The Desire to Dominate or be Dominated

by Professor ADAM DeVILLE

I’ve never forgotten listening live on Ancient Faith Radio to the All-American Council in Pittsburgh in 2008, at which the OCA elected then-Bishop Jonah to be its new metropolitan. I wrote to a friend who was a priest in the OCA, telling him how impressed I was by what Bishop Jonah had said about the problematic conceptions of bishops and the tendency to confuse church hierarchy with “imperial aristocracy.” As an Eastern Rite Catholic, I was almost envious. Here, I exclaimed, was a bishop who clearly “got it” about many important but overlooked issues, not least the propensity to dress hierarchs up like emperors of old and place crowns on their heads.

Bishop Jonah’s vision, at the time, was a healthful and hopeful corrective to certain practices of episcopal power as when, for instance, he said in his first address after his election that “the episcopos is not the master of the house: he is the head slave. And I am the head slave of the head slaves.” Sadly, as many of us know, that vision and that primacy did not pan out: Metropolitan Jonah was removed from his post in 2012.

But parts of that vision, including Metropolitan Jonah’s talk of doing away with the “culture of intimidation,” deserve not just to be revived but implemented everywhere. The Orthodox scholar Ashley Purpura, in her excellent book, God, Hierarchy, and Power: Orthodox Theologies of Authority from Byzantium, has made a compelling case for looking into the problems of power in the Orthodox Church. My own recent book, Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power, which draws heavily on Orthodox ecclesial structures, goes even farther in examining the problem of episcopal power and the loss of synodality among Catholics.

The problem of Christian hierarchs imitating imperial and monarchical models is a very old one, going back arguably to at least the fourth century. Bishops almost everywhere have long been part of a social and ecclesial elite, endowed with tremendous powers, and they almost never act, dress, or are treated like “head slaves.” Rather, we treat them, and they usually expect to be treated, as “headmasters.” And in turn, the temptation in the Church to vie for mastery over one another goes back even farther.

The discussion Jesus has with the hyper-ambitious mother of the sons of Zebedee indicates it was a temptation among the original apostolic band (some of whom seem not to have had the guts to talk to Jesus directly—hence they had their mom do it!) even when Jesus still walked the earth and clearly told all of us that he came “not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:20-28). Notwithstanding that clear dominical counsel, most of us rather like being served by others.

But what about our desire to be dominated by others? What about the urge we all have, at least some of the time and in some circumstances, to surrender our freedom and responsibility, often to some strongman (president, patriarch, pope—but many others far less exalted, too, and of both sexes), and allow others to tell us what to do, even (perversely) to the point of pain? (As The Guardian reported recently, the sadomasochistic novel Fifty Shades of Grey has sold over 150 million copies worldwide and was the fastest selling book in British history.) We might dismiss this as the sign of a culture in an advanced state of decadence and decay but for the fact that it has tapped into an urge to which Christians have no natural immunity, just like the rest of humanity.

How ought we think about the problems of power and freedom in a Christian context? In an era when, like never before, the sins of bishops have been revealed in appalling detail, and the rest of the clergy—who, as far as we know currently, were not abusers or enablers of the same—do nothing but stand around seeking to protect their powers, privileges, and perks, the inclination for the rest of us is to summon our inner Robespierre and lob off a few mitred heads pour encourager les autres.

That, of course, tends to raise delicate moral scruples (take, for instance, the commandment on murder). It would also be an entirely counter-productive strategy, as Robespierre himself found out when he lost his own head on the guillotine to which he had condemned so many others. The replacement of one elite group holding a monopoly on power is invariably followed by another group erecting its own monopoly. Every revolution in history bears this out. As the Italian historian Benedetto Croce once said, history is a stage on which victims and executioners merely swap roles from time to time.

It should, of course, be different in the Church. But it rarely is. What can we do about that?

Yes, we could tinker with, say, episcopal vesture by replacing crowns and capes with something less grand. We could refer to popes and patriarchs as “head slave” rather than “Your Holiness” or “Your Beatitude.” But that would be cosmetic and almost entirely useless.

