Deus Absconditus et Otiosa — Atheism, Modernism, Mormonism
By: Nathan Smith
Tags: Atheism, Christianity, Philosophy, Religion, Psychology

“People readily swallow the untested claims of this, that, or the other. It’s drowning all your old rationalism and scepticism, it’s coming in like a sea; and the name of it is superstition. It’s the first effect of not believing in God that you lose your common sense and can’t see things as they are. Anything that anybody talks about, and says there’s a good deal in it, extends itself indefinitely like a vista in a nightmare. And a dog is an omen, and a cat is a mystery, and a pig is a mascot, and a beetle is a scarab, calling up all the menagerie of polytheism from Egypt and old India; Dog Anubis and great green-eyed Pasht and all the holy howling Bulls of Bashan; reeling back to the bestial gods of the beginning, escaping into elephants and snakes and crocodiles; and all because you are frightened of four words: He was made Man.” — G. K. Chesterton, The Complete Father Brown Stories (Wordsworth Editions, 2006), 394–395

Before proceeding, it is most important to define one’s terms: in this case, modernism and atheism.

In The True Life, Alain Badiou describes modernity’s dramatic evaporation of the social structures which gave order to the life of the West. The two respective events, according to Badiou, which transitioned boys to men and girls to women were military conscription for males and marriage and childbearing for women. This system held for centuries, if not longer, with obvious strains and flaws: for instance, a woman who had a child out of wedlock had no place in the symbolic order of her society and was thus either exiled, abused, or otherwise disregarded. Conscientious objectors may be something of an equivalent among men. The fact that these individuals were seen as anomalies or threats to the stability of society only serves to emphasize how strongly these institutions were rooted in the cultural soil of the West.

These structures have, by and large, since evaporated, with strange results, according to Badiou. The military and marriage were tantamount to initiation or coming-of-age rituals, signaling to not only society at large but to the participating individual that the latter had transitioned from childhood to adulthood and should thus be treated as such. Thus with the dissolution of these structures comes an odd dissolution of any concrete moment in which a boy may become a man or a girl may become a woman in secular society. Considering this neither a negative nor a positive, Badiou only observes that with the blurring of a previously defined society comes the contemporary sense of being adrift — modernism’s lack of identity, belonging, or purpose. According to Badiou, males are no longer required to enter the military, meaning there is no moment in which they are granted the status of manhood by their culture, leading to a kind of Lost Boys-like perpetual youth; likewise, for females, with the rise of sexual liberation and the decline in frequency of traditional monogamy, girls are seen as always already women, always conferred womanhood and thus never experiencing childhood. Even if one denies Badiou’s division of results among males and females, one cannot deny the modernist experience: the structures of traditional pre-modern societies have mostly collapsed, to the point that they are largely no longer viewed as mandatory, opening up a space of freedom. But not only freedom, but a freedom so absolute that it leads to a kind of existential vertigo. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom,” writes Søren Kierkegaard; in more modern terms, you can be absolutely anything, and thus all options are equally relevant or desirable, and thus, paralyzed by options and unable to choose, you become nothing really.

Friedrich Nietzsche described a similar phenomenon in The Gay Science, wherein a madman rushes into the city and cries out:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” — Section 125, trans. Walter Kaufmann

The crowd laughs at the fool, until he runs into a church to pray; afterward, the crowd continues their business. Often the most focus is given to the madman who cries “God is dead,” yet little attention is given to his additional point that “we [ourselves] have killed him,” and almost no attention is paid to his conclusion that “we ourselves [must] become gods simply to appear worthy of it.” The point is not simply that traditional religion or theism has mostly died out and that some people simply cannot accept its end, but that the symbolic order which rendered the cosmos itself intelligible and thus manageable for believers has collapsed. Moderns, according to Nietzsche, have generally responded to this collapse in one of two ways: the first is that of the madman, hopeless nostalgic who can only weep at the grave of God; the second, however, is that of the crowd, who meander through the streets with no destination or purpose.

