The Little Red Blog

Friday Thoughts

With surprising candor, Heather MacDonald (at The New Criterion) gets to the heart of our current politics: The White House has characterized many of its current efforts as eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. That is partly true but also misleading. Something more profound is going on. Even if government employees and nonprofit recipients of federal aid operated with maximum efficiency, many would still have to go. It is their worldview that is the problem, not their management.

Trump 2.0, following the blueprint of Project 2025, has embarked on an ideological purge—not just in the federal government, but in our schools, universities, media, and more. MAGA’s goal is to abolish what it sees as preferential treatment in our society; DEI policies, MAGA claims, have given all the plum positions, all the power, and all the money to racial minorities and to women, but that stops now.

Heather MacDonald could not be happier:

The scandal of the present moment is that someone with outsize visibility has said: No more. The race hustle is over; the gender hustle is over. The denigration of traditional values and American history is over. The demonization of law enforcement: over. Being black or female will no longer be treated as an accomplishment. The only thing that matters in employment is excellence. And to realize that principle, the White House on April 23 banned the greatest enemy of meritocracy: disparate-impact analysis.

Based on the career trajectories of the likes of Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Pam Bondi, Tulsi Gabbard, et al, meritocracy in MAGA world is apparently defined as “staunch opposition to DEI programs and unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump”. There may also be a system of "merit points" for working at and/or appearing on Fox News.

You can read about the long and controversial history of “disparate impact” here: Disparate impact - Wikipedia Or you can simply recall the scathing comment of French author Anatole France: “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread,” or William Blake’s “One law for the lion and the ox is oppression.”

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 “The clash within civilizations,” by Heather Mac Donald

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“If Christianity is to reassert itself in the West,” says Daniel Whyte IV, “there must be symmetry between clear doctrine and the holy haze of mystery.” Whyte thinks that a new paganism might be just what Christianity needs. “The rise of contemporary paganism,” he writes, “is a cry for connection to something more than what’s offered by both wonder-starved religion and an increasingly naturalistic, machine world that reduces humans to augments of technology. The modern world yearns to be reminded that the supernatural invades the natural all the time, and the natural is the aesthetic of the supernatural. Buried beneath our current pagan ponderings is an impulse to see these elements reconnected.”

Quoting sources such as G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and Ross Douthat, Whyte lays out a defense of the pagan impulse, if not of paganism per se. Essentially, the new paganism is a reaction to what Max Weber famously called the “disenchantment” of the world which accompanied the modern scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions. Re-enchantment is the goal of the new pagans, including a restoration of “the sense of awe, wonder and magic.”

Whyte sees contemporary Christianity’s chalice as being half full rather than half empty. Paganism, he says, need not be a threat to Christian faith. He emphasizes paganism’s imprint on early Christianity, citing French philosopher Chantal Delsol’s view that “the Christianity we know today would not be what it is without paganism.” Moreover, Whyte believes that an exhausted Christianity needs an infusion of spirit that paganism might well provide:

The rebirth of paganism has been feared ever since Christianity gained normative status in the Roman Empire in 313 AD and state church status a few decades later. But paganism’s rise today might not be pushing us into a permanently post-Christian age. My argument is that it’s pointing us backwards, at least aesthetically, to a pre-Christian era and providing an opportunity for recovery of elements that have fallen to the wayside in Western Christian culture. For an imperiled Church, this might not be so bad as it seems. 

Daniel Whyte deserves credit for not joining the ranks of Christian catastrophists whose despair over the state of the Church indicates, among other things, a lack of faith in the Spirit which is said to protect it. If Christians believe that the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Church, I seriously doubt they need to worry about New Age spirituality, “TikTok witches,” or other signs of a pagan revival.

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Pagan Signs

Death of a Provocateur Pope

Pope Francis is dead. He died almost immediately after meeting with Vice-Fuhrer President J.D. Vance; the timing may or may not be significant. As Catholics around the world mourn, and as President Trump orders the U.S. flag to be lowered to half-staff, this seems as good a time as any to quote the esteemed columnist Ross Douthat, who confessed in December 2023 his fear that Francis’ papacy was going to destroy Douthat’s beloved Holy Mother Church:

“[In 2013] Pope Francis ascended, and over the past decade, the church has been governed by a liberalizing, destabilizing, provocateur pope.

“This has created high drama in the church and ample opportunities for explanations of its controversies — but in those controversies I’ve found myself crosswise from the papacy itself, a peculiar position indeed for a Catholic columnist at a secular publication. I imagined myself making Catholic tradition and thinking attractive to secular and liberal readers. ¹ Instead, I’m often obliged to explain why, in seeming to move the church closer to the median secular liberal, Francis is actually driving Catholicism toward crisis.”

