The Little Red Blog

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

The War in Heaven

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Non-Existent Enemy?

{Was it a mistake to give Professor Arguendo a pulpit from which to preach his unorthodox gospel?}

Arguendo: modern Christians can only give lip service, at best, to the beliefs of Jesus and his earliest disciples. Those beliefs were deeply rooted in a pre-modern worldview no longer tenable today. 

I am hardly the first to notice or to call attention to this fact. David Bentley Hart, a 21-st century Eastern Orthodox theologian, has emphasized the radically different New Testament worldview:

“The New Testament emerges from a cosmos ruled by malign celestial principalities and torn between spirit and flesh. There are no comfortable medians in these latitudes, no areas of shade. Everything is cast in the harsh light of final judgment, and that judgment is absolute. In regard to all these texts, the qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretation is always false.”

It is, however, the ingeniously qualified, moderate, common-sense interpretations which allow modern Christians to ease their cognitive dissonance by pretending that the New Testament authors meant something other than what the authors themselves, and their earliest readers, thought they meant.  

In another essay, Hart describes the Pauline/early Christian worldview in detail, discomfiting as it may be:

Paul’s teachings emphasize the overthrow of bad angels. For Paul, the present world-age is rapidly passing, while another world-age differing from the former in every dimension – heavenly, not terrestrial, spiritual and not physical – is already dawning. The story of salvation concerns the entire cosmos; and it is a story of invasion, conquest, spoliation, and triumph. For Paul, the cosmos has been enslaved to death, both by our sin and by the malign governance of those ‘angelic’ or ‘daemonian’ agencies who reign over the earth from the heavens, and who hold spirits in thrall below the earth. These angelic beings, these Archons, whom Paul calls Thrones and Powers and Dominations and Spiritual Forces of Evil in the High Places, are the gods of the nations. In the Letter to the Galatians, he even hints that the angel of the Lord who rules over Israel might be one of their number. Whether fallen, or mutinous, or merely incompetent, these beings stand intractably between us and God.

But Christ has conquered them all. In descending to Hades and ascending again through the heavens, Christ has vanquished all the Powers below and above that separate us from the love of God, taking them captive in a kind of triumphal procession. All that now remains is the final consummation of the present age, when Christ will appear in his full glory as cosmic conqueror, having ‘subordinated’ all the cosmic powers to himself – literally, having properly ‘ordered’ them ‘under’ himself – and will then return this whole reclaimed empire to his Father. God himself, rather than wicked or inept spiritual intermediaries, will rule the cosmos directly. Sometimes, Paul speaks as if some human beings will perish along with the present age, and sometimes as if all human beings will finally be saved. He never speaks of some hell for the torment of unregenerate souls.

The new age, moreover – when creation will be glorified and transformed into God’s kingdom – will be an age of ‘spirit’ rather than ‘flesh’. For Paul, these are two antithetical principles of creaturely existence, though most translations misrepresent the antithesis as a mere contrast between God’s ‘spirit’ and human perversity. But Paul is quite explicit: ‘Flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom.’ Neither can psychē, ‘soul’, the life-principle or anima that gives life to perishable flesh. In the age to come, the ‘psychical body’, the ‘ensouled’ or ‘animal’ way of life, will be replaced by a ‘spiritual body’, beyond the reach of death – though, again, conventional translations usually obscure this by speaking of the former, vaguely, as a ‘natural body’.

For modern Christians, Paul’s writings present obvious challenges. For one thing, Paul’s predictions regarding the end of the “present age” (or “evil age”) simply did not come true; his eschatological timetable was off by—well, as of today, almost two thousand years and counting. Second, Paul’s cosmology, anthropology, demonology, and angelology make absolutely no sense today—and, frankly, made no sense to many of his first-century contemporaries. Third, as we have already mentioned: if Paul’s discredited views reflected those of Jesus—what does that say about the man who Christians continue to worship as God?

Linking Jesus to the views of his time about Satan and the demons, Christian theologian James Kallas has written: “Even though Jesus accepted these facts, not even the most Bible-pounding fundamentalist truly accepts them today, no matter what he may say to the contrary. Whatever Jesus said [about demons], no one today believes it! Not even the most pious among us accept that fact! No matter what we say in theory, for us pain is a medical, not a theological, condition.” Moreover, Kallas continued, “How many of us, when we wake up in the morning, are surprised that we woke up and that the world did not end? How many of us, as we walk the streets in the daytime, have our eyes fastened on the heavens, literally waiting for Jesus to break through the clouds surrounded by angels, bringing an end to the world?” And he concluded, “We really do not believe these things [that Jesus and Paul and the early Christians believed]. No one does. We are making as the standards of orthodoxy statements we do not really accept.”

