The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: "Memorial Service"

H.L. Mencken, “Memorial Service” (1922):

Where is the graveyard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a time when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter today? And who of Huitzilopochtli? In one year - and it is no more than five hundred years ago - 50,000 youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. Today, if he is remembered at all, it is only by some vagrant savage in the depths of the Mexican forest. Huitzilopochtli, like many other gods, had no human father; his mother was a virtuous widow; he was born of an apparently innocent flirtation that she carried out with the sun. When he frowned, his father, the sun, stood still. When he roared with rage, earthquakes engulfed whole cities. When he thirsted he was watered with 10,000 gallons of human blood. But today Huitzilopochtli is as magnificently forgotten as Allen G. Thurman. Once the peer of Allah, Buddha and Wotan, he is now the peer of Richmond P. Hobson, Alton B. Parker, Adelina Patti, General Weyler and Tom Sharkey.

Speaking of Huitzilopochtli recalls his brother Tezcatilpoca. Tezcatilpoca was almost as powerful: he consumed 25,000 virgins a year. Lead me to his tomb: I would weep, and hang a couronne des perles. But who knows where it is? Or where the grave of Quitzalcoatl is? Or Xiehtecuthli? Or Centeotl, that sweet one? Or Tlazolteotl, the goddess of love? Of Mictlan? Or Xipe? Or all the host of Tzitzimitles? Where are their bones? Where is the willow on which they hung their harps? In what forlorn and unheard-of Hell do they await their resurrection morn? Who enjoys their residuary estates? Or that of Dis, whom Caesar found to be the chief god of the Celts? Of that of Tarves, the bull? Or that of Moccos, the pig? Or that of Epona, the mare? Or that of Mullo, the celestial jackass? There was a time when the Irish revered all these gods, but today even the drunkest Irishman laughs at them.

But they have company in oblivion: the Hell of dead gods is as crowded as the Presbyterian Hell for babies. Damona is there, and Esus, and Drunemeton, and Silvana, and Dervones, and Adsalluta, and Deva, and Belisima, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by millions, full of demands and impositions, able to bind and loose - all gods of the first class. Men labored for generations to build vast temples to them - temples with stones as large as hay-wagons. The business of interpreting their whims occupied thousands of priests, bishops, archbishops. To doubt them was to die, usually at the stake. Armies took to the field to defend them against infidels: villages were burned, women and children butchered, cattle were driven off. Yet in the end they all withered and died, and today there is none so poor to do them reverence.

What has become of Sutekh, once the high god of the whole Nile Valley? What has become of:

      Resheph                       Baal
      Anath                         Astarte
      Ashtoreth                     Hadad
      Nebo                          Dagon
      Melek                         Yau
      Ahijah                        Amon-Re
      Isis                          Osiris
      Ptah                          Molech?

All there were gods of the highest eminence. Many of them are mentioned with fear and trembling in the Old Testament. They ranked, five or six thousand years ago, with Yahweh Himself; the worst of them stood far higher than Thor. Yet they have all gone down the chute, and with them the following:

Arianrod                      Nuada Argetlam
      Morrigu                       Tagd
      Govannon                      Goibniu
      Gunfled                       Odin
      Dagda                         Ogma
      Ogryvan                       Marzin
      Dea Dia                       Mara
      Iuno Lucina                   Diana of  Ephesus
      Saturn                        Robigus
      Furrina                       Pluto
      Cronos                        Vesta
      Engurra                       Zer-panitu
      Belus                         Merodach
      Ubilulu                       Elum
      U-dimmer-an-kia               Marduk
      U-sab-sib                     Nin
      U-Mersi                       Persephone
      Tammuz                        Istar
      Venus                         Lagas
      Beltis                        Nirig
      Nusku                         En-Mersi
      Aa                            Assur
      Sin                           Beltu
      Apsu                          Kuski-banda
      Elali                         Nin-azu
      Mami                          Qarradu
      Zaraqu                        Ueras
      Zagaga

Ask the rector to lend you any good book on comparative religion: you will find them all listed. They were gods of the highest dignity - gods of civilized peoples - worshipped and believed in by millions. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead.