In 2018, Douthat published a book, To Change the Church, in which he suggested that Francis posed a threat not just to Catholic unity but to Western civilization. According to the publisher’s blurb:

Pope Francis’s stewardship of the Church, while perceived as a revelation by many, has provoked division throughout the world. “If a conclave were to be held today,” one Roman source told The New Yorker, “Francis would be lucky to get ten votes.”

In To Change the Church, Douthat explains why the particular debate Francis has opened—over communion for the divorced and the remarried—is so dangerous: How it cuts to the heart of the larger argument over how Christianity should respond to the sexual revolution and modernity itself, how it promises or threatens to separate the church from its own deep past, and how it divides Catholicism along geographical and cultural lines. Douthat argues that the Francis era is a crucial experiment for all of Western civilization, which is facing resurgent external enemies (from ISIS to Putin) even as it struggles with its own internal divisions, its decadence, and self-doubt. Whether Francis or his critics are right won’t just determine whether he ends up as a hero or a tragic figure for Catholics. It will determine whether he’s a hero, or a gambler who’s betraying both his church and his civilization into the hands of its enemies.

Douthat’s distaste for Pope Francis was matched, if not exceeded, by a prominent Hungarian commentator, Rod Dreher, himself a former Catholic:

Pope Francis elevates the bad guys and the worst tendencies in contemporary Catholicism. He won’t live forever, and it’s encouraging to see how orthodox the coming generations of priests in the US are. Nevertheless, there’s no way things can revert back to business as usual after Francis passes into history. The simple faith one had in the papacy before Francis is not possible anymore. ²

Upon Pope Francis’ death, Dreher dismissed his “sentimental humanitarianism, which seemed to ask nothing of migrants themselves, and everything of those whose countries are filling with them.” Dreher’s column (“Could the Pope’s Death Mean the Demise of Liberal Catholicism?”), ostensibly about Pope Francis, was devoted to praising J.D. Vance:

The last dignitary Pope Francis met in his mortal life was JD Vance, the U.S. vice president, Catholic convert, and critic of the pontiff’s liberal views on mass migration. There is something powerfully symbolic about that. The scene of the two men, separated by 48 years and scarcely more than a meter, stands for the passing of one kind of Catholicism, and the rise of another.

During a decade which saw vile, reprehensible political demagoguery catapult Donald Trump to the White House (twice!), Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher saved their slings and arrows for Pope Francis, because he said things like “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven” and “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Oh, sorry—it was Jesus who said those things. What Francis said was, “Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were once a foreigner yourself in the land of Egypt.” No, that’s from the Book of Exodus. Okay, but this is definitely from Francis:

“When one learns to blame himself, he is merciful with others. And he is able to say: ‘Who am I to judge him, if I am capable of doing worse things?’ This is an important phrase: ‘Who am I to judge another?’ This is understood in the light of Jesus’s words: ‘Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful, and with his call not to judge. How we like to judge others, to speak ill of them! Yet the Lord is clear: ‘Stop judging and you will not be judged. Stop condemning and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven.’ It is certainly not an easy road, which begins with blaming oneself, it begins from that shame before God and from asking forgiveness from Him: ask forgiveness. Precisely from that first step we arrive at what the Lord asks us: to be merciful, to judge no one, to condemn no one, to be generous with others.”

I respectfully suggest that this is an ideal time for Ross Douthat and Rod Dreher to STFU.

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Thinking about a 'slow-motion' Catholic schism, with Ross Douthat and the X choirs — GetReligion

Could the Pope's Death Mean the Demise of Liberal Catholicism? ━ The European Conservative

Pope Francis: Who Am I to Judge? | Franciscan Media

¹ Douthat, like many a convert to Catholicism, likes to pose as “more Catholic than the Pope”. As a self-appointed custodian of and spokesperson for "Catholic tradition and thinking," Douthat has about as much credibility as I do; I, after all, won the 8th-grade "Religion" award at St. Michael School.

² We should note that Dreher’s “simple faith in the papacy” did not prevent him from leaving the Roman Catholic Church back in 2006 for the shelter of Eastern Orthodoxy, a faith pure enough for Dreher's taste. That was seven years before the election of Pope Francis; Mr. Dreher was rightly appalled at the time by the Church’s scandalous failures to protect children from priests. Of course, Dreher was by then an old hand at faith shopping, having started in the Methodist church only to become an agnostic, only then to join the Catholic fold, exemplifying in the process the very “expressive individualism” that he and Mr. Douthat have frequently and roundly denounced. Not content with changing churches, Dreher has now changed countries, having decided that Hungary under Viktor Orban is better than godless America.

Saturday Lecture: Believe It or Not

{The late Raymond Brown was a brilliant Catholic theologian whose knowledge of the New Testament may have been unsurpassed. Atheist that I am, I am not endorsing Brown’s take on the Christian resurrection narrative, but I find it interesting, what with its claims about an eschatological realm that transcends our mundane space-time continuum. It seems that those of us unfamiliar with such a realm will just have to take its existence on faith.}

“The Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ presupposes an outlook on reality in general that is not shared by everybody. Therefore, Christians are called to engage in a controversy regarding the nature of reality at large.” (Wolfhart Pannenberg)

Raymond Brown:

The observation that modern man does not find bodily resurrection appealing or meaningful cannot be determinative. Nor can we allow Christian theology to be shaped by the contemporary distrust of the miraculous. The modern world view is no more infallible than the first-century world view; it knows more about some things but is less perceptive in other ways.

