Dissolving the Outer Man
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey.
The following Research Reflection, by Fabien Muller, Postdoctoral Fellow, is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
Scholars and practitioners are used to thinking about religion in terms of what it does: making people happy, mindful, visionary, healthy, ecstatic, or safeguarding a civilization, tradition, culture, or community. They assume that religion realizes itself fully in its concrete effects and that these effects conform to the “economy” of human interests and intentions, as if religion were like any other social and historical force. But this interpretation overshadows the deeper, dialectical aspects of religion—aspects that could reveal something beyond the tangible expression of religion in society and history.
The reductive idea that religion only “exists” in its human effects spans a variety of scholarly approaches. Sociologists and scholars of “lived religion” insist that religion empowers practitioners as embodied beings, allowing them to embrace and realize their shared beliefs. What lies beyond the physical, concrete existence of the human being is not relevant because it is not accessible to empirical assessment. Cultural conservatives, on the other hand, see the purpose of religion as a moral norm that preserves national or political identities and wards off social change. They equate religion with a bulwark of their tradition or political ideology.
Such reductivism is not unique to the study of religion. The history of philosophy reveals that it is a century-old issue. In his 1958 book Retreat from Truth, British philosopher G. R. G. Mure (1893-1979) critically argues that in the twentieth century, the focus of philosophy shifted from inquiries into objective structures of meaning and value to focus on what he calls the “economic agent.” The economic agent sees the world not as something that has meaning and value by itself but as a space determined by his own subjectivity: “The economic agent’s world widens as his purposes expand.” Inside that space, the economic agent’s being is entirely “directed to the end of maintaining, expanding, and enjoying his own life as a singular individual.” Meaning and reality are construed only in categories relevant to economic action. Things that don’t appear within the realm of that action don’t matter.
Mure extends his analysis into religion. “If the economic agent believes in a God, he endows him with no more than a magnified form of that same economic character which he attributes to things and other men.” It seems to me that scholars and practitioners today understand religion this exact way. They locate religion in what it produces in things and humans: health, growth, civilization, and order. Religion is a modality of economic action—one practices religion in exchange for some tangible result.
Doesn’t history show that the heart of religion is the very rejection of such action, even rejecting action entirely?
Matthias Grünewald (1470-1528), a late Gothic painter from the Alsace region in France, explores this rejection of agency in his famous “Isenheim Altarpiece.” Grünewald depicts the crucifixion of Christ witnessed, according to a traditional iconographic model, by four figures: Mary, mother of Christ, Mary Magdalene, John the Evangelist, and John the Baptist, accompanied by a lamb, a symbol of Christ’s sacrifice.
In the painting, John the Baptist points his finger to Christ, saying: “He must increase, but I must decrease,” a reference to a passage (3:30) in the Gospel of John. John the Baptist is aware that the very meaning of his existence is to announce a message about Christ as God. To convey the fullness of that message, John must present himself as a person empty of any self-reference, referring only to the otherness of divine existence. He points away from himself and points to Christ as if relinquishing his very being and nullifying it. John has no interest in his own life.
In Grünewald’s “Isenheim Altarpiece,” John the Baptist embodies what Karl Barth calls the “dissolution of the outer man.” Pointing away from himself, John rejects the “outer man” as Mure’s economic agent, and he opens himself to the absoluteness of God. His religion does not point toward himself, nor does it culminate in a “lived” practice, nor serve any subjective, political, or cultural aim. John has the opposite of a “growth” mindset: he embodies openness to decrease and become naught.
Grünewald’s altarpiece suggests religion can be explored differently than studied today: as a call to complete otherness, not as “lived” religion nor as politics, but as a dynamic transcending the boundaries of subjectivity and temporality.
John the Baptist in the “Isenheim Altarpiece” teaches us that no subjective category can reach the point where religion manifests its innermost meaning: the point that requires the human being to point away from itself and to rely, as Karl Barth writes, “not on life (Erlebnisse), experiences, or sensations—even if they are most exalting—but on plain objective knowledge of that which ‘no eyes has seen, no ear has heard.’”