Rieff ’ s Typology of Culture and Its Applicability to the Literary Hybridization of the Theological Ideas of Humanity and Spiritual Progress ( A Bulgarian Case Study )

This work was supported by a grant from National Science Centre in Poland (decision No. 2014/13/B/HS2/01057). Competing interests: no competing interests have been declared. Publisher: Institute of Slavic Studies, PAS. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 PL License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/), which permits redistribution, commercial and non­ ­commercial, provided that the article is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2016. Grażyna Szwat-Gyłybowa Institute of Slavic Studies Polish Academy of Sciences


Philip Rieff's Typology of Culture and Its Applicability to the Literary Hybridization of the Theological Ideas of Humanity and Spiritual Progress (A Bulgarian Case Study) 1
This paper focuses on Teodora Dimova's novel Влакът за Емаус (2013/2014), an example of a Christianthemed novel not often found in modern Bulgarian literature, which deals with divine revelation and the experience of metanoia in modern life.The narrative paraphrases the story of the two disciples who meet the risen Jesus on the road to Emmaus.In the evangelical account Jesus joins the disciples but remains unrecognized.As they walk together he outlines his Messianic interpretation of Jewish prophetic writings.When the disciples recognize him, Jesus disappears.In Dimova's "poemnovel", the meeting of Jesus and his dazed disciples is a pivotal point for the novel's various plotlines happening in a realistic modern Bulgarian setting.Влакът за Емаус tells the story of three people, pilgrims on the paths of life, who are subtly connected by the filaments of religious rev elation.The characters experience revelation at the lowest point of anguished isolation, paving the way for a profound transformation of their personality.Dimova's book is firmly anchored in the Christian paradigm, which portrays Jesus as God Incarnate and the ultimate ideal of humanity, leaving no room for any other interpretation.Dimova (who talks openly about her recent conver sion to Christianity) aims to create a narrative that evokes a modern religious sensibility but retains the Christian concept of metanoia.Влакът за Емаус is an interesting text, both in its careful descriptions of the characters' religious experiences (such as the meeting between Jesus and an atheist, the Eucharist or the mystical dimension of the church), and in its painstakingly crafted style (notably the use of prose rhythms that imitate the sound of train wheels on the track).For reasons of space, those and many other interesting angles of approach have to remain unexplored here.
Luke's description of the encounter on the road to Emmaus, which forms the basis for Dimova's extended paraphrase in the novel, is a foundational text of Christianity on a par with the writings of St Paul (transvalued in modern times by the European intellectual left) (see, among others, Agamben, 2000;Badiou, 2007;Žižek, 2006).When accepted as revealed truth, the passage provides the basis for an interpretation of Jesus' teachings and death as a cul mination of the messianic hopes of Judaism.Probably written down after the destruction of the Temple,2 Luke's text demonstrates how overwhelming messianic enthusiasm was affecting human lives and nascent religions in that period, as all the nongnostic Christian churches were placing Christological interpretations at the heart of their exegetic traditions of the Old Testament.I emphasize this particular aspect even though at first sight it appears to have no bearing on Dimova's novel, whose narrative centers squarely on human spiritual formation (progress), based on a personal relationship with God.The novel's motto, from the Serbian priest Radovan Bigović,3 is a condensed interpretation of orthodox Christian anthropology: Orthodox Christians should testify to their faith in the living biblical God, to their faith in the holy Trinity, to their faith in God whose other half is human, and to their faith in man whose other half is God (Димова, 2014, p. 4).
In this interpretation, people are incomplete until and unless they share a personal relationship with God, meaning the Holy Trinity.When that happens, a personal spiritual struggle ensues in every pilgrim on this earth (Kasimow & Sherwin, 2005, p. 43)4 a struggle which according to orthodox Christian anthropology culminates in theopoesis: an unearned gift of God's loving grace (Evdokimov, 1964, pp. 53-136).In the context of Dimova's novel, this humbling anthropology puts meaning in characters' lives despite their anguish and suffering.And so, a character named Mina (we will revisit the semantic aspects of his name shortly) experiences loneliness, bereavement following his daughter's sudden death, and ultimately an abrupt mystical experience which violently invades his psychological and physical world to result in a thoroughgoing revaluation of his paradigm.This happens as Mina is taking a walk in the back alleys of a European city and glimpses a cross, the sight of which triggers an avalanche of thoughts and emotions leading to profound personal change: from this moment on, Mina will live solely to serve God and other people.
