The Little Red Blog

Wednesday with Pascal: My Favorite Marcion

{I made it very clear to Pascal the existential Russian blue cat that his proposed title for this post was unacceptable. Did he listen? No, he did not. I have allowed it to stand, but with my disapproval noted.}

“The problematics raised by heretics played a large and positive role in the discerning of the fullness of truth for the churchly Christianity itself.” (N. Berdyaev)

Christian theology, as is well known, started with Paul, in the decades immediately following Jesus’ death. It took nearly a hundred years more, however, before Christianity had its next important theologian, who also happened to be its first notable heretic. Marcion of Sinope, preaching to Christians in Rome, claimed that the Christian God (Jesus’ Abba) was not the same as Israel’s God, the YHWH of the Hebrew testament. Marcion’s reading of Jewish scriptures convinced him that YHWH was a petty tribal god afflicted with delusions of grandeur, which delusions led him to claim to be the only God in existence. ¹ According to Marcion, Jesus had been sent not by YHWH but by a hitherto unknown God, whose intent was not to save mankind from Satan, sin, and death, but to save it from YHWH, the true source of those evils. To call those views “unorthodox” is understating the case. Even so, it is hard to deny that “Elements of Marcionism can be discerned in the Fourth Gospel, in the epistles of Paul and in his hostility to the "world", in his teaching about redemption and about the surmounting of the Law, i.e. in the very essence of Christianity.”

However plausible his exegetics may have been, Marcion’s conclusions were not widely accepted. Naturally, having made those views public, Marcion was expelled from the good graces of the Roman church, leading him to form his own “Marcionite” sect. His heresies, however, by forcing apologists to think through Christian claims about God, Jesus, and salvation, were invaluable in the development of Christian theology; at the same time, Marcion’s creation of a corpus of “acceptable” Christian writings (ten letters attributed to Paul and an edited version of the Gospel of Luke) led in time to the Church’s canonical New Testament. ²

Two thousand years later, Marcion is all but forgotten, but anyone interested in post-Pauline Christian thought ignores him at their peril. The study of Marcion’s beliefs has been hindered by the fact that none of his writings have survived; we have only excerpts cited, for polemical purposes, by his theological opponents. We cannot know how accurate the excerpts are, or whether they were unfairly taken out of context, much less what was omitted that might have been germane to Marcion’s argument.

The 20th-century Russian theologian/philosopher Nicolai Berdyaev linked Marcion’s heretical thoughts to a perennially vexing issue: “Marcionism,” he wrote, “signifies a [radical solution] to the problem of theodicy.” Theodicy is the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with the providence of a God said to be infinitely good, loving, and compassionate. Berdyaev acknowledged that the problem of evil “never had a rational theological resolution, one that is acceptable for the moral consciousness of man.” He also noted that “Modern man, when he approaches religion, becomes struck and shaken by the problem of evil and suffering.” The greatest of Russian writers, Dostoevsky, repeatedly grappled with the issue: “Ivan Karamazov does not accept ‘God's world’ because of the tears of a little child. He spurns both the Creator and the creation, in which there is pestilence and plague.” Theodicy would also be the underlying theme of Albert Camus’ novel The Plague.

Like the Gnostics of his time, “Marcion rose up against the God of the Bible, the God of the Old Testament, against the Creator and Fashioner of the world, responsible for having created evil and suffering, and against this he set in opposition Christ, the revelation of another and unknowable God, foreign to the world and not responsible for having created the world.” Marcion was not himself a Gnostic, but he shared Gnostics’ resentment at the suffering woven inextricably into existence itself. In Marcion’s mind, and despite his critics, he was a Christian; he believed that “Christ came to set free from the power of the evil God, the Demiurge, such as had created this evil world. If atheism is set in opposition to the belief that this world was created by an All-Good God, as revealed in the Bible, then Marcion was an atheist.”

For all the genuine exegetical and theological issues involved in the Marcionite controversy, we should not lose sight of the fact that more than orthodoxy was at stake. Early Christianity was reviled for being (among other things) a novelty, a new religion with no historical or socio-cultural foundation; pagans found the very idea of religious innovation to be offensive. Christians responded to such charges by associating themselves with biblical Israel, by expropriating Israel’s scriptures, and by insisting that their religion was the legitimate continuation of the centuries-old worship of YHWH. When Marcion proclaimed a new and hitherto unknown God, he was inadvertently confirming the accusations against Christianity; for that reason, if for no other, he and his heretical views had to be disavowed.

