End Times by Kenneth Smith   

5. Medieval Civilization I

A. New Wine in Old Wineskins

Medieval civilization is the regime of the principle of spirit. "Spirit" is a metaphysically peculiar principle classically called actus purus, or activity untainted by any passivity or suffering. All that is in nature acts and is acted upon in a dialectic or reciprocation, a relativity of priority: to be natural is to be marked by liabilities, necessities or needs as well as powers and instincts for self-providence. But spirit is the idea of absolute or unencumbered power, unconditioned by and abstracted from the web of natural transactions. The God Christianity conceived is a sole and solitary authority, a sovereign who acts on unilateral initiative, who is bound by no higher or lower order, owes nothing and needs nothing. All creatures He made have specific instincts and motives driving their actions, but God alone is free in the ultimate sense. His power is infinite, unbounded by any rival principle, unconfined by any inner "nature" of His own (in the sense of a nature coordinated with and subject to the order of Nature outside), and this power is capable of any effect: that is, omnipotent. The self-sufficiency and self-rule that Greek aristocracy took as the highest state for exceptional humans to strive for — exemplified not just by the Olympians but also by every animal's instinctual self-conduct — has become an exclusive prerogative of this God alone, who possesses it in the superlative degree.

Under the new theological premise, nothing in nature accounts for itself: nothing is strictly natural, self-active or self-evolving. The Greek Gods had co-evolved along with a natural order which was their matrix, too. But all of nature is now seen as architected and harmonized by God; under the Christian regime nature has an altogether different status as a divine work of art. Unlike the human artisan who takes for granted a preexisting material on which he works some modifications, the Creator-God assumes nothing: He brings into existence out of a nugatory nothingness both the form and the matter of the cosmos and its creatures, just as the pure activity of Spirit implies. Organicism, instinctual self-providence, intuitive sense of what is good, teleology — all these now describe God's dispensation, the system He ordained and sustains for the benefit of his creaturely children. It is God's edict, His preferred style, that form and matter are in every case married as they are.

The authority of nature over itself, its ultimacy or irreducibility, has been deposed. What was once the very Sun is now a satellite of another principle, of which no natural derivation or explanation can be given. The logic of nature that constituted basal ancient wisdom is conceived to be invalidated by another, more arcane wisdom hidden from the eyes of the too-clever and too-erudite. Jesus expressed this new wisdom in homely but subversive parables not just so that simple peasants might comprehend, but also for the sake of being esoteric by design:

...Unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

—Mark 4:11-12

These teachings were not for all, but meant to be an impediment to those who should rightly be baffled and denied — those whose minds belonged still, and forever, to the old order.

This concept of supranatural divinity has bound the thinking of Christians to its own absolutist and abstractivist logic, inducing them to suppose that such a religion cannot have arisen out of the natural-psychological or historical matrix. We know from documentary evidence that in spite of its ahistorical orientation Christianity did draw its materials from preexisting sources, Platonic and Parmenidean no less than Gnostic and Essene: a century before Jesus, a leader or prophet named Judah uttered many of the remarks formerly taken to be original with Jesus. The Gnostic Book of Thomas contains many of Jesus' wisdom-sayings and morals but devoid of the supernatural and immortalist premises on which the New Testament and the later Church were built. Christianity is not an abrupt and historically rootless phenomenon. But so vehemently antagonistic was it to its predecessors that the ancients took it as certain that Christian zealots had burned down the legendary library at Alexandria, the compendium of all pre-Christian culture.

In spite of its repudiation of its own natural-historical lineage, Christianity in its origins was very much a symptom of ancient culture. Its very concept of spirit was a retort or counterforce to the fatalism of ancient naturalism, without whose contrasting principles — the defining natural dialectic of active/passive — the very meaning of spirit cannot be grasped (as today so many self-uncomprehending True Believers evidence by the ingenious ways they have compounded Christianity with ethnocentrism, class-interests, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, xenophobia, etc.). As a classically educated citizen of Hellenic culture, St. Paul comprehended that the world Christianity had to contend with was the insidiously daimonic and naturally political world contesting for the souls of human beings, a world ultimately like that which the Greeks had viscerally set themselves to master:

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

—Ephesians 6:12

What had anciently been an animist or ensouled world is now construed as a battleground for the alignment of souls with Good or Evil.

