Spirit against Spirit: Klagesian Geist and the Church

Or, Why I no Longer Go to Church on Sundays

Firstly, this is a piece about my experience of church life, if it works for other people then I am extremely happy for them because I know the joy it can bring. Thus this is meant as a piece primarily in relation to the sacred and the modern world via the philosophy of Couliano and Klages, it isn’t meant as an attack, and I am currently working on a text about how to approach Christ within the modern world.

Many of my followers will likely have followed my journey into the Catholic Church over the past 2-3 years. Many of those followers likely will have also seen my recent ‘exit’ and disappointment with that Church. After spending some time thinking about the reasons as to why - of which there are a lot, many of which are personal - I thought it time to write something about the key struggle I faced during the latter part of my stay. Admittedly it’s a tad embarrassing to have entered into the Church and spoken of it with such fervor only for it to now all come crumbling down around me. But one can only be honest, and attempting to hold onto it when it no longer worked made everything worse, and, in my opinion, is borderline disrespectful. I’ll talk a little bit about where ‘I’m at’ near the end, but to get to the heart of this analysis we need to go all the way back to the Counter-Reformation by way of Ioan Couliano and look at just what happened to the Sacred over time.

See, a question I kept asking myself when I was sat in Church was ‘Where is the sacred?’, ‘How was it that the sacred came to fall away and allow the profane to take over our collective understanding of the world?’, ‘What happened to the sacred potency of terms such as soul and prayer'?’ And there is, undoubtedly, extensive literature on this topic, often focusing primarily on the transition from a predominantly religious society to a predominantly secular one. But this isn’t the angle I wish to hone in on. I want to address the specific degradation of what might be titled the ‘earthy’ elements of Christianity. The decline of the spiritual potential and feeling within man in favor of quantification and material certainty. For theorization to open up this strange flip of religious ideals I shall turn to a somewhat infamous text by Ioan P. Couliano, namely his 1987 text Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. 

At the beginning of chapter 9 of said book, in a section titled Abolition of the Phantasmic, Couliano coheres various threads that have arisen throughout the book thus far and solidifies them into one of the book’s major theses. Via liberal reform, Luther came to reduce imagery and external forms of ritual in order to concentrate on inward religious experience (192). With (for Couliano) the most important goal of…root[ing] out the cult of idols from the [Catholic] Church. (193) For Couliano this leads to a complete censorship of the imaginary and of phantasms, those things which Couliano theorizes as transforming the five senses into messages perceptible to the soul. As such, without these phantasms, the soul can understand nothing of the world. Nothing of the external can be brought to be understood by the internal. In short, the great tyranny of the Reformation for Couliano was not primarily political or ecclesiastical, but truly spiritual, if not internal. It was a usurping of that inner sense that connects us in an ‘earthy’, soulful way to the Divine. 

However, Couliano’s reading does not stop here. He asks us, what was the reaction of the Catholic Church and its counter-reformation? Was it to hold fast and defend ritual? Not at all, it merely replicates the quantified and material impetus of the Reformation on its own ground, leading both ‘sides’ of Christianity at that juncture heading forward without any difference where spiritual depth is concerned. 

I haven’t the ground to go too deep into the intricacies of Couliano’s text here but place this quick thesis here as a historic marker of change. Wherein - once again, for Couliano - institutional Christianity becomes its own tyrant, mimetically infecting itself with the contemporaneous attitudes of the day, whilst simultaneously shedding itself of anything it feels may hamper its progression into the future. At this point in time (Reformation/Counter-Reformation), I would argue, Christianity comes head to head with the modern world and instead of believing its rituals as Truth in themselves, seeks to quickly occlude them in the hopes of continuing its status and popularity amidst cultural change. One could possibly argue that it was this transition that allowed institutional Christianity but 100-200 years later to manage a coexistence with the Industrial Revolution that may have otherwise been impossible. Yet such a possibility of coexistence - that is, if you agree with Coulian’s thesis - merges the sacred and the profane, makes a mockery of the spirit-material duality, leaving us, where exactly? 

If it is that the sacred and the profane have come to coexist, therein denying the inherent hierarchy afforded the spiritual/divine ever since man has written of God, then we are left with but a single world from which to draw our conclusions. From such a world it comes as no surprise that materialism wins the day and becomes the default worldview, for the fact that in merging the sacred with the profane, the former is drawn down to the level of material, and thus symbol becomes sign, ritual becomes play, and prayer becomes psyche. Now this isn’t to say that by entering into that long-since lost inner life one need cast aside all that is material, only that in allowing oneself to be brought up to God is equally to realize the folly of the world in all its impermanence. 