And there you have, in brief, the story of my favorite Marcion.

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¹ To be fair, Marcion’s reading is not indefensible, merely unpopular.

² Needless to say, Marcion’s “bible” did not include Israel’s scriptures (aka the Christian “Old Testament"), though he acknowledged those scriptures contained much that was of value.

Marcion and His Amanuensis

Saturday Lecture: On the Nature of Demons

{Demonology and angelology are sadly neglected subjects in our modern woke universities. It’s no wonder that, as Richard Weaver pointed out, it has been all downhill since the 14^th century.}

"I saw Satan fall like lightning from heavens." (Luke 10:18)

Norman Cohn, from Europe’s Inner Demons:

Throughout the history of the early church, Satan and the lesser demons continued to be imagined very much as they were in the New Testament; with the elaboration of a Christian theology, however, their theological significance became more clearly defined. Gradually they were integrated into the central doctrines of Christianity, the fall of man, original sin, and man’s redemption through the crucifixion of Christ.

In the first century before Christ, the Book of Enoch hinted that it was one of a number of “Satans,” conceived as followers of the chief Satan, who had led Eve astray. In the first century after Christ, Satan was at last brought explicitly into relation with the serpent in the Garden of Eden; either the serpent was Satan disguised, or Satan acted through the serpent. The Books of Adam and Eve, composed late in the first century, elaborated on the part played by Satan in the fall of man. To deceive Eve, Satan hung himself on the walls of Paradise, looking like an angel and singing hymns like an angel. ¹ He persuaded the serpent to let him speak through its mouth. ²

This same Satan had once been one of the angels of God, but he disobeyed God’s commands and led other angels to disobey, with the result that he and his followers were cast out of heaven. In the main, this view of the fall of Satan and the fall of man was adopted by the Fathers of the Church, from the second-century apologist Justin Martyr onwards. The only point of dispute concerned the fall, not of Satan himself, but of the lesser angels. Earlier sources held that these angels had fallen because they desired the daughters of men; it followed that, unlike Satan, they had not fallen until well after the fall of man. This difficulty was circumvented by the third-century theologian Origen, who proclaimed that the passage in Genesis about the sons of God and the daughters of men must be taken allegorically; the true fall of the angels had taken place before the creation of the world. ³

By the end of the fourth century, it was generally accepted in East and West alike that the fall of man was part of a prodigious cosmic struggle which had begun when some of the heavenly host had revolted against God and had been cast out of heaven. As for the habitat of the demons, there was never, in those centuries, any doubt about that. Whereas the angels dwelt in the highest heaven, near the throne of God, the demons were confined to the dark air immediately above the earth. This is the meaning of Paul’s famous phrase about ‘spiritual wickedness in high places.’  The Fathers shared his views. Augustine, for example, maintained that ‘the Devil was expelled, along with his angels, from the lofty abode of heaven, and was cast into darkness, that is to say, into our atmosphere, as into a prison.’

It was also agreed that, since angels possessed ethereal bodies, composed of air and light, demons must be similarly equipped. According to Augustine, these ethereal bodies give demons extraordinary powers of perception and enable them to transport themselves through the air with extraordinary speed. From their airy habitat, Satan and his demons wage incessant war upon the Christians; for the Devil, who never knows peace, cannot leave men in peace. Together with his demons he causes both the sickness of individuals and collective disasters such as drought, bad harvests, epidemics among men and beasts. They also seduce Christians to abandon the true faith, to fall into schism and heresy. St. Cyprian even held that, save for the activity of devils, there would be no heresies or schisms at all. ⁴

Not for a moment do demons cease from their plaguing and tempting of mortals. Demons are filled with such hostility towards mankind that it is a miracle that any human being survives. 

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¹ Paradise had walls? Apparently so.

² Ventriloquism having been, in the day, one of Satan’s many talents.

³ The creation stories in Genesis do not mention either Satan or angels. It is only after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden that we are told “On the east side of Eden, God placed cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.” The cherubim, whatever their original function(s), were quite literally deployed as guardian angels.

