The Little Red Blog

Saturday Lecture: Superiority Lost

{Friedrich Gogarten, a German theologian and contemporary of Karl Barth, pointed out that Gnosticism and early Christianity both considered man fundamentally alien to the world. For Gnosticism, the alienation derived from the bungling and malevolence of the demiurge, the false creator god; for Pauline Christianity, man’s sin had caused his own, and the world’s, alienation.}   

“It is the orderly world, anchored in the law, from which Christian faith frees us.”

Friedrich Gogarten (from Despair and Hope for Our Time):

The apostle Paul, proclaiming freedom from the law as freedom from the legalistic powers of the world, could not be more explicit. These powers possess divine and all-permeating force. However, since they belong to the created world, they are not gods at all but creatures—which should not overshadow the fact that they are of prime significance in the world. Because they are powers of the law, they preserve the world as world; that is, these powers keep the world in its worldly order without which it would not be the world, would not be an ordered entity. ¹ They accomplish this by attempting to enclose the world, so that the world seeks its basis and its meaning in itself. On the one hand, the powers fulfill their task as creatures; on the other hand, they become, in effect if not intent, hostile to God. Inasmuch as the world becomes self-enclosed, it shuts itself up against its creator and against its own creatureliness.

These powers pervade the world and close it off from God, but they are not, as Paul understands them, in essence hostile to God. Their seeming hostility must be understood as man’s doing. According to Paul, man is not caught in some cosmic fate but in his own guilt. Man’s sin has enabled the powers to engulf the world; sin, for Paul, means that man has decided in favor of the world against God.

When Paul attacks “the ungodliness and wickedness of men,” he attacks a false piety in which man worships the powers as a divine reality. For such a piety, Paul’s argument is bound to appear as a horrible blasphemy; it elevates man above the divine power of the world, which, in the view of pagan thought, entails an intolerable profaning of the world and of the powers which pervade it. When this happens, pagans argue, nothing can be divine anymore for man; his life falls prey to an inevitable arbitrariness and becomes totally meaningless. ²

For Paul, the evil which befell man and the world is the result of man’s guilt and not of a cosmic mishap. Man’s sin, in which he serves and worships the creature instead of the creator, causes the unfortunate transformation of the cosmos. God’s creation—in which everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected—has been corrupted, through man’s, sin into this fallen world which is in the power of the evil one. Sin affects God and the world, it perverts the fundamental order of all existence, the relation between the creation and the creator; therefore, it becomes a fate which man cannot reverse.

The Christian faith and Gnosticism are similar in maintaining man’s superiority over the world. In this, both are in sharp opposition to previous ancient thought; in both, therefore, the world is overturned. In opposition to all previous thought, both Gnosticism and the Christian faith understand man as a being who is not from the world, who owes his existence not to the fact that it is enclosed by the world and embedded in its order but to its not-being-from-the-world.

Gnosticism represents the breakthrough of the insight into the basic foreignness of everything worldly to everything human, causing a “tremendous insecurity, a world anxiety, fear of the world and of oneself.” This insight and this anxiety are the driving forces of Gnosticism: they define its attitude toward the world and hence to everything else. Therefore, it can content itself with negative statements concerning man who stands in opposition to the world, and concerning the god in whom man finds his salvation. Gnosticism expresses the ontological foreignness of human existence over against the world and hence man’s superiority, although this only means that human existence is not worldly, not “of’ the world. In this way, Gnosticism is the pioneer in discovering man’s selfhood, a true consciousness over against everything worldly, one which is no longer enclosed by the world.

Gnosticism’s view of man, however, has only the negative meaning of “non-worldly and anti-worldly.” The superiority of man over the world as it is revealed by the Christian faith is of a very different sort. Admittedly it, too, has a negative meaning:  Christians are admonished to return to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil who had caught them and made them obey his will, to rise from sleep and to be awake because they belong to the day and not to the night. As in Gnosticism, which uses the same expressions, this means that they are being called out of the world. Here, too, the world is called evil and hostile to God; it is the realm of the lord of this eon, and its wisdom is folly in God’s sight. What Gnosticism says of the law which belongs to the world is true here as well: It does not bring life, as man is wont to believe in his worldly captivity; on the contrary, it brings death.

But all these statements have a fundamentally different meaning for the Christian faith. For while Paul says that the law brings death to man, he also says that this law has been given to bring life. For “the law is holy . . . and just and good.” The reason for the fact that it causes death for man who deals with it and seeks life in it, is not the law itself but man’s sin. It is not the law which has become death for him, but sin which through the law caused death; hence, it is man who has caused this evil. Through him this world has become—and this is emphatically stated in the New Testament—“this world,” the world of sin and hostility toward God.

Man’s superiority as discovered by the Christian faith is of a fundamentally different kind from that of Gnosticism. Christianity understands man’s superiority over the world as having been forfeited, along with his salvation, by sin. Man must now be addressed as a sinner who has lost his superiority over the world.

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Friedrich Gogarten - Wikipedia

¹ Gogarten here pictures the world’s “powers” as a katechonic force for law and order. Carl Schmitt would later promote the same idea.

² This “pagan” argument is more or less the argument made by David Bentley Hart in his essay, “Christ and Nothing”.

Wednesday with Pascal: Christian Nihilism? (Part One)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat may have bitten off more than he can chew with his excursion into Christian nihilism. To be honest, he is less than convinced of his own thesis, thus the question mark in the title. In any case, he will post Part One today and Part Two next week, once he’s had time to finish digesting the sources.}

“What does it profit a man to gain the whole world but to lose his soul?” (Jesus)

David Bentley Hart believed that modern nihilism resulted from Christianity’s failure to hold the cultural ground it had seized, fifteen hundred years ago, from pagan antiquity, leaving in its stead a spiritual vacuum. Other observers, though, have asserted a much more fundamental connection between Christianity and nihilism; some have gone so far as to claim that nihilism is at the very heart of Christianity. How in the world, most of us would ask, could anyone make such an absurd claim?

