The Little Red Blog

Book: The Darkening Age

{This is more a preview than a review, since I have only just begun reading the book in question.}

I am finally getting around to reading Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age, an account of The Christian Destruction of the Classical World. Ms. Nixey candidly acknowledged that hers was a revisionist view which ran counter to the prevailing views of professional historians; but she insisted on the importance of highlighting what she considered a kind of cultural genocide.

Here, in Nixey’s own words, is the gist of her j'accuse:  

Before it preserved, the Church destroyed. In a spasm of destruction never seen before - and one that appalled many non-Christians watching it - during the fourth and fifth centuries, the Christian Church demolished, vandalized, and melted down a simply staggering quantity of art. Classical statues were knocked from their plinths, defaced, defiled, and torn limb from limb. Temples were razed to their foundations and burned to the ground. A temple widely considered to be the most magnificent in the entire empire was levelled. Many of the Parthenon sculptures were attacked, faces mutilated, hands and limbs hacked off, and gods decapitated. Some of the finest statues on the whole building were almost certainly smashed off the ground into rubble that was then used to build churches. Books - which were often stored in temples - suffered terribly. The remains of the greatest library in the ancient world, a library that had once held perhaps 700,000 volumes, were destroyed by Christians. It was over a millennium before any other library would even come close to its holdings. Works by censured philosophers were forbidden and bonfires blazed.

The results of all of this were shocking and, to non-Christians, terrifying. Townspeople rushed to watch as internationally famous temples were destroyed. Intellectuals looked on in despair as volumes of supposedly unchristian books - often in reality texts on the liberal arts - went up in flames. Art lovers watched in horror as some of the greatest sculptures in the ancient world were smashed by people too stupid to appreciate them - and certainly too stupid to recreate them. The Christians could often not even destroy effectively: many statues on many temples were saved simply by virtue of being too high for them, with their primitive ladders and hammers, to reach.

The destruction chronicled in this book is immense - and yet it has been all but forgotten by the modern world. Many Romans and Greeks [mourned] as they saw their religious liberties removed, their books burned, their temples destroyed, and their ancient statues shattered by thugs with hammers. This book tells their story; it is a book that unashamedly mourns the largest destruction of art that human history had ever seen. It is a book about the tragedies behind the ‘triumph’ of Christianity.

Catherine Nixey was not (and is not) a professional historian. She studied and then taught classics for several years at Cambridge, after which she worked as a journalist at the Times (UK). According to a brief biographical note at Google Books, Ms. Nixey’s mother was a nun, her father was a monk, and she was brought up (as she acknowledges in The Darkening Age) Catholic. Iconoclastic as her book may have been, and as irreverent as her tone unquestionably was, she did not seem to be pursuing an anti-Christian agenda; she believed herself to be correcting the historical record.

The Darkening Age was named a New York Times “Notable Book” of 2018; it appeared on several other “best books of the year” lists. The critical response was, well, mixed. The book was described by one reviewer as "Engaging and erudite...a triumph, offering both a compelling argument and a wonderful eye for vivid detail". Another reviewer praised Nixey for having put together "a finely crafted, invigorating polemic against the resilient popular myth that presents the Christianization of Rome as the triumph of a kinder, gentler politics. On those terms, it succeeds brilliantly." Even such friendly reviewers noted, however, that Nixey’s narrative was one-sided, lacking balance or nuance; it seemed at times to be a kind of Gibbon redux, a revival of Edward Gibbon’s classic effort to blame Christianity for the “fall” of Rome and for the alleged “Dark Ages” which followed.

But then there were the critics, the reviewers who could barely constrain their indignation over Nixey’s “shoddy work”. A relatively kind critic called the arguments advanced in The Darkening Age “problematic, depending on quite a bit of nifty footwork.” Nixey was said to have relied on “broad generalizations based on limited evidence.”  She was lambasted for “overplaying her hand with her fierce tone and gross exaggeration". The book, critics said, “lacks any historical structure”; Nixey was accused of making “some serious historical slips.” She was chastised, as mentioned above, because The Darkening Age "does not seek to present a balanced picture." And because it was "a book of generalizations.” One critic added that “Nixey ends up endorsing the long-debunked view of the Middle Ages as a period of blind faith and intellectual stagnation".

According to the academic specialists, Nixey had ventured "into areas where she is clearly out of her depth". The resultant book was "a shoddy work that fails to make the grade even as a polemic." Nixey’s attempt to blame Christianity for the “supposed destruction” of classical culture was "simply dishonest," evidenced by how she repeatedly “misrepresented both primary and secondary sources.” One critic summed up the dissenters’ view of The Darkening Age: “The book is a travesty.”

We have, then, a controversy. What I have read so far of The Darkening Age is well-written, lively, and candid in its bias (or biases). That Ms. Nixey got on so many scholarly nerves does not seem to have hurt the book’s popularity with the non-scholarly public, which was quite obviously her intended audience. Nixey’s latest book, published earlier this year, is Heretic: Savior, Lover, Killer—The Many Lives and Deaths of Jesus Christ. One can only imagine the savagery with which it is likely to be greeted.

________________________________________ 

The Darkening Age - Wikipedia

Sunday Sermon: "Eating of the Devil's garbage"

{John Chrysostom was a fourth-century bishop of Constantinople, a noted Christian apologist, and a ferocious opponent of Jews and Judaism. Nicknamed “Golden Tongue” for his oratorical prowess, he is recognized as a saint by both Eastern and Western denominations, notwithstanding his having written what James Parkes has called ‘the most horrible and violent denunciations of Judaism to be found in the writings of a Christian theologian,’ no small accomplishment itself. In the following excerpt, Bishop Golden Tongue explains why, even though Jesus had already conquered Sin, Death, and Satan, those things continued to exist and to plague the Christian faithful almost as much as did the Jews. This is patristic theodicy at its finest.}   

St. John Chrysostom:

Yesterday we began our sermon concerning the Devil. But others, while these matters were being discussed here, took their places in the theatre, and were looking on at the Devil's show. They were taking part in lascivious songs; you were having a share in spiritual music. They were eating of the Devil's garbage: you were feeding on spiritual unguents. Who pray decoyed them? Who pray separated them from the sacred flock? Did the Devil deceive them? How did he not deceive you? You and they are men alike; you and they have the same soul and the same desires, so far as nature is concerned. How is it then that you and they were not in the same place?