⁴ Norman Cohn notes that “In the days of the Fathers, the church was still full of optimism, still sure of its faith and of the triumph of that faith. Satan might be strong, but it was within the power of any Christian to resist him.” However, he adds, “Gradually, over the centuries, new and terrible anxieties began to make themselves felt in Christian minds; by the later Middle Ages, Satan and his demons had become far more powerful and menacing.”

Josh Hawley: Confused Again, Naturally

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) recently gave a stemwinder of a speech to the National Conservatism Conference (bless its heart). I am not, to be honest, a fan of Senator Hawley. He looks to me like a used-car salesman (luxury cars only) or a clone of Don Draper; he is Mitt Romney without Romney’s charisma. Nonetheless, Hawley’s speech has garnered attention. Most reactions have focused on Hawley’s promotion of ‘Christian nationalism’ (his version of it, at least); the speech itself repeatedly emphasized that America was founded as a ‘Christian nation’ and can only flourish if it remains so.

Whatever one may think of that, a good deal of Hawley’s Christianity-heavy speech expressed an economic populism with which most of us on the Left would agree—except that we have no reason to believe (a) that Josh Hawley means what he says, or (b) that the Republican Party of which Hawley is a member has the slightest intention of championing the reforms he recommends. Hawley’s rhapsodic praise of the ‘common man,’ of labor, of the working class, of families, etc. is not reflected in a single piece of legislation that either he or his colleagues have managed to craft, much less enact into law. Cap interest rates on credit card debt? Tax capital at higher rates than wages? Oppose corporate tax cuts? Strengthen labor unions? Defy the tyranny of Wall Street? Tell your base that greed is bad?

I will believe in this Grand Old Populism when I see it. I do, however, believe Hawley is serious when he says he wants to crown every federal building in the country with a flag bearing the national motto, “In God We Trust.” That, I believe, is doable for today’s GOP; even Mr. and Mrs. Alito would proudly display such a flag (though they might at times fly it upside down).

In his speech, Hawley spends at least as much time castigating “Bush-Romney” Republicans as he does the anti-God Left, ¹ thus proving himself to be a bravely independent voice, a maverick willing to buck the party line. If I had the energy, I could look up Hawley’s voting record to see how maverick-y he really is; but when I think about researching his Senate career, I keep seeing the image of his clenched-fist salute to the January 6, um, tourists, and then the image of him scurrying down the hallway inside to join fellow lawmakers in an undisclosed secure location. Geez—I mean, who hides like that from tourists?

 

 

All that aside, my main bone of contention with Hawley’s speech is that he claims his version of ‘Christian nationalism’ comes from none other than St. Augustine, whose book City of God Hawley apparently thinks was a blueprint for a theocracy, as well as a guide for the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness”. Sadly, for Hawley, he is a liar as mistaken in his reading of Augustine as he is in his understanding of American history.

City of God, written in response to the sacking of Rome in the early 5^th century CE, posited the simultaneous existence of two ‘cities’ on earth, i.e., the City of God and the City of Man. Emphasizing that Christians’ true home was the City of God, Augustine did not advise them to seek control over the City of Man, nor did he expect the City of Man to operate according to the values of the City of God. Instead, Augustine (much like Paul) advised Christians to work towards the peace and good order of their earthly abode, while keeping in mind that they, as Christians, were only pilgrims passing through the City of Man on their way home to the City of God.

To clarify the matter, allow me to quote Dr. Mark Allen of Liberty University (admittedly, not my usual go-to source) on Augustine’s recommendations for Christians living in the two cities:

Citizens of the City of God do not put their ultimate hope in the earthly city. They are eschatological beings, happy in the hope of the full manifestation of the heavenly city in the new heaven and new earth.  They take a realistic, even chastened, view of how much actual good can be accomplished in the City of Man. The City of God must not coopt the City of Man or collapse the two into one missional entity hoping to bring about the fullness of the Kingdom of God through its partnership with the earthly city. Or, from another perspective, an earthly nation can never so absorb the heavenly city that that nation becomes a primary advancer of the Kingdom of God.

You might say that Augustine posited two distinct cities, each demanding a certain loyalty. Christians, said Augustine, could be good citizens in the City of Man, but they were to be mindful of where their deepest loyalties must lie.

