He does
not exist. He is so absorbed by the others that
he does not exist, being dispersed. He gave his
very wholeness = his soul away. He needs them
all to make him whole and to recall who he is
who he thinks. He lives for them and through
them; when he is actively doing this for
someone, he has no room for anyone else, himself
included.
“Himself” is the most important here. He denies
himself to rescue those who succumbed to the
evil. He forgets about food or rest. At night he
prays to God the Father asking Him for strength
and endurance to carry on his own mission. At
dawn he is back, knocking at the bolted from him
door, demanding to be let in, moved by the fear
to be too late to prevent the disaster. He is
told to go away but he insists, unstoppable in
his desire to save no matter what the price is,
even if it is the price of crushing the other’s
will.
His love
is totally unconditional i.e. more perfect than
Christ’s. He has no agenda of doing the will of
God the Father, calling for repentance as the
ground for the forgiveness of sins. His love
does not demand change, it only demands to be
taken and used; the sins are forgiven instantly
without even asking as soon as another agrees to
take him in. Unlike the Love of God that has the
Person of Christ attached to that Love (you want
the Love of God then surrender to Christ – or
better to say Christ is the embodiment of God’s
Love that incudes other things, like judgement)
his love does not have himself [his Self]
attached to it. He is more perfect than Christ;
he is prepared to give his love without himself.
He is
eager to act on implicit behalf of the other. He
does all the work on their change for them; all
they have to do is to slightly nod to his
efforts. He delivers them where he thinks they
must be, leaves them there and then take their
role in the environment that may need their
presence. He is happy to play a vice role – a
vice husband, a vice father etc – those vice
roles feel much truer to him than his real (own)
roles. He has grown into vice roles so much that
at some point they became more real than the
real ones so he can no longer distinguish what
is real, leave alone to remember the reality of
his own life – and in any way “my own life”
sound too selfish and this is why it is unreal.
As
Christ, who delights in imparting to a soul (who
is striving to get rid of own sins to be able to
be with Him) His grace that is changing the soul
into His likeness, the saviour also delights in
the changes he causes in the object of his
rescue activity. Unlike Christ though he manages
to do this without another wanting to change or
to selflessly be with him. It happens in a much
less selfish way; he accepts another as he is
and this is forever, no change is needed. Unlike
Christ, he can be with those who gave themselves
to evil without challenging them. Even if
initially it causes suffering it becomes easier
with time. He sees less and less evil in another
person, calls it “improvement” and credits
himself for it. The evil is in a process of
being abolished – without repentance and without
the hard work of the one saved – the saviour
does all their work for them.
With
passing time not just he lives through the
rescuing of others but also those others, being
absorbed into the space of his own soul
(all-embracing and all-accommodating and without
boundaries anyway) begin living through him and
in him – not as whole persons though but as the
pieces of persons, alter-persons, here and there
– pieces of cruelty, malice, despair, emptiness
– those very things the rescuer has tried to
save them from. They are now living in him,
being hidden within his person. He takes upon
himself the hell of others and gives them a new
life in disguise, unknown even to himself.
--------------------------------------
The grotesque description above was my final
attempt to crack the enigma of “an extremely
good and selfless person” called in clinical
psychology books “a compulsive rescuer” or “a
compulsive saviour”. Such people usually go to
an unprecedented extreme to help others, often
spending all their time doing that; typically,
they seem to be unable to say “no” when they
perceive an explicit or implicit request to help
– or, in some cases, there is no request at all
but the saviour cannot resist his compulsion to
rescue.
I am not
speaking here about those who give all their
money away to charity or about a missionary who
goes to a Pacific ocean island to establish a
hospital there or about my distant relative, a
Russian woman who reportedly was feeding the
German prisoners during the Second World War
because they starved – she and her family had
the bare minimum for themselves and yet she
managed to spare a part to give it to the
enemies of her own people, now securely
imprisoned in a labour camp, simply because she
felt sorry for them. Those examples of different
kinds of charity have one common notion in them:
the sense of freedom. The people there do not
have a compulsion to do good; they are free to
give and to stop giving; a missionary for
example can pack up and leave his island if
feels he can no longer carry on because he is
burnt out or because of the change of
circumstance i.e if the locals there began
hating his activity, for whatever reason, and
want him to leave. Just the same, a charitable
person can choose to place his money somewhere
else if he discovers that those to whom he was
giving were not as poor as they presented
themselves and in fact quite dishonest. I am
quite certain that my great-grandmother also
would stop giving her spared bread to the
Germans if they swore at her and spat into her
face in a response to her attempt to relieve
their condition. Those things are very obvious
but they appear to be beyond the grasp of the
particular type of a compulsive giver I am
writing about. My hero is someone who is not
free but bound to do good; the bondage is
always intimately personal.
