Christianity
The paradox of Christianity is that Christians identified their
God with a lowly, subversive Jew who lived in Judea at a time when that region
was occupied by the Roman Empire, but this religion became that empire’s
official religion in the fourth century. Jews had been awaiting a messiah in
the Davidic line to defeat their foreign rulers and usher in the Kingdom of God
on earth. The Maccabees, a group of Jewish warriors, revolted against the
Seleucid Empire from 167-160 BCE, to end the influence of Hellenism on Jewish
culture, and after the Romans conquered Judea in 63 CE, which had been run by
the Hasmonean dynasty, Jews formed the political movement of the Zealots to
foment rebellion against Rome. Their opposition culminated in the first
Jewish-Roman War from 66-73 CE and in the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Although
those events scattered the surviving Jews across the Mediterranean—at least
those who weren’t captured and sold into slavery—Judaism, the underdog,
arguably defeated Rome in the end—but through selfless Christianity rather than
by Jewish force.
The paradox is solved not by positing Christianity’s truth
and thus a supernatural explanation of its success, but by attending to the
historical context and to the continuation of Jewish syncretism. Christianity combined
Jewish and Greco-Roman cultures. Judaism itself was divided at the time between
Pharisees, Sadducees and various smaller, apocalyptic and ascetic cults
collectively called the Essenes. The Pharisees supplemented the Jewish
scriptures with theological interpretations deriving from Zoroastrianism, such
as the principles of freewill, resurrection of the dead, and heaven and hell
issuing from a divine judgment. Indeed, the name “Pharisee,” often taken to
have meant “set apart,” as in the Pharisees weren’t real Jews because of the Persian influence on them, may instead
have derived from the Aramaic “Parsah,” meaning “Persian” or “Persianizer.” The
Sadducees were less Zoroastrian and confined their thinking to the written
Jewish Law. Both groups were secular compared to the Essenes who congregated in
caves, took vows of poverty, led a strictly communal life, practiced daily
baptism, and wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Jewish side of Christianity, apparent from the Gospel
narratives, is eclectic, combining elements of Pharisaic, Sadducee, Essenic,
and Zealot beliefs and practices. Thus, the compromising function of
Christianity begins at the outset even within
the Jewish side of the synthesis with paganism. Like a Pharisee or an Essene, the
character Jesus speaks at great length of heaven and hell and of the coming
judgment at the End Times, but he also argues over interpretations of the Torah
with legalistic Jews like a Sadducee, and called Pharisees hypocrites, as an
Essene would have done. Moreover, Jesus spent a long time in the wilderness and
lauded the poor like an Essene, but he also selflessly went about healing the
sick and helping feed the poor instead of shutting himself away in a cave. Like
a mystical Essene, Jesus taught in parable form and he said his teachings
contained esoteric meanings that only insiders would understand. He’s baptized
by the Essene John the Baptist who prostrates himself before Jesus. And Jesus
overturned the tables of the money changers and told his followers to carry
swords, like a Zealot.
Of course, the Gospel narratives were written decades after
Jesus was thought to have lived and were canonized only much later, in the
fourth century but officially at the Council of Trent in 1546. But by either
point the Second Temple Jewish sects were no more and Christianity had already
split from rabbinical Judaism, so there would have been no interest in casting
a wide scriptural net to attract different kinds of Jews to Christianity.
Instead, the Jesus depicted in the gospels that feature his Jewishness isn’t
placed squarely in any one Jewish faction. The point of Jesus’s Jewishness in the
Gospels, then, is that Jesus was the perfect Jew who transcended such squabbles
and beat the Jewish sects at their own games.
