Empty and seductive philosophies...

23rd Week OT (Tues): Col 2.6-15, Luke 6.12-19
Fr. Philip N. Powell, OP
St Albert the Great Priory

I used a deck of Tarot cards to do “readings” for the poems. Each poem got a reading as if the poem were a person. The seminar paper I turned in was a collection of these readings, and I concluded from my experiment that “literary texts,” “meanings,” and “authorship” all belonged in the dusty occult catalogues along with mermaids, dragons, and elves. The randomness of the flip of the Tarot card and the arbitrary assignation of mythical meaning to the card flipped was a clear demonstration that anything like an interpretation of a text was just silly. Language has no meaning beyond the reader who is the meaning-maker. That I, the author of the paper, had spent about 35 pages of text in the English language defending the thesis that there are no authors, no meanings, no texts bothered me not at all. Under the beautiful seduction of deconstructive theory, all things were possible, nothing off-limits; I was denied no critical pleasure, and my terribly fragile, almost adolescent ego was never, never challenged by the threat that I might have to grow up and stop playing with my wordy toys.

The sheer emptiness of this devilish philosophy didn’t strike me until I was crippled by a staph infection in my spine. Derrida, Cixous, deMan, none of the apostles of deconstruction gave that pain meaning. The immediacy of the need for relief from pain and the need for some means of giving that pain an explanation—a means of suffering well, if you will—is a person, not an empty and seductive philosophy.

Almost immediately after accepting baptism in Christ, the Colossians began to invite into their spiritual lives the empty and seductive philosophies of their pagan neighbors. Perhaps in the name of dialogue with the culture, or in the name of seeking the truth in all expressions of divinity, the Colossians opened themselves to be seduced, and eventually captured, by those philosophies that encouraged them (and us!) to deny the unique and final mediation of Jesus Christ with the Father on our behalf.

Luke Timothy Johnson notes that the Colossians lived in a region of Phrygia where the cult of the Mother Goddess, Cybele, flourished. He argues that the Colossians fell into their neighbor’s syncreticism, that is, the indiscrimnate and uncritical blending of religious doctrine and practice, b/c “[they were] fascinated by the charms of those who could offer them more […] a greater perfection than was available in their own cult.” These charms were the “elemental powers of the world”—fire, water, wind, and earth, the worship of the creature rather than the Creator. This is not of Christ.

What is of Christ is that in him the fullness of the Godhead dwells. We share in this fullness, members of the Body, baptized with him, buried with him, raised with him from a death to sin. Having forgiven all of our sin, we are brought to life with him and all the bonds of sin are broken, nailed to the cross in defiance of the elemental powers, the seductive philosophies. It is Christ who does this for us and with us, not Cybele nor any of her contemporary children: deconstructionism, feminism, capitalism, Marxism, neoconservatism, any of the “ism’s” of this world that would claim our soul’s allegiance, arrest our maturity in Christ, and seduce us into denying or even compromising the most fundamental truth of our apostolic faith: Jesus Christ is Lord!

And in case those empty and seductive philosophies are whispering to us now, now in the chaos and confusion of disaster, in case we are tempted to look to something other than the church, someone other than Christ, listen: He stood on level ground and a great crowd of people came to him. Everyone in the crowd sought to touch him…because power came forth from him…and he healed them all!