Love as Knowing and Being Known: A Response to Slavoj Zizek

I’ve recently come upon the ideas and work of the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in part due to poserorprophet. Also recently, I heard Zizek’s brief but brilliant commentary on Alfonso Cuaron’s film, Children of Men. My interest piqued, I sought out some of Zizek’s writing – he is deliriously prolific, it turns out – and some criticisms/reviews of his writing. In what little I’ve read to this point, I’ve repeatedly come up against a certain, terribly provocative, idea. This paragraph from the essay “The Real of Sexual Difference” captures it clearly enough,

On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know everything. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would inexplicably still be higher than complete knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement of Christianity is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God, that is, the place of ultimate perfection.

If I understand him correctly, Zizek identifies this as the “perverse core” of Christianity. Admittedly, I’m not clear as to what he thinks is “perverse” about it. Anyway, I’m really only interested here and now in this idea that “the true achievement” of the Christian faith is the elevation of a “loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God.” (Of course, this idea is not peculiarly Zizekian. If not identical with it, it is brother to Jurgen Moltmann’s conception of the “crucified God.” Nonetheless, he gives it a unique and especially provocative presentation.)

Obviously, Zizek’s reading of Christian faith is revisionist. This is so, in part at least, because he works with peculiar defintions of love, perfection, and god. If not truly exclusive to him, these definitions are at least radically different from those used by the patristics and medieval Christian thinkers. Put briefly, Zizek identifies lovingness with vulnerability, the susceptibility to harm. Or, perhaps more accurately, he insists that love necessarily involves this openness to wounding. Insofar as one loves, one remains at risk, open to harm from the loved one. This is true of god, no less than (wo)man.

Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love is therefore that incompleteness is in a way higher than completion.

I wonder if this, what Zizek calls the “utlimate mystery,” is in fact true. Is the “lacking, vulnerable being” really the only being capable of love? Bonhoeffer and Moltmann (to talk about two of my favorite theologians) seem to think so; they see the crucified Jesus as revealing (and, in Moltmann’s case, perhaps inaugurating?) the divine vulnerability, God’s openness to harm.

Frankly, however, I’m not yet sold on the idea. I’m moved by it. It is wonderfully beautiful and vibrant. I agree with those who lament the felt distance between ourselves and the impassible god of patristic and medieval Christianity. What they named transcendence often feels and sounds like simple indifference. But I’m not yet sure if this feeling is to be trusted. The passible god may seem to be the only possible god for we (post)moderns, but with God all things are possible – even faithfulness to God in God’s perceived “absence.” I wonder if it might not be possible for us to accept the god of classical Christian formulation if we could see him to be inviolable rather than invulnerable, open to pain, but not perversion?

I should return to the main point. Zizek spots this “perverse core” in Paul’s letters. For instance, he sees it in the famous paean to love, 1 Corinthians 13.

First, Saint Paul claims that there is love, “even if we possess all knowledge” — then, in the second paragraph, he claims that there is love only for incomplete beings, that is, beings possessing incomplete knowledge. When I will “know fully [. . .] as I have been fully known,” will there still be love? Although, unlike knowledge,“love never ends,” it is clearly only “now” (while I am still incomplete) that “faith, hope, and love abide.”

Zizek does point out something I, at least, had overlooked. And his commentary kicked my mind into a higher gear. He’s right: Paul does make a difference between “possessing all knowledge” on the one hand, and “knowing fully” and “being fully known” on the other. One can “understand all mysteries and all knowledge” and still be “nothing.” In fact, as Paul says earlier in the letter,

The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know. But the man who loves God is known by God.

But I think Zizek’s reading of this pericope is misguided, regardless of its provocativeness. Paul is not saying that love exists only where knowledge is incomplete. Whereas Zizek claims “we love because we do not know everything,” Paul claims that to love is to know, in the only sense that matters. Knowing is being known; knowing is being-in-relation, being-with and being-for.

We would do well to remember that “knowledge” in this first epistle to the Corinthians refers to the self-claimed spiritual and religious insights of the self-proclaimed privileged and elite believers within the Corinthian ekklesia. From first to last in the this letter, Paul exposes the Corinthians’ hybris and pretension as fundamentally anti-Christian. He rails against them. What is needed is not secret knowledge reserved for the initiated few. What is needed is a life of Christ-like faith and service, a life of caring for others, a life of preferring others’ needs to one’s own.

In 1 Corinthians 13, which is a model of brilliant and biting rhetoric, Paul turns the Corinthians’ elitism back on them. Paul writes of those who “understand all mysteries and all knowledge” as being a “resounding gong and clanging cymbal.” Doing this, he implies they are acting just as those pagan idolators whom they hold in contempt. As we know from chapter 8 of 1 Corinthians, these uber-spirituals contended idols were “nothing,” and that the weak-minded Christians who refused meat offered to these idols and the pagans who worshipped them were alike in their “foolishness.” Here, Paul turns that back on them. It is they, the ones who claim knowledge but do not love, who are “nothing”!

Love, then, sanctifies knowledge. It makes knowing meaningful, for love is, in Paul’s view, the highest form of knowing. He who loves is known and knows. He who claims to know without love only deceives himself.

As Zizek reads it, Christianity exalts the vulnerablity of love into the place of god, identifying the crucified Jesus with the perfect and immortal Being. He is close to right. Here’s his mistake: he forgets the Resurrection. He thinks this life is the all in all. He forgets, or has not heard, that Jesus inagurated a new life, a new creation. Make no mistake, the crucified Jesus is to be indentified with God, so that we can rightly say that God (in some sense, at least) makes Godself vulnerable in Jesus. But – this is the decisive point – that same crucified Jesus of history is identical with the resurrected Lord of our faith. In the Easter light we see the vulnerability of God as a triumphant vulnerability, a once-for-all wounding overcoming the very susceptibility to wounding which characterizes this present darkness. This alone is our hope: death dies in Jesus’ death. If that is true, then vulnerability is not a necessary condition of love’s being in the future, in God’s future which is guaranteed by Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Origen got it wrong. Life in “heaven,” in the age to come, will not be a series of fall and redemption. Christ’s victory is the decisive one. Those who enter into Christ’s new reality, into the kingdom, enter into a state of unremitting and inexorable bliss.

According to the Edenic myth, Adam and Eve were “naked and unashamed.” Which is to say they lived in a state of non-vulnerability. They weren’t defenseless, for no defenses were necessary. Uncovered, they weren’t unprotected, for no protection was needed. They were “naked,” meaning they hid nothing, neither from each other nor from themselves. Truly and absolutely open to the other, they were nonetheless not susceptible to harm. They were open to each other – without risk. (The fact that they fell from this state does not refute this point. The myth could not explain everything.)

Vulnerability (susceptibility to harm) is not essential to love. Or, more accurately, it is only essential to love as love is in this present age, in this time before the Consumation. Then, when we know fully as we are fully known, when we see “face to face,” when we enter into the “life after life after death” inaugurated in Jesus’ prototypical resurrection, we shall love without vulnerablity, in a world without end. Amen.