Author: staceymeeker

One of the New Testament’s most memorable stories is John 7:53-8:11, the haunting and dramatic pericope de adultera, or as it is perhaps better known, the story at the center of which stands the famous saying “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her”:

7:53 Then each of them [the apostles] went home, 1 but Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. 2 Early in the morning he came again to the temple; all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them. 3 The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery, and placing her in the midst 4 they said to him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in the act of adultery. 5 Now in the law Moses commanded us to stone such. What do you say about her?” 6 This they said to test him, that they might have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 7 And as they continued to ask him, he stood up and said to them, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her.” 8 And once more he bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. 9 But when they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the eldest, and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him. 10 Jesus looked up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” 11 She said, “No one, Lord.” And Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you; go, and do not sin again.”

Homilists and theologians seeking to illustrate the “radicality of forgiveness” and “radical acceptance of sinners” practiced by the historical Jesus (Kysar 134) have frequent recourse to this pericope, since it seems so powerfully to embody the egalitarian morality of the Sermon on the Mount: “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and prophets” (Mt. 7:12). But to see the story of the woman taken in adultery as little more than a dramatic vehicle for the delivery of a separable ethical commandment is potentially to overlook the moral significance of those aspects of the scene that give it its power: the ironic tone that suffuses Jesus’ utterances and the cryptic action of stooping to write in the dust. The homiletic approach follows existential theologian Rudolf Bultmann in drawing a distinction between the story’s significant content–the famous saying–and its form, the dramatic context in which the saying is pronounced. To Bultmann, the saying possesses historical and theological priority; the context, however, he assigns to what we might call the “mythic” background:

Here, in proper fashion, Jesus is first of all asked for a judgement, to which he replies with a saying that has been conceived of as an unity with the situation itself. But the initial silence of Jesus is unusual and can be classed as novelistic; if so, the circumstantial ending, introducing the conversation with the woman, is more than anything else novel-like and secondary (63).

Is there an alternative to Bultmann’s hard-edged form/content dichotomy, a way of reading this story–and, by extension, the other gospel texts it resembles–that demonstrates the equal theological significance of utterance and context in revelatory scenes like this one? This essay will present such an interpretation, by approaching the pericope de adultera from the standpoint of Eric Gans’s “generative anthropology.” First sketched out in The Origin of Language [University of California Press, 1981] and subsequently extended and tested in four books and numerous articles, generative anthropology represents a rigorous and far-reaching means of understanding cultural phenomena–such as religion–by viewing culture in light of its hypothetical origin. Culture’s origin, Gans posits, was simultaneous with the emergence of humanity’s defining characteristic, the ability to use language. But how, precisely, did this ability emerge? Gans rejects the widely-held view that language evolved gradually (that is, unconsciously) from non-significant animal communication because such a view ignores both “man’s uniqueness with respect to his animal ancestors” (Science and Faith 2) and the logical necessity that “[c]onsciousness must originate all at once–it must originate consciously” (“Differences” 798).(1) The ability to use language, he argues, resulted not solely from the gradual accumulation of random physiological mutations in individuals, but in a collectively-experienced event–a scene–in which the capacity for linguistic signification deferred an imminent conflict that was threatening to break out among a group of proto-humans. For Gans, humanity’s essential attribute is therefore its capability for deferring violence through representation.

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But whence does the need for such deferrals arise? Generative anthropology answers this question by considering not how proto-human and homo sapiens differ, but what they have in common. Humans and higher animals share a capacity for imitation or mimesis, which is both the vehicle of non-genetic transmissions of information and a potent source of intraspecific conflict. Here generative anthropology follows the pioneering insights of René Girard, whom Gans credits with having rediscovered “the critical, inherently conflictive nature of [mimesis], a category of action that had previously been viewed, following Aristotle’s Poetics, as an unproblematic source of esthetic pleasure” (Originary Thinking 8). Girard agrees with Aristotle that “the habit of imitating is congenital to human beings from childhood (actually man differs from the other animals in that he is the most imitative and learns his first lessons through imitation)” (Poetics 20). Girard differs from Aristotle, however, by holding that the intensity of the human capacity for mimesis (as Gans explains)

leads to intensified rivalry over attractive objects and thence to a generalized conflict that can only be resolved by the channeling of collective aggression against a single “marked” member of the group­­–one whose marginal status makes him an appropriate butt for the hostilities of the others. Because this victim brings peace to the community in crisis he is the first sacred object; . . .he is also the first significant object, and the source of all significance. (“Differences” 800)

The mob Jesus confronts in the pericope de adultera bears all the hallmarks of what Gans and Girard would identify as a “community in crisis”: feeling their religious/legal tradition belittled by the imposition of Roman authority, and riven by competing ideas about how to re-assert the significance of Jewish nationality and identity, the crowd gathers and prepares to immolate a hapless woman in the hope that the execution of an adulteress will re-establish group unity. To this recurrence of an archetypal human event–a lynching–Jesus brings an originary intuition of the shared roots of significance and violence that enables him to short-circuit the sacrifice of the woman taken in adultery. In what follows, I will employ the methods and insights of generative anthropology to interpret two of the most puzzling and provocative aspects of the pericope de adultera: why, exactly, Jesus’ famous words disperse the lynch-mob, and what is the meaning of writing in the dust, an action which Bultmann sees as just an atmospheric embellishment of the “novelistic” silence with which Jesus initially answers the crowd’s challenge. I will then extend these insights to suggest how the pericope, ­­though not written by the same hand as the rest of John, ­­is thematically and theologically unified with the Fourth Gospel by its demonstration of the ethical dimensions of verbal and gestural irony. From this analysis will ultimately emerge a vivid illustration of generative anthropology’s extraordinary capacity for extracting from religious texts and phenomena their innate, though sometimes obscured, cognitive and ethical insights.

II

Consideration of the story of the woman taken in adultery from the standpoint of generative anthropology begins with a kind of reader-response analysis: on what in the story does my attention focus, and why? Clearly, our attention to the pericope is as much drawn to the saying that stands at its center as it is to those more evocative details–the writing in the dust, the actions of the mob, and the puzzling exchange at the end of the episode between Jesus and the adulteress. Nevertheless, since the saying stands out from the rest of the story with a sort of epigrammatic intensity, I will begin with it before turning to the more mysterious aspects of the scene.

There is in the famous saying “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” more complexity than the homiletic tradition tends to grant it, complexity that resituating the saying in the fullness of its context helps to identify. The primary source of complexity in the saying and context is the melange of impulses motivating the crowd to want to lynch the woman in the first place. Behind these sometimes suspect and contradictory impulses stands, however, the unifying feeling of resentment, directed first and foremost against the Roman conquerors of Judea. Captured after the Sanhedrin has been stripped of its power to enforce the sanctions for violations of Jewish law (believed to have occurred around 30 C.E.), the woman must be lynched ­­that is, executed without benefit of “official” due process­­ because, as Duncan M. Derrett observes,

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that was the only way in which she could be punished. Because the Sanhedrin was not allowed to hear cases involving the death-penalty, at any rate in Jerusalem itself, the constitutional method of seeking a penalty against her would have been to approach the Roman governor. The [Jewish] Law prescribed how and by what means an adulteress should be punished; but its application was hindered so far as regular administration was concerned, and the Romans provided no attractive alternative. No Roman judge would condemn to death a woman taken in adultery, and that was what the crowd (and the husband) wanted, it would seem, to happen to her. A smaller legal punishment, or even another at the judge’s discretion, would by no means satisfy their zeal (10-11).