My purpose here is not to disparage Christians or Christianity, but to clarify the reality of Christian beginnings. Christianity, regardless of how it managed to survive, develop, and become an enduring world religion, began as a very literal war (albeit one fought with spiritual weapons) against Satan. That war was launched by Jesus, whose subsequent death on the cross was, depending on your perspective, either a crushing defeat or a stunningly paradoxical victory.

Or, of course, it may have been a pointless display of defiance in the face of a non-existent enemy. 

Wednesday with Pascal: Prophets and Loss

{Pascal was sniffing around a stack of books on “Christus Victor” theology when he found an unexpected, albeit unrelated, treasure. He shares his reaction to it here, at some length.}

“They do not know how to do right,” declares the LORD, “who store up in their fortresses what they have plundered and looted. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Book of Amos)

When it comes to theology and scriptural exegesis: Lord, I do love a crank, an eccentric, a lone voice crying in the wilderness. And while it may be impertinent of me to describe as a “crank” a man so credentialed and distinguished as Professor Morris Silver, allow me to present my evidence. ¹

In 1983, Morris Silver published Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. The book was neither a best-seller nor a critical favorite, though even reviewers who opposed Silver’s thesis acknowledged his indefatigable multi-discipline research into his subject. “Silver's book will be useful to many because of the wealth of material he has collected,” one reviewer grudgingly conceded; another praised Silver’s “meticulousness and logic,” calling the book “a vivid example of how powerful the tenets of economic behavior can be in ordering even limited evidence.” A study of ancient Israel’s political economy might stir mild academic interest and/or disagreement, but it does not seem to be the stuff of major controversy.

Until, that is, you look at Silver’s main thesis:

The writing prophets of the eighth-seventh centuries—Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Micah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Ezekiel—succeeded in committing the rulers of Israel and Judah to welfarist reforms. With the support of the state’s armed might they unleashed a “prophetic revolution.” The ill-conceived policies severely damaged the economy and morale. Traditional historiography holds that Israel and Judah fell because the prophetic counsel was ignored. In fact, whatever its presumed moral virtue, the advice of the classical prophets was destructive from the standpoint of economic affluence and political strength. In the end, the prophets did not succeed in transforming the Israelite. Since they understood neither the man nor Israelite society, they succeeded only in making the former miserable while destroying the latter.

If you wonder why economics is sometimes called “the dismal science,” consider Morris Silver’s audacity in besmirching the reputation of the hallowed Old Testament prophets; consider how, as an economist, Profess Silver blithely dismissed the “presumed moral virtue” of the prophets’ declarations, as though calls to moral betterment were a mere distraction from the business of piling up treasure on earth.

Mustering economic and archaeological data I am not qualified to assess, Silver concluded that “By the beginning of the eighth century BCE, Israel and Judah [were experiencing] a glittering era of prosperity and power.” Why, then, did buzzkills like Amos, Isaiah, and Jeremiah choose that time to denounce the nation in the name of (and at the command of) its God? What is so wrong with prosperity and power, even if somewhat unequally distributed? According to an earlier book by Silver (Affluence, Altruism, and Atrophy: The Decline of Welfare States), “Altruism or the taste for helping others is one of the ‘higher needs’ described by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow. [Research and behavioral evidence] suggest that affluence increases the demand for altruistic consumption, which often takes the form of state actions to improve the lot of the poor.” ²

By “altruistic consumption,” Silver meant “indulging in the senseless luxury of trying to help others”. In other words, the prophets were “social reformers,” over-educated and out-of-touch elites who, consumed by guilt over their own privileged lives and/or worried about potential social unrest (which they helped to stoke), demanded that the state implement policies to achieve “social justice”.

Is any of this beginning to sound familiar? Writing in the early Eighties, Silver was, for all intents and purposes, composing a revisionist gospel of Reaganomics. He accused ancient Israel’s elite of “talking to itself” through the medium of prophecy. “The struggle for social justice [in ancient Israel],” wrote Silver, was an effort by “the wealthy, both royal and non-royal, with the guidance of the prophets, to employ state power to nullify the laws of economics and society. These well-meaning but uncomprehending efforts backfired disastrously.” ³

As Jesus said, “The poor will always be with you, so why bother?” In Silver’s analysis, the prophets—reformers brimming with misplaced compassion and wielding well-intentioned blueprints for social reconstruction (“fundamental transformation,” as it were)—were the bane of Israel and the proximate cause of its downfall. ⁴ Barry Bandstra and John Lunn summarized Silver’s charge: “The governments of Israel and Judah responded to the calls of the prophets for land reform and other measures to aid the poor, and the reforms weakened the economies of the two nations, ultimately leading to Israel’s defeat by the Assyrians and Judah’s defeat by the Babylonians.”