I
probably should give a few examples, which, just
like the examples above are well-known to many.
Most people know the phenomenon of a “good
self-sacrificial Christian wife” who does not
leave her abusive alcoholic husband because she
wants “to save him” – he visibly cannot stand
her, regularly beats her up and abuses her
otherwise but she is determined to stay to save
him. Or (a far less known phenomenon) is a “very
kind and selfless man” who is remaining in a
marriage with an extremely emotionally and
physically abusive woman because he fears that
if he leaves he will not be able to prevent the
abuse of their children – it is not likely that
the court will grant him custody over them
because they are not actually his but from the
previous relationship. Or it is a devoted friend
of a narcissist, quietly in unrequited love with
him – a narcissist is trying to save the world
via engaging in some ambitious project and his
friend puts her entire life and resources at his
service because the narcissist is too
disorganized and could not complete anything
without her help.
The
people from those examples above stay in the
abusive relationships “for the sake of a greater
good” – for the sake of saving an abuser or
others connected to him or the world or all the
above. Someone may say that if they are free to
stop doing this and to leave but do not do that
then it is their free choice and there is no
much difference between them and the other three
people whom I described just before, as the
examples of free giving. Theoretically speaking
it is true: the two spouses of the abusive
people and the friend of the narcissist can
leave any moment but they do not do that;
furthermore, such individuals typically reveal
(in private) that they cannot leave
because they are afraid that if they leave those
to whom they are bound will perish, a spouse or
children will perish or (in a case of a lesser
stake) a project will perish. It may sound
self-sacrificial but, in my experience, when the
circumstances change – an alcoholic spouse dies,
children grow up, a project is finished (or
ruined) – the compulsive saviour remains bound
to the abusive subject of their efforts to
rescue or to another one, promptly found.
It must
be clarified that I am not speaking here about
the victims of abuse who either truly cannot
leave the situation, like children abused by
their parents or a housewife with small children
battered to the extreme who is trying to merely
survive until she can leave – in one word not
about those who are truly imprisoned and have no
choice or cannot exercise their choice to leave
their prison yet. I am speaking about those who
appear to choose to walk down into the prison,
to carefully lock the gates and to live there,
determined to never leave the prison and those
who dwell therein.
A
mother and her boy
Much is
written about the phenomenon of a compulsive
saviour, also called “white knight syndrome”,
and I have not much to add to its explorations
by others, from the point of view of clinical
psychology. One and probably the most pervasive
theory argues that “a compulsive saviour”
suffered some kind of emotional trauma in his
childhood that impaired his sense of a normal
self-worth. For example, a boy who is in a
relationship of emotional incest with his mother
would become accustomed to being her “rescuer”
from her suffering caused by her emotionally
unavailable husband, effectively becoming a
vice-spouse or a surrogate spouse.
A
mother, a source of a life, is a god or goddess
for a little child who is expected to satisfy
the emotional needs of the goddess – if he can
do that he is obviously omnipotent, just like
God is omnipotent; if he fails he is shameful
and useless, not necessary because his mother
treats him as such but because her palpable
sorrow, which he instantly feels without
understanding its true cause, fills him with a
fear and shame “I failed to comfort”, “I failed
to prevent”, “I failed to save”. And, if his
mother’s private sorrows periodically make her
emotionally unavailable (emotionally dead) to
him he may experience such periods as “I failed
to keep her alive”. This is why, the theory
goes, a grown man (or a woman) willingly
sacrifices himself without discrimination – the
worst case is the better because the worst is
closer to his childhood experience, not
necessary because of the cruelty of the
emotional exploitation (abuse) but because of
the magnitude of the demanded rescue. The
mother is the worst and the most grandiose case
of a rescue par excellence because she is a
goddess and this is what makes her “the worst
possible and the most difficult case to rescue”;
if a boy could rescue his mother goddess he can
rescue anyone and he must do that, for the sake
of who he was made believe he is.