Between Judaism and paganism there already stood Gnosticism
in the first century CE, a Jewish-Platonist movement and a more philosophical,
anti-natural and even Eastern rival of the universal, ever-compromising form of
Christianity that would become known as “Catholic.” Gnostic Christianity was
influenced by Plato through Philo of Alexandria, the first century Jewish
philosopher who read the Jewish scriptures allegorically to adapt them to
Platonic metaphysics. Later, in the third century, the philosopher Plotinus
created Neo-Platonism, a religion combining Plato’s philosophy with the Hindu
idea of an impersonal source of all being, which Plotinus called the One and
which is found in our true self through asceticism and ecstatic meditation. Gnostics
were metaphysical dualists who thought that nature was created by an evil or
ignorant deity, and that we’re imprisoned in a domain of corrupting material
forms unless we obtain secret knowledge to save ourselves, knowledge supplied
by a higher, transcendent and benevolent God. Aspects of Gnosticism are
apparent in the Pauline epistles, which display little interest in the
historical Jesus and in which Paul proclaims that he received gnosis, of saving
knowledge, from a vision of the risen Christ. Gnosticism is found also in the
Gospel of John in which Jesus is depicted as a heavenly revealer, a
representative of the divine light against the darkness of godless nature. In
the third century, Manicheanism, too, represented a rival form of universal
religion, combining Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity. According to
Jennifer Hecht’s book Doubt, while Manicheanism
was eventually condemned as heresy, this religion’s enormous popularity, in
Persia, the Roman Empire, India, and China astonished Christians, forcing the
Church to adopt Eastern ideals of asceticism to meet the public demand for
otherworldly spirituality.
On the Greco-Roman side of the union, there were the Mystery
Religions and the fact of the polytheistic Roman Empire itself with its bias
towards universalism and expansionism, as well as its tendency to worship its emperors
as gods, according to the imperial cult. The Mystery Religions were similar to
Gnosticism in that they were underground schools, featuring rituals that provided
the initiate with esoteric knowledge of the nature of reality and of his or her
ultimate purpose. Specifically, according to the New Testament historian Samuel
Angus, “common to all the Mysteries was the faith in communion, or
identification with God.” This was achieved in various ways, such as through
ecstasy or enthusiasm brought about by vigil, fasting, whirling dances, or
hallucination. One of the forms of divine union was deification or apotheosis,
the initiate’s literal transformation into a deity. For example, according to
Angus, there was “the God-Man conception,” which rose from Eastern religions
like Hinduism and Buddhism. The Mysteries conceived of deification in three
interrelated ways: “mystic identification with the tutelary” or divine
guardian, “endowment with deathlessness and transformation into the divine
substance,” and “the divine indwelling, by which the material man became
spiritual.” As Angus points out, the second form is apparent in the sacramental
meal, called the Eucharist, which Christians took over from the Mysteries,
while the third form “was so conspicuous in the mystical aspects of Paulinism,
and still more in the thought of the Fourth Gospel.”
Thus, the Mystery Religions transmitted Eastern monism to
the West, via the routes opened up by Alexander the Great. That form of
spirituality thrilled the Romans whose native religion was a comparatively stale
and contractual transplantation of Greek polytheism that depended on the correctness
of practices rather than on faith or dogma. Ancient Roman religion wasn’t meant
to fire the imagination or to call for existential questioning, because this
religion had to be neutral enough to accommodate the various cultural sectors
of the empire. Perhaps because Roman soldiers faced death on the battlefield,
they needed a more uplifting religion and so many of them gravitated to the Mystery
Religion of Mithraism.
To make sense of this, consider that if religion generally in
the ancient world was akin to a modern company and brand, an imperial religion must have been like a transnational corporation. We know from the
arts that when you try to please everyone, the quality of your work declines.
This is true of movies, television, music, novels, fashion, architecture,
comedy, and virtually every other field of production that has an aesthetic
aspect. The more potent the point you wish to make, the more you will alienate
some portions of your potential audience, and so your niche must narrow. To
reach the broadest possible audience, you must ensure your content doesn’t
offend the consumers by presupposing that they have much intellectual curiosity
or background knowledge. If you’re running a massive franchise, your best bet
is to produce cheap merchandize or insipid entertainment that the masses can
afford or easily digest and to fill your storefronts with Muzak, and if you’re
running an empire that spans numerous cultures, you’ll want a bland,
inoffensive ideology to unite the peoples that you control and protect. While
this approach works collectively, at the societal level, it doesn’t work for
individuals: it enables people to function in their roles as conquerors or
conquered, but it doesn’t inspire them to transcend their apparent limitations
or give them an existential reason to go on living. This is where the Mysteries
and Christianity entered the picture of the declining Roman Empire. Note that
the Roman Empire needed an external source of spiritual vitality, whereas the
Persian Empire didn’t, because Roman culture was largely inauthentic, having
been borrowed from the Greeks, whereas the Persian religion was based on a
vision by the indigenous prophet Zoroaster, although he would have been
reforming the prehistoric, polytheistic Indo-Iranian religion.
