End Times by Kenneth Smith   

7. Medieval Civilization III

C. Selfless Love and The Encompassing

All who have read Plato know what a profound value the Greeks put upon the beautiful (to kalon) and upon Eros, the God whose authority consists in the need human soul has for beauty, the rapture in which beauty exercises its power over us. Plato understood the power of beauty as part of the intrinsic teleology of Nature, the psychic tides by which we are swept toward what we most profoundly lack: that is what will complete us and make us whole, as every natural being instinctively desires to be an integral organism (holon) and for this reason does not just eat, copulate and sleep but indeed delights in these naturally necessary forms of "recreation" of its energies and morale. Eros is just such need-driven love. The Greek language had several other terms for other kinds of love, philia for brotherly love, for example, and agape for a giving, generous kind of love.

It was of course agape that Christianity took to heart as the highest or most spiritual form: "Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends" (John 15:13), and "Love thine enemies, and do good, and lend, hoping for nothing in return; and thy reward shall be great" (Luke 6:35). For simply and starkly put, "God is love" (I John 4:16), and "If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and His love is perfected in us" (I John 4:12). It is not simply remarkable that love opens up the narrow partitions of ego and its property, it is a righteous miracle: love evidences an unworldly, unnatural power and property of spirit, which is its infinitude, its ability to overflow the barriers which the finite world of nature and society erect, the territoriality of mine and thine, the hostility between one's friends and one's enemies, and the limitedness of all things which are natural realities. Goods of spirit are radically unlike goods of nature, as Jesus evidenced with the miracle of the loaves and fishes: if these few baskets had been no more than natural they would have been depleted, as all natural and economic goods must be. Jesus did this not to perform a magician's trick but to manifest the freeflowing inexhaustibility of spirit by feeding five thousand people, and then having more leftover than there were loaves and fishes to begin with. This is not about the constraints on the catering trade; it is about the qualitative or modal differences between different species of values.

Goods of the flesh, of nature or the body, are consumed in the process of being used; their enjoyment is exclusionary — what I take you cannot also have. But goods of the spirit express the prodigious creativity of spirit, its power of infinitude or self-replenishment. The moral is pointed: if we orient ourselves toward self-interest and narrow ego and their thingly prepossessions, we harden ourselves and deprive ourselves of higher values than we can conceive — what do we gain by such egocentrism that is even half as precious as what we lose? "What shall it prosper a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36). Every miser and exploitative individual immiserates himself as well as those he debases: like a pig, as the French adage says, a miser only does good for others when he dies, and like King Midas he discovers how very few of the needs of human personality gold can minister to. "What the world considers wise is foolishness to God" (I Corinthians 3:18-19); "If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14). Spirit by contrast has a higher and richer kind of power than the worldly can even imagine. It spends itself in generosity like the giving of all good and needful things which was the act of divine creation. Goods of nature and the economy, material goods, are finite; either one person takes them or another takes them; and once used or enjoyed, they are consumed or lost. But goods of the spirit are synergistic, they live and grow greater in the process of being shared. Jesus by this miracle alluded to an entire dimension of spiritual being by which humans enhance one another and live in mutual strength and health, and do not advance their desires at the expense of those who lose or are excluded. It is not necessary that human beings should have a negative or attritional value for one another, or be bound to live in vicious competition by which everyone is diminished.

The primitive Christian Church worshipped this miracle of commonness of spirit or koinonia.

In one body there are many members, and they do not have the same function. In the same way we — though we are many — are one in Christ, one body; and individually we are members one of another.

—Romans 12:4-8

They celebrated and rejoiced at common feasts and their members pooled all their worldly goods in order that the needy might lack nothing ("Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," (Matthew 25:40). Such communism was a severely logical expression of the way spirit transcended the finite forms of worldly life and mentality (see II Corinthians 8:9-10 and 13-14). Even those remote from Christian ways were astonished: Aristides, a non-Christian, said in defending Christians before the emperor Hadrian, "If one of them is poor and there isn't enough food to go around, they fast several days to give him the food he needs... This is really a new kind of person. There is something divine in them." The Greeks had well known that human beings had the capacity to form families and communities, to merge or fuse into unions: but how in truth are humans capable of rising above the cloying narrowness of ego, to form in some moral and psychic sense a we whose members love one another every bit as fully as they love themselves?