Well, there’s this: “Do not love the world or the things that are in the world. For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life—is not from the Father but from the world.” And there’s also this: “Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God?” And, you know, this: “My kingdom is not of this world.”

The New Testament yields numerous such quotes that seem, at least rhetorically, to set Christians against the world and any of its purported meanings. Christian nihilism, if such it could be called, was not complete nihilism; Christians didn’t believe that nothing mattered. They only believed, or were encouraged to believe, that nothing in this life mattered; mortal existence was merely a passage to eternity (if you were lucky) and Christians were therefore taught to avoid worldly attachments. Paul used himself as an example: “For the Lord’s sake I have suffered the loss of all things, but I count them as rubbish if I gain Christ and am found in him.” He advised his followers not to have children—hostages to fortune, as they say, and distractions from the heavenly prize upon which Christians were to keep their eyes. Jesus had given similar counsel; leave family behind and let the dead bury their dead. Time was short, said Paul, and the world was on borrowed time; you could not invest your hopes in it. Moreover, this world was the realm of Satan, its acknowledged prince; for a Christian, the best counsel, as Paul (or Bob Dylan?) said, was, “Keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes.” Neither Jesus, Paul, nor their followers needed a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.

Again, and in fairness, Christians were not “world-haters,” the epithet famously (and accurately) applied to ancient Gnostics. Christians believed that creation was the work of a loving God, but it had been corrupted by man’s sins; still, they believed that mortal life had value simply because it had been given to us by God. Moreover, most Christians held that the way we live determines our immortal fate; life was an ordeal that tested our faith and our spiritual strength. That notion, however, was put to theological rest in the 4^th century by St. Augustine in his polemics against the Pelagian heresy. Man could not “earn” salvation, said Augustine; salvation could only be a gift of God graciously bestowed on undeserving sinners. Augustine cut the ground out from those who thought that “right” living (moral purity, loving one’s neighbor, keeping the commandments, etc.) and faith in Christ would enable believers to pass through the narrow gate to heaven; as he explained (and as Luther and Calvin reiterated), nothing a man does in this life has any effect at all on God’s judgment—no one deserves to be saved from hellfire, and God’s decisions are both mysterious and irrevocable.

Christianity’s ambiguous stance towards the world could be seen by contrasting the fanatical ascetism of the “Desert Fathers” (e.g., St. Anthony the Great), which morphed into Christian monasticism, with the worldliness of the post-Constantine Church. On the one hand, “The model of Anthony and other hermits attracted many followers, who lived alone in the desert or in small groups. They chose a life of extreme asceticism, renouncing all the pleasures of the senses, rich food, baths, rest, and anything that made them comfortable. They instead focused their energies on praying, singing psalms, fasting, giving alms to the needy, and preserving love and harmony with one another while keeping their thoughts and desires for God alone.” They may not have hated the world, but neither did they embrace it; it offered nothing but snares and delusions.

On the other hand, following Constantine's conversion to Christianity, Christian leaders gained unprecedented status and authority. Christianity became the beneficiary of the emperors’ largesse; it became, in the words of Robert Markus, “increasingly wealthy, prestigious, and privileged.” ¹ Less than a century after Constantine, Christianity was made the official religion of Rome; pagan practices were outlawed. To its credit, Christianity played a crucial role in preserving the legacy of Rome, but it did so in part by taking on some of Rome’s imperial characteristics; the Church could not very well renounce a world in which it played such a prominent role.

Even with the Church triumphant, the strain of nihilism remained, preserved in New Testament texts; for centuries, it would lead periodically to sectarian outbreaks, Gnostic heresies, millennial cults, etc. Jesus’ admonition against trying to serve “two masters” (e.g., God and Mammon) made ordinary Christians wary of earthly ambition, a wariness reinforced by the fact that wealth and power were for the most part out of reach anyway. If Christianity did not deter worldly progress, neither did it encourage it, much less inspire it. In all, Christendom viewed the material world, for all practical purposes, as a crime scene—the crime of Adam, of course, reenacted in perpetuity by all his progeny. Ecclesiastical authorities shepherded their flocks through life, incessantly cautioning them, “Move along, folks; there’s nothing to see here.” For Christians, it wasn’t life's journey that mattered; it was the destination.

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Re St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers:  Desert Fathers - Wikipedia

¹ Robert Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity. Markus, for what it’s worth, would likely disagree with my thesis of ‘Christian nihilism’ and my claims about the ‘world-denying’ aspect of early Christianity; “From the later second century,” he wrote, “Christians had been moving fast towards an assimilation of secular culture.” The spread of Christianity could not have happened if the faith had required of believers an explicit rejection of, or distancing from, ‘ordinary’ life, customs, and habits. “Since that time,” Markus continued, “Christians had begun to penetrate every level of Roman society and had moved even further towards accepting the values and the culture of their pagan contemporaries.”   

Nihilism: when you've got nihil, you've got nihil to lose.

Sunday Sermon: Unoriginal Sin

{My admiration for Leszek Kolakowski knows no bounds, but not even he can convince me that the doctrine of original sin is anything more than a plot device crafted by the authors of the Christian narrative. In any case, by now there is nothing original about the idea of original sin; could we all just agree to get over it and move on?}

Leszek Kolakowski, from “Can the Devil Be Saved?”:

The possible disastrous effects of the concept of original sin on our psychological condition and our cultural life are undeniable; and so are the disastrous effects of the opposing doctrine, with its implication that our perfectibility is limitless…however, the fact that both affirmation and rejection of the concept of original sin have emerged as powerful destructive forces in our history is one of many [facts] that testify to the reality of original sin.

