seemingly irresistible, drives derived from DNA, from family, from the capitalist
system, or where-ever. In love, however, we learn to listen for another voice. The voice of
God, who alone knows how it is that human beings may flourish. The command to love is
therefore, in its most basic form, an apprehension of the pressure God exerts, within the real
material world, towards our freedom, our liberation towards life not only for ourselves, but
for the people around us as well. The command to love reminds Christians that love cannot
be what human beings would like it to be. Love can only be what God is. A costly pressure
within the world of bodies toward justice, peace and reconciliation.
Third, the God of Christians is a human God. This is implied in what I have said already
about the identity of Jesus. Karl Barth put it something like this: in Jesus we learn that God
has chosen to become Godself in, with, and as a human being. What this means is that the
very great distance between creatures and the creator has been overcome, not ontologically
(not, at least, in the static sense in which ontology was understood before Heidegger), but
existentially. In Jesus we learn that God freely chooses to embrace humanity, even to the
point of becoming human, and therefore submitting to the very worst that human beings can
do to one another. Yet, this is done not for the sake of some kind of powerless solidarity that
is not able to do anything about our situation. God does this, rather, because God is love.
God traverses the very great distance in order that we may know this, and therefore realise the
power of this love to transcend our limitations and actually and really embody the divine love
in a way that repeats and prolongs the transformation of created life that took place in Jesus of
Nazareth.
The significance of the Johannine insistence that Christians are those who acknowledge that
Jesus has come in the flesh, and thus bear witness to an irreducibly embodied grace and truth
is born out, also, in the essential nature of the Christian community as a liturgical assembly,
whose ¢â‚¬Ëœwork ¢â‚¬â„¢ is nothing other than a repetition of the divine story of God-in-Christ within the
concrete embodiments of political life. The dismissal of Paul ¢â‚¬â„¢s image of the church as the
body of Christ as a ¢â‚¬Ëœmere metaphor ¢â‚¬â„¢ therefore misses the point. The church is indeed the
body of Christ in ¢â‚¬Ëœtransubstantiated ¢â‚¬â„¢ form: that fleshly community in which the Spirit of Jesus
is actually celebrated and suffered. ¢â‚¬ËœCelebrated ¢â‚¬â„¢, because the church embodies an alternative
political practice where all people, even those who are as ¢â‚¬Ëœnothing ¢â‚¬â„¢ to the capitalist system,
are recognised as valuable because God has declared them valuable. ¢â‚¬ËœSuffered ¢â‚¬â„¢, because the
capitalist system neither understands nor values the ethics of embodied love, and therefore 5
attempts to push the actual communal practice of such virtues out into an invented netherworld of what we call ¢â‚¬Ëœprivate ¢â‚¬â„¢ beliefs and practices which have no bearing on the ¢â‚¬Ëœreally
real ¢â‚¬â„¢. The disappearance of ¢â‚¬Ëœpublic ¢â‚¬â„¢ Christianity in modernity is therefore a symptom of this
pressure: only where Christian truth is preached and lived as ¢â‚¬Ëœpublic ¢â‚¬â„¢ truth is the body of
Christ actually alive.
The Gnostic heresy as the ¢â‚¬Ëœspirit ¢â‚¬â„¢ of capitalism
Contrast all of that with the essentially spiritualist soul of ¢â‚¬Ëœgnosticism ¢â‚¬â„¢. You will recall that
the Gnostics, in various ways, were essentially pessimistic about the world we actually
inhabit. They saw the fleshly life of human beings as not only fallen and flawed, but also
irredeemable, incapable of transformation. They therefore dreamed of ways in which human
beings might ¢â‚¬Ëœtake flight ¢â‚¬â„¢, departing the historical world of flesh and suffering, for a world of
pure spirit in which the terrible gravity of flesh could be done away with forever. At the
centre of the gnostic spirit, then, is a particular kind of desire: a desire for a real that never
actually presents itself within the nitty-gritty of the lives we actually live.
Slavoj … ½i … ¾ek has written about the soul of global capitalism as a contemporary form of the
¢â‚¬Ëœgnostic heresy ¢â‚¬â„¢. Unlike the essentially materialist spirituality of the New Testament ¢â‚¬”which
understands that spirituality should not be dissociated from the lives we actually live in
human communities, so that spiritual desire is properly directed at material, embodied
outcomes ¢â‚¬”global capitalism inscribes a form of desire which actually brackets out our real
lives by producing a desire that is directed at nothing that is real, except perhaps desire itself.