“Silver’s hypothesis,” Bandstra and Lunn went on to say, “questions the use of the Old Testament prophets in evaluating modern societies. Following the ideas of Amos or Isaiah would harm rather than help the poor. Silver’s analysis upends the views of most Christians about the prophets,” they concluded. But maybe those views deserve to be upended, based as they are on flawed economic reasoning and on false assumptions about human nature? Incentives matter: give a man a fish, as Paul Ryan would tell you, and he’ll stay in his hammock all day long.

In the opinion of Morris Silver, to take at face value what the Old Testament prophets had to say about Israel’s economy and society would be “like writing a history of the US economy relying solely on the opinions of Ralph Nader.” Moreover, “From the perspective of the prophets (and of many modern social reformers), any economic transaction between a rich person and a poor person [qualified as] robbery, whether it was legal and uncoerced or not.” To hear the likes of Amos and Micah tell it, there is such a thing as systemic injustice, what we might call society’s “preferential option for the rich”. Professor Silver will have none of that. The Old Testament prophets, by preaching a God of social justice rather than cultic or national solidarity, actively sought to undermine both those latter elements; “the ordinary Israelite could not be converted to a new religion of social justice and social reform until he had been robbed of the peace of mind and the sense of belonging provided by the ancient religion.”

Silver did not hesitate to draw the obvious comparison: “The Israelite society portrayed by Amos and his successors suffers terribly from severe oppression of the poor, injustice, commercial dishonesty, and official corruption, all of which are linked to the lifestyle of a well-to-do middle class. The central image is one that is familiar to modern Americans, namely the blight of poverty amid affluence. There can be no doubt,” Silver wrote, “that the prophets were social reformers. For them, social injustice is neither private nor inevitable; it can and must be eliminated by a resolute act of social will. And the will—that is, the necessary force—is to be supplied by the state.”

In case the reader has not yet gotten the message, Professor Silver spells it out: “Modern liberalism is the closest contemporary analog to the program of the prophets. Motivated by idealism or personal ambition, [liberals] seek, with the support of the affluent, to commit the rulers to programs of social amelioration and regeneration.” He allows that “the prophets were authoritarians, not social democrats. For them, extremism in defense of social justice is the supreme virtue, while the passive acceptance of injustice is a vice. At times the prophets seem to play the role of revolutionaries and their oracles have the ring of sedition.” Nonetheless, the parallels with liberals today are clear.

Even apart from its contemporary political implications, Silver’s analysis did not persuade most reviewers. “Not being a biblical scholar,” wrote one, “Silver makes many mistakes, and his lack of training in biblical studies [inevitably results in] a lack of method.” Bandstra and Lunn accused Silver of “misusing the models he employs to draw unwarranted conclusions” and to “claim ‘facts’ that are not in evidence in either the Scriptures or the archaeological record.” 

Morris Silver had anticipated criticisms, especially those which would dismiss his work as “a conservative polemic against liberal social reformers.” He lamented that “modern liberal-minded attitudes,” along with “presumptions of a Marxist-Leninist character,” had led to inaccurate (or meretricious) assessments of ancient Israel’s economic conditions. His research led Silver to insist that “there is no reason to believe that the [Israelite] poor became poorer”; rather, “there is abundant reason to conclude that an appreciable number of Israelite citizens became men of means during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE.” A rising tide lifts all arks!

Silver’s thesis, of course, hinged in part on the claim that the prophets had significant influence and that their social critiques were translated into government policy. Again, Bandstra and Lunn: “The evidence from Hebrew scriptures does not provide an answer to whether Israel or Judah engaged in land reform and other welfarist actions.” For that matter, they add, “Although the biblical evidence is not straightforward, Silver utilizes the most skeptical school of thought regarding the scriptures’ reliability.” Not to overstate the obvious: “Silver’s characterization of the prophets is not typical for biblical scholars.” Silver himself, in a 1995 publication, described his proposition as ‘startling,’ which did not mean he intended to retract it.

Reading through the work of both Silver and his critics, one is amazed at the amount of dogged research that goes into this level of scholarship. Interpreting ancient documents written in archaic languages, correlating them with other contemporaneous materials, sifting through archaeological finds, and trying to piece together fragments of a culture distant from us in so many ways: all that is an extraordinary undertaking. No wonder scholars disagree—there is so much to disagree about, and so many ways to disagree about it.

That said, and given my own modern liberal-minded bias, I would like simply to conclude that Morris Silver was wrong about ancient Israel and about the Old Testament prophets; but I have, if I am being honest, no grounds for doing so. Silver’s thesis goes against the grain and against everything I have ever read or heard about Amos, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Micah, and the other prophets; their words continue to inspire and to echo through the millennia, and I for one would rather not think of them as the mistaken proclamations of economically illiterate bleeding-heart reformers.

After all, man does not live by the “laws of economics” alone, but by the sharing of both bread and sorrow, of weal and of woe. Morris Silver’s market-based critique of prophetic calls for social justice may be economically defensible, but it will not get an “Amen” from me; as for me and my house, we will take our business elsewhere.