I cannot
help but make a passing remark here, about a
strange parallel that came to my mind right now
for whatever reason, between the dysfunctional
family, an emotionally absent = “dead” father, a
grieving mother and a boy = a surrogate spouse
and the Egyptian myth about Osiris, the spouse
of the goddess Isis: Osiris is slain by his
envious brother Set, Isis reassembles his body
and conceives from a dead husband a son
Horus who later becomes a rival of Set and a
king. His victory over Set completes the
reconstruction/resurrection of his father,
Osiris.
I have
never thought about that myth in the context of
emotional incest; being taken as such it is
quite chilling. It can be continued like this
then: a little boy, now glorious “king Horus”
spends his life “resurrecting” his father, first
for his biological mother and later for her
countless successors. His manhood then lies in
providing a woman with a vice-spouse, a
strangely blurred figure in which a son, a
father, and a lover are united. Most important
here are the ever-present notions of
self-sacrifice and of an impostor. He sacrifices
himself to resurrect his own father, the true
legitimate spouse of his mother, in himself. Via
doing so he also acquires the omnipotence of his
missing father – the ideal, his and his mother’s
fantasy (a mother hoped to be “saved” by her
spouse and is “saved” by her child instead, thus
the omnipotence is taken from the father and
given by her to his son, again a parallel with a
pagan myth).
From right to
left: Isis, her husband Osiris, and their son
Horus, the protagonists of the Osiris myth,
Twenty-second Dynasty statuette
[Notice
that Horus, being a vice-father ceased to be
human; notice also that Osiris, the real father
is a kind of a statue here, not really alive and
looks somewhat meeker than his wife and own son;
he looks more like son than his son who truly
looks like a spouse of his own mother.
Obviously, I speak only about the impression
this group made on me, totally ignoring the
Egyptian symbolism.]
Horus
and Christ
Returning to a real boy and then a grown man,
his self is being highjacked by the noble [and
thoroughly blasphemous, for a Christian]
self-image, first imposed on him and then
willingly embraced. He is to give not out of the
abundance of the very well developed generous
altruistic self that knows its human limits but
out of his false self-image of an unlimited
omnipotent benefactor, a saviour who takes his
strength not from God – God the Father, Son, and
the Holy Spirit – but out of the compulsive need
to keep alive his father in him, his mother in
him, their relationship (idealised) in him and
countless others in him; if he keeps them alive
he will be alive as well; if he sacrifices
himself = dies he will keep them alive as well
and thus he wins. I am speaking here about the
death of a true Self or, better to say, a
partial death; the true Self is alive as much as
it is necessary to be alive to perform its own
daily sacrifice.
Here we
return somewhat to the grotesque in the
beginning of this story, the strange perversion
of Christ done out of good intentions. Like God,
a compulsive saviour must keep all dear to him
in his memory to keep them alive; like God he
must be always present within them (with them in
his case) to keep them alive; like Christ he
must sacrifice himself to release them from
death. The only difference is that it is a fake.
The proof? – First, Christ actually dies in His
Body on the Cross and a saviour dies
psychologically; this death has no end hence
there is no resurrection. Second, Christ did not
compromise Whom He was/is for the sake of
others. He did not compromise the absolute Good,
Himself for the abolition of metaphysical evil
– on the contrary, he died as a result and for
the sake of the most complete confrontation with
the evil, down to entering hell which, according
to the Church Fathers, swallowed Him as a mere
human and then was destroyed because it came in
a contact with the Son of God, the total
antithesis of the evil. A pathetic tiny cage of
the evil could not hold the omnipotent God.