Because you and they have not the same purpose. On this account they indeed are under deception, but you beyond deception. I do not say these things as discharging the Devil from accusation, but as desiring earnestly to free you from sins. The Devil is wicked; I grant this, but he is wicked for himself, not towards us—if we are wary. For wickedness is destructive to those alone who hold to it. Virtue is the contrary. Virtue is not only able to profit those who hold to it, but those nearest at hand too. Evil is evil in itself, but good is also good to others.

Those in the theatre were deceived, but you were not deceived. This is the proof that, in every case, the purpose is master. Use this method of proof; if you see a man living in wickedness, and exhibiting all kinds of evil, while blaming the providence of God, and saying that by the necessity of fortune and fate and through tyranny of Demons our nature is beset, and on all sides shifting the blame from himself to the creator who provides for all: silence his speech not by word, but by deed, showing him another fellow servant living in virtue and forbearance. There is no need of long speeches, no need of a complex plan, nor even of syllogisms. By means of deeds the proof is brought about. Say to him: you are a servant, and he is a servant; you are a man, and he is a man. You live in the same world: you are nourished with the same nourishment under the same heaven: How is it that you are living in wickedness, he in virtue?

On this account God allowed the wicked to be mingled with the good. He did not give one law to the wicked while appointing another world as a colony for the good, but mixed these and those, conferring great benefit. For the good appear more thoroughly approved when they are in the midst of those who try to hinder them from living rightly, and who entice them to evil, and yet keep hold of virtue. For there must be also heresies among you that they which are approved may be made manifest among you.

Therefore also on this account God has left the wicked to be in the world, in order that the good may shine the brighter. Do you see how great is the gain? But the gain is not owing to the wicked but owing to the courage of the good. On this account also we admire Noah, not because he was righteous nor yet because he was perfect alone, but because in that perverse and wicked generation he preserved his virtue, when he had no pattern of virtue to follow, when all men invited him to wickedness; and he went his whole way contrary to them, like some traveler pursuing his way while the great multitude is being borne along vehemently. On this account he did not simply say Noah was “just” and “perfect,” but added “in his generation”—in that perverse, desperate generation, when there was no acquisition of virtue. ¹

Trees tossed about by contrary winds become stronger. There is gain to the wicked from their mixing with the good. They feel confusion, they are ashamed, they blush in their presence; and even if they do not abstain from evil, yet nevertheless they dare what they dare with secrecy. And this is no small thing, not to have transgression publicly committed. For the life of the others becomes the accuser of the wicked. For the righteous man is grievous to the wicked, even when beheld, and it is no small beginning of amendment to be tormented at his presence. If the sight of the righteous man did not torment the wicked, if they were not stung and pinched in conscience at his presence, there would be but little hindrance to indulging in wickedness with pleasure. Do you see how great is the gain both to the good from the wicked, and to the wicked from the good? On this account God has not set them apart but has allowed them to be mingled together. ²

Our argument about the Devil is the same. God has left him here in order that he might render you the stronger, in order that he may make the athlete more illustrious, in order that the contests may be greater. ³ When therefore anyone says, “Why has God left the Devil here?”, say to him: “Because the Devil not only does no harm to the wary and the heedful, but even profits them, not owing to his own purpose (for that is wicked), but owing to their courage who have used that wickedness aright.” The Devil even fixed upon Job, not that he might make him more illustrious, but in order that he might upset him. On this account he is wicked both because of such an opinion and such a purpose. But, notwithstanding, he did no harm to the righteous man Job; the Demon showed his wickedness and the righteous man his courage.

“But the Devil does upset many,” says one. But that is owing to their weakness, not owing to his own strength. Direct your own intention aright and you shall never receive harm from any, but shall get the greatest gain, not only from the good but even from the wicked. For on this account, God has suffered men to be with one another, and especially the wicked with the good, in order that they may bring them over to their own virtue. ⁴

The power of the righteous has its force not in the magnitude of their number, but in the grace of the Spirit. There were twelve Apostles. The whole world was in unbelief. But those twelve turned the whole world to themselves. For this reason, God left the wicked in the midst of the good, that since they are of the same nature as the righteous, they may also become of the same purpose.

__________________________________________

Three Homilies on the Devil - Part 2 - Sermon Index

¹ God, in other words, graded Noah on a curve, which, to be honest, is as good a fate as any of us can expect.

² A strategy (mixing the wicked with the righteous) akin to filling a barrel with a mixture of good apples and rotten apples. What could possibly go wrong?

³ Human existence, then, is conceived as a sporting match in which the stakes are eternal blessedness or eternal damnation. Feel free to place your bets at the counter with M. Pascal.

⁴ Chrysostom’s argument can also be directed against what John Milton called “cloistered virtue,” that is, to be proven, virtue must be tested and tried.

Wednesday with Pascal: What Would Jesus Demystify?

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat continues to rummage through various accounts of early Christian history. Recently, he was surprised, but intrigued, to find an historian of religion claiming that—well, allow William Arnal to speak for himself.} 

“In a sense, Jesus himself is irrelevant.” (William Arnal)

William Arnal asserts, reasonably enough, that historians must demystify the narratives they investigate. "And then a miracle happened" is not a phrase in the historian's lexicon. Joshua and the Israelites may have triumphed at Jericho, but no reputable historian would postulate that they were aided by God’s stopping the movement of the earth around the sun (or, as scripture portrays it, the sun around the earth); nor can historians take at face value Mohammed’s ascension into heaven on a horse. Arnal explains:

The idea of mystification is pretty simple. The kinds of things that we tend to call “religion” routinely invoke entities who don’t obey the ordinary laws of nature: gods, devils, spirits, angels, what have you. Since religious behavior and thought concerns itself with these kinds of beings, what we call religion appeals to this kind of supernatural activity as its basis. And so, it situates its authority outside of this world. It situates its authority outside of the normal chains of cause and effect that we use normally to, to assess non-religious things. The ways that I assess my neighbor’s activity or, say, contemporary politics, are naturalistic; they don’t invoke explanations from beyond this world. Whereas religious behavior and religious artifacts, documents, and so on, often invoke some authority that’s grounded in chains of cause and effect outside of nature.