In our human condition, we have no way of discovering beyond any doubt what does and what does not depend on us; we are unable to draw the line between the temporary and the lasting aspects of our spiritual and physical poverty. We do not even know how to define these aspects. Many specific misfortunes are reversible, and many burdens can be alleviated, but we can never know in advance what price we must pay for our achievements, since the values we gain are paid for in a coin that is nonconvertible. Each fragment of what we call progress has to be paid for, and we can make no comparisons between the expenditure and the rewards. Our inability to balance the books is itself part of our incurable disablement. Since an increase in our satisfactions is always accompanied by a multiplication of our needs, we cannot know whether the gap between what we subjectively need and what we are capable of satisfying is decreasing, or, if it is, how to measure that decrease. We feel it our duty to struggle against all sources of affliction, but we do so without hope of ever being certain that there is fruit on the tree of progress.   

Our corruptibility is not contingent. We pretend to know this but rarely examine the relevance of this knowledge to our hopes. We pretend to know that nothing is evergreen, that each source of life is eventually exhausted and each concentration of energy eventually dispersed. We pretend to know that the biological process of life itself is the source of anxiety, conflict, aggression, uncertainty, concern. We pretend to know that no consistent system of values is possible and that at every step values we consider important become mutually exclusive when we attempt their practical application to individual cases; tragedy, the moral victory of evil, is always possible.

We pretend to know that reason often hampers our ability to liberate our energies, that moments of joy are more often than not wrested from intellectual lucidity. We pretend to know that creation is a struggle of man against himself and, more often than not, against others also, that the bliss of love lies in hopeful dissatisfaction, that in our world death is the only total unity. We pretend to know why our noble motives slide into evil results, that our will toward good emerges from pride, hatred, vanity, envy, personal ambition. We pretend to know that most of life consists in taking flight from reality and concealing this reality from ourselves. We pretend to know that our efforts to improve the world are constrained by the narrow limits defined by our biological structure and by the pressures of the past which have molded us and which we cannot leave very far behind.

All these things, which we pretend to be aware of, compose the reality of original sin—and yet it is this reality we attempt to deny.

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Wednesday with Pascal: Was Blaise Pascal Happy?

{This one is personal. Pascal the existential Russian blue cat was all but chomping at the bit to get this post written and published. He may or may not believe himself to be the feline reincarnation of Blaise Pascal, but he does seem to be taking the idea seriously.}

"The heart has its reasons, which reason cannot know." (Blaise Pascal)

The Imaginative Conservative has recently reprinted an essay from 2015, “The Tragedy of Blaise Pascal”. For obvious reasons, I take a particular interest in the essay and in the topic with which it dealt. The author, Mark Malvasi, presented this indictment of Pascal’s theology:

Pascal’s tragedy originated in his embrace of Jansenism, which introduced Calvinist doctrines and attitudes into the Catholic world of seventeenth-century France and Western Europe. The Jansenists had revived the Manichean dualism, which characterized humanity as divided between good and evil. For the Jansenists, every soul was a battleground, its fate determined by whichever conflicting impulse was strongest. ¹ The Jansenists insisted, therefore, that virtue must be imposed on rebellious and perverse human beings. Only an exacting and solemn authority could direct individuals toward rectitude and purity. The Jansenists also prescribed such discipline for the churches they controlled and the local governments in France over which they exercised some influence. The flesh must be compelled to yield to the spirit. It takes no great leap of historical imagination to see that the Jansenist admiration for order, management, restraint, bureaucracy, and surveillance could be made to attend the requirements of the totalitarian state. The Jansenists determined to administer the “greatness and misery of man,” which was the foremost theme of Pascal’s work, through compulsion.

Jansenism was officially condemned as heretical by the Catholic Church (Pope Innocent X—can you believe that the Catholic Church had that many innocent popes?) in 1653, again in 1713, and one last time in 1728. The Jansenists were accused of being closet Calvinists; for their part, they claimed to represent a continuation of Augustine’s teachings on predestination (among other things). Leszek Kolakowski, a Polish philosopher whose book God Owes Us Nothing explored Jansenism and Pascal’s connection to it, claimed that the defeat of Jansenism resulted in a “semi-Pelagian doctrine of salvation,” that is, salvation earned by good works and personal merit. We are all, to paraphrase Richard Nixon, Pelagians now.

Pascal would have none of that; heretical or not, he embraced the Jansenist position, which Kolakowski described as “a religion for unhappy people, designed to make them unhappier.” This embrace may have owed more to Pascal’s temperament than to any theological arguments. Mark Malvasi noted:

Pascal disdained the society in which he lived—a disdain that reinforced his displeasure with his fellow human beings and, at times, with life itself. Most men, he assumed, were intellectually lazy and emotionally tepid. Desultory, incurious, and stupid, they were incapable of profound thought, searching doubt, or vibrant faith. The majority preferred not to bother about any subject, whether intellectual or theological, that would jolt them out of their passivity, lassitude, and indifference. Pascal’s disillusioned analysis of human nature may have issued from the Jansenist view that human beings are both helpless and degraded. He could not avoid exposing the rancor, the insincerity, the conceit, the dishonesty, the self-deception, the cowardice, and the pettiness that circumscribed and disfigured the lives of most ordinary men, and which made him despise them.

