REVIEW: John Carroll, ‘The Saviour Syndrome’

John Carroll’s wrestling with the question of meaning in the modern West continues in The Saviour Syndrome: Searching for Hope and Meaning in an Age of Unbelief. Study in mathematics taught Carroll long ago that when you are faced with a significant question you should always go back to first principles. Carroll’s career has thus been in constant orbit around the three principal metaphysical questions:

Where did I come from?

What should I do with my life?

What happens to me when I die?

In The Saviour Syndrome these three questions are worked into a slightly different form. Tracing the after-life of the Christ archetype, Carroll divides the work into three parts:

the saviour figure, who calls me into existence

the saviour within, which is life in service of being; and

the question of transcendence Law (from which the saviour draws their captivating source).

While easy typologies should always be held loosely, from my own Christian theological perspective this structure itself is revealing. There are echoes here of common theological patterns: the saviour is obvious enough, and along with that the inner work of the Spirit, and the transcend realm of God.

Throughout examples are drawn as easily from literature as cable TV, high culture as everyday life: sport, film, the beach, Hindu proverb, reality show, and personal tragedy. It is as if Carroll offers his own kind of anthology. The search is for impression points: gathering places of meaning, where the subterranean structure of culture gives us access to transcendence which pierces the veil of everyday life. Part of the point is to call us to the ways everyday life is already suffused with this subterranean depth; the task is to see this, feel it, live by these mythic depths. This is key to the particular gift and contribution of Carroll's work to the sociological corpus. Unlike most other sociologists, Carroll shows little interest in the structure of social life, preferring the richer fare of life's texture, tone, and feel.

This volume¹ is a very affectionate text. More autobiographical than other texts by Carroll, it shows deep affection for his own family — and his football team.² The affection extends beyond that: the three impression points gathered at the end (each youthful) are great objects of affection. The child who is the twinkling star of the nursery rhyme, a Hindu archer both puzzling and prodigy-like, and a young woman thrust into maturity through tragedy. (The book itself is dedicated to Carroll's own daughters.) Throughout, the affection for these figures spills over to the embrace of everyday people, their lives, their favourite TV shows. A book like this is only possible with a certain kind of hopefulness: condescension and cynicism are banished, shown to be useless.

What Carroll offers is perhaps more witness than answer. Giving voice to the disappointment we live, the joy of children, the experience of great teachers. On this last point, I have to confess a personal bias here: I fondly remember lectures, and seminars, and conversations with John as an undergraduate. Reading classic works of culture, pouring endlessly over every detail of key pieces of Western art, and discovering John Wayne films. I went to La Trobe University (of which Carroll is Professor emeritus) in part because I was already a fan of Carroll's work; I took all of his classes. This kind of personal investment is necessary when trying to really get at the metaphysical foundations of social life: it is life itself, after all, which is the subject here.

If life is the subject throughout The Saviour Syndrome, then what seems to have receded in focus is death. The occlusion of focus on death is often when it lingers closest as spectre. The section reflecting on the final works of great masters — The Tempest by Shakespeare among them — seems a kind of final nod to the question of death. In the end the final offering of an answer to the metaphysical questions which have so shaped Carroll's corpus seem to revolve around questions of youth and legacy. A kind of yearning that one's life was lived in accordance with transcendent Law: that life might be an impression point for those that live on — particularly the young.

What is helpful in this approach to an answer is that it takes seriously the existential depth of the question. How to live is not, as we have been led to believe, primarily an ethical question. On that point we will always fail. The question is what to do with disappointed and failed lives, to recast them as participants in some transcendent sense of purpose. Carroll's persistent clarity on this point is one of the most astute among contemporary commentators. Carroll has a singular focus which leads him beyond the common noise of social analysis and commentary. This is an unencumbered work, and so the journey is easier.

