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by
Richard Beck
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December 21, 2015 - May 18, 2016
The most striking example of this is found in the road to Emmaus narrative (Luke 24) where two followers of Jesus encounter the resurrected Christ but fail to recognize him. Intriguingly, in Luke 24 Christ is revealed to these followers in the act of hospitality. The Resurrected Lord is known by extending hospitality to a stranger.
Given the impact of sociomoral disgust upon human affairs, it is not surprising that the act of hospitality is fundamentally an act of human recognition and embrace. If exclusion is fundamentally dehumanizing, hospitality acts to restore full human status to the marginalized and outcast.
Hospitality isn’t simply a warm greeting. As we observed in the church at Corinth, the Lord’s Supper and the hospitality associated with it was a deeply countercultural act in the life of the early church.
Where people are abandoned, socially or economically, hospitality seeks to provide human affection and material care. In extreme cases, hospitality provides refuge for the victims of society.
When we offer hospitality to strangers, we welcome them into a place to which we are somehow connected—a space that has meaning and value to us. This is often our home, but it also includes church, community, nation, and various other institutions. In hospitality, the stranger is welcomed into a safe, personal, and comfortable place, a place of respect and acceptance and friendship. Even if only briefly, the stranger is included in a life-giving and life-sustaining network of relations.4
Boundaries of selfhood and community are vital to maintaining psychological and communal integrity. At the end of the day, disgust is a protective mechanism. Thus, any assault on disgust and the practices of purity needs to face these dangers honestly and candidly.
We all have a moral hitch in our hearts, a slight hesitancy to grant out-group members full human status. Too often, humanity, even if only subtly, ends at the border of our tribe. For the most part, these tendencies can only be detected in reaction time tests, but their mere existence allows hate, discrimination, scapegoating, and paranoia to take hold in a population during times of communal stress.
That is, it is often argued that psychological and relational health requires clear and appropriate boundaries between self and other. These boundaries create a space for self-care and emotional restoration: we disengage from others to care for the self. The worry is that if boundaries between the self and other don’t exist then the self would be worn down, expended, or victimized by the relational demands of others. Clear “boundaries” prevent this from happening.
Consequently, the therapist is keen to encourage the individual to erect emotional and behavioral “boundaries.” But these boundaries are erected between the self and the other as a form of protection. And this recommendation is wholly consistent with the analysis of love I’ve presented. Boundaries act as a form of separation between the self and the other, often signaling the failure of love.
The notion of a self-determined, isolated, autonomous ego is a ubiquitous feature within modernity. The buffered self is a critical feature in how we moderns view our social contract, politically and economically.
Because any Christian notion of selfhood and love will seek to be a participation in the triune love of God, the mutual self-giving agape between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The three “persons” of the Trinity are one. The Godhead is communal. This recognition is vital to how the Christian understands the notion of agape. Christian love is inherently communal and self-giving. It is a participation in the triune life of God.
Dirt is the attribution that life has become “messy” and disordered, where aspects of life—physical or, more often, moral—have come into illicit contact, been blended or dissolved into an undifferentiated mixture. More specifically, dirt is transgressive; it signals a normative failure. In this, by linking normative failures to dirt, pollution, and contagion, powerful psychological systems are mobilized to enforce the norms of the community upon the wayward individual. Transgression becomes a form of pollution.
I was recently confronted anew by this question while reading the provocative parables of Peter Rollins in his book The Orthodox Heretic. In the book, Rollins gives us a parable of hospitality entitled “Salvation for a Demon.”8 The parable dramatically confronts us with the question of extending hospitality to monsters. It begins with a “kindly old priest” famous for his hospitality: “The priest welcomed all who came to his door and gave completely without prejudice or restraint. Each stranger was, to the priest, a neighbor in need and thus an incoming of Christ.” All well and good until a
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Radical hospitality may be inspiring, but it is difficult to see how the community can maintain its ethical and spiritual peculiarity if no distinctions are made between the “demons” and the church.
The call to hospitality is not simply a call to charity but is, rather, a call to remake the heart, my emotional stance toward otherness.
In short, the only way forward for people of hospitality will be the assumption that they are psychologically compromised in various ways even when they don’t feel compromised!
Hospitality is, at root, an emotional and psychological activity. It is a will to embrace. A will that actively seeks to overcome the emotions of otherness.
Hospitality is about selfhood. It is that space where the dignity of every human person is vouchsafed, embraced, and protected deep within the heart of the church.
Evidence in support of this notion is observed in an interesting exception to disgust responses regarding bodily fluids. Specifically, all bodily fluids, except one, are reliable disgust stimuli. Blood, vomit, urine, semen, sweat, and puss, all are found, generally speaking, to be disgusting. The one exception is the bodily fluid that seems quintessentially human and spiritual: tears.12 Given that tears are associated with the deepest and most profound human experiences, tears are considered to be a kind of spiritual fluid, a fluid that separates us from the animals rather than identifies us
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Many persons, cultures, and religious groups have very positive views of the body. In short, while many religious groups consider the body to be a location of temptation, depravity, and bestial impulses, many faith communities consider the body to be holy, good, and a location for spiritual exultation.)