This is Nietzsche’s atheism, properly defined. Rather than to simply say “there is no God,” as if such a phrase were at all self-explanatory, atheism is pure negation — a-theism, the negation or rejection of theism, or normative religion. Atheism need not foreclose on the mythological, or even the supernatural per se, but is instead a negation of the traditional religions that have structured Western societies for the past millennium or more. This is what Nietzsche means when he insists that the world has slipped into nihilism: not that the world has simply sloughed off old superstitions, but that it has broken out of its previous pre-defined patterns of thought and behavior into a dizzying openness; and in that open void, there is no alternative structure waiting to replace the former failed system. Because atheism is simply negation, it has no positive descriptors to add; subtracting theism, it does not then become a religion of its own, but the mere absence thereof. This absence thus begs the question: what, if anything, may come after the death of God?

Modernism and atheism, far from tragedy or triumph, are purely neutral events — perhaps much like the passage from childhood to adulthood — yet that is not to say that they mean nothing. Rather, together, they are the guardians at the gate who open for twenty-first century societies and individuals a world of inexhaustible inexplicability and absolute freedom — which may be two ways of saying the same thing.

Mormonism, too, has not escaped this seismic transition. According to Jana Riess’ The Next Mormons, though the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (or LDS Church) has maintained a relatively higher retention rate among its youth relative to other American denominations, youths (gen-X, millennials, gen-Z) are still disaffiliating from the LDS Church at a progressively increasing rate. Opinions also continue to shift from older to younger generations within Mormon culture concerning sex, gender, and sexuality; reliance upon organized religion, authority figures, and hierarchy; certainty concerning doctrines and traditional practices — among other things.

Furthermore, similar shifts into this realm of inexplicability and freedom punctuate Mormon history. After the assassination of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder, Mormonism as a whole threatened to disintegrate as Smith’s followers broke into a number of factions in the greatest succession crisis the Mormon movement has since experienced. Contrary to the views of devout members of any Mormon denomination, and though most surviving Mormons followed Brigham Young to Utah (in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), the initial succession crisis which led to this fragmentation was not simply brought on by the opportunism or narcissism of a few of Smith’s surviving contemporaries. Smith’s sudden murder — foreseen (if at all) by only perhaps a few days, maybe weeks — left no opportunity for him to put into place a definite apparatus to determine who would succeed him. The event of Smith’s death led the Mormons into an undefined space, from which they emerged with a number of contradictory arrangements. This same experience has reoccurred within various Mormon denominations, such as when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints ceased plural marriage, when the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (now Community of Christ) transitioned to leaders not directly descended from the Smith family, or when the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints witnessed Warren Jeffs’ arrest and imprisonment. Each moment was the dissolution of a previous organizing principle, leading to an open space of possibility, from which emerged not simply one triumphant progression but numerous varying developments.

The least controversial statement one could make about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon denomination with which I identify) is that the majority of its American members err on the side of a general conservatism — politically, socially, economically, etc. Though this is by no means universal among American Mormons, and of course says nothing of the non-American majority of Latter-day Saints, this datum may nonetheless indicate how many modern Mormons have responded to the advent of modernism and atheism: opting for the role of the madman weeping at God’s grave rather than that of the aimless drifters in the streets. Among Latter-day Saints of this persuasion, much of the non-Mormon world and even Mormon culture (especially the elements which contradict or conflict with traditional Mormonism) are usually experienced as the “wickedness of the world” and the “influence of the Adversary” — a broadly conservative perspective with obvious theological effects. However, given that this general conservatism is more of a persona — or even a caricature — of the genuine diversity of Latter-day Saints, within and beyond the LDS Church, one wonders if Mormon culture might have other options in considering how to respond to the questions of modernism and atheism. More pointedly, what would come of Latter-day Saints leaning into this inexplicability and freedom rather than resisting it? What may come of a plural marriage of atheism, modernism, and Mormonism?

One may begin by stating that all human discourse and understanding is ultimately bound by perspective: one experiences nothing that is not mediated through their own nervous system, complied and interpreted by their own brain — experience is most fundamentally subjective. With this in mind, anything one may say, even theologically, will run the risk of being a superficial reification of their own internal lives, a projection of their psychological state onto the universe. For this reason, perhaps one may attempt to reverse the causal flow; rather than speaking theologically about the universe, one may attempt to speak theologically about oneself and their own subjective experience. In this sense, to speak theologically, even in a particularly Mormon context, would be to describe back to oneself and others their present modernist, atheist experience — the experience of feeling the structures which once provided them with order, identity, purpose, and belonging whittle away against the flint wheel of impermanent reality. What is it like to be a Mormon who is, whether they may realize it, already a modernist and an atheist?