The third character, Katalina, is a troubled individual plagued by psy chological problems caused by a toxic mother.Katalina cannot shake free of her "significant others", who include her mother, her peers, and her friend.Her suffering is caused by the immaturity of her parents, who are unable to terms with the death of their son, and cannot muster any love or acceptance for the surviving daughter.Raised to believe that she had usurped the place of her deceased brother, Katalina is unloved and unable to love.Her trans formation begins with her relationship with the dying Liya, followed by her encounters with Mina.
It should be pointed out that the meaning of this transformation in the novel manifests itself solely through a personal relationship with the God of paradoxes, a transcendent being who never stops talking to people.In this sense, Christianity arguably remains a kind of replica of its parent religion.5 To look at the problem from the perspective of Judaism, the American sociologist Philip Rieff described this kind of opening up to the sacred dimen sion of reality as "culture of faith", an attitude which produces lifeoriented works (Lubańska, 2008, pp. 365-387)6 Rieff 's controversial book My Life Among the Deathworks (2006), despite the serious objections it raises against Christianity (which Rieff blames for the transgressive iconicity of the Western civilization), finds a significant common denominator which the Christian and the Mosaic paradigms share;7 on that basis Rieff develops a distinctive sociological and historical concept of Western culture.Based on an analysis of various works of European art, literature and philosophy, Rieff proposes a set of criteria forming an original typology of cultures that is diachronic and synchronic at the same time.The distinction is between cultures predicated on belief in fate (pagan culture), faith (the worlds of Judaism and Christianity), or death (the selfreferential world of fiction).Rieff identifies the underlying anthropological assumptions in each of those cultural practices which view the human being, respectively, as a subject in a deterministic reality (culture of fate), a self in a relationship with its Creator (culture of faith), and a "psy chological man", a patient in a "therapeutic" society (culture of fiction).In historical terms, Rieff concluded that a therapeutic society, identifiable with (post)modernity, focuses on death, unlike faith culture, which focuses on the sacred and which he identified as being lifeoriented.8However, Rieff 's apparently clearcut taxonomy also has some nonlinear characteristics in that cultural processes shift and change over time.Cultures of faith may lose their 5 I borrow this concept from R. Brague, Prawo Boga. Filozoficzna historia Przymierza (2014).6 The recent decades have seen a revival of the opposition between the classical Greek and the Jewish/Christian heritage in European culture; however this is not the same as the opposi tion of Judaism / Christianity.
7 One interesting viewpoint concerning the secondary or imitative nature of Christianity relative to Judaism is represented by Brague (1992), where he describes as heroic the resistance of the Church Fathers to the exclusion of the Old Testament from the Christian scriptural canon (an idea first promoted in the 2 nd century by Marcion).According to Brague, compa rable heroism was displayed by Franz Rosenzweig in the 20 th century in his related advice to the Church in The Star of Redemption (1921).
8 For all its shortcomings, Rieff's approach (even though it is sometimes based on sim plification that usually suggests a violation of hermeneutic loyalty to the cultural text under study), deserves closer attention.
attributes when hijacked for political purposes, and cultures of fiction (more precisely, their users) may change direction when moving along the vector of the sacred (via).Those options are available to subjects who, one way or another, remain immersed in an objectively existing sacred order.A subject may move further away from, or closer to, the centre (Rieff, 2006, p. 12); in other words, subjects may experience lifeinducing growth or deathinducing transgression.
Rieff takes an ethical view of this experience of loss of human purpose, blaming Christianity (among other things) for rejecting the Law and embracing transgressive iconicity, a move that paved the way for a third culture: Christianity's rejection of the Law in favor of the idea of personal union between the self and Christ (Gal 2:20; 3:24), a state supposed to be itself an incarnation of the Law, was to Rieff a 'Christological utopia' which paved the way for a de facto anti Christian and antiJewish divestment of the sacred I by the third culture (Lubańska, 2008, p. 376).