Psychologically, we feel that purity and holiness is achieved by removing ourselves from the gutter and waste. This impulse also makes us want to protect God from the disgusting aspects of our bodies and existence. God needs to be quarantined. But this movement is worrisome. In the impulse to become holy we move away from the more dirty aspects of the human predicament. In light of the Incarnation, the divine moving into the grit of life, this holiness via a flight from the body seems to be pulling us in the wrong direction. The church is pulled away from life rather than toward a deeper
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Stanley Hauerwas has remarked that the spiritual life of Christianity is very often “too spiritual.” In the rush toward spirituality the body and the physical world is left behind.
But the biological, animal function of sex isn’t all there is to human sexuality. For humans, sex can be experienced as a deeply spiritual activity. Sex is often an experience of spiritual exultation and transcendence. Further, the deepest feelings of human love and union are often experienced within the sex act.
Profanity can create an existential confrontation, in essence saying: “You are a reproducing and metabolic animal!” By highlighting the oozy and disgusting aspects of our bodies profanity points out our animal nature, mocking any spiritual fantasies that we might escape, avoid, or minimize our physical existence. Profanity is a shock to a creature aspiring to be like the angels.
What we find, following Carlin, is that what is often considered to be taboo, illicit, vulgar, indecent, profane, degrading, disgusting, or obscene frequently clusters around worries associated with the body. More specifically, the vulgar and profane tend to cluster around aspects of physical existence that remind us of our physical vulnerabilities, dependencies, and death.
In short, the emotions of disgust and degradation are often repressing or hiding deep existential anxieties. Disgust fends off and pushes death anxiety out of consciousness.
Existentially motivated disgust is causing the Christian community to evacuate the world in the pursuit of “spirituality,” “holiness,” and “purity.” But this escape, this flight from the “brass tacks” of human existence, is, at root, a form of denial. Worryingly, due to the unconscious dynamics involved, the church is often unaware that its concerns over purity, dignity, and holiness are actually manifestations of a fear-based defensive response. Such a church, handicapped by its fears and lack of self-awareness, is ill-prepared to move into missional living and a passionate engagement with
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I’ve called this squeamishness Incarnational ambivalence: the worry, denial, or offense at a fully human Jesus. We often see Incarnational ambivalence on display when outrage is directed toward robust depictions of the humanity of Jesus.
The debates surrounding the doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, were not about the paradoxes of the math (i.e., how can God be Three in One?). Rather, admission of Jesus into the Trinity was a debate about the qualities and nature of God.
The problem with Arius’ view of God, according to Athanasius, is that Arius’ self-contained and perfect God is sterile. Arius’ God needs nothing. Consequently, Arius’ God cannot love. Love, according to McGill, presupposes need. The Son needs the Father and the Father, to be love, needs the Son.
As McGill summarizes, “Love and not transcendence, giving and not being superior, are the qualities that mark God’s divinity.” Thus, “since giving entails receiving, there must be a receptive, dependent pole within the being of God.”4
Following McGill, it appears that we are deeply ambivalent about our neediness. We feel that our neediness, our physical vulnerabilities and dependencies, are disgusting, degrading, and offensive. And nothing signifies this neediness more strongly than the human body. Feeling this degradation we seek to protect God from need, to create quarantines around God. God, thus, is self-contained, perfect, and holy. But inherent in this impulse is a flight from our own need, a refusal to exist in a state of need.
The Church Fathers have always claimed that the primal human sin is the desire to become “God-like.” We often think about this desire as some sort of “pride.” This is true, but it is a conceit of a particular sort. Specifically, we posit a self-contained God, a God that needs nothing. And with this as the Imago Dei, we then seek to become like this God, self-contained and self-sufficient, needing nothing to sustain ourselves. In short, a denial of the Incarnation is an attempt to flee from our need and, as we will see, this undermines our capacity to love.
Our utter dependency is nowhere more manifest than in our vulnerability to death. In fact, death is what defines human need. The forces of death are always at work in my body. And to fend off death, I must eat and excrete. I am always moving into hunger, always in need. And if I eat, I must defecate and urinate. The whole metabolic cycle is driven by the forces of death and decay and my daily efforts to fend them off.
This repression of death and need is particularly acute in America and other modern, technologically advanced nations. The reason for this is that our material wealth and technological success obscure our need and vulnerability. Never suffering want or poverty, and trusting in modern medicine, Americans can live (and pretend) as if they were immortal. This creates a cultural worldview that is characterized by what Ernest Becker has called “the denial of death,” the refusal to admit the reality of death into our lives and consciousness.
