The paradox of personhood and selflessness

Laozi 老子

One of the great benefits of reading Berdyaev in conjunction with Eastern philosophers like Laozi 老子 and Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒, and poets like Qu Yuan 屈原 and Wen Yiduo 聞一多, is that you get a clear sense of the complementarity of the truths offered by the Russian tradition (which is really to say: the Greek Academic philosophical tradition always already filtered through a Christian lens) and those offered by the still more ancient Chinese philosophical tradition. The book Christ the Eternal Tao by the Serbian Orthodox Hieromonk Damascene is one I have been mulling on for a while now; eventually I will have to go back to the Daodejing 《道德经》 and look for the points of contact in greater depth.

But one thing that struck me about Hieromonk Damascene’s book (and he is one excellent writer, by the way), is how adeptly he sorts the genius of Western wisdom from that of Chinese philosophy. My father-confessor at St Herman’s and I were discussing this book the other day. I cannot take credit for a lot of the insights that follow; those must go to Fr Paul or to Hieromonk Damascene. In any event, Hieromonk Damascene avoids both the sillier, shallow forms of New Age jargon and jumbling, as well as the blinkered, chauvinistic view of Derrida (or Žižek) that Chinese people are incapable of philosophy.

Instead, he focusses on the ability of Western thought, in conjunction with the Hebrew prophetic tradition, to grasp the importance of the personal. Moses and Elijah beheld (though they were not and could not be aware of the full truth of it) the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word of God. The Hebrew God—is a personal God. Not an idea or a concept or a mental construct. We human beings are each a crafted icon, an image-and-likeness, of the Divine. This is precisely the Mosaic-prophetic intuition. However, the difficulty in the West is in attributing to the personal God those aspects of self-will which we manifest in our fallen state. At worst, the Hebrew prophets interpreted their God as a stern lawgiver, a monad and a grim Lord of vengeance; at their best, they could see within God the patience of a loving Father, but these glimpses were rare. The Hebrews were expecting, not Christ, but a Saviour of a very different sort.

The intuition of Laozi, on the other hand, is that the divine Being, or Way, or Dao 道, is perfectly selfless. It makes no demands, it does not stand on its own rights, it does not force itself, it does not ratiocinate or justify or excuse itself, it does not inflict violence or destroy the other to build itself up. It has no self-will, no ego. It simply is. The idea of wu wei 無為 supposes an absence of will, a selfless simplicity. However, this too has been broadly misunderstood and misinterpreted. The Daoist ideal of selflessness was applied to rulership, and ended up bolstering a kind of Legalistic doctrine wherein the personal characteristics of ruler and minister are both obscured as heavily as possible. Alternatively, the Daoist principle of wu wei has been politically misappropriated to support liberaltarianism and anarchism of various shades, even though all of these interpretations involve political assertions of desire, egotism and self-will that are in fact contrary to wu wei. When one thus de-emphasises personality, ideology begins to take hold. Small wonder the 18^th-century Yijing 《已經》 scholar and Daoist master Liu Yiming 劉一明 complained:

七十二家炉火事，三千六百淫邪功。
以盲引盲迷正路，阻挡学人入牢笼。

There are 72 schools of material alchemy, and 3,600 aberrant practices. Since the blind lead the blind, they lose sight of the right road; they block students and lead them into a pen.

The dangers of overemphasising independence (which leads to egotism, judgmentalism, and ultimately a kind of dead legalism), and overemphasising nothingness (which leads to an emptying of the content of life and a reification of bureaucratic forms, another kind of legalism), are thus made apparent. Both truths have to be held simultaneously, a paradox beyond the grasp of classical philosophy, whether East or West. Equally fascinating, though, are the trinitarian presentiments which Hieromonk Damascene attributes to Laozi in the Daodejing. Hieromonk Damascene puts a particular emphasis on Daodejing 42, which begins:

道生一，一生二，二生三，三生萬物。

The Dao produced One; One produced Two; Two produced Three; Three produced All things.

The idea is that Laozi had an insight into the triune nature of the Divine. But here Laozi approaches them as though they are something akin to Platonic numbers; they are not treated as persons. The operation of the Trinity was intuited by Laozi, however the personal nature was not seen, only intuited. As the Chinese Daoist philosopher and teacher of Hieromonk Damascene and Fr Seraphim Rose, Gi-Ming Shien (or Shen Jiming 申紀明), put it, the Three of Laozi represents ‘the reconciliation of opposites’, that it is ‘the principle of order’ which ‘produces all things’.

However, the primary thrust of the book – a philosophical insight common to the personalism of Orthodoxy and shared by the Desert Fathers, Nikolai Berdyaev, Dr Martin Luther King, Rowan Williams and others – is that the person can be selfless. This is what Hieromonk Damascene calls the ‘paradox of personhood and selflessness’. The person and the individual are not identical; the person is not merely a rights-bearer; the person and the ego are not the same thing. The personhood of the Trinity is not only unselfish but in fact selfless, non-monadic; it is erotic and kenotic: it begets and it proceeds out of itself; it pours itself out and is continually renewed. This continual dynamic self-emptying as a cosmic principle of order is something that Laozi himself intuited:

道沖而用之或不盈。淵兮似萬物之宗。

The Dao is (like) the emptiness of a vessel; and in our employment of it we must be on our guard against all fulness. How deep and unfathomable it is, as if it were the Honoured Ancestor of all things!

We thus come to the nub of the argument. There really are only Three Persons in one single substantive Being, and we among the wanwu 萬物, the myriad things produced by this Three-Persons-in-One-Being, are all icons of that Being and those Persons. But insofar as we are fallen; that is, insofar as we insist on our selves, our individuality, our sufficiency unto ourselves as little gods and little idols, our personhood is actually diminished. The paradox of personhood is that it can be realised only through selflessness: the selflessness of the Dao, the selflessness of the Way in which we were created. In our darkened state we become substantive, we become person, only by losing our selves, and by loving others in the way that we were loved when the Lover of Mankind made us.

There is a great deal of philosophical truth worth pondering and discussing in Christ the Eternal Tao, and again it strikes me that I need to re-read the Daodejing in order to get more out of the centrepiece and commentaries of the book. That said, I certainly invite my readers to take a stab at reading Christ the Eternal Tao as well.