The prevalent tendency in our society to overestimate individual freedom is wreaking havoc on personal happiness and threatening to bring down Western culture. This culture is built on a Judeo-Christian foundation and it will not survive the dismantling of that foundation.
Fr. Longenecker concludes his interview with author and friend of René Girard with a discussion of Gil Bailie’s new book The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self (336 pages, Angelico Press, 2023). See the first part of the interview here.
The title of your new book is intriguing. The Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self. What is the sovereign self and why apocalypse?
The sovereign self or “autonomous self” expresses a conception of selfhood that exaggerates the quality individual freedom, at the expense of a richer anthropological assessment of human subjectivity, one entirely consistent with classical natural law reasoning. The word apocalypse means revelation, in the sense of a truth previously hidden, overlooked, or suppressed. Associated as it inevitably is with the Biblical book of Revelation, the word often arouses cataclysmic anxieties. Each of these facets is applicable to the predicament of the “sovereign self.” The prevalent tendency in our society to overestimate individual freedom is wreaking havoc on personal happiness and threatening to bring down Western culture. This culture is built on a Judeo-Christian foundation and it will not survive the dismantling of that foundation. With René Girard, I use the term “apocalypse” to refer to both the revelation of the truth and the catastrophe of continuing to ignore it.
Apropos of this catastrophe, compare what Romano Guardini wrote in the aftermath of the Great War with what René Girard wrote more than a half-century later. “Everywhere we see true culture vanishing,” Guardini wrote in 1924, “and our first reaction tells us that what is replacing it is barbaric.” In 1987 Girard wrote: “No one takes the trouble to reflect uncompromisingly about the enigma of a historical situation that is without precedent: the death of all cultures.” At the time Girard wrote these words few could have imagined the degree of cultural disintegration that was to occur in subsequent decades. In 2011, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben observed that “nowhere on earth today is a legitimate power to be found; even the powerful are convinced of their own illegitimacy.”
The oceans of blood shed in the two world wars of the last century, and the comparable carnage of both the totalitarian and abortion regimes that arose in the aftermath of these wars, testify to the spiritual and cultural precariousness of our situation. To ignore the apocalyptic potential is unserious. To appropriate T. S. Eliot’s famous apocalyptic alternatives, we might say that the bang, if it comes, will likely be preceded by the whimper, which seems rather ominously to distinguish our own situation.
Gil Bailie
As for the sovereign self, G. K. Chesterton famously said that small mistakes in Christian doctrine can lead to huge blunders in human happiness. The assumption that the self and the person are just two different ways of speaking of one reality is one of those mistakes. The contemporary concept of selfhood was memorialized by Justice Anthony Kennedy in his often-quoted opinion in the 1992 Planned Parenthood vs. Casey Supreme Court decision: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” That so many today find this statement unproblematic is a symptom of how a soft form of nihilism has triumphed in our time. According to this doctrine, nothing must be allowed to preempt the arbitrary will of the sovereign self. So triumphant is the principle today that no small number of people claim to believe that whether one is a man or a woman depends, not on one’s genetic endowment, but on one’s personal choice. Our world is awash in the spiritual and psychological wreckage occasioned by the widespread adoption of the premise Justice Kennedy enshrined. Maureen Mullarkey provided the apt summation: “Decomposition of the cultural ecosystem that sustains our civil society has roots in Kennedy’s precept. And the nihilism it epitomizes.” This nihilism may appear in the first instance as a welcome liberation from norms external to the individual, but it will eventually be recognized as the anthropological and moral poisoned pill that it is.
You trace the philosophical and historical development of the “sovereign self” in a very accessible way. What thinkers played the most important roles in this development?
I may have caused some of my readers a little heartburn by beginning with Bob Dylan and compounding the perplexity by comparing one of Dylan’s life-altering experiences with that of Thérèse of Lisieux. Thereafter, I turn to authors as varied as Flannery O’Connor, Virginia Woof, Arthur Miller, René Descartes, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Sigmund Freud, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and so on. I use this widely divergent collection of authors, playwrights, poets, philosophers, and psychotherapists to give the reader a sense of how we arrived at our present predicament.
Where does Friedrich Nietzsche fit into the picture?
As Henri de Lubac observed, Nietzsche was a man “whom Minerva did not fail to visit occasionally.” Girard admired Nietzsche’s daring, not least because he insisted that the choice we face is that between Christ and Dionysus. At the beginning of my chapter on Nietzsche, I quote one of Rene’s most insightful interpreters, Giuseppe Fornari: “We must be careful not to jettison any of the precious stellar material that the Nietzschean supernova throws out in all directions, on the faint-hearted or morally fastidious pretext that it is too hot to handle.” Again, I take the liberty of rounding out something René said more than once in my presence. The only difference between me and Nietzsche, René said, is that Nietzsche chose Dionysus and went mad, and I chose Christ and remained sane.
