The idea of Salvation comes, I believe, from the one whom suffering breaks apart. He who masters it, on the contrary, needs to be broken, to proceed on the path toward the rupture.
-Georges Bataille, Inner Experience
Within some cleft of history emerged the fallenness of humanity.
First we become aware of impersonal minds, entities, abstract forces, egregoric concepts, and see a capacity for material need fulfillment. We anthropomorphize them for want of a more faithful point of reference and beg their favor, directing our libidinal attentions and energies towards these deities and divinities. Through need fulfillment, base suffering is transformed into the suffering of conditioned forms, inevitable realization of the the failure of anything in the world to end striving and thirst. Following, salvation from this life, from suffering. Moksha. Nirvana. Plato’s Phaedo. Gnosticism. The Death Drive. In this modality, salvation involves a spiritual withdrawal from the world. Socrates spent his life contemplating the abstract Forms and so had no fear of death. Buddhists practice detachment so as to end the arising of duḥkha, suffering, in the sense of the intrinsic dissatisfactoriness of the world and everything in it. The Israelite people of the 1st millennium BCE codified a strict moral law in overcoming of instinctual human volitility. All imply liberating realizations of the illusory nature of reality and the salvific effect thereof. Finally, it is no longer merely that we take refuge from this life; now we take refuge by means of this life from an afterlife imaginary; this life becomes the instrument of salvation from another.
Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible, a podcast about philosophy and religion. It’s a new year and I’m taking a new approach with the project, focusing each episode towards answering a particular question. This is the project’s sixth year and if you’ve been following me the entire time—first of all, thank you, that means a lot to me. Second, you’re probably aware of how much my knowledge has grown and my thinking changed over the years. When I started I had been studying philosophy for a couple of years at most and hopefully I was clear about the limitations of my perspective. It’s certainly something that is clear to me now when I go back to my old episodes. Philosophy is vast and difficult and I’m really only just starting to feel like I actually know what I’m talking about. But for better or worse I’m always moving forward and this is the direction for the immediate future. In this episode I’ll be addressing the question, “Do we need salvation?”
The title of this episode is “The Ergonomics of Salvation” and typically the word “ergonomics” refers to a type of commodity design philosophy that takes into account human physiology so as to maximize work efficiency, ergonomics from ergon, a Greek word meaning “work,” and nomos, meaning “law” in the sense of “laws of physics.” So, say you’re designing a chair and you want to make it ergonomic, you take into account the shape of the human spine and the musculature of the back and general tendencies in human sitting behaviors and design the chair around that information, the idea being that users will be able to sit in the chair more comfortably for longer periods and thus work longer and more efficiently. What’s happening is that you, as the chair designer, are abstracting human physiology, generalizing from it and mirroring it. It’s the same process an artist uses when doing abstract work, taking for example Picasso’s abstraction of the human form, generalizing it while leaving some features behind. In the same way, an anteater’s tongue is an abstraction of the shape of ants’ nests. And all of this is fundamentally systems of representation. The world is everywhere representing itself to itself; Schopenhauer went so far as to argue that representation operates at the ground floor level of reality, representation itself being the appearance for us of the true substance of reality, the blind will.
So by “the ergonomics of salvation” I mean the laws of operation by which the human condition is abstracted into soteriology, which is the branch of theology concerning salvation.
Some of my audience might be wondering why this is a matter of any importance whatsoever, and that question hinges on exactly what it is that I’m talking about in this episode. You might be thinking, “I’m an atheist (or non-Christian in any case) and I’m already settled on the matter of not needing the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ.” But our concepts of salvation didn’t arise in a vacuum; rather, they respond and interface with historical human psychology and continue to do so even in the absence of the traditional structures of meaning given by religion. This is what Nietzsche described as the “shadows of God,” the effective operation of religion even in contexts we tend to think of as being purely secular. Soteriology continues to ergonomically interface with human psychology even when—especially when—we’re not aware of it.