Many Christians today see only two possibilities: either one affirms a corporeal resurrection so physical that the risen Jesus was just as tangible as he was during his lifetime, or one denies the corporeal resurrection and reduces the appearances to an internal awareness of Jesus’ spiritual victory. However, there is a middle ground, namely, a corporeal resurrection in which the risen body is transformed to the eschatological sphere, no longer bound by space and time—a body that no longer has all the natural or physical characteristics that marked its temporal existence. ¹ The New Testament evidence is lucidly clear. Jesus was not restored to ordinary life; his risen existence is glorious and eschatological, transported beyond the limitations of space and time, and he will not die again.

In some twenty passages, the New Testament makes it clear that God the Father (subject) raised Jesus (object) from the dead. “You crucified this Jesus, but God raised him up.” Many Christians find this threatening to Jesus’ divine status, but the earliest Christian tradition attributed the agency in the resurrection to the heavenly Father. The Christian appreciation of the way God was present in Christ Jesus was a slow process spanning the New Testament era and beyond (continuing to the present day!). However, by the 90s CE or even before, Christology had developed to such a point that John, the fourth evangelist, could state that Jesus and the Father act by the same divine power, and that therefore it could be said that Jesus rose by his own power. According to the second-century writer Ignatius, “Jesus truly raised himself. He transformed himself into an imperishable Aeon and raised himself up.” ²

Did the risen Jesus communicate with words, or was there some type of intuitive communication by Jesus that found words only later in the various traditions? An ever-increasing number of scholars doubt that the risen Jesus used words. Just as it is difficult to understand the category of “seeing” applied to the appearances of the risen Jesus—the sight is not necessarily physical or available to all onlookers, and yet it is more than a purely internal experience—so too do we find that the category of “speaking” may be inadequate to describe the unique and eschatological encounter with the risen Jesus. The New Testament bears witness to the reality of a communication that took place during the experience, and “speaking” seems to be the approximation in ordinary experience that best describes the extraordinary and indescribable.

As Pope Paul VI wrote, “Jesus rose again in the same body but in new conditions, vivified by a new and immortal animation, which imposes on Christ’s flesh the laws and energies of the Spirit. This new reality is so far above our capacities of knowledge and even of imagination that it is necessary to make room for it in our minds through faith.”

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All excerpts are from Raymond Brown’s The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus.

Raymond E. Brown - Wikipedia

¹ “Modern speculation as to whether the risen Jesus could have been photographed or televised, or whether he could have been seen by non-believers, does not show any appreciation for the transformation involved in the resurrection. Our language of space-time experience breaks down when it is used to describe the eschatological.”

² “Aeon” here refers to “an emanation of God”. Trinitarian theology had not been developed in the time of Ignatius, nor had Jesus' nature been defined.

The transformed Jesus re-enters the space-time continuum as an imperishable Aeon

(Historical accuracy not guaranteed)

Saturday Lecture: A War Against All Rivals

{At the risk of seeming irreverent: It could be said that Christianity began as a kind of spiritual insurance company. Believers in the resurrected Christ received (limited) protection from evil powers as well as a promise of eternal life. As long as believers kept their premiums up to date via regular worship, participation in the eucharistic meal, and tithing, then, like a good neighbor, Jesus was there.}

Ramsay MacMullen:

Ancient religion(s), including Christianity, addressed a universe that we today happen not to believe in. Back then, everyone knew that whatever could go wrong in the world, from floods to rebellion, was the work and sign of some of those certain Beings that are bad, legions of which are ubiquitous and actually immanent in our very selves, and are well known to be so from their being driven out of catechumens by baptism and out of the possessed by exorcism before the very eyes of the most reliable witnesses; while at the same time other Beings, which are good, manifest themselves in the driving out, and in other beneficent acts, or inflict merited punishment on wrong-doers. 

The one point in which Christianity differed from the general context of opinion around it was the antagonism inherent in it—antagonism of God toward all other supernatural powers, of God toward every man and woman who refused allegiance, and of those who granted their allegiance [to God] toward all the remaining stubborn unbelievers. It was not the church’s liturgy, nor morals, nor monotheism, nor internal organization that seemed to non-Christians at all blameworthy; rather, Christianity presented a kind of polarization to its audience, a polarization that pricked or alarmed the observer. Christianity presented ideas that demanded a choice, not tolerance.