______________________________    

Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel. By Morris Silver.

Prophets and Markets: The Political Economy of Ancient Israel | Morris Silver - Academia.edu

Markets and Prophets: An Examination of the Silver Hypothesis* | Barry Bandstra - Academia.edu

¹ Morris Silver is Professor Emeritus of Economics at City College of New York. A member of the American Economics Association and a veteran of the U.S. military, Silver holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from Columbia University.

² According to Doug Bandstra and John Lunn, Silver argues that “Political altruism tends to become perverse, weakening the economy and the society, in part because it is based on a taste for ‘doing good’ even when the results may not be good. Silver adds, ‘Altruism becomes dangerous because of the range of policy options available, the kinds of options selected, and above all the massive scale and persistence with which the attempt to improve society is carried through.’” As Silver explained the evidence, the prophets’ calls for economic justice were “perverse” and even harmful to the very people whose cause they claimed to champion.

³ Writing in 1983, Silver could have been providing a template for future works by the likes of Charles Murray (Losing Ground) and Marvin Olasky (The Tragedy of American Compassion). While the Invisible Hand of the Market is adept at turning self-interest into social gains, it seems to be all thumbs when it comes to spinning the straw of compassion into the gold of prosperity (see my forthcoming monograph, “The Rumpelstiltskin Economy”.) In fairness, the Invisible Hand is, after all, only a hand; maybe we need to give it an Invisible Heart?  

⁴ This is entirely irrelevant, but the online dictionary (“Oxford Languages”), while defining “bane” as “a cause of great distress or annoyance,” employs the following example: “The bane of the decorator is the long, narrow hall.” I must admit that, of all the baneful things in the world, that one would never have occurred to me. 

Thus says a voice in my head to which no one else is privy:

"Thou shalt not bite the hand that feeds thee, nor kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Neither is there such a thing as a free lunch. Those who do not work shall not eat." 

 

 

The Joy of Heresy (Part 3): The Lake of Fire

{Are we done with Marcionism? No, we are not done with Marcionism, nor is Marcionism done with us. I am going to gnaw at this bone until—well, until I stop.}

In a prescient 2019 article at Crisis, Fr. Tim McCauley warned about neo-Marcionites in our midst, heretics who reject the Old Testament God for being judgmental, cruel, arbitrary, irrational, etc. Neo-Marcionites, like their titular predecessor, prefer a kinder, gentler God, a God of unconditional love and infinite forgiveness; Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion, refers to this conception disparagingly as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism,” a label which has been given the Orthodox Christian seal of approval by serial Christian convert Rod Dreher.

Alas, it is already too late for Fr. McCauley’s alarum, Christian Smith’s analysis, or Rod Dreher’s endorsement to help us. The neo-Marcionite invasion is well underway, as we see from the following publisher’s blurb for Doug Frank’s book A Gentler God:

What is God like? Is he the lofty Almighty of conservative religion, with power to stop heartbreaking human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, but who inexplicably declines to do so? Is he the callous Judge, offering the faithful a place in his heaven while summarily casting the faithless into everlasting hell? Is he the vain King on his throne, requiring us to stroke his ego by praising him--unceasingly--for his "awesome power"? If this is the God we have been taught, it is no wonder that many people have come to realize that they do not like, let alone trust him. The simple certainties of their childhood no longer make sense. But the equally assured assertions of today's atheists also leave them cold. They want a personal connection with God --an honest faith that grows out of their own felt truth and touches them at the deepest levels of their being. This book points the way. It dismantles the "angry, punitive God" of traditional Protestantism and beckons us toward a kinder, more welcoming God. This God does not ask us to grit our teeth and try our best to believe. Instead, this God meets us in our humanity, inviting our hearts to respond in genuine trust and love.

Get thee behind us, Satan disguised as Doug Frank! What Frank's book dismisses as “the simple certainties of childhood” is the very Word of God, preserved in the inspired pages of an infallible Bible. Do today’s pseudo-Christians “want a personal connection with God”? They should be careful what they wish for; as the author of Hebrews proclaimed, and as the pages of scripture abundantly show, “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”

Thankfully, not all Christians are sheep easily led astray. Contra the neo-Marcionites, the folks at “Answers in Genesis” (AiG) proudly subscribe to good old-fashioned Old Testament monotheism. AiG owns (among other things) a popular tourist attraction in Kentucky called “The Ark Encounter,” which, according to one observer, is “devoted to emphasizing – with great specificity – the wrathful nature of God and the eternal damnation that awaits unrepentant sinners.” The Biblical tale of Noah’s ark is a perfect object lesson in YHWH’s severe justice, illustrating as it does that “all humans are sinners and are therefore subject to God’s wrath and condemnation.”

