Reconciliation’ meaning completely different things in different imaginary ontologies, & the way to escape.
A Good Friday thought after re-reading Maimonides on reconciliation
What is ‘reconciliation’? It differs as part of a whole, an imaginary world.
I noticed a new thing, new to me, while re-reading Maimonides’ advice on the process of reconciliation. The different assumptions about what ‘repentance’ and ‘reconciliation’ mean, and in relation to whom, in the Western vs. Greek & Hebrew side (I’m making them ideal-types, and I know the differences are not acually this monochromatic), co-inherently relate to their wholly different imaginary ontologies, which also relates to their different concepts of what ‘justice’ and ‘righteousness’ are. Basically, the Western side of the Church and Western European cultures tend to imagine that to repent and seek reconciliation means looking up to God, as the ultimate authority who can forgive us, and hence the kind of ‘forgiveness’ they imagine is like in a Roman court, the judge or tribunal deciding from a position representing the highest authority to grant a pardon.
Likewise, what is ‘morality’ comes to be viewed as primarily relative to an ultimately arbitrary (imagined to = ‘sacred’) authority’s commands (it’s arbitrary when the ‘rightness’ of a supposed moral claim does not require making sense of in relation to the facts), or a chain of command, not so much a sense of universally humanly reasonable moral reflection and perspective-taking by empathically standing in the victim’s place and thinking about how to restore a just relationship with them — a covenantal, committedly loving kind of relationship, which means that morality is ontologically binding, ultimately not just voluntary or conventional — the voluntary and conventional parts are obliged to discern what is real.
So injustice = unrealistic behaviour in relation to what another person *is*, and it’s intuitively discernible from immediate empirical reality all around us, not just linked to arbitrary commands from “on high” which one is supposed to accept because they’re from an unknowable source, or from the first past (the protological fallacy, which is basically Platonistic, leading to arbitrary social conservatism), or from a certain place (which tends to validate ethnocentrism, or ‘ethnophyletism’ in terms of heresiology).
There are ‘commandments’ or ‘statutes’ too, but when you pay close attention to what’s actually there *or not* in the canonical texts, very little of it is about individual purity, (such as negatively obsessing about sexuality, as if being asexual, like a pre-adolescent with little sense of individual consciousness and independent moral agency, naively trustingly subordinate to a parent or other higher authority, is what being ‘moral’ ideally means).
It’s also mostly not about subjective intentions, as in the (Western?) Church’s formula: ‘sin’ = actual harm + sufficient understanding + sufficient free will; which shifts the focus of examination of conscience to ourselves and our subjective intentions, rather than the locus of moral comparison and judgement being primarily the perspective of the poor, sick/ disabled, prisoners (or slaves), and strangers/ refugees, as in Matthew 25:31–46.
Conveniently that means we can always find mitigating excuses because of our ignorance, especially as “knowledge of Good and evil’’ is assigned to an essentially inscrutable, separate source, ‘God’, who hands down rules which we’re required to obey but not to understand, so we couldn’t be expected to know or discern for ourselves what’s compatible with the Good; and the ‘Tree of knowledge of Good and evil’ is assigned to a ‘supernatural’ kind of separate reality (the other meaning of ‘supernatural’ is ‘of a grace beyond or on top of what was given at our birth or Creation’), compared to myths symbolising meanings that should make good sense in this factual world, which makes passively remaining ignorant into a ‘get out of jail free’ card.
Logically excusing sin when it’s because of individual or self-like group ignorance converges with the necessity in colonial-capitalism to maintain a privileged sense of “our” entitlement, partly by actively ignoring how our socially normal behaviours affect(ed) those we’ve imaginarily divided off and call “them”, and goes along with the habit of assigning ‘evil’ to being an essential characteristic of our out-groups, that they are collectively predisposed to evil or violence because of their race, ethnicity or religion, originally so that we could rationalise to ourselves exploiting “them”.