Such irreducible reservations about Christianity notwithstanding, Rieff categorized the Christian and Judaic paradigms as culture of faith, and viewed the postulated revival of the ChristianJewish way as a desirable outcome in the ongoing psychomachy between the expiring culture of faith (notably, in the case of Judaism, as a result of the experience of the Holocaust), and the inva sive and parasitical culture of fiction.Rieff's concerns relate to the fact that humans can easily get lost among the blandishments of consumerism offered within the culture of fiction, as affirmed by therapeutic society.People, who are called to have a relationship with the sacred, may turn out to be the losing party in that struggle.Rieff's dystopian picture is not completely devoid of hope: a change of direction on via'saxis is not impossible, as the ultimate decision lies with the individual subject who, whether he or she accepts it or not, ultimately operates within the inescapable (objective) sacred order, freely moving towards its center or periphery, "up, down, or sideways" (Rieff, 2006, p. 12).In other words, one either experiences lifegiving growth, or thanatic transgression.Implied in this outlook is a tacit assumption that the Christian and Jewish paradigms can at some level be regarded as indistinguishable from each other, apparently because both religions are ultimately optimistic about the Creation and the human condition.
In this context, it is difficult not to agree with a critic who pointed out that Rieff simply restates or transliterates the religious language of the Torah into the sociological language of cultural theory (Lubańska, 2008 p. 368;Zondervan, Philip Rieff's Typology of Culture and Its Applicability… 2005, p. 127).Rieff's argument puts him in the same camp as those scholars who trace Jewish thought in Western philosophy and humanities to the Torah rather than the gnostic or cabbalistic variants of the Jewish tradition (Ger shom Scholem, Harold Bloom, Walter Benjamin, Kafka, Jábes, etc.) To Rieff, a person of faith is seeking salvation but remains an integral being endowed with the unity of the living soul of the Hebrew tradition, an indivisible thing which can accept God's Ruach but remains unaffected by the dualistic split of Platonism with all that it entails.According to Claude Tresmontant, Hebrew anthropology did not presuppose a duality of body and soul, and recognized a dimension of ruah/pneuma ignored by subsequent philosophers: (…) L'anthropologie hébraïque, d'une manière analogue, est caractérisée par: 1) par l'absence du dualisme âmecorps.(…) 2) la présence d'une dimension originale, abso lument ignorée dans les philosophies, et spécifique de l'apport biblique: la ruah, que les Septante traduisirent par pneuma, et qui est repris sous ce terme par le Nouveau Testament, en particulier avec beaucoup de précision par saint Paul.Cette dimension nouvelle introduit une dialectique irréductible a l'antinomie platonicienne âmecorps, dialectique qui régit les relations entre l'homme et cette part surnaturelle en lui qui le travaille et l'appelle a une destinée naturellement imprévisible et inespérée, et que les prophètes signalent par la distinction entre l'homme, qui est une 'âme vivante', ou, ce qui est synonyme, 'chair', et 'l'esprit'; entre ce que Paul appelle le 'psychique', ou 'charnel', et le 'spirituel' (Tresmontant, 1953, p. 87)9.