To understand this, consider the language of authenticity as it operates in the contemporary world of advertising and commodity consumption. Advertisers tell us that we can be and express our authentic selves through the purchase and consumption of commodities. “Authentic” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2023, and if you search the web for the terms “authentic” and “authenticity” you’ll find endless pages on topics like how to present your authentic self in your social media feeds and how to market your business as authentic. I suspect that this drive towards authenticity has leaked its way into public discourse from the existentialist philosophy of the mid-20th century and in particular the work of Martin Heidegger, who described the inauthentic self as being in a state of fallenness. The contemporary philosopher Byung-Chul Han has written several short works which discuss how the matter of authenticity plays into the hands of contemporary neoliberal capitalism, and I think what’s at work in that process is the psychology of salvation. Our desire for authenticity arises from a desire to escape some fallen state.
In the introduction I developed three concepts of salvation which I’ll review here.
Salvation in vita, or petitionary salvation, is the closed salvation of this life. As living organisms we have needs which we are driven to fulfill, succeeding or failing in any given case, but successful need fulfillment is always temporary. We always have to eat again, sleep again, clean up again, and so forth. At the same time, our religious sentiment—putting aside for the moment its veracity or lack thereof—inspires the possibility of need fulfillment through divine intervention. In Exodus 16, the Israelites are wandering in the desert after their escape from bondage in Egypt. They fear starvation, and so Moses entreats God to provide for them, which God does by providing them with an edible substance called manna. In this modality, divine intervention fulfills a need within this life. This form of salvation is fully enclosed within the context of organismic life in the material world. Both problem and solution are in and of the world; divinity acts as a kind of lubricating medium, removing barriers and frictions within the world.
It would be a mistake to think that we’ve progressed or evolved past this modality. As Jean Baudrillard pointed out in his 1970 book The Consumer Society, there is a certain kind of magical thinking present in commodity consumption. The profusion of commodities creates the appearance of a world where everything is in reach and everything is possible. We forget that commodities and their placement in the world around us are the product of human activity.
During the Second World War, the United States military used various Pacific islands as staging grounds for the war against Japan. The indigenous societies living on those islands had had little to no contact with the outside world up to that point; almost overnight, the most technologically advanced nations on the planet were fighting a war on their doorstep. The indigenous islanders watched as people in ceremonial dress—air marshalls in military uniform—performed rituals (using hand signals to direct aircraft) which appeared to summon huge iron birds from the sky (cargo planes), birds which delivered various goods to those who had summoned them. Religions arose among the islanders in the wake of these events, religions we refer to as cargo cults which center on rituals performed to summon cargo from the skies. Baudrillard asks whether our modern consumer society is really all that different. In our case, the magic works: type the right words and numbers into the magic box and you can have cargo delivered right to your doorstep. But is the underlying thinking any different from the cargo cultists of Melanesia?
And if we’re talking about divinity as a lubricating medium which removes barriers and frictions preventing us from getting what we want, then it becomes clear that the God of the capital order is in fact petroleum. I’m not the first person to notice this; the novel Cyclonopedia by the speculative philosopher Reza Negarestani describes petroleum as a “Tellurian lube” which facilitates the apocalyptic interaction of technocapital and Abrahamic monotheism. Under this analysis, the War on Terror is indeed a religious war, not of Christianity against Islam but of the two united with technocapital through the medium of petroleum to achieve immanence with the burning Sun.
Salvation ex vita, or exclusionary salvation, is spiritual retreat from the material world. While in vita salvation has likely been part of human culture since we started using language, ex vita salvation seems to have emerged much later, in the mid-1st-millennium BCE, around 2500 years ago. The Vedas, the most sacred of Hinduism’s many scriptures and the oldest known collection of sacred texts, contain various devotions and rituals which align the material and spiritual worlds, but starting around the 8th century BCE we start to see texts called the Upanishads, which frame the Vedas with philosophical insight concerning liberation not within the world but from it. No longer is the problematic strictly contained within the world along with its solution; the world itself is now in error, although this may be an illusory result of appearances rather than fundamental essence or nature. In Hinduism this is described as maya, the veil of ignorance which leads us to mistake the transience and finitude of the material world for the Absolute. In Israelite religion, the world is a place of moral danger and deception. Holiness requires compliance with the Law of Moses, which has been brought into the world from outside through divine intervention. Through compliance with the Law, the Israelites drew away from the moral dangers of the world and closer to the world of God, separating them as God’s chosen people, a people apart from the goyim, the nations.