To paraphrase Sherlock Holmes: once you’ve eliminated the supernatural, whatever is left, no matter how unlikely, is what the historian must work with. To do otherwise—that is, to incorporate supernatural events or divine intervention into one's historical narrative—is to be a believer, not a historian. In other words, as Arnal says:

From a religious studies perspective, we’re looking at religious artifacts as human artifacts. As a result, we have to put aside any kind of explanations that rely on extra-human agents or non-natural chains of cause and effect. For example, take the story of Jesus walking on the water. Jesus walks on the Sea of Galilee out to boat to his disciples. I could try to explain that story as follows: Jesus was the son of God and he walked on the water because he was capable as the son of God of suspending the ordinary laws of nature, and the Gospels record this episode because it actually happened that way. In that case, obviously, I am not demystifying. But the mystification internal to the Christian tradition is so deep and pervasive that it finds other ways of working itself out that aren’t quite as blatant but are just as mystified. There are scattered throughout extensively historical works on the origins of Christianity, their appeals to charisma, appeals to conversion, the enthusiasm of conversion, appeals to belief, and so on. All these are actually part of the rationalizing structure, internal to early Christian discourse, that have been shorn of blatantly supernatural elements, but those elements have been absorbed structurally.

History is written by the winners. Ever since Christianity vanquished its pagan rivals, our histories have acknowledged Christianity’s moral, intellectual, and spiritual superiority, the inspiring faith of its martyrs, the grudging admiration of its enemies, etc. All that, says William Arnal, is bad enough, but what is worse, he complains, is “the tendency of so many scholars to get really hung up and write thousands and thousands and thousands of pages on the so-called historical Jesus.” From Arnal’s perspective, the “historical Jesus” is a red herring that distracts us from realizing that the Christian religion in no way depended on the historical Jesus of Nazareth, whose life, stripped of supernatural accretions, was unremarkable: itinerant Galilean preacher on a mission from God (or so he thought) causes disturbances and controversies in Jerusalem around the time of Passover and is promptly and efficiently dispatched by religious and secular authorities, end of story.

As Arnal sees it, only belief in Jesus’ divinity—a belief denied to the historian qua historian—makes his life of interest:

The enterprise of the historical Jesus is basically the recognition that the Gospels are filled with all kinds of supernatural details, and that, as historians, we can’t take these details as, well, gospel truth. It’s really an exercise in paring away from the Gospel stories the implausible features of the stories, and seeing what’s left, trying to make a coherent picture of Jesus the human being as he really was 2000 years ago, before Christians overlaid all these theological elements on top. This exercise originated as part of an effort to critique dogma. Its origins are very critical. But since the 19th century, the historical Jesus scholarship has really been a theological enterprise. The mystification central to it is the idea that what really happened in the life of the human person, Jesus, is incredibly, intrinsically important—if, that is, Jesus is the son of God.

Christianity was not established by the historical Jesus, Arnal reminds us:

The mystification insinuates itself even as we pare away all these supernatural details. The reason that so many scholars have written so many pages, pinning down exactly what Jesus said and did, is that, behind this, is the assumption that Jesus is the cause of Christianity. But that is a terrible historical assumption. The cause of Christianity is the appropriation of the figure of Jesus subsequent to his death. You’ve got religious historians incorporating a fundamentally theological, mystified assumption that Jesus is the source of Christianity, which is a doctrinal claim. It’s a theological claim, but it becomes incorporated in supposedly historical work. It’s a serious struggle to guard against incorporating Christian theological suppositions in one’s historical work.

When all is said and done, concludes Arnal, “In a sense, Jesus himself is irrelevant. I believe that there was a historical person, Jesus, on which the gospel stories are based, but other scholars do not. We could go around and around on this question, but what I think is interesting about it, is that the answer to that question makes almost no difference for how any of us understands the origins of Christianity. Skeptics could be 100% right, and it wouldn’t change much of anything about what I say about the subsequent development of Christianity. I think that indicates how little Jesus himself, as someone other than a literary character, mattered to the unfolding of Christianity.”

Arnal's is a remarkable conclusion: that, from a historian's perspective, Jesus of Nazareth had little, if anything, to do with the religious cult that worshipped him as a god. The gospels emerged from Christian communities; they reflected, but were not the source of, Christian beliefs. For Arnal, the Christian narrative properly begins at Pentecost in Jerusalem, not at Christmas in Bethlehem; it stems from Paul's journey to Damascus rather than from Jesus' journey to Calvary.

Either way, of course, Christianity went on to shape the history of the West, a fact not even the most revisionist or skeptical of historians can deny.   

Ancient Christian Origins: A Heterogeneous History | The Religious Studies Project

Petrus and Paulus, but no sign of Jesus

Sunday Sermon: Detecting the Pulse of the Cosmos

“And Jesus said, ‘The kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the sons of the living father. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty, and it is you who are that poverty.’” [From “The Gospel of Thomas”]

Mark Vernon (from A Secret History of Christianity):

Something is going wrong with Christianity. In the western world, it’s not hard to make the case that something has already gone terminally wrong. People are abandoning their churches in droves or, more commonly, simply steering clear of the services that nourished their forebears. In spite of sustained attempts to reverse the decline, nothing seems able to stop it.

The root issue lies with how Christianity has come to be presented or, to be more precise, how Christians have come to misunderstand its message. What was once experienced as a pathway to more life has, today, morphed into a way of life that to outsiders seems self-evidently deluded, defensive, or distorted. The almost limitless capacities of the human soul, which in the past have been articulated and explored by Christianity’s exponents, have been largely forgotten by Christians today, and sometimes actively rejected. The working assumption of many western people is that Christianity will curtail your options, not expand your life, let alone affirm the truth about yourself. The people whom sociologists call ‘spiritual but not religious’ or ‘nones’ shrink from Christianity.

Most Christian apologists haven’t really understood the nature of the problem. Evangelicals try to sell or prove Christianity, not to learn or to grow, while theological liberals try to cut Christianity back, feeling they must conform to, not test, contemporary secular assumptions. Both sides try to whittle away the secret sense of life to which the historical Jesus was supremely alert.  

That sense of life is ‘secret’ in the sense of being hard to see even when plainly spelled out. It’s secret in a way that a treasure is secret even though it is, in truth, resting beneath your feet, waiting to be found. It’s a perception that can be known just like the quiet constancy of your breath. It is a truth that is yours to discover. It can be known directly, not on the basis of someone else’s report, someone else’s authority, or someone else’s rhetoric, but inwardly and reliably—though it’s the work of a lifetime fully to align with it.