Can Philip Rieff's analytical categories prove useful for analyzing Christ centric works of literature, such as Dimova's novel?It certainly appears to be the case.When viewed in those terms, Dimova's characters seem to corroborate Rieff 's insight that a culture that moves away from the via, and leads a parasitical existence living off its religious promise of salvation, is ultimately futile.Mina, Lia and Katalina spend most of their lives torn between a sense of powerlessness in the face of vagaries of life (culture of fate) and a naïve belief in the effectiveness of popular therapeutic strategies (culture of fiction).The characters are drowning in a world filled with self destruction, projections and selfdeceptions, lies, pretenses and ineffective therapies, where the offerings of culture of fiction ultimately prove hollow.Mina painfully experiences the hollowness when he loses his daughter.Lia collides with the void headon when she discovers that she has been adopted, a fact she regards as an indelible stigma.Katalina is likewise shrouded by emptiness as she despises her own body and despairs at her inauthentic life.In Dimova's novel, the characters' personalities are made whole again, and their relationships are healed or established when they open up to the sacred, i.e. the mystical dimension of salvation.In Rieff's terms, the subject changes direction in its movement along the axis of the via.The male character plays a special role: Mina becomes a good messenger whose life's pilgrimage cred ibly testifies to the sacred mysteries: (…) защо сега вече не ме е страх, Минá, защото се чувствам изпълнена с бла годарност и жалост, защото сега сълзите ме пречистват и разпалват, ако човек дори за малко зърне истината, той става спокоен, нали, Минá, какво направихте с мен, с какво заслужих вашата любов, Минá, всеки ли, който умира в ръцете ви, го обичате толкова много, или само мен обикнахте така, или това е заради Причастието, което ме научихте да приемам, вие облекчавате самотата ми, когато си тръгвате изпадам в неописуема паника, не мога да си представя как ще дочакам следващия ден, за да ви видя отново, за ми говорите за Христос (…) (Димова, 2014, pp. 127-128).
Against this background, the eponymous train to Emmaus takes on a metaphorical meaning to denote a special kind of wandering.This kind of wandering differs from the experience of being called out of one's place (like Abraham), whereby one is moving away from the location of one's original encounter of the sacred (in a way, this idea is also found in the exodus from Egypt).Many modern scholars believe that given the course of its historical development, Jewish tradition is facing the threat of severing of its ties to that foundational Event, however it continues to draw lifegiving energy from its faithbased vitalism.10Christianity (informed as it is by the concept of God's incarnation and mystical presence in the tangible world in the Eucharist, among others), does not suffer from the same problem, however, it faces a dif ferent difficulty: it has trouble understanding itself because it is ignorant of its own Jewish roots.This is in fact an ancient realization, shared already by those early Christians who were proponents of retaining the Old Testament in the Christian scriptural canon.
In Luke's gospel, the road to Emmaus is a journey to the hot spring of faith (emaus is the Hebrew for "hot springs").In this case, faith springs from the encounter with the risen Jesus and his reinterpretation of Jewish pro phetic scriptures.Dimova reproduces this paradigm.In her novel, the faith of the wandering pilgrims lost in culture of fiction (psychotherapy, parapsy chology, esoteric practices, astrology) springs from sudden experience: Mina experiences the presence of Jesus, Katalina experiences the beauty of Creation, and Lia experiences a trusting encounter with another person sent by God.
In this context, how should we interpret the words in the novel's appar ently banal closing scene, where two of the characters share a kiss?Some clues can be found in the etymology of their names.The characters who embrace at a train stop on their way to Emmaus are Mina (a variation of Michael, a name whose Hebrew origin means "Who is like God")11 and Katalina (derived from the Greek word katharos, "pure" or "flawless").Katalina's name brings to mind the medieval Cathars (and hence the neognostic myth of Bogomilism), a religious group who yearned for the Good God and were mistrustful of the world of creation (importantly, Katalina despises the human body and her relationships with people are marked by fear and anxiety).Mina/Michael shares his name with an angel, an emissary of God, and as such he helps Katalina to change her attitude towards the world.When unlocked with this etymological key, the love of those two characters is a metonymic portrayal of the love between God and people, as expressed in human terms by doxol ogy; notably, doxology is rooted in the Jewish tradition, a fact made apparent by the psalmist tradition.In the Hebrew tradition, doxology was a product of the habitus; gratitude could only be expressed by praising the God of the Covenant, whose presence the psalmist experienced in the course of his life (Suski, 1974, p. 9): Philip Rieff's Typology of Culture and Its Applicability… Zondervan, A. W. (2005).Sociology and the sacred: An introduction to Philip Rieff 's theory of culture.Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Žižek, S. (2003).The Puppet and the Dwarf.The Perverse Core of Christianity.London: The MIT Press.