The pericope itself demonstrates, however, that the zeal of the crowd was aroused by more than just the woman’s violation of the law. Mixed in with their righteous indignation against the woman’s sin are at least two kinds of resentment: the first against the constituted colonial authority of the Romans, the imposition of whose relatively lax legal code could be seen as yet another affront to Jewish religious and political sovereignty, and the second against Jesus, taken by the crowd as a self-constituted moral authority, whose self-evident righteousness also arouses resentment. When in John 7:19 Jesus asks an adoring throng, “Why are you looking for an opportunity to kill me?” he is greeted with shocked disbelief: “You have a demon! Who is trying to kill you?” (7:20) Verse 6 of chapter 8 reminds us that the crowd’s moral outrage against the woman is not unmixed with an animus against Jesus: the purpose of their question of “Now what do you say?”, the story remarks, is “that they might have some charge to bring against him.” This lynching is, then, a more involved enterprise than it appears on the surface. The woman is largely a pretext for the expression of other resentments, especially those of the scribes and Pharisees for any perceived threat to their civic and political authority. Understanding this aspect of the story enables us to appreciate even more the interconnectedness between Jesus’ famous utterance and the context in which it arises. Note that “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her” does not prohibit the contemplated action from taking place. Indeed, it is not even a direct answer to the question the crowd directs at Jesus; it is, rather, something of a mild suggestion (“Let him among you”) qualified by what is under the circumstances an ambiguous psychic and moral condition: what does it mean to be “without sin?” Not presently in the act of sinning? Never having committed a sin? Incapable of sinning? And to which of the many varieties of sin and sinfulness is Jesus referring?

The vague and mild character of Jesus’ response to the crowd’s question presents, of course, a striking counterpoint to the malice and clear intent presumably emanating from the assembled group. There is, though, one part of this utterance that is crystal clear, and from it emerges the saying’s overriding anthropological significance. The part of the sentence to which we should look for the saying’s ethical importance is not the ambiguous expression “without sin,” but the phrase “the first to throw a stone at her,” especially the adjectival phrase “the first.” “To throw a stone” is, of course, an unambiguous action, the motivation and consequences of which are obvious in this context. One cocks an arm, takes aim, and lets the stone fly, hoping it will strike the presumably restrained sinner squarely in the head. Jesus seeks unmistakably to bring to mind for each member of the crowd a clear picture of what is about to happen, and thus forgoes euphemism or any other type of figurative language. “First” is similarly unambiguous, and lies even closer to the revelatory kernel of the entire scene, for it brings to light the secret, fatal vulnerability that lurks at the heart of every lynch mob.

Generative anthropology sees the all-against-one configuration of the sacrificial mob as the sinister repetition of a moment of the event in which language originated, the moment of the sparagmos in which the violent impulses temporarily deferred by the emergence of linguistic signification are vented, as it were, upon the body of the central object. Since the center/periphery orientation of the originary scene of language was produced by a build-up of mimetic tension and rivalry between the members of the group, the aggression ultimately released on the body of the victim was not originally aroused by that victim per se. Thus the “sin” of the lynch-mob’s victim, as my analysis has already suggested, is something of a pretext, since at least part of the real purpose of the punishment is to ward off a threat of group disunity. Establishing and securing the unanimity of the group of sacrificers is, as it were, the real purpose of the lynching; and anything that conduces to single out any member of the group thus threatens the entire enterprise. The precise means that this group has chosen to exact punishment on the woman caught in adultery is, of course, particularly well suited to this end, since in the aftermath of a hail of stones, who can say which was first and which was last?(2) (Or, for that matter, which merely injured the victim, and which delivered the fatal blow?) The unanimity of the group’s action ultimately confers anonymity on each individual, who, after all the stones have been thrown, enlists his own uncertainty concerning the precise order of events in order to still any pangs of conscience that might be stirred by having participated in what could, under other circumstances, be construed as a murder. Jesus’ use of the word “first” is intended precisely to destroy the comforts of anonymous unanimity. And this is precisely what it does, for after another short pause, the story relates how the mob, originally an undifferentiated mass headed by “scribes and Pharisees,” degenerates into a collocation of individuals, who depart from the scene “one by one.”

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A sophisticated understanding of what could be called the hidden anthropological strata of lynch-law thus undergirds Jesus’ canny response to the question laid before him both verbally by the group and situationally by the circumstance with which he is presented. This understanding stems not from just a historic or scriptural knowledge, but from an intuition of the originary connection between scenes like this one and the internal scene of representation–the conscience–that results from the origin of consciousness itself. Were there no need for some sort of forestalling of the pangs of conscience that such events are capable of arousing, were there no ethical ambiguity in the action contemplated by the mob, then there would be no need for the elaborate measures the crowd takes to ensure the anonymity of unanimity. Jesus knows that the crowd’s felt need to ask the judgmental question testifies to the presence of a latent moral pang. Human consciousness is originally constituted on a public scene (possibly, like this one, a scene of victimization); the scene leaves in each individual a trace, a remnant, that is the source of what is commonly identified as conscience. There is an originary link, then, between victimization and conscience. Awareness of this link is precisely what lynch mobs must try to forget, but which Jesus’ carefully crafted reply is formulated to bring to light.

But what of this scene’s other feature which the story is so careful to preserve, the mysterious moments in which the reluctant judge “bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground?” What is the purpose of these actions, and what, if anything, does Jesus write in the dust at his feet? These evocative details have understandably intrigued generations of interpreters, and over the centuries many have exercised their ingenuity in attempting to solve this tantalizing textual riddle. Some have taken the story’s failure to specify the content of Jesus’ inscription to mean that nothing identifiable was written–Jesus doodles in order a), to buy some time for the victim and then to allow his words to sink in, or b) to show his contempt for the entire proceeding. Others see the unusual word used to describe the act of writing–katagraphen, “writing down” or perhaps “tallying up”–as an indication that Jesus wrote something specific, such as the sins of his questioners.(3) Duncan Derrett enlists his formidable knowledge of the laws and customs of colonial Judea to support the hypothesis that Jesus wrote two passages from Exodus that comment upon the actions of the lynchers. The first is Exodus 23:1b, “You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness,” and the second is Exodus 23:7, “Keep far from a false charge.”(4)

These two schools of thought are, of course, mutually exclusive: either Jesus wrote a recognizable text the content of which somehow helped to shame the mob into dispersing, or his writing was illegible and achieved a similar purpose via less direct and obvious means. Of these two alternatives, the latter is preferable for two reasons. First, the chronicler shows meticulous care in preserving the delicate precision of Jesus’ utterances. If Jesus had indeed written some text in the ground that directly commented on the event, it is likely that the chronicler would have carefully preserved it as well. Second, some sort of written accusation, such as the crowd’s violation of a law, or their sins, no matter how subtle or implicit, would jar with the resolutely non-accusatory tenor of both Jesus’ central utterance and his concluding refusal to condemn the woman.

To hold that nothing recognizable was written does not, however, necessitate viewing the action of writing in the dust in the way that Bultmann does, as a secondary, “novelistic” detail included to dramatize the heightening tension of the situation. The importance of this element of the story lies more in the act of writing itself than in what is or is not written on the ground. The very action of writing, in other words, is itself symbolic, and forms an essential part of Jesus’ ethically-oriented response to the situation. That such is the case may be observed by recalling exactly when Jesus pursues this cryptic action. Verse 2 relates that after Jesus’ early morning arrival at the temple, “all the people came to him, and he sat down and taught them.” Though the text does not specify the precise configuration of this group, the fact that Jesus sat down to teach leads one reasonably to infer that the people were arranged in a rough circle, Jesus sitting with them seminar fashion on the periphery of the circle. That this was the arrangement is further suggested by verse 3, which relates how the scribes and Pharisees placed the woman caught in adultery “in the midst.” The Scribes and Pharisees thus transform the egalitarian circle into a potential scene of violence simply by providing the circle with a center. Jesus’ response is to bend down and write “with his finger on the ground,” an action which, in its way, repeats the action of the scribes and Pharisees, though with a difference. Writing in the dust echoes the placement of the woman in the midst of the crowd by directing the attention of those on the periphery away from each other to the circle’s center. Jesus’ action differs from that of the scribes and Pharisees, however, in the extent to which it is ambiguous. Like the famous central saying, writing in the dust presents a striking conjunction of gestural clarity with representational ambiguity. Jesus touches the ground, and leaves a lingering trace of something in the dust–but what, exactly, is the inscription? Is it composed of letters, initials, pictures, or just random markings?