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Memorial Service by H. L. Mencken (donparrish.com)

H.L. Mencken - Wikipedia

Whatever he may have been like in person, H.L. Mencken was an unpleasant man in print. His writings were caustic, bombastic, cynical, iconoclastic—and often hilarious. He was, if not racist, racist-adjacent; he was reputedly anti-Semitic; he despised democracy, the New Deal, organized religion, and bourgeois life in general. As a journalist, Mencken covered the Scopes “Monkey Trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, seizing the opportunity to mock the beleaguered William Jennings Bryan (who died shortly thereafter).

 

The Great Refusal: On Demonic Obstinacy

{In which, having previously established that Satan and his demonic followers set the standard for the Great Refusal, we turn to Thomas Aquinas (via Joseph Suk-Hwan Dowd) to understand better the nature of demons, the consequences of sin, and the justice of eternal damnation.}

"On the feast of St. Nicholas in 1273, Aquinas was celebrating Mass when he received a revelation that so affected him that he wrote and dictated no more, leaving his great work the ‘Summa Theologiae’ unfinished. To his secretary’s expostulations he replied, 'The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me.'" (Wikipedia)

Like St. Paul before him, Aquinas told no one what devastating “things” had been revealed to him; humankind can bear only so much revelation, after all. In any case, in the course of his life Aquinas had already disclosed a good deal of hitherto hidden information: for instance, the need for eternal punishment of the damned. “The punishment of the damned lasts forever,” explained the Angelic Doctor, “because the damned keep sinning forever.”

As is often the case, this assertion provoked a question, here paraphrased by Joseph Suk-Hwan Dowd (in his essay “Aquinas on Demonic Obstinacy”): “If the damned are punished forever because they keep sinning, then why do they keep sinning?”  The sheer obstinacy of damned humans is hard enough to understand, but even more so is that of demons. “The question arises especially in the case of demons, the fallen angels of Christian tradition, whose intelligence is supposed to be far superior to that of humans. Why would a demon be obstinate in sin?” Even if one assumes that the Devil makes them do it, why is the Devil himself so set in his evil ways? Has he not figured out by now that his Rebellion was doomed from the start?

Fortunately, Thomas Aquinas had a ready explanation: “The demons’ obstinacy results from a kind of intellectual rigidity. Unlike humans, demons cannot revise their judgments. In the beginning, the demons judged that autonomous happiness (rather than God-given) was the best goal. Because they cannot revise that judgment, they cannot stop willing autonomous happiness—and it is a sin to will autonomous happiness.” Demons simply cannot help themselves, although, according to Aquinas, “they wish they could stop, for they wish they could avoid punishment.”

As Dowd notes, “Demons’ inability to revise their judgements is a puzzling feature of demonic cognition,” but Aquinas, having announced that inability, did his best to make sense of it. Dowd observes that other Christian thinkers had wrestled with this problem as well. John of Damascus, for instance, wrote that “The demon is not susceptible of repentance because it is incorporeal; for it is owing to the weakness of his body that man comes to repentance.” Dowd adds, “Jeffrey Burton Russell notes a difficulty with this explanation: the demons’ incorporeal nature was not an obstacle to moral change in the beginning, when they turned from good to evil, so why should it be an obstacle now?”

Gregory the Great and Peter Lombard offered a different analysis: “Only God’s grace can rehabilitate a sinner. Now, humans did not sin on their own; the devil tempted them to sin. Thus, it is fitting for God to rehabilitate human sinners. Demons, by contrast, sinned without any extenuating circumstances; thus, God has no reason to rehabilitate them.”

Will that explanation suffice? Not according to Aquinas, who argued that, with or without extenuating circumstances, there is no reason to think that the demons’ initial rebellion put them out of reach of God’s mercy; it was, rather, their persistent choice of evil, unmixed with even a single good act or intention, that damned them eternally. In Aquinas’ considered view (there is no doubt he gave a good deal of thought to the matter), “If the demons cannot stop sinning, it is because something about their nature prevents them from doing so.”

Having once turned away from God in search of their own “autonomous happiness,” the demons cannot turn back. Another awkward question arises: if demons cannot stop sinning because of something about their nature, how can God blame them—and punish them eternally—for their sins? “Aquinas,” Dowd informs us, “had a response to this objection. He asks us to consider a drunk who commits a crime. At the moment he commits the crime, the drunk may not have control over himself; thus, in a sense, the drunk may not be able to avoid committing the crime. Despite this, Aquinas says, we often hold the drunk responsible, because he could have avoided becoming drunk in the first place. Likewise, Aquinas says, the demons could have avoided becoming obstinate in sin in the first place.”