Here is
a point I have been trying to make many times to
“the compulsive saviours”: if you are
good/servant of God you cannot remain in the
evil situation (endure evil abuse) without
confronting it; even if you do not oppose the
evil physically/visibly the good inside you will
challenge the evil and the confrontation will be
inevitable. Then several things can happen: the
evil may be scared by God within you, reduced or
abolished, it may spit you out or, in an
unlikely case, you may be destroyed by the evil
physically – in an unlikely case because,
thankfully, you are not in a concentration camp
so you can leave when the evil is beyond your
limit or to sever your connection with it by
other means. And here is a typical answer: I am
very good but I cannot leave; I chose not to
confront the evil for the sake of the greater
good; I chose to remain there so the other (for
example, children of an abusive mother) would
have me and my good influence. That “a good
influence” is supposed to come from a fellow
abused who, by the virtue of his choice, has to
inevitably accommodate/bend to the evil
somewhat, for the purpose of remaining with it
and keeping it at bay – and hence in reality he
can provide no “good influence” because one
cannot teach good while compromising with the
evil – this somehow escapes the speaker
entirely. And even if a saviour manages to
convey his goodness in that situation he also
conveys something truly vile: goodness being
imprisoned by the evil with neither willingness
nor hope to escape – unlike the hope of
exercising a choice given by some “bad” person,
“a traitor”, who chose to leave the abusive
system.
Being
examined closely, his conviction, that he can
magically emit goodness in any circumstance, is
probably not surprising. As a boy used to be a
“prisoner of conscience”, of his mother; he has
never willingly left his mother because if he
did, he would “fail” to rescue; if he leaves, he
typically goes for another (substitute) case to
rescue similar to his mother.
There are other very important aspects in his
childhood story, some of them already mentioned
but I will sum up them here. First, his mother,
keeping him a prisoner (an imposter) made him
believe that he succeeds in rescuing her via
his very presence. His presence is enough to
ward away the beasts and to prevent disaster.
Hence it follows that he indeed cannot leave an
abusive situation, especially if some others
(typically “helpless others”) are involved.
Second, he “rescued” his mother for the price of
the denial of who he truly was, not an
omnipotent rescuer of a goddess but merely a
weak child hence the sense of omnipotence.
Third, he took the place of his father hence he
became an imposter and he became accustomed to
this role, of taking the responsibilities and
the place of someone else, even to the point of
becoming them. Paradoxically, the fiction
character feels more familiar and more
comfortable then a real self. Again, this makes
Horus even more the antithesis of Christ Who did
not pretend to be the Father but kept insisting
that He came to do His Father’s will for the
Father’s glory and not for the Saviour’s glory.
Also, it is God the Father Who resurrects His
Son, unlike Horus and a rescuer who “resurrect”
their fathers.
The
flip
So far,
a compulsive saviour appears to be a victim, of
his childhood circumstance and of his
self-image, a somewhat misguided person with
good intentions, used by others and living in an
illusory world of murky relationships. There is
one jolt or turn in his personality though that
remains hidden until the blow of a trumpet of
his personal doom – a saviour remains a good
selfless omnipotent victim only until someone
catches him on something in the realm of the
interpersonal relationship that clashes
with that image. Then a sudden and
unexpected flip-like transformation takes a
place: a saviour-victim disappears giving a way
to a prosecutor who acts and even looks like the
embodiment of that very evil he has been trying
to save the others from.
As an
illustration let us consider a situation when a
saviour, to satisfy the demands of those whom he
is trying to rescue by his mere presence (the
members of his narcissistic family for example),
is “forced” by them to do something that he
promised never to do to a third party, someone
outside of the system
and dear to him, because it would hugely
compromise her interests and their relationship.
Via
continually doing that “something”
that he promised not to do, he is betraying
himself, his promise, the interests of the third
party and their relationship thus exchanging the
betrayal for being allowed to remain a part of
the toxic family so he could continue saving
them and not being spat out.
Being
fearful of losing the third party whose trust he
violated he says nothing i.e. lies to them about
his continual betrayal thus violating their
trust even further. Noteworthy, his “bad”
actions are entirely driven by the fear of not
satisfying = losing both parties. And so it
goes, until the victim of his deception
discovers the truth i.e. the lie, the deception
serious enough to blow away her trust and cause
lasting damage to her sense of self-worth and
also of reality/unreality because the “good
caring man” she has known somehow treated her so
badly i.e. not like a good caring man does.
However, the worst is yet to come.
His
betrayal being uncovered, the saviour then does
something even more alien to his “rescuer”
nature than the actual betrayal: he leaves the
victim in distress, out of shame. Later, being
demanded to explain himself, he rages,
guilt-shifts, and abuses the victim failing to
show anything reminiscent of true empathy. In
one word, he exhibits the behaviour disturbingly
similar to someone he passionately hates: a
narcissist.