The Christian Synthesis
But now we need to consider how the Jewish and pagan
elements came together to form
Christianity. The earliest Christians were Jews, but after the destruction of
Jerusalem in 70 CE, Christians were forced to disavow and even to demonize
Jews, to demonstrate their independence to Rome. Thus, even while the Gospel of
Matthew has Jesus defend every jot and tittle of the Torah, the Gospels—from
Mark to John—lay the blame for Jesus’s execution more and more on the Jews who
were supposedly jealous of Jesus’s popularity, not on the Romans who actually would
have carried out the crucifixion. Nevertheless, early Christianity was Jewish
in its apocalyptic theology, including its linear, progressive view of time.
Also Jewish were the seditious implications of the early Church’s ascetic principles
and the interrelations between Christian scriptures and Jewish ones. Thus, early
Christians thought of Jesus as a Jewish prophet and messiah.
But Christianity also plainly adapted pagan elements, three
of which are crucial. First, Christianity offered salvation to everyone, not
just to Jews or to those who adopt Jewish morality. Paul wrote to his Christian
communities that Jesus fulfilled the law and initiated a new covenant, one
requiring mainly faith in the power of Jesus’s sacrificial death to atone for
everyone’s sins until the end of time. In the gospels, Jesus goes out of his
way to aid pagans and the poor and disadvantaged, because his message was
understood to be universal. After he rises from the dead, he exhorts his
disciples to convert all nations to the Christian faith.
Second, Christianity is infamous for contradicting itself by
being both monotheistic and polytheistic. The incoherence of that theology only
lends it a numinous aura for those willing to trust in it. The monotheistic
contention, deriving from Judaism, is that the persons of the Holy Trinity
share a metaphysical, divine essence, while the polytheistic point is that the
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are nevertheless separate divine persons. Thus, if
you think a god must be a person rather than an impersonal force or shared
essence, you’re forced to conclude that Christianity is polytheistic. Its
virtual polytheism continues with its cult of holy Mary, mother of God, and
with its plethora of saints who are likewise individually sanctified.
Third, the figure of Jesus Christ wasn’t a messiah in the
expected mold. Instead, Jesus was eventually worshipped as the mortal incarnation
of God. Instead of merely defeating one earthly empire, Christians believe
Jesus died to save all of humanity from the enemy of death itself, and from
everlasting torment in hell. Judaism was and still is aniconic, meaning that
Jews forbid even a representation of God, to avoid the temptation of vainly
supposing we might have some power over God by way of our theological knowledge.
The names of God were guarded by the High Priest and Jews preferred to speak of
God in euphemisms. To imagine that a human person could be literally the Jewish
God would have been the height of blasphemy, if not of lunacy. But the
Mysteries Religions such as the cult at Eleusis already offered a more mystical
theology according to which God is everywhere and is thus in each and every one
of us. We merely have to purify our consciousness to recognize our divine
potential, as in Jainism.
The gospels might even have been read initially as
allegories or metaphors, not as historical records. The point would have been
for the Gnostic or Essene to recognize his or her “Christ-like” potential, to
die to the fallen world and be reborn in a higher one, with an elevated
perspective. This would indeed have been the Gnostic interpretation of the
Catholic gospels, since the Gnostics had little use of an historical Jesus,
because they believed the transcendent God can appear at any time in spiritual
visions, as he was supposed to have done to Paul. This is how anyone can be
saved even without having met a historical savior. Sacred knowledge was what
was freely transferable, for the Gnostic, and so this knowledge was God’s
method of redeeming his Creation. By contrast, not even the risen Christ
lingered on the earth, since he was said to have ascended to Heaven only 40
days after his crucifixion. Indeed, the allegorical interpretation of the Bible
was forced on the Church Fathers by the challenges of Gnosticism and Marcionism,
since the Gnostics pointed out that the Christian God was evidently different
from the Jewish one, that indeed the latter seemed more like a demiurge or devil,
and Marcion rejected the entire Old Testament. In the second century, Justin
Martyr defended the Church’s continuity with Judaism by interpreting the tyrannical
or otherwise problematic portions of Jewish scripture as allegorically pointing to Christ. Clement of Alexandria and his
student Origen followed suit and read the Bible as consisting largely of symbols
that had literal, historical meanings for the illiterate masses, and deeper, often
Platonic meanings for Christian intellectuals.