The 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, inspired by the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, described the world as being, at its core, the striving of a blind will. This will manifests in the individual, whose constant striving for growth and power impinges on other individuals, resulting in suffering. Striving cannot come to satisfaction through fulfilling some end goal or telos; this can be seen in all natural phenomena, such as with gravity, which continues its attraction even to the point of collapsing matter into black holes. For this reason there is constant struggle and constant conflict in all things, each thing striving for infinite attainment in a world of finitude and finite resources. Commodity consumption comes into play here again, with the profusion of commodities presenting us with the illusion of a transcendent abundance, an availability of goods beyond what we’re immediately able to experience.
At some point in history, we began to realize that satisfaction and the end of suffering are not to be found within this world. The solution then, for many religions, is to withdraw from the world. This modality may or may not involve an afterlife. In the Phaedo, Socrates is unafraid in facing death because he has spent his life contemplating the eternal Forms, the perfection of which this world is but a shadow, and so knows that his soul will gravitate towards that realm. The afterlife, in this case, is not the target so much as it is the continuation of the intrinsic good of the vita contemplativa, the life of contemplation.
The third salvational stance is salvation post vitam, prophylactic salvation, in which an afterlife imaginary becomes a threat against which one must guard in this life. This is the scenario of Christianity, or at least its orthodox formulation after the first few centuries AD: all souls are condemned to Hell, a place of eternal conscious torment, due to sin, even the smallest quantum of which is sufficient to bar one from Heaven, but individuals can be redeemed, justified with God, and freed from the burden of sin by accepting the vicarious atonement of Jesus Christ through his death on the cross.
Examples of the good place / bad place afterlife dichotomy appear in numerous ancient religions. In ancient Egyptian religion, Anubis weighs the heart of the dead against a feather. If the heart is lighter, meaning that it was not weiged down in life by evil, the akh—the soul—is allowed to pass into the afterlife. Otherwise, the akh is devoured by Ammit, the crocodile-headed devourer of the dead, and annihilated. In ancient Greek religion, which was likely inspired to some extent by the religion of Egypt, souls are judged on their moral character and either condemned to Tartarus or allowed to pass on to the paradise of the Elysian Fields. In Zoroastrianism, the dead are judged at the Chinvat Bridge and either dragged down into eternal suffering in the House of Lies or allowed to cross the bridge to the House of Song.
Salvation in Christianity is specifically salvation from sin and the effects of sin. Modern Christian doctrines of salvation arose in the 16th century during the Protestant Reformation; the Catholic position was affirmed at the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century contra what they considered the heresies of Protestantism. Bear in mind that the post vitam soteriology of contemporary Christianity is never explicitly stated in the New Testament, which, taken in itself, has a much more ex vita character. The biblical position is that humans are not right with God as a result of sin, and that a theosis, a partaking of divine nature, is required in order to bring humanity into a state of justification. This theosis is accomplished through faith in Jesus Christ, whose crucifixion serves as a sacrifice to effect this justification. The New Testament repeatedly advocates for a withdrawal from the world—Romans 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind;” 1 John 2:15-17, “Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world, for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world”—but discussions of a possible afterlife of eternal torment appear as little more than vague insinuations. The details about Heaven and Hell that we have come to know as Christianity were elaborated by theologians over the course of the next several centuries; those details were heavily contested and the specifics continue to be debated.
But the interesting thing about Christianity is that it removes the division of the afterlife along lines of morality. The belief remains prevalent within folk Christianity that good people go to Heaven and bad people go to Hell, but this position is far from being biblical and in fact the Bible specifically refutes that position:
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through him. Those who believe in him are not condemned, but those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
John 3:16-18
According to orthodox Christian soteriology, pieces of shit like Pat Robertson, Ronald Reagan, and even the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer are all in Heaven. Mahatma Gandhi, on the other hand, is in Hell, and will be joined by Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, when he eventually dies. Some branches of Christianity maintain that good works are necessary for salvation, but never sufficient, and God forgives the sins of all those who sincerely repent.