We could and should look—as my own new book does—at ecclesial structures which allow hierarchs to monopolize power and find ways to dismantle those unhealthy and dangerous sources of temptation and wickedness. That is important and necessary in this era unlike ever before.

But it would still leave unexamined the underlying psychology on the part of Christians, and indeed all human beings, which wants to have leaders exalted over us, which wants to surrender to a powerful elite or singular potentate our own personal freedom and responsibility for both self-governance and governance of our communities, ecclesial and otherwise. In this sense, the problem is not limited to how we treat bishops; often it is most pronounced at the parish level—for instance, with the phenomenon of recent converts seeking “spiritual fathers” whom they can consult about every moral decision in their lives, including those involving the marital bed.

In saying this, let me hasten to add here, I am not advocating for some radically individualistic Christian libertarianism, which I think theologically absurd and socially destructive. I am, rather, suggesting that it’s time we started thinking about crucial questions first asked almost 80 years ago on the eve of America’s entry into the Second World War.

That question was asked in 1941 by Erich Fromm. This year marks the 40th anniversary of his death, which must not go unremarked for he was of one of the most influential but theologically neglected thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in 1900 and dying in 1980, Erich Fromm—psychoanalyst, global social critic, and anti-nuclear activist whose views were closely noted by at least one U.S. president and two popes—wrote internationally best-selling books that sold millions of copies and continue to sell each year. But as the Harvard historian Lawrence Friedman has put it in his magisterial biography, The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (Columbia University Press, 2013), “the deepest and most important of Fromm’s books” was his 1941 runaway bestseller, Escape from Freedom. I would add to this only that his first major English-language book from 1941 should be read alongside his last, exactly 40 years later: the short book published posthumously in 1981, On Disobedience: Why Freedom Means Saying “No” to Power.

Both books raise a challenge that Christian theology—East and West—has not taken up in any satisfactory way as far as I know. Certainly, Fromm’s questions and insights have been totally ignored in my own field of ecclesiology.

If we were to take him seriously and begin thinking about the problems of power, freedom, and submission, we would need to ask such questions as: Why is “obedience” thought a virtue in the Church? Is “disobedience” always and everywhere a vice? Why are bishops necessary—or are they? If we got rid of bishops, or at least any notion of having to “obey” or “submit” to them, wouldn’t the Church be a healthier, freer place? And what of our parish priests: while we benefit from their wisdom, are we also developing the measure of self-reliance that most any healthy spiritual life demands?

Fromm does not answer those questions directly. Nor can I here give them a systematic exposition, let alone application. Instead, I want to leave all of us asking: how do we understand our desire for submission? How can we bring it to the surface and the light of day for critical examination?

Fromm notes that ours is not just a desire to submit to external political figures or ecclesial hierarchs; nor do we do so simply and only because we are afraid of them. Rather, we begin with our own “submission to internalized authorities” and to “inner compulsions.” There is something fearful within us that lurks in the shadows of our heart, our mind, our soul, seeking to escape from that freedom for which, as St. Paul puts it so boldly to the Galatians, Christ has made us free (Gal. 5:1; but compare this with the rest of the epistle, which has compelling things to say about the dynamic between “bondage” [2:4] and “freedom”). Why is that? Why would we rather not be free? Why do we bind ourselves first before others demand our submission to them?

If we begin by asking these questions, we may well come up with a more satisfactory, or at least less problematic, proposal than to amend or abolish hierarchical authority within the Church. For in doing so, we would inevitably merely replace one set of actors with another, and the dynamic of submission would start all over again. To avoid that cycle, let us begin at the beginning: with ourselves.

Why do we seek to escape from freedom? Why do we long to submit to others? It is high time we seek out some answers for ourselves as well as for the good of the Church.

ADAM DeVILLE is associate professor and director of humanities at the University of Saint Francis, Ft. Wayne, Indiana and author most recently of Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power. He runs the blog Eastern Christian Books, easternchristianbooks.blogspot.com.