Historians, theologians, and biographers will argue over whether this Jansenist/Calvinist misanthropy (since Adam and Eve, human beings are universally and uniformly “totally depraved”) is fairly attributed to Augustine; but they would agree that Augustine’s best-known theological opponent, Pelagius, promoted a more sanguine view of human nature. Moreover, it is widely believed (and asserted) today that, in Kolakowski’s words, “Modernity is fundamentally Pelagian, including its Promethean hope for a perfect human city without evil—that is, a belief in man-made salvation.” Augustine, contra Pelagius, distinguished very clearly between the City of God and the City of Man, and he taught that, on this earth, never the twain would meet.

Kolakowski—a former Communist—acknowledged the dangers of Pelagian optimism, always risking hubris:

Viewing the Pelagian image of man with suspicion is no doubt justified after the spectacular disasters that utopian dreams have brought upon European civilization in our century. That there are no lasting obstacles built into human nature to the heavenly city on earth is a dangerous and potentially calamitous fantasy; this has been amply confirmed by our experience. There is much in this experience to bear out the deep conservative mistrust of all-encompassing utopian projects and the belief that, since evil is inherent in our world, all progress and improvements in human affairs must be paid for, sometimes dearly, sometimes intolerably so.

Is the Jansenist view, Pascal’s view, thus vindicated? If only it were that simple. Kolakowski cited Pascal’s “wise dialectical remark” that “Everything is true in part, false in part; nothing is purely true and thus nothing is true in the sense of pure truth.” Truth is partial and provisional; Pascal lamented that “What is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other,” but he did not deny that “truth” and “error” were thus matters of perspective. Thus, Kolakowski continued:

While it is true that the Pelagian mentality, especially once it had secularized itself and assumed the form of utopian politics, is deservedly discredited nowadays, it may well have played a liberating role in the history of modern Europe. It put into circulation a belief in human freedom; it made possible the habit of trusting in our spiritual prowess and our potential to better our lot, to inquire fearlessly into the secrets of nature, to create and to expand, to apply our curiosity to anything we can think of.

It was not a question of truth versus error, but a trade-off of partial truths: “If Pelagianism brought disaster in our age, it also made possible the great achievements of modern European civilization in the arts, the sciences, and social institutions. Let us accept, then, in the Pascalian manner, two contrary truths.”

According to Mark Malvasi, Pascal’s tragic failure was that he rejected love:

[For Pascal], love was equally vain and worthless. It prompted only deception and contempt for truth. Human beings are so flawed and imperfect that they are wretched and detestable. Loving themselves and desiring others to love them, they conceal their transgressions and deformities. Since no one is inviolate, no one deserves to be loved just as, were strict justice to prevail, no one deserves to be saved. ²

Leszek Kolakowski, however, came to a different conclusion: “The Augustinian/Jansenist world is not tragic, it is only sad. In that worldview, we are always morally wrong if we act by our own will, and we are only morally right if we are guided by grace [which works infallibly and irresistibly]. In Pascal’s eyes, the human world was a farce played out at Golgotha. He pretended to be happy himself, and he pretended to perceive a higher justice in both temporal and eternal pain. But he was undeniably sensitive to the mass of human woe. Divine justice [Pascal believed] is incomprehensible; since this justice encompasses everything temporal and eternal, we must conclude that the world itself is altogether incomprehensible. There is meaning in everything, but we have no access to it. Pascal’s universe, insofar as it is accessible, is meaningless—to him, and to us.”

Kolakowski once wrote an essay, “Is God Happy?” He concluded that God could not be happy unless every human being was saved, without exception, unless “Hell and purgatory are now longer in operation, and all human beings are enjoying celestial bliss, lacking nothing, perfectly satisfied, without pain or death…” From Pascal’s perspective, if the God in whom he desperately believed could not be happy in the face of human suffering and death, how could Pascal—a mere mortal, a fragile “reed”—be anything but deeply, even desperately, unhappy?

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The Tragedy of Blaise Pascal ~ The Imaginative Conservative

Jansenism - Wikipedia

Leszek Kolakowski quotes are from God Owes Us Nothing (one quote is from “Is God Happy?” an essay collected in the book of the same name).

¹ Judaism postulates the existence, within each human soul, of two conflicting impulses: the yetzer hatov and yetzer hara, corresponding roughly, in modern terminology, to the Freudian superego and id. More recently, the acclaimed Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote that “The dividing line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart.” Whether that is Manichaean (or, for that matter, Jansenist) is another question.

² “Use every man after his desert,” said Hamlet, “and who should ‘scape whipping?”

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

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.

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Sunday Bible Study: Adam and Eve After Eden

{At least for today, the Sunday Sermon has given way to Sunday Bible Study. I promise it will be every bit as edifying.}

When Moses wrote Genesis, he showed surprisingly little interest in the post-Eden lives of Adam and Eve. ¹ The first couple was booted from the text almost as quickly and unceremoniously as they had been booted from the garden. Only six terse and disconnected lines chronicle Adam’s life span (930 years!) and tell of Adam’s family tribulations. You would think that the adventures of humanity’s progenitors (and holders of the patent on Original Sin) would have been worth recording. Did Adam and Eve, having invented both disobedience and lying, go on to invent other sins—like gluttony or envy, or pride or despair, or even, perhaps, politics? Did Eve and the serpent part ways? How did Adam and Eve divvy up their chores, how did they spend their leisure time, which of them handled the finances? Did they travel extensively or were they content to stay at home? Did Eve learn to knit, did Adam learn to whittle, did either learn to whistle? Did they ever seek couples’ counseling? Did they ever get over their initial blunder?  