It is this merged world we currently live in. Little has changed since the historical event of the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and Industrial Revolution other than the acceleration of the material ideals it presupposed.

However, this still doesn’t quite sit right. Imagery, idols, statues, beauty, and inner life are all most certainly still parts of the Catholic church. They are so much parts of the Church they have become points of contention for its critics, those who would state that if the Church truly wished to help the poor the Church should sell all its gold. That is to say, it is very apparent that the Church does still have such images that Couliano argues were removed and quashed within both the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, so what gives? I think something more malicious, more subtle is going on here, and it’s only when you find yourself grasping towards the Lord amidst a sea of smartphones and chatter that you come to intuitively realize it. But to expand upon this part of my discussion I need to turn to another marginal and critically overlooked thinker, one Ludwig Klages, specifically his philosophy of ‘spirit’. (If you know nothing of Klages I recommend my chat with Paul Bishop here)

In terms of this discussion on the Church, I find it quite ironic that Klages is indebted to Aristotle for his understanding of spirit (from here on out ‘geist’). ‘the doctrine that the spirit is added to life from outside (= thurathen, according to Aristotle’s expression)’ [1] This is an ancient splitting of spirit, soul, and body. Or perhaps more aptly - for Klages, body and soul (that are somewhat unified) and then the spirit. For more on the body-soul connection, we can turn to Klages Of Cosmogonic Eros (quoted from Bishop):

The cosmos is alive, and all life is polarized into soul (psychae) and body(soma). Wherever there is living body, there is soul; wherever soul, there is living body. The soul is the sense of the body, the image of the body is the appearance of the soul. Whatever appears, that has a sense; and every sense reveals itself as it appears. Sense [der Sinn] is experienced internally, appearance [die Erscheinung] externally. The former must become image if it is to be communicated, and the image must become internal again, for it to have an effect. Those are, expressed without metaphor, the poles of reality. (2018, p89)

See here my bold emphasis, is this not what Couliano also is writing of? The body as the appearance of the soul as phantasmic apprehension of the image as communicated directly to the soul. Yet for Klages - and I must be clear - this communication would not be a splitting into a night and day, a heart and head, but a singular relation that once separated is destroyed. The body and the soul are within a unilateral relationship sans the lateral. So the question for Klages is how are the body and soul split? Here we turn once more to The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul (as quoted by Bishop):

Body and soul are poles of the life- cell which belong inseparably together, into which from outside the spirit, like a wedge, inserts itself, in the endeavour to split them apart, to ‘de-soul’ the body, to disembody the soul, and in this way finally to kill all the life it can reach. (2018, p90)

There it is, that spirit against spirit, or Geist against spirit, that wedge that invades into the sacred under the veil of presupposed, heightened articulation. Geist, for Klages, seeks to deprive the body of the soul, to deprive the soul of body, and in this way to kill life itself. (2018, p91) Klages then is not opposed to some form of specifically intellectual Geist but to all Geist in its most general terms. Something he understands as entering like a wedge and splitting us from the passionate-intuitive part of our selves, so that our (instrumental) consciousness is purchased at the price of alienation from the emotional and affective component of our identity. (Bishop, 2018, p91) Geist draws us out, external to reality, and thus alienates us from ourselves, from our souls.

In being drawn away from finitude and fleeting mortality via the tyrannical artificial dialectic of Geist man is made emphatically modern. For he is both made sympathetic to the whims of the Zeitgeist via comparison and thus assumed progress, and equally is excluded to a disembodied position wherein he believes himself eternal. I should emphasize, however, that this Klagesian Geist is not new, and as long as there have been monuments and idols, there has been Geist. In my own opinion, Klagesian Geist is that which makes man ever-modern, eternally modern. It usurps the embodied reality and affords man a false pedestal from which he can assess, analyze, and quantify the life (his life) that he is no longer living.

What in the world does this have to do with me no longer going to church on Sunday? It certainly seems likely an extremely verbose excuse to not have to get up early. But why would I get up? For what? The equivalent of an hour-long talk long since possessed by the profane! My own appreciation of Klagesian Geist is not that it is always some grand, overarching leviathan that fragments entire worlds - though this certainly has been the case. But that it equally manages to infiltrate the most minor of settings via the inconspicuous tools that Geist itself has justified! Geist is the vacuum cleaner charging in the corner during Mass, Geist is the horrid grey microphone cables strewn throughout the cathedral, Geist is the rush for tea and cake, Geist is the bureaucracy, the policy, and the procedure that suffocates the sacred to such a degree that we can now control, and therein, lose it. In short, the Church of the Spirit needs to exorcise its Geist!