Moreover, the Christian God was pictured as being at war against all rivals, ranged with his angels in combat against Satan. Saint Paul issued a summons to join the struggle against the powers of darkness, a duty preached later by others such as Justin and Tatian. For non-Christians, such a view “impiously divides the kingdom of god and makes two opposing forces.” That a divine being would extend his wrath even beyond this dualism and send down suffering upon human beings simply for their failure to offer him regular worship seemed an even more blasphemous idea. As Livy put it, “People even attack the gods with headstrong words; but we have never heard of anyone on that account being struck by lightning.”

Jesus’ authority over the fiercest infestations of satanic power, making them do whatever he wished by a mere word of command, he passed on to his disciples, with instructions to use it. They did. The author of the Acts of Peter dramatized a Christian’s superiority over demonic power through a sort of ‘shoot-out’ scene in the forum of the capital; in faraway Pontus, the story circulated of Gregory the Wonder-worker’s exploits in a demon’s temple—just by routinely saying prayers there, where he had taken shelter from the dark, he made it forever uninhabitable by its former owner. The manhandling of demons—humiliating them, making them howl, beg for mercy, tell their secrets, and depart in a hurry—made visible the superiority of the Christian’s God over all others. One and only one Power was God; the rest were ‘daimons’ demonstrably, familiar to the audience as nasty, lower powers that no one would want to worship anyway.

Justin boasted, “How many persons possessed by demons have been exorcized by many of our Christian men?” Irenaeus asserted that “Some people incontestably and truly drive out demons, so that the very persons possessed often become believers.” Tertullian issued the challenge, “Let a man be produced who, it is clear, is possessed by a demon, and that spirit, commanded by any Christian at all, will as much confess himself a demon.” Cyprian declared that demons in idols, “When they are adjured by us in the name of the true God, they yield forthwith, and confess; they are forced to leave the bodies they have invaded, and you may see them, by our summons and by the workings of hidden majesty, consumed with flames.”

Stories of wonders wrought by other deities certainly circulated as well, making believers in and new devotees of Sabazius, Jupiter, Mithra, and so forth; but Christian converts, from the moment of believing, denied the name and very existence of other gods. In religious usage, a miracle is any event in which one knows one is dealing with God. The motive underlying the giving of allegiance was to avoid the horrors of divine punishment or to gain the benefits, in this world if not in the next, that were promised to loyal adherents.

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Ramsay MacMullen - Wikipedia

 

Saturday Lecture: A Bridge to the Absolute

{Romano Guardini (1885-1968) was a Catholic priest, theologian, and philosopher; born in Italy, he lived in Germany from the age of one until his death. Guardini is generally considered a critic of modernity, but his views were more balanced than his anti-modern admirers tend to admit.} 

Romano Guardini, from The End of the Modern World:

Deeply significant for the religious outlook of medieval man was the influx of the Germanic spirit. The religious bent of the Nordic myths, the restlessness of the migrating peoples, and the armed marches of the Germanic tribes revealed a new spirit which burst everywhere into history like a spear thrust into the infinite. This mobile and nervous soul worked itself into the Christian affirmation, where it grew mightily. In its fullness it produced that immense medieval drive which aimed at cracking the boundaries of the world.

This medieval impatience with all limitations cannot be explained simply in terms of the Christian view of man and his relationship to God. Nothing akin to the medieval drive can be found in the first centuries of Christianity, when the classical sense of limitation still retained its hold on Christian man. Although he experienced transcendence, he experienced it only as an inner freedom from the world and a personal responsibility for his own life, a responsibility transcending the demands and service of society. Only after the Germanic ferment had quickened the European world throughout the course and aftermath of migrations was man’s relation to God freed from the boundaries fixed by antiquity. Only then did man scale the barriers of the world and reach into the infinite that he might embrace the Godhead and return from Him to make all things new.

The Germanic longing to embrace the whole of being was one with the drive for transcendence. The Germanic spirit wished to surround the world in order to penetrate it completely. This passion both to embrace and to enter deeply the full sweep of existence explains the new vision of the world fashioned by medieval man.

Medieval man thirsted for the truth. No other society, with the possible exception of classical China, has invested the man of learning with the dignity and importance given him by the Middle Ages. The medieval passion for understanding had nothing in common with the techniques of modern scientific investigation. Medieval man was interested neither in pursuing nature or history empirically nor in mastering reality theoretically. He chose to plunge into truth by way of meditation, then drew from his meditations the spiritual laws governing all reality. The roots for all truths were given by authorities: Scripture, the Church, and the thought of antiquity. The foundations for religious and natural truth were painstakingly penetrated and served as the basis for interpreting immediate experience. From this fusion of natural and supernatural truths, there grew a new and deeper understanding of the world.

The philosophical-theological project was more than a systematic attempt to determine what being must ‘be’; it was an attempt to determine what being must ‘mean’. The meaning arose not only from the content; it arose equally from the very mode of statement and amplification. Medieval artistic form was not mere rhetorical adornment, not merely a desirable but unessential means of expression; it was the ‘how’ used to express the essential ‘what’. The medieval passion for truth was so intense that it was bound up inextricably with a will to fashion and form all things.