So many questions, but Genesis is deaf to them. Instead, it gives us mere fragments of biography:

Genesis 4, 1-2: “Adam lay with his wife Eve, and she became pregnant and gave birth to Cain. She said, ‘With the help of the LORD, I have brought forth a man.’ Later she gave birth to his brother, Abel.” ²

Adam and Eve discovered the joy and mystery of conjugal coupling, and Eve discovered the pain of childbirth which God had promised her because of her sin—and this is all the text has to say? Ought not the entire process of procreation have seemed astonishing to them? Ought it not to have been worth a bit more comment? What did Eve think was growing inside her womb for nine months—had anyone explained to her (and to Adam) about the birds and the bees? Had they been watching with keen interest various animals coupling and then giving birth, and were they astute enough to have made the connection? Based on their record of being easily duped, they don’t seem to have been the sharpest tools in God’s cosmic shed.

Bypassing the first childhoods, the narrative then skips to the sad fate of Cain and Abel, to the latter’s murder by the former, and to the former’s punishment from God. ³ We learn nothing at all about Adam and Eve’s primitive parenting skills or about their reactions as they watched their sons grow. The text jumps from Cain’s and Abel’s births to their fatal encounter, with no hint of any earlier sibling rivalry, repressed or otherwise. Once God has sent the guilty but unrepentant Cain packing, Genesis (4:25) abruptly (and indiscreetly) informs us that “Adam lay with his wife again, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying ‘God has granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.”

Not to be judgmental, but Adam and Eve don’t seem to have shed a tear over the world’s first fratricide or to have mourned their dead son Abel for a minute; the first human death in all history did not faze them in the least. In fact, having learned the secret of reproduction, Adam simply put another bun into Eve’s oven and presto! They had themselves “another child in place of Abel”. They did not grieve the fraternal quarrel itself or ask God why he had favored one brother over the other, nor did they lament Cain’s exile; at least, the author(s) of Genesis did not report them as having done so.

Finally, Genesis 5, 3-5: “When Adam had lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image; and he named him Seth. After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters. Altogether, Adam lived 930 years, and then he died.” ⁴    

The text here is revealing: Adam had “a son in his own likeness, in his own image,” unlike the original creation where “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.” This suggests that humans, after Eden, had been deprived of the heritable image of God; instead, they inherited the image of hapless, cursed Adam, whose progeny ever after would be mere flesh and blood, a bunch of trousered apes. ⁵

Adam lived nearly one thousand years. Given that today’s “young earth creationists” believe in a six-thousand-year-old earth, that would mean Adam lived for one/sixth of human existence, which is as impressive as it is dubious. Regardless, here is what he accomplished (that we know of) in his 930 years:

• Walked with God in the garden.
• Ate the fruit of the prohibited tree in Eden, thus forfeiting, for himself and for his descendants, the divine image and the life God intended for him.
• Impregnated Eve numerous times, spawning sons and daughters in his own image and likeness.
• Fathered the first sons (twins?), one of whom became the first murderer and the other, the first murder victim.

Even granted that those were different times, that seems a modest list for a man who lived almost an entire millennium. Genesis gives us so little to go on about Adam; did he invent fire, the wheel, writing, indoor plumbing, or shag carpeting? Did he become a real estate mogul, a robber baron, or a respected sage? Did he invent barter, money, pants, shoes, music, dancing, or juggling? Did he ever express regret? Did he and God ever speak to each other again?

For that matter, did Adam even invent language? He seems not to have employed it much; if Genesis is our guide, Adam was taciturn in the extreme. In his 930 years, these are the only words he is quoted as having spoken: (1) “This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man;” (2) “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid;” and (3) “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”  ⁶

Genesis records nothing else as having passed from Adam’s lips. On the other hand, and in all fairness, what exactly could he have said: “Honey, I broke creation”? Adam and Eve’s best option, after their fall, was to live in obscurity and to die without fanfare, a fate they seem to have achieved; or perhaps Moses was just being discreet and did not want to speak ill of his, and our, ancestors. For whatever reason, after Eden the rest is all but silence.

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¹ Exegetical clarification: Moses did not write Genesis.

² We do not know how much “later” it was before Eve gave birth to Abel—which is to say, the text leaves open the possibility that Cain and Abel were twins, but it also leaves open the possibility that they were born years apart.

³ The punishment is that Cain can no longer till the earth; instead, he is condemned to be a “restless wanderer on the earth”. However, Cain ignores that harsh verdict, settles down in the land of Nod, and builds the world’s first city. God seems okay that Cain has made lemonade out of the lemon of a fate which God had decreed for him.

⁴ No mention is made of Eve’s longevity or of her death. For all we know, she is alive to this day—perhaps living in Ireland, from which snakes were banished by St. Patrick.

⁵ A bit of historical trivia: there were no trousers then.

⁶ Note how the affectionate “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh” quickly gave way to the accusatory “The woman you put here with me”. Adam managed simultaneously to shift the blame to Eve and to God, which suggests I may have underestimated him.

The first fairy tale: And they all lived happily ever after...

O Felix Culpa!

{“Felix culpa” is a Latin phrase used in Christian theology. ¹ It means “fortunate fault” and refers to the supposedly beneficial consequences of Adam and Eve’s primordial sin, “As a result of which the world was made better” (John Calvin). The logic is not easy to follow, but then, that’s theology for you.}

At Townhall, columnist Michael Eisenberg puts a surprising spin on the idea of “felix culpa”; in an unorthodox interpretation of Genesis 2-3, he claims that the story of Adam and Eve is a cautionary tale warning us against such socialist ideas as “guaranteed income”.  

I will skip over Eisenberg’s political polemic and go right to his dubious scriptural exegesis. “In the Garden of Eden,” Eisenberg says, “all of Adam and Eve’s needs were satisfied. Without care or cultivation, the trees yielded an endless supply of fruit, such that the world’s first couple didn’t need to expend an ounce of effort.” In fact, we are told, in Genesis 2:15, “The lord GOD took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Eden was no sweatshop, but it was not a free lunch, either. Eisenberg then overlooks Adam’s naming of the animals (surely a form of work, given how many animals there are), and he blithely skips past the surgery Adam undergoes so that God could create “a helper suitable for him”. Why would Adam have required a “helper” if, as Eisenberg claims, he had no work to do and “all of [his] needs were satisfied”?