This is, in fact, standard mystical theology. It follows from the discernment that ‘God’ is not another being but is the ground of Being itself. God is the poetry in the poem, the fire in the equations, the life in the living, the pulse of the cosmos. Christian truth must be inhabited to be understood. Over the last four or five hundred years, Christian churches have been losing touch with this inner element—because of the impact of the Reformation, the rise of science, the separation of psychology from spirituality, etc. But it can be rediscovered. Like the pearl of great price, this truth is waiting to be uncovered. 

_________________________

Mark Vernon, A Secret History of Christianity: Jesus, the Last Inkling, and the Evolution of Consciousness (2019)

Saturday Lecture: "Not in name, but in action"

{In his books about Christianity in the late Roman empire, Robert Markus emphasized that the phenomenon of Christianity could not be divorced from the context in which it developed. Inevitably, Christians shared some of the assumptions of rival religious cults and “mystery religions,” assumptions rooted in the pessimistic temper of late antiquity. Moreover, as Christianity became the officially preferred religion of Rome, morally and spiritually rigorous Christians (e.g., Pelagius) worried that “true” Christianity was being compromised by extending its embrace to a world full of natural-born sinners.}

Robert A. Markus:    

In religion, a man looked for his deliverance from the absurdity of life in this world, for a promise of salvation in another world, for a revelation of the divine and a ritual union with it. The longing for deliverance was common to pagans and Christians who could speak in much the same language about the insignificance or the unreality of life on this earth or the horror of the human condition. Men were not ‘at home in the body’ and found any identification with their world impossible. It had to be rejected as vile, treated as a joke or accepted with resignation as a place of trial; in whatever way the world of space and time was explained, men felt themselves, in their innermost being, to belong elsewhere.

The projection of inner conflicts onto the stage of the outer world was the mainspring of these innumerable dualistic religions which opposed a world of light to a world of darkness, or a world of spirit to a world of matter. They opposed two worlds, each in the grip of one or the other warring powers of a good and an evil principle. The world was the theater of their conflict, and man was caught up in it until his final release and return to his true home. The cosmology of the two worlds and the imagery of man’s destiny in them distilled the sense of alienation and revulsion on which their strong appeal rested.

Christians could not accept the cosmological dualism which would amount to a denial of one, good, all-creating God. Nevertheless, they did to a large extent share the pessimistic response to the world for which dualistic religions were the vehicles. Christians dwell in their own countries, but only as sojourners; they bear their share in all things as citizens, and they endure all hardships as strangers. Their existence is on earth, their citizenship is in heaven.

Christians were not immune to the neuroses of their contemporaries. They were committed to the belief that the pain and suffering of the world were bound up with a primal fall from grace. Some of them toyed with the notion—a notion that also had wide currency among non-Christians—that the fall had been a fall into the body. Resentment against the world was easily concentrated into resentment of the self being imprisoned in a body. For many Christians, as for many pagans, the body became the chief locus of all the frustrating powers of the world.  Christians were not immune to the neuroses of their contemporaries. If anything, they were liable to experience them in a heightened degree.

Pelagianism was an onslaught on the languid, second-rate Christianity which blurred the line between a conventional Christian and an ordinary, pagan Roman. ‘God wished his people to be holy and free from all injustice and iniquity. He wished it to be so devout, so pure, so immaculate, so innocent, that the pagan might find nothing to revile in it.’ A Christian whose conduct is indistinguishable from a pagan’s is the beginning of blasphemy. ‘A Christian is one who is so not in name only, but in action.’ In fact, ‘not in name but in action’ is the ceaseless refrain of a Pelagian treatise on the Christian life. Baptism, a holy anointing, must be followed by holy conduct. For Pelagius and his followers, Christianity is a demand for moral ardor and unceasing struggle.

In the crisis of identity which afflicted Western Christians in the time of mass Christianization of Roman society, Pelagius’ brand of puritanic revivalism offered a means of establishing one’s Christian identity. Pelagius wanted his Christians to be as clearly defined and as distinct a group in society as the ascetics were in the Christian Church. His austere call for perfection offered his generation the most radical answer to the perplexity which haunted it: what is it to be a Christian? The wholesale reform Pelagius called for was a high price to pay.

______________________________

Robert A. Markus: Christianity in the Roman World and The End of Ancient Christianity

Pelagianism - Wikipedia

Blaming the Gnostics

{Patrick Deneen’s recent essay on “Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism” is too irritating for me to ignore. For a man whose intelligence I once admired to declare that public health measures undertaken during a pandemic reflect “the [Gnostic] belief that the physical world [is] abhorrent” causes in me the same reaction that Greil Marcus had to Bob Dylan’s “Self-Portrait” album: ‘What is this shit?’}

“[Eric] Voegelin saw the rise of totalitarianism as a potent form of fully political Gnosticism - or the belief in human perfectibility through politics.” (Patrick Deneen)

One grows weary of pointing out that Eric Voegelin’s polemics against “modern Gnosticism” represented a grotesque misunderstanding of the nature of ancient Gnosticism. One grows especially weary when someone who should know better—in this case, Patrick Deneen—repeats Voegelin’s nonsensical claims. For instance, Deneen quotes this with approval from Voegelin’s New Science of Politics:

“With the prodigious advancement of science since the seventeenth century, the new instrument of cognition would become, one is inclined to say inevitably, the symbolic vehicle of Gnostic truth. In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation.” ¹

“Scientism” may be taken as the attempt, via natural science and materialism, to unlock the operating secrets of the physical universe, the very universe which the Gnostics dismissed as an error, an abortion, or a prison. Gnostics never sought to understand the universe or to control it; they sought to escape it. Idiosyncratically, Voegelin equated (and confused) scientific empiricism with spiritual illumination and metaphysical speculation, perhaps because they all can be considered types of knowledge (“gnosis,” of course, means “knowledge”). Of course, revelation, tradition, and authority are also types of knowledge, but neither Eric Voegelin nor Patrick Deneen object to them.   