In short: do not do the crime if you are not willing to do the time, especially when the time will be eternal.

Aquinas mulled over other explanations of demonic obstinacy: the “epistemic” explanation (angels have unlimited knowledge, so they knew what they were getting themselves into), the “single appetite” theory (unlike humans, angels cannot be distracted from or change their single-minded goal), and, as mentioned above, the “incorporeal” theory. In the end, Aquinas settled on this:

“Because angels have intellect instead of reason, they accept whatever evaluation they make in an intelligible way. Now, what is accepted in an intelligible way is accepted irreversibly, such as when a person accepts that every whole is greater than its part. Thus, the angels cannot abandon an evaluation once they have accepted it, whether it is true or false.”

Dowd charitably adds, “Readers who have reservations about Aquinas’ reasoning can simply remember the following claim, which Aquinas evidently accepts: angels and demons cannot revise their judgments. Unfortunately, Aquinas does not otherwise explain why he accepts that claim.” Aquinas, in fact, leaves a good deal unexplained; for one thing, according to Dowd, he says that “God refuses to rehabilitate the demons because of ‘divine wisdom’, which suggests that there is a reason, a wise reason, why God refuses to rehabilitate the demons. But Aquinas does not say what that reason is.”

For all his unparalleled knowledge of angelic and demonic natures and of God’s unfathomable will, the Angelic Doctor could only explain so much.

Dowd ends his essay by noting that Aquinas believed that some human sinners might be just as obstinate as demons, and therefore just as deserving of eternal punishment. The logic was clear, given Aquinas’ understanding of both this life and the next: “At the Last Judgment, God will reunite human souls with their bodies. But unlike our current bodies, our resurrected bodies will be completely subject to our souls. Influence will flow in only one direction: from soul to body. Thus, although bodily changes can affect the soul’s conception of its ultimate goal in this life, that will not happen after the resurrection. Chronic sinners will retain their bad goals forever, and they will keep incurring punishment forever.”

You can only wonder what awesome revelation could have silenced Thomas Aquinas, to whom so much had already been revealed. 

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Joseph Suk-Hwan Dowd:

(PDF) Aquinas on Demonic Obstinacy (researchgate.net)

The Thinker

Sunday Sermon: Getting Over the Astonishment

Emmanuel Carrere (from The Kingdom):

There are people for whom being isn’t something you take for granted. From childhood they wonder: What am I doing here? And what’s “I”? And what’s “here”?

A lot of people can live their whole lives without ever being bothered by such questions—or if they are, it’s only very fleetingly, and they have no problem getting over them. They manufacture cars and drive around, they make love, talk at the coffee machine, get pissed off because there are too many foreigners in their country, or too many people who think there are too many foreigners in their country; they plan their vacations, worry about their children, want to change the world or be successful—and when they are, they’re afraid of becoming less successful; they make war, know that they’re going to die but think about it as little as possible; and all of that is quite enough to fill a life.

But there’s also another type of person for whom it’s not enough. Or too much. In any case, they’re not content with things as they are. You can argue all you want about whether they are more or less wise than others, but the fact is they’ve never gotten over their astonishment, and can’t live without asking why they’re living, what it all means, and whether it means anything at all. For them, existence is a question mark, and even if they don’t exclude the possibility that there’s no answer, they go on searching, they can’t help it. As others have searched before them—and some even claim they’ve found “it”—they listen to their testimonies. They read Plato and the mystics, they become what are known as religious minds—sometimes outside of any church.

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Emmanuel Carrère - Wikipedia

Books Report

Stephen Marche is Canadian, and his The New Civil War (2022) is written in the calm, reasonable tones one would expect from a Canadian. “The United States is coming to an end,” he begins. “The question is how.” Marche’s book is a discouraging read for anyone who believes that the United States is just going through a rough patch, politically speaking; Marche thinks we are kidding ourselves if we think the country can survive its current enmities and divisions. He insists that the USA can no longer function as a nation; it is a failing state, if not already a failed one, and it will either explode, implode, or, best case scenario, amicably reconfigure itself into four countries (Texas, California, North, and South). I am not usually susceptible to alarmism or to doomsday scenarios, but Marche’s matter-of-fact presentation tends to wear down even the most skeptical reader; “One way or another,” Marche announces authoritatively, “the United States is coming to an end. The divisions have become intractable. The political parties are irreconcilable. The capacity of government to make policy is diminishing. An underlying tribalism is shredding the ability of the political order to respond to threats against its own stability. The Constitution is becoming incoherent…The situation is clear; the system is broken, all along the line.”