In The Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel describes this subjectivity, positing that “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject” (trans. A. V. Miller). For Hegel, subjective experience — one’s conscious experience as an individual person — was central and paramount to his philosophy. However, nearly since its publication in 1807, Hegel’s Phenomenology has been — according to some of his latest interpreters — woefully misread.

To understand this misreading, one must turn to Immanuel Kant. Kant’s contribution to Western philosophy was his distinction between a “thing-as-appearance” and a “thing-in-itself”; in other words, Kant described the human subject’s inherent inability to grasp reality in itself, and therefore their reliance upon the limited representations their mind can produce of this or that narrow selection of reality. Ultimately, Kant’s distinction between these two categories is a distinction between two forms of knowing: to believe one possesses the “thing-in-itself” is to deceive oneself into believing one has perceived objective reality, that one’s knowledge is certain and unquestionable; and to understand that one possesses only a “thing-as-appearance,” or a diluted representation of the thing itself, is to recognize the limitations of one’s perceptions, and to scrutinize one’s understanding. The former naively assumes they simply see the world “as it is,” while the latter recognizes that they see the world only “as they are,” mediated by the narrow filter of their senses and mental faculties.

Arthur Schopenhauer, a passionate student of Kant, articulated this view further in The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer recognized that the human nervous system can only absorb so much sensory data from the world around it, which the brain then compiles into a working simulation (a virtual reality, if you will) in which the subject lives, moves, and has their very being, so to speak. In other words, Schopenhauer recognized some of the consequences of the fact that the human subject only experiences the “thing-as-appearance” (Vorstellung), never truly accessing the “thing-in-itself” (Wille). He was also a sharp critic of Hegel, the former believing the latter had either misunderstood or outright rejected Kant, describing Hegel’s work as a “pseudo-philosophy” audaciously attempting “to comprehend the history of the world as a planned whole” (Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, vol. 2, trans. E. F. J. Payne [Dover, 1966], 442). According to Schopenhauer, in describing “grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject,” Hegel was subscribing to the very epistemological certainty — the naïve belief in access to the “thing-in-itself” — which Kant had critiqued. Worse yet, he claimed, Hegel had made not only an epistemological statement, but an ontological one: the human subject could perceive any and all things, even things not directly present, as in the pre-Kantian metaphysics of Reason, which could deduce the mysteries of the universe from a contemplative distance alone. And thus for the following two centuries, most commentators read a kind of “amputated” Hegel, to use Todd McGowan’s term: attempting to rescue Hegel from his own apparently embarrassing ontology, numerous commentators reduced him to a philosopher of epistemology or anthropology merely. For nearly 200 years Hegel has been read as a commentator on subjectivity alone, his statements on Being itself having been subtracted.

However, as recently as 1989, with the English publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Zizek has begun a bold re-reading of Hegel — or, perhaps more accurately, a more faithful interpretation of Hegel’s original intent. According to Zizek, Hegel’s equivocation of subjectivity and substance is not a rejection of Kant, but a faithful tracing out of the consequences of Kant’s work. As Kant and Schopenhauer proposed, and as Zizek insists Hegel believed, one never experiences reality-in-itself, only narrow representations thereof; like Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, the subject, a field of consciousness, is a polished surface reflecting back (in warped fashion) its immediate surroundings. In Hegel, subjectivity is experienced as a kind of contradiction between oneself and the external world. Similar to Schopenhauer, Hegel recognizes that the human mind can only represent a narrow portion of its external world back to itself and others. One may compare this limited subjectivity or consciousness to cartography: one explores a given terrain, then distills that experience into a map. The map and the terrain are not the same, and sometimes they can even contradict one another. In this sense, a conscious subject in the world is like a map of the United States hanging on a wall somewhere in the United States. And because consciousness and reality, like a map and its terrain, can be disjointed and out of sync with one another, subjectivity possesses an inherent division or internal fracture — a contradiction. Hegel’s contribution, according to Zizek, was thus not to reject Kant’s epistemology, but to tease out its consequences: if a subject or being arises from and is a part of Being, and if this subject experiences this inherent contradiction within themselves, then something about Being itself must also possess this internal contradiction. What Hegel rejects is not Kantian epistemology but Cartesian dualism, which insists that the human mind is a foreign object in the world. Rather, Hegel proposes, the subject grows out of the world — a being from Being — like a wave from the sea, not inventing this divisive contradiction in its own subjectivity, but bringing with it the division which always already pervades Being itself all the way down. Reality at its most fundamental is fragmented, a contradiction reeling against itself as it continually unfolds into countless different beings and things.