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The intriguing combination of ambiguity and clarity serve something of the same purpose here as it does in the gripping central utterance. In the originary event, the production of the first linguistic sign occurred when a group arranged around an attractive central object reached for it at the same time, only to abort their gestures of appropriation in fear of the conflict that would break out if all managed to lay a hand on the object. The object’s apparent ability to repel the appropriating gestures of the individuals on the periphery granted it a sacred aura, and, thereby, the “transcendent”–since it is capable of being both itself (an appetitively attractive object) and something beyond itself (the thing that forestalls conflict)–nature of the linguistic sign. On the originary scene, gestural certainty leads to sacred ambiguity, with the emergent capacity for language serving as a means to defer intraspecific, mimetic conflict. By writing in the dust, Jesus portrays how scenes of sacrifice like those urged by the scribes and Pharisees are capable of producing a decidedly less troubling and victimary outcome. The action symbolizes what generative anthropology offers as a minimal definition of the human capacity for language: the deferral of violence through representation.

III

The two aspects of the pericope de adultera upon which this essay has so far concentrated–the famous saying and Jesus’ writing in the dust–have something in common: both seem calculatedly ambiguous and ironic, requiring of the hearer a degree of interpretive intrepidity far beyond that of even the most obscure of the synoptic parables. In fact, the ambiguity of this pericope extends past obscurity to enter into the realm of irony, not in the narrow literary-critical sense of meaning the opposite of what one says, but in an existential sense akin to that developed in Soren Kierkegaard’s doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Irony. Kierkegaard begins his examination of the unsuspected depths of irony with an observation about questions that emerges as remarkably pertinent to this essay’s interpretation of the story of the woman taken in adultery:

It is manifest that the intention in asking questions can be twofold. That is, one can ask with the intention of receiving an answer containing the desired fullness, and hence the more one asks, the deeper and more significant becomes the answer; or one can ask without any interest in the answer except to suck out the apparent by means of the question and thereby to leave an emptiness behind. The first method presupposes that there is a plenitude; the second that there is an emptiness. The first is the speculative method; the second the ironic (36).

Jesus’ first utterance is a response to a direct question posed by the Scribes and Pharisees, and his second utterance is comprised of two questions he directs to the erstwhile victim of the mob, with whom he is now left alone: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” Strictly speaking, these are rhetorical questions, since their answer is obviously provided by the context in which they are asked. The shamed crowd has trudged off, having abandoned in embarrassment their grim purpose. While, as Duncan Derrett observes, the text fails to provide any explicit guidance as to whether Jesus’ tone in asking these questions is “sarcastic or humorous” (25), it seems likely that a faintly wry smile of irony–the look that says “Ah, I knew it” or “Just so”–crossed his face at that moment. The credulous woman answers the questions, which in the context of what has just occurred illustrate the unacknowledged ethical dimension of Kierkegaard’s concept of the ironic mode of questioning. The ambiguity of Jesus’ words and actions in the presence of the mob ironizes the menacing scene constituted by those who would condemn the woman to the extent that their scene is disassembled, leaving an emptiness behind. Or, to put it another way, the ironic distance Jesus is careful to put between himself and the woman’s accusers has the ultimate effect of exposing the ultimately debilitating internal contradictions of “lynch law.”

In addition, irony provides an important thematic and formal link between the interpolated story of the woman taken in adultery and the rest of the Fourth Gospel, which, for all the resolute Christology of its famous opening sentence–“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God”–presents us with a picture of Jesus at his most human: loquacious, emotional, occasionally bitter and mocking, and almost always teasingly ambiguous when he speaks. It is, after all, only in John’s gospel that Jesus’ troubling rebuke of his mother at the wedding in Cana occurs: informed by Mary that the wine has given out, Jesus responds “Woman, what concern is that to you and me? My time has not yet come” (2:3-4). It is also only in John that we find the encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well, in which Jesus may or may not declare himself the Messiah. The woman says to Jesus “‘I know that Messiah is coming’ (who is called Christ). ‘When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.’” Jesus’ response in the original Greek is ego eimi, ho lalon soi: does that translate (as most Bibles have it) to “I am he (that is, the Christ), the one that is speaking to you?” Or is it just “I am the one that is speaking to you?” as if to say, “Don’t talk to me of the Messiah now; listen to what I am saying to you.”

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By far the most striking and extended example of irony in John, though, comes in the trial before Pilate, longer and far more detailed here than in the synoptic gospels. As in the story of the woman taken in adultery, irony and verbal ambiguity arise in the context of a capital accusation. Unlike the lynch mob in the pericope de adultera, however, Jesus’ priestly accusers admit–though not to Pilate, of course–that their real motivation for bringing the charge of sedition against Jesus is not to punish him for his crimes but to secure Jewish unity at the expense of a scapegoat. In chapter 11, the infamous Caiaphas berates his fellows on the high council with “You know nothing at all! You do not understand that it is better for you to have one man die than to have the whole nation destroyed,” a statement which persuades the elders “from that day on” to plan to put Jesus to death. The Roman governor’s ignorance of this conspiracy initially places him in something akin to the impartial stance Jesus assumes when called on to judge the woman taken in adultery. His anthropological intuition, though, is no match for Jesus’: that this is the case is indicated by Pilate’s mode of questioning, which is, in Kierkegaard’s terms, predominantly speculative rather than ironic:

18:33 Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” 34 Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” 35 Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” 36 Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” 37 Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” 38 Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”

There is a great deal of psychological and anthropological significance packed into this subtle and complex verbal dance, the complete elucidation of which lies beyond the scope of this essay. For our purposes, it is necessary first of all to notice that irony and ambiguity once again arise during a forensic examination–that is, at a time and place in which discursive clarity assume life or death importance. Second, it is noteworthy that Pilate’s famous ironic question–“What is truth?”–produces an emptiness similar to that revealed by Jesus’ questions to the adulteress: without staying for a reply, the Roman governor leaves his captive and returns to the crowd to report “I find no case against him” (18:38). Again, questioning in the ironic mode reveals the moral emptiness of the charges brought against the scapegoat. But the events of the next few hours will demonstrate that there inheres yet another wrinkle to what the pericope and Pilate’s examination reveal as irony’s ethical dimension. By turning away from his interlocutee after asking his sardonic question, Pilate pinpoints the distinction between mere mockery and the revelatory irony Jesus employed to disperse the crowd in the pericope. In this context, mockery is irony’s pale and ineffectual shadow, as is illustrated when Jesus, mocked and scourged as the “King of the Jews,” truly has his body broken and actually dies on the cross.

IV

It may be observed from the above analysis of the scene between Pilate and Jesus that irony’s structuring role in the Fourth Gospel is ultimately paradoxical, since what serves in the first case to avert a violent outcome appears to produce one in the second. How can this be?

Solving this riddle requires recognizing what the two episodes reveal in juxtaposition. In both, the essential function of the originary scene–the generation of meaning out of crisis–may be observed. In employing verbal irony and gestural ambiguity to divert the attention of the woman’s would-be lynchers from the object of their malicious intent, Jesus demonstrates the fragility of the sign/signified relationship which the lynching hopes to establish. The crowd, provoked by the scribes and Pharisees, want the dead body of the lapidated adulteress to serve as a guarantor of the authenticity of the Law which they feel has been delegitimized first by the Romans and then by Jesus. That is, they want to make the body into a sign that will derive an unshakable stability from the permanence of the woman’s death. The law of Moses, say the scribes and Pharisees, “commands” this. Jesus’ response is consistent with his statement in Matthew 5:17 that he came not “to abolish the law or the prophets.” To reveal through ironic detachment the law’s cognitive and linguistic sources is not, strictly speaking, to abolish the law. It is, however, to show how the law, as a system of representations, is vulnerable–perhaps even fatally so–to deconstruction. In the pericope, Jesus destabilizes the hoped-for sign–and thereby spares the woman–not by merely questioning the crowd’s right to execute her or by suddenly superseding the old law with a new. Rather, he approaches the question of the law anthropologically: he tacitly asks the crowd, “What is a law? What is the relationship between the law and the language in which law is expressed? What, if any, essential characteristics of social interaction are exemplified in setting up systems of law and punishing transgressors?”