Christianity originated as a plebeian or lower-class cult during the late Roman Empire, spread around the Mediterranean by the ubiquitous Roman army — as also was Mithraism, the mystery-cult that competed with Christianity for dominance. As Gilbert Murray noted, superstitious gullibility and ineptitude to comprehend abstract ideas — in which Christianity was caught up, of which it was a symptom, and to which it contributed greatly — grew so rampant in late antiquity that the "wisdom of God" or Hagia Sophia was thought of as "Sophia the daughter of God," and in one case was even identified with Helen of Troy; the concept of God's Logos — His teleological system, authoritative regime or way of ordering the world — went through a similar process of decay into simplism, into God's "Word" ("Pagan Religion and Philosophy at the Time of Christ"). The very exotic cultural materials that mingled in those oppressive and benighted times were Rome's inadvertent bequest, a seedbed for the forces that would one day gather up the fallen reins of empire and commandeer to other purposes the very heart of ancient empire — the city of Rome itself.

Christianity was from its founding an uneasy blend of Theism and Deism, impossible to render rationally coherent. The belief in personal divinity or Theism derives from the Greek word for god, theos; the Latin deus was incorporated into Deism, an utterly different mode of religion. One of the simplest precepts engraved on Apollo's Delphic temple was "Ei," Thou art — a memorandum that the Gods were never to be thought of as distant or alien, but rather in the intimate second person; like the riches of the myths, Homeric epic illustrates many times Aristotle's notion of Parousia or being-alongside, the sense that the Gods inhabit our very skins with us and coauthor our acts and motives. Theism feels not just that the Gods are in us but that we are in the Gods, each is permeable to the other and implicates the other: the finite and the infinite (as Heraclitus, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hegel, and Kierkegaard all comprehended) cannot be exclusive of one another, as two finite things must be — the very divinity and infinity of Gods consist in their powers of inclusion and permeation. Theism, as such a pantheism, is a sophisticated heir to primitive animism, to the wonder that all things are alive with Gods who are evident and existent.

Deism however conceives that the Gods are remote, implacable, abstract and faceless powers, no more moral or just (in human terms) than are forces of nature: it is a religion of alienation and futility, whether as determinism (Fata) or as blind chance (Fortuna), a worldview more metaphysical than moral, and more intellectual and desperate than pious and full of gratitude for the bounties of a rich existence. Deism's aloof and inhuman divine Powers naturally decay over centuries into a Deus absconditus who has abandoned man. Is God a free, inconsistent person — liable to reverse His decisions, to be softened in His judgments by prayer, to repent of His overreactions — or a rigorous and unitary metaphysical principle, necessitarian and lawful? It took the scrupulous reasoning of Spinoza to unmask these incoherencies of Christian theology — the schizophrenia of moral (theist) and metaphysical (deist) dimensions in its notion of divinity — that its ancient critics had also foreseen. For all of its centuries, Christianity attempted to derive the benefits of radically incommensurable theorizing postures or modes of religious worldviews.

The Romans — both plebs or commoners and patricians or wealthy nobility — conceived that the Will of Jove (or Jupiter) put an ultimate seal on their fated lot: the powerful and moneyed classes were bound to act according to their class interests, and the deprived and destitute Many were bound to suffer according to theirs. What was true among Gods and animals — the privileges of hierarchic rank — was no less true among humans: What is permitted to Jove is not permitted to a cow (quod licet Jovi non licet bovi). Religion, rather than tempering inhuman vices, merely ratified the course of an imperial Juggernaut. The rule that Rome extended throughout the ancient world was unstintingly crass, a bleak and crushing extortionary power politics rooted already in the very founding of Rome by a legendary gang of brigands. Indeed Polybius' or Suetonius' history of regimes in Rome reads more like the chronicles of the Mafia than the civilized rule of law. Not by virtue but by brute force Rome triumphed over the autonomous Greek poleis and their codes of communal values, to give the very concept of "politics" a radically more materialist and brutal or coercive meaning. It is the cynical Roman worldview of Realpolitik that dominates modernity, which finds the Greeks' politics as alien as their philosophy and culture. Politics to the Romans was the Machiavellian craft of domination through deception and the ruin of opponents, i.e. machinations of coercion and exploitation — the Greeks descended into this kind of feral power-mongering only with the decadent era of the sophists, but to the Romans such predation and self-interest had been normal and universal from their very origins. In Hobbes' classic phrase, homo lupus hominis, "man a wolf to man." Political power-mongering thus eroded the very sense of community or friendship (socius, societas) on which society was primally based.