In any case, Deneen, inspired by Voegelin, proceeds to slap the “Gnostic” label on Liberalism, Progressivism, and anything else to the left of the political space where Deneen has planted his revanchist flag:

What was once a “reformist left” is today a radicalized messianic party, advancing its gnostic vision amid the ruins of the Christian civilization that once balanced these forces. What we today call “woke” is merely a new articulation of the revolutionary dream that was once vested in Communism. The examples are legion: the wholesale transformation and even elimination of the “traditional” - i.e., natural - family. The effort to define sexuality according to human desire, aided by technological interventions. An understanding of crime solely as a function of the social order. ² The disdain toward those who work in non-gnostic areas of life - the working class.  The effort to impose bio-political dominion over all of human life during the suddenly irrelevant “crisis” of the pandemic was but an extension of this deeply Gnostic impulse - the belief that the physical world was abhorrent, that we could through masking, distancing, and enforced medical intervention eliminate risk of disease and death.

That last claim is so ludicrous as to border on the idiotic, but Deneen isn’t done:

Voegelin’s fears have come true. The progressive ruling class that populates and runs the main institutions of American and European society are now the most thoroughgoing and ideological exemplars of political gnosticism. Their relentless efforts to extirpate any remnant of the predecessor “classical and Christian” society is daily on display. As Voegelin observed, gnostics necessarily become the most vocal anti-Christians, rightly detecting that they are the greatest threat to the “re-divination” of the political order. Those who bear the stamp of that belief - in significant part, in deference to the limits and realities of the created order - become marked as domestic enemies. ³

In his essay, and following Voegelin, Deneen repeatedly refers to “political Gnosticism”: “A feature of political Gnosticism,” he writes, “is its insistent denial of reality, history, and limits.” The adjective “political” carries a lot of weight there, especially given that the ancient Gnostics were not at all political, in part because politics did not exist at the time and in part because the Gnostics believed the physical world to be utterly beyond redemption, which makes dubious the very idea of “political Gnosticism”. Having invented the category, however, Voegelin was free to describe its inhabitants however he liked; as Deneen explains, “Voegelin described gnostics [as being] marked by ‘disregard for the structure of reality, ignorance of facts, fallacious misconstruction and falsification of history, irresponsible opining on the basis of sincere conviction, philosophical illiteracy, spiritual dullness, and agnostic sophistication.’” If Eric Voegelin said it, who are we to question the accuracy of his description?

As to the current issue supposedly at hand in the essay—Russia, America, and the war in Ukraine—Deneen declares that “the war over Ukraine continues to serve the Gnostic ambitions of America’s political classes.” Increasingly unhinged, he goes on to refer to America’s “rotten ruling class,” which he also characterizes as “the laptop class,” which is funny, because you just know that Professor Deneen owns, works on, and carries around with him a laptop. That aside, he frets about nuclear war and about the possibility that “our fellow countrymen and children will be asked to fight and die” for a regime that despises them and their beliefs.  

What any of that has to do with Gnosticism is anyone’s guess. Ancient Gnostics were anathematized and harried out of existence by the Church centuries ago, their writings destroyed, their reputations slandered; some of them, like the Cathars and Albigensians of southern France, were simply murdered (“Kill them all,” was the order famously given; “God will know His own.”) You would think that, after all this time, Gnostics could be allowed to rest in peace rather than being blamed for the woes of modernity.

___________________________________

Russia, America, and the Danger of Political Gnosticism (substack.com)

¹ “Sediment in the variants of salvation” is not as well known as Voegelin’s catchy “immanentizing the eschaton,” perhaps because, while the latter phrase is merely obscure, the former is completely unintelligible

² Deneen may have just read the libretto from “West Side Story”: “I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!”  

³ Has Patrick Deneen been marked by the Biden regime as a domestic enemy? It doesn’t seem to have hurt his career in academia or on the lecture circuit, much less his book sales.

 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Retreat of the Gods

{For an existential Russian blue cat, Pascal is surprisingly obsessed with early Christianity and with its beliefs about Satan and his demons.)

"My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power." (Paul, 1 Corinthians)

Peter Brown is the doyen of scholars of late antiquity and early Christianity. This is from   his The Rise of Western Christendom (second edition, 2003):

In the course of the third century CE, Christian communities expanded rapidly and unexpectedly. There is little room for the myth that Christians were a perpetually hounded minority, literally driven underground by remitting persecution. Nor is there any truth in the more modern myth which presents the advance of Christianity as due to its being a religion of mercy and equality among the underprivileged. Christianity was by no means the religion only of slaves and simple folk. Christians were not innocent of wealth, of slave-owning, or even of power.

The Christian churches of the third century were not places where the world was turned upside down. What was striking about the Christian groups was their intense sense of order and of belonging to a network of similar communities which stretched from one end of the Roman world to the other.

Set against the existing religious landscape, early Christianity was the same as, only different from, its rivals:

What would have struck a contemporary was that the Christian Church was unlike the many trade associations and cultic brotherhoods which proliferated in the Roman cities, in contrast with which the Christian church was a variegated group. High and low, men and women met as equals because equally subject to the overruling law of one God. Those who entered such churches were encouraged to find in them an orderly assembly. Grown men, married women and children, widows and unattached women: each group was carefully separated and seated in their appropriate place. Social differences were not expunged in such gathering; they were, rather, handled with an elaborate and pointed courtesy.

Social distinctions prevailed on earth, but eternity was a different matter. In the metaphysical realm, in heaven and in hell, there would be neither rich nor poor, powerful nor powerless, aristocrat nor plebe:  

The message which was preached in these churches was severe: it was about salvation and about sin. It was through this preaching that Christianity emerged as an unusually democratic and potentially wide-reaching movement. It takes some leap of the modern imagination (which has come to be saturated for centuries by Christian language) to understand the novelty of seeing every human being as subject to the same universal law of God and as equally capable of salvation through the conquest of sin, brought about by baptism followed by permanent and exclusive membership of a unique religious group.

That is all exemplary, and it constituted an advance (at least in theory) towards modernity’s declaration that “All men are created equal”. ¹ However, as Peter Brown makes clear, life on earth remained spiritually perilous:

Salvation meant, first and foremost, salvation from idolatry and from the power of the demons. “The unity of God and the refutation of the idols” were themes which any Christian lay man or woman was free to expound to outsiders. All past tradition was reinterpreted by such teaching. In polytheist belief, the lower ranks of gods had been treated as ambivalent, moody creatures, capable of being spiteful and manipulable on some occasions and generous and powerful on others. Christians developed this division of the gods in a more radical direction. They ascribed to all gods without exception the unreliable qualities of the lowest gods.