At the same time, it is here that a more confessional theological response is necessary. As a Christian theologian there is much in Carroll's work that needs to be admired. Perhaps, however, modern society is not so unencumbered of faith as the description from the subtitle suggests: Searching for Hope and Meaning in an Age of Unbelief. It is of course true that religious belief and affiliation have been in precipitating decline — my own tradition, the Uniting Church, tends to top the list of the fastest decline. And yet the rise of the age of unbelief is not so much a matter of declining intellectual assent and identification: these are symptoms, not causes. The cause is the deeper cultural shift where the core stories of the Christian tradition are incredible, unable to even rise to the level of basic credibility. It is not cultural antagonism towards the church, but unthinking apathy which marks unbelief.

For those of us still active within the church, and seeking after a kind of faith which takes seriously the very real challenges and crises of modernity (not least the midst of the crisis of climate catastrophe), the church itself lives a disappointing life. Driven by a commitment to the big story of the West,³ the churches now find themselves robbed of the credibility which enabled them to make such significant contributions to civil society, and to provide a home for the metaphysical wanderings of everyday people. This needs to be acknowledged and not ignored. The church has been driven by a daimonic drive to tell and embody the story of Jesus Christ, the foundational figure of Western culture itself, primarily as a story that the church itself owns. Its own disappointment (registered by insiders and outsiders alike) has led instead to the church’s death in cultural terms.

Here the truly theological point needs to be made. In the Christian story death is not in itself an end. Rather, through death is the way to resurrection. Resurrection, and faith in it, is not an easy grasping at hope. It is the reversal of hope, a kind of anti-hope. Resurrection begins at the confrontation with death itself: the terminus of all hope, all meaning, seemingly all light and good. Resurrection begins after the quest for hope and meaning has itself run aground. It is not a tragic shock which wakes us up to transcendent Law, but the reaching out of a new kind of transcendent world which comes to meet us. There are much more technical theological terms in which this point could be argued, but the work of resurrection is not merely the arrival of a saviour who aligns us with an inner sense of purpose. Such that our finite lives can be bequeathed to the future heirs of this world. Resurrection is a fundamental interruption of this world and our place within it. Rather than attuning us to the hidden music of this world (for which the modern person always seems to be seeking), resurrection attunes us to a sound which makes the melody of this world seem slightly out of tune.

The faith which is capable of allowing us to face death, in other words, is not faith in the spirit of youth which will inhabit the mythic depths of this world — led, we hope, by the trace of our example. Our lives are far too disappointing, too filled with failure for that. The faith which overcomes death rests in the assurance that the transcendent world is not secret, but futural. It is a looming spectre set in the distance ahead of us. What we bequeath in passing on faith is not the assurance that this life and this world can be navigated with a clear sense of meaning, but that before us is an open future in which all will be well.  Here the mere archetype of a saviour who structures the collective unconscious of culture cannot do. Only the saviour who themselves greets us from an open future, and beckons us into that world will do. From this the churches ought to take their cue: to acknowledge and confess that they are not-yet the body of Christ, and this is precisely what defines them as the church. Indeed others may have travelled more quickly towards the future than the disappointing communities we call churches.

The churches now must go the way of death, and see what world is calling them out beyond. Much of the yearning for a saviour is not merely to fulfil our present lives, but to transform and renew our lives as something different. A higher purpose not as something clear and given, but as an open future which is discovered and made. The church’s task, then, is only ever to be the signpost pointing the way ahead. Much of the modern rejection of belief is a rejection of the given nature of belief, as a static and decided thing. This is not the faith in resurrection which ought to animate the church: as those who are not tellers of a story, but those told into existence by the story itself. The church’s task is to invite people into a story that the church itself does not own, and so cannot control how this story works its way through finite and disappointing communities. This openness to how the story retells itself to transform individuals, communities, and the world itself offers a word of hope because our limited existence is never a final world. Even death is never a final world. Resurrection is always the final world. The church, then, ought to be the ones who invert in a hopeful tone the gatekeeper’s words from Kafka’s parable: “this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to open it.”

1.  A “volume 2” of the earlier Ego & Soul (despite the named reticence to invoke the language of “soul”).

2.  "My team won easily," Carroll says with pride — imagine the disappointment to find he goes for Essendon.

3.  A story, of course, which cannot be told without moving well beyond the boundaries of “the West.” Particularly with the rise of World Christianity.