In any case, Eisenberg then gives this entirely novel reading of Genesis 3 (usually titled “The Fall of Man”): “Eve, eventually turned to what had in turn become the most interesting thing in the Garden: the serpent. Monotony and an existence devoid of genuine work and purpose led to a loss of human communication, and, ultimately, exile.” In Eisenberg’s reading, then, God had blundered, creating Adam and Eve but leaving them bored and without purpose (also, note that Eisenberg singles out Eve, and not Adam, as responsible for the couple’s exile from Eden). Did the Lord GOD not know that idle hands are the devil’s tools?

Fortunately, the Genesis story has a happy ending, at least in Eisenberg’s opinion. Adam and Eve eat of the forbidden fruit, God finds them out and—rewards them? That is how Eisenberg sees it:

“Only once Adam and Eve were forced to work, to deal with thorns and thistles, did they innovate their way to sustenance and, indeed, meaning. Importantly, it was then after they discovered a productive living that they had children.  Although popular lore suggests that Adam and Eve were cursed with thorns and painful labor, respectively, the Bible actually never refers to these burdens as a “curse.” The Book of Genesis is a beautiful and simple statement about the facts of life. Productive work leads to productive lives, which leads to posterity, the only vehicle for ensuring human progress. This is an inspiration, not a curse.” 

By “popular lore suggests,” Eisenberg apparently means “the Biblical text clearly states”; if Eisenberg’s claim is true, the Genesis authors should have chosen their words more carefully. After God learns of the couple’s sin, he first turns to the snake and says, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals.” God then addresses Eve, saying, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children.” It is difficult, on the face of it and in context, not to construe that as a curse. Finally, God speaks to Adam and says, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.” At the end of the speech, Adam is told that, after a lifetime of difficult toil, he will die: “You [will] return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.” Nowhere in these passages does God (or, for that matter, the author(s) of Genesis) suggest, much less state, that Adam’s and Eve’s fates were blessings in disguise.

With all due respect to Michael Eisenberg, his is the single most tendentious reading of any text I have ever encountered. I say “tendentious” because his take on Genesis 2-3 is so ludicrously far-fetched it could not have been arrived at in good faith; nobody is that obtuse. The icing on Eisenberg’s disastrous exegetical cake is his comment that “It was after [Adam and Eve] discovered a productive living that they had children.” On the one hand, Eisenberg is correct; on the other hand, the couple’s firstborn son went on to murder his younger brother, an outcome that may not speak well either of the benefits of “productive living” or of the lessons supposedly learned in Eden.

To summarize: Genesis 2-3 says nothing about the issue of a “guaranteed income”. If Michael Eisenberg wanted to bolster his argument with a scriptural citation, he would have been better off to go with “He who does not work, neither shall he eat,” a timeless dictum uttered first by Saint Paul (2 Thessalonians) and later affirmed by Vladimir Lenin (“‘He who does not work shall not eat’ is a necessary principle under socialism…”). There is no reason to drag Adam and Eve into this; they have enough to answer for as it is.

Guaranteed Income Has Been a Bad Idea Since the Garden of Eden by Michael Eisenberg (townhall.com)

¹ Full disclosure: “Felix Culpa” was also a character in my unpublished novel, Killing Bobby Kennedy. In that book, Culpa was an FBI agent who may or may not have been involved (at the behest of J. Edgar Hoover) in both the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the murder of Marilyn Monroe. He and the novel’s protagonist meet by accident in Dayton, Ohio in a bar called “Mexico City”; they have a brief and unproductive conversation, after which Bobby Kennedy walks in and is fatally shot (again) by an unknown assailant, possibly the protagonist’s father. (Years later, I considered writing a series of pulp fictions featuring Felix Culpa as a Chandleresque gumshoe; but by then existential detectives were no longer in fashion.)   

"Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go!"

Saturday Blinks

At Commonweal, Gary Gutting reviews Steven Pinker's best-selling ENLIGHTENMENT NOW. Mr. Gutting, a Professor of Philosophy at Notre Dame, finds Pinker's book engaging but not altogether persuasive, in particular when it deals with philosophical and theological critiques of modernity:

Steven Pinker is an excellent scientist and engaging popular writer. He’s an amiable, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide to the many empirical issues that come up in his defense of the Enlightenment. But there are, as he admits, also conceptual, logical, and normative issues. He seems to believe that a smart and good-willed person like himself can competently handle these issues without taking seriously the relevant work of philosophers and other humanists. This isn’t true, and the result is a book that, for all its merits, is as flawed as those (and there are many) by humanists who pontificate about science without really knowing what they’re talking about.

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ours-best-world-ever

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At The Catholic Thing, David Carlin (who is nowhere near as funny as the late George) says that the problem with modernity is we've forgotten how inherently depraved and sinful we are:

I think our fundamental problem is that we are living in a modern world characterized by a repudiation of Augustinianism. By “Augustinianism,” I have in mind St. Augustine’s teaching (something he derived from St. Paul) that human nature is corrupt, radically sinful; and has been so ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve.

We are afflicted by Original Sin. If we occasionally behave in a non-sinful manner, and if some few people (the saints) behave habitually in a non-sinful manner, this is because of the grace of God, which is a countervailing force to the power of our corrupt nature. 

Modernity represents what Carlin calls "the triumph of anthropological optimism...over anthropological pessimism (or Augustinianism). [This change] didn’t happen overnight. It was a long and gradual process. But by now, the early 21st century, it is pretty nearly complete."