Centuries after Jesus, demons persisted and plagued humankind:

These lower gods had usually been spoken of by polytheists as ‘daimones,’ as invisible, intermediary beings. To the Christians, all gods were ‘demons,’ in the sense in which we still use the word ‘demon’. They were not just touchy; they were evil. Christians never denied the existence of the gods. Rather, they treated all gods, even the highest, as malevolent and unreliable. The demons were faceless invisible powers, past masters of the art of illusion. They merely used the traditional rites, myths, and images of polytheism as so many masks, so as to draw the human race ever further away from the worship of the One true God. Seen with Christian eyes in the age of Constantine, the immemorial worship of the gods throughout the Roman world was a grand illusion; the ancient rites to which the emperor Diocletian paid such heavy reverence were no more than a tawdry stage-set, set up by demons so as to stand between mankind and its rightful God.

Part of Christianity’s appeal was its demonstrated ability to overcome and to expel demons:

Nor was this God a distant reality. Christian communities encountered the polytheist world along a front which crackled with demonstrations of divine power. Exorcism, for instance, was a well-known form of religious drama. Christians used this common practice to teach nothing less than a condensed lesson in the direction of world history. Christ, they believed, had already broken the power of the demons in the invisible world. Now his servants could be seen to drive them from their last hiding places on earth. Exorcism rendered palpable the preordained retreat of the gods, as the demons, screaming the names of traditional divinities, withdrew violently from the bodies of the possessed when challenged by the name of Christ.

There is no way, at this historical distance, to assess the various motives behind conversions to early Christianity. However, it seems likely that persuasion, apologetics, and even the Sermon on the Mount produced fewer converts than did convincing displays of “divine power”; Satan and his minions served as convenient foils for Christian exorcists, whose triumphs over unseen (and, perhaps, nonexistent) forces were the ultimate proof of the Christian gospel.  

____________________________________________

¹ This is not unlike the claim that the Christian doctrine of Original Sin has the effect of creating an egalitarian “democracy of sinners”. 

What the early Christians were up against

Books Report

Of interest (at least to me):

The Rise of Western Christendom, by Peter Brown

Peter Brown is the doyen of historians of late antiquity and early Christianity. His 2003 classic The Rise of Western Christendom was a revision and expansion of the original edition published in 1996.

In the 2003 revision, Brown, chronicling “Western Christendom” from 200 CE to 1000 CE, extended his gaze to the east, making clear that Christianity was not originally a western religion:

“Throughout this period, the Christianity of what we now call Europe was only the westernmost variant of a much wider Christian world whose center of gravity lay, rather, in the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East. The eastern Roman Empire was not a remote and unchanging presence of little relevance to the emergence of Latin Catholic Christianity; rather, it (and not Rome) lay at the hub of a worldwide Christianity which stretched as far into Asia as it did into Europe.”

Brown acknowledged that he had been prompted “in light of modern scholarship” (archeological discoveries in particular) to rethink his views on “the conventional Grand Narrative [regarding] the spread of Christianity in late antique and early medieval western Europe.” Here is an example of Brown’s new perspective:

It was in the early Middle Ages, and not earlier, that the Christian imagination took on its peculiarly western shape. There occurred a series of irrevocable “precipitations” of ideas which had existed in diffuse form in late antique Christianity, but which had never been brought together with such decisive clarity of focus until the seventh and eighth centuries. These novel “precipitations” did not occur in late antiquity but in the period between 550 and 750 CE; they mark the true “End of Ancient Christianity”.

These [early medieval] changes are not associated with dramatic changes in doctrine. They are considerably more important than that. They represent nothing less than a slow reorientation of the Christian imagination of the West. It is as if, having traveled all day through a landscape, we looked out the window to discover we had, indeed, entered a different region. Old landmarks are nowhere to be seen. New ones dominate the horizon. There are now large monasteries, pastoral systems devoted to confession and to the saying of Mass for the relief of souls in the other world. We can even detect the first, tentative outlines of the “Christian” cemetery, after centuries where such an institution had been strikingly absent.

It is only by looking back to the beginning of our journey that we realize that these new landmarks (landmarks which we now take for granted as part and parcel of Christianity) had simply not been there when we started out. On issues which intimately affect the Christian view of the afterlife and the day-to-day practice of all believers, we have left behind an ancient Christianity.  

Peter Brown (historian) - Wikipedia

________________________________________

The Bolsheviks in Power, by Alexander Rabinowitch

Alexander Rabinowitch’s The Bolsheviks in Power focuses on The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd. Rabinowitch, who had previously written Prelude to Revolution and The Bolsheviks Come to Power, was given access, in the 1990s, to previously inaccessible Soviet archives; what he found there “demolishes standard interpretations of the origins of Soviet authoritarianism.”  

What Rabinowitch sought in his research was, essentially, an explanation of how Bolshevism went so wrong so quickly, in the process betraying its own ideals:

If the success of the Bolshevik party in 1917 was at least partly attributable to its open, relatively democratic, and decentralized character and operational style, as seemed clear, how was one to explain the fact that it was so quickly transformed into one of the most highly centralized, authoritarian, political organizations in modern history? Further, if soviets, in 1917, were genuinely democratic, embryonic organizations of popular self-rule, as my studies also suggested, how was it that the independence of soviets and other mass organizations was destroyed so quickly? Most fundamental, perhaps, if the goal of many of the dissatisfied lower-class citizens of Petrograd who spearheaded the subversion of the Provisional Government and facilitated the Bolshevik seizure of power was the creation of an egalitarian society and a democratic-socialist, multiparty political system, and if this goal was shared by many prominent Bolsheviks, as my research also showed, how was one to explain the extraordinary rapidity with which these ideals were subverted and Bolshevik authoritarianism became firmly entrenched?

Rabinowitch’s narrative covers, among much else, “the rapid fall of influential moderate Bolsheviks, the formation of the dreaded Cheka, the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the Red Terror, the national government's flight to Moscow, and the subsequent rivalry between Russia's new and old capitals.” According to him, “In the first few days after October, amid internal and external counter-revolutionary threats, the ad hoc nature of Bolshevik government could perhaps be justified. Most Bolsheviks viewed the first repressive decrees as extraordinary measures to deal with temporary emergencies.” Instead, those “temporary” measures and tactics shaped the regime that emerged from the wreckage of civil war, and the “emergencies” never disappeared.