The
victim of a saviour then is being left in
dismay, unable to reconcile her experience of
him before and after the discovery of his
betrayal. The very reaction [narcissistic] of a
selfless saviour, to the discovery of his lies,
appears to totally deny who he is = who he was
known to be by her. And, if his actual betrayal
already quite damaged her sense of self-worth,
his reaction to the discovery of his betrayal
hammers her even further down.
Paradoxically, the saviour who has spent his
life saving the victims of self-abuse and of the
abuse inflicted by others, via attempting to
make reparations for others’ sins, now seems to
be unwilling or unable to save the victim of
his own abuse from her despair caused not
just by his abuse of her trust but even more so
by his refusal to engage in the most natural
response a regular human being would have when
he sees the pain he caused to the other – a
heartfelt repentance and reparation. [I.e., no
“saving” is needed here apart from the saviour’s
soul.]
Unfortunately, for a victim and for a saviour,
the unreserved repentance of his evil deed and
the reparation, while being the only means to
return to her the good person she has known, to
the savour means his destruction – in his mind,
the destruction of his flawless self-image.
The
twin brothers
Earlier
this paper explored the probable role of
emotional incest with the mother in making a
child into a compulsive rescuer. The same is
often true for the making of a narcissist who
never truly separates from his mother. Both a
rescuer and a narcissist are assigned an
omnipotent role; both frequently play a role of
a surrogate spouse; if they fail to satisfy
their mothers they “fail” as persons in a grand
sense (i.e. cease to exist) and this is probably
why their rage appears to have an identical
nature (i.e quite primal and deathly, in its
essence and in its intensity).
The
differences are, firstly, that a narcissist
defends against the perceived destruction of his
fake grandiose self, of being a grand person
in essence while the rescuer defends against
the perceived destruction of his fake grandiose
self-image of a grand rescuer, grand in his
actions. A narcissist is made believe that
he is grand as such, by the right of birth,
without doing anything else; the grandeur of his
deeds – any deeds – is determined by who he is,
the grand person. A saviour is made to believe
that his deeds are flawless, grand in their
supreme goodness – and they make him good and
flawless. That means that, when one challenges a
narcissist about his lie, a narcissist may react
in a shameless way as someone entitled to lie
because it is who he is – “Yes, I lied to you so
what?” said with a mocking smile. The immoral
deed, however bad, cannot reduce a narcissist in
his eyes. However, if someone points out to him
that he is a small pathetic liar who lies to
cover his insignificance there will likely be a
rage, as at any time when the word “small” is
being applied to a narcissist.
On the
other hand, if someone points out to a rescuer
that he is flowed (not grand) in the
areas other than his rescue activity he will
take it fairly well but if someone confronts him
about his flowed or evil, if deliberate,
deed that let the other down he is likely
to throw in a typical narcissistic defences
because he cannot act in a deliberately bad way
towards another human being – such a deed would
destroy who he is. He can admit any of his flaws
and misdeeds as long as they have nothing to do
with hurting others, especially deliberately.
A catch
twenty-two for him then is being squashed
between two parties with contrary interpersonal
demands, like a person who “flipped” in an
example in the previous chapter. Trying to
satisfy both, a rescuer inevitably compromises
something beyond him – the objective good and
bad. This is another difference and
similarity between the two: both a narcissist
and a rescuer have their own moral low. A
narcissist measures good simply by how good it
is for himself. A rescuer measures good by how
good it is for the other. [I cannot help but to
compare it with a capitalist and communist
ideology, respectfully.] Both seemingly opposite
measures are relative. I would like to examine
both in comparison with two absolute measures
(commandments) given by Christ: “You shall love
the Lord your God with all your heart and with
all your soul and with all your strength and
with all your mind, and your neighbour as
yourself.”
The case
of a narcissist is quite straightforward: he is
god so he loves himself as such “with all
his heart and with all his soul and with all his
strength and with all his mind”. As for a
neighbour, since he is god he simply expects
(according to his understanding of God) others
to adore and serve to him (what they do between
themselves is beneath him) – and this is all
about the narcissist.
The case
of a saviour is far more complicated. He is
naturally inclined to love his neighbour but
there is one problem here: Christ demands of him
to love his neighbours as he loves himself.