In any case, Gnosticism and Marcionism lost out to the
Catholics who did indeed teach that Jesus was a historical figure as well as
humanity’s savior who was identical with God. The historian Elaine Pagels
explains the political dimension of this conflict which led to the persecution
of Gnostics as heretics. A spiritual savior which can appear anywhere at any
time is antithetical to creating a religious institution with central authority
over the flock. If Christ could appear to Paul, he could appear also directly
to Tom, Dick, and Harry. This was the Gnostic point—although being Platonists, that
is, elitists, Gnostics were also cynical about the masses’ chance of enlightenment,
because most people evidently prefer to remain lost in the haze of material
distractions. But as the decades passed and the end of the world hadn’t arrived
as early as expected by the apocalyptic Essenes and early Christians alike,
Catholics would have been pragmatic in realizing that the growing Christian
movement had to be organized if it was to survive, especially after the fall of
Judaism which left Christianity at the mercy of Rome. Therefore, to justify
their political power over Christians, the fathers of Catholicism would have
emphasized or even invented the historical Christ, perhaps lifting the heart of
the gospel story from the Suffering Servant metaphor in Isaiah 53, since they
could then trace their authority to the transfer of power from Jesus to his
disciple Peter, whom they regarded as the first pope. Those so-called Christians
who fell outside the organization that spread from that localized event could
be discredited.
Catholicism became the dominant form of Christianity within
decades after Constantine converted to that religion in 312 CE. By that point,
Christianity was enormously popular, and church hierarchies had already
developed. The name “Catholicism,” which means “generally, universally, or
according to the whole” has a curious implication hiding in plain sight. Christians
point proudly at the swift rise to power of their religion, from its humble
origin as a movement that glorified the poor and downtrodden to an imperial
power a few centuries later that converted the very empire that had conquered
the Jews and crucified Jesus. The rather democratic assumption there is that the
greater an ideology’s reach and popularity, the more likely that set of ideas
is true. On the contrary, we might think, the truth is hard to understand, as
is clear from mass ignorance of modern science, and the presence of God in
nature should be shocking, not comforting. To be sure, Catholicism soon enough
dominated, but that kind of popularity and power should be inherently
suspicious.
Christianity’s historical triumph was only the latter stage
of a process of appropriation and compromise that began with the Yahwist
faction eight centuries before Christianity. To grow to achieve monotheistic
status, Yahweh first had to absorb the powers of the Canaanite pantheon in the
Jewish imagination. That’s why “El” lost its meaning as the name of a distinct
deity and became a generic term for “god.” Baal was at one time the storm god,
but then Yahweh became identified with the storm, as in Psalm 97, for example:
“Clouds and thick darkness surround him; righteousness and justice are the
foundation of his throne. Fire goes before him and consumes his foes on every
side. His lightning lights up the world; the earth sees and trembles.” The
goddess Asherah was assimilated to Yahweh’s Shekinah, to his divine presence
and feminine aspect. And to graduate from being merely the greatest god to the only one,
Yahweh had to take on the cosmic and apocalyptic aspects of Ahura Mazda.
Then in the first century CE, Jews were outmatched by a
pragmatic empire that wouldn’t have scrupled to crucify a Jewish healer and
wise man like Jesus. To reinvigorate their tradition, some Jews began to
combine elements of Greco-Roman culture with Judaism, including the element of polytheism
but also that of the profound Eastern ideas from the Mystery Religions. This
isn’t to say there was a conscious conspiracy, but this kind of syncretism is evidently
what works in a cultural version of Darwinian selection. Nor should this point
about syncretism be confused with the dismissive contention that Christianity
is a cheap copy of pagan dying-and-rising godman cults, as some skeptics and
Jesus mythicists insist. Regardless of whether Jesus historically existed,
Christianity’s synthesis of Jewish and pagan ideas and practices was original
and plainly effective. In the second century CE, Justin Martyr conceded that
Jesus Christ resembled the Greek gods that die and rise again to commemorate the
seasons and crop cycles, but Justin needn’t have worried about the competition because
Jesus’s death and resurrection had no such mundane meaning. Instead, Christians
lauded Jesus’s death and rebirth as a morality tale, the meaning of which
derives from Judaism’s distortion of Zoroastrianism.
