priesthood is an intrinsic necessity for human life—as necessary as air and water and food. Such necessities are, in their inmost essence, life-giving and good. Yet, in practice, priesthood is not always benign. The roots and connections and limits of human experience run deep beneath the surface. Priesthood provides our access to them. But the border country is dangerous country. Not everyone who enters it emerges as a priest of TRUTH. Some of us linger long without ever paying real attention. Our impressions are jumbled and half-submerged. Others may take into that country shortcomings of character that will make us try to bend our meeting with the HOLY to our own ends. In such cases, we will return to the everyday world having seen not so much REALITY as a magnified version of our own internal untruth.
To become a true priest of the LIFE-GIVING HOLY requires a certain loving detachment. We have to enter the border country and live among its secrets without having our eye fixed too much on how we can make use of them. We are there for love and communion and enjoyment, not for use. We must often learn to let the HOLY set the question as well as give the answer. We must accept the gift of insight as sufficient reward. If we enter the border country to control it or organize it, or to have our prejudices confirmed or to make some gain, we risk having our humanity warped or destroyed. And we shall usually harm others in the process.
If we enter the borderlands “knowing” too much in advance, if we only want answers to our prefabricated questions, or escape from an everyday reality that we are tired of grappling with, or proof of our own righteousness and wisdom, or a chance to satisfy our own grandiosity by taking possession of great mysteries, we cannot grow in truth—except by having our expectations shattered. If we are distracted by self-interested motives, we cannot be fully present to TRUTH; we cannot be attentive long enough to grow in it. TRUTH, after all, can be humiliating; it can deprive us of our most treasured lies and plunge us right back into the problem we were trying to escape. But TRUTH is also what grounds us and our everyday world. What is not true is not of GOD, is not, finally, HOLY or real. To live safely in the border country, we need to cultivate a quiet openness to the unexpected and to let go our hopes of ever controlling GOD. If we use the priestly arcana to gratify personal ambition or to protect us from whatever we fear, they will be distorted and become malignant. If we use them to satisfy the passions of a group, they will become demonic.
In the scriptures of Israel, one of the first stories about human life in this world is about priesthood and how it can become entangled with personal ambition. In the stories about Adam and Eve after their expulsion from Eden, the first characteristic human activities mentioned are sex, childbirth, and the naming of children (Genesis 4:1). After these activities, we hear of productive labor, specifically herding and farming (4:2). Third, the scriptures mention priesthood (4:3–4).
Abel and Cain each offered sacrifices to GOD, choosing good things from the fruits of their work. Sacrifice is one of the ancient sacraments of priesthood; it represents the entry into the border country, with its attendant loss of control and self-possession. But like any rite, it cannot guarantee a divine response. The HOLY always remains in its own power, not in ours. It shows itself to us as it wishes; it holds back when it chooses. The first sacrifices were like all the later ones in this regard. GOD, the story says, accepted one sacrifice and rejected the other. No reason is or can be given. It was an exercise of the sovereignty of the REAL. At one moment, the HOLY shows itself; at another, not.
Cain, however, refuses to accept the judgment of GOD, of the HOLY. He will not let go of his insistence on satisfying his own desires. The differing response to the two sacrifices creates jealousy in him, and from this spring hatred, falsehood, murder, judgment, exile, alienation, revenge, and a host of other ills. In this Hebrew story, one man competing with another over priesthood brings about all the troubles that the Greeks blamed on the curiosity of a woman who opened a forbidden box. Cain could not consent to let GOD be GOD, the HOLY be the HOLY, because to do so would confront him with his own limits. His only concern was to prove that he was as good as or better than his brother. To this end, he tried to use the DIVINE. When he failed, he grew angry, his priesthood became malignant, and he made himself a murderer.32
Priesthood becomes dangerous partly because we try to use it as one more opportunity for human competition. In every age, claims to possess unique (or at least superior) access to the HOLY are rife. Such claims are often entangled with struggles for power or financial gain, but they cannot simply be reduced to them. If anything, our desire to exceed one another in our “command” of ULTIMATE REALITY is even more decisive than the struggle for everyday goods. We are constantly frustrated by the impossibility of gaining any clear, decisive advantage over our competitors. The lust to be recognized as the unique priest can easily lead a person into falsehood, extravagance, vituperation, demagoguery, and pandering to popular bigotries.33 At the same time, of course, this lust leads one away from true priesthood, which can flourish only in company with an unaffected regard for TRUTH.
The person who subordinates priesthood to the passions not just of an individual, but of a group, makes of it something even more destructive and evil—something we can legitimately call “demonic.” As Simone Weil wrote, “The flesh impels us to say me and the devil impels us to say us; or else to say like the dictators I with a collective signification.”34 Hitler must have spent time in the border country The very power with which he evoked and encouraged and fed the passions of his audience identifies him as a man with experience of the arcana. But his desire to sway an audience, to become their leader, and to satisfy their demands led him to become demonic and to sanction the demonic in them. Hitler had indeed seen demons in the border country. But he mistook their nature. He mistook the demons for Jews and Gypsies and gay men and the others he hated, when in fact they were reflections of himself and his audience—of their own evil grasping after control and exaltation. When our internal evil comes, in this way, to be externalized and to take power over us, it is not too much to speak in terms of demons and demon possession.35
The results were powerful—but, as it turned out, only for death and destruction. Hitler satisfied the worst of his nation’s passions and in doing so destroyed the lives of millions—many of them his own partisans, still more of them people who became his enemies only because he insisted on being theirs, few of them people who held any deep ill will for him before he attacked them. The results were not only appalling but bizarre, a great conflagration beyond rational comprehension, a holocaust, as it has come to be called. And what is a “holocaust”? It is a whole burnt offering. The language is sacrificial language. The language is about approaching the arcana—an approach turned in this case to evil and destructive use. The borderland is dangerous country.
Priesthood, then, has the capacity to do harm. In the case of Hitler’s priesthood, as in that of Cain’s, the harm continues to ricochet through history. As Genesis declares, one murder will beget others (4:13–15). How long will it be before the people of Germany and Austria will be free to think of themselves in terms that are not radically conditioned by the holocaust, whether through acknowledgment of it or through denial? (Denial, after all, is merely the postponement of acknowledgment; and when the debt is finally paid, it carries heavy interest.) How long will it be before the modern world can free itself from the self-replicating specter of genocide? How long will it be before the Jewish people can think of themselves in terms that are not overwhelmingly dominated and driven by this one event? In one sense, the answer to all these questions is “never.” The Hitlerian history is a permanent accretion to our identity as human beings, just as its own roots stretch back into the distant past. In even the most superficial sense, the answer is “not for a very long time.”
Such priestly evils reverberate through the history of many nations, perhaps all. In the United States, they have to do particularly with the evils involved in two aspects of our history. One is the conquest of the continent by people of European descent, who often justified what they were doing in religious terms as the triumph of Christian light over pagan darkness or, in a thinly secularized form, as the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny. The other was slavery, for which a religious apologetic was also offered.36 In each case, evil priesthood, claiming access