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That he asks these questions ironically and indirectly indicates the extent to which Jesus’ anthropology is generative–that is, it attempts to understand human interaction from the standpoint of the origin of humanity’s defining characteristic, language. To do so, however, is to threaten to unleash the mimetic tension originally deferred by the emergence of language against himself, for, as Gans writes,

Irony is the necessarily indirect and allusive expression of the deconstructability of the formal structure of language that is the model for all formal structures, all of which are in the last analysis structures of representation. To think a formal structure is to conceive both its levels on the same plane, to deconstruct it–to ironize it. True thinking, originary anthropological thinking as opposed to the positive thought that unconditionally respects formal difference, is thus always ironic. (Signs of Paradox, in MS).

The task of sifting the teachings of the “historical Jesus” from apostolic emendations and corruptions, it seems, would greatly benefit from considering whether the text in question respects or questions formal difference. For all that can be said about the New Testament’s varying depictions of Jesus–especially between the synoptics and the fourth gospel–there is a striking consistency in the lack of respect Jesus affords to the formal differences upon which his age set such great store. What are the parables of the good Samaritan (Lk. 10:30-37), the laborers in the vineyard (Mt. 20:1-16), and the prodigal son (Lk. 15:11-32) if not reminders of the ultimate instability of human concepts of significant difference? What are the Beatitudes (Mt. 5:3-12) if not a call to re-think the relationship between linguistic sign (“Blessed” or “Happy”) and the collective contexts from which those signs originally derived their meaning?

That Jesus ultimately fell victim to the originary instability his characteristic irony was so effective in revealing does not, of course, invalidate either that irony or the truth it was capable of uncovering. As Gans writes,

because humanity depends on the maintenance of formal structures in order to defer conflict, ironic thinking is potentially tragic. Once the absolute formal barrier between sign and referent has been shown to be vulnerable, an end is made to deferral and the central figure becomes subject to sparagmatic violence (Signs of Paradox).

Both the pericope de adultera and John’s description of trial of Jesus by Pilate illustrate not only the power of generative anthropology, in Gans’s words, “to extract from religious texts clearly formulated and in principle ‘falsifiable’ anthropological theses” (Science and Faith vii-viii). They also show the extent to which Jesus’ theology and mission–his theory and practice–reflected an understanding of the originary links between mimesis, violence, and the definitive human attribute of language.

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William Mishler’s article on Ibsen’s Brand is an adaptation of a paper delivered in the COV&R section of the American Academy of Religion in November 1996. The other three articles have been adapted from papers delivered in the Generative Anthropology – Religion lecture series in Spring 1997 sponsored by the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA by Doug Collins, Tom Bertonneau, and Matt Schneider.

About our Contributors

William Mishler is Professor of Scandinavian in the Department of German, Scandinavian, and Dutch at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and an active member of the COV&R (Colloquium on Violence and Religion). He is a specialist in Ibsen and in modern Norwegian literature.

Douglas Collins, a member of the Anthropoetics editorial board, teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Washington. He is the author of Sartre as Biographer, as well as articles on nineteenth and twentieth-century French literature.

Matthew Schneider, a founding member of the GA seminar (who has managed to attend some portion of the seminar every year it has been given) holds an MA from Chicago and received his PhD in English from UCLA in 1991. The author of Original Ambivalence: Violence and Autobiography in Thomas De Quincey (Peter Lang, 1995), Schneider has also published articles on Jane Austen, John Keats, and critical theory. He has recently been promoted to Associate Professor of English (with tenure) at Chapman University (Orange, California).

Tom Bertonneau, another original member of the GA seminar, received his Ph.D. from UCLA in Comparative Literature in 1990. His dissertation applied GA to the study of the modern epic: William Carlos Williams’ Paterson and Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés…” Since then he has published and presented papers on Williams, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, and other American authors, as well as on theoretical topics (and science fiction). Tom has also written for Heterodoxy, Chronicles, Academic Questions, and National Review, and is well known in Michigan for his controversial writings on college English teaching. He currently teaches English at Central Michigan University.

1. Introduction

Generative Anthropology’s primary concern is not with literature but language, i.e., representation, but because literature consists of language that inherently shows the traces of the process by which it arose, GA finds in literature an ideal interlocutor. And among literary genres, perhaps the one most apt to engage GA in dialog is tragedy. As Eric Gans writes in The End of Culture: “If the epic converted myth into literature and the lyric did the same for choral marriage-hymns and the like, with tragedy, literature penetrated into the very heart of ritual: the sacrifice whose origin is traceable to the originary event.” (Gans, 1985, 280)

In any given epoch, then, whether ancient Greece, Renaissance England, 17th century France, or 19th century Scandinavia, one might somewhat abstractly understand the function of tragedy to have been that of reformulating the originary event in the terms of the current culture’s ethical understanding. This event, as readers of Eric Gans’ work recall, is hypothesized to have occurred in a moment of stymied impulse when the protohuman group was arrested in its hungry convergence on an object of collective desire by the countervailing force of that desire itself. Each individual was prevented from reaching out to take sole possession of the object by the assembled force of the encircling ring of identical, i.e., mimetic, desires. In that moment of pause and rigid attention, the group found itself compelled to designate the object to itself–that is, convert it from mere instinctually targeted thing to cognized sign by an operation that was both magical and radically paradoxical. Indeed, it produced the fundamental paradox of which all human culture was to become the endlessly complex unfolding. That the object had to be lost as thing in order to be recovered as sign is the conundrum which religious ritual celebrates–fixing on the aspect of transformation, of transubstantiation–and secular ritual, i.e., tragedy, deplores–fixing on the aspects of loss and arbitrary victimage. In this issue of Anthropoetics, which is devoted to the topic of religion, I would like to bring Henrik Ibsen’s religious tragedy Brand (1866) into a kind of dialog with Generative Anthropology–with the hope of contrasting their views regarding some of the religious implications that flow from the double nature of the human sign. I find that GA helps clarify the radically anthropological nature of Ibsen’s drama, just as I also find that the anthropological Ibsen poses certain fundamental questions to GA.

That Ibsen’s tragic sense was rooted in an intuition concerning the fatal entanglements generated by the paradoxical nature of the human sign is a fact not often credited in the critical literature, despite the fact that the line from Peer Gynt, ” Only what’s lost may be held forever,” is frequently cited as kind of a gnomic concentrate of his fundamental insights. Elsewhere I have written of Ibsen’s poetic apprenticeship which, as recapitulated in an autobiographical poem entitled Players, portrays the process of poetic election as having occurred by way of the painful experience of mimetic rivalry. Here Ibsen suggests that he became a dramatist by discovering at first hand that the object of desire can never, by definition, be obtained. The glamour which surrounds the object derives solely from the fact that it is contested by another. Thus personally attuned to the conundrum of the original scene, Ibsen went on in his major historical and philosophical dramas to explore the implications of mimetic rivalry as they operate in and among cultural systems. In Brand (1866), Ibsen wrestled with the ominous fact that ethical systems, i.e., religions–the very systems by which society attempts to pacify the violence generated by mimetic rivalry–tend by a further turn of the generative paradox to become mimetic rivals themselves. The sign which cleared a space and provided a moment of peace in the originary scene becomes in turn an object of desire because of its mystifying power. Between Christians and Jews, for example, the sign of the lamb is just such a disputed sign. Because Christians claim this sign of peace in an exclusionary manner, they recharge it with the very violence which the lamb gave his life to quell, i.e., the death of the first born.