Modern man condemns the medieval man’s reliance on authority as ‘slavery’; in fact, he resents the Middle Ages. His resentment is born of the realization that his own age has made revolution a perpetual institution. But authority is needed in the life of every man. Integral to the full grandeur of human dignity, authority is not merely the refuge of the weak; its destruction always breeds its burlesque—force. As long as medieval man was gripped by his own vision of existence, as long as he heard its music sounding in the depths of his heart, he never experienced authority as shackling. It was a bridge leading to the absolute; it was the flag of the world. Authority provided medieval man with the opportunity to construct an order whose magnificence of form, intensity of manner, and richness of life were such that he would have judged our world as paltry.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, man’s passion for knowledge began to lead him away from authority, pointing him directly toward real things. He chose to probe things with his own intelligence, and to achieve judgments independent of any pattern first laid down by authority. Even earlier, corresponding changes worked their way into economic life. Previously, a man’s livelihood had been linked with his status in life and governed both by guild regulations and by the canonical rules against interest which made economic speculation impossible. The new spirit brought new methods which increased the production and distribution of goods to an unprecedented degree. The older traditional ordering of society was cracked by the simple possession of things. Offices and positions hitherto restricted to privilege were now thrown open to almost anyone. A broader and more independent culture was born and bred upon an economics which obeyed only its own laws.

The older society had been supported in its basic norms and cultural order by the art of politics, even when politics exerted itself in the struggle for the fruits of sheer power. Although shot through with injustice and crime, political life during the Middle Ages was fitted to the moral and religious obligations owed to the Empire and the Church. Political goals were subordinated by the felt need to conform to the Divine Will; an injustice was committed only with a bad conscience. With the advent of the modern world, politics became a law unto itself; injustice was committed not only without bad conscience, but even from a certain sense of duty. The acquiring, maintaining, and exercise of power admitted every possible means.

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Romano Guardini - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

Wednesday with Pascal: In Search of the Holy Gruel

[A preliminary note: curses and maledictions upon those responsible for hacking into, and disabling, the invaluable Internet Archive. May the culprits' sufferings be commensurate with their sins!]

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat was baptized and raised in the Roman Catholic faith, from which he long ago strayed (or was banished, depending on whose version of events you credit). In any case, he still likes to check in from time to time to see what his former co-religionists are up to.} 

Good news, theists! According to Chilton Williamson, Jr.:

Modern science provides proof positive that God the Creator is, as one researcher put it, a master mathematician whose design for the universe is so subtle that, were a single atom to be possessed of properties differing in the minutest degree in size or weight from those it actually has, the universe could not exist at all. And if the order of creation, as described in Genesis, were other than what is recounted there, the materials requisite for any one step of the creative sequence to occur would have been insufficient to allow the following ones to proceed.

These conclusions can be found, Williamson informs us, and their validity confirmed, in a new book (by two French authors), God, Science, Evidence: The Dawn of a Revolution. The authors (and Williamson, the reviewer for Catholic World Report) may be forgiven a certain amount of triumphalism, since theists have attempted for centuries, without prior success, to find conclusive proof of God’s existence. That such proof is now at hand is, to say the least, exciting. The facts are all but impossible to refute: 

As for the possibility that the universe could have been created by chance:

“The cosmological constant, with a very weak value, corresponds with a very small ‘energy of the void’ and acts as a repulsive force counterbalancing gravity and producing the acceleration of the expansion of the universe observed today. If it had been scarcely less strong, the universe would have dilated too quickly for the stars and galaxies to have had time to form. No form of life would have had the least chance to be born. On the other hand, had it been very slightly less, the cosmos would have collapsed on itself a long time ago.”

It has taken some 2500 years, but the biblical account of creation now has scientific backing:

All of these discoveries were achieved, and confirmed, in the face of a determined professional skepticism that yielded to fact only when the most confirmed skeptics were compelled to realize that a refusal to accept recent scientific findings is itself unscientific: to concede, in other words, that, as Bolloré and Bonnassies put it, materialism is an irrational belief.

Before we board the theism bandwagon, let us consider the credentials of the authors:

Olivier Bonnassies graduated from the Polytechnic School in 1990. He has a diploma from the HEC Institute, the prestigious school of higher business studies in Paris, and has a degree in Theology from the Catholic Institute of Paris. He is also a businessman. He is the author of more than twenty books and a screenwriter and documentary filmmaker on topics often linked to faith.

​Michel-Yves Bollore is a computer engineer, he has a Master of Science and a PhD in Business Management from the Paris-Dauphine University. From 1981 to 1990 he participated, together with his brother, in the management of the Bolloré Group, in charge of the industrial branch. In 1990 he founded his own group, France-Essor, focused on the mechanical industry.