So when our political collective heads make an “apology”, mostly it’s just a performance to ourselves, to our peers and our in-group’s idol or “God”, for soothing our own feelings, not doing what those we’ve wronged need now. When the residual coloniality mentality is nearer the surface, they also blame the actual victims or their allies for offending their assumed sense of superiority, as tho what’s really immoral for them is if subaltern groups of people sometimes ‘forget their place’ or violate their superior’s “rights” (assumed privileges) in the authoritarian moral hierarchy (e.g. see Judge Barak’s dissenting opinion in the latest ICJ provisional measures order).
And if you look at the overall pattern of when Western states talk about people having “rights” and when they actually act accordingly, it’s mostly when they grant people the status of ethno national or (less reliably) civic national peers by cultural assimilation into “citizens”, and then they view them as personally having “rights”, but such ‘granted rights’ depend on mattering instrumentally to the in-group hierarchy, not inherently. Some of the inter-group purity laws which are in the bible could mean staying clearly away from idolatry, or iow. dividing divinity into imaginary gods for us vs. them.
Also, the senses of what ‘evil’ means are totally different in these two different imaginaries: in the Western / Roman and more platonistic sense of ontology, ‘evil’ is more often imagined as a separate essence, and that essence is imagined to be ‘out there’, more in the ‘impure’ / un-self-like others, not primarily relating to oneself and one’s own partial community.
If you read the official theologies they mostly don’t agree with that above. E.g. Aquinas’ understanding of ‘evil’ is basically that it’s a partial good unjustly detracted from the whole and perfect balance of all goods, i.e. ‘the Good’, primarily due to a fault in understanding, and secondly, a degree of wilfully aiming at what one more or less understands as a partial good for oneself or self-group and as unjustly divided or subtracted from what is universally good for everyone or all of Creation in common. I think in the more communitarian imaginary ontology, ‘evil’ is unnecessary wilful harm which results from selfish partiality, while aiming for a partial good for oneself or one’s self-like in-group, which is objective transgression, and what makes it also ‘sin’ is when it involves somewhat knowingly actively ignoring that it’s an unjustly divided ‘good’ and that’s harming another.
The Roman and colonial-capitalist sort of divided and hierarchical ontology typically first leads to injustice or violence to strangers/ exiles who don’t have a political community around them to defend them, which is why if you count up the biblical co-occurrences of statements against idolatry and against injustice or inhospitality to strangers, they are directly one after the other very often.
There’s also an inherent relation between the authoritarian hierarchical imaginary ontology etc. and strategic xenophobia, which is an evolved strategy (not necessarily conscious) from political leaders seeking to divide a community into a cluster they can control more and use it to manipulate the rest into reacting, out of fear, according to their agenda and framing, and the amoral centrists (or only believing in conventional moral obligations to their particular constituents or citizens) then react as expected, basically because, at scales of relevance beyond their in-group of imaginary peers (Western states and their citizens), they operate with a similar sense of a divided and hierarchical world as the populist-authoritarian imaginary.
If you pay close attention to what’s actually said about reconciliation in the synoptic gospel accounts and the Jewish tradition, it’s always first and foremost about making amends with and seeking forgiveness from the actual victims, “horizontally” before “vertically” in imaginary ontology terms, among the community of human beings (and perhaps even other than human beings), e.g. “So when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” (Matthew 5:23–24) This bit is referenced in the Eastern rites’ Eucharistic liturgies, but not as far as I remember explicitly a part of preparation for holy communion in the Western rite. Another thing often ignored is, in the parable of the talents, omitting to do the best we could with the talents entrusted to us is worse than not conserving individual purity, or burying it for safekeeping. The standard of judgement accordingly is the best we reasonably could do, not just not doing harm.
This is the same as Maimonides’ schema of reconciliation — first move to make amends in a relevant way to the one who has been transgressed (notice: objective ‘transgression’, not subjective ‘sin’, in this context), before even asking for forgiveness. The acceptable scale of amends is up to the one wronged, and it can’t just be some symbolic token or merely expressing an “apology”, which literally means a *defence*, which is also related to the Western / Roman hierarchical ontology and its original metaphor that ‘justice’ involves defending oneself in court to an authority, rather than to the victim.