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2. The Sacred, Religion, Tragedy

I would like to take a slightly more differentiated look at the process by which the central object becomes sacred. Two moments in the originary scenario can be distinguished: the first when the object holds the group at bay, the second when it serves as the substrate for the transcendental sign. The first moment is that of impending violence, the second that of the advent of peace. When it first magnetizes the group with its presence the object is like a bomb, charged with the appetitive charge of collective desire. If it does not explode, i.e., if the group does not tear itself to pieces, it is because it has generated a sign which can be known by all equally, i.e., shared in the mind. This mental communion leads to a third moment when the object can be shared equitably in concrete fact. Thus, somewhat in the manner of the prototypical scheme envisaged by René Girard, at least as regards outcomes, the object gives itself to the group in a way which saves it from its own incomprehensible violence. Incomprehensible because collective. No individual within a group has a 360 degree apprehension of the situation. The group’s violence, whether manifest or latent, of which s/he is only one component part, flows around him/her with the impersonality of the divine. And again as René Girard has often averred, the radical change produced by the sacred object from a situation of imminent destruction to one of established peace is of such magnitude that it registers to the group as a miracle. Ensuing religious rites, as both Gans and Girard agree, are the formal reiteration of this magical (i.e., not comprehended) transformation.

While the affective charge of this transformation may be difficult for modern people to grasp, the Bible contains several episodes that give us at least a hint of its impact upon people of a primarily religious imagination. The example I would like to cite not only illustrates this immediate point, but will be relevant to my subsequent discussion. The example I have in mind is that of the Moabite king mentioned in 2 Kings 3:24-27:

But when they came to the Israelite camp, the Israelites sallied out and attacked them, driving the Moabites in headlong flight. The Israelites pushed forward into Moab, destroying as they went. They razed the towns to the ground; they littered every good piece of land with stones, each man casting a stone on it; they stopped up every spring of water; they cut down all the fine trees; and they harried Moab until only in Kir-hareseth were any buildings left standing, and even this city the slingers surrounded and attacked. When the Moabite king saw that the war had gone against him, he took with him seven hundred men armed with swords to cut a way through to the king of Aram, but the attempt failed. Then he took his eldest son, who would have succeeded him, and offered him as a whole-offering [burnt offering] on the city wall. There was such great consternation among the Israelites that they struck camp and returned to their own land.

The fear inspired in the Israelites by this act of royal filicide gives us an index of the affective charge inherent in the religious sign. The killing of the boy becomes a sign of such potency that it causes them, on the very point of victory, to abandon their campaign and flee homeward in fear. As in the originary scene, the transmutation of the central object into sacred sign imposes peace. But with a crucial difference. Notice that this sign gains its potency by playing off an earlier sacred sign. For the Israelites the killing of the Moabite prince must have struck them as an inversion of their own founding sacred sign, the non-killing of Isaac. To the Israelites the sight of this king killing his first born son and heir, the being most central to the Moabite kingdom, must have struck them as a fundamental violation of the sacred order of things, an inversion of sacred centrality itself, so to speak.

In addition to giving us a hint of the affective power of the sacred, this example also helps us think about the relation of religion to tragedy. For when we consider this Moabite king, we of course think of Agamemnon, or Euripides’ Heracles, or, for that matter, the mothers in Euripides’ The Bacchae. And then comparing these accounts of child sacrifice, both the religious and tragic ones, with GA’s hypothetical originary scene, we are given a sudden, startling hint concerning the nature of the sign. If at first it arrests violence it does so not by overcoming it but by transmuting it to a state of permanent virtuality. Within the peaceful sign flickers the ember of violence that gave rise to it.. In a new situation, in a new configuration of forces, the ember flares to a blaze and the sign recharges itself by crossing back over the line from metaphor into concrete fact. It wouldn’t have served for the Moabite king merely to perform an animal sacrifice on top of the wall, for example, recalling to mind the sign by which Isaac was replaced on the altar. That sign would not have been sufficiently powerful to arrest the Hebrews. Only by dipping the sign back in the human blood which gave birth to it could the king invoke its full power. What does this suggest to us about the long-term relationship between human beings and their sacred signs? Generative Anthropology finds in the equality of access to the sign which is proffered to all in the originary scene a hopeful prognosis for human culture, as if such equality, when sufficiently clarified and raised up in consciousness, might ultimately lead to a condition of mutual reciprocity for all humanity. But for such an outcome to occur, the would have to somehow overcome the antithetical energies imparted to it at its origin. In suggesting this outcome as realizable within historical time Generative Anthropology is of course placing itself in continuity with the eschatology of Judaism which finds in the name of God a whole and unitary means of salvation. But the intuition of tragedy as it repeatedly arises in the course of Western history stands in direct opposition to this understanding of the sign. Where religion points to the sign as the instrument of peace, tragedy in turn points to it not only as the precondition but under certain circumstances as in fact the cause of war.

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Tragedy does this most insistently, of course, in the aftermath of a given war when it looks to the partisanship which sparked it and makes of it a non-partisan analysis. Eric Gans writes: “Tragedy first reached a high-cultural level in a period of patriotic fervor–that of the Persian war–and it could surpass this level only by becoming independent of civic considerations.” (Gans, 1985, 290). By extrapolation, we might say that tragic authors in every age are those who, when they contemplate the bloody facts of war, realize that religion which keeps peace within the group is somehow unable to accomplish this task between groups, for obviously there are few wars of historical record where the religious expedient employed by the Moabite king would have produced a comparable effect. This leads the tragic author to bring the lesson home and inquire into the sacred mechanisms undergirding his own culture.

Such, at least, seems to have the process that led Ibsen to write Brand.

3. Ibsen’s situation in 1865

Ibsen wrote Brand in 1865 in Italy, fifteen years after his first play, Cataline. He had left Norway in 1864 for a year’s study abroad. Stopping for a few weeks in Denmark, he was resident in Copenhagen during the weeks when the Germans attacked Denmark’s southernmost province, Schleswig, and appropriated it. Denmark appealed to Sweden and Norway to come to its defense, as they had promised to do, but faced with the superior might of Germany, both refused. Ibsen was appalled. A patriot and an enthusiast of pan-Scandinavianism, he had spent the past fifteen years of his career writing plays on national romantic topics. The general program for these works had been to portray historical Scandinavian kings and warriors, whatever their faults, as figures of great stature and consequence, possessed of a “greatness” that might serve as an incentive to modern Norway in its first years of independence and national self-definition. This phase of his work Ibsen brought to conclusion with The Pretenders (1864), a play about Norway’s civil war in the fourteenth century. In this resolutely ambiguous work, Ibsen presents national unity as a worthy ideal while at the same clearly showing the lynch-mob mechanism which the victorious King Håkon found himself constrained to employ to achieve it. Now, a year after completing The Pretenders, faced with the German attack on Denmark– and Norway’s reaction to it– Ibsen suddenly found himself having to rethink his understanding of national identity and of his role as Norway’s more or less self-elected national dramatist.

Full of compassion for Denmark and of indignation toward Germany, Ibsen settled in Italy and tried to formulate some sort of artistic response to the situation. He worked hard for a year but with minimal results–producing only a fragment of a narrative poem, now known as The Epic Brand, in which the figure of a passionately idealistic clergyman by the name of Brand takes up rhetorical arms against Norway’s torpid, unheroic, and self-centered citizens. Month after month Ibsen labored on the poem, and at last ground to a halt. Then, all at once, during a visit to St. Peter’s, Ibsen experienced a moment of inspiration that changed everything. I would like to present this event in the words of Vigdis Ystad, a noted Norwegian Ibsen scholar, from her recent book “–livets endløse gåde” Ibsens dikt og drama (1997) [“life’s infinite mystery” Ibsen’s poetry and drama]. Ystad writes:

After about a year the work was still in a rudimentary form. The poet was in despair. But then a decisive event occurred, which Ibsen has described in a letter of September 12, 1865 to his fellow poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. “Then one day I went into St. Peter’s–I was in Rome on an errand–and there, suddenly, the form for what I had to say came to me, forcefully and clearly.” In the same letter he wrote the famous words, “I read nothing but the Bible,–it is powerful and strong!” In other words, Ibsen describes a sudden and revitalizing inspiration that caused him to put aside The Epic Brand. During the summer and fall of 1865, he worked on his great verse drama Brand in a state of near intoxication.Scholars debate about the nature of Ibsen’s experience in St. Peter’s and its impact on the finished work. Most frequently they interpret it as a religious experience, and place it in relation to the religious problematic at the heart of the drama. (Ystad, 1996, 130, my translation) 

