Michael Bolerjack Apostle is One Sent

I am sent to speak of the apocalypse. As Paul was an apostle of the founding of faith in the resurrection, which I take to be the true origin of the Church, not necessarily reckoned to Pentecost, for reasons I will come to, though hard to speak of, and perhaps only able to be spoken of in a mode of supposition or conjecture, without being bound by such speculations, that is to say again, as Paul is the apostle of the origin of the faith, in the resurrection, it seems to me that I am the apostle of the end of faith, or of the end of the Church, for the Church, despite its mission, has proved itself faithless. To act with the end in view, many disparate pieces of information will be gathered herein. All perhaps bearing on the question Derrida raised at the start of his writing, in the essay on Levinas: how can there be an absolutely surprising convocation? One of the premises of my thinking through of the apocalypse is that it applies only, or primarily, to the Roman Church. The Church is set in the World and the fall of the former will I believe have a profound impact on the latter. Another of my premises is taken from Derrida concerning closure, that it has taken place. But the meaning of this event, I think, has still not been understood, and I think can only be understood in relation to the apocalypse to which it is essential. Closure has a dual aspect. I think of Heideggers comments to Stambaugh on the appropriation and the janus-face between the world and that which is the enowning of it. In thinking through closure, I am thinking of relations between the container and the contained, of the containment as it is thought in terms of its necessity for a decontamination to be possible. The triangulation of deconstruction-deconsecration-decontamination is the verbal matrix for my thought. The hope I have is that into the textual containment of closure a decontaminant may be introduced which will destroy satan, trapped symbolically in the text, as trapped in the letters of the words Christian and Transubstantiation. One way to look at the containment, and I may just mention this almost in passing, is found in Buddhist psychology, with the mind as mirror being the container and thoughts the contained. It is, I think, the goal of the Buddhist to wipe the dust of thought from the mirror of the mind. In this is a figure for the decontamination I hope will take place generally in what I believe is, based on readings in writers such as Averroes, the one mind. In Derridas textuality, the text would be the container and signs the contained. In Ptolemaic cosmology, the Primum Mobile contains the concentric shells with the earth at the center. For Cusanus, there is the Wall, and for the early Heidegger, the horizon. One might say, reading the next to last paragraph of Derridas essay on Levinas, that in this age of difference, our wall or horizon is one of hypocrisy. Closure, in a sense, is the worst for Catholics, and the best for the World, depending on whether the demise of the Church is life for the World in which it is set or if the voiding of Catholicism will deprive the World of something essential to it, on which it depended the last 2000 years, and without which it cannot survive. If all the worst is contained in the Church, all will go well for the World, but if on the other hand, the Church is a tomb or crypt, as in the deconstructionist theory of the text, from which a spectral truth will disseminate involving the World and contaminating it as well,

then not only will the Church cease to be, hollowed out from within by its deconsecration, but the World too will be erased by the complicity it has with the hypocrisy of the Church. Whether the Church and the World are one system or two separate entities remains to be seen. The Church in her history sought to see herself set apart from the World and completely opposed to it, and if that is true, then the World is fortunate. Of course, this is a paradox. Behind this paradox is the idea that the scandal of the Church is that unknown to it and despite itself, it became sin, in order to take away the sins of the World. In the closure of the text all good and evil is transposed into signs. In this containment the struggle takes place, with the possibility of decontamination, involving a shift transcending the law of morality toward a mystical love above the antithesis. To recover this thesis is the way to decontamination. However, if this is not accomplished, there will be a fall into a synthetic state below the moral. The works of Joyce, Ulysses and the Wake, describe this schema, indicating both the way up, in the former, and the way down, in the latter. Though I think the complexity of the situation in the Wake is not simply one of the fall into a lawlessness without the hope of mystical love, which like the love expressed in the final words of Ulysses can redeem all, for there is the indication still that there will come an eventual awakening, and that the era of textuality is something that can be traversed, not a labyrinth without hope of exit. Having said these things as a kind of preparation for an apocalyptic gospel, I might begin the actual good news with the proclamation Be Not Angry, rather than Be Not Afraid. To echo Maurice Blanchot, with whom I bear a siglum, I say to Catholics, you are Awaiting Oblivion, but know it not. How could you? For the truth is outside your walls. Clean the inside of the cup. Inside your whitewashed tombs are dead mens bones, buried under altars kissed. Having previously assessed a new Christology within the destruction of Catholic theology, the same can be done for a Pneumatology of Catholic spirituality. I recall John Fords film The Grapes of Wrath, in which John Carradine plays an ex-preacher who had the spirit and what it made him do, and diverse preachers of healing ministries like Benny Hinn, who attribute their gifts to the spirit, and keeping in mind the sacrament of confirmation in the Catholic Church, which is said to confer the spirit to the person receiving the sacrament, and that this confirmation is the required entrance into the sacramental life of the Church, and that furthermore, it is said in Revelation that the mark is received on the hands and the forehead, which is precisely where one is signed with the chrism in the sacrament of confirmation, gaining access to the economy of grace, and wonder what is spirit that it may possibly be present in all these instances, remembering Derridas important work on Heideggers spirit, and thus, without offense to the Holy Spirit of God, realizing that there is probably more than one spirit in the world, that Paul has instructed us to test the spirits because some are good and some are evil, and therefore question the spirituality of the Catholic Church in particular, inquiring philosophically as to the truth of the spirit it has. I wonder then if the spirit of the Church is the Spirit of God. I believe the Church at Rome claims for itself, beyond a mere papal infallibility, a general infallibility of the Church as a whole, as Thomas Aquinas assumes in his Summa, that the Church cannot be wrong, and that this is a matter of having the charism of the Holy Spirit. Christ promises the apostles the Spirit in the last supper discourse in John, and since Pentecost and the spiritual breakthrough recounted in Acts, the Church has assumed it is led surely by the Spirit of God. But is it? Can a Church that has done such remarkably evil