In the Hebrew and Greek imaginary social ontology, and hence sense of what ‘reconciliation’ is, it’s up to the one actually harmed to graciously forgive, not God. The Mishnan says that even on the Day of Repentance (Yom Kippur), all sins in relation to God, the convental relationship, or the binding between how things all things really exist and what is true and just, may be forgiven, but not the transgressions in relation to another person unless that person has already accepted the amends and forgiven.
The Greeks also had an empire before, but apparently didn’t maintain so much of an imperial attitude to how all things exist in relation to other things, or all its implications and consequences, when they converted, or they struggled with it. (And btw, some ancient Greeks also converted to Buddhism c.200 BC, see the Milindapanha, ‘Questions of King Milinda’).
I found myself saying to a friend recently, in one of those moments of thinking while writing, that probably why the early Greek Christians felt the need to come up with the Trinitarian doctrine and why they struggled over christology and trinitarianism for centuries was, I think, because it met an underlying need to understand the systematic differences between the sort of imaginary social ontology they’d culturally inherited from their ethnic community and the sort of imaginary social ontology involved in Judaism’s Covenantal theology and in Christian Incarnational theology.
So if you look at the innovations and controversies about Trinitarian doctrines from that point of view, as a symbolic means of a cultural adjustment, I think they functionally make sense as rebalancing relative to the Platonist sort of ontological imaginary (separate ideal essences and forms), and thus judging whether they were right about the two, one or mixed natures outside that context seems like silly pedantry or rivalry for the sake of it, but I don’t think so many clearly wise people would have considered it valuable to engage in if so. Perhaps also interesting — many of King Milinda’s questions to the monk Nagasena were about Buddhism’s relational ontology, called dependent origination (paticca-samuppada).
The thing about flunking reconciliation and pretending to ourselves that merely making statements of apology, or asking forgiveness from “our” “God”, in heaven, not here, is that it doesn’t change us sufficiently. We keep on behaving in ways that necessitate complicating and compounding our moral ignorance, making it even harder to escape; e.g. that Western states overall, mainly, with some courgaeous exceptions, are diplomatically allowing and materially supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza, and the fact they’re doing so necessitates making up even more convoluted stories, apologetically for themselves, that they’re the real victims of “Antisemitic” (Arab) immigrants and leftists being divisive, and the real “genocidal” speech offences are acknowledging that Israel is committing genocide.
Israel certainly isn’t objectively or from their internal point of view simply White or Western, but the way other Western states relate to the Israeli state is as tho it’s one of their club, and so gets the same privileges, and loyalty over ethical principles or even laws. Western democratic states have only so far been democratic in values and mostly act accordingly internally and within the club, but not in relation to foreign subjects, so arbitrary cruelty to people who don’t matter personally is a state’s “right”.
Asking Western elites to compare Israeli and Palestinian lives sometimes elicits responses which seem like ‘we can’t compare apples and oranges’, or as tho they’re different data types, so proportionality of risks to civilians on both sides as equals from acting or not acting a certain way can’t compute — they’re different kinds of objects in incompatible ontologies — one group contains equal human persons, whereas the other contains instances of a group identity which is incomparable in status, so however many people are killed they are counted in numbers, but the numbers of people killed and injured on Israeli versus Palestinian sides are not comparable, as the latter are not seen as individual, irreplaceable persons.
As Martha Naussbaum observed about objectification, they’re treated as fungible tokens, exchangeable, sacrificable, replaceable. One dimension of the Israeli government’s indignation about internationally being criticised for genocidal ethnic cleansing is that all other major Western states did similar racist mass atrocities in their founding times, and have politely forgotten about it for each other. So Israeli ultra-nationalists of Goltz’ variety expect the same privileges as their peers in the colonial club or else it’s unfairly singling them out. Objecting to them finishing what they started seems unfair based on their expectations of equality with other more or less formerly colonial nation-states, who did the same kind of atrocities to establish their nation-states (including to European Jews, of course).
Phoney apologies without practical amends don’t make us face what we collectively as a political community over centuries did to other communities, and how we still live on the proceeds and cumulative profits and capital interest of those crimes, even the churches, nor let us stop.