A little later in her discussion Ystad adds this interesting note:

That the work’s external form underlines its religious themes is fairly clear. Hallvard Lie has suggested that the verse patterns of the drama seem to have been influenced, among other things, by the Catholic Requiem Mass, in particular the Dies Irae. (Ystad, 131)

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I wanted to present this event in Ystad’s words because she succinctly frames it with the pertinent quotation from Ibsen and the relevant questions concerning the nature of Ibsen’s inspiration. As a final note, however, concerning the background of the work, I would like to point to a significant symmetry in Ibsen’s experience of the Danish/Prussian conflict. Not only did Ibsen happen to be staying in Copenhagen when the attack occurred, he also happened, some months later, to be staying in Germany, when the victorious troops came home. He writes in a letter:

I was in Berlin when the victory parade took place [in early May 1864 after the Prusso-Danish War], and I saw the mob spit into the mouths of the [Danish] Dybbøl cannon, and it seemed to me a sign of how history will one day spit in the faces of Sweden and Norway for their part in the affair. (Ibsen, 1)

Although full of partisan feeling when he wrote these words, we understand that Ibsen’s objective situation as a non-participant observer in both Berlin and Copenhagen in fact allowed him to experience the nationalist passions on both sides, the symmetrical fervors, so to speak, which meant that later in a more reflective moment in Italy he was able to hold them together analytically in his mind.

4. The plot of Brand and its form

The plot of Brand is complicated and difficult to narrate because everything in the work carries allegorical significance, so that even the descriptions of landscape–mountain and valley, sunshine and shadow–are charged with second-level meanings. It is a reading drama not intended for the stage, its language charged with echoes, allusions, cunning word plays, and cross references, so that as with any successful poem its meaning is elusive and unstable. But stripped to its bare narrative, the story is as follows: Brand, a Christian minister is returning to his childhood village. He is driven by a sense of mission, which is to awaken his countrymen to the moral necessity of a spirit of self-sacrifice, what he calls offervillighed, i.e., a willingness to sacrifice. His motto is All or nothing, which of course never means nothing but always all. Everywhere he is met with resistance. The one exception is Agnes, the fiancée of his childhood friend, Ejnar. When she hears Brand engage Ejnar in debate, she is so impressed by Brand’s moral seriousness that she switches her allegiance and love to him. Eventually she and Brand marry and have a son, Alf, who in Act 3 falls ill. The village doctor tells Brand that to save his son’s life, he must leave the dark, unhealthy north and take him to the south. Brand is eager to comply but encounters resistance from the villagers, who have taken him as their spiritual leader and interpret his departure as a betrayal of a sacred trust. For an agonizing moment, Brand hesitates, torn between his paternal and spiritual obligations, but then decides to follow his own lofty motto and sacrifice his son’s life. Alf dies. This proof of spiritual valor augments Brand’s authority among the populace, and brings him into conflict with the local civic and religious authorities. Defying them and responding to the people, Brand supervises the building of a huge new church in town, but when it comes time to consecrate it, realizes that his vision has been too small, too mundane. He casts the keys to the church door into the fjord and leads the villagers up into the mountain, promising them a higher form of spirituality, again premised on a higher notion of self-sacrifice. For a brief enthusiastic moment the people follow him, but when the first pangs of hunger set in they turn on him and curse him for a false prophet. They take up stones and Brand narrowly escapes with his life. Brand has so obviously merged with his prototype, Jesus, that one of his followers, the expelled Gypsy girl, Gerd, falls to her knees and tries to worship him as the returned Messiah. Rejecting her worship, Brand climbs higher into the mountains, and there in a penultimate moment encounters the specters of dead family members who have all died as a result of his moral crusade. i.e., the ghosts of his son Alf and his wife Agnes (who died as the result of losing her son), and of his mother, whom he allowed to die unshriven and unattended because she was unwilling to heed his call to renounce her earthly goods. Facing the glacier, Brand suffers a final agony of indecision as to whether he has been guided or misguided in his spiritual striving. By way of answer he is buried in an avalanche of snow, unleashed by a rifle shot of the crazy Gerd, as a heavenly voice responds to his question with the words: “He is Deus Caritatis.”

One advantage of stripping Brand to its bare outline, I think, is that thus reduced it offers us a dim but plausible clue as to the nature of Ibsen’s inspiration in St. Peter’s. Let’s turn for a moment to the crux of the play, the conclusion of Act III, where Brand informs Agnes of his decision to remain with his parishioners, leaving her to draw the fatal consequences in actual fact. The passage reads:

Agnes. [lifting the child high in her arms]

                      God on high! The sacrifice thou cravest                           I dare raise up towards Thy Heaven!                           Lead me through the terrors of this world!

                                          [She goes into the house.]

Brand. [stares unseeingly a short while, bursts into tears, clasps his hands together over his head, throws himself down on the steps and shouts]

Jesus! Jesus! Give me light. (Ibsen, 155)

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Surely this scene reminds us of the Offertory of the Mass. Why else would Ibsen have Agnes elevate her doomed son? Brand’s collapse and anguished prayer ironically recall the priest’s prayerful genuflection after the elevation of the host. And why otherwise does the play conclude with Brand being rejected and nearly stoned by his followers? Is this not in consonance with the prologue of John’s Gospel– “He came unto his own and his own received him not”–which used to be recited as the “last Gospel” of the Mass? And, finally, why the Latin phrase which ends the play if not so serve as a vague echo of the “Deo Gratias” which formerly closed the Latin Mass? We recall that the critic Hallvard Lie found a close resemblance between Brand’s verse form and that of a Requiem Mass. My suggestion would be that the parallels extend to the form as well. I think, in other words, that when Ibsen stepped into St. Peter’s, where in all likelihood a Mass was in progress, he had a flash in which he understood that if he cast his Brand in the form of a Mass, it would, purely in its form, pose a fundamental question concerning the paradoxical link between Christian culture and war by subtly lifting up the culture’s central religious ritual for esthetic consideration. For here in St. Peter’s, Ibsen found himself standing in Christian Europe’s central temple and observing with eyes undulled by habit a sacrifice of substitutionary atonement in which the Son is offered up to the Father for the benefit of all, a theologically non-symbolic reiteration of a sacred process not unlike that effected by the Moabite king. (Non-symbolic because Christ is really present under the appearance of bread and wine.) Perhaps Ibsen, like the Israelites, was jolted. For although Ibsen was a Lutheran who was not in the habit of attending church, he was a thorough Bible reader and he had been precisely informed by Paul as to the sense of what takes place on the Catholic altar:

And so, since we have now been justified by Christ’s sacrificial death, we shall all the more certainly be saved by him from final retribution.” (Romans, 5:9)

5. The Mass as an exemplary instance of the sacrificial dialectic of cultural forms

Two features characterize the human signifier: it is arbitrary and differential. The signifier is always this not that, the this proposing itself through some aspect of non-identity with that rather than through some inherent or transcendent quality of self-sameness. Which is to say that human signification proceeds through dialectic, i.e., argument, which at the level of words merely results in differentiation–Pa is not Ma–but at the level of culture always produces a winner and a loser. In its conception of the founding scene of human meaning, Generative Anthropology provides a narrative which, as Eric Gans tells it, underlines the potential for peace inherent in the cognitive shift from thing to sign, but Tragedy, I am suggesting, takes us back to the same scene and the same story, and its reading always emphasizes the arbitrary– that is to say, sacrificial, that is to say, magical–nature of the object offered up for meaning. As Tragedy contemplates the provisional resolution of conflictual tension by means of the sacrificial signifier, it intuits the putting-in-place of a logic with implications of perpetual and lethal recursion.. Eric Gans writes