It is difficult to dispute any of that; moreover, hope not being a plan, I have no solution to offer.

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Abolish Work is a 2016 anthology edited by Nick Ford, the express purpose of which is “to desecrate the temples of work.” David D’Amato establishes the book’s tone in his Foreword:

For the conniving sycophants of the political sphere, work is not only inevitable but desirable, not only desirable but holy. And among those afflicted with the political delusion, whether purportedly worried about coercion against the individual or social and economic justice, the salutary effects of more work — morally, psychologically, physically, etc. — are much touted. How little awareness they show of their shared religion, buried under the slogans of duty and self-denial, of twenty-first century slavery. Afraid of what they might see should they open their eyes, work’s prey cower and keep up the pretense of choice. Earnest employees itch to broadcast their schedules, each one more brimful than the last, proud, affected signals of just how busy they are.

D'Amato suggests that work serves purposes other than “productivity and efficiency”; it is at heart a “mechanism of control” that reinforces “existing class stratifications and categories…” He continues: "Premised on what David Graeber accurately calls “a hyper-fetishism of paperwork,” the bowels of our hellish corporate economy are simply bureaucracy for bureaucracy’s sake, a moribund world of anxiety and alienation. Quite contrary to the supercilious assurances of capitalist apologetics, work is decidedly not finely tuned for maximum productivity and efficiency; it is a mechanism of control, as concerned with maintaining existing class stratifications and categories as it is with producing iPhones and Nikes. Were efficiency (whatever indeed that is) its goal, work would at least appear very different from the bloated, wasteful monstrosity of the existing corporate economy, so dependent on the very kinds of compulsion that advocates of “free trade” purport to hate."

Thus is work necessarily predicated on a disorienting and Orwellian denial of reality.

Abolish Work is obviously just one more bit of Critical Thought meant to destroy the American Way of Life, a plot conceived by Marxist intellectuals to seduce the proletariat. But if America is on its way out anyway, why worry about its work ethic?

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The French author Emmanuel Carrere has won numerous awards for his work, fiction and non-fiction alike, on subjects ranging from Philip K. Dick to post-Soviet Russia; he was also involved in creating the brilliant French television series, Les Revenants. In The Kingdom, a book that is part historical novel, part memoir, and part theological meditation, Carrere grapples with the genesis of Christianity, with its “charms and foibles,” and with “the ragtag group of early Christians” who followed in the path of a man named Jesus (“an obscure religious freak who died under notorious circumstances”); all in an effort to understand how "normal, intelligent people can believe something as unreasonable as the Christian religion, something exactly like Greek mythology or fairy tales." Preposterously, to Carrere, modern Christians' "pie-in-the-sky ideas coexist alongside perfectly level-headed activities."  Is such belief an instance of "double-mindedness" or does it suggest some profound truth inaccessible to ordinary reason? 

Described as “blending scholarship with speculation [and] memoir with journalistic muckraking,” The Kingdom promises to be, like its author and its subject alike, both idiosyncratic and iconoclastic.

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They're called "books". They contain words printed, in ink, on paper. 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: The Cathars

{In his quest to understand the Great Refusal, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has found that religion inspires refusals of all kinds—the refusal of individuals and even groups to accept certain dogmas, doctrines, rituals, or sectarian orthodoxies, and the equally adamant refusal of religious authorities to leave such dissenters alone. Even apart from religion, of course, history is littered with the corpses of men and women who Refused to Comply with Authority of one sort or another. Saying “I would prefer not to” to a medieval King or to a Pope was inevitably ill-advised, as the likes of Savonarola, Thomas Becket, Sir Thomas More, and thousands of Albigensian heretics discovered.}

“Kill them all, God will know his own.” (Attributed to the crusading monk Arnold Amaury, outside the town of Beziers, 1209)

We should get this detail out of the way immediately. According to Stephen O’Shea (The Perfect Heresy), “The name ‘Cathar’ was a German play on words implying ‘cat worshiper’. It was bruited about that Cathars performed the so-called obscene kiss on the rear end of a cat.”