Dr. Allen continues:

Citizens of the City of God do not seek to dominate the earthly city. The very lust to dominate is the insidious urge that twists and corrupts the earthly city into what it is. Individual citizens of the City of God should be cautious about taking positions of power. We serve as leaders not to gain the upper hand in a culture war but to care for the well-being of others. As James Davidson Hunter puts it, citizens of the heavenly city rather than “seizing power” seek to be a “faithful presence” in the earthly city. They work for the common good and peace of the earthly city. “The earthly city can achieve limited goods, even if not the greatest goods for which humankind was created. And citizens of the Heavenly City can help foster those goods in the many different earthly cities in which they find themselves.” 

I cannot speak either for or against the sincerity of Josh Hawley’s Christian convictions or of his economic populism. I can, however, attest that he has taken Augustine’s name in vain, which, while not expressly prohibited, is frowned upon in polite circles. Promote your Christian nationalist agenda all you like, Senator Hawley, but please don’t stamp it with the imprimatur of the sainted Bishop of Hippo; I doubt he would find either you or your agenda endearing. 

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Sen. Josh Hawley: America Founded on 'Christian Nationalism' (dailysignal.com)

The City of God and the City of Man | Dr. Mark D. Allen | ACE (liberty.edu)

¹ Why does Josh Hawley believe that everyone on ‘the Left’ is an atheist? I admit that I’m an atheist, as are some of my friends, but I know plenty of Left-leaning Christians.

Today's Musings

I rarely venture into the ideological cesspool that is Christopher Rufo's City Journal, but I do occasionally put on my hip boots, hold my nose, and try to see if I can find anything salvageable in the muck. Today I am pleased to say that Stephen Harrop at City Journal has produced a perfectly reasonable and fair-minded review of Oliver Traldi’s recent book, Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction. Harrop informs his readers that Traldi has articulated at least three essential points about political beliefs:

Traldi, a research fellow at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, enjoins the reader to take a few lessons. The first is that “people’s motivations for developing their political beliefs are often rather obscure.” What someone believes often tells us little about why he believes it. Questioning those beliefs can be little more than self-gratification. Another lesson: exposure to political information is not necessarily a royal road to political knowledge, to knowing what justice is or what the best means to achieve it are. Most important is the “value of independent thought.” Traldi might agree with my summary of this lesson in two Enlightenment slogans, ‘nullius in verba’ (“take no one’s word for it”) and ‘sapere aude’ (“dare to know”).

When a commentator at City Journal approvingly cites two Enlightenment mottoes, we are in uncharted territory.

Harrop has his quarrels with Traldi’s book; he finds it “short on a precise definition” of what ‘political’ means, or of what qualifies a belief as being political. That aside, Harrop concludes that “Our differing beliefs tend to be defined by the insides and outsides of our little bubbles. That might explain which of our debates are political, but on its own it does little to tell us how reliable those beliefs are. To determine that requires plodding, patient hard work. It requires a “daring to know.” As a call to do that, Traldi’s book excels.”

Thank you, Stephen Harrop, for making my excursion into the muck of City Journal worthwhile.

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Review of Political Beliefs: A Philosophical Introduction by Oliver Traldi | City Journal (city-journal.org)

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Amelia Soth’s article “Wild Saints and Holy Fools” is right up my alley, focusing as it does on the eccentric hermits and monks of the early Christian centuries. As she notes, “Early Christian lore is full of accounts of ascetics who sought salvation through a return to wildness. These bestial saints wandered through the desert, eating only raw food and clothed only in their long, unruly hair; their nails grown into claws, and they shied away from people like wild deer.” I said “eccentric,” but I am fairly certain that a non-zero percentage of these saints were deranged.

Soth continues, in an entirely nonjudgmental tone: “The ascetics reportedly lived alongside lions and gazelles, sharing their food and water, forgetting human civilization and all its evils.” The desert was their preferred habitat; after all, as Bruce Springsteen said, “It’s hard to be a saint in the city.” Soth quotes Judith Adler:

“Desert—in the sense of wild and uncultivated rather than specifically sandy or rocky space—became newly valorized as the spiritual/intellectual center of a cosmopolitan monastic movement. Christian ascetic writers cast wasteland, where there is ‘neither perpetrator nor victim of injustice, nor complaint of a tax collector as an earthly ‘paradise of the fathers,’ while market towns and cities that saints were said to ‘flee’ were depicted as a dark, uninhabitable ‘wilderness of this world’.”