One may read this Hegelian division theologically, as well. In Godhead and the Nothing, Thomas J.J. Altizer proposes that this is in fact the central message of the Christian epic: at the beginning of time, Being — or Godhead, as opposed to God, to use Altizer’s terms — rips itself to pieces in a “primordial sacrifice,” dividing itself in a way which creates not only good but evil, life and death, contentment and horror. Between all things, Altizer states, is an infinite abyss or nihil, the Nothing of Godhead itself, which separates all things: people from themselves, one another, the world — everything. Uniquely, this division is also transposed into God, who also becomes a fragment of the larger Godhead constantly tearing itself to pieces in creation. This primordial sacrifice, eternally ongoing, is recapitulated in various ways by human beings, notably in rituals of division and sacrifice, sometimes even involving the shedding of blood; and ultimately in their own deaths, when they themselves are “ripped to pieces” and cast to the four winds of the world which survives them. In a sense, this is a quasi-Gnostic interpretation of the human condition: while normative Judaism, Christianity, and Islam see Creation and Fall as two distinct events occurring in succession, Gnostic variants of these traditions often describe Creation and Fall as the same event. To be created is to always already be fallen, as, in order to create, Godhead must divide itself from itself.

In the closing chapter of The Puppet and the Dwarf, Zizek describes how deeply this primordial sacrifice or Hegelian contradiction goes by analyzing the narrative of Job, specifically the theological friends who come to “console” him. According to Zizek, Job’s friends represent the typical human response to this fundamental division in themselves and Being itself, and the violence and ignorance (such as their blindness to Job’s profound suffering) which result therefrom. To cope with the chaos of Being, humans construct ideologies through which to interpret the unintelligibility of life: in Job’s case, his friends approach with tightly-defined theological explanations for precisely why he is suffering, and even what he can do to change that; but when Job rejects their explanations, ostensibly “threatening” their existential security, the friends recoil and become enemies, turning on Job. According to Job’s friends, they have simply sought to make sense of the world; in reality, they have sought to explain away the world.

In the end, after Job’s steadfast rejection of his friends’ attempts to explain his suffering by fitting him neatly into their various ideologies, God descends and rejects the explanations offered by Job’s friends, instead endorsing Job himself (cf. Job 42:7). Curiously, however, Job has offered no explanation of his suffering which might compete with the explanations offered by his friends — he has simply rejected any attempt to integrate his experience into their fantasies, ideological or otherwise. However, for Zizek, the question which follows is not so much “how do we cut through fantasy to reality?” but “how does reality produce fantasy at all?”

Following Zizek’s example, one may utilize the three-part psychological structure pioneered by Jacques Lacan of the Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real. Imagine a universe entirely devoid of conscious beings, no one to analyze or evaluate any of its contents — this is the Real. Now plant one conscious human on a desert island in the middle of nowhere, entirely alone, and grant them the discursive thinking natural to a conscious person. They can sense external reality, represent it back to themselves (perception, memory), and respond to those representations (plans) — this is the Imaginary. Add two or three more humans, or a thousand, and together they leverage the Imaginary to create a society and culture with social norms and a status quo, so much so that these collective imaginative structures seem almost as if to take on a life of their own — this is the Symbolic. The Real precedes consciousness and its contents, while the Imaginary is a necessary and involuntary byproduct of consciousness, but the Symbolic is the active principle of consciousness, its attempt to not only perceive but alter its environment — including other conscious subjects who may enter its field of awareness.

In a manner of speaking, while the Real and Imaginary are in themselves natural, the Symbolic is a kind of recoil in response to them, an attempt to beat them back, as it were. The Symbolic is a collective attempt at holding back the trauma of the Real and the Imaginary, whether tragic circumstances or unwanted thoughts and feelings. The Symbolic is the realm of ideology — political, religious, or otherwise — a series of potentially utilitarian fantasies operating by and large unconsciously within the subjects themselves. While the Symbolic is objectively an emergent principle of the Real, the subject typically experiences things the other way around: they believe the Symbolic is an organizing principle around which the Real arranges itself, rather than something the Real itself has produced.

