GIL BAILIE AND THE HOPE OF HISTORY - REFLECTION
PETER MAHER*
Peter Maher reflects on the recent conference co-sponsored
by ACMICA featuring Gil Bailie from the Cornerstone Forum
California, USA.
Gil Bailie bases his analysis of the impact of the Christ
event for the world on the Christian anthropology of Renee
Girard. Girard claims that the beginning of all culture is
violence; that myth and human sacrifice are the cathartic
process for keeping the lid on this violence and maintaining
social cohesion; and that Christ’s death and resurrection
overturns this mechanism of scapegoating by unmasking the
ethical imperative of the innocent victim precisely in the
unique event of the death and forgiveness of Jesus in his
ontological innocence. Girard claims that the Christ event
is the beginning of history, by which he means that the cyclic
time of the ancients is broken, so that we can imagine something
new. The very nature of ritual is to maintain control of the
people by repetition, thus anything new is seen as dangerous.
Christ broke this cycle of scapegoating, by moving the crowd’s
vision from the “guilty victim” to the “innocent
victim”. Thus history begins as the engagement in a
struggle to protect the victim which results in a historical
struggle. The claim is that once the veil has been removed
from our eyes about the ritual scapegoating that blames the
victim (guilty or innocent) for society’s failures or
lack of understanding, there is no turning back. This knowledge
“infects” all cultures that the gospel touches,
in spite of the church’s failure to live it.
Naturally this overview is a taste and thus radically inadequate.
But it may serve to flag the terrain we are in as I offer
these few reflections on Gil Bailie’s Sydney Conference.
One strength of this analysis is the way it values Christianity
in history. It offers a thoroughgoing intellectual framework
for Christianity’s extraordinary faith claims. Bailie
presents a reasoned case for Christ’s incarnation, crucifixion
and resurrection as a unique event that offers real hope for
the victim and gives meaning to suffering and failure. The
Eucharist is the place where this mystery is worked out sacramentally,
not as a remembrance that needs constant repetition like in
the old order of sacrifice, but that literally makes present,
in the community, the forgiveness necessary to overcome the
deep resentment humans experience in the wake of sin. That
is to say in the wake of the reoccurring disappointment of
failure which is precisely what Christ came to overcome so
that we could experience true freedom over mistaken optimism.
Real hope emerges only when we know God’s mercy in the
light of the truth about ourselves.
These are a few of ideas that were teased out in Gil’s
eclectic style. Gil brought these ideas alive with an imaginative
mix of scripture, theology, anthropology, philosophy, Greek
and Roman classics, poetry and drama. This is what he means
by an interdisciplinary approach.
There are some challenges in Gil’s work. Does it assume
too much about Christian faith? Girard’s critics note
such difficulties as the lack of a critique from a patriarchal
or feminist perspective. The use of Western, Greco-Roman,
Middle Eastern religious and Aztec cultures as the only references
for a claim to universality could be problematic. For example
is there anything to substantiate the presence of bloody human
or animal sacrifice in Australian Aboriginal culture? Without
such evidence, this certainly challenges the claim of the
uniqueness of Christianity as offering a way out of bloody
sacrifice to bring human freedom. Another point would be the
place of other religions in the world. Are they really so
inadequate as to render them irrelevant in the light of the
Christ event?
With these points noted, I was impressed by the sense of
humility in Gil’s presentation. He willingly noted the
need to reflect on all questions further. He noted that the
problem with ideology was that to the extent that it was separated
from the gospel, it became self defeating. Ideologies tend
to lead to oppression despite their claim to protect the victim.
Some examples of this were Pol Pot, Stalin and the failure
of feminism to protect the victims of abortion or the Civil
Rights movement failure to protect the victims of the ghettos
of South Central LA or Chicago. These are powerful arguments,
although has not Christianity also failed in these struggles
– or is it that it has not been tried?
These are a few reflections on the wonderful three days with
Gil Bailie. Gil Bailie’s intellectual rigour applied
to our faith gives real hope for reclaiming meaningful religious
language and a marvellous respect for paradox gives us the
chance of life from a gospel perspective – life that
brings real freedom to be human in all our inadequacies and
weakness.
»«
*“The History of Hope and the Hope of History: Today’s
World in Anthropological Perspective”, Conference, UTS
and ACU, Sydney, July 18-20, 2003
Peter Maher is chaplain at the University of Technology,
Sydney and Pastoral Animator of ACMICA.
|