Christian soteriologies are either monergic or synergic, and in both terms we see the Greek root ergon again, “work.” Monergic means “unitary work” or “work of the one,” whereas synergic means something more like “working together.” The question arises in soteriology as to how salvation interacts with human free will and divine sovereignty. The three concepts do not play well together. A monergistic soteriology is one in which the saved individual plays no active role whatsoever in their own salvation. Such soteriologies often discuss humans as existing in a state of total depravity, completely incapable of any good absent divine intervention. Under a monergic soteriology, God provides the gift of grace to those whom God wills, and at that point, either the person can passively accept the gift of vicarious atonement, doing nothing of their own will but choosing not to refuse or resist the gift; or they don’t even have that option and are at that point saved whether they like it or not. Such is the soteriology of unconditional election in Calvinism.
Philippians 2:12-13:
Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure.
The phrasal verb “work on” is translated from the Greek katergázomai, and this word yet again involves the Greek root ergon. This verse can be and has been interpreted both in monergic and synergic terms, but to my mind it’s clearly synergistic: God works to enables my work but the work of salvation is fundamentally mine, and I agree with the verse that it’s a matter worth taking seriously.
George Bataille quotes the Marxist Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève in the epigraph to his Theory of Religion:
In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the “negation,” the destruction, or at least the transformation, of the desired object: to satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus, all action is “negating.”
Putting aside the historicity of Christ entirely, we can certainly at least say that there was something in the 1st and 2nd century Greco-Roman mind desirous of vicarious atonement through the death of God. There is a motion here which Slavoj Žižek has described as the double motion of transference: first the motion of history to the Passion narrative, however that came about specifically and even if it was a total fabrication, and then a retrospective return to the event in which it takes on the role of an ideological symptom. In this, the event itself is negated and transformed.
An animal can only see in any particular moment whether their needs are satisfied, but a human has the unique capacity of looking forward from a place of satisfaction to a point in the future when that need is no longer satisfied. When we’re eating a great meal, we are capable of looking ahead to a point in the future when we are hungry again. So even though the transience of satisfaction is true for every being, only for us is it true in every moment. We experience suffering, then, not only when we suffer, but even in moments of enjoyment and satisfaction. Every moment of contentment contains within it its own finitude. But without this sense of lack, we would never get past the limitations of our given reality. A world of complete and perfect satisfaction is certainly an empty one; limitation is, after all, a transcendental condition for the possibility of experience. Bataille said that the idea of salvation originates in the person who is broken by suffering, but also that that breaking is necessary. We cannot exist without it; in a sense we are most alive in our suffering and require it to attain the limits of experience.
From the detached distance of exclusionary salvation, we can see the world as a kind of Hell, a place of eternal suffering. From this vantage, the afterlife becomes a target of cathexis, of libidinal investment. Detachment from the world creates enjoyment, a process described by Slavoj Žižek, drawing from Jacques Lacan, as surplus-enjoyment, the paradoxical satisfaction that individuals derive from their very dissatisfaction, and this excess must be channelled into some object of desire. Beliefs in the afterlife reflect the material world—we have no other point of reference—but are detached from material reality and so our libidinal investment in afterlife imaginaries pushes them out to the extremes of what this life can be: paradise or torment, forever.
There’s an echo here of Bataille’s concept of base materialism: in withdrawing from the world, the material world becomes a remainder, irreducible to God, an active principle which “destabilizes all foundations” (Noys, 2009, p. 499). The elevation of an ideal world above the material in fact depends on the material, and in this way “the purity of the ideal is contaminated” (ibid, p. 500).
Salvation post vitam subsumes and suspends its in vita and ex vita predecessors in the determinate negation of their immediate content. In realizing the intrinsic emptiness of the material world, it becomes a floating signifier, an empty space awaiting the forces of instrumentalization. The raw jouissance of life, the excessive intensity of the Real, shunts our libinal attentions towards greater and greater profligacy; our libidinal investments grow like a tumor and this life thereby becomes an instrument towards the reproduction of death.
And now to the central question. Do we need salvation?
I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that we are, collectively, as a species, very much on the wrong track at the moment. In the 12,000 years, give or take, since the advent of agriculture, we’ve transitioned from the balanced coexistence with the planet that dominated the prior millions of years of human existence to planetary-scale industrial warfare, the total reconstruction of our environment into a costly, wasteful, and toxic artificial habitat, the transformation of the atmosphere into a noxious miasma unfit for humans to breathe, and a teeming population with most living in brutal poverty under the oppression of an all-pervading, exploitative, and cruel system of production designed to enrich the powerful and impoverish everyone else. Corporations with immense wealth and power surveil us, analyze us, and collaborate with states and media to shape our behavior, all while administering the illusion of freedom. Fascists threaten to take control again and turn the world into a graveyard. A critical supply system of incomprehensible complexity is stretched to the breaking point, threatening the global food supply. An ongoing pandemic has killed millions and while many of these deaths could have been prevented, we failed to do so. Oppressive regimes secure their power through superstitious nonsense reinforced by propaganda and violence, opposing both rational thought and authentic religious devotion.