But the wild saints did not have a monopoly on unconventional behavior. There were holy fools as well, some of whom chose to terrorize, or at least scandalize, the towns and cities:

According to legend, after thirty years grazing in the wild, St. Simeon felt a divine call to go to the city. He arrived at its gates with a dead dog strapped to his belt, and, oddly enough for a saint, he quickly established himself as a public menace, writes religious studies scholar Jesse Perillo, by blowing out the candles right before Mass, pelting locals with walnuts, overturning market stalls, flagrantly violating rules of fasting, walking around naked, relieving himself in public, and (perhaps worst of all) openly associating with actors. It was a sixth-century version of freaking out the normies.

At the same time, he performed miracles—curing diseases, driving out demons, saving a building from an earthquake—all the while using his constant mischief to distract the public from his holiness. In doing so, he established a lineage of “holy fools.” In his footsteps followed figures such as St. Andreas, who staggered about pretending to be drunk, curled up with the stray dogs to sleep at night, and quenched his thirst from puddles in the road.

You really cannot make this stuff up.

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Wild Saints and Holy Fools - JSTOR Daily

St. Simeon, patron saint of dog catchers...

Saturday Lecture: Christianity, Nihilism, and Ethics

“Religion is man’s great venture and man’s great, fatal failure.” (K.H. Miskotte)

K.H. Miskotte (from When the Gods Are Silent):

The gods are silent. The idea is still in the air, but it is mute. The shape lingers on the horizon but is suffused in a silent fog. The words still resound, as in a strange, unknown language or like a song from childhood; but they no longer speak the mystery to us. We no longer feel secure in the bosom of nature; we know that all things far and near do not speak, neither the Milky Way nor the electron. We are bound by the spell of things; the facts have us in their grip. We still feel an occasional prickle of dead before a higher power, but that power is voiceless, it no longer shows any signs of life.

Nihilism can be understood as a reaction to Christianity, which, after all, had increasingly put the stamp of the divine on worldly entities; in this sense it was the Enlightenment that inaugurated the process of nihilism in Europe. Then the Enlightenment itself strengthened ‘the agonizing feeling of the nothingness of science,’ for in a strange way understanding brings with it an emptying of life and initiative. According to Nietzsche, nihilism comes as a reaction to the mind’s habit of construing by means of value judgments an increasing number of areas and goals of life as being desirable and meaningful. But then, ‘The untenability of one interpretation of the world, upon which a tremendous amount of energy has been lavished, awakens the suspicion that all interpretations of the world are false. It makes no difference whether the question of meaning was a proper question to which previously we have given a false answer or whether it was a wrong question which must always be followed by a wrong answer.’

Nihilism may also take the form of saying, ‘There is no reality behind any faith or any ideal. There is nothing but an abyss of absurd existence. But hail to the summer, the sun, laughter; blessed be life and strength and women! We roam the world with hungry eyes to see everything we can; we want to fly to the moon; there is not enough time to enjoy to the full this terrible life!’ This kind of nihilism is genuine, warm, human, and understandable.

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{In which we are told that moral codes are made to be broken.}

“If someone asks me what he should do in a particular situation, I cannot tell him.”

John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):

There is no such thing as a general ethic for man as to what he shall do, or not do, in all circumstances. Such a theory would presuppose an understanding of man as a being with definite plans and goals. But man does not have his life at his disposal in such a way. Man lives in a state of uncertainty in the face of what meets him from day to day, and every decision is a new decision. Ethical truth is distinguished from other forms of truth, such as mathematical truth, by the fact that it is never self-evident but becomes evident only in the concrete situation. The actuality of our present situation is always a decision which we have to make, and the ethical truth which appears is not a general truth but a particular truth. There is no such thing as ‘goodness’ in itself, nor is there any moral law as such.

There can be no such thing as a system of individual or social ethics. Neither is there any such thing as moral law as such. The idea of a ‘general’ ethics or a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. Ethics develops no program but deals from case to case. It uses no high-sounding language about the uplift of humanity or the creation of a better social order but gets down to real and simple things. A man knows only what he needs to do now, not what he may have to do in the next quarter of an hour.

Neither man nor the world can be improved, they can only be kept in check, and that with difficulty. To treat the Sermon on the Mount as a general ethics, or as a body of laws applicable to all circumstances of society, can only lead to disillusionment and disaster. This world cannot be ruled by the Sermon on the Mount; it is the ethics of the new man and of the new world, the ethics of the kingdom.