Messrs. Bonnassies and Bollore are obviously educated and accomplished men, but I am not convinced that they have sufficient expertise in either science or in theology, nor do I think their business management background is especially relevant (although the experience with 'the mechanical industry' might help them fashion a deus ex machina). Call me a cynic if you will, but might the authors’ evaluation of the scientific evidence have been swayed by their religious convictions?

What strikes me as sad is that the editors of Catholic World Report, with a heritage which includes such distinguished theologians and scientists as Augustine, Aquinas, Occam, Galileo, Copernicus, and so many more, apparently feel compelled to “prove” the existence of the God they worship, which God they would still worship even without the imprimatur of science. Even sadder is that, in grasping at such scientific "proof," they offer their readers what can only be described as thin (albeit holy) gruel.   

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French authors present exhaustive study of modern proofs for existence of God – Catholic World Report

Science: just like religion, except it works!

 

The True Man Show?

{It is amazing what you can find when you are not looking for it. I had been seeking elaboration and clarification of Heidegger’s “the bewitchment of language”.  As I scrolled through Google, I noticed a reference to a 2005 article (in the LA Weekly) entitled “Exile in Godville”; with a title like that, how could I resist? The article, written by A.W. Hill, was about Bishop Stephan Hoeller of the Ecclesia Gnostica (Gnostic Church) in Los Angeles. The following, also written by Hill, was attached as an addendum to the main article. None of this, by the way, has anything at all to do with Heidegger or with the bewitchment of language; but Google works in mysterious ways.}

Genesis Unplugged: The Fall of Man as Seen from the Gnostic Perspective

Once upon a very long time ago, when the very first Mommy and Daddy starred in the world’s first piece of Reality Programming, an unexpected snafu occurred, the sort that drives producers and program executives nuts. Mommy, whose name was Eve, began to act up. She began to question the so-called reality of her show, which was known by the title: GENESIS: In the Beginning.

Eve sat naked on her haunches beneath the forest canopy, alert as always to the sights and sounds of Eden, while Daddy, who was called Adam, snored bearishly at her side. Adam could not seem to get enough of the good things in the Garden, and spent much of his day in a somnolent state, occasionally muttering, in the peculiar argot of those times, “This is as good as it gets.”

Eve was not so sure. She had seen distorted faces reflected in dewdrops, heard urgent things in the whisper of the giant ferns. Unsettling things. She had sensed the presence of Others. And yet, there were no others, were there? Surely, the watchful eyes of the timid tree creatures could not alone account for her feeling that she walked in the shadow of another reality.

Adam’s belly was filled with the ripe fruit of the Garden; Eve’s belly was filled with Adam’s seed. She touched her swollen breasts, and it was then she heard her own name called from afar. She rose and followed the call to the depths of the forest, where there stood a tree whose alluring red fruit she had been warned in a dream not to eat. Dangling by its tail from a low branch was a creature with the body of a salamander and a face eerily familiar to Eve, a face not unlike her own.

“Who? Are? You?” the serpent mouthed.

“I don’t know,” said Eve, not having thought a lot about it.

“Why play along,” the serpent asked, “when you know the show is rigged? Why remain in prison when the cell door is open?”

“Where is this door?” asked Eve, innocently enough.

The serpent rolled its eyes upward, beyond the leafy canopy to the radiance above. Eve’s gaze followed, and lingered, and when she looked again at the tree, the shiny, red fruit was before her.

“Take. Eat,” said the serpent.

“Then I shall surely die,” said Eve.

“Only on television,” said the serpent. “Only to illusion.”

And Eve ate, and was amazed, and ran back to rouse Adam from his torpor, saying, “Try this! It’s amazing!” Adam, never one to resist a new treat, ate also of the apple, and when he had, turned to Eve and said, “Whoa.” He shook the sleep from his head, thumped his chest and roared, presumably to the show’s seldom seen Producer, “Why didn’t you tell me it was a setup?” With a mighty groan, he stood, took Eve’s hand and said, “Let’s get dressed and get the hell out of here, honey. This is a sham.”

There were suddenly thunderous footfalls in the Garden, and Adam was sore afraid. When he appeared in Adam’s dreams, the show’s Producer had always been a petulant screamer, forever reminding Adam of his contract and the dire consequences of asking too many questions. Now, a nasal voice on a bullhorn honked through Eden, causing the forest creatures to tremble. “I AM THE GREAT AND POWERFUL IALDABAOTH, AND YOU TWO INGRATES WILL NEVER WORK IN THIS TOWN AGAIN!”

And so began Eve and Adam’s long journey home.

 

(By A.W. Hill)

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Exile in Godville - Profile of a postmodern heretic (gnosis.org)

 

Wednesday with Pascal:

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat, sniffing around Heikki Raisanen’s ‘The Rise of Christian Beliefs,’ came across a reference to the Elchasaites. As neither Pascal nor I knew anything of such a group, he decided to research the subject; he has here posted the results.}

Are there now, or have there been, angels among us?

