In the book Glimmerings: Letters on Faith Between a Poet and a Theologian by Miroslav Volf and Christian Wiman, Volf references Scheler’s Ressentiment in referencing Scheler’s particular critique of Nietzsche “wrongly lumping” modern western morality with Christian morality. In his view, one cannot understand the Christian narrative apart from understanding the ways in which love itself frees us from the restraints of our moral constructs. The westernization of our world has largely led us to neglect the fact that “All ancient philosophers, poets, and moralists agree that love is striving, an aspiration of the lower toward the higher. The beloved is always higher, the lover is always lower.”
For Scheler, the difference between Ancient Greek and Christian accounts of love, which is what we find being made apparent in the life and letters of Paul (beginning with what is arguably one of, if not the earliest reference we have to the Christ confession, the borrowed poem of Philippians 2), is it’s conception of love’s directionality. For the Ancient Greek, the stories represent the “universe” as a great chain, where “the lower always strive for and is attracted by the higher.” Here there is only this upward movement, stories which beckon one to ascend to the deity, which “itself does not love, but represents the eternally unmoving and unifying goal of all these aspirations of love.”
In other words, as Volf puts it, “In this account, love is a vehicle that carries one to the state of non-love.”
In Christopher Beha’s exceptional book Why I Am Not An Atheist: The Confessions of a Skeptical Believer, he offers a sweeping view of this Greek philosophical movement through it’s continental historical development, growing into the tenants of modern western culture and society. One of the most striking things about this development is the natural trajectory that we find from this upward movement to deism to western bents towards utilitarianism. The inevitable outcome of this narrative is both that we elevate ourselves to the form of the gods while distancing the gods from the world we are reconstructing. That we call this rationalism simply hides the fact that buried within these same philosophers is this consistent awareness of being held captive by the shadows of this reality we are constructing. And one of its most powerful chains that we bind ourselves to is in fact its moral systems.
Which is where Paul’s words break through all those years ago with his own awareness and critique of this inevitable trajectory. As Volf writes, “In the Christian account, the direction of movement is reversed,” which is precisely the point of Paul borrowing and using the poem in Philippians 2 in the way he does- he reframes it so as to illuminate it’s own need for the revelation of God to to be made known in it’s midst, rather than as something that needs to be attained. As he cites from Scheler, in the reversal of this movement from upward attainment to downward descent, in the story of Christ “There is no longer any highest good independent of and beyond the act and movement of… Love itself. (Love) is no longer a value of a thing, but of an act.”
This is a narrative that stands as antithetical to the myth of progress, the very story that continues to uphold the entire enlightenment project. The reality that this myth upholds is that this upward movement, seeking towards that which we must attain, requires our detachment from the chains of history. We don’t simply do away with the old gods, marked as they are by a lesser way of seeing and being and knowing, we recreate the world in our own image. The “our” in this case being an elevated and better human society. And yet, behind this sits the shadows of progress, justifying itself through the construction of its systems and technologies in a world where the imagined and largely defined aim can never reach beyond the authority of its own primordial and Neanderthal past- always and forever bent towards survival, with every fresh iteration of the newest and next enlightened generation convincing itself that it is the thing history has been desperate for and striving to obtain. Only, as things go, turning to perceive the emerging generation as threatening to send it all back to the age old rhetorical image of the dark ages from which we came.
All of this giving way to this inherent and underlying sense that maybe, just maybe, we will find ourselves arriving at the end of this ascent to find nothing but the shadows, the illusions that this whole human project thought it could create something that never existed in the first place.
Such are the cycles of the western narrative. The Christ narrative thus stands today speaking the same Gospel, the same revelation, into that central human tendency- the need and desire to remake this world in our own image. In Christ, this upward movement, in which we become gods and the gods become distant, is exchanged for the truth of the incarnation. Love made known, Love made true in this story of it’s downward decent. In its taking up residence in the world, in residing within it, transforming it’s view of it’s own idenity, shifting the story from that which it needs to attain to that which is gifted as the beloved.
The Stories of my Life 