Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Proust and the Christian Sacrifice

   Sacrifice, a common theme in religion, generally stood for a trade off with divinity, even if it was just to appease"it" before a critical  situation affecting many. Ancient cultures did it, in the hope of obtaining, or making happen, things they needed, as well as stopping those that were destructive to them, the cause of which they often saw as divine wrath. In this sense, sacrifice had some type of utility, just like petitioning prayers.
 If one communicates with divinity, one should be in awe, not in want. Nietzsche considers all religiosity a form of gratefulness, of which, I think, awe is the highest expression. 
 
  In the same way that a real prayer should be an expression of reverence in addressing divinity, sacrifice, an ultimate and final prayer, should never be a transaction, but the extreme surrender to divinity.
   In love with the Father, Christ was a gift, not a victim. 
  The Christian sacrifice, usually understood as a purging of the world's sins by "the lamb of God", was Christ's terrible, painful and passionate return to his deepest Self, where the endless love between creator and creature resides; "the will of the father". That is why, even being critical of Christianity,  Nietzsche saw the Christian sacrifice not as a trade off of Christ's life for the salvation of the world, but as a matter of authenticity to Christ.  
  As we all know, Christ was not exclusive in considering himself a son of God, but, on the contrary, considered all of us to be children of his same Father. 
Christianity reawakened, through metaphor, a still more atavist religious practice, which is that of cannibalism. The immensity of such love, of being at one with the loved one in flesh and blood, more than self-sufficient, is pure exuberance: it needs nothing, and it asks for nothing. 
In the context of nature, the bond between life and death is constantly revealed.  Animals are killed so their predators can live. Babies are born, out of lacerated bodies. The women, who were girls until giving birth, cease to exist when they become mothers. Seeds die, in order to bear fruit.
Even if just metaphorically, resurrection, as an overcoming of oneself, follows sacrifice. Resurrection is not a "goal"to be attained, but a rebirth that is intrinsic to dying for God. Here, we come to Proust and his enlightened view of the several deaths of the selves that we were, throughout life. 
When he loved Gilberte, he was a different person from the one he came to be, after arduously forgetting her, and eventually falling in love with Albertine. Death of that self, as an overcoming of it through suffering, gives birth to a new self; to a metaphorical resurrection. 
 We all know the saying "no pain, no gain". Proust says the same, when asserting that pleasure is good for the body, but only pain can strengthen  the spirit. He expresses the dynamics of the Christian sacrifice/resurrection, when saying:
"Chaque personne qui nous fait souffrir peut-être rattachée par nous `a une divinité dont elle n'est q'un reflet fragmentaire et le dernier degré, divinité dont la contemplation en tant qu'idée nous donne aussitôt de la joie, au lieu de la peine que nous avions. Tout l'art de vivre c'est de ne nous servir de personnes qui nous fount souffrir que comme d'un degré permettant d'acceder `a sa forme divine et de peupler ainsi journellement notre vie de divinités." (Each person who makes us suffer may be linked by us to a divinity of which he is only a fragmentary reflection and the last degree, a divinity whose contemplation as an idea immediately gives us joy, instead of the pain we had. The whole art of living is to use people who make us suffer only as a step allowing us to access our divine form and thus daily populate our life with divinities."