Still, Christian syncretism isn’t pretty. Thus, Yahweh was
split apart again to make room for his
only begotten Son and for the Holy Spirit that would guide the Church. Thanks
to the Trinity doctrine, gentiles could pick between monotheism and polytheism,
gestalt-shifting between theological perspectives as the needs arose. Moreover,
the moral and spiritual benefits of Judaism were offered up to non-Jews without
the stark monotheism or the need to labour under an all-consuming legal framework.
And Catholics would hardly stop there. The Eucharist is a pagan
reinterpretation of the Jewish symbol of the paschal lamb. Instead of being just
an animal sacrifice to commemorate Passover, the wafer and wine in the
Christian meal are supposed to miraculously turn into the body and blood of
Jesus, thus creating a union with God in the manner prized by the Mystery
Religions and the Dionysus cult. Jesus’s birthplace became December 25 so that
Christianity could overshadow the pagan festival of the Invincible Sun. Much of
the symbolism of Christmas, including Santa Claus, the Odinized version of
Saint Nicholas, derives from the Germanic Yuletide festival. At around 600 CE,
Pope Gregory wrote a letter to Mellitus, the first Bishop of London and a
missionary to England, telling him that instead of destroying pagan temples, he
could more easily convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity by reusing their
shrines for Christian purposes.
Such borrowing and reworking of mere symbols from pagan
culture or even from Judaism were made possible because the essence of
Catholicism is to be universal at all costs; like water, the Catholic Church
takes the shape of its surroundings to flow onward. More crucially, though, the
fusion of moralistic, apocalyptic, and exclusivist Judaism with the amoral
pragmatism of the Roman Empire entailed a debasement of Jesus’s uncompromising,
otherworldly principles. Saint Augustine advised Christians to plunder the
riches to be found in pagan learning, just as the Israelites were said to have
plundered the gold and silver of Egypt in the Exodus, because otherwise, said
Augustine, pagan philosophy is in the service of devil worship. Christian
eclecticism was the opposite of any puritanical fundamentalism. Thus, Christian
standards declined, especially in the West with the collapse of that part of
the Roman Empire. Monks, nuns, and the priesthood could practice being
Christ-like while the majority of Christians would praise God for creating a
more foolproof method of salvation, requiring mainly the verbal confession that
Christ already did all the work for them. To run the fading empire and manage
the emergencies of the Middle Ages, the Church would need a Just War Theory as
well as some theological rationales for the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the
witch hunts. The Catholic scriptures proved sufficiently malleable and were selected
in the first place to promote a lowering of religious standards, as compared
with the Gnostic texts. Thus, Christian elites were happy to oblige at least
the idea of the Holy Roman Empire, what the philosopher Kierkegaard called “Christendom.”
As we’ll soon see, this secularization of the Church seems to have reached its
nadir in American conservative Christianity.
Western and Eastern Christianity
With that historical context in mind, let’s consider the
meaning of Christian life, which is to be saved from the consequences of our
inevitable sin. We can never be as perfect as Jesus and so we can’t save
ourselves from death and from divine judgment. Whereas the Church may
compromise to provide a sanctuary for the beleaguered masses for two millennia,
God’s moral standards are infinitely high. Taking pity on his doomed creatures
and seeming to salvage what was supposed to be the pinnacle of his Creation,
which he’d apparently botched, God sent a version of himself to pay the price
of sin, to meet his impossibly high standards so that we wouldn’t have to worry
about our fallen nature. We can be redeemed just by accepting God’s sacrifice
of himself to himself. Once we confess that we need such a saviour, and break
down in tears in thankfulness that God loves us even though our inherent behaviour
is hideous in God’s sight, we’re regenerated by the personal relationships that
form between us and Christ and the Holy Spirit.
At least, that’s the Western
Church’s answer. The Eastern Orthodox Church carries on the Gnostic practices
of eschewing the base notion that Jesus’s death was an all-important god-man
sacrifice, and of calling for escape from nature, or for noetic renewal. The
Eastern Church’s technique isn’t to bow before an ancient saviour but to save
ourselves by becoming God, that is,
by recognizing our godhood through spiritual illumination, as in the Mystery
Religions. Like the Buddha’s path to nirvana, the Orthodox Church offers
therapy to overcome our sinful desires and to liberate our nous, our higher mind, by theoria,
by loving contemplation of religious icons, prayers, biblical allegories,
ritual meals, and experiential knowledge of God. Jesus’s task was only to
conquer death by his resurrection and thus to enable us to improve and rescue
ourselves.
