The Insufficiency of the Cross: Man’s Cannibalistic Creation

Over the course of three papers, I will demonstrate that the Sacrifice of Christ on the Cross was insufficient in itself for the Salvation of man, that His work on the Cross is developed within the hearts of man through the working of the Holy Spirit, and that Christ indeed did have to ascend into Heaven so that man might be fully saved. This is part three, the final section. For continuity, I have repeated the the final paragraph of part two as the first paragraph of part three. All quotes from Pope Saint John Paul II are taken from his encyclical, Dominum et Vivificantem, and his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, unless otherwise stated.

It is quite literally true that our personhood is changed through the working of the Holy Spirit at the foundational levels of our hearts.  This is not to say that we cannot change, silence, and ignore the whispers of the Holy Spirit within our hearts to such a great extent that we are no longer even aware of our own actions as being contrary to our own happiness.  This is in fact very possible, and is what Christ would call the “unforgivable sin”, that sin which is never repented of because the sense of sin in the subject has been lost due to a constant, repeated, and intentional silencing and therefore expulsion of God’s welcome in the recesses of the heart.  At this stage of being, the subject not only “rejects the ‘convincing concerning sin’ which comes from the Holy Spirit and which has the power to save” but he also  “rejects the ‘coming’ of the Counselor - that ‘coming’ which was accomplished in the Paschal Mystery, in union with the redemptive power of Christ’s blood: the Blood which ‘purifies the conscience from dead works’”.  In this act of rejection of the Holy Spirit the actor literally redefines the good in an invincible way to his own mind.  He refuses to acknowledge his own need for forgiveness because he rejects the unlooked for Mercy of God in its entirety from the Cross to his own life.  This then is the image man who deems himself capable of happiness and goodness left to his own devices: lost without his own sense of identity in a perpetually spiraling nightmare of his own creation, harboring animosity and contempt at the suggestion that he needs any outside intervention in his life, for “God the Creator is placed in a state of suspicion, indeed of accusation, in the mind of the creature”.  This lost soul is the picture of a man in isolation.  Such a man is still a person, because that which makes him happy still exists; his unique experience of the world simply becomes tortuous and he is unintelligible as the person he exists as, since his manifestations and communications of himself are so distanced from the reality of his person that “the truth about man becomes falsified”, without context, and absurd in themselves.

Even when man lives as though God does not exist, when he tries to create his own world and become the arbiter of good and evil, he cannot escape the primal inclination towards that which God has preordained good.  In a post-modern world, man finds himself with a “sense of justice [which has been] reawakening on a vast scale; and without doubt this emphasizes that which goes against justice in relationships between individuals, social groups and "classes," between individual peoples and states…”.  Even so, the inclination towards good takes on a horrid appearance of little more than a caricature of the truth when left to man’s own devices, turning into nothing less than further and more horrific violations of that which true Justice demands as man tries to set himself up as the new God, creating the world in his image.  Man becomes increasingly isolated within the nightmarish hell he creates for himself, seeing everything rightly as a threat to his own total autonomy and fearing “falling victim to an oppression that will deprive him of his interior freedom, of the possibility of expressing the truth of which he is convinced”.  In an attempt to preserve his own freedom, man devolves further and further into the pursuit of what he deems to be justice by creating more and more programs to fight perceived injustices.  These “programs which start from the idea of justice and which ought to assist its fulfillment among individuals, groups and human societies, in practice suffer from distortions. Although they continue to appeal to the idea of justice, nevertheless experience shows that other negative forces have gained the upper hand over justice, such as spite, hatred and even cruelty”.  When man rightly recognizes that his neighbor acts towards what he sees as the highest good but does not recognize that the highest good for all man is a relationship with God, the source of all happiness, the attempts at curbing perceived injustice turns into a literal “‘dehumanization’”, an unwarranted villainizing and shunning of a scapegoat who must be sacrificed to the machine, the nightmare of man’s own making which eventually tries to cannibalize its creator: Justice without the Mercy of God causes “the individual and the society moral decay, in spite of appearances”.

The problem of evil has been tackled by many throughout the ages, but none so successfully as St. Augustine.  In his confessions he states that evil is an absence of God and therefore cannot be understood: it is a metaphysical absurdity.  Evil is unintelligible and cannot be understood: instead, evil demands a response.  This response is nothing short of the Mercy of God, which unlooked for can only come from without, and through love.  This Mercy through love was initiated by Christ on the Cross, but can only be completed by conversion and attentiveness to the Holy Spirit, who “knows from the beginning the secrets of man.  For this reason He alone can fully convince concerning sin… by constantly guiding toward the ‘righteousness’ that has been revealed to man together with the Cross of Christ: through ‘obedience unto death’”.  Without the response to evil as opposed to a reaction, a response only possible through love, mercy, and power that belongs to God to set things back aright, Justice in human terms is doomed to a farcical existence and to be in constant battle with man himself, creating a vicious circle of creation, cannibalization, and decay.  Man is right to be afraid.

An example in our own time of the dangers of justice divorced from mercy is in what has been called the Great Bud Light Controversy, where the parent company Anheuser Busch sent one confused young man who believes he is a girl a beer can with his face on it.  Rightly so, conservatives across the nation were outraged and to this day refuse to drink any brew from this company.  The term “go woke, go broke”, while perhaps not originating with this movement, became mainstream almost overnight in response.  The boycott continues, despite Busch’s efforts to appease its once loyal customer base, the firing of the PR director responsible for the original scandal, and doubling down on its American identity.  Nothing at all seems able to shake the tenacity with which conservatives have decided to avoid this company.

Now, to be fair to this example (and we are not going to go too far into the weeds on this issue), this massive company just wants money.  It would be no great loss if it were to cease making their beer altogether, and companies only listen when their profits are threatened.  In one sense, the boycott has been a success: the CEO even made a statement saying “we hear you”.  However, a boycott only works if there is an opportunity for redemption.  The internal logic of this should be fix yourself or go broke, instead of a perpetual punishment inescapable for making a mistake.  There is no motivation for any other company to better themselves to align with the good if the threat is simply complete alienation.  In this light, a boycott is no longer a carrot or a stick as much as it is an obstacle for the company to overcome in spite of the boycott.  It renders any future boycotts useless, personal, vindictive, and ultimately petty.

Should the boycott against Bud Light cease?  This is beyond the scope of our discussion today, whose purpose is to illustrate the unique subjectivity of man and his need for Mercy.  To this end, we must acknowledge that our radical subjectivity comes from our Image of God, that Anamnesis in the center of man’s being which causes him to seek for God in a unique way and which informs his talents, his interests, and his strengths.  Freedom to search for the truth is an integral part of being man, one that cannot be alienated from his being.  But it is not a freedom from exterior influence; this is not possible.  God Himself is external to man, and yet by virtue of the working of the Holy Spirit is at the same time internal to man, causing knowledge of the good to well from the depths of man’s own being.  It is only by acts of obedience, acts which specifically reject the motivation of the sin of Adam in the garden to set oneself up as their own god does man experience the world in the proper context and with the possibility of happiness.  It is only when the Person of God is no longer a threat to man that the personhood of man can be seen as not a threat but a subject to be encountered.  Only when the Justice of God is upheld can justice be served in the world; not justice as strict ledger of good or ill, but justice impregnated with mercy and aimed at human flourishing, and a relationship with God.