Taking many forms — God, State, Father, Mother; the Big Other guaranteeing meaning and intelligibility — the Symbolic is that element which has largely broken down for the West in the advent of modernity. More precisely, the Symbolic has fractured: once a mostly universal means of structuring one’s experience of the Real, the Symbolic has formed fault lines, delineating nearly irreducible competing factions. These competing factions can be cultural, political, philosophical — any interpretive system, or ideology (to retain Zizek’s term), which creates meaning, order, and manageability in one’s subjective experience. Ideology, unconscious fantasy, is the levee one erects to hold back the traumatic floodwaters of the Real — reality as such. The Symbolic is the theology of Job’s friends, who cannot see the suffering Job for the fact that they are too busy “explaining” him — and one can see myriad correlates throughout the history of Western theism and the institutions of normative religion. Or, to return to Badiou’s examples, one may consider the previously unquestioned and unquestionable customs of military conscription, monogamy, and childbearing, once unconditionally expected of Western society generally. These ideologies are the “God” whose death the madman announces in a panic and which the crowd awkwardly shrugs off. The dreadful point is that the crowd forgets that the Symbolic serves a purpose, while the madman naively presumes the Symbolic is contingent upon something which precedes it — both refuse to face the Real.

For Altizer and Zizek, this tension is illustrated in Jesus Christ, particularly his destitute cry from the cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34, New Revised Standard Version). In this climax of the crucifixion, God withdrawing from Jesus, one may see modernity itself: the absence of a Big Other to guarantee meaning in one’s suffering, let alone their existence, leaving them in what Zizek calls “the desert of the Real.”

G.K. Chesterton describes this event well:

“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay (the matter grows too difficult for human speech), but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.” — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (Ignatius, 1995), 145

According to Altizer and Zizek, in proper Hegelian fashion, Christianity extends the contradiction within the subject to God, wherein God becomes alienated from God as any other subject alienated from themselves. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek explains:

“[I]n Freudian-Lacanian terms: Christ is God’s ‘partial object,’ an autonomized organ without a body, as if God picked his eye out of his head and turned it on himself from the outside. We can guess, now, why Hegel insisted on the monstrosity of Christ. “It is therefore crucial to note how the Christian modality of ‘God seeing himself’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the harmonious closed loop of ‘seeing myself seeing,’ of an eye seeing itself and enjoying the sight in this perfect self-mirroring: the turn of the eye toward ‘its’ body presupposes the separation of the eye from the body, and what I see through my externalized/autonomized eye is a perspectival, anamorphically distorted image of myself: Christ is an anamorphosis of God.” — Zizek, Monstrosity of Christ, 82

In this divine absence, or self-division, bereft of a Big Other to guarantee a meaning to his experience (which would ultimately only dissociate him from it), Jesus enters the space of absolute freedom and chooses to lean into the inconvenient and fatal Real. With no Symbolic order gazing over his shoulder, insisting upon or even compelling him to do anything in particular, Jesus may produce an action that is entirely authentically his own — he may receive reality as it is, even in its “antagonism,” and choose for himself how to respond.

Elsewhere in The Monstrosity of Christ, Zizek articulates the ramifications of the crucifixion of Jesus:

“[W]hen people imagine all kinds of deeper meanings [to their experiences] … what really frightens them is that they will lose the transcendent God guaranteeing the meaning of the universe, God as the hidden Master pulling the strings — instead of this, we get a God who abandons this transcendent position and throws himself into his own creation, fully engaging himself in it up to dying, so that we, humans, are left with no higher Power watching over us, just with the terrible burden of freedom and responsibility for the fate of divine creation, and thus of God himself. Are we not still too frightened today to assume all these consequences of the four words [of Chesterton, ‘He was made Man’]? Do those who call themselves ‘Christians’ not prefer to stay with the comfortable image of God sitting up there, benevolently watching over our lives, sending us his son as a token of his love, or, even more comfortably, just with some depersonalized Higher Force? … “Hegel’s underlying premise is that what dies on the Cross is not only God’s earthly representative-incarnation, but the God of beyond itself … “That is to say: what dies on the Cross is precisely the ‘private’ God, the God of our ‘way of life,’ the God who grounds a particular community.” — Zizek, Monstrosity, 25, 29, 295