And we’re still collectively behaving in ways which implicitly assume a divided ontology of us versus the rest of the natural world, as if our economic ‘externalities’ are or could be really separate, as if in some other world, which is so unrealistic and unjust ultimately it will kill most of us if we don’t stop soon. As long as we don’t really honestly acknowledge the scale and seriousness of what we collectively did, objectively, taking the perspective of the victim — not hyperfixating on individual and subjective ‘purity’ scruples as a convenient distraction and behavioural displacement to avoid our guilty consciences, we’ll continue mostly unconsciously as individuals following along and participating in the socially normal behaviours dependent on exploitation and oppression, mostly out of sight and out of mind in other countries, and then making excuses/ apologies to “our” “God” for our individual purity sins, but not really making amends.
Such phoney apologies and absolutely inadequate amends are not acceptable, and they can’t lead to genuine reconciliation either because we don’t become persons who in future will justly relate to the other who we’re supposedly reconciling with. There is no real reconciliation without really making amends, which in the case of Western civilization’s major multi-societal and trans-generational habitual sins are: colonialism, slavery and all the remaining coloniality we still enact; and the environmental injustices we impose on the whole world, as if the ‘costs’ or harms we externalise and discount are somehow damaging another, external world.
Realistic amends would require massive financial reparations payments, for as many years as the crimes have been, from the Global North to the Global South (notice this is an imaginary ontology again), paying for the impacts of five centuries of labour and natural resources over-exploitation where we refused to account for all the costs and avoid unnecessary harms, correcting the deprivation we’ve imposed and falsely naturalised as theirs; and NOT conditioning the reparations payments on them conforming their socioeconomic policies to be instrumentally useful or exploitable for the divided “us” again. Then we can fairly ask forgiveness for the irreparable harms which we can’t make amends for, only, but from the actual victim(s), not from the head or “God” of our group’s imaginary ontological hierarchy.
Finally, we need to inhabit new metaphors and configurations of metaphors wherein we are not divided and above/below each other, and God is not just ‘up there’, but “everywhere present and filling all things” (from the prayer to the Holy Spirit in the beginning of every Orthodox prayer service).
At the beginning of Lent or the Great Fast, the Roman rite(s*) and Eastern rites’ churches do different rituals symbolising what repentance is about.
The Roman ritual involves marking each person’s forehead with ashes, reminding us of our mortality, and indeed, remembering and accepting death in advance does free us up to contemplate purposefulness in life, but, its about individual purity again, and the relation is from the priest (representative of authority) to the penitent, thus repentance is vertical.
Whereas in the Greek Orthodox and Eastern rites, the ritual symbolising what repentance is about begins with the priest prostrating to the deacon (deacon = ‘servant’) and he says “God forgives. May you also forgive me”, and so it continues all around the community, even prostrating to babies. Physically prostrating on the ground in front of each member of the community couldn’t get much more ‘horizontal’ as an imaginary symbol.
I think we should do both, but if it has to be one for practical reasons, do the one where the relation to God is in all the relations in community, and not just a partial “us” or “our” but the whole of Creation as our community.
In the Reproaches read or sung today (Good Friday), God accuses us, and we have no possible answer — and that’s the point, I think, not rushing to apologetically defend ourselves, as if merely making ourselves feel better is it. In some Jewish interpretations of the Mourner’s Kaddish, the ‘consolations’ (נֶחְמָתָא) are for God’s absolute inconsolability for every living creature who dies, so it’s taking God’s perspective and mourning together.
We need to stop repeating the habit of sacrificing other people for anything supposed to be “good” for “us”, in a divided “us” over “them”, and leave the imaginary worlds in which doing so seems to make sense or be normal. Some of such imaginary worlds have been handed down by the Church too.
“This is the Pascha of our salvation: this is the one who in many people endured many things. This is the one who was murdered in Abel, tied up in Isaac, exiled in Jacob, sold in Joseph, exposed in Moses, slaughtered in the lamb, hunted down in David, dishonored in the prophets.” St Melito, c. 190 AD.
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*If you count Protestant churches descended from the Roman rite Catholic church under the category of ‘Roman rite’ still.