Alexander Rabinowitch - Wikipedia

______________________________________

Grand Hotel Abyss, by Stuart Jeffries

Zach Beauchamp, writing at Vox, recently interviewed the British journalist Stuart Jeffries about the meanings (and misunderstandings) about postmodernism. Postmodernism, of course, is a well-known gateway ideology that leads inevitably to Cultural Marxism; and it turns out that Stuart Jeffries has already plunged down that rabbit hole as well. In 2016, Jeffries published Grand Hotel Abyss, a history of the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist (and post-Marxist) thinkers—Benjamin, Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse—widely accused of seeking to destroy Western Civilization by replacing Truth with Relativism, Nihilism, and Critical Thought.

The evil that men do, it has been said, lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones. Here is how Jeffries’ publisher (Verso Books) describes the book:

Grand Hotel Abyss combines biography, philosophy, and storytelling to reveal how the Frankfurt thinkers gathered in hopes of understanding the politics of culture during the rise of fascism. Some of them, forced to escape the horrors of Nazi Germany, later found exile in the United States. (Benjamin was arrested in Spain and committed suicide when threatened with deportation to Nazi-occupied France.)

From the relative comfort of [postwar] California, Herbert Marcuse wrote the classic One- Dimensional Man, which influenced the 1960s counterculture and thinkers such as Angela Davis; while in a tragic coda, Adorno died from a heart attack following confrontations with student radicals in Berlin.

By taking popular culture seriously as an object of study—whether it was film, music, ideas, or consumerism—the Frankfurt School elaborated upon the nature and crisis of our mass-produced, mechanized society. Grand Hotel Abyss shows how much these ideas still tell us about our age of social media and runaway consumption.

In the words of Stuart Jeffries, “The Frankfurt School deserves to be freed from its detractors, from those who have wittingly or otherwise misconstrued its works for their own ends. It also deserves to be liberated from the idea that it has nothing to say to us in the new millennium.”

______________________________________

Zach Beauchamp’s interview of Stuart Jeffries is at: How capitalism undermined postmodernism - Vox Jeffries’ most recent book is Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern

Saturday Lecture: In Search of Gnosis

“It would be more correct to speak of Christianity as a branch of Gnosticism than to characterize Gnosticism as a Christian sect.” (Paul Carus)

Paul Carus, from “Gnosticism in Its Relation to Christianity”:

Gnosis was metaphysical or mystical insight, which comes in an unaccountable way by inspiration. But the main characteristic feature of Gnosticism was psychological and soteriological. Almost all Gnostic philosophers and teachers from Philo down to Plotinus were dualists who looked upon the soul as a spiritual entity temporarily entangled in the world of matter and longing for a return to its source. Material existence was in their opinion the cause of sin and evil, and to be delivered from the bondage of the body was the final aim of the soul and an end devoutly to be wished for.

The Gnostic aspirations were partly lofty and philosophical, partly ethical, going to the extreme of rigorous asceticism, partly fantastical, evincing a belief in visions and miracles after the fashion of common conjurers.

Gnosticism is commonly regarded as a Christian sect, but it is of far wider significance, and its proper appreciation throws a new light on the origin of Christianity and the early history of the Church. Gnosticism was a religious movement characterized by a seeking for Gnosis or enlightenment for the purpose of finding salvation. Its interests were concentrated upon the psychological problems of the soul and the metaphysical problems of the origin and end of the world, and when we bear in mind that in all its essential features it antedates Christianity we shall at once recognize it as a period of Sturm und Drang which immediately preceded the establishment of the Christian Church and paved the way for the acceptance of a religion whose claims and ideals, in contrast to the national religions of antiquity, were not only universal and supernational but at the same time personal and spiritual.

Gnosticism was full of vagaries, but it was possessed of a high ideal, and we shall appreciate its good sides if we regard the movement as a problem which stirred the human mind, rather than as a solution. The ideal which Gnosticism presented was great, but the efforts made by Gnostics for its realization must upon the whole be regarded as failures, and the Christianity of the Church is the result of the spiritual fermentation of Gnosticism. Christianity offers an answer to the questions of Gnosticism and is in this respect itself a Gnostic movement. Christians for a long time actually called themselves Gnostics, and some Church fathers, such as Clement, used the name Gnostic in the sense of Christian.

It was natural that the Christian Church, with increase of power, should begin to condemn all non-Christian Gnostics. By and by the very name began to be repudiated, and the kinship that obtained between the Christian solution of the religious problem and other Gnostic solutions lead to the idea of treating Gnostic teachers as heretical Christians.

While pointing out the pre-Christian existence of the Gnostic movement, we do not intend to slur over the differences that exist between the pre-Christian and post-Christian Gnosis; on the contrary, while we insist on their historical continuity, we would emphasize their difference, which is obvious and striking. The spread of Christianity marks an epoch in the evolution of the conception of the Gnosis inasmuch as the Christian Gospel forced a new issue upon the various Gnostic schools which could not be left unheeded.

The methods of the Gnostics resembled a chase after will-o'-the-wisps, and their results were mostly vain speculations and vague dreams. Apollos and Simon Magus may have been more brilliant and more ingenious than Peter and Paul; but the latter were more sober. There were enough most lamentable vagaries current among the early Christians. There was the belief in the imminent advent of Christ shared even by Paul, to which superstition many thousands fell victims by neglecting the duties of life. There was the communism of the Church at Jerusalem which made of their members destitute beggars, for whose benefit collections had to be taken up among the wealthier Christians of Greece. There was the chiliastic notion, with its apocalyptic excrescences. There was the belief in the resurrection of the material body from the grave, the restitution of the very flesh itself, most seriously insisted upon even in the Apostolic creed. But in spite of all these aberrations Christianity, as compared with the theories of the Gnostic teachers, was sobriety itself.

Christianity is not an accidental formation; it is a necessary result of the evolution of thought. The history of the Church is, especially in its beginning and during the Middle Ages, a sad medley of vagaries, intrigues, usurpations, and crimes, but through all the balderdash of dogmatic speculation, of mystical trash, of visionary theorizing, even in spite of the heresy trials, Bartholomew slaughters, and autos-da-fe, there goes the red thread of an upward aspiration which slowly, very slowly, leads to better and clearer conceptions, in constant search of the true Gnosis.