[Americans] must create a living world where life is so full, so secure, and so rich with possibilities that it gives no hint of death and deprivation.”8
This social pressure to be “fine,” to hide from others our vulnerability and failure, is the dark and pathological side of the American success ethos. It is the drive to become so materially successful as to eliminate all trace of need. It is the quest, as noted above, to be god-like: separate, autonomous, self-contained, and without need.
Humans can waste life, acting as if time were a replenishable and inexhaustible resource. We live, practically speaking, as if we were immortal and god-like, as if we had “all the time in the world.” Consequently, many religious traditions encourage meditation on morbid subjects. The goal is to recognize the transitory nature and the preciousness of life so that we live deeply and don’t “waste” life.
Recognizing the gift of life and puncturing delusional aspirations toward immortality are certainly worthy goals. But these are not, for our purposes, the most important reasons the church needs to confront death and human need. The real reason the church must fight against death repression is the reason we observed in Matthew 12: honestly embracing need is critical for a life of mercy.
As we observed with the Pharisees, blindness to our need also blinds us to the need in others. It is a matter of empathy, compassion, and solidarity. Never experiencing poverty, we fail to understand why the poor (“those people on welfare”) just don’t go out and get a job. Our smug, self-contained, god-like success creates gaps of understanding and compassion. And, once again, we find disgust creating boundaries between people. In this case disgust at the poor hides our own vulnerabilities, allowing us to pretend...
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As hinted at in our discussion of the Trinity, love is not possible without need. As the Church Fathers asserted, a self-contained God without need is sterile. For God to be love there has to be a Son, a needy, receiving component within the Godhead. God the Father empties himself into the Son and the Son returns that glory to the Father. The love, nature, and life of God are revealed in this dynamic cycle of emptying and receiving between Father and Son. And so it is for Christians seeking to step into the life and love of God. Christian love cannot be from our excess. Love is not letting go
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This is the deep reason as to why blindness to our own need undermines a life of mercy. The issue does begin with empathy, seeing my need reflected in the lives of others. But it doesn’t stop there. Mercy is costly. True love moves me into need. Which is, admittedly, a scary prospect. It is an act of faith and it requires a community, a “fellowship of neediness” to use McGill’s phrase. And it is within the giving and receiving of this “fellowship of neediness” where the life and love of God is fully expressed and experienced. In this, the life of the Trinity creates the life of the church or,
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Once again we see the need to dismantle disgust psychology if we are to move into experiences we perceive as morbid, demeaning, and disgusting. Disgust and contempt prevent us from recognizing and embracing the need, vulnerability, death, and decay within our own lives. Because, despite appearances and protestations to the contrary, we are not “fine.” And by admitting as much we embrace, without disgust or distain, our fragile and shared humanity. We embrace neediness as the only route available to us if we are to be a people of grace, mercy, and love.
Effect have shown how easy it is, due to the close association between morality and cleanliness, for physical cleansing to replace moral effort. What we see in this is how a psychological dynamic is tempting the church into a religious-based cleansing that might have little to nothing to do with passionate missional engagement with the world. Such a church “feels” clean to itself, but its engagement with the world remains insipid and static.
For many of us, humanity ends at the borders of our tribes. This is the social psychological dynamic that causes the moral circle to shrink by focusing my acts of giving and kindness on the very few. Thus, if the Christian is to embrace the call to hospitality, the dynamics of otherness must be mastered at a deep psychological level. Miroslav Volf calls this the “will to embrace.”
Disgust psychology cannot be eliminated from the life of the church. The pull of disgust will remain a constant temptation, pulling the less vigilant, as will our sweet tooth, into overindulgence. The goal for the church is to live life managing this sweet tooth, embracing disgust when it serves a legitimate protective function but rejecting the impulse when it produces social exclusion, a Macbeth Effect-type hypocrisy, or a Gnostic flight from the body. Life with disgust will be, for the church, similar to managing one’s diet. Disgust must be managed intentionally, continually, and with
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Notions of purity and holiness create judgments regarding pollution, defilement, and contamination. These are dangerous attributions. Purity and holiness carve the world into clean and unclean and then direct feelings of revulsion and contempt toward the self or the other, those designated as “unclean.” Once these judgments and boundaries are in place, it is almost impossible to see how the mission of the church can be accomplished. Given all this, it might just be safer to eliminate purity and holiness categories from the life of the church, to restrict or eliminate their use in the faith
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Propriety is a felt experience that has no objective basis; it exists only within the subjective experience of the individual. This makes adjudication on the basis of disgust notoriously vague, fickle, and idiosyncratic. “I know it when I see it” fails miserably when people see things differently.
Why not reduce legal and policy issues to objective considerations of freedom, equality, and harm? This is the crux of Nussbaum’s argument. Let’s keep disgust out of law and policy. Perhaps a similar recommendation might work for the church.
A second problem with using disgust as a criterion of law and policy is that disgust is a difficult emotion to control. If allowed to regulate social life, disgust can have disastrous consequences.