Let us speak no more of such matters. ¹

O’Shea goes on to explain:

The Cathar heresy, a pacifist brand of Christianity embracing tolerance and poverty, rose to prominence in the middle of the so-called ‘renaissance’ of the twelfth century, the time when Europe shook off the intellectual torpor that had afflicted it for hundreds of years.

It was a time of change, experimentation, and broader horizons. The spread of new ideas and the birth of new ambitions often led to dissatisfaction with an early medieval Church more suited to a benighted age of huddled monks and shivering peasantries. The great awakening of the twelfth century ushered in an era of spiritual longing that searched for and often found the sublime outside the fortress of orthodoxy.

What the Cathars found, however, did not fit the authorities’ definition of ‘sublime’; in their eyes, it was monstrous Heresy, a blend of Gnosticism and Marcionism that denied all the truths of scripture and of Church tradition. Worse still, the Cathars seemed completely indifferent to papal condemnation and even to formal excommunication; the authority of Rome meant nothing to them.

O'Shea:

For the Cathars, the world was not the handiwork of a good god. It was wholly the creation of a force of darkness, immanent in all things. Matter was corrupt, therefore irrelevant to salvation. Little if any attention had to be paid to the elaborate systems set up to bully people into obeying the man with the sharpest sword, the fattest wallet, or the biggest stick of incense. Worldly authority was a fraud, and worldly authority based on some divine sanction, such as the Church claimed, was outright hypocrisy.

St. Paul had said that temporal powers were instituted by God and were to be obeyed.  Jesus had handed Peter the keys to the kingdom and, thus, full authority over the world! Who did the Cathars think they were? Who died (for their sins) and made each of them boss?

The god deserving of Cathar worship was a god of light who ruled the invisible, the ethereal, the spiritual domain; this god was unconcerned with the material and simply didn’t care if you did anything contrary to the teachings of the medieval Church. It was up to the individual to decide if he or she was willing to renounce the material for a life of self-denial. If not, one would keep returning to this world—in other words, reincarnation—until ready to embrace a life sufficiently spotless to allow accession, at death, to the same blissful state one had experienced as an angel prior to having been tempted out of heaven at the beginning of time.

Purity was optional, as were all the other virtues. Relax, said the Cathars; enjoy yourself. You have all the time in the world, as many lives as you need, to indulge your carnal appetites, demonic as they undoubtedly are. Heaven can wait!

To be saved, then, meant becoming a saint. To be damned was to live, again and again, on this corrupt Earth. Hell was here, not in some horrific afterlife dreamed up by Rome to scare people out of their wits.

The world was not fallen, corrupted by Original Sin. It was what it was always intended to be by its evil creator: a place of suffering and torment, a trap, a prison—Hell. As O’Shea points out, “Even a cursory description of the Cathar faith gives an idea of how seditious the heresy was. If its tenets were true, the sacraments of the Church necessarily became null and void, for the very good reason that the Church itself was a hoax. Why pay any attention to it? Why pay any taxes or tithes to it?”

Such ideas could not be allowed to stand. They were, therefore, summarily wiped out of existence, along with the people proclaiming them:

The Albigensian Crusade, which lasted from 1209 to 1229, was launched by the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, Innocent III, and initially prosecuted by a gifted warrior, Simon de Montfort, under the approving eye of Arnold Amaury. The mail-fisted response to the questions posed by a popular heresy, the crusade set baleful precedents for Christendom’s approach to dissidence, by laying waste to Languedoc, the great arc of land stretching from the Pyrenees to Provence.

The crusade’s two decades of salutary slaughter then gave way to fifteen years of fitful revolt and repression, which culminated in the siege of Montsegur in 1244. A lonely fortress atop a needle of rock, Montsegur eventually surrendered, and more than 200 of its defenders, the leaders of the embattled Cathar faith, were herded into a snowy clearing to be burned alive.

By the middle of the fourteenth century, the Inquisition had razed any residual trace of the Albigensian heresy from the landscape of Christendom, and the Cathars of Languedoc had vanished.