This means that the neighbours and he are
equally valuable to Christ; while He (Christ)
said “Greater love has no one than this, that
someone lay down his life for his friends” he
did not say “Greater love has no one than this,
that someone is engaging in the slow murder of
his own soul by those who abuse him, for the
sake of others”. Because a saviour believes that
he must save others by any means i.e. that
others are more valuable than him he cannot
fulfil this commandment. He also fails the
preceding commandment, “You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart and with all your
soul and with all your strength and with all
your mind” because if he did that, he would be
forced to subject his rescuing activity to God
i.e. to strive to do His will and not his own,
truly (not just in imagination) following
Christ.
Finally,
Our Lord said, “If anyone would come after me,
let him deny himself and take up his cross and
follow me”
and also “If anyone comes to me and does not
hate his own father and mother and wife and
children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even
his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”
Meaning, that one is demanded, first and
foremost, to hate = to deny himself for God,
not for human creatures; to deny the God-given
self for another creature is idolatry. Hence a
narcissist and a compulsive rescuer are two
sides of the same unacceptable for a Christian
thing, two flipsides of a coin: a narcissist
sacrifices others for himself, a true god (pagan
idolatry and blasphemy via self-delusion) and a
compulsive rescuer sacrifices his Self, the
image of God in him (via compromising/bending to
evil), for the others. That is also idolatry and
blasphemy but far better concealed from others
and from himself. I must add that personally I
find the rescuer to be far more potent in the
destruction of others and of himself precisely
because he has genuine goodness in him.
This
increase of evil in a proportion with the
increase of the misguided good is something
truly mind-blowing, something that comes to the
light only when the shadow life of a saviour
comes to light. Truly, the better a human being
he is the more appalling is his deception “for
the sake of good”; the more appalling his
deception the more damage to another soul (and
his own) he does; the more genuine is the
unfortunate victim of his attempts to find a
compromise with the evil the more she will be
stuck, paralysed and unable to decide who he is
– truly bad or truly good because his good seems
to make his bad more monstrous and more potent.
The more a victim tries to reconcile the two the
further she sinks – just like the saviour
himself. She has zero chance to extract anything
meaningful out of the saviour because as soon as
she challenges the motivation behind his
unsightly deeds, he will fly into a
self-image-protecting-rage akin to that of a
narcissist, the very person he hates because he
is so opposite to him. It is exactly the
question about the goodness of his motivation,
not the deeds themselves that throw a saviour
out of the balance.
Not being a
narcissist, he is able to see the vileness of
his conduct providing that it is agreed that
even the most damaging things were done out of
his goodness/selflessness, not out selfishness –
thoroughly rotten fruits from a good tree so to
speak.
And here we come to something very interesting:
selflessness as a measure of good and
evil – contrary to a narcissist for whom
selfishness is the measure.
The
moral law within
As it
was said before, a narcissist measures good and
evil by himself; what is good for him is the
ultimate good and what is bad for him is the
ultimate bad. That effectively makes him a god.
Although it is obnoxious, it is entirely
natural. All small children, before learning the
objective good and bad, measure this by
themselves. Later they learn to subject
themselves to the objective (universal) moral
law and find a compromise between their own
needs and desires and the desires and needs of
others. This is the equality proclaimed by Jesus
Christ “love your neighbour as you love
yourself”. This equality has plenty of space for
a genuine altruism stretching all the way up to
sainthood. A saint is someone who treats others
with a true love that mirrors the Love of God.
Wouldn’t you like the other to love you as God
loves i.e. genuinely, desiring the genuine good
for your soul? A good question, because such
love is not [only] all-embracing but demanding
as well. A saint can spend weeks working day and
night in a hospital taking care of lepers and
the same saint can challenge one of them and
publicly accuse him of doing evil things in the
eyes of God and demand him to change. A saint
can also walk away from someone when he or his
message are not accepted or his help is not
wanted; he can also refuse to help (without
caring what effect it would have on his
reputation) if he perceives that it is not what
God wants him to do. In one word, a saint is
someone who is striving to follow Christ and
thus he is just as uncomfortable for others as
He. To follow Christ means to allow Him to
change his person = self in conformity with His
Own Person. That means that saints were persons;
they had selves which they did not hide and the
palpable presence of those selves in a process
of being conformed to Christ made not less
impact on others than their deeds, sometimes
more and sometimes without deeds altogether.
Just as Christ, a saint is someone who causes
polarization between good and evil in a measure
of his conformity to Christ, preparing the way
to the Lord.
