Freud wasn’t surprised when Hitler marched into Austria in 1938. He thought we all secretly long for a tyrant and that sooner or later a tyrant will come, if not Hitler someone like him.
As Mark Edmundson points out in The Death of Sigmund Freud, Hitler and Freud actually lived in Vienna at the same time for a few years in the beginning of the century, though there’s no record of them meeting—Freud an up-and-coming doctor and intellectual, Hitler a down-and-out artist sometimes living on the street. Maybe Freud passed Hitler on the curb once and tossed a coin into his hat.
Freud wasn’t surprised that so many Austrians would cheer and cry, joyous, when Hitler returned and took over the country, because he knew that deep down we all long for a strong man, a leader, to think for us, to relieve us of the strain of living with the complexity of our lives.
We want someone we can put our absolute trust in so that we don’t have to think anymore. We want a leader, Freud thought, who gives us permission to release our basest impulses, our strongest feelings, because then we don’t have to work so hard to restrain and channel them. We want someone to lift us out of the ordinary, day-to-day work of living in the world the way it really is. We want more excitement.
For Freud the work of psychoanalysis is to make that desire known, to bring it out into the open, so that it won’t act on us unconsciously. There is no magic solution. There is no hero.
Freud argued, too, that the God of the Judeo-Christian religion is much the same kind of tyrant, an all-controlling father who both represses and frees us, a Sky-God who doesn’t want us to think for ourselves—and too often Freud is right. Too often Christians believe that when they surrender their will to God, they are forever absolved from responsibility for their own freedom, intellectually and morally.
But this isn’t the God at the heart of the Gospels. This isn’t the God who hangs on a cross.
German Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and German Jesuit Alfred Delp were both arrested and executed for their resistance to the Nazi regime–they sacrificed their lives–and not out of faith in a monarchical God but out of faith in a God of such fierce and courageous tenderness that he gave himself entirely away. To follow Christ, they believed, they had to give themselves away.
Bonhoeffer and Delp didn’t fight tyranny on behalf of a tyrannical God who dominates and controls us but on behalf of a loving God: on behalf of Christ, our true and gentle brother, who even when he rose and appeared to his friends appeared so subtly and fleetingly that in his generosity and tact he gave us the freedom to ignore or forget or misinterpret him, and then to walk away.
God lets himself be pushed out of the world onto the cross, Bonhoeffer wrote from prison, as we awaited execution:
He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . . Christ helps us, not by virtue of his omnipotence, but by virtue of his weakness and suffering.
This is a remarkable insight, born out of Bonhoeffer’s own suffering in the face of the false God of Nazism, exactly the God that Freud analyzes and urges us to reject. Bonhoeffer rejects the Fascist oversimplification, too, and by grounding himself in the Gospels, in their plain narrative of the Passion, of what exactly happens on the Cross:
Our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us. The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. The God and with God with live without God.
Taken out of context this could almost be seen as an affirmation of atheism. What Bonhoeffer is describing is not a ruthless king, not the repressive father, but a man, the true man, the real man, who allowed himself to die.
Bonhoeffer didn’t believe that Christ had abandoned him. He believed that Christ was with him even in prison and especially then, and that he would always be with him, in death as in life, and finally beyond death, forevermore.
“Surely this man was the Son of God,” the centurion says in Mark, when he sees “how Jesus breathed his last.”
Jesus is the Son of God not because he got down from the cross but because he didn’t.
What does this mean? What does it mean for those of us who are anxious and afraid because of what’s happening now in our country and all over the world?
That the Incarnation is real and complete. That the Lord will be us even unto the end of time–not a God who will solve all our problems, not a God who will always give us what we want, not a God who will love only us worthy few, but someone far greater and more marvelous still: Emmanuel: God with us. All of us. In our sorrow and our joy. In our triumph and our grief. Not thinking for us but thinking with us. Not ignoring our suffering but sharing in it.
The God who in his love will never restrict or coerce or force us.
The God who in his love will never leave us.