Queer Faith

Reading Promiscuity and Race in the Secular Love Tradition

Melissa E. Sanchez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479867516
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Sessualità e genere nella religione

1

The Queerness of Christian Faith

Things Unseen

It is hard to dissociate the concept of love from some definition of faith: sincerity, trust, perseverance, loyalty, commitment. Understood in terms of either monogamy or the belief in things unseen that characterizes religious thought, “faith” seems an inherently straight concept, one that excludes the experimentation with and destabilization of identity usually associated with queerness. To be sure, the modern Christian Right has relentlessly coupled “faith” with the heteronormative nuclear “family.” Faith in God is verified by the formation of and devotion to a family; identity as a spouse and parent functions as a badge of morality, respectability, and legal entitlement. Because “faith and family” has become such a catchphrase, it has been easy to forget not only that the definition and cultural significance of “family” has varied throughout Western Christian history, but also that within biblical, patristic, and Reform writings, “faith” is neither sure nor stable, nor is it dependably satisfying or pleasurable.

Quite the opposite. The experience of faith is one of experimentation, frustration, damage, and reluctance. In the theological as in the vernacular meaning, “faith” is both objective and subjective. Belief and believability are mutually reinforcing: we are faithful not only because we trust, but also because we are trustworthy.1 Once we stop believing, once we turn away from someone, whatever the reason, the purity of our own faith—the extent to which our promises and loyalties are to be credited—comes into question. In its objective sense, faith is the ultimate sign of love, for it entails making oneself vulnerable to another, trusting in something that, by definition, cannot be proven—that, however much we accept the truism that love hurts, we will, on balance, gain more than we lose. The more intense the love, the more intense the faith, the more intense the demand for faith in return, the greater the danger of heartbreak or disillusion. To practice faith is to doubt much of what we see and to believe in what we don’t, to believe that behind the faulty creatures we embrace and the broken world we encounter there is goodness and redemption.

Faith would not be faith without such risk, but with this risk comes the battle against our own faithlessness. This orientation to the unseen and unverifiable involves the possibility that we may be wrong. We may be duped, betrayed, used, let down. Or we may just get bored. Keeping the faith means battling self-protective suspicion, fear, anger, and testing. It also requires us to face our propensity to distraction and seduction, the possibility that we may find ourselves tired of or repulsed by someone who once seemed irresistible. The human lover (and, as Paul and Augustine assiduously remind us, the obedient Christian subject is above all a lover) is congenitally incapable of sustaining the wholehearted trust, concentration, and self-forgetting that defines absolute faith. Absorption gives way to distraction, fascination to boredom, attraction to repulsion, certainty to doubt. We have neither the stamina nor the attention span to hold a pose of rapt adoration.

Faithful love, in other words, entails work on the self. It cannot be directed toward a future outcome. To the extent that faith (or love) demands reciprocity or reward, it is instrumental, finite, and ultimately self-serving. True love, by contrast, proclaims itself in a tenacity and patience focused only on persevering in what Alain Badiou aptly calls the “grueling work” of the present moment.2 If love is pure and selfless, we don’t get anything out of it. The logical end of this proposition appears in stark relief in the seventeenth-century cult of “pure love” described by Leo Bersani, which endorsed the “impossible supposition” that true believers were those who would continue to worship God even after they were condemned to hell.3 The paradigmatic expression of a love that desacralizes all else in the world—including the self’s own needs, interests, and desires—is not mutuality but unrequitedness. Finding secular expression in any number of romances and melodramas, this noble ideal of selfless love, in fact, mimics the position of a Christian God, who inexplicably loves creatures who can never repay or deserve his affection.

In the vicissitudes of feeling that faith struggles to stabilize is also a confrontation with a self that is never transparent or predicable. To strive for faith is to approach the self and its motives with suspicion. Self-abnegation can be a form of self-promotion. Because faith entails not only our credence but also our credibility, its exercise endows us with the ability to convince, to persuade others to believe our vows and testimony. The sincerest claims of integrity and selflessness are themselves rhetorical insofar as they pursue moral authority for the future that cannot be empirically validated in the present. The temporal dimension of faith—a present feeling about a future that does not yet exist and that we cannot know will come to pass—entails the hazard of treating the present as instrumental. To exercise faith, one must resist straining toward its own supersession and fulfillment in a future in which belief is replaced by vindication. Rather than belief in and desire for a future in which the present has become the past, faith in the theological sense is rooted in the present. To adapt a venerable biblical pun, we believe only as long as we do not “know.”