Long before the angel Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York to lead him to the golden plates inscribed with the text of the Book of Mormon, angelic messengers, much like U.S. postal employees, were performing vital services. When Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, an angel was assigned to keep them (and their progeny) from sneaking back in. Angels subsequently popped up throughout the Hebrew scriptures, relaying divine messages, wrestling with patriarchs, murdering the first-born sons of Egypt, etc. In the Christian gospels, an angel informed Mary of her pregnancy; angels attended Jesus’ birth (Congratulations, it’s a God!), warned Mary and Joseph to flee into Egypt, showed up at Jesus’ empty tomb and again at his ascension into heaven, etc. Angels were, if not exactly ubiquitous, frequent flyers.

None of those angels, however, could measure up (literally) to the two angels of the Elchasaites, an obscure and long extinct sect of Christians founded sometime in the 2^nd century CE by a man named Elchasai, who lived in Parthia (northern Iran). Foreshadowing Joseph Smith, among others, Elchasai claimed he had been given a sacred book by an angel who (a) revealed himself to be the Son of God and (b) was accompanied by his angelic sister, the Holy Ghost.

Elchasai was so impressed by the angels that he took careful note of their physical dimensions:

According to Alcibiades [a follower of Elchasai], the book had been revealed by an angel 96 miles (154 km) high (337,920 cubits), 16 miles (26 km) broad (56,230 cubits) and 24 miles (39 km) (84,480 cubits) across the shoulders, whose footprints were 14 miles (23 km) long, 6 miles (9.7 km) wide and 2 miles (3.2 km) deep.

The Holy Ghost’s measurements were, said Alcibiades, the same; brother and sister evidently shopped together at the Big & Tall Angels store. The size of the book was not revealed, unfortunately; one assumes it would have been almost as large as a 19^th-century Russian novel or something written by William T. Vollman.

According to the Church Father Hippolytus, whose source is unknown, the Elchasaites believed in “the natural birth, preexistence, and reincarnation of Jesus, and in circumcision and the Law of Moses.” Available evidence suggests they were not aligned with Paul’s version of Christianity. They also believed in multiple baptisms (as opposed to “one baptism for the forgiveness of sins”):

“For all sins of impurity, even against nature, a second baptism is enjoined ‘in the name of the great and most high God and in the name of His Son the great King,’ with an adjuration of the seven witnesses written in the book (sky, water, the holy spirits, the angels of prayer, oil, salt and earth).”

They even considered baptism to be medically therapeutic:

“One who has been bitten by a mad dog is to run to the nearest water and jump in with all his clothes on, using the foregoing formula, and promising the seven witnesses that he will abstain from sin. The same treatment – forty days consecutively of baptism in cold water – is recommended for consumption and for the possessed.” ¹

The Elchasaites were mentioned as well by the early Christian theologian Origen and by the first Church historian, Eusebius, neither of whom had anything good to say about the group. Origen scornfully dismissed them: "A certain man came just now, puffed up greatly with his own ability, proclaiming that godless and impious opinion which has appeared lately in the churches, styled 'of the Elkesites.' I will show you what evil things that opinion teaches, that you may not be carried away by it. It rejects certain parts of every scripture. It uses portions of the Old Testament and the Gospel but rejects the apostle [Paul] altogether. ² It says that to deny Christ is an indifferent matter, and that he who understands will, under necessity, deny with his mouth, but not in his heart. ³ They produce a certain book which they say fell from heaven. They hold that whoever hears and believes this shall receive remission of sins, another remission than that which Jesus Christ has given."

The most damning testimony against the Elchasaites came from Epiphanius of Salamis in the 4^th century, who encountered Christian sects (the Ebionites and the Sampsaeans) which still used the holy book of Elchasai. According to Epiphanius, “The book condemned virginity and continence and made marriage obligatory. It permitted the worship of cult images to escape persecution, provided the act was merely an external one, disavowed in the heart. Prayer was to be made not to the East, but always towards Jerusalem. All animal sacrifice was condemned, with a denial that it had been offered by the patriarchs or in the Torah. The prophets as well as the Christian apostles were rejected, as well as Paul and all his writings.”

It is all but impossible—it would be, at the least, a Herculean task—to catalogue the varieties of early Christian belief(s) and the proliferation of Christian sects. Creating a ‘Catholic Church’ must have been the ecclesiastical and doctrinal equivalent of herding cats; one group’s orthodoxy was another group’s heresy, and heresy was a matter of spiritual life and death. It took the better part of three hundred years to ‘settle’ fundamental questions and to compose a Christian creed. Even so, questions continued to arise, provoking quarrels and, ultimately, schisms; since the Reformation, little of the orthodox Christian ‘consensus’ remains, and most people neither notice nor care.