Christianity, of course, taught contempt for such materialism and for all the other vanities of this world. No other world-religion has made "worldliness" into such an opprobrium, as a vice of compromise and conformism that in extremis makes one indeed a deluded slave of the shrewd arrangements of self-interest. Not just the victims of a hypermaterialist world-order but also that order's masters are in truth chained to a logic that has no soulish or spiritual truth, no moral validity at all. "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). Against such corruption Christianity promised redemption, which is the buying back of a slave, the liberation from being a commodity in the tides of the market. How utterly unworthy is such slavery of a Christian soul that conceives of its high and noble human estate as the only creature made in the image of God, the only place in all of Creation where the Creator in effect signed His authorial signature by fashioning a being that could not conceivably have been a product of blind Nature. From what did ancient man need to be saved or delivered? From the asphyxiating webs of imperial authority and the ever-more radical injustice of concentrated wealth, from the sordid degradations of a world-system expert at ruining the integrity of the soul and bleeding off its morale. "Salvation" is not just a matter of repenting over one's personal sinfulness and weakness, although such self-slavery is a primary obstacle to spirituality. In modernity what is called Christianity has utterly turned its eyes away from the social, political and economic mechanisms that enforce wholesale regimes of sinfulness; organized religion by this sin of omission puts itself truly in league with that exploitative world-order. It focuses consciences on petty, personal, retail sins while organized sin and injustice degrade human lives and souls en masse.

Although Jesus cautioned the prudence of rendering unto Caesar what was Caesar's due, Christianity introduced a heightened attitude of contempt for all that was worldly or ephemeral. The Greeks had harnessed such contempt for the phenomenal or appetitive (for what is slavish or pathetic) in behalf of aristic ethos, demanding that the truly excellent soul should care only to execute those values that had perennial significance — beyond the flux of trivial opinions — and would imbue one's own name with memorability. For man's natural mortality there could be no cure, but his acts of will could become as deathless as the desire of men-to-come to know what had been the crests of past greatness. But Christianity despised as well all such efforts at self-immortalization, and all communities in which excellence might be respected or esteemed: "Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets" (Luke 6:26). What was Jesus shattering and demoralizing by these remarks? Plato had said Greek aristocracy was essentially a timocracy or rule by and for the sake of honor: in order to have one's individual and exemplary virtues recognized by a connoisseurial culture and discriminating peers, one committed oneself to the arduous pursuit of excellence. No more.

For Christianity leveled all human and social accomplishments to the same debilitating futility and meaninglessness. Vanity of vanities, said the morose Ecclesiastes of the late Old Testament: all is vanity. All the high humanizing values of antiquity were disparaged witheringly by Christ: "If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all" (Mark 9:35) — whoever seeks to be first in the eyes of men shall be made last in the eyes of God; seek instead to be humble, that you might be raised by God. For all that is worldly is temporal, the evanescent issue of the day, spent and lost in the very processes of living. Christianity wielded to devastating effect an Olympian perspective of disdain for all the futile endeavors of man: "Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?" (Matthew 6:27). Men cannot look to other men for their ultimate standards of what is good or right, and they cannot expect help from others in the rigors of soulish obedience; human communities certainly cannot provide immortality for any good or great accomplishment of an individual, inasmuch as they themselves have no immortality to give. The Greek poleis thrived on an aristocratic consensus about what was worthy and sane, a moral and political hygiene among well-honed connoisseurs: such moral communities proved transient, and their wholeness was now ruptured and septic. Men in late antiquity needed a code that would enable them to live morally and spiritually in isolation and hostility, in the midst of the dementia and depravity of the polyglot larger civilization that came to encompass their once-autonomous communities.

Christianity assaulted the ancient hierarchy of natural rank, the aristocratic ethos that showed its design not just in the system of nature but also in the striving of men — what is higher, to be excellent or to triumph over one's own ego and appetites? Or is self-overcoming, in Nietzsche's phrase, not itself the most difficult of excellences to cultivate? (Homer had already posed that question at the climax of the Iliad, when aged Priam abased himself at the bloody hands of Achilles the slayer of his sons; and at the climax of Odyssey, when Odysseus returns home but must rein in his fury over Penelope's parasitic suitors.) That ethos of natural rank manifested itself in the prerogatives of the ancient Gods as well, and it is here that Christianity's theological core shows mutant elements that defied the comprehension of ancient minds. For it proposes a holy God who cannot suffer at all, even in the ways Gods suffer from their peers or from natural necessity, and who sends His sacrificial Son to suffer in ways no ancient God would or could ever have suffered. To the ancients, the Gods are transcendent over human actions, beyond our reach; but Jesus, bound and condemned, is executed by crucifixion like the lowest wretch, an excruciating fate reserved for thieves and traitors. A God who is so vulnerable is like a slave, a creature of too much matter — why call Him a God at all? To the ancients even the Gods in their high estate are still natural and subject to the laws and courses of the regime of Fate; but the Christian Father is neither of these. And, of course, all talk of the power to create and the created world violates the most primal order of a self-evolved, self-continuous nature that presupposes itself back into abysmal eternity.

Likewise the Greek mythoi, being shared and grown within a culture, provided a way for a community to recall its members to the roots of religion in human nature and the human condition: religion in the hands of human insight and conscience could foster moral riches and values that nourish the entire organism of the polis. An ancient folk saying explains: The myths are the work of the daimones, the godlings whose business is the inner promptings of human souls. And myths are also the seedbed for human culture — Greek polytheism is intensely moral, concentrated upon soulcraft or self-cultivation; at the same time, it conceives humans to be radically self-governing for better or for worse. Like every natural being they have an impulse of self-direction that is the very quintessence of their nature, and which not even the Gods in their authority deem it right to overwhelm or violate. As Nietzsche perspicuously remarked. "No Greek God ever told a Greek Thou shalt." Those Gods have not a paternal but an avuncular relation to men, offering counsel to those who can benefit from it; or the Gods manipulate the many blind spots in motivation and judgment to which hybristic or overreaching humans are obtusely liable. But the Gods do not directly contravene the sovereignty of human self-authority or autarkia. The Greek Gods were thus at one and the same time far more moral and also far less than the Christian God: by way of myths and dreams they supplied insight into wisdom, which was preeminently theirs to share, for the sake of the metabolism of moral intelligence in the community at large. But they never dictated to men what ought to be done. Men have a right and a responsibility to exercise the virtuosity of their ultimate insight and judgment for themselves, being all the while in the hands of the daimonic powers that are their ultimate and intuitive life-energy.

Ancient religion existed to further the culture of the polis, to serve as its foundation of piety: religion is a human, natural need and value, indispensable to balanced perspective and sanity. Prayer within the polis was a public thing because religion was for the sake of political intelligence, as philosophy too was intended to galvanize acuity for public affairs as the very acme of strictly human concerns: as vital as the survival of oneself or one's family was, all that much more vital was it that the political community should be steered according to the highest values and for the sake of the most ample good a whole people could attain. Christianity by contrast fostered an intensively individual sense of prayer, worship and consultation with God:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say onto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

—Matthew 6:5-6

Christians in modern society are transparently too much concerned with public show and too dependent on others' rhetoric to be able to comprehend why Jesus would have insisted on such intimacy and candor. It is utterly the extrinsic or worldly and social appurtenances of religion that rule it today.

The Greek concept of a daimon was an ironic thing, an intensively private force within one's sensibility which could not be seen or known by one's own conscious self: because one's daimon so biased one's powers of judgment, no one could himself tell whether he was being steered by a benign or a malignant daimon. Only other people, studying dispassionately the oblique evidence of one's general course of actions and drift of life, could make that determination — and as many tragedians and philosophers remarked, only after one's life was safely over is it possible to say decisively whether it was governed by a good or wholesome daimon (eudaimonia, commonly mistranslated in Aristotle's ethics and politics as a simplistic "happiness"). In his trial for impiety Socrates appealed to his anomalous daimon that spoke directly to him — and that did not impel him to act, but intervened only to deter him from acting. Socrates' daimon seems far closer to the Christian concept of conscience — a private forum with God — than to anything his contemporaries could recognize as moral essence; they disbelieved his claims of piety accordingly. By way of that more individualist, anarchic power of conscience, Christianity broke away from the bonds that made religion an integrative factor in ancient culture, politics, and literature. Like the new wine Jesus described in Mark 2:22, Christianity threatened to burst the old skins of the ancient regime. The Roman emperors rightly feared it not just as heretical but as profoundly subversive of the ligaments of empire.