Breaking the cycle of power
The eccentric St Paul of the Cross, who took peculiar delight in his own “nothingness,” opens a loophole in our embattled political imagination.
Part 7 of our series with David Benjamin Blower: Notes on Poverty, Death and Nothingness, exploring the writings of St Paul of the Cross
“You should choose your enemies wisely, because you will become like them.”
I believe it was Rene Girard who said this. It comes to my mind with such regularity these days that I'm bored of it. I see this playing out everywhere, all the time. I see myself doing it.
It is the mistake that keeps recurring. The folly that replays over and over. Do other animals watch us doing this? Walking into the same glass door every day? Do they wonder why it keeps happening? Do angels watch from the trees and place bets on exceptions to the rule?
The pattern is so ordinary that, actually, I'm not sure it is commonly understood that this is a pattern. Even when the pattern is noted, it is very difficult to understand how to avoid it. It’s not so easy for the river to cut itself a new path.
How do you take back power from the takers, without becoming a taker? How do you revolt without then reproducing the power you revolted against, once you've taken the stage? How do you not become a reflection of the hateful violence you overthrow? How do you not become the resonance of the opponent who occupies your mind constantly?
Something is revealed in these questions. The problem isn't just the people in power. The problem is our relationship to power itself. People naturally want their enemies gone, but power squats treacherously after the war. I write this amid the wearying grind of the weeks before a general election. Debates between would-be prime ministers are a mix of scripted spiels, immature character assassinations, and populist posturing. The political game is primarily a contest for power. It feels embarrassingly naive to imagine anything else (a collaboration toward common good? A space to attend to suffering? An arena of deep listening?). What are you even doing if you're not vying for power? What is there, besides power?
Here it seems to me that the eccentric St Paul of the Cross, who took peculiar delight in his own “nothingness,” opens a loophole in our embattled political imagination. Here is the strange and dim possibility of a politics that has no interest at all in contests of power.
St Paul's sense of his own “nothingness,” as he would call it, was not about self-negation or self-loathing (though he certainly has his moments). It was about his otherness to God: his smallness before God's endlessness, and his littleness as part of all that God has made. It is, we might say, his language for his own creatureliness.
There’s not much basis here for the divine right of kings, or for human dominion over nature, or for Christian exceptionalism. Nothingness is a not-so-grandiose take on the human creature. For Paul, the smaller he saw himself, the truer his vision was. His was a total refusal of power. He seemed to find great joy somewhere to the side of all that noise.
I call this creature politics: to see oneself as a very small part of a very big ecology of life. Paul would describe himself as a drop in the ocean. This wasn't a despairing image, but a euphoric one. His life was tied into the life of everything. He thrived with the thriving of everything. He wanted to lose himself in the measureless realm of God, and God's doings. In the end, this web of relations is the way creation lives and thrives. To seize power over it is the first step of a protracted suicide. “God can do nothing,” he says, “with the one who wishes to make something of himself.”
Creature politics is not quietism. In an age of violence and unjust power-relations, faithful living means resistance. But to try and seize the power of enemies, to return their violence back to them, or to mirror their contempt and hatefulness, or to seek their seat of power, all this is to reproduce their wrongs back into the world through our own lives. I have little hope for the culture wars.
To remain joyously small in a world that fetishizes the Great and the Tremendous—to meditate daily, as Paul would put it, on one's “nothingness”—is an act of resistance against a collapsing age, and joyous thriving dance to the side of those “rulers and authorities, who,” as the other Paul said, “are coming to nothing.”
Action, contemplation, a peace pilgrimage to Telford
As an August update, a quick reminder that our friends Peace Pilgrimage are undertaking a six-day walk from Malvern to Telford, in witness against the SDSC Arms Fair next month. If this interests you, sign up now as either a participant or to assist those taking part on the walk in September. More details here.
If you’d like your event or opportunity featured in PASSIO, send us an email at hello@passiozine.com.
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