_____________________

Paul Carus - Wikipedia

The War in Heaven

{I may have made a mistake giving Professor Arguendo the password to my blog. He appears to be bound and determined to impress upon one and all the connection between early Christianity and the myth-laden cosmos of the ancient Near East. Why he believes that issue to be important remains unclear; it’s almost as if something has possessed him.}

Arguendo: "Both Christ and Satan are necessary for salvation. 'No Devil, no God,' was John Wesley's way of putting it." (Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic)

After his uncredited cameo in Genesis, Satan received scant attention in the Hebrew scriptures until the Book of Job, when he unexpectedly was awarded a co-starring role. After a brief prologue praising Job’s piety, the author commences the plot:

“One day the angels came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came with them. The LORD said to Satan, ‘Where have you come from?’  Satan answered the LORD, ‘From roaming through the earth and going back and forth in it.’ Then the LORD said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.’ ‘Does Job fear God for nothing?’ Satan replied. ‘Have you not put a hedge around him and his household and everything he has. You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.’”

Unable to resist the challenge, God first allows Satan to inflict calamities upon Job’s properties, his animals, and his family, culminating with the tragic death of Job’s children, to which loss Job responded with, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised.” “In all this,” the author insists, “Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.” We then witness round two: Satan returns for another chat with God, who smugly brags of Job, “He still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him without any reason.” Satan has a ready answer: “Skin for skin!” Satan replied. ‘A man will give all he has for his own life. But stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.’” God, who seems surprisingly accepting of torture, agrees: “Very well, then,” he tells Satan; “He is in your hands, but you must spare his life.” The rest of the story is too well known to need repeating, though it is worth noting that God never admits that Job’s troubles stemmed from a wager with Satan; likewise, Job never suspects that anyone other than God could be responsible for his miseries.

The point is, YHWH (the God of Israel) and Satan had a long and complicated history. As Israel’s fortunes declined, its anguished prophets developed a new understanding of the balance of powers in the cosmos. As Norman Cohn explains:

From the second century BCE to the end of the first century CE, the Jews produced a new, complex, and comprehensive demonology. There grew up a body of literature commonly known as ‘apocalyptic,’ full of allegedly supernatural revelations about the future. This literature abounds in references to evil spirits working to thwart and undo God’s plan for the world. Evil spirits ‘rise up against the children of men and against the women’; they are demons who torment human beings on this earth. They also lead them astray into sacrificing to pagan gods. Within limits prescribed by God, evil spirits or demons wreak destruction on the earth; they are also seducers, tempting human beings to every kind of sin. The chief of the fallen angels, Belial (or Satan), emerges as the antagonist or rival of God. His subordinates tempt men to fornication, jealousy, envy, anger, murder, and idolatry. Ultimately, the Devil and his servants, human and demonic, form a single host and are all alike doomed and destined to be overthrown and annihilated.

Such apocalyptic dualism—Good pitted against Evil—was late in coming to Judaism, but its antecedents were ancient and can be found in mythologies from numerous cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Persia, India, etc.). Neil Forsyth (The Old Enemy) links the Jewish and Christian narratives to ancient dualistic myths in which the world, along with its human inhabitants, was the scene of divine combat. “The Christian version of the plot,” he writes, “is something like this: A rebel god challenges the power of Yahweh, takes over the whole earth as an extension of his empire, and rules it through the power of sin and death. He is the typical death-dealing villain who causes consternation among his subjects, and his depredations and cruelty make them long for a liberator. This dark tyrant, ‘the god of this world,’ as Paul called him, is eventually thwarted by the Son of God (or man) in the most mysterious episode of the Christian story, the crucifixion, which oddly combines both defeat and victory. The struggle with Satan continues, however, and we wait still for the end of his story in the end of history. The function of Christ is to be the potential liberator of mankind from this tyranny, while the function of Satan is to be the Adversary in this Christian variant of the ancient combat narrative.”

“This bald and inadequate summary of the story,” Forsyth admits, “is nowhere contained in the scriptures. Versions of it are implicit in the New Testament, but its obscurity and fragmentation there, its presence as an assumed truth rather than a revealed truth, has made it possible for centuries of rationalizers, from the earliest allegorists to the latest liberal or humanist Christians, to ignore or avoid the devil’s role in the Christian system. The Bible says very little about the devil, and that mostly obscure and allusive; furthermore, texts which did apparently mention the devil seemed to give contradictory information about him.” 

Forsyth insists that “A shift of focus from God to Satan helps to clarify the mythological foundations of the whole Christian system. ‘No Devil, no God,’ as John Wesley put it, but this idea is not a peculiarity of the devil-soaked Protestant imagination; it is basic to the Christian story. It is mainly Satan, in fact, who gives to Christianity its mythological dimension. The depredations and tyranny of Satan are what motivate the incarnation story and that against which the activities of Christ are directed. The myth is most evident in those parts of the Christian testament which are explicitly apocalyptic, but it is present wherever the Satan figure or his demonic allies appear. In Luke, Christ sees Satan fall like lightning from heaven; the implication is that the struggle of the disciples with demon opponents is an episode or manifestation of the larger myth. Similarly, when we are told that Satan enters into Judas, the human tale of treachery is transformed into another stage of the cosmic battle being waged between Christ and his adversary; such battles are the stuff of myths.”

Christianity insisted that its salvific events had taken place in history rather than in the realm of myth, but the inclusion of Satan in the narrative created problems: 

The mythological mode ascribed evil to the activities of an independent cosmic principle loose in creation—Satan or the devil. If human life is seriously viewed as conditioned by a struggle between divine forces, it becomes difficult to insist on human responsibility; yet human responsibility was essential to both Judaism and Christianity. The notorious difficulties of Paul’s theology may be seen as his efforts to construct a version of the narrative that would allow for a separate principle of evil but would confine its power. A cosmic evil, beyond human control, raised the difficult problem of the relationship between evil and sin. 

The cosmic struggle could not absolve the humans caught up in it; a vestige, at least, of human responsibility had to be preserved. According to Paul, humans were tainted by Adam’s original sin; they were enslaved by Satan, by Sin, and by Death; their will was conflicted, and their flesh was weak; they could do nothing at all to save themselves; yet, as the Book of Job had emphasized, humans had no more right to lament their condition than clay had to complain to the potter. Humans had been given “free will” and sufficient knowledge of God; they had no excuse for their idolatry or their other sins, for which they would be judged accordingly. They could not be neutral regarding the spiritual war; they had to choose a side.

^{_________________________________}