A
rescuer, someone who remains in a toxic
environment at all costs, including a cost of
his own true Self, cannot thus cause such
polarisation; to be able to remain in the evil
environment causing as little turbulence as
possible he hides his true Self. He is akin to a
Christian who was convinced “just to stand near
a pagan statue while someone else does the
sacrifice” for the sake of preservation of his
life for the cost of his betrayal of Christ,
with the difference that a saviour betrays
himself (and thus the image of Christ in his
soul) for the sake of his pagan god, the
perceived good of the other. (It must be
remembered that via doing that he makes himself
incapable of achieving the very thing he
sacrificed himself for, the true saving others.)
Thus, the perceived good for the other
becomes for him the measure of the ultimate
good and the ultimate bad = a god and this
is why, just like a narcissist, he fails to
fulfil the first commandment.
The
loss of Self
It is
commonly said that a rescuer, appearing to be so
self-sacrificial, in his depth is selfish
because his selfless actions feed his grandiose
self-image of a saviour that he is unable to
give up. I think it is very likely indeed,
simply because a rescuer was forced to assume
his grand role while being a child so he grew
into it so to speak. It also means that his
selfishness can be quite unconscious. Yet the
semi-unconscious nature of selfish motives
behind seemingly selfless actions cannot excuse
the harm to others (and to himself) a rescuer
causes – the harm he himself is mostly curiously
oblivious to. The reason for this, in my
opinion, is his habitual detachment from his
Self. [Yet the fact that a saviour is oblivious
to the selfish motives behind his seemingly
selfless actions cannot excuse the harm they
cause to others (and to himself) – the harm to
which he mostly remains curiously oblivious. The
reason for this, in my opinion, is his habitual
detachment from his Self.]
It is
quite simple: providing that a rescuer has a
so-called genuinely good nature (and I have no
reason to believe otherwise at this point) he
can act in a harmful way only if he loses
sensitivity to that harm, to himself first of
all and this is precisely what he does to be
able to remain in a harmful environment and with
harmful (evil) individuals, for the sake of
“saving” them. There is absolutely no way for
even the most virtuous person in the world to
remain unaffected while “sleeping” (sometimes
literally) with the evil. If one partakes
something/unites himself with someone it becomes
a part of him, quite organic with time.
The
evaluation of good and evil happens through the
true Self. If contact with the true Self is
impaired, for the sake of the ability to remain
in an evil environment for the sake of doing
“good” who does the evaluation then? – Yes, the
evil other; the logical outcome of the saviour’s
activity is allowing the engrossed by the evil
others to decide what is good and bad for him –
while he decides what is good and bad for them
from the point of his grandiose self-image
i.e. that it is good for them to be saved by
him (not by anyone else, not by God even) at
all costs and this maxim becomes the motto
of his life. Anyone who tries to take
this motto = the substance of his self-image
away is doomed to experience his grandiose =
narcissistic rage because the rescuer does not
differentiate any longer where he is and where
they are; the narcissistic victim and the
selfish rescuer have become one, bonded by life
in the evil domain. This is why a rescuer who
was caught on lies and deception for the sake of
those he wished to rescue gives the full
impression of narcissist rage. Them (them and
him entwined) and saving them (them and him
entwined) became his measure of good and evil
and his justification; the absolute nature of
narcissist rage perfectly matched the absolute
nature of his attachment to his mission.
[I will
note here that a Christian ‘saviour’ is not
usually as eager to save or to help those who
are not of his immediate circle i.e. family or
work, unlike the Christians in the beginning of
this paper who help those who are in need
without discrimination, simply because their
hearts moved them to do so. This fact supports
the idea of selfishness hidden within
selflessness, in the heart of a saviour – or at
least the idea that he is bound to prioritize
what is beneficial to his self-image over his
true Self. It also supports the idea of the
necessary merging of a saviour with the objects
of his activity – it is easier to merge with an
immediate circle thus; hence satisfying its most
ethereal needs commonly takes precedence over
the most desperate needs of those who are far
away.]