Let us not pretend to mourn their passing; their belief system was ludicrous, even by comparison with mainstream Christianity. Dispensing with conventional morality and defying established authority, they were a public nuisance and a scandal to their decent, God-fearing neighbors. Were Cathars to appear on the streets of our cities today, we would charge them with vagrancy or public lewdness, lock them up, or give them one-way bus tickets out of town; in other words, we would give them the bum’s rush, just as we do to drag queens, Critical Race Theorists, and gender ideologists.

Just don't blame Catharism on the cats.

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¹ We should also dispose of any possible confusion between the Cathars, a heretical religious sect, and the Catheters, a wandering band of troubadours who ran afoul of the authorities for practicing medicine without a permit.

Does this look like a heretic to you?

Sunday Sermon: By the Rivers of Babylon

"By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept / when we remembered Zion." (Psalm 137: 1)

St. Augustine, glossing Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon”) and sounding like Ecclesiastes:

‘The rivers of Babylon are all things which are here loved and pass away. For example, one man loves to practice husbandry, to grow rich by it, to employ his mind on it, to get his pleasure from it. What he has loved is not a foundation of Jerusalem, but a river of Babylon. Another man says, it is a grand thing to be a soldier; all farmers fear soldiers, are subservient to them, and tremble at them. If I am a soldier, farmers will fear me. Madman! You have cast yourself headlong into another river of Babylon, and that still more turbulent and sweeping. You wish to be feared by your inferior; you should fear Him who is greater than you.

To be an advocate, says yet another, is a grand thing; eloquence is most powerful; clients hang on every word of their advocates, looking for loss or gain, death or life, ruin or security. This too is another river of Babylon; you do not know where you have cast yourself, its roaring sound is the din of water crashing against rocks. Mark that the river flows, it glides on; beware, for it carries everything away with it.

To sail the seas and to trade is a grand thing—to know many lands, to make gains from every quarter, never to be answerable to any powerful man in your country, to be always traveling and to feed your mind with the diversity of the nations, and to return enriched by your gains. This too is a river of Babylon. When will the gains stop? When will you be secure and content with the gains you have made? The richer you are, the more fearful you will be. Once shipwrecked, you will be stripped of everything, and rightly will you bewail your fate in the rivers of Babylon.’

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Quoted in Bob Goudzwaard's Capitalism and Progress

Psalm 137 is a lament written when Israel languished in exile in Babylon. The psalm closes with this charming benediction: "Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction, / happy is the one who repays you / according to what you have done to us. / Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks." 

Watching the River Flow

 

Wednesday with Pascal: Refusing Caesar

{Whether because of his Russian heritage or his existential stance, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is sinking his teeth and his claws into the Great Refusal. Having previously noted that, in Christian tradition, Lucifer had pride of place as the inventor of Disobedience ^TM, Pascal now remarks the irony that the early Christians themselves embraced Disobedience ^TM (civil, of course) as a virtue, thus confirming that the merits of Disobedience ^TM are in the eye of the beholder.} 

If Lucifer was, as Saul Alinsky claimed, “the first rebel,” should we then assume that all rebellion, every non serviam, is demonic?  The sainted apostle Paul explicitly told the members of his ecclesia, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.” ¹ That would seem to settle the issue, at least for Christians: Do what thou art told. Thou shalt not refuse authority.

Yet Paul, hardly a model of civic decorum himself, referred on more than one occasion to Satan as “the ruler of this world,” and it seems unlikely that Paul expected people to obey Satan; in fact, he stated, “Do not be conformed to this world,” which complicated the idea of submission to the authorities. Military service, holding public office, the payment of taxes, attendance at theater or at other entertainments: all these ways of being “conformed to this world” were questioned by Christians at one time or another.  

Christians were a defiant lot from the start. While claims of widespread Christian martyrdom in the first few centuries CE have been exaggerated, there is ample evidence that, despite Paul’s admonitions, followers of Christ frequently ran into trouble with authorities. Moreover, the trouble was caused in many cases by Christians who stubbornly asserted a form of “Non serviam.”