 

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 Two)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is aware that Christians, on the rare occasion they give thought to such matters, do not think of themselves as nihilists. He apologizes for disturbing them and promises to move on from this topic as soon as possible.} 

 “Our life is illusion; the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God.” (Karl Barth)

“The gospel is not a truth among other truths. Rather, it sets a question mark against all truths.” (Karl Barth)

Despite Christianity’s openly declared contempt for the world, Christians found themselves stuck with living in it. Having been catapulted to power and respectability by Constantine, Church authorities made the best bargains they could with what Paul had described as the world’s “powers and principalities,” becoming, in relatively short order, one of those very powers. The Church’s worldly triumph required reinterpretation of certain scriptural passages, but Christian apologists were up to the task. The nihilism at the heart of Jesus’ and Paul’s gospel was discretely ignored, though it never went away.    

To make a long story short, Christendom lasted until it didn’t. Whatever claims to the contrary had been made by Christian authorities—or, for that matter, by Jesus himself—Christianity could not forever resist the currents of History. In the nineteenth century, challenged by the Enlightenment, Protestant theologians began rethinking their Weltanschauung, while Catholics dug in their heels against the modern tide. The former eventually arrived at “liberal” theology, which mixed the social gospel with a humanized Jesus while hoping to immanentize the eschaton; the latter (Catholics) thumbed their nose at Enlightenment and conceded the pope infallibility. Then came the Great War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and what might be called the Disillusionment of the West.    

Toward the end of the war, the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, following the lead of Soren Kierkegaard, scandalized and provoked his Christian brethren by reminding them of the nihilism concealed beneath the cover of their respectable bourgeois religion. According to J. Gresham Machen, Barth insisted that “God is not another name for the totality of this world; and he is not to be found in any experience of man. He is, with respect to this world, the "completely Other," the One who is incommensurate with anything that can possibly enter into the life of man. Such is the stupendous dualism between the world and God that is at the root of the thinking of Karl Barth.” Nothing in this world connects us to Barth’s God; God may deign to reach out to us or to reveal his will—or he may not, and if he chooses not to do so, there is nothing we can do about it.

In Barth’s view, not even Christianity could bridge the gap between human and divine. Walter Lowrie, following Barth, put it this way: in our religious rituals and language, “We are thinking not of God but of man; as Barth says, while we thought we were speaking about God, we were merely ‘saying Man with a loud voice.’” Ludwig Feuerbach had made the same point in the nineteenth century, but on behalf of atheism; Barth, on the other hand, wanted to force Christians to confront the emptiness of their earthly existence, including their faith. As Karen Leslie Carr puts it, “For Barth, ‘Faith is no possession, rather it is a void; God is nowhere present in history, rather the truth points us only to his total absence; Jesus’ message lay not in his superior knowledge of God but in his cry, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In short, for Barth, ‘Religion possesses no solution to the problem of life; what it does is to disclose the truth that the problem cannot be solved.’” People long for security, foundation, and assurance, but none of that is to be had in this life. People crave God but God is not in the world: “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here.”

Carr continues: “For Barth the issue was, how do we even make sense of the inchoate mess that is our existence? How can we claim to know anything about God at all, when ‘the indisputable reality is the invisibility of God?’ God is so far removed from our experience that one is driven to question his very existence. Barth wrote, ‘Our world is formless and tumultuous chaos, a chaos of the forces of nature and of the human soul. Our life is illusion: this is the situation in which we find ourselves.’”

Was Barth a nihilist? Only in the sense that he pinned all earthly hopes on a God who cannot be known unless he chooses to reveal himself; mortal existence, in Barth's theology, has no value in and of itself. That is a hard gospel to preach, and a harder gospel to accept.

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Karen Leslie Carr quotes from The Banalization of Nihilism.

God is forever out of reach, and yet we keep reaching...

Saturday Lecture: The Pursuit of Shadows

{In the 1920s and 1930s, for a variety of reasons, Protestant theologians—most prominently, Karl Barth—abandoned the ‘social gospel’ and its aspirations to construct God’s kingdom on earth. Instead, they put their trust in a God whom they declared “wholly Other” and out of human reach. In effect, Barthian ‘neo-orthodoxy’ insisted we throw ourselves on the mercy of a mysterious, absentee Judge whose verdict would have little or nothing to do with the merits of our case. The following was written in 1933 by an admirer of Barth’s. You may note its resemblance to more recent polemics against Modernity; almost by definition, traditionalists have no new arguments to offer.}   

John McConnachie (from Barthian Theology):

A judgement is being pronounced today on our whole Western civilization.