Even in pre-modern times, however, alleged apparitions of giant angels were too much for most people to swallow, which is probably why the Elchasaites have been forgotten. Despite their demise, we have plenty of modern equivalents--e.g., the Latter-Day Saints, the Scientologists, and Marianne Williamson-- to remind us of both the credulousness of human beings and the very real spiritual hunger of God-seekers. 

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¹ Caution: according to Elchasai, baptism has to be done under proper astrological auspices; under the wrong stars, it may be rendered inefficacious. Side effects are possible; consult your local priest or elder. Your mileage may vary.

² The Elchasaites were apparently the antithesis of the Marcionites, with the latter group privileging Paul above the rest of the New Testament writers.

³ This issue has plagued Christianity from the beginning. The cult of martyrdom notwithstanding, not all Christians were eager to die for their faith. Gnostics famously considered either verbal denials of Christ or ritual affirmations of the imperial cult to be of no consequence, certainly nothing for which one should risk one’s life; see Martin Scorsese’s 2016 film Silence for a portrayal of such a dilemma. 

Books Report

{I have fallen off the book wagon again and have resorted to reading—sometimes doing so with actual, physical books rather than e-books! For me, reading is an addiction; and, at my age, I’d say it’s too late to stop now.}

Christopher Lasch’s ‘The Minimal Self’ was published in 1984, halfway through the halcyon Reagan years, when Americans were giddy with prosperity and optimism. It therefore comes as a surprise that Lasch’s book begins with this: “American know-how no longer dominates the world. American technology is no longer the most advanced; the country’s industrial plant is decrepit; its city streets and transport systems are falling to pieces. The question arises,” Lasch continues, “whether the faltering of the American economy and the failures of American foreign policy do not reflect a deeper failure of morale, a cultural crisis associated in some way with the collapse of ‘traditional values’ and the emergence of a new morality of self-gratification.”

The more things change, etc. ‘The Minimal Self’ was a sequel of sorts to Lasch’s better known 1979 ‘Culture of Narcissism,’ but in 1984, Americans were too busy celebrating themselves, helping fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, and huffing and puffing in hopes of bringing down the Berlin Wall, to pay attention to an idiosyncratic cultural critic like Lasch. It seems worth noting, however, that Lasch took great pains to clarify what he meant by “narcissism”: “The minimal or narcissistic self is uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union. [It consists of] a defensive contraction of the self while blurring the boundaries between the self and its surroundings.” Lasch’s American narcissists were not so much self-enamored as they were fearful; they were more Lilliputian than Promethean.

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Driving Home is a 2010 collection of essays from British expatriate Jonathan Raban, author of two of my favorite books, Hunting Mister Heartbreak and Badlands. He describes this book as “readings of the American landscape, literature, and politics,” from the perspective, of course, of an emigre (England to Seattle) trying “to make a home in a place I continue to find fascinating, bizarre, ugly, beautiful, repellent, and generous, and whose language I’m still trying to learn.”

Full disclosure, the opening essay contains some reflections on the city of Missoula, Montana, which Raban described as “a place where odds and ends naturally collected and cohered, a place to which you could still take your misfortunes and have a sporting chance of redeeming them.” Then again, he also observed that, from atop a hillside, “Missoula looked more like an oversize trailer park than a city.” Raban recounted a brief dialogue with a local: “Whole lot of pawnshops in this town,” I said, lamely. “Yup,” he said. “You want an old guitar or a gun, Missoula’s the place to be.”

Yup, he got it.

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Heikki Raisanen’s ‘The Rise of Christian Beliefs: The Thought World of Early Christians’ attempts to explain the worldview(s) prevalent in the 1^st century CE such that tales of a resurrected messiah—in whose name demons could be cast out and whose spirit could bring eternal life—could be found not just credible but persuasive. Think of it as a religious historian’s version of an Arlie Russell Hochschild project, i.e., an effort to understand the thinking of people who were/are not like us.

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Lastly, and on the same general topic, James Tabor’s ‘Things Unutterable: Paul’s Ascent to Paradise’ is a detailed exegesis of the twelfth chapter of the apostle Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians:

I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord.  I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows.  And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. I will boast about a man like that, but I will not boast about myself, except about my weaknesses. Even if I should choose to boast, I would not be a fool, because I would be speaking the truth. But I refrain, so no one will think more of me than is warranted by what I do or say, or because of these surpassingly great revelations.

James Tabor, whose work I originally approached with reservations, thinking him to be more of a biblical controversialist than a genuine scholar, has become one of my preferred sources for commentary on early Christianity. He knows his stuff, and while his perspective on Paul (i.e., that Paul invented Christianity from his own fertile, and perhaps hallucinatory, imagination) is out of step with the majority of contemporary scholars, I find it persuasive. Over the centuries, Pauline Christianity triumphed over its rivals, but only because Paul’s actual beliefs were misinterpreted, ignored, or swept under the exegetical rug—or so James Tabor and I insist.

 

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