The profane has overtaken the sacred and utilized its own grammar as justification! Well, it would be impractical; there’s a reason we do that; it functions quite well; how long will it be; the committee will decide on Tuesday; check the rota, check the rota, check the rota. Hell is little more than one being forced to partake in an eternal committee without recourse to suicide. And for those who wish to make their bed with Geist - and before you do, have you checked the energy-essence distinction of those sheets? - I decry you as little more than pathetic Geist slaves, who given half a chance would transform Communion into a relay race! Geist must be dealt with severely and yet impractically, if not almost nonsensically for our modern minds. We cannot measure it, control it, nor analyze it, for to do so we enter into its own playing field. Any attempt against Geist is fuel for Geist, it will consume all you afford it because all it knows is quantification. Once more, there will be those who defend Geist on its own terms, “But we need to know, there must be rules, it says over there, there are 14 liters of sacred in here today…”, and these sniveling rats of function should simply sit down and count the nanoseconds until their death.

This in itself is, theologically, no reason to abandon ship. But all theologies are merely separate fideisms and the church - oddly - is reluctant to admit to the importance of faith. “Ah, you wish to know God, there’s a 12-week course on How to Know God coming up, I just need your card details.” For nothing is immune to Geist, and so too has faith itself been split with a wedge, wherein those who fall to the side of the body scrabble around countless archaic texts looking for the next perfect proof, and those who fall to the side of the soul are without feet to keep them stable. And so when one is sat and trying to allow for that Klagesian soul-body harmony, wherein the forces, energy, and breath of God and/or sacred are to flow into and through one, they routinely find that their efforts are already quashed by the atmosphere of Geist. For Geist (spirit) has already possessed the event, the context, we know this and yet we refuse to see it. David Beth once said, “Modern man no longer has eyes with which to see the Abyss.” (referring to Nietzsche), and I would expand this by saying that the eyes of modern man are inherently eyes possessed by Klagesian Geist, though I think this tautological.

Klages would argue that it is always already too late and, as I’ve already said, the process of Geist has been well underway since history began. I disagree with him here, though I must admit I’m not really sure why. I think there’s hope, but as to how to exorcise Geist from institutions is not a matter for manuals or committees (though I would love to see such a thing). Exorcising Geist from institutions, buildings, or masses doesn’t seem too difficult, for within materiality Geist is often plain to see. The difficulty is in exorcising Geist from our own perception, a place that it has made its home, and we need turn no further than Christ Himself to understand this:

⁹ He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.

¹⁰ And his disciples came and said to him: Why speakest thou to them in parables?

¹¹ Who answered and said to them: Because to you it is given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven: but to them it is not given.

¹² For he that hath, to him shall be given, and he shall abound: but he that hath not, from him shall be taken away that also which he hath.

¹³ Therefore do I speak to them in parables: because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

¹⁴ And the prophecy of Isaias is fulfilled in them, who saith: By hearing you shall hear, and shall not understand: and seeing you shall see, and shall not perceive.

¹⁵ For the heart of this people is grown gross, and with their ears they have been dull of hearing, and their eyes they have shut: lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and be converted, and I should heal them.

¹⁶ But blessed are your eyes, because they see, and your ears, because they hear.

(Matthew 13:9-16)

What is happening to the disciples in line 10 except for possession via Geist? An original statement (9) pertaining to the body that one has is quickly usurped by questioning the function of the statement itself. It is a matter of soul-body harmony, for their hearts have grown gross (15). Their hearts, their eyes, and their ears have all been infected with the grossness of Geist, and any attempt at purgation is met with Geist-based questioning - “But why should I hear? How do I hear? What should I see? How do I see? What is this I feel?” Good Lord, be in your body!

~

So where am I? Simply put, I have returned to my old spiritual friends GG, JMG, and FB. Christ still plays a key role in my spiritual life, that’s all I can really say.

[1] This quote is from Klages The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, as of yet untranslated, and so I am indebted to the scholarship of Bishop, see Ludwig Klages and the Philosophy of Life - A Vitalist Toolkit (2018) - wherein I quote Bishop (or Klages via Bishop)