To Modernism we can attribute much of the present disintegration of the old divine ordinances of society, of the family, home, marriage, which constituted the firm foundation on which life was lived in a former day. What man was, he was through those ordinances, but what he is now, he is through himself. The world in which we live now is one of convinced individualism, which accounts for the prevailing uncertainty and confusion of thought, and for the moral Bolshevism so rampant.

Humanity is not without its admirable features. Though subject to transitoriness and death, it has shown itself capable of great self-denial, and self-sacrifice, and through its efforts it has brought into being a whole group of cultural, aesthetic, and scientific values. But humanity conceals within itself the titanic impulse to storm the heights, to ‘build us a city and a tower whose top may reach to heaven, and to make us a name.’ By ignoring the distance between man and God, it has been guilty of Promethean pride and self-glorification, and has succumbed to the sinful ambition ‘to be as gods.’

In the faith of the nineteenth century in the unfailing progress of man, of human culture and morals, with Herbert Spencer as its high priest, this pride found arrogant expression. ‘Progress,’ said Spencer, ‘is not an accident but a necessity. What we call evil and immorality must disappear. It is certain that man must become perfect.’ The final product of this pride in humanity is Humanism, especially as it has come to full flower in America. John Dewey, the leading American Humanist, with perfect logic rules out God altogether; for if humanity be thus irresistible, if man can confront the world as lord, what need is there for a God anymore? Man is God to himself. Religion remains as a human product, valuable because of its usefulness, but the only possible religion in the end is the worship of humanity.

This proud self-conscious humanity, with all its gifts and powers, has come into the crisis of its existence and has been overtaken by judgement. All its fine idealisms have been seen to have been delusions, and all its self-deifications to have been dreams born of intoxication. Its judgment is revealed in its deficiency of power. It has become weak and almost despairing, for the crisis has revealed what it is not, as much as what it is. The proud Towers of Babel which it sought to build are toppling down. Its sin of trying to do without God is being discovered.

Our modern individualistic Protestantism has its roots much more in the enthusiasts and humanists of the Middles Ages than in the Reformers. A Church which has sunk in many places into being a social center, a home of Humanism, with nothing better to offer than some special brand of ‘Christian culture’ (higher than, perhaps, but no different in kind than that of the world) has lost its substance in the pursuit of shadows. The religion of temperament and sentiment has replaced the religion of will and obedience, but it has proved inadequate for our time. Synergism has been enjoying its great day, pervaded by a Pelagian conception of sin, salvation, and grace. We have come to understand ‘the Kingdom of God’ as a project of social and moral idealism, a perfect human society here on earth.

Our age can be compared with the age of the close of the Roman Empire. Now, as then, there is a widespread sense that the foundations are being shaken on all sides. Once more a quite elementary longing has arisen for something that is beyond time’s shakings, for an ‘Archimedean point’ outside, a longing for contact with a Reality above the relativity of history and experience.

This crisis is perhaps the most hopeful aspect of our age. For when humanity ceases to rely on itself and to make of itself a god, hope may be at hand. The world has experienced a veritable apocalypse of evil, which has shaken the faith of all but the very young in the nobility of human nature. The preaching of our time has sought to lift men by an appeal to their strength rather than by a reminder of their weakness. It has made much of the seeming good in human nature and has inclined to ignore the overmastering evil. The crisis into which such preaching has brought us must be regarded as a judgment.

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Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Shadows

 

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.

My Fair Share

{I confess I have increasingly burdened Pascal the existential Russian blue cat with writing the lion’s share of The Little Red Blog’s posts. That is a lot to ask of a cat, even one as gifted as Pascal. I promise to do better; to begin with, here is my fair share for today.}

Oh, no: Victor Davis Hanson is upset about a thing—I mean, about another thing—I mean—oh, let’s face it, Victor Davis Hanson is, as always, upset about everything.

Why won’t the Baby Boomers, “the generation that is now passing after a half-century of preeminence and whose Jacobin agendas have nearly wrecked the nation they inherited,” get off the nation’s lawn?

The Sixties generation’s new normal is to impeach a president twice, to try him as a private citizen, and to seek to remove him from state ballots.

