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 to ultimate TRUTH, shaped the everyday world in ways that burden us still. When our national priests claimed that GOD willed the evils of conquest or slavery, they effectively justified both the deeds themselves and the passions of greed and racial hatred that informed them. Doctrines of Manifest Destiny, based on the history of Israel, and a professedly literal interpretation (actually a racist allegory) of the curse of Noah gave weight to a whole series of lies about white superiority that still permeate our culture. Americans go on living with the consequences of our demonic priesthoods. Perhaps it is much the same with other nations.
Priestly experience, then, is frightening and sometimes dangerous. To be a priest entails living on the everyday plane with an awareness of the DEEP under our feet. In reality, of course, all human existence is lived out on this boundary; and yet, we are not, as human beings, conscious of it all the time. We can and do retreat into the shallows of the everyday; we prefer, most of the time, the lower stakes of day-to-day existence. But, as Genesis puts it, humanity was created from dust and the breath of GOD (2:7); we belong to both worlds. When we encounter the HOLY, we are encountering what is essential to us, even if it seems beyond us. We are drawn inescapably. From the beginning, in Cain and Abel, humanity has been approaching the border with gifts and with fear.
The fear is well-founded. TRUTH, as such, is beyond our grasp. We can at most grasp lesser truths of varying degrees of inclusiveness. The flaws in ourselves distort the lens through which we look. The person who wants to be important will look for a truth that is distinctively his or her “truth” and will make it out to be better than the next person’s. The person who happens to despise others, whether Jews or people of color or homosexual persons or some other group, will find some plausible pretext for prejudice and hatred—and will not notice how these lies distort all areas of life. The person of intense partisanship will concoct some device to prove that his or her group alone possesses the truth and all others are contemptible. It is hard for us to turn our competitiveness, our schemes, and our preconceptions loose and simply to live in communion on the boundary.
TRUTH, as a whole, is beyond us and, at a certain obvious level, almost unaffected by our existence. TRUTH, in our grasping at it, however, falls prey to all the twists and turns that human evil can inflict. Going to the boundary, meeting the TRANSCENDENT, does not deliver us from our humanness. Sometimes it may even magnify our human potential for evil to an appalling degree. The egomania that brought suffering and death to the people of Jonestown is an extreme example of something endemic