The Ark Encounter exhibits are labeled to help visitors draw the correct theological conclusions: 

Genesis 7:16 states that, as the flood waters rose, God slammed shut the door into the Ark. Once shut, all the humans and animals on the other side of the door were doomed to drown. According to a placard displayed at Ark Encounter, there may have been upwards of 20 billion people on Earth at the time of the Genesis flood, a number that would have included children and infants, not to mention the unborn.

Another placard asks, “Was it just for God to judge the whole world?” The answer: “Since He is the one who gave life, He has the right to take life. Secondly, God is perfectly just and must judge sin. Third, all have sinned and deserve death and judgment.”

Generations after the deluge, a supposedly righteous man named Job learned the folly of questioning God. What part of “I am God, and you are not” do modern Christians not understand?  From Eden onward, testing the LORD’s patience has been a losing strategy; “FAFO" ("Fool Around and Find Out”) is spelled out in fiery letters throughout the Bible. “Answers in Genesis” does not blink at the dire message found in the scriptural text:

According to AiG, this ancient divine slaughter prefigures a future divine slaughter. As the Ark Encounter website puts it, “God will judge this wicked world once again, but this time it will be by fire.  God always keeps His promises – judgment will come.” According to AiG, we can escape this fate by believing in Christ, but for the billions (past and present) who have not or do not, the result is “everlasting, conscious punishment in the lake of fire.” ¹

Doug Frank, neo-Marcionites and Moralistic Therapeutic Deists would be well advised to purchase their asbestos diving suits while they can. They may not have started the fire, but they are destined to spend eternity in its flames. 

______________________

At a popular evangelical tourist site, the Ark Encounter, the image of a 'wrathful God' appeals to millions (theconversation.com)

¹ The “lake of fire” should not be confused with Johnny Cash’s “ring of fire,” although both are known to “burn, burn, burn”.

The Joy of Heresy (Part 2)

{It has been suggested to me that very few people share my interest in early Christian heresies or in the ditheistic system of Marcion of Sinope. I find this difficult to believe. Is this not still a Christian nation? And ought Christians not to be on guard against the revival of ancient heresies such as Gnosticism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism? The roads to Hell are many and varied, filled with seductive roadside attractions and a plethora of unknown unknowns; the more we learn about the landscape of heresy, the better we can avoid it.} ¹

“In holding the idea that the revelation of God in Christ was transitory rather than intrinsic to the godhead itself, Marcion anticipated the modalist-Monarchians such as Praxeas and Sibellius. His Christology inevitably led him in the direction of patripassianism.” (R. Joseph Hoffmann, from Marcion: On the Restitution of Christianity)

Whatever happened to the Modalist Monarchians? They were one of the best of the New Wave/punk pseudo-apostolic bands; Praxeas and Sibellius were the Lennon and McCartney of their era. Perhaps they got lost on their way to Patripassianism; it is, I have heard, a long and winding road, and the signage, in koine Greek and Aramaic, is confusing.  

As we were saying, heresies—by which we mean, divergent views about Jesus and about the implications of his life, death, and resurrection—abounded in the early centuries of Christianity. It was only a matter of time before authorities stepped in to quell the riot of religious and metaphysical speculation. Unfortunately, by the time order was restored, an entire clowder of Gnostic cats had been let out of the bag. We turn again to Rufus Jones (The Church’s Debt to Heretics) for explanation:

It is no exaggeration to say that by the middle of the second century the Church found itself engaged in a life and death struggle with the multitudinous forms of Gnostic religion. With all their variations, they can quite well be grouped under the label, 'the Gnostic complex.'  ‘Complex’ seems a very appropriate word for these movements. The word properly means organized tendencies or sentiments which are in some degree confused, morbid and abnormal. They are usually found in individuals, but here in these movements we are confronted with social waves, or tides, or drifts, of morbid and unbalanced sentiments which were more or less 'contagious.' We have revealed to us in these movements a society which seems neurasthenic and psychopathic—suffering from nervous prostration— in which almost any ‘suggestion’ may powerfully operate and effectively work.

A great many of the Gnostic societies are, of course, not rightly called heretical. They were often wholly outside the sphere and area of the Church. Some of them plainly antedate the birth of the Church, but they tended all the time to influence and color its life and thought, and the movement was the fertile mother of heresies. Christianity has throughout all its history borne the marks of its conflict with this mélange of rival faiths, for while it was ostensibly victorious over them, it was at the same time in some degree 'led captive' by those whom it conquered.