The Western and the Eastern churches each regard the other
as wildly heretical, but somehow the opposite charges of heterodoxy don’t end
in nullification. Clearly, the theological rigmarole of the Western Church’s
creed is a thousand times absurd, but Catholicism has assimilated that absurdity,
too. For example, the Catholic Catechism speaks of the “mystery” of the Most
Holy Trinity, evidently using that word as a euphemism for “absurdity.” There’s
even a Catholic line of argument, going back to the early apologist Tertullian,
according to which the Christian should feel confident about believing that the
Son of God was crucified as a human precisely because this idea is absurd.
Tertullian’s point was that the gospel story is so improbable that it wouldn’t
likely have been a mere fabrication. He seems to have overlooked the fact that
even were this so, a fabricator could exploit the literary preference for
verisimilitude and invent miracle stories, knowing that they’d command faith
for the reason supplied by Tertullian. Moreover, the Catholic creed was formed
not by sheer literary invention, as in the case of artistic inspiration, but by
a commitment to political compromise; the theological self-contradictions
reflect the attempt to please both sides of an issue by ramming opposite
doctrines—or even opposite religions—into each other. And so the fact that
Christian doctrines are self-contradictory or otherwise preposterous is in the
Jewish tradition of mangling Zoroastrian monotheism, to bypass rational thought
and to use religion as a political weapon. The irrationality of a major
religion’s beliefs is like the shoddiness or the toxicity of a transnational
corporation’s products. The point isn’t to admire them but to submit, to buy into the culture and belong
to a social order.
Still, the Eastern Orthodox Church welcomes the apparent
contradictions as indications of Christianity’s mystical power. Eastern
Christianity was strongly influenced by the Greek-speaking parts of the
Byzantine Empire, which preserved the ancient Greek philosophy that in turn
influenced many of Christianity’s founding fathers. Whereas the Western Roman
Empire collapsed in the fifth century, the Eastern side of the empire remained
intact until 1453 CE. Thus, the Eastern Church had the luxury to develop sophisticated
theology that absorbed Neo-Platonism, Manicheanism, and Gnosticism and that
prized mystical visions and ascetic practices. For the Eastern Church, the
point of Christianity isn’t that Jesus did all the spiritual work for everyone
so that to be assured of eternal life we need merely observe some minimal rites
such as baptism, the Eucharist, and verbal confession of sins. Instead, the
ascetic Hindus and Buddhists demonstrated a higher form of spirituality. And so
Clement of Alexandria and Irenaeus, the Bishop of Lyons, taught that Christians
should imitate Christ’s single-minded devotion to God, not out of humble
thanksgiving for any sacrificial payment for sin, but to become deified. As Clement said, in line with the Mystery
Religions, Christ was the divine Logos who became a man so that all people
“might learn from a man how to become God.” Origen likewise taught that by
contemplation, the soul gradually ascends, leaving behind its body and gender
to become pure spirit. God, for this more mystical and philosophical
Christianity, is impersonal rather like the God of philosophers such as
Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas. This God is the absolute,
metaphysically simple source of all things which isn’t therefore itself a thing
that can be said, strictly speaking, to exist or not to exist.
The modern philosopher and East Orthodox theologian, David
Bentley Hart, defends this kind of Christianity against Protestants and
postmodern theologians who tarnish Christianity with their worship of the
Bible, their vulgar personification of God, and their lax, secular standards of
Christian behaviour. For example, the Holy Trinity isn’t split really into
persons, says Hart, but into hypostases, or metaphysically distinct substances
or essences. Thus, God is three distinct substances united by a single,
undivided essence. And Christian literalists such as William Lane Craig reply
that this so-called sophisticated language is obscure to the point of being
vacuous. Indeed, as we’ll see in a moment, mystical philosophy slides into
atheism, since theism is belief in a personal
creator of the universe, and so the Eastern, philosophy-friendly Church doesn’t offer much of a bulwark for
those seeking to avoid secular temptations. What remains are the ecstatic experiences
of a transcendent, supernatural state of being, but these are best captured by
Rudolph Otto’s sobering analysis. Nature’s causal unity and indifference to
life are horrific—at least for those
who haven’t undergone the full ascetic operation of annihilating their ego and
humanity.