Because faith cannot by definition be based on empirical fact, it is a form of fantasy about ourselves and our objects of desire. This fantasy recombines the fragments of our reality that we deem meaningful into truths that are bearable. Faith, in short, turns out to be a profoundly queer concept, one that disrupts stable understandings of desire, identification, and subjectivity.4 A view of faith as inherently elusive and perverse is at the heart of Paul’s Epistles and Augustine’s Confessions. Because the pursuit of faith is already a second-order desire—a desire to feel a particular way—it pulsates with infidelity. In this chapter, I first trace the contradictions of faith as they were so influentially articulated by two formidable saints, Paul and Augustine. For these anguished converts, it is only the experience of infidelity that keeps us faithful, for it reminds us that grace is, to state the obvious, gratuitous. We are no more entitled to divine grace than to human love. I then turn to the secular love poetry of one of Augustine’s most celebrated fans, Francisco Petrarch. In ruthlessly adapting the logic and structure of religious devotion to secular eroticism, Petrarch places infidelity at the heart of the discourse of romantic love that he was so instrumental in founding. Situating Petrarchan love in a theological genealogy defamiliarizes the romantic conventions we have ceased to notice and makes their perversity and their poignancy newly remarkable.

Paulus = “Small”

In the Pauline Epistles, the pursuit of faith is a struggle with the limits of imagination and desire as much as will and integrity. It is also a struggle with the limitations of language and figuration. When we practice faith (and faith is always practice, never perfection), we try to follow the example of Jesus Christ, who “emptied [exinanivit] himself, taking the form of a servant [formam servi accipiens]. . . . He humbled himself, becoming obedient unto death, even unto the death of the cross” (V/DR, Phil. 2:7–8).5 Paul announces his own imitation of Christ’s evacuation of self in naming himself Paulus, servus Jesus Christi, “servant/slave of Christ” (V/DR, Rom. 1:1). Paul’s self-divestiture appears not only in the epitaph servus Jesus Christi but also in the change of proper name from Saulos to Paulos. As Giorgio Agamben reminds us,

Saulos is in fact a regal name, and the man who bore this name surpassed all Israelites, not only in beauty, but also in stature (1 Sam. 9:2; this is why, in the Koran, Saul is called Talut, the highest). The substitution of sigma by pi therefore signifies no less than the passage from the real to the insignificant, from grandeur to smallness—paulus in Latin means “small, of little significance,” and in 1 Corinthians 15:9 Paul defines himself as “the least [elachistos] of the apostles.”6

In becoming “Paul,” the man formerly known as Saul confesses that he was never truly great or powerful—never really “Saul”—to begin with. As human creature, he was always small and insignificant, whatever his worldly stature. To wholeheartedly embrace the role of Christ’s servant in imitation of Christ’s own humiliation is to empty oneself of will and ego in favor of a servitude that is meaningful only insofar as it is unrewarded. The erotic dimension of this humiliation has not escaped critical notice: as Graham Hammill and Jonathan Goldberg point out, Caravaggio’s and Tintoretto’s renderings of Paul’s conversion accentuate the fleshly intensity of giving in to God.7

Such obedience strives to dissolves the hierarchies upon which the concept of submission depends. The true obedience of faith is promiscuous in that it dispels our ability to discern where human will ends and divine will begins. At its logical extreme, Christian faith is the end of individual selfhood. To be a member of Christ’s body, given earthly form in the Church, is to relinquish not just power or status, but all individuation. The most famous statement of Christian indifference appears in Paul’s Letter to the Galatians: “There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither bond nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus” (V/DR, Gal. 3:28). Once “all” become “one” in a corporate Christianity, earthly identity, allegiance, and hierarchy cease to exist. The egoism of uniqueness gives way to the emptying out of selfhood, the diminution of ego, that is faith. In Christian devotion, as Virginia Burras, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick point out, obedience and selflessness cease to signify in the usual sense as “mastery and submission meet (and dissolve) at their limits.”8

But the loss of self that is the logical end of faith cannot be complete in the world because that would obviate the very hierarchy of creator and creature that gives deity’s sacrifice and humanity’s obedience meaning. The wondrous mortification of Christ, if imitated exactly, would reverse the descent of God into human weakness. Humanity would achieve divine perfection expressed in an inhuman control of the will—an absolute command over the self that approximates divine omnipotence. In order to avoid what Burras, Jordan, and MacKendrick aptly describe as the “paradoxical arrogance” betrayed “in the notion of kneeling before humility in a subtly surpassing imitation of divine submission,” a gap must always persist between (human) copy and (divine) original.9 The aspiration to perfect faith must remain thwarted, human and divine will separate. If they are identical, the prayer that “thy will be done” is indistinguishable from “my will be done”; obedience is no different from omnipotence. The pride and doubt that adulterate human faith are necessary in that they remind us that we are not God, that whatever faith we achieve is itself a divine gift. If we are to remain properly grateful—that is, if we are to understand our relationship to deity correctly— “We must resist even the temptation to be untempted,” as Burras, Jordan, and MacKendrick point out. “The ease of non-desire is not an option. . . . There is no merit in not resisting, no submission without a trace of the desire to dominate.”10 Although, as Amy Hollywood observes, “The potential danger of mysticism is that it turns one too completely away from the cares of this world,” such rapture also circumvents the need for faith by moving the mystic beyond its struggles.11 For ecstasy, Badiou argues, is itself a form of knowledge: the unspeakable miracle confirms that belief is justified. Pauline faith, by contrast, can only be declared, never proven, and so resists claims to mastery.12 In order to obey, the believer must remain a distinct—and potentially intractable—s...