And lo, declaims Carlin, see where it has gotten us:

It has led almost everywhere to the triumph of the idea of democracy (if not always actual democracy); for if we are good by nature we can be trusted to govern ourselves. It has led to the universal spread of capitalism; for if we are good by nature, our passion for wealth must be good. It has led to the sexual revolution; for if we are good by nature, we can give free rein to our sexual impulses.

Carlin concludes with the best and most honest argument (from a Christian standpoint) for Original Sin:

But if we are good by nature, what’s the point of Christianity? Christianity is a religion of salvation. Salvation from what? From sin. But if we have no sin, at least no sin deeply rooted in our nature, who needs Christianity? Who needs the suffering and death of Jesus? What need is there for the Atonement?

As Maria McKee sang, "You gotta sin to get saved..." ¹ As I have written before, it was the genius of Pauline Christianity that it offered both an explanation of our existential predicament (Original Sin) and a guaranteed cure ("Christ Jesus"); just as the classic Alka-Seltzer commercial explained about "the blahs" that "We wouldn't have invented a disease if we didn't have something you could take for it." ²

https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2018/03/24/are-we-bad-or-good-by-nature/

¹ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niFRb_cLbVc 

² Yes, I'm aware I just compared Christianity (and Jesus) to Alka-Seltzer. I am so going to hell...

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Finally, Jordan Ballor (at Public Discourse) explains, with the help of C.S. Lewis and Madeline L'Engle, the Christian via media between individualism and collectivism, concluding:

In the end, the Christian quest for the common good is not reducible either to the simple aggregate of individual goods or to the promotion of the needs of the collective at the expense of the one. It is, rather, a call to love and justice pursued in humble faithfulness as human beings created in God’s image, a perspective that liberates us from the diabolical dialectic of collectivism and individualism.

Atheist that I am, if I just remove five particular words from that passage, I can and do wholeheartedly endorse Mr. Ballor's message.

http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2018/03/21217/

Despair Disguised as Hope

In his 1974 essay "Can the Devil Be Saved?" Leszek Kolakowski conceded that the doctrine of Original Sin has had some unfortunate consequences, intended or otherwise:

I do not deny the justice...of much of the criticism of the Church for its harmful use of the doctrine of original sin...No one can deny that the idea of original sin and the incurable corruption of human nature may be (and has been) used as an effective ideological instrument of conservative resistance to social change and attempts to undermine existing systems of privilege. [Moreover] the possible disastrous effects of the concept of original sin on our psychological condition and our cultural life are undeniable...

Despite that disclaimer, Kolakowski came not to bury Original Sin but to praise it, stating that "the concept of original sin gives us a penetrating insight into human destiny." In particular, he insisted, original sin explains why evil can never be completely overcome, and why our well-intended attempts to improve the human condition often amount to exchanging one set of evils for another:

To say that we are infected with original corruption [means] that there is a great deal of evil that cannot be eradicated, and that there is something incurable in our misery. It does not mean that all kinds of evil are incurable, all forms of misery unavoidable. But in our human condition we have no means of discovering beyond any doubt what does and what does not depend on us; we are unable to draw the line between the temporary and the lasting aspects of our spiritual and physical poverty. We do not even know how to define these aspects.

Unintended consequences bedevil our best efforts, and the limits of our knowledge are by definition unknowable except in retrospect:

Many specific misfortunes are reversible, and many burdens can be alleviated, but we can never know in advance what price we must pay for our achievements, since the values we gain are paid for in a coin that is nonconvertible. Each fragment of what we call progress has to be paid for, and we can make no comparison between the expenditure and the rewards. Our inability to balance the books is itself part of our incurable disablement. Since an increase in our satisfactions is always accompanied by a multiplication of our needs, we cannot know whether the gap between what we subjectively need and what we are capable of satisfying is decreasing or, if it is, how to measure the decrease. We feel it our duty to struggle against all sources of affliction, but we do so without hope of ever being certain that there is fruit on the tree of progress.

Or, one may add, whether the fruit is edible or whether it is toxic or riddled with worms.

Kolawkowski said that our "corruptibility" is inescapably part of our (fallen) condition, and that even when we claim to know and to accept our limits, we in fact act as if they did not exist:

Our corruptibility is not contingent. We pretend to know this but rarely examine the relevance of this knowledge to our hopes. We pretend to know that nothing is evergreen, that each source of life is eventually exhausted and each concentration of energy is eventually dispersed. We pretend to know that the biological process of life itself is the source of anxiety, conflict, aggression, uncertainty, concern. We pretend to know that no consistent system of values is possible and that at every step values that we consider important become mutually exclusive when we attempt their practical application to individual cases; tragedy, the MORAL victory of evil, is always possible. We pretend to know that reason often hampers our ability to liberate our energies, that moments of joy are more often than not wrested from intellectual lucidity. We pretend to know that creation is a struggle of man against himself and, more often than not, against others also, that the bliss of love lies in hopeful dissatisfaction, that in our world, death is the only total unity. We pretend to know why our noble motives slide into evil results, why our will toward good emerges from pride, hatred, vanity, envy, personal ambition. We pretend to know that most of life consists in taking flight from reality and concealing this reality from ourselves. We pretend to know that our efforts to improve the world are constrained by the narrow limits defined by our biological structure and by the pressures of the past which have molded us and which we cannot leave very far behind. All these things, which we pretend to be aware of, compose the reality of original sin--and yet it is this reality which we attempt to deny.