The entire course of the dialectic of linguistic form, up to and including the supralingistic forms of discourse, can indeed be understood as a progressive revelation of he arbitrary character of the linguistic sign, and, at the same time of the (proto) dialectical symmetry of man’s relation to linguistic presence, the evolution of form being at the same time a revelation of human content. (Gans, 1981, 267 )

As an object lesson in the dialectical tension at the core of the human signifier, consider the streak of lamb’s blood daubed by the Hebrews on the door posts of their houses on the eve of their exit from Egypt. To the Angel of Death this single sign conveyed a double message: a) Don’t kill the first born son inside this house. b) Do kill the first born son in the unmarked house next door. The lamb gives up its blood to produce both aspects (arbitrary & differentiating) of human meaning simultaneously. And at every Passover meal since that first blood smear, a lamb bone has been placed on the table as a sacrificial sign of recognition of that first sacrificial sign of liberation. Now this of course is this same lamb which in turn, i.e., appropriated and re-defined, becomes the founding signifier of the Christian Mass. The logic driving this act of symbolic permutation is animated by the utopian hope that it might constitute the final turn of the sacrificial dialectic, for Jesus, in the narrative lens of the New Testament authors, is positioned within the scene of the Last Supper as containing all aspects of the sign within himself in a perfect manner, i.e., finished and non-differentiating. He is both priest and victim, center and periphery, both slain and not slain, the first born son who dies and the first born son who lives. It’s a symbolic operation which re-writes both the Abraham/Isaac and the Passover scenes of Judaism in an to attempt to free itself from Judaism at the same stroke, defining itself against the Passover meal by an act of discrimination as if it might thereby free itself from sacrificial contamination. Indeed, this is precisely Paul’s trope, that the dough of the Mass might somehow not be leavened with the dough of the Passover:

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Have you not heard the saying, ‘A little leaven leavens all the dough’? Get rid of the old leaven and then you will be a new batch of unleavened dough. Indeed you already are, because Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. So we who observe the festival must not use the old leaven, the leaven of depravity and wickedness, but only the unleavened bread which is sincerity and truth. (1 Corinthians: 6-8)

But notice that at the very moment that Paul tries to disentangle the two leavens, the Christian and the Jewish, he brings them into contact with each other through invidious comparison. The Jesus of the Gospels, of course, had preceded him in this maneuver, at least in the New Testament textual sequence, by discriminating himself from his spiritual brother Judas, when he dipped the unleavened bread into his cup at his last supper, prior to its consecration, and handed it to his betrayer, thereby marking him as the expelled one, doomed to suicide, whose removal from the scene could open a space in which the transubstantiation might occur without taint. Given this sacrificial prelude, the Mass, which on the theological level attempts to undo or overcome difference by containing all differences within its complex single signifier, on a cultural level obviously instigates a new differentiation whereby the “old” Jews, faced with the “new” Jews who have re-defined themselves as Christians, now find themselves shifted into the place of the Egyptians, i.e., into the house not marked with the blood of the Lamb, and thereby defined as “the leaven of depravity and wickedness.”

Ibsen, I imagine, as he stood within the baroque enclosure of St. Peter’s, his eye moving from Michaelangelo’s Moses to his Pietà by way of the high altar, suddenly grasped in a flash that the religious field of culture consists of a closed loop in which symbolic figures change their valences from plus to minus depending upon propinquity or substitution, but that the logic is always sacrificial and the sum total constant. If the role of ancient Greek tragedy was to lift up the sacrificial basis of culture to aesthetic scrutiny, the role of a modern, northern, Protestant tragic artist was to point to the sacrificial logic by which Judaism had been appropriated and re-inscribed within Christianity, not to vindicate the one against the other, but to show how together they formed a closed symbolic loop whose effect, in time of war or impending war, tended to stimulate rather than to abate violence, whistle up the angel of death, so to speak. For, again, the datum Ibsen was struggling to decipher had to do with the clash of Christian armies.

6. YHWH , Gans’ reading of the name of God, Moses, priesthood, Brand’s name.

When Moses, the liberator and lawgiver, asks YHWH, who has appeared to him in the form of a burning bush, by what name he wishes to be known to his people, YHWH instructs Moses to say that his name is “I am who I am” (or in other translations, “I am who I will be”). Eric Gans has analyzed this exchange in his Science and Faith: The Anthropology of Revelation (1990), and seen it as marking a major advance in the dialectic of representational forms:

God’s “I am who I am” affirms the permanence of the imaginary scene as a prerequisite not only of linguistic communication, but above all of human relations. The God who “is what he is” is the God who exists only to maintain an imaginary scene purged of any preconceived central object. (Gans, 1990, 64)

In YHWH’s declaration of pure self-identity Gans sees the center of the original scene of representation presenting itself as such, as a kind pure potential-for-representation, as if freed from the necessity of differential definition:

It is no longer a matter of replacing the Egyptian gods by another god, even if he be unique, but of substituting for the center closed by the rival Other an open center that is a pure locus of presence. (Gans, 1990, 62)

In making this claim Gans is obviously looking at the scene through religious eyes, i.e., in a manner similar to the Paul of the two leavens, as if there could be a Jewish “locus of presence” which might be utterly freed from its Egyptian antecedent. Now to this, of course, Gans might reply that in itself the “pure locus of presence” is indeed pure, a space cleared of concrete idols and so available to abstract thought. But in order to give this reading Gans must neglect two things: 1) the embeddedness of the scene within a textual and historical context, and 2) the force of dialectic which even in the absence of a concrete sign continues to operate in potentia… Let me take these points in order.

In focusing on YHWH’s “I am who am,” Gans takes only half of YHWH’s self definition. For YHWH goes on to say:

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God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘The lord, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you: this is my name for ever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations.’” Exod. 13: 15

In other words, the “locus of pure presence” is situated within a line of patriarchs, a line of fathers, whose distinguishing characteristics are a) that they did not kill their first- born sons b) but instead instigated rivalry among their sons, setting brother against brother for the long term benefit of the national group. In this stratagem, of course, they were following the example of the God of Genesis, who obviously could have accepted the sacrificial smoke of both Cain and Abel, but instead chose to ignite the fire of resentment in the heart of the more enlightened brother by showing a preference for blood sacrifice. Now the fact that these tribal fathers did not sacrifice their first born sons, as was perhaps the (occasional) practice among other tribes in the area, e.g., the cults of Moloch and perhaps Baal, is obviously in our eyes a cultural advance, but it is also one which, since this abstention first occurred at YHWH’s arbitrary behest, must always be understood as being instantly and arbitrarily reversible. In other words, within human culture filicide is not some archaic remnant, some by-passed, benighted phase of development, but an ever present potentiality whenever the Center requires it. For the point, as Jewish commentators on the Akedah (binding of Isaac) always insist, is not the killing or non-killing of Isaac, but rather Abraham’s faith and perfect obedience. Which means that “throughout all generations ” the son’s life must remain forfeit in principle. (Some midrashim say that Isaac was killed not by the knife but by the fire, since the sacrificial fire would already have been lighted before he was placed on it. See Robin M. Jensen. “The Binding or Sacrifice of Isaac–How Jews and Christians See Differently.” Bible Review, Vol IX, Number 5, October 1993.)

For how else could the Center ever raise an army?