For what capitalism produces is the desire for desire. We are induced to desire something,
and to realise that desire by going out to buy it. But at the moment we buy it, we realise,
instead, that we do not really possess what we really desired. All that we have is desire itself,
which will then drive us to go and buy something else, which will again turn out to be nothing
else but a chimera and shadow of the Real Thing. Desire itself then becomes the substance of
a post-modern kind of spirituality: the experience of passing from one object of desire to
another without ever really finding what you are looking for. Of course, if the object of desire
is not real, not flesh and blood but a disembodied sense of nothingness in which desire finally
ceases to produce itself, then the only way to achieve that is to disappear into nothingness
through self-medication or the mantra-like repetitions of dance clubs or neo-Buddhist
meditation practises. But of course, in the spiritualities of capitalism, New Age or Western
Buddhist as they usually are, these respites from desire are actually ways of keeping the desire 6
for desire alive. They are carefully designed illusions by which a person can be ¢â‚¬Ëœrefreshed ¢â‚¬â„¢
for a renewed engagement with capitalism. They are the religious practices that you have
when you don ¢â‚¬â„¢t have a religion that can actually release you from the never-ending
production of desire.
In this environment, the success of a novel like The Da Vinci Code is completely
understandable, is it not? For what The Da Vinci Code gives its readers is an experience of
being ¢â‚¬Ëœspiritual ¢â‚¬â„¢ without being religious, that is, actually engaged in the communal practice of
the faith of Christ in the church. It pretends to let the reader in on a ¢â‚¬Ëœsecret ¢â‚¬â„¢ about the real
nature of Christianity. Our desire for a spirituality that can help us escape from the banality
of our lives is aroused. But of course, in the end, the ¢â‚¬Ëœsecret ¢â‚¬â„¢ is nothing that makes any real
difference to the way we live. It is not an alternative way of life that is really able to save us
from our addiction to desire itself. Instead, we are left with the tantalising sense that we have
glimpsed something important, that we could perhaps find out more about by going to see the
movie or buying more books, or perhaps consuming some other pastiche of religious goods.
What The Da Vinci Code promises is exactly what the gnostics promised: salvation through
the discovery of a secret. But of course, as with the gnostics, the ¢â‚¬Ëœsecret ¢â‚¬â„¢ is just an experience
that you have to produce for yourself, over and over again and in ever-more novel ways
because, in fact, there is no secret that has any real, flesh and blood, reality. The secret is
nothing other than an insubstantial nothing, so alien that it can have no real impact or gravity
in the real world of flesh and blood.
Christians claim that the Real has come to visit us in Jesus of Nazareth. They also claim that
the Real continues to be with us in the flesh and blood reality of the Christian community,
which is the body of Christ in which his Spirit continues to dwell. Desire, for Christians, is
not about the discovery of a secret. The secret is already out. Nor is it about the production
of the desire for desire, as in the spirit of capitalism. No, Christianity has always provided the
moral foundation for our most trenchant critiques of capitalism. Nor is Christian desire
directed towards an alien reality that is somehow beyond this world. No, Christian desire is
directed very much at the transformation of this world of flesh and blood after the flesh-andblood model of human love that was revealed in Jesus and in the early Christian communities.
For Christians, there is no escaping this world though some kind of secret knowledge. There
is only the possibility of transformation, a possibility inscribed in the irreducibly material and
bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. 7
David Bentley Hart has observed that capitalism not only has a spirituality as its secret core,
but this spirituality is actually non-materialist, a project which ¢â‚¬”far from aiming to transform
this world into the image of justice and reconciliation inscribed in the body of Jesus Christ ¢â‚¬”
actually aspires to an escape from this world into the disembodied nihilism which functions as
the hidden supplement of every version of modernity. Capitalism is therefore the arch-enemy
of Christianity, and should be resisted even to the point of martyrdom, which represents, of
course, the holy foolishness of the crucified in a system obsessed with ¢â‚¬Ëœnothing but its own
creations ¢â‚¬â„¢: a phrase (as Jacque Lacan would have it) that hides its own true meaning and
supplement: that the purpose of the system is, precisely, to create nothing ¢â‚¬”and to do it over
and over again, mechanically, in an eternal return of the same.