Gnostic writings were given to speculation about the origin of the world and the source of evil, but they were much more akin to magic than to philosophy, and they drew upon mythology and imagination for their constructive material rather than upon rational and verifiable grounds of truth. They are decadent forms of religion, full of confusion, superstition, gullibility, credulity and wild imagination. ²

With all due respect to Rufus Jones: just hold your horses there a minute, buddy. “Mainstream” Christianity was chock-full of so-called "divine revelations," miraculous events, and what might plausibly be called wild imaginings. Paul deliberately eschewed and explicitly denigrated “rational and verifiable grounds of truth” in favor of mystical visions he modestly claimed to have been granted (“whether in the body or out of the body,” he did not know); those visions revealed to him, in his words, "things hidden since the foundation of the world."

As for Gnostics’ belief in magic: I am at a loss as to how anyone can view the transformative effects of pneuma, as described by Paul, as anything other than magic; pneuma was said eventually to transform believers into quasi-divine creatures with authority to judge angels. ³ The Church’s official doctrine of eucharistic “transubstantiation”—bread and wine transmuted into “the body and blood of Christ”—is as magical as the day is long, especially as it is facilitated, according to the Church, by formulaic words being spoken as part of a structured ritual by an authorized priest. You simply cannot get more magical than that.  

Continuing his polemic, Rufus Jones damned Gnostics with the faintest of praise, suggesting they were, at best, industrious scavengers:

Gnostics were very skillful in their use of “the debris of ancient faiths,” out of which they fashioned new and fantastic structures. They “plundered” the older faiths somewhat as the builders of new temples plundered the ancient shrines for their building material. The religions of Babylonia, Persia, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Old Testament and Greece, especially the imaginary world system set forth in Plato’s Timaeus, furnished suggestions, and sometimes even body and filling, for the weird Gnostic “gospel” during the prolific period of the first and second centuries.

Again, with respect: Gnostics were no more guilty of “plundering” than were orthodox Christians, who expropriated in toto the sacred scriptures of ancient Israel, reinterpreting them at will and using them as a cudgel with which to browbeat the Jewish people. Moreover, while the Gnostic gospels were undeniably “weird,” I would hesitate to make that point if I were, like Rufus Jones, an adherent of a religion which worships an incarnate God who was born of a miraculously impregnated virgin and who, after performing all sorts of miracles, allowed himself to be cruelly murdered before rising from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes and then disappearing from the planet for good.

In other words: let whoever is without weird religious ideas of their own cast the first stone at the glass houses of others.

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¹ See Fr. Tim McCauley’s prescient warning: Beware the Neo-Marcionites (crisismagazine.com)

² Pagans like Celsus and Porphyry described Christianity itself in almost identical terms.

³ Pneuma was also said to help build strong bodies 12 ways--I think. 

 

The Little Red Blog's research assistant

Sunday Sermon: Our Daily Affront

{Full disclosure: I was never the same after reading, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, Mark Twain’s fierce, irreverent polemics against religion and Christianity. His “Letters from the Earth,” “The Mysterious Stranger,” and “The Great Dark” were my introductions to atheism and to metaphysical nihilism, undoing, alas, the valiant efforts of Sister Mary Josephine, Sister Mary Conrad, and various other devoutly dedicated Catholic teachers. If the authors of the Baltimore Catechism had been even half as funny as Mark Twain, I might have stuck with the Church; as it was, it was (and is) far too solemn for me. In what follows, Satan, having been suspended for a time from the heavenly court, pays a visit to Earth and reports back to his fellow angels. His letters make it clear that he finds mankind simultaneously amusing and appalling; the best that can be said about man is that he may be God’s favorite mistake.} 

Mark Twain (from "Letters from the Earth"):

This is a strange place, an extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing like it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself “the noblest work of God”. This is the truth I am telling you. And this is not a new idea with him, he has talked about it through all the ages, and believed it. Believed it, and found nobody among all his race to laugh at it. 

Moreover—if I may put another strain upon you—he thinks he is the Creator’s pet. He believes the Creator is proud of him; he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes, and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. Man prays to Him, and thinks He listens. Isn’t it a quaint idea? Fills his prayers with crude and bald and florid flatteries of Him, and thinks He sits and purrs over these extravagancies and enjoys them. He prays for help, and favor, and protection, every day; and does it with hopefulness and confidence, too, although no prayer of his has ever been answered. The daily affront, the daily defeat, do not discourage him, he goes on praying just the same. There is something almost fine about this perseverance.  

I must put one more strain upon you: he thinks he is going to heaven! He has salaried teachers who tell him that. They also tell him there is a hell, of everlasting fire, and that he will go to it if he doesn’t keep the Commandments. The Commandments, too, are a curiosity. I will tell you about them by and by. 

“I have told you nothing about man that is not true.” You must pardon me if I repeat that remark now and then; I want you to take seriously the things I am telling you, and I feel that if I were in your place and you in mine, I should need that reminder from time to time, to keep my credulity from flagging. 

For there is nothing about man that is not strange to an immortal. He looks at nothing as we look at it, his sense of proportion is quite different from ours, and his sense of values is so widely divergent from ours, that with all our large intellectual powers it is not likely that even the most gifted among us would ever be quite able to understand it. 