How does a deeper understanding and appreciation of great literature help us understand the sovereign self? Can you give an example?
One of the many things I learned from René is that writers of fiction can be better explicators of social and cultural permutations than are academics who specialize in such things. This is not a critique of formal intellectual life, far from it. It is based on professional circumstance. In one of the book’s early chapters I sum up what I learned from René on this subject:
By professional necessity, social scientists work in guilds. They are therefore more vulnerable than more solitary writers of fiction to being swayed by the mimetic power of theories and intellectual fashions. Not only do literary artists work outside of such guilds, but they are forced by the nature of their work to give a believable account of social relations. Thus, they have often painted arresting portraits of the spiritual and psychological exigencies of the late-modern or postmodern self.
How does Girard’s thought tie in with the Apocalypse of the Sovereign Self?
Girard was an apocalyptic thinker. Almost alone among his distinguished academic colleagues, he did not disparage the apocalyptic implications of Christian revelation. I tried to highlight this feature of Girard’s thought by analyzing the anthropological and historical implications of the centurion’s reaction to Christ’s death on the cross. A harden man, accustomed to torturing and executing those juridically determined to deserve such punishment, he nonetheless declared Christ innocent.
What happened to the centurion in a heartbeat would gradually happen to those exposed to the Christian revelation. In due course, moral misgivings would overtake those blindly following what I have called the Caiaphas formula for transforming aggregate social animosity into peace – “it’s better that one should die than that the whole nation be destroyed.” The waning efficacy of that recipe for restoring order eventually leaves humanity with the “Christ or nothing” choice to which several perceptive observers have alluded.
Your subtitle is Recovering the Christian Mystery of Personhood. How does “personhood” differ from “the sovereign self?
The word person is a Christian word. It entered our vocabulary after Tertullian and other Church Fathers used it in the Trinitarian debates of the early centuries of Christianity. It was Tertullian who gave us two of the most remarkable formulations of Christian thought: that the Trinity consists of three persons in one God, and that the soul is naturally Christian. It is this latter formulation–that the soul is naturally Christian–for which I try to give an anthropological argument, one that is supremely summed up by Guardini:
“The knowledge of what it means to be a person is inextricably bound up with the Faith of Christianity. An affirmation and cultivation of the personal can endure for a time perhaps after Faith has been extinguished, but gradually they too will be lost.”
Are you familiar with Carl Trueman’s book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self? How does your book connect with Trueman’s?
My manuscript was in my publisher’s hands before I became aware of Trueman’s book. What struck me about it was how similar in many ways our approaches were. There are significant differences, but none that diminish my high estimation of Trueman’s work. His treatment of contemporary victimhood is very good, but if my memory serves me right, he doesn’t draw out the ways in which the Christian revelation arouses a moral concern for victims, a concern that the enemies of Christianity have learned to exploit to their advantage. In other words, today’s widespread victimary thinking is as Chesterton would say, a Christian virtue gone mad. I very much concur with Trueman about the value of Philip Rieff’s work in diagnosing our current crisis. He and I both see Rousseau, Nietzsche, Freud, et al. as having contributed to our present woes. Whereas Trueman conducts his analysis with an eye to fortifying a Scriptural, Protestant, Evangelical, and distinctly moral response, I have tended to approach the same issues in a more Catholic and anthropological register. There is nothing tendentious in this. I very much admire what he has given us. As Robert Frost said, we work together whether we work together or alone.
Finally, you wanted to return at the end to the theme of apocalypse. How might our situation be apocalyptic in the biblical sense of the word?
As I mentioned, I began the book with the lecture Bob Dylan gave upon receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Later in the book, I return to Dylan and to what seemed a watershed in his career: the 1979 album Slow Train, and specifically to the song Gotta Serve Somebody, with the famous refrain:
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes
Indeed you’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Dylan rephrased one of Hans Urs von Balthasar’s most lapidary remarks, namely that history after the Christian revelation consists of the mutual intensification of both the Yes and the No to Christ. Who today would imagine that each of the important choices we face is that between the devil and the Lord, between a Yes or a No to Christ? The best way to defend these two shocking remarks is by slightly reformulating something that Chesterton once said: that if we all lived to be a thousand years old, we would all die Catholic. (That’s my paraphrase.) The implication of Chesterton’s quip is that, were we to look back on a thousand years of experience, we would realize that each of the important decisions we made over all those years was, in one way or another, a choice between the Yes and the No to Christ, or in Bob Dylan’s variation, between the Devil and the Lord.
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The image is of Gil Bailie is courtesy of the author.