“The fact of evil threatens all our achievements, including pious ones, insofar as they are expressed through ‘fraudulent totalizations’ of our being,” wrote Paul Ricoeur, who continued, “the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the Church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.” This is clear warning on totalizing projects and programmes even within the Church. In August 2021, the Syro Malabar Synod of Bishops decreed that the ad orientem tradition be followed uniformly across all dioceses. Several sections of the Church, most prominent among them being a majority of the priests of the Ernakulam-Angamaly diocese, voiced strong opposition and advocated for versus populum. The decision of the Synod is worthy to be studied, especially within this principle of hermeneutics. The Synod imposes uniformity and not unity. Such an initiative was never allowed to be discussed widely by a letter of the Pope procured even before the Synod decision by telling the Pope unfounded facts and statements and by the letter disallowing any discussions. There is a will to impose a fake ideal of unity, creating an illusory identity for the Church. Pope Francis spoke at the general audience in St Peters Square on 5 October 2016 about Christian unity, specifically pointing out what it is not about. Namely, they aren’t about uniformity or the total absorption of one aspect by another, but instead consist of a common communion in Christ. If we let ourselves be guided by the Holy Spirit, he said, “the richness, the variety, diversity” do not become a source of conflict, but are instead a point of enrichment. The false model of unity Francis said is to believe that unity is equivalent to uniformity. This is an attempt of totalizing.
Did not the Synod take a totalizing decision without any discussions and with an intent that has no theological or pastoral content? True evil, the evil of evil, is not the violation of an interdict, the subversion of the law, disobedience, but fraudulence in the work of totalization. In this sense, true evil appears only in the very field which the Church has produced, in the field of contradictions and conflicts determined. This is done on the one hand, demanding for totalization which constitutes reason, both theoretical and practical, and, on the other hand, creating an illusion which misleads thought, the subtle hedonism which vitiates moral motivation. The malice corrupts the great human enterprises of putting together.
The controversy is the fate of what we shall call the myth-poetic core of imagination. Over the illusion of unity and the fable-making function of actual uniformity demystifying hermeneutics it sets up the rude discipline of necessity. It is the lesson of Spinoza’s slavish mentality. Actually it is denial of ethics of ascetics that must be undergone to tame and humanize the affirmation of the will to power, the imperialism of the dominant class. The Synod’s adamant position creates a stand-off between those supporting the synod and its opponents with the police force backing the Synod.
When considering hermeneutical issues, the three masters of scepticism are to be taken seriously. They are, assuredly, the three great “destroyers” of bad consciousness. We want a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a “destructive” critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud make the fundamental category of consciousness the relation hidden-shown or, if you prefer, simulated-manifested. The Marxists are stubbornly insistent on the alienation that Nietzsche is dogmatizing about the “perspectivism” of the will to power, that Freud mythologizes with his “censorship,” “watchman,” and “disguises”. What is essential does not lie in these encumbrances and impasses. What is essential is that all three create with the means at hand, with and against the prejudices of their times, a mediated science of meaning, irreducible to the immediate consciousness of meaning.
What all three attempted, in different ways, was to make their “conscious” methods of deciphering coincide with the “unconscious” work of ciphering which they attributed to the will to power, to social being, to the unconscious psychism. They warn us concerning the process of false consciousness. Evil and hope are more closely connected than we will ever think of them; if the evil of evil is born on the way of totalization, it would appear only in a pathology of hope, as the inherent perversion in the problematic of fulfilment and of totalization. The Vatican is not understanding the unfortunate path the leadership of the Church takes with regard to their spiritual desires—that of affirmation, rejection, or moderation—which are and remain fallible. Ricœur’s theory of affective fragility opens the possibility of a critique of human affectivity. With regard to spiritual feelings, three different failures can occur: we can suffer from an excess of spiritual desires; a lack, denial, or suppression thereof; or an appropriation of spiritual desires by excessive adrenal desires for possession, power, or recognition.