björn thorsteinssonissue of “what cannot but appear as the hidden perverse core of
Christianity: if it is prohibited to eat from the Tree of Knowledge in
Paradise, why did God put it there in the first place?” (15). Further, he
recounts the story of the exchange between Jesus and Judas at the Last
Supper, where the former responds to the latter’s question as to
whether it is he that will betray him, simply by the words “You have
said so” — a “disavowed injunction” if there ever was one, according
to Žižek (16). He goes on to comment:
Here I am tempted to claim that the entire fate of Christianity, its
innermost kernel, hinges on the possibility of interpreting this act [the
utterance “You have said so”] in a nonperverse way. [...] The problem,
the dark ethical knot in this affair, is thus not Judas, but Christ himself:
in order to fulfill his mission, was he obliged to have recourse to such
obscure, arch-Stalinist manipulation? (16)In other words: if God is omnipotent, why did he invite, if not
explicitly arrange for, the Fall, and why did he sacrifice his son? For an
answer to these questions, Žižek finds support in such thinkers as
Hegel (who famously interpreted Christ’s death on the cross as, quite
simply, the fact that God is dead^7 ) and the English conservative thinker
G. K. Chesterton; for, as the latter wrote, commenting on Jesus’ cry
from the cross, we “will not find another god who has himself been in
revolt,” or, in other words, we “will find [...] only one religion in
which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”^8 In other words,
still following Chesterton, Christianity is “terribly revolutionary. [...]
Christianity is the only religion on earth that has felt that omnipotence
made God incomplete.”^9 In a way, God dies in order to signal that he
is not omnipotent, and, thus, that he needs us to make up for this lack.
Žižek seizes upon this issue of God’s apparent despair and self-
contradictory limitation to elaborate on the notion of Christian love.
- For this claim, see e.g. G.W.F. Hegel, “Glauben und Wissen,” in Jenaer Schriften
1801–1807 (Werke in zwanzig Bänden, Volume 2), Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp
1971, 432. - G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995, 145 (as quot-
ed by Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 14). - Ibid. (as quoted by Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 15).