It is true that, by and large, the first Christians were decent, law-abiding citizens of the various cities in which they resided, dutiful subjects of Rome who, as Paul had instructed, paid their taxes and followed the laws. The “non serviam” issue arose when Christians were called upon (along with their non-Christian neighbors) to participate in civic rituals that involved honoring the Roman emperor, who was, technically, held to be a god. Followers of Jesus refused to take part because (they said) it would have violated their monotheistic beliefs.

Traditionally, Rome had been tolerant of the myriad religious beliefs and practices found within the expansive borders of empire, so long as such beliefs and practices did not disturb the peace or scandalize the citizenry. ² The fact that Jesus had been crucified under Roman law as a criminal inevitably raised suspicions about the loyalties of a cult that worshiped him, rather than the emperor, as a god; even so, Christianity, while being widely reviled, was not consequently outlawed. ³ Christians were allowed to openly proclaim their faith, and to gather for their agape services, despite rumors that such services featured cannibalism and incest; but, like adherents of other faiths, Christians were still expected to demonstrate publicly their loyalty to Rome.

Christians were not averse to affirming their civic allegiance. When pressed, they would verbally insist on their credentials as citizens, pointing to good works they did in the community; but they would not offer the ritual honors to Caesar. Exasperated, the Roman authorities sometimes bent over backwards to accommodate Christian sensitivities; in essence, they would tell Christians that they could offer sacrifice while maintaining mental reservations, or crossing their fingers, or muttering under their breath. ⁴ Weary magistrates implored them, explaining that the ritual was just a formality: Just make the gesture, they said, and be done with it. We would rather not punish you. We don’t care what you really believe.

A significant number of Christians refused the offer, a testament either to their honesty or their obduracy. Their stance was analogous, perhaps, to 21^st-century Americans who refuse to stand for the national anthem, to salute the flag, or to recite the Pledge of Allegiance (worse, to recite it while deliberately omitting the words “under God”). The earliest followers of Jesus were unwilling to compromise on the issue. The Roman authorities, on the other hand, had to consider the potential reaction of the non-Christian masses to this blatant public defiance; in the end, they had to insist, and then they had to enforce that insistence—however cruelly.

What, you may ask, would Jesus have done? Would he have applauded those who suffered (or even invited) torture and execution rather than engage in a perfunctory and meaningless civic ceremony? We cannot know, of course, but we find a clue of sorts in the gospel of Mark:

Some of the Pharisees and Herodians went to Jesus to catch him in his words. They said, ‘Teacher, we know you are a man of integrity…you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay taxes to Caesar or not? Should we pay or shouldn’t we?’

‘Why are you trying to trap me?’ Jesus asked. ‘Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.’ They brought him the coin, and he asked them, ‘Whose portrait is this? And whose inscription?’

‘Caesar’s,’ they replied.

Then Jesus said to them, ‘Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.’

For Jesus, tokens of imperial authority were evidently meaningless, and certainly not worth taking a stand over or becoming embroiled in controversy. Would he have felt the same about the mandatory civic rituals and their dutiful gestures of obeisance to Caesar? There is no way for us to know, but Jesus’ followers had no doubt about what was expected of them: nothing short of a Great Refusal would suffice, a non serviam to Caesar, his empire, and his pretensions.

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Persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire - Wikipedia

¹ Paul goes on to say (in Romans) that “the authorities are God’s servants, who give their full time to governing,” a remark so ostentatiously obsequious (and so unlike Paul) as to suggest that Paul, sending this letter to Rome ahead of his arrival, was trying to scotch rumors that he and his fellow Christians were troublemakers or subversives of some kind. He had adopted a similar tactic in advising believers at Thessalonica to avoid rocking the civic boat: “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business, and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders.”   

² Or frighten the horses.

³ It was sporadically banned, and local persecutions flared up around the empire from time to time. The idea that the earliest Christians were forced into “catacombs” en masse to practice their faith is simply untrue.

⁴ A tactic famously adopted by Galileo, who, having been forced by Church authorities to cease promoting his heretical notion that the earth moves around the sun, was said to have muttered, as he left the ecclesiastical proceedings, “Eppur si muove”: “And yet it [the earth] moves.”