My second objection to viewing “I am who am” as disembodied center–which, to be sure, in the abstract, it is–is that it is posited without regard to the periphery which is its necessary concomitant, despite Gans’ own assertion that the model of linguistic presence is the model for human relations. To which Gans might reply that for the moment his concern was only with one half of the equation, with the potentiality offered by the emptied center for unconditioned representability. To which I would reply that the humans for whom representation thus becomes a larger option are situated on the periphery as overshadowing conditioning factors of the center. What effect does this swept-clean center have on them? A glance at Exodus suggests that when the Center becomes utterly central and utterly pure, then, like a convex lens, it concentrates the energy of mimetic rivalry which is ever active on the periphery into a focused potential for maximum violence. If the sacred object of the original scene could be thought of as a bomb that blessedly did not explode, the abstract and purified object who speaks to (and then through) Moses can be thought of as a far larger device that periodically (at divine behest) goes off and rips through the Periphery with devastating effect. For although Moses had what we (and one dead Egyptian official) might call a bad temper before his encounter with YHWH, that meeting filled him with a potential for absolute rage (which Michaelangelo, by the way, thanks to a translation error, depicted on his Moses’ forehead as two bulging horns). Exodus 32: 25-29

Moses saw that the people were out of control and that Aaron had laid them open to the secret malice of their enemies. He took his place at the gate of the camp and said, ‘Who is on the LORD’s side? Come here to me’; and the Levites all rallied to him. He said to them, ‘The LORD the God of Israel has said: Arm yourselves, each of you, with his sword. Go through the camp from gate to gate and back again. Each of you kill brother, friend, neighbor.’ The Levites obeyed, and about three thousand of the people died that day. Moses said, ‘You have been installed as priests to the LORD today, because you have turned each against his own son and his own brother and so have brought a blessing this day upon yourselves.’

In short, the center as “pure locus of presence” translates into pure potentiality for infinite sacrificiality on the periphery, each priest, as agent of the center, a potentially consuming flame sprung from the non-consuming central fire. Which leads us back to Ibsen’s priest, who seems to have been named in recognition of this precise dialectic. Notice that Brand has no surname. To call him Brand Olsen, for example, would have obscured his quality of allegorical essence. His name in Norwegian means fire, as in conflagration, and is cognate with the German word of the same spelling and meaning. In Ibsen’s German Bible, Brand is the first half of the word for sacrifice, literally “burnt offering,” as for example in God’s command to Abraham in Genesis 22:2:

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Und er sprach: Nimm Isaak, deinen einzigen Sohn, den du liebhast, und geh hin in das Land Morija und opfere ihn dort zum Brandopfer auf einem Berge, den ich dir sagen werde.

God said, ‘Take your son, your one and only son Isaac whom you love, and to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a sacrifice on one of the heights which I shall show you. 

In Ibsen’s play, Brand’s characteristic activity is to engage every person he meets in a no-holds-barred debate with the goal of demonstrating the moral superiority of an ethic of voluntary self-sacrifice, citing as compelling precedent both Isaac and Jesus as cognate examples. In other words, Brand, as spokesman for the center, necessarily becomes the rival of everyone of the periphery. Thus he stands as the embodiment of the paradoxical nature of the religious sign, noted above: namely to stand as spark and wind to the conflagration it attempts to quell. Or, as Eric Gans writes of Jesus: “He who comes to abolish ethical difference arrogates to himself by that very act an absolute difference.” (Gans, 1990, 99)

7. What does God want?

Brand and Eric Gans seem to agree that the telos of religion, in so far as one might extrapolate it in a worldly sense, is perfect human reciprocity, each giving him- or herself for the other. Gans, as a philosopher/anthropologist who, standing to one side of religion and studying the dialectic of its historical forms, would seem to be tacitly suggesting that such a goal might perhaps be accomplished in an eventual aftermath of religion when, by a final cognitive turn, religion would have offered up to humans its abstract essence. On the basis of Brand, I would guess that Ibsen, as thinker, would have found himself in profound sympathy with Gans’s vision but on the other hand would have found in the sacrificiality of the originary scene a fatally conditioning factor trip wired to rise up and reassert itself. The bloodless sign entails the bloody sign, the two linked to each other as the plus and minus virtually present in any sign, even the most abstract. For although Christianity would like to posit itself as the replacement for Judaism in taintless Aufhebung, it finds it must always leaven the new dough with the old, for that’s the only leaven there is. At the risk of stating the obvious, let me recall that the God of Judaism and the God of Christianity are not two Gods but one. Jesus prays to the God of Abraham. The God of Abraham acknowledges Jesus as his beloved son at his baptism in the Jordan. On the cross Jesus calls out to the God of all the patriarchs when in the words of David he asks why his Father has abandoned him, showing that even in extremis he is operating within the logic of Judaism, making sense of his situation as an unreprieved Isaac.

When Jesus’ death in turn gets raised up as the founding sign of Christianity, it is presented as an overcoming of its sacrificial antecedent, Jesus himself perhaps attempting to accomplish this operation by proposing bread and wine as stand-ins for either animal or human sacrifice. But in this, we read, he was blocked by his father who, having stayed the hand of Abraham, apparently now needed a more potent sign of differentiation.

Many readers, of course, are loath to impute such motives to God, but not Paul, the new Church’s first theologian:

With all this in mind, what are we to say? If God is on our side, who is against us? He did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all: how can he fail to lavish every other gift upon us. (Romans 8:31-32)

And ever afterward, whenever a theologian has attempted to understand this rite of sacrificial substitution in a less sacrificial or sanguinary sense, Rome has refused the metaphorical shift, insisting under pain of excommunication on the presence of real blood, real body, under the accidental appearances of bread and wine. Thus Ibsen’s Brand was standing on firm Pauline ground when, just prior to sacrificing his own son, he calls out in wrathful indignation to the timid Protestants who were trying to stay his hand: “Humane? Was God humane to Jesus Christ?” To which, of course there are theological and other rebuttals, but the point is that Brand speaks the obvious sense of the text, not its subtle or idealistic deconstruction. Perhaps Ibsen himself provided a rebuttal of his fiery preacher with his “He is the God of love” which ends the play. But if it is a rebuttal, notice that its provenance is not of this earth where the fires of mimetic rivalry are variously damped or driven by the variously (i.e., differentially) sacrificial modes of culture, and where, over the long haul, they grow progressively hotter and larger.

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8. Conclusion

In short, the question which Ibsen’s Brand seems to pose to Generative Anthropology is whether, given its understanding of the sacrificial nature of the originary scene and the originary sign, which is to say of the human sign tout court, it can somehow envisage a non-contaminating turn of the dialectic by which representational forms might give way to each other. This is the utopian hope that drives, if not religions, then their theologians. Clearly, such a turn would have to occur in some way other than all prior cultural shifts, i.e., other than by way of mimetic rivalry. And when tragedy reads the Bible, it finds that Judeo-Christianity, which conceives of itself as the solution to the threat of mimetic rivalry, is, or can be in times of trouble– i.e., more often than not– its magnifier.

Brand is a priest and a father. At the turning point of the play he finds that, despite his love for his son and his own insight into the moral necessity of not yielding to the inertial pull of culture toward mimetic violence between father and son, he must kill his son. With his keen psychological acuity, Ibsen gives us hints of a whole array of psychological motives for this terrible action, all of which can be reduced to one form or another of mimetic rivalry, but the decisive responsibility for the deed must ultimately be laid at religion’s door. Brand is thrown off his own best instinct by the combined force of the Judeo-Christian cult. Not the moral teachings of Jesus, of course, nor the anti-sacrificial teachings of the Old Testament, but by the dark glamour surrounding child sacrifice as it persists even under prohibition in Judaism or theorized by Paul and his followers in Christianity. In both the New and the Old Testament the impression persists that what God requires of men is at least the willingness to kill their sons as a sign of perfect obedience, for this is what he required of Himself as the precondition of mankind’s salvation. There may be other ways to read these texts, but the sacrificial interpretation lies close at hand, and conventional culture always finds it. The religious sign is inherently ambiguous, not only as to sense but as to its impulse power, so to speak. Generative Anthropology finds in the suspension of violence provided by the first sign an ultimate hope for humanity; Ibsen finds in the suspended violence, which is religion, a potential for violence forever waiting to unleash itself.

In short, the question which Ibsen’s tragedy may be seen to pose to Generative Anthropology is that of determining in what sense the origin of culture is ultimately determinative. Or, phrased somewhat differently: whether it is possible to credit the human sign with the potentiality to discharge the violence that gave rise to it within the closed loop of contentious human culture.