Americanism and the Horror of Holiness
Thus, while you might expect Christians to feel equal
because of their notion of original sin, social hierarchies remain in the
Church—and not just between the ascetic professionals and the secularized
laypeople. True, Christianity did promote the value of human equality, since
Jesus overturned expectations about who would succeed in the afterlife.
Specifically, he maintained that earthly and heavenly gains are inversely related,
so that it’s almost impossible for a rich person to please God since the material
wealth naturally becomes a corrupting idol.
But by altering the Zoroastrian conception of hell, possibly
out of what Nietzsche called the resentment that flows from slave morality—that
is, by making hell permanent rather than rehabilitative, the Jesus of the gospels
pushed the decisive social hierarchy into the afterlife. In Christianity, there are the saved and the condemned,
the sheep and the goats, the wheat and the chaff, and the everlasting
destinations after physical death are what divide those groups. The infinity of
punishment for finite sins is of the same order of lunacy as the notion that
there’s one lone, male deity who has always been sovereign over everything for
no reason. Again, the counterintuitiveness serves a purpose, which is to force you to choose to have blind faith or to
lose that gracious gift of salvation. All that’s required is to humble
ourselves and concede that human reason is foolishness to God—even though God
must have supplied us with the capacity for rational thought to enable us to
survive for tens of thousands of years in a variety of hostile environments.
With the mystics, we’re supposed to stand in awe of Christianity’s preposterousness,
construing the illogic not as a sign that a monstrous fraud has been
perpetrated, but as paradoxical evidence of God’s presence in the Catholic
tradition.
However, the Church’s interest in mysticism is superficial.
To be sure, Catholics have their assortment of saintly ascetics who have turned
to mysticism to make sense of their religious experiences, and the Eastern
Church prescribes contemplation of God as a way of purifying the mind. But Christian
escapism operates like the Jewish kind: the implicit
directive is to regard God as absurd and thus as horrific, and to flee divine
matters for as long as possible, seeking refuge in the secular world. Again, the theologian Rudolph Otto captured part of
this message, in his analysis of the idea of holiness. The experience of the
numinous is of the amoral aspect of a holy being. For Otto, the idea of the fundamental
cause of all things ought to humiliate us, reducing our parochial concerns and
frivolous conceits to so much drivel; the creature who recognizes the necessary
incompleteness of its pitiful attempts at rational explanations suffers awe,
terror, dread in the face of this ultimate source’s absolute unapproachability.
Faith in God ought to mean primarily fear
of God, as it does for Jews and Muslims but not so much for Christians, because
the wrath of God was a metaphor for nature’s overwhelming power in the face of
which we’re forced to come to terms with our nothingness, with our stature as
mere creatures. And yet despite the awe, terror, and dread, we’re drawn to this
mystery, because we’re curious to a fault. Like moths to a flame we’re
attracted to something radically alien and indifferent to us which snuffs us
out.
Why, then, do Western Christians especially tend to speak of
the need to love God rather than to fear
him? To avoid the genuine religious experience of God’s holiness—which is as
unhelpful to modern secular concerns
as is an entheogen such as cannabis or peyote. Following the logic and the
illogic of Christianity leads us to realize that the Trinity, the Incarnation,
and the Sacrifice are just repellant enough to legitimize the Church’s secular mission. Dostoevsky captured this
mission in his Grand Inquisitor parable in The
Brothers Karamazov, according to which the Church had to survive somehow to
clean up the mess left by its visionary founder. Christianity is about
confronting the choice between submitting as an admission of weakness and of withholding
faith out of pride, between accepting and rejecting Christianity’s absurdity. God
has consigned us to the wilderness and it’s there that our freedom is tested.
The world didn’t end as Jesus had supposedly predicted and God left the Church
in charge after he ascended to Heaven. The Catholic institution solves the
problem of its shaky foundations by effectively aligning itself with Satan, with
the lord of this world, mythically speaking, by promoting mass slavery to idols
to relieve us of our burdensome freedom.
There’s no clearer proof of this unsettling thesis than the woeful
state of American Evangelical Christianity over at least the last four decades.
