End Times by Kenneth Smith   

9. Medieval Civilization V

E. Faith Understood as a Vice

By no accident but by the internal structure of an ideology, those living under Christianized culture are overwhelmingly deprived of the pertinent concepts to see in a critical way how it shapes and biases their mentality. "A delusion is a state of mind in which we are least able to think of what we most need to think of": Kierkegaard's economical but vertiginous maxim fits very well the matrix of Christendom, that is, Christianity taken as a worldly, human-all-too-human reality. We must discriminate between the de jure Christianity of idealities — the ethos and its putative values, the worldview as it insists that we should see, interpret and judge it — and the de facto Christendom of actual political forces, understood as a system of conformizing controls that produces and permits only irrationalist reactions.

That is to say, it is an ideological climate that explains the following imbalances in the culture at large: for every ten thousand or hundred thousand (misanthropes may say, every million) successfully formatted "Christians" (taken as ideological serfs or drones), it may yield up one fully subtle, thoughtful and self-reflective individual who is Christianized indeed down to the ultimate concerns of his or her soul; as well as this significant imbalance — for every hundred thousand who react in mindless revulsion and repudiation against Christianity (or even against religion per se), it may yield up one unflinchingly critical and autonomous individual who can in truth analytically evaluate the deformative profile that Christianity has inflicted on both its blind followers and its witless contrarian. To be for Christianity no less than to be against it are for the most part irrationalist postures. About the most important matters in life and conscience human beings are ideologically not permitted to reason — all the moreso in decultured and nihilist modern culture, which repudiates a priori the very thinkability of values.

What is hard for Christians no less than for moderns in general to comprehend is the extent of the artificialism that dominates their inner lives. Capitalism has purveyed a uniquely modern form of artificial poverty (not just systematic dearth of money but a cloying, obsessive need for all the advertised goods one has not got, which are no longer thought of as luxuries but as some sort of psychologized necessity); and scientism has promulgated a peculiar mode of artificial intellectual narrowness inculcated by methodical specialization and institutional training (but not confusable with the truly naive natural idiotism common in all ages). So too Christendom has propagated an artificial or cultured parochialism or closed-mindedness that induces even the most arrant know-nothings to suppose that they know a priori what is right, what life should mean, and how the world should go for everyone else.

This "cloud of unknowing" — the "unexamined life" normalized as an ultimate, beyond whose limits no one may go — is not pure and simple innocent provincialism or ethnocentrism such as existed for millennia before there were telemedia or even dispersion of the printed word. This is instead a narrowness by design that has been formally engineered and reinforced, catechized into a theoretical self-righteousness. It combines great and facile sophistication with abysmal naivete, hopeless poverty of insight with turgid egocentrism, and obtuse arrogance with self-perceived "humility." No astute inhabitant of Christendom can have failed to observe the kind of aggressive stupefaction by which churchly know-nothingism propagates itself. The motto of all censors, We read in order that others may not, draws a boundary around all of Christendom and encloses, within it, any islands of free thinking: there is much, infinitely much, that counts as forbidden knowledge for Christians.

What are the implications of founding a religion on a cult of faith or fideism? Without knowing or having to inform oneself, one assures oneself that one already knows all that is essential: Christian fideism is the degradation of Platonic apriorism into irrationalism, the evolutionarily or rationally retrograde collapse of philosophical culture into dogmatism. It embraces as if it were the most complete virtue the vice of somnambulism, going through life in a dreamstate. It lives wholly in the domain of inner currents, of a wish-world structured on puerile emotionalist reactions — desire for paternal approval, fear of eternal torment, and the Heaven and Hell that these project — and it cannot begin to ask itself whether these are really ultimately morally true or spiritually responsible points of view. Idiotistically it lives utterly in its myopia. The Greeks understood very well the difference between this base subjectivism and the noble "inwardness" they had in common with Christianity; but Christians on the whole were nowhere near so discriminating. Their culture made them insipid or devoid of taste on these matters, bound to conflate what in actuality were radically different forces and perspectives.

The task of human culture and philosophy — of soberly and critically knowing oneself as one actually and naturally is, in the fundamental forces of character and culture that define one — cannot dawn on such a subjectivist, self-indulgent mentality. Philosophy that deserves the name has asked ever since Heraclitus and Aristotle for the nimble-fingered finesse to see and understand the significant structures of the world as they are: how to save the subtle shape of natural and human phenomena as they are, not as we willfully or obtusely want to preconceive them. The philosophical task that a religion of fideism so obviously shirks is this: how to discriminate between faith that may be truly the ingression of the divine into our lives, and faith that is merely human-all-too-human rationalization? For lack of such hard intelligent labor, the Christian centuries did indeed prove a reign of Dark Ages, of deliberate, directed obliviousness and suppression of heretical realities. To twist a phrase from Kierkegaard: it begot legions knighted by infinite resignation.