I believe I could go on in this fashion for some time.
One point on which I am absolutely certain is that no one knows what happens after we die. I’m a theist; I believe in God. Do I have a soul? I don’t know. If I do, what will it experience after I die? I don’t know. Will God judge me? How will God judge me? I don’t know. What I know is who I am in this life, how I am called in this life, and that’s not something I can put aside for some afterlife imaginary. By “imaginary” I don’t mean here that such afterlives don’t exist—again, I don’t know—but rather that our image of the afterlife arises from our collective imaginations rather than from any direct experience or reliable evidence. To put it in epistemological terms, we have beliefs about the afterlife, and those beliefs may be true—although I don’t think they are—but even if true, our beliefs are not justified and thus fail a key criterion for knowledge. On this basis, I reject post vitam salvation: I do not live this life for the purpose of saving some other life of which I know nothing.
I accept the Buddhist and Schopenhauerian analysis of suffering. There is no true satisfaction to be found in this world. And I think that this understanding is deeply valuable and therapeutic, but I also don’t think that it’s something that we can escape from by withdrawing from the world. Detachment is valuable in itself, but it is limited and I don’t believe that it is salvific.
And as to our material needs, seems to me that we’re perfectly capable of fulfilling those ourselves. When we fail to do so, it’s not because of the absence of divine intervention, but more typically because we’re shortsighted assholes. To a limited extent, this is the area where I do think we need to reach out to a higher reality (or a lower one, depending on your perspective), in order to get beyond the limitations of our individual viewpoints to see what it is that we really are and why cooperation is generally in our best interests. This is a position that the mathematician Douglas Hofstadter described as superrationality, a rationality that is properly situated as rationality within a community of superrational agents.
Our drive to seek the Outside, to understand transcendental reality, is motivated by questions of salvation but I don’t think salvation is what we get from it, except insofar as salvation comes in the form of our own destruction. There may be benefits to such pursuits, but there are hazards as well.
Of more pressing concern, I think there may be a fourth stage in the soteriological progression of history. Our libidinal investments in an afterlife imaginary redirect our energy away from the material world, resulting in a degradation of material conditions. We make things worse for ourselves because we’re focusing our energies on preparing for another life. So at the end of the progression, the concept of salvation itself becomes a threat, a threat which arises from within salvation itself, from its own failure to obtain as a final and absolute objective, as an ultimate solution to our problems. It’s enantiodromia: salvation becomes the form of its own opposite. So then perhaps what is most needful is salvation from salvation, not an embrace of our fallenness but our recognition of its being an inescapable part of the human constitution.
Works Cited or Referenced
- Bataille, G. (1943/2014). Inner experience (S. Kendall, trans.). State University of New York Press.
- Bataille, G. (1973/1989). Theory of religion (R. Hurley, trans.). Zone Books.
- Baudrillard, J. (1970/1998). The consumer society: Myths and structures. SAGE Publications.
- Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics. Verso.
- Hofstadter, D. (1983/2012). Metamagical themas: Questing for the essence of mind and pattern. Basic Books.
- Negarestani, R. (2008). Cyclonopedia: Complicity with anomalous materials. re.press.
- Noys, B. (2009). George Bataille’s base materialism.Cultural Values, 2:4, 499-517
- Schopenhauer, A. (1844/1969). The world as will and representation (E.F.J Payne, trans.). Dover Publications.
Todd;
I’ve very much enjoyed your work via your podcast, which I discovered late last year and have worked my way through episode 64 so far, having started from the beginning. I have not heard your more recent posts but I am catching up.
All this to say, thank you for what you do, and I don’t know if you still live in Colorado (I believe you stated that in an episode) but if you are ever in Las Vegas for any reason I would love to buy you dinner and a drink.
Thank you,
-Katie, an atheist and fiction author who enjoys having her beliefs challenged