In a literary vein, this interpretation of the crucifixion of Jesus — of God the Symbolic — may be most clearly seen in Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ, namely the novel’s portrayal of the execution of Jesus. Having spent his prophetic career in a wrestle between his own desires and the call of God, Jesus wishes for nothing more than domestication, to settle down with a woman and raise a family. Upon the cross, he passes out, dreaming that an angel of God has come down, helping him off the cross, telling him that God has seen his devotion and decided not to force Jesus to go through with crucifixion after all. The angel takes Jesus to Mary, the sister of Lazarus, whom he marries and with whom he fathers children; he even marries her sister Martha, expanding their family. Jesus receives everything he ever wanted. However, after a charged encounter with Paul, who preaches a Messiah who was killed for his and all others’ sake, Jesus realizes he has not had his desires fulfilled at all, but that he is only in a dream, and thus still upon the cross, unconscious. Jesus then chooses of his own volition to wake up, to return to consciousness while hanging from the cross, where he cries out in relief — where he surrenders himself to the Real — “into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46, NRSV) — a moment Kazantzakis describes in the closing passage of The Last Temptation:

“Jesus rotated his eyes with anguish, and looked. He was alone. The yard and house, the trees, the village doors, the village itself [where he lived with a family in his dream]— all had disappeared. Nothing remained but stones beneath his feet, stones covered with blood; and lower, farther away, a crowd: thousands of heads in the darkness. “He tried with all his might to discover where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. He wanted to complete his cry, to shout LAMA SABACTHANI. . . . He attempted to move his lips but could not. He grew dizzy and was ready to faint. He seemed to be hurling downward and perishing. “But suddenly, while he was falling and perishing, someone down on the ground must have pitied him, for a reed was held out in front of him, and he felt a sponge soaked in vinegar rest against his lips and nostrils. He breathed in deeply the bitter smell, revived, swelled his breast, looked at the heavens and uttered a heart-rending cry: LAMA SABACTHANI! “Then he immediately inclined his head, exhausted. “He felt terrible pains in his hands, feet and heart. His sight cleared, he saw the crown of thorns, the blood, the cross. Two golden earrings and two rows of sharp, brilliantly white teeth flashed in the darkened sun. He heard a cool, mocking laugh, and rings and teeth vanished. Jesus remained hanging in the air, alone. “His head quivered. Suddenly he remembered where he was, who he was and why he felt pain. A wild, indomitable joy took possession of him. No, no, he was not a coward, a deserter, a traitor. No, he was nailed to the cross. He had stood his ground honorably to the very end; he had kept his word. The moment he cried ELI ELI and fainted, Temptation had captured him for a split second and led him astray. The joys, marriages and children were lies; the decrepit, degraded old men who shouted coward, deserter, traitor at him were lies. All — all were illusions sent by the Devil. His disciples were alive and thriving. They had gone over sea and land and were proclaiming the Good News. Everything had turned out as it should, glory be to God! “He uttered a triumphant cry: IT IS ACCOMPLISHED! “And it was as though he had said: Everything has begun.”

Interpreting Martin Scorsese’s film adaptation of Kazantzakis’ novel, Zizek focuses on Jesus’ cry of abandonment to the Big Other who has failed to make sense of his outstanding failure and horrific execution. According to Lacan, God is the Big Other of the Hebrew Bible, the great che vuoi? or “what do you want?” making traumatic yet gripping demands of the people. In Jesus’ destitution, however, he realizes that this Big Other is not the ground of Being but an emergent property of Being, arising from his own mind; not an externality which he asks che vuoi? but something internal to himself. And thus he returns to the Real. In either case, novel or film, one finds not necessarily the historical Jesus upon the cross, but certainly the literary Jesus of Gethsemane who prays “not my will, but thine, be done” (Luke 22:42, King James Version; cf. Matthew 26:39, Mark 14:36, John 6:38) — a Jesus who surrenders himself willingly to that which exceeds his control, that which is most real.

