Philosophy

The Imitation of Christ

Archbishop Flynn is launching a project to re-energize Catholic faith in the archdiocese. A cornerstone of this plan is a project to encourage Catholics to follow, imitate, "live in" Jesus who is called the Christ, the anointed one. The language is drawn from the piety of Paul and the early church, and surely some good will come of this effort. I worry conceptually about the initiative. Jesus didn't follow anybody, except maybe shepherds and maybe his father and, in some extended way, God, whom he urged people to "be like." Also, the evidence that he thought about himself is elusive, since the statements beginning "I am" in the gospels are often plausibly construed as attempts by later theologians to interpret Jesus' words and actions, well after his death. It seems pretty clear to me that the core teaching is a direct engagement with the natural and social world of Jesus' time. See Dominic Crossan's The Five Gospels for an attempt at reconstructing that core.

The puzzle is then this: what does it mean to imitate a non-imitator, to follow an original and fairly mysterious person. It looks like a paradox of the sort philosophers love: if one does, one doesn't, and if one doesn't, one does. I worry that "Follow Jesus" will translate into "Do what you think you should do" -- ensuring that action will never rise above the quality of each individual's "shoulds." See Mark Twain's picture of Huck Finn's moral torture about whether to give the runaway slave Jim back to his owner, for an idea of how that trap works.

I'd suggest this as an alternative, perhaps a friendly amendment, to Archbishop Flynn's proposal: try to recover and test out whatever squint Jesus had when looking at the world, and try to recover and test out Jesus' gambits in action, his opening moves in the social game. Squinting is a fascinating activity: one forces one's eyes to focus a little differently than they want to focus. The magic eye books take advantage of the capacity to squint, and allied capacities of the imagination, to enable people to see strange new images in meaningless jumbles. And gambits are fascinating: the first moves in which are contained the possibilities for later interaction, and the limits of later interaction. The Jesus stories are full of clues about squints and gambits. And the process of testing out is different from the process of following or imitating. One checks out the results, as one goes along. One is an active mind in the process.