Wednesday with Pascal: The Wasteland of Modernity

{Hiding out somewhere in Montana’s tri-city area (Pony, Willow Creek, and Three Forks), Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has somehow come across a copy of a book by the late Ivan Ilyin, a controversial Russian philosopher. I have no idea whether Pascal agrees with Ilyin’s ideas or whether he just likes having found something by a Russian author.}

Ivan Ilyin (1883--1954) was a Russian philosopher, an opponent of Bolshevism, a Fascist sympathizer, and, at least intermittently, an anti-Semite. Ilyin had the dubious honor of having been expelled from Russia by Lenin and having fled Germany during Hitler’s regime. Ilyin’s work has been rediscovered in post-Soviet Russia, where it has influenced the likes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Dugin, and even Vladimir Putin. The Foundation of Christian Culture was written in 1937, just before World War II. ¹ As the following excerpt indicates, the book was an indictment of secular modernity, which makes it relevant for today’s culture warriors and for the culture wars they continue waging. 

This is from Ilyin’s opening chapter:

Everything that has occurred in the twentieth century, and continues today, is proof of the fact that Christianity is suffering a crisis. Massive swathes of the population have lost their living faith and have left the Christian churches. Within the limits of what was formerly Christendom, there is a wide anti-Christian front that has tried to create an un-Christian and anti-Christian culture. This phenomenon is not a new one. The twentieth century, following in the footsteps of the nineteenth, only manifests a process that has been developing for centuries. The process of separation of culture from faith, religion, and the Church began a long time ago. It has been going on for several centuries. In Europe and America, ‘secular culture’ and secularization itself can trace their beginnings all the way to the Renaissance.

During the first millennium and a half after the birth of Christ, the situation was radically different. There could be many reasons for this. Possibly, people in general were more trusting, their spiritual makeup less complex and variegated, more instinctive, even irrational; therefore, more modest and spiritually careful. Perhaps the divine origin of the Gospel was more immediately apparent, more vividly and profoundly experienced. Perhaps man did not yet feel himself to be the master of nature, but one subjected to nature’s whims. Or maybe life was simply more chaotic and more fraught. However it may be, it was during this time period that people in Christendom considered religion to be the center of their life, its most important (or possibly its exclusive) source of existence and meaning. ²

For the last four centuries, and especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, all this radically changed. Even the end of the Middle Ages contained within itself the seeds of these changes; and we are the ones having to reap what those centuries sowed.

European culture of the nineteenth century was in essence already secular and desacralized. Science, art, law, agriculture, worldview, cosmology—all these were thoroughly secularized. The culture of our own time continues this separation from Christianity, but not only from Christianity; contemporary culture is losing its religious spirit, its meaning, and its beauty. It has not turned to any new religion, nor has it even started to seek anything of the sort. Having separated from Christianity, it has gone into an a-religious, godless wasteland. Mankind has not only ceased to contemplate, develop, and preserve the experience of the Christian church, but it has brought fruit to no other religious experience at all. It has left Christianity, but it wanders the wasteland aimlessly.

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Ivan Ilyin - Wikipedia

 ¹ According to Wikipedia, Ilyin was among those exiled by Lenin in 1923 on the famous “Philosophers’ Ship”. Wikipedia goes on to offer this fascinating report:

Until 1934, Ilyin cooperated with Nikolai Berdyaev on Russian Religious Renaissance. In “On resisting evil by force,” he advocated the use of violence in the struggle against Bolshevism, which he regarded as despotism. He criticized the anarchist and pacifist ideology of Tolstoy. He called for the courage to "arrest, condemn, and shoot," which Maxim Gorky called a "gospel of revenge"; Berdyaev compared Ilyin’s proposal to a "Cheka of God" and described it as “legalism devoid of grace”. Zinaida Gippius called Ilyin’s book "military field theology"; according to her, "Ilyin is not a philosopher who writes books, not a publicist who writes press releases: he is a man possessed running amok." In other words, he was a typical member of the Russian intelligentsia. 

² Ilyin could have added that village life in pre-modern Europe was arranged around liturgical calendars (e.g., feast days of saints were occasions for civic festivities); religion was not an individual matter but a communal and social obligation—dissenters, heretics, and non-conformists were met with scorn, if not worse. Local priests wielded an authority that was rarely questioned. Not surprisingly, what religious dissent there was came from the educated classes, from the leisured nobility, and from the monasteries and the universities: all of them potential sources of heterodox opinions, as they remain to this day.

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.

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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.  

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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