In his study of fundamentalism and American power (The Family), Jeff Sharlet examines the ministry of Jonathan Edwards as a case in point. Edwards is interesting because he uses empiricism as a means of grasping the mechanics of the divine spirit in the process of conversion. In his study of conversion, published in 1737, Edwards’ scientifically proves conversion to be an exceedingly violent process. The association of violence with divine action is far from unusual. Both Edmund Burke (1757) and Immanuel Kant (1803) credited the experience of the sublime to the entrance of infinite magnitude into time and space. When the infinite enters the finite, the finite is endangered and often is destroyed.
Among Edwards’ most touching accounts of conversion is that of Abigail Hutchinson. In the course of her conversion, Hutchinson comes to the realization that it is her body as such that presents the greatest obstacle to her conversion. Her conversion parallels the decimation and eventually the death of her body. It is taken, both by Edwards and by others, as an especially compelling instance of divine violence. When the infinite enters the finite, the finite is destroyed. There is to Hutchinson’s conversion-death something of the spectacle. The community watches her convert-die and cannot help but be attracted to her conversion-death.
Edwards detailed description of Hutchinson’s conversion-death, the Christian attraction to it, begs a question that Sharlet did not examine. To what do we owe this fascination? Burke and, later, Kant attributed it to the sublime. As Kant put it:
[While] the beautiful prepares us for loving something, even nature, without interest; the sublime [prepares us] for esteeming it even against the interest of our senses.
Kant illustrated human attraction to what can destroy them by asking his readers which is more sublime, the statesman or the military general:
Even in a fully civilized society there remains this superior esteem for the warrior, except that we demand more of him: that he also demonstrate all the virtues of peace – gentleness, sympathy, and even appropriate care for his own person – precisely because they reveal to us that his mind cannot be subdued by danger. Hence, no matter how much people may dispute, when they compare the statesman with the general, as to which one deserves the superior respect, an aesthetic judgment decides in favor of the general. Even war has something sublime about it if it is carried on in an orderly way and with respect for the sanctity of the citizens’ rights. At the same time it makes the way of thinking of people that carries it on in this way all the more sublime in proportion to the number of dangers in the face of which it courageously stood its ground. A prolonged peace, on the other hand, tends to make prevalent a merely commercial spirit, and along with it base selfishness, cowardice, and softness, and to debase the way of thinking of that people.
From this vantage point, Christian attraction to conversion-death stories, much like Christian attraction to the gallows, should be credited to its divine origin: to the sublime.
In his critique of violence, Walter Benjamin makes a similar observation.
consider the suprising possibility that the law’s interest in a monopoly of violence vis-a-vis individuals is not explained by the intention of preserving legal ends but, rather, by that of preserving the law itself; that violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens it not by the ends that it may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law. The same may be more drastically suggested if one reflects how often the figure of the “great” criminal, however repellent his ends may have been, has aroused the secret admiration of the public. This cannot result from his deed, but only from the violence to which it bears witness.
Under capitalism, Christians are notoriously attracted not only to military leaders, but also, more generally, to criminality. Whether it is flaunting speed limits, gerrymandering voting districts, violating the rights of other citizens, or opposing public control over public institutions for public ends, Christians everywhere praise the violation of the law. They celebrate violence.
Whether human beings are or are not naturally attracted to violence I cannot say. Nevertheless, it is interesting that Hegel, in his critique of the Kantian sublime, faults him for ascribing human attraction to violence to their being human as such, rather than, as Hegel felt, to the divine formation of the condition for such attraction. In Hegel’s view, the divine is not only in the absolutely large, but also in the finite. When the infinite enters the finite, it enters a domain that is not at odds with, but is instead a dimension of the divine.
As we will see later, this was what Benjamin referred to as “divine violence.” Karl Marx, by contrast, referred to it as the two-fold form of the commodity. If Marx’s analysis holds, this could suggest that Christian attraction to conversion-death accounts is compelling evidence that their form of spirituality in the modern epoch is structured around that same social form: the commodity.