The surplus of grace that swallows up nothingness
This eternal mechanical loop of capitalism, that can only produce the nothingness it already
is, suggests a potent analogy between the Gnostic impulse and the ¢â‚¬ËœWestern Buddhist ¢â‚¬â„¢ notion
of ¢â‚¬Ëœkarma ¢â‚¬â„¢. Karma is the power of necessity, the compulsion we feel to ¢â‚¬Ëœget ahead ¢â‚¬â„¢ by paying
our dues, working hard, and keeping our patrons happy. It is that constant feeling that we
have not really produced what the system promises we can produce. It is the surplus of desire
over production. Of course, we would not feel such compulsion unless we believed in karma
ourselves, if we did not want to get ahead, if we were not already invested in the very system
that enslaves us because we believe it will reward us. Yet this is where most of us are.
Compelled, entranced, invested. Yet, the karmic system can only ever lead us to despair, for
it condemns us to reap only what we sow. It is like capitalism, which delivers to us only what
we produce ourselves ¢â‚¬“ images of the real, but not the real itself. The real eludes us, for we
are not God. We cannot create even ourselves, let alone what we need for happiness or peace!
Christians believe that there is another power in the world, the power of grace! Grace is the
opposite of karma or capitalism or Gnostic nihilism. It is a different kind of surplus: the
surplus of uncreated blessing. It is like the blessing of children of which the Psalmist speaks.
Children cannot be produced by the machinations of our human longings, needs or planning.
They are not a reward for our labour or a right to be possessed. Children come, as many of
you know very well, as a sheer gift from God, without reason or foretelling. Children are
therefore signs to us of grace, that condition of blessedness and peace which comes not from
ourselves but from somewhere other, from God. Grace is that which comes to question, to
interrupt, to displace and even destroy the cycle of despair which is karma. With the gift of 8
grace, we reap what we have not sown, and live in the power of that which we have not
produced or made for ourselves. In grace we experience the love of God shown in Christ ¢â‚¬â„¢s
self-sacrifice. In Christ, God is totally for us, even to the point of so identifying with us in our
karmic cycle of despair that he suffered the full consequence of what that cycle produces:
nothingness, and only nothingness.
Of course, having given itself over to nothingness and to death, grace is not exhausted. It
rises, from the power of its own superabundance, and proceeds to infect the karmic system
like a virus which cannot be quashed. In the gospel story, this power or property is called
resurrection. It is the perseverance of love in the face of death and despair, the never-depleted
surplus of possibility over necessity. For Christ himself, and for all who follow his way of the
cross, it is only by dying to the demands of the capitalist system that we shall find ourselves
free of its determinations. For while we are indeed part of the system we inhabit, and should
never pretend otherwise, that system need not possess us thereby. For we are Christ ¢â‚¬â„¢s, and
our truest selves are hidden with Christ in God, as the apostle says. Therefore we are being
freed from the desire to get ahead, to succeed in terms determined by the law of karma. We
are people who know a love which is stronger even than death, and the gift of a life and future
we have not produced. Therefore we choose, over and over again, in all the minutiae of life,
to serve God in our neighbour, without thought of cost or ego. For the price is already payed.
What can karma produce in us that Christ has not already given?
You should all go and see what Hollywood is doing these days. A system of karmic despair if
ever there was one, it has nevertheless been infected with the virus of grace. The last Matrix
movie is called Revolutions, the third volume in a three-fold re-telling of the gospel as I have
proclaimed it today. In that story, it is at the precise moment when the new Son of Man, Neo
Anderson, gives himself over to the power of karmic inevitability, that the revolution begins.
As he lies crucified upon the power of the machines, absorbed, it seems, into the power of the
same old thing, a miracle begins to happen. What was absorbed begins to absorb. What was
dead now begins to infect the whole system with life. What had been given away now returns
more powerfully to inhabit all the world, bringing light and life and peace where once there
was only darkness, death and enmity. This is what grace can do to capitalism, if we surrender
ourselves to its logic with absolute trust and abandon.
Garry J. Deverell
June 12, 2007
Discussion
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