After a long, long history of Judeo-Christian co-optations and compromises,
Protestant settlers of the New World found themselves taking on board the
ideology of Americanism. We’ll look further into this ideology soon, since it’s
at the center of the modern secular humanistic solution to the problem of
life’s meaning. But for now, think of Americanism as beginning with the
conviction that every individual should be free to decide how to pursue her
private happiness, as long as she doesn’t deprive anyone else of the same
right. And think of it as ending in the enshrining of capitalism and democracy
as the institutions most conducive to protecting individual liberty. Capitalism,
in turns, ends in vast economic inequality and so in plutocracy; thus,
capitalism supplies the nature of the demagoguery to which democracy is prone to succumbing.
Superficially, therefore, Americanism is utterly
anti-Christian, and when you see the millions of Evangelicals venerating the
narcissistic billionaire Donald Trump, holding fast to their self-destructive
ambitions even as it emerges that Trump is beholden to America’s rival, Russia,
it’s hard to speak in earnest of Evangelicalism as a kind of Christianity. But
when we attend to the Christian subtext, to the direction of Christian escapism, an irony emerges. Evangelicals may
be truer Christians that the saintly
ascetic monks and nuns who shut themselves away from secular society.
Evangelicals seem to take to heart the debilitating horror that the God you
find at the center of self-contradictory Christian theology is empty. Instead
of crippling themselves with religious experience, they prefer to be happy, to
escape God’s evident inhumanity while they can, by busying themselves with the idols
of Americanism, with the Constitution and the American military, wedge issues
and family values, the Republican Party and the free market right to consume
the world’s resources like a parasite.
The interpretation of Western monotheism as a retreat from
religion’s absurdity to the distractions of secularism is consistent with the
philosopher and sociologist Marcel Gauchet’s thesis in his book, The Disenchantment of the World. Gauchet
argued that once the social hierarchies of Neolithic civilization undermined
the holistic, egalitarian, animistic vision of our unity with sacred nature,
religion was forced to undo itself, to make way for the godless, materialistic,
science-centered worldview. Monotheism
was God’s fatal wound, not Nietzsche’s diatribe or philosophical reason. To
understand Gauchet’s point, picture the infinite spirits of primeval animistic
religion, the spirit of this stone or of that leaf, the wise ancestor spirits
that guide the tribe. Now picture these spirits being compressed into a
singularity, and this singularity disappearing like a black hole behind an
event horizon. This is what monotheism eventually accomplished, effectively
freeing or condemning us to live with a mostly absent deity. As Gauchet wrote,
“There is no intellectual access to a God radically separated from the world,
so humans are now on their own, with only the light of their investigative faculties
to assist them before this silent totality that resists their aspiration for
meaning.”
But before God disappeared completely, his dwindling
relevance was preserved by his preference for Jews, so that Jews carried the
dying light of God’s presence in their ritualistic culture. Christianity
completed the deicide, according to Gauchet, by restricting God’s presence even
further to a single man in history, with the doctrine of the Incarnation, and
then killing off that man and thus God. The logic of monotheism is thus one of
localizing and eliminating God, of identifying divine spirits which were once
concrete and omnipresent for the prehistoric animist, with literally no thing, or
with some alleged thing beyond the universe of all things and immune to being
understood by anyone. Perhaps this black hole sun, to borrow the rock band’s
phrase, will one day swallow the world, but until then religion no longer
structures civilized societies and has been relegated to matters of private
faith. It wasn’t that the world fell from God’s grace, but that monotheists
realized that civilization made God obsolete, so these loyalists struggled to
conceive of ways to enshrine vestiges of divinity.
Mind you, Gauchet argues as though history were bound to
unfold according to some metaphysical, quasi-Hegelian logic, but there’s no
such logic. True, organized religions look desiccated next to the mythopoeic
vision of enchanted nature, but this is like saying we individually die as soon
as we exit our early stage of childish wonder. Children experience the world as
a magical place, but they don’t understand much of anything. The same would
have been true of the naïve, prehistoric animists. Moreover, Gauchet’s thesis
has trouble explaining Christianity’s emphasis on the Holy Spirit in Church
history or even on Christ’s resurrection and availability in visions to Paul
and to the Gnostics. Likewise, Islamic submission to Allah in theocracies,
which follows Christianity, seems inconsistent with Gauchet’s claim that
religion’s inner logic ended with Christianity, making God politically
irrelevant.
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