In times past the human being has had (and worn out and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today he has hundreds and hundreds of religions, and launches not fewer than three new ones every year. I could enlarge that number and still be within the facts. One of his principal religions is called the Christian. A sketch of it will interest you. It is set forth in detail in a book containing two million words, called the Old and New Testaments. Also it has another name—the Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. 

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So, it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; all its best precepts and rules of conduct came also from those other Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and a singular heaven I must tell you about. 

What shall we do? If we believe, with these people, that their God invented these things, we slander Him; if we believe these people invented them themselves, we slander them. It is an unpleasant dilemma in either case, for neither of these parties has done us any harm.   

   

Satan's Limitless Imperialism

{Though some may dispute the relevance of Satan, he has been in the news lately thanks to Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who stated that the Catholic Church is “controlled by Satan,” and Georgia gubernatorial candidate Kandiss Taylor, who is explicitly running against the “Satanic Elites,” the “Satanic Regime,” and the “Luciferian Cabal”. My own interest in Satan is less political, but I applaud Greene and Taylor for their audacity in standing up to the Prince of Darkness. Yesterday, I offered an excerpt from Mark Twain in which he discussed his own lifelong curiosity about Satan; since that excerpt exhibited a streak of irreverence, today I provide a more orthodox perspective.}

It is good to know one’s enemies. For Christians, the primary enemy is Satan, and Christian scholars through the ages have expended much effort (and much ink) to explain Satan, his diabolical nature, and his malevolent intent. ¹

According to Denis de Rougemont (The Devil’s Share), “The Bible informs us that Lucifer is an angel fallen from heaven.” In fact, the Bible says little if anything about Lucifer, but de Rougemont takes Jesus’ statement “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven” as definitive.

I have no idea how de Rougemont knows so much about Lucifer/Satan, but I can assure you that none of what follows can be sourced to the Bible:

Angels are spiritual creatures living and functioning on the frontiers of the Eternal and the Creation, of eternity and time. They are divine intentions, messengers, servants flying on lightning wings, whose speed is that of thought, and this is why they are invisible to us; intelligences without fraud, participating in the omniscience of the Creator, and this is why we have difficulty in understanding them. At the summit of the angelic hierarchy are the Archangels. One single Archangel betrayed his mission, his message, and his very being, and this is Lucifer, the bearer of Light. Satan rebelled, he refused to serve, he refused to transmit his divine message, he wished to become original, the author of his own destiny, the bearer of his own light. And immediately, by the very laws of Being, he fell from heaven, which is the region where God’s intention reigns absolute. Lucifer became his own messenger, and as he is but a pure spirit, once the source of the Spirit was cut off, he became the messenger of Nothingness and its mysteries.

Though fallen, he has kept the nature of a pure spirit. Like an artist who has lost his genius and who no longer believes in painting, but who has kept his ‘knack’ and his eagerness to belong to the vanguard, Satan still knows Spirit and spirits, but no longer the end and the glory to which they are destined.

The dazzling and consuming act of pride which transformed the Angel of Light into an Angel and Prince of Darkness condemned him to a limitless and therefore desperate imperialism. The entire world could not fill the void which the consciousness of having left his rightful place in the world forms in the heart of a creature. Having fallen from the eternal, Satan wants the infinite. Having fallen from Being, he wants Having. But his problem is forever insoluble. Everything that he annexes to himself he destroys. To be sure, he can have everything, since he is called Prince of this World in Scripture—but he will never have anything but this world. He will never reconquer Heaven, which is properly the soul of the world; of the universe, he will have only the material carcass. It is from the debris of this disaffected Mansion that he will make the firewood to kindle his Hell.

He knows it full well. This is why his desire and his rabid jealousy focus on individual souls. He prowls around us like a roaring lion in quest of his prey. He prowls around us like a gangster obsessed by kidnapping. His victories will always be sterile, for one does not become a father by kidnapping a child; one can steal the child, but not paternity. One can steal power, but not authority. Satan can steal this world, not its divinity.

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¹ Ink is known to possess anti-demonic properties. Martin Luther once routed the Devil by hurling an inkwell at him.

Denis de Rougemont was a Swiss author and “cultural theorist” best known for his classic study Love in the Western World. He won a defamation suit in 1982 against a journalist who accused de Rougemont, in print, of advocating “French Fascism” and who compared him to the Vichy collaborators in World War II.

Denis de Rougemont - Wikipedia

Rougemont 2.0: Denis de Rougemont's complete online — Rougemont 2.0 (unige.ch)

English translations of de Rougemont’s works are available online, for free, at www.archive.org

Saturday Lecture: On Superstition

Plutarch (from “On Superstition”):

It occurs to me to wonder at those who say that atheism is impiety, and do not say the same of superstition. What say you? The man who does not believe in the existence of the gods is unholy? And is not he who believes in such gods as the superstitious believe in a partner to opinions far more unholy?