For all the eloquence of that argument, Kolakowski was not unsympathetic to those of us who resist the notion of original sin:

Our denial is not without grounds, and arguments can be put forward to justify it. One can argue that sometimes the truth can poison, and a lie may well be a blessing. One can argue that the truth about original sin entails the conclusion that this truth must not be revealed, since we may be so utterly discouraged by the awareness of the narrow limits within which our efforts are successful that paralysis prevents us from achieving even the modest successes of which we are capable. One can argue that only an infinite hope can set in motion the energy needed to achieve finite results, that although we can never get rid of suffering, we can alleviate or limit it, and in order to do so efficiently we must accept the erroneous belief that eventually suffering will be totally abolished. ¹  In short, it is arguable that we can do what we can only because we believe we can do something that we cannot.

Kolakowski was willing to acknowledge the attraction of and even the necessity for (if not the truth of) such arguments:

It seems probably that we could not endure life if we knew from the beginning all that we have learned from decades of experience. An ingenious device exists in our inability to convince young people of the deceptiveness of their great hopes; if these hopes do reveal anything of value, it can only be because they were deceptive. Probably little of value would have been achieved in human life had people known in advance the price they would have to pay. Perhaps the most usual form in which one perceives the concept of original sin is the conviction that every individual is eventually defeated in his struggle with life, that we have lost before we begin the battle. In most cases, to hold this conviction would deprive us of the will to fight--there is good reason why we prefer to reject the ontological meaning of evil.

In another essay ("The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture"), Kolakowski asserted "Religion is man's way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat." He then noted that "One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is sense beyond that inherent in human history..." In other words: religion, having condemned our earthly endeavors as doomed to fail because of original sin, offers the only alternative to inertia and despair: an afterlife in which all will be well and "suffering will be totally abolished".

In the end, Kolakowski believed in original sin, arguing that the doctrine is necessary for us to understand our human predicament. He predicated his instrumental defense of original sin on its relationship to, of all things, our capacity to doubt:

Doubt has played an essential role in our attainment of the status of rational beings; we must protect our ability and our right to doubt in order to preserve our intellectual and our moral balance...doubt may be considered one of the consequences of original sin, but it also protects us against its more deleterious effects. It is important for us to be uncertain about the deep motives of our own deeds and the grounds of our own convictions, since this is the only device that protects us against an all-justifying fanaticism and intolerance.

If it takes Original Sin to prevent us from being too sure of ourselves and too fixed in our beliefs, and to guard against our Faustian/Promethean impulses: to that extent, I may grudgingly acknowledge its utility. But I still don't like it; and, despite Kolakowski's eloquence and immense erudition, I don't accept it.

That said: both "Can the Devil Be Saved?" and "The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture" can be found in Kolakowski's MODERNITY ON ENDLESS TRIAL. I have yet to discover anyone more articulate or persuasive than Leszek Kolakowski when it comes to critiquing modernity from the standpoint of traditional Christianity. He was neither an obscurantist nor an ideologue; in fact, his defense of original sin (in "Can the Devil Be Saved?") concluded with a plea for both Christianity and socialism:

We need more than Christianity...we need the living tradition of socialist thought which appeals to human forces solely by promoting the traditional values of social justice and freedom...We need a socialism that helps us to understand the complexity of the brutal forces acting in human history and reinforces our readiness to fight against social oppression and human misery. We need a socialist tradition that is aware of its own limitations, since the dream of ultimate salvation on earth is despair disguised as hope--the will to power disguised as a craving for justice.

As a wise man once said, "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear."
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¹ I am not aware of any serious secular claims or predictions that "suffering will be totally abolished" now or in the future. On the other hand, the Bible is filled with such claims; the difference of course being that, in the latter case, it will be God who brings about the abolition.

"The Mystery Most Distant From Our Knowledge"

"Is it possible for humanity not to inquire after the origin of evil?"                                                                                           (Jean Delumeau, SIN AND FEAR)

Speaking of Original Sin:

It is astonishing that the mystery most distant from our knowledge, that of the transmission of sin, should be a thing without we can have no knowledge of ourselves.

For without doubt there is nothing more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has made culpable those who, being so remote from this source, were incapable of participating in it. This transmission not only seems impossible to us, it even appears very unjust. For what is more contrary to the rules of our wretched justice than the eternal damnation of a child, incapable of will, for a sin in which he seems to have so little part that was committed six thousand years before him? Certainly nothing shocks us more harshly than this doctrine. And yet without this most incomprehensible of all mysteries, we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The knot of our condition takes its twists and turns in this abyss, so that man is more unintelligible without this mystery than this mystery is unintelligible to man...it is not through the proud exertions of our reason, but through its simple submission, that we can truly know ourselves. (Pascal, PENSEES)

To provide some context for Pascal's remarks, here is Jean Delumeau:

Christian civilization placed the Fall at the center of its preoccupations and construed it as a catastrophe initiating all history...[the] conception of Original Sin had such a profound impact that all future theological reflection on this problem in the Christian West was geared toward it...For an entire civilization, Original Sin [was] a kind of deus ex machina, constantly used as the final and definitive reason for all that goes bad in the universe...the attribution of a crime of cosmic dimensions to the first man was facilitated [in medieval Christendom] by the unanimously accepted notion that human history occupied only a short chronology (of six or seven thousand years), which was nearing its end. There was not the faintest idea of the vast length of the earth's geological, paleontological, and archaeological timelines. Nor was there the slightest inkling of the now obvious fact that "more than 99 percent of the history of the human species belongs to prehistory."

Which is to say: Blaise Pascal, brilliant as he undoubtedly was, was a man of his time. He could no more see beyond the Christian doctrine of Original Sin than you or I can see beyond the theory of evolution, and it makes no difference that the one is religious dogma and the other is a well established working scientific hypothesis: what matters is that we are (for the most part) creatures of our cultures and of the epistemological limits they impose.

Of course, were he alive, Pascal might well argue that such limits are simply one of the consequences of Adam's sin.