The Christian lethargy or ignorantist sloth — the profoundly passivist self-assurance that one need not exert oneself to know or understand how the world, human nature, social order, etc. actually work in themselves — is the primal sin of Christianity against its own difficult precept of spirit. In this way a religion devolves into the very sort of blind obedience or literalist orthodoxy that Christ despised as "dead letter," the mechanical routine of repetitious formulas or rituals. Like ancient aristocratism with its hard-won dimensions and nuances of self-mastery, true or authentic Christianity also demands an athletic self-discipline in struggling against the constant gravitational pull of natural appetites and the sedimentation of social conformity; for ingrown tendencies toward consensus and complacency — the very mutual agreeableness of a communal culture in which Christianity assures itself that it has won itself a homeland in the world by triumphing over pagan forces — are the most insidious enemies of incandescent spirit. Not the blatantly evil Adversary that Christians see and sermonize against, but the unseen and gradual erosive and consumptive processes of their own unreflected inner human nature are of course what eats the heart out of spirit. Christians' paranoia about the war of satanic forces upon the faithful precisely obscures what it is in us that wants to conspire and collaborate with those forces. Is the seedbed of evils anything other than human nature, uncomprehended, uncriticized and uncontrolled? Das Bekannt is darum nicht erkannt, wrote Hegel percipiently: "The familiar just because it is familiar is not recognized for what it is." He never put his Heraclitean insights more succinctly than this: human nature thus fates itself to self-obscurity.

"Faith," said Nietzsche, "is not wanting to know what is true": but faith is, even more fundamentally than that, the vice of fomenting contempt for one's own inner powers of self-criticism, for one's need and determination to see with the most severe strictures of penetrating truth. For lack of a sufficiently stringent self-critical eye, Christianity fosters in generation after generation an entropic subcultural culture of anti-intellectualism and misology, despising the virtues of a lively mind and acute intuition: but of course it takes subtlety and acuity to fight against one's own idiotia or self-favoritism, against the accommodations and habituations that induce humans to excuse their own obtuseness. Faith extremized is dullness par excellence, a perverse refusal in principle to question and to see: an artificial moronism. If spirit is the very essence of self-activity and autonomy, then fideism is a spiritual lobotomy. It is not naturally obvious to every kind of mind what is a virtue and what is a vice — these are iridescent matters, shifting with the angle of our interest and bias. Degeneration of self-formative spirit into dull psychological matter, fit only to be manipulated and exploited, is the consequence of complacency and self-congratulation, and the very design of the theology of fideism. Religion is then corrupted not just by political predation but also by economic. Far from being a transcendent cure for the corruption of polity and justice, it becomes a premier tool in the arsenal of unjust forces and interests.

The aroma of congregations of sheep inherently attracts opportunist wolves, who sense the perfect settings for their own Machiavellian craftiness: who better to manipulate than those who have scruples against questioning and seeing? To these predators, all is a means to the insidious genius of ego, even piety, sanctitude and sacred precincts. Among those whose critical wits have been blunted by sleepy fellowship, who can tell the difference any longer between authentic fervor and sanctimoniousness? between humility and self-celebration? between divine service and material self-indulgence? or between crusading moralism and political ambition? One recalls Kley's savage cartoon of the country parson beset by the most horrifying nightmare — that he was indeed as poor as his Savior had been. Far scarcer than a true Christian is a church hierarch living in poverty and contented to exercise nothing but the moral authority of trying to be a good example; for even in the poorest countries in the world, the church accrues great wealth to itself. And in the wealthiest lands, it becomes a material accomplice to the imperial strategems of powermongers; indeed, it becomes a powermonger itself, through the inheritance of estates cadged from the moribund, whose fear for their immortal souls is carefully nursed. The Church has a prodigious cloak of respectability which it is willing to share selectively, with just the right politicians, padrones, and intellectuals; but this cloak is not to be had for free. It is modernly considered an asset, to be played for profit.

Everywhere, those who relish the privileges of an established Church are unfailingly discontent to wield only moral command; they do not hesitate to employ also political, social, economic, and other forms of ideological coercion. By fair means or foul, they demand control over as many souls as possible. It is empire they lust after, power and political aggrandizement: not the wholeness of souls. One has to be a little stunned to see Catholic reactionaries still making common cause with the Inquisition — disputing only its methods, to some extent, as misconceived.... The Church today feels nostalgic and rueful that it once had a near-perfect monopoly of power in its grasp, and did not seize it more ruthlessly. Today modern factionalism and secularism have taken away the very possibility — and of course so has the entire renovated landscape of modern culture.

Institutionalized religion fosters gullibility and ethnocentrism as if they were virtues. It encourages no sense whatsoever of a profound self-responsibility to criticize ambient preconceptions and to hold oneself aloof from the manipulable Many: for it, all should be sheep whose only defense against the world is to huddle in their sheepfold. The primal individualism of spirit that early Christianity honored, evident everywhere in Jesus' anarchic and contrarian tenor and the very heroism of martyrs, was quickly displaced from the moral canons of an organization that exploited that folk religion only to evict it from its own premises. In country after country — particularly in the Third World — Church hierarchies are still engaged in pitched battles with those of its priests and laymen who sense the existential bite of Christian values in a world far more corrupt and unjust than ever. A little too much Christian insight and conscience, and one starts to understand what is betokened by the complicity of the Church hierarchy with the evils of the world. Dostoevsky's "dream"-chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, "The Grand Inquisitor," is a singular revelation of the depths of nihilism of which organized religion is capable; but it is a century and a half too old to have encompassed the perfidies of televangelists and the religious Right, or the machinations of a Church that has today taken to its bosom