Ignorance and blindness in regard to the gods divides itself at the very beginning into two streams, of which the one produces in hardened characters, as it were in stubborn soils, atheism, and the other in tender characters, as in moist soils, produces superstition.​ Every false judgement, and especially concerning these matters, is a mischievous thing; but where emotion also enters, it is most mischievous. For every emotion is likely to be a delusion that rankles; and just as dislocations of the joints accompanied by lacerations are hardest to deal with, so also is it with derangements of the soul accompanied by emotion.

Atheism, which is a sorry judgement that there is nothing blessed or incorruptible, seems, by disbelief in the Divinity, to lead finally to a kind of utter indifference, and the end which it achieves in not believing in the existence of gods is not to fear them. But, on the other hand, superstition, as the very name (dread of deities) indicates, is an emotional idea and an assumption productive of a fear which utterly humbles and crushes a man, for he thinks that there are gods, but that they are the cause of pain and injury. In fact, the atheist, apparently, is unmoved regarding the Divinity, whereas the superstitious man is moved as he ought not to be, and his mind is thus perverted. For in the one man ignorance engenders disbelief in the one who can help him, and on the other it bestows the added idea that He causes injury. Whence it follows that atheism is falsified reason, and superstition is an emotion engendered from false reason.

Atheists do not see the gods at all, the superstitious think that they do exist and are evil. The former disregard them, the latter conceive their kindliness to be frightful, their fatherly solicitude to be despotic, their loving care to be injurious, their slowness to anger to be savage and brutal. Then again such persons give credence to workers in metal, stone, or wax, who make their images of gods in the likeness of human beings, and they have such images fashioned, and dress them up, and worship them. But they hold in contempt philosophers and statesmen, who try to prove that the majesty of God is associated with goodness, magnanimity, kindliness, and solicitude. So the atheists have more than enough of indifference and distrust of the Beings who can help them, whereas the superstitious experience equal agitation and fear towards the things that can help them. Or, in fine, atheism is an indifferent feeling toward the Deity, which has no notion of the good, and superstition is a multitude of differing feelings with an underlying notion that the good is evil. For the superstitious fear the gods and flee to the gods for help; they flatter them and assail them with abuse, pray to them and blame them. It is the common lot of mankind not to enjoy continual good fortune in all things.

The atheist, when he is ill, takes into account and calls to mind the times when he has eaten too much or drunk too much wine, also irregularities in his daily life, or instances of over-fatigue or unaccustomed changes of air or locality; and again when he has given offence in administering office, and has encountered disrepute with the masses or calumny with a ruler, he looks to find the reason in himself and his own surroundings. But this is not the way of the superstitious man, who, if even the slightest ill befall him, sits down and proceeds to construct, on the basis of his trouble, a fabric of harsh, momentous, and practically unavoidable experiences which he must undergo, and he also loads himself with fears and frights, suspicions and trepidations, and all this he bitterly assails with every sort of lamentation and moaning. For he puts the responsibility for his lot upon no man nor upon Fortune nor upon occasion nor upon himself, but lays the responsibility for everything upon God, Band says that from that source a heaven-sent stream of mischief has come upon him with full force; and he imagines that it is not because he is unlucky, but because he is hateful to the gods, that he is being punished by the gods, and that the penalty he pays and all that he is undergoing are deserved because of his own conduct.

The atheist thinks there are no gods; the superstitious man wishes there were none, but he believes in them against his will, for he is afraid not to believe. And yet the superstitious man would be glad to escape his fear by which he feels oppressed, and he would call the condition of the atheist happy because it is a state of freedom. But, as things are, the atheist has neither part nor lot in superstition, whereas the superstitious man by preference would be an atheist but is too weak to hold the opinion about the gods which he wishes to hold.

There is no infirmity comprehending such a multitude of errors and emotions, and involving opinions so contradictory, or rather antagonistic, as that of superstition. We must try, therefore, to escape it in some way which is both safe and expedient, and not be like people who incautiously and blindly run hither and thither to escape from an attack of robbers or wild beasts, or from a fire, and rush into trackless places that contain pitfalls and precipices. For thus it is that some persons, in trying to escape superstition, rush into a rough and hardened atheism, thus overleaping true religion which lies between. 

Atheism’s ignorance is distressing, and to see amiss or not to see at all in matters of such importance is a great misfortune for the soul; for it is as if the soul had suffered the extinction of the brightest and most dominant of its many eyes, the conception of God. But superstition is attended by sore distress, disturbance, and mental enslavement from the very beginning.

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Plutarch • On Superstition (De superstitione) (uchicago.edu)

Plutarch - Wikipedia