All that was now characteristic of a generation that learned in the 1960s that if it did not get its way, it would wreck what it could not control. So, it was logical that it sought to pack the court, to end the filibuster, to destroy the Electoral College—and to corrupt the law to achieve political ends. Or as the Sixties generation taught us, “by any means necessary”—an arrogant affirmation of Machiavelli’s dictum that “the ends justify the means.”

Now we are left with a final toxic gift from this generation: the destruction of jurisprudence, a system designed not to easily protect the popular and admired but those often pilloried in the public square, the unorthodox, eccentric, and unliked.

Also, much to their discredit, the Baby Boomers, as Hanson notes, failed to liberate Europe from Nazi Germany. Where were all the hippies at Normandy, Boomer?

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The Destructive Generation—Proving America’s Weakest Link › American Greatness (amgreatness.com)

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I am guessing that Pavlos Papadopoulos, who teaches at Wyoming Catholic College, has no idea that parts, at least, of his tirade against American higher education are reminiscent of the 1962 “Port Huron Statement” that helped jump-start the Sixties’ counterculture mentality:

The last century has seen our constitutional republic largely replaced by a new administrative state. This replacement mirrored, and was midwifed by, a transformation in our dominant institutions of education. The sprawling modern research universities that, since the turn of the 20th century, have created an administrative state at home, sustained an American Empire abroad, and continue to dominate higher education today, were built on radically different foundations than the humble classical liberal arts colleges that taught the citizens and statesmen of the early centuries of American history, through our colonial, founding, and early-republican periods.

The regime-level function of the contemporary university is to catechize and credential managers whose expertise will legitimate their rule of the American people, and the wider world, via the federal bureaucracy and a suite of mega-corporations and non-governmental organizations. The regime-level function of our old classical colleges had been to train elites whose wisdom would prepare them to serve the material and spiritual needs of their communities. Today’s university presupposes, and reinforces, the bureaucracy of an empire and the careful management of subject peoples. Our older colleges presupposed, and reinforced, the civil society and structures of a republic and the moral and political self-government of its citizens.

I commend to Mr. Papadopoulos’ attention this link: The Port Huron Statement (1962) | The American Yawp Reader He might learn that the bureaucratic, research-driven academic “regime” he opposes today is the same “regime” we opposed in the Sixties, before we started camping out on Victor Davis Hanson’s lawn.

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As the Schools Go, So Goes the Nation - TomKlingenstein.com

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Christoph Blumhardt:

Our work must follow two laws. We may not bear grudges against anyone, for the kingdom of God is God’s love for all people. And we must not annoy, scorn, or despise any of the poor as of less value than ourselves. You are yourself a miserable wretch if you treat them as though they were of no value. We must always have God’s values before our eyes. God’s treasure lies within each person, not with the great and powerful of this earth. The divine worth in any despised person must be recognized, and we must protect and cherish it. Whenever we get together with people, we need to consider their value for the kingdom of God.

When history, which confuses us and creates enemies, comes to an end and deception has been driven out of the world, we might see this kingdom, this treasure, shining clearly. In the meantime, I must see it in my enemy as a mustard seed and forgive again and again. If someone should insult me a hundred times, I must still see in him value for God.

This is what people have not yet learned, and I believe that this is why the kingdom of God has not yet come. People bite and scratch, warring against each other, despising and scorning one another. Even the finest people are ready, for the sake of their beliefs and convictions, to judge and condemn others – they have thoroughly learned that! But to discern what is of God in the enemy, to grasp God’s worth in those who insult us, in foreigners, in those far from us who think differently, in the poor just as much as in the noble – this they have not learned.

The above is from a sermon preached by Christoph Blumhardt in 1899. The congregation listened attentively, then went out into the world and, following Blumhardt’s advice, loved their enemies, turned the other cheek, and went out of their way to see the value in everyone. Their efforts were contagious, and, within a miraculously short time, the mustard seed of love had become an entire kingdom. Nations did not make war no more, swords were turned into ploughshares, and everyone got a pony. Honest—that’s what happened; I mean, proleptically.

Fun fact: Blumhardt, a respected Lutheran theologian, declared his support for socialism in 1899, and announced that he had joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was promptly fired from his position as a Lutheran minister.

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How God Sees Us by Christoph Friedrich Blumhardt (plough.com)