An
inverted bridegroom
The last
paragraph of the grotesque sketch in the
beginning describes the transformation of a
compulsive saviour into one he is trying to
save. It is the exact opposite of the true
Saviour, Christ; one who recognizes Him as his
Saviour, picks up his cross and follows Him is
to be slowly transformed into His likeness. The
key phrase that makes the whole difference is
“one who recognizes Him as his Saviour, picks up
his cross and follows Him”. This is an action of
a free will – to recognize, to accept the cross
and to follow. Such recognition is only possible
if a person clearly sees the Person of the
Saviour, the Christ. The presence of the
true Self, clear and unobliterated, in the
Saviour, and His acceptance of the choice (“yes”
or “no”) by the one to whom He offers Salvation
are the necessary components for the
transformation into His likeness = into the
Salvation = deification.
I did
not make a mistake here: Jesus Christ is
Salvation and He offers Salvation, Himself. To
be saved, one must accept who Christ is.
That means he must accept the very real fact,
that he cannot be [in communion] with Christ =
Salvation unless he begins changing. Salvation
is given to him in advance, via Christ’s
sacrifice on the Cross; to actualise and to
retain it/ to grow into it he must be conformed
to Christ via giving Him his free permission to
change him, with his cooperation. Here two free
wills are acting together. Here also is a clear
recognition of the ultimate good and the
appalling lack of that good in oneself. I.e. it
is the active stretching of a human hand up to
the Son of God, out of his own misery and
inability to do anything by himself – for
himself and for others.
God
is omnipotent but He is also not able to do
anything by Himself here. He is unable to do
anything against a human will, to violate it. He
does not rape a human being with His good –
unlike a compulsive saviour from the grotesque
sketch above.
A
compulsive rescuer is doomed to violate another’s
human will and to deceive because he does not
present himself to the object of his
attempts to save as who he is. If he did,
the one whom he was trying to save and who has
succumbed to the evil would either throw him out
with disgust or run away with a fear or repent,
just as he would do with Christ. To be accepted
by the object of his efforts = to have a chance
to save, a saviour pushes away his true Self and
bends to the one who succumbed to the evil and,
via him, to the metaphysical evil itself. He
accommodates to the evil at the expense of
pushing away his true Self that is the image of
God, ultimately at the expense of his being.
Yes, he “saves” at the expense of being who
he is supposed to be in truth i.e. a feeble
human being who is trying to do the will of God,
and via presenting the false self-image,
of a grand saviour who is prepared to do
anything, even to lose his Self.
Christ
sacrificed Himself, He did not lose Himself
because if He did, He could not sacrifice
Himself – there would be nothing to sacrifice.
Meaning, Christ offered Himself Who is the
Person and the Action as well, two in one,
quantum mechanics, a particle and a wave. A
saviour offers an action detached from his true
Self and thus lacking its source, frozen in a
time and a place – if he did not do that his
offer would not be accepted by the evil. He
gives the wave so to speak and the particle, the
object of his efforts, being unchallenged by
another particle, his true Self, remains the
same. I am speaking here about the absurd
situation when a good-willing husband for
example, being hated by his toxic wife, refuses
to leave her because he must “save” her – but to
be able to stay i.e. to be tolerable to her he
bends to her evil because the open opposition to
her would cause him being thrown out and losing
contact with her, the only way “to save” her. I
did not invent this situation; it’s absurdity
lies in the fact that “to save” a saviour must
first conform to the evil (even if only
superficially or partially) and thus to lose the
very ability to save out of his core, out of who
he is, out of his real Self. If Christ was
to assume this method he would have to throw the
stone at the adulteress to convert Pharisees, or
to save her but not to add “go and sin no more”,
or not to call Pharisees “white washed tombs”
but to commend them for good cleaning, or to
leave the sellers in the temple but to oblige
them to give a half of profit to the poor etc.
In the context of Christ, the perverse
self-sacrifice that is in fact pushing away the
true Self until the contact with it is lost
would be equal to the Crucifixion without Christ
truly being present on the Cross – because the
real Christ was crucified not for what He did
but for Who He was.
The
Crucifixion was the result of His Self’s
confrontation with the evil, not of the clash of
his actions with the other’s points of view.
Hell swallowed Him, not His actions, and was
obliterated by Him, not by His actions. It is
Him, the Saviour, not a saviour who extinguishes
the evil by mere contact with it. A saviour then
has no other choice but to submit to the
Ultimate Saviour, to align his will with His and
that will mean, among other things, to say “no”
to the evil, to walk away, even for the price of
the true losing of oneself, in Christ and for
Christ.