This mytheme of the self-sacrificing Jesus parallels Hegel’s own notion of reconciliation. Summarizing Zizek’s own reading of Hegel, Todd McGowan expresses this messianic-Hegelian reconciliation well:

“Hegel doesn’t stop with uncovering contradiction in being that corresponds to contradiction in thought. Instead, he contends that the contradiction in being is even more intractable than the contradiction in thought. Most philosophers view knowledge as a movement from thought to being: thought aspires to the knowledge of being. But Hegel reverses this relationship. Thought has a higher status than being and thus can tell us about the nature of being. Though being has a chronological priority — obviously being is a necessary condition for the emergence of thought — thought has a logical priority because it has a capacity for enduring and reconciling itself with contradiction that being lacks. Being simply succumbs to contradiction without gaining any purchase on it. “Reconciliation is the great achievement of thought. Through the act of reconciliation, thought adopts a different relationship to contradiction than being does. It doesn’t overcome contradiction but grasps its necessity. As Zizek puts it in Less Than Nothing, ‘what Hegel calls “reconciliation” is, at its most basic, a reconciliation with the antagonism.’ [Pg. 951.] Even though antagonism or contradiction acts as a limit or obstacle to thought, thought nonetheless has the ability to grasp this limit as what defines it rather than as what it must surmount in order to realize itself. Spirit is, for Hegel, thought’s capacity to recognize contradiction not simply as an obstacle to overcome but as i[t]s own innermost condition of possibility. Reconciliation marks a triumph through the embrace of the necessity of failure.” — McGowan, “The Insubstantiality of Substance, Or, Why We Should Read Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature,” International Journal of Žižek Studies 8:1 (2014), 13

Finally, with this Hegelian background fully formed, one may propose a radical reinterpretation of Mormonism itself, utilizing the narrative structure of the temple rituals practiced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the initiatory and the endowment:

In the temple, one begins in the time of “pre-existence,” time before time, where they are given a unique name they are not to share with any other — an identity so fundamentally their own that it cannot be expressed to another. In parallel to this antechamber to time, one may read the Mormon narrative of a war in heaven, a primordial fragmentation of the divine family, a war “before the foundation of the world” between not opposing principles but siblings, both children like any other of a God who can only watch as the cosmos begins to fray and fragment. This God, too, joins in the disintegration: in Mormonism, God is a person, composed of “flesh and bones as tangible as” anyone’s (D&C 130:22); God knows the “pains and sicknesses” of finitude on a visceral, physical level, intellectually and experientially (Alma 7:11–13); God is not exempt from the suffering of existence, nor is God aloof from the human condition —even God can weep (Moses 7:48).

From this primeval time before time, one proceeds in the temple’s ritual narrative to the creation of the world, where they encounter a trinity substantially different than that of normative Christianity: rather than Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one encounters Elohim (a plural noun in Hebrew), Jehovah (Christ), and Michael or Adam (humanity). Rather than a tight priesthood hierarchy organized by genealogy, one may instead read these three figures in terms of set theory: the proper class Elohim or the Real — the plurality of Godhead or nature tearing itself to pieces — from which emerge, among numerous other sets, Michael the human Imaginary and Jehovah the human Symbolic. Thereafter, Michael-as-Adam is cut off from Elohim and Jehovah in forgetfulness; he is cut off from himself in the division of male and female through sleep; they are cut off from the immortality of changelessness through eating the fruits of finitude and becoming mortal and bearing children distinct from themselves. Ultimately, they find themselves in the “lone and dreary world” of the human condition — the world of Hegelian contradiction all the way down, subject and substance.

Then begins the process of reconciliation, returning to the Elohim from which Adam has become inherently alienated. This is signified through ritual acts such as perfectly unified prayer with others, against whom one must hold no resentment; and an embrace with the Lord through the very veil which separates the Real from even itself — the dividing contradiction running all the way down; Altizer’s nihil ensuring the gaps between beings and things, Zizek’s less than nothing in excess of something and nothing — all while Adam carries the name they received before time began, the name uniquely their own and no other’s.

Additional rituals are then performed: the previously performed rituals, repeated this time in remembrance of the participant’s deceased family and loved ones — by name, with attendant birth and death dates, places of residence, all particular details to testify to this person’s irreducible individuality. Beyond this are sealings, wherein spouses, siblings, children and parents, friends and loved ones, ancestors and descendants, come together in eternal relationships — a Hegelian reconciliation which does not dissolve the differences of each person involved, but honors those differences, even in their “antagonism.”

Finally, every week, Latter-day Saints gather to renew these rituals through one central ceremony — sacrament — wherein bread is ripped to pieces, water is meted into thimble-sized cups, and each person eats and drinks in remembrance of both contradiction and reconciliation. And thus, in narrative and ritual, the fragmented universe holds itself together even in its division, a stained-glass cosmos of multicolor pieces, woven together by the wrought-iron less than nothing.

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