things in its persecutions, inquisitions and such, in its idolatry and bigotry and arrogance, be said to be led by the Spirit of God? I personally must be careful now in what I say, for I believe in the Holy Spirit of God, and do not want to speak incorrectly. I believe if I sincerely seek the truth and do not violate my conscience in what I write that I am speaking for the Spirit and not against Him. Christ said, if He said it, for I fear many things attributed to the Lord in the Gospels were inventions of the evangelists to suit the situation in the early Church, which accounts for many contradictory things in the sayings of Christ, that the Spirit would lead the apostles into all truth. But it seems the Church has often been in error and did not ever reach the whole truth or all the truth, failing in this to live up to its catholic, universal calling. For instance, Karl Rahner, one of the great theologians of the Second Vatican Council, found that the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church, made hundreds of errors in just the area of scripture studies alone in the twentieth century. How can the Magisterium, and the Church as a whole, said to be led infallibly by the Spirit of God? It may be that the Catholic Church is not led by a good spirit. Looking back to the early days of the Church in the Acts of the Apostles, it seems to me that it is blasphemy to attribute to the Holy Spirit of God the case of the couple who were struck dead for not giving all their money to Peter. I identify this moment in the history of the Church as the moment when the Church went wrong. For the Spirit of God is not a Spirit of fear, but it was then that great fear fell upon the Church, as opposed to the previous joy following the outpouring at Pentecost. The Spirit of God is one of love, joy, peace, patience and self-control. I believe the career of the Church from that point on, up to today, is one that pretends spiritual good while doing spiritual evil. I realize in the lives of the saints there is abundant evidence of spiritual good that could be offered as a counter-example to my assertion. As has been said, the Spirit blows where He will. But the institution of the Church is not led by the same Spirit as some of its members. It is a case of the parable of the wheat and the tares, not drawing the distinction between the Church and the World, but between different spirits contending within the Church itself. The Church sought throughout its history to control through sacramental means the access of persons to the Spirit of God and to Christ, to ration the goodness of God, to in other words practice simony. It was not the Spirit of God however that they were bartering, for He is free and is not bound to obey such evil intentions. It was another spirit that led Catholicism. It was the Spirit of God that attempted to save the Church at Vatican II. It is another spirit that has made war on that council in the persons of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Christ said that one who blasphemes the Holy Spirit of God will not be forgiven. He spoke of those who attributed the true works of the Spirit of God that He was performing to an evil spirit. I do not knowingly or intentionally speak against the Holy Spirit in what I am saying. God forbid. I believe I am discerning the spirits and following the true Spirit of God. I believe on the other hand that the Church in some basic error has long attributed to the Spirit of God what cannot be His works, for the institution itself is full of sin and error, however holy many of its members may be. It was perhaps the root of the basic error to think that the Church was infallible. In this the institution never examined its conscience, since it believed it could do no wrong. Perhaps the next pope will call a council for just the purpose of performing a full public examination of the conscience of the Catholic Church. Surely, it can be said in response that John Paul II apologized publically hundreds of times for the sins and errors of the Church. Yet, why did things get worse instead of better?

The Church is in some radical way contaminated by evil spiritually and the Church must repent of that spiritual evil in order to be saved. Repentance means the beginning of the decontamination of the Catholic Church, the first step in the cleansing of it from the corruption that is destroying it. I have already argued at length and shown, elsewhere, the apocalyptic nature of the deconsecration that threatens the Church through the activities of the two popes who are antichrist, whether they know it or not. If the Church is to be saved, it must begin by admitting not in such and such a case, like the case of Galileo, that it got it wrong, but that in principle, the Church is fallible, not infallible, that no Pope or council, at any time, is ever infallible, since they are human, and on this basis to completely revise, even deconstruct, all Catholic theory and practice, in order to recognize the Catholic culpability in attempting to define and control God. When it has given up the intention to control God, God may choose to control it. When the Church has given up the notion that it is derived from scripture and tradition, it may die and be revived or resurrected by the Spirit of God which is living and true, of the present and the future, not a thing of the past. The Church must also give up its Roman bias, which is pagan and ancient, for a universal, truly catholic approach, to make real the aggiornamento that the men of Vatican II hoped to accomplish, the coming world-church that Rahner saw beginning during the council. All of this, which seems impossible, is not impossible, for it can be done by one man. That man is the man who will succeed Benedict XVI, the man who will be the last Pope of the Church. As in The Tempest of Shakespeare, this man may use all the papal machinery in order to set things right, and then lay that machinery aside forever. It would be possible at this point in the itinerary of the project to go on to the explication of the strategies of textual containment and decontamination, which might be useful, both in a general sense, and also in the special sense of the case of the Catholic Church, but I will leave these aside for now, with the intention of returning to them elsewhere. The work on this to come will involve a discernment of spirits at the level of the text, in what I call the Ultrastructure, the revelation of which is found in theories of the Cabbala and in the textual practice of James Joyce and in the writings of deconstruction. That work, if it comes to fruition, will show the interconnectedness of all things thought on the basis of the sign and the text as emblems of the one mind, which is at once both spiritual and psychological, that by which we cooperate in thinking, finding that the Spirit of God or the Imagination or the Active Intellect, names for this that enowns us, to which we are appropriated, seen also in the prosthesis of the Artificial Intelligence and technology, is the mystery in which we are caught up to God and by which we experience the grace of God and perceive Gods providence and His work in the world, which Catholic theology reflected on as the Logos or Word, but in this held too much to the individual and univocal and failed to see the ensemble in which creation occurs.