Greek philosophical anthropology understood that human beings were naturally born as self-centered infants and most remained such idiotes more or less until they died. The primal principle of psychic gravity by which nature holds human personality together is this overweening amor propria or sense of love for what is "one's own" (idiotia). If all humans were all equally trapped in that gravity-sink, we would of course live more like animals than like humans: like the barbaric and cannibal Cyclops that Homer portrays in the Iliad, man would be a lone hunter unfit for any context but his own solitary cave. It is a great and unaccountable bounty of natural virtue that makes some few humans competent to rise above this idiotism, to despise it and suppress it for the sake of the love of virtues, principles and the very life of the moral and political community itself. The anomalous aristoi make civilized and social life possible whereas appetite-driven douloi (slaves) and thing-obsessed banausoi (materialists and profiteers) would indeed quickly debase polity, culture and community into predatory, amoral and subhuman ways of living.

Like the Greeks, Christianity understood that such egocentric mentality was not a virtue nourishing community or civilization but a vice parasitic upon it. A millennium and a half before Proudhon wrote that "property is theft," St. Basil had already rendered exactly that judgment. "The rich take what belongs to everyone, and claim they have the right to own it, to monopolize it."

...The shoes rotting in your closet belong to the man who has no shoes; the money which you put in the bank belongs to the poor. You do wrong to everyone you could help, but fail to help.

"I am criticized often for my continual attacks upon the rich," wrote St. John Chrysostom: "Yes: because the rich continually attack the poor." There had to exist other, more fundamental principles in us that made a common life possible in the first place. The Greeks had realized that love, the mutual attraction of Eros, was one of the great world-forces bonding the forms of human social life together, but it was to Christianity not just one such principle but the ultimate and most divine force, and unlike aristocratic politics, philosophy and culture, love was a form of riches available just as much to plebeians as to patricians. All across the world and throughout history, the rise of new life and growth of cities would not have been possible without the nameless and unnoticed willingness of mothers, fathers, teachers, soldiers, doctors, lawgivers, and others instinctively to sacrifice themselves for the sake of what they knew to be more vital, more important. Love is the tacit fuel upon which the worldly world runs, the servant of thankless tasks wherever there are human needs and desperations. Spiritual love is already, from time immemorial, the foundation this self-seeking world takes blindly and blithely for granted. Men in their self-importance and hardened practicality do not think to ask themselves on what footing they stand, who nurtured them and cared for them when they were still helpless and useless. If all human beings had the values of the power- and profit-mongering world of imperial forces, of course human beings would never have lived to become such moneygrubbers and manipulators. Christianity saw the unrecognized and unrespected value of love, truly more powerful than power itself and capable of inducing humans to do what Caesar himself could not effect. What this all-too-worldly world dishonored was precisely the very heart and essence of things.

A society that does not concern itself with what is fundamental risks ultimately this primal perversion in its actions and mentality: its very ways of living and organizing itself may indeed be systematically undermining its own foundations, just as individuals may willfully ruin their own health or even kill themselves. Every society philosophically and religiously subtle enough to ask itself, how is the order of finite reality and active human existence possible?, must attempt to grasp what the more comprehensive or infinite forms and forces are that overreach us. Within what more encompassing reality are we contained? On what deeper strata of forces do we rest, what do we take for granted as a firmament? And how can we hope to grasp such transcendent issue with our normally corrupted and warped understandings? — Without considering such matters, not just individuals but societies as well build their houses upon the sand. The Greeks answered this question, after early hypotheses by the pre-Socratic thinkers, with the system of Nature as the genius of Heraclitus first understood its paradoxes and cryptic laws. Men, as Heraclitus understood, may be enveloped by their own occlusive self-interest but even so the Cosmos is making use of them whether they comprehend its ways or not. Even the idiot and the sleeper are doing a kind of work, a task from the perspective of the whole of things. Even to be an obtuse moron is a way of advancing the working-together of the elements that compose the Logos or organicism of the world. Heraclitus may rail as Aristotle and Nietzsche later would about humans who squander their lives indulging themselves like the cattle of the field, but he knows that this, too, must somehow be naturally necessary, that vast numbers of human lives be spent unwittingly on myopic and stupid functions. Idiotism marks the ineducable irrationalism of the Many, the bed of egocentric sloth in which most lie in utter torpor.

For Christianity the encompassing reality that contains this world and makes it hold together as a form of Logos is not Nature but Spirit: it is inconceivable to Christians that nature could be anything but a finitizing or divisive force in the world, not the primal cohesive power that joins the world together in the first place. Of course "nature" had been reduced and redefined in the process of being so criticized; and it was a civilizationally corrupted or senile cosmos that the early Christians saw about them. A new regime was beginning to exercise its logic, for which love is the organ by which the unifying power of spirit exercises itself and undoes the disintegrative ways of human nature. Sin is ultimately the very same issue taken from the reverse side, yet miserably miscomprehended by most moralizing sermonists. The New Testament was not just written in Greek, it was conceived out of Greek ideas; and sin was originally one of these. Hamartia was a term out of archery, "missing the mark," and got transferred into the criticism of tragic drama to describe the primal flaw of misjudgment that compounds itself into fullblown tragedy: hamartia, not to see what is central or essential is, in life and in one's own self-cultivation, a lethal fault.

Oedipus illustrates hamartia in its worst degree, as an individual on whom every clue, every prophecy, every acute word is wasted: Oedipus prides himself on being shrewd and quick-witted but in essential matters he is dense and lethargic. Sophocles' play Oidipous Tyrannos (mistranslated as Oedipus the King) is riddled with ironies and paradoxes; and Oedipus' own words unwittingly speak the truth when he least comprehends it, or say the very opposite of what is true when he means to speak what is so. At the central link of an individual's wits is the power to override his own illusions and delusions, or else his central intelligence is cancered. Oedipus' misperceptions are so profound they must have appeared unholy, unnatural and eerie, to the Greek audience. No human being operating under the impulse of faulty nature could conceivably be so absolutely, persistently, diametrically wrong. Oedipus, as all but he can see, is in the grip of a malevolent divinity, a dysdaimonia. And indeed the condition could virtually be defined from Oedipus' singular case, as a brash and headstrong miscreant whose character is designed by fate to bring the utmost evils upon himself, wholly by his own actions and in spite of all that others can do to warn him. That is hamartia in extremis, in its purest or most radical form. Oedipus has primally mistaken which of his powers or virtues ought to be harnessed to the others. He stands as an exemplary human pathogen, the very paragon of what the sophists professed and fostered as fulfilled rationality and individuality (what Aristophanes savaged in the combat between the old and the new Logoi in The Birds).

Sin etymologically derives from a root signifying a splitting-off; it is akin to asunder, scintilla, scissors, shingle, and even science as a methodologically analytical procedure. Sin is the rending of what ought to be whole. What is gained from its Greek form, hamartia, is that we know not just the results of sin but its preformation: sin takes its rise from the seductions of ego, from the failure to hew scrupulously to what is central or essential. Spirit unifies what exists, and ego is merely the knife's edge by which flesh is determined to cut off its overweening portion of the world. Not to see what is spiritually vital is to tie oneself off and strangulate what feeds one's higher intelligence. It was a paradox apparent to Aristotle that, unlike the things of nature and materiality, the keen edge of acute intelligence only grows sharper as it is used; it is an analogous paradox in Christianity that whoever chooses the better part indeed gets the whole (Luke 10:42). Through self-denial — not against lower goods or desires, but against the dysfunctional mentality that cannot comprehend their proper place in the scheme of things — one rises to a full and abundant life which includes the lower elements. This paradox Kierkegaard would later articulate into sublime detail and nuance, that from its own perspective a pagan or "esthetic" life lived for the sake of feeling seems desperately to exclude the principles and perspectives of the spirit; but the ethical and spiritual life, from its own side, does not exclude the esthetic. One viewpoint is finite, the other infinite.

In Greek tragedy there is a point called the peripeteia or reversal at which all the previously free actions become all too patently self-enslaving; intelligence beclouds itself and judgment commits itself to the ruin of its own life. Civilizations too experience such ironic reversals. It is an acute irony that Greek civilization, which originated in profound aristocratic contempt for inertial idiotia, in spite of itself ultimately propagated a hardened and pathological form of idiotism in the form of the highly sophisticated politics and philosophies of the sophists. It proved to be indeed a masterful, insuperable form of egocentrism and self-interest that finally commandeered Greek aristo-democracy for its own submoral purposes. And Christianity, too, which originated in utter revulsion for the natural selfishness that defines almost all human moral psychology, would likewise ultimately yield a hardened and sophisticated species of vicious egocentrism that would triumph altogether over the ethos of Christian spirituality — would in truth kill God Himself. So, too, the modern epoch, conceived in license if not liberty, has more and more deeply immired itself in addictions, compulsions, and pathetic and slavish delusions, all for lack of the values from which it deemed it was emancipating itself. Civilizations at their peripeteia begin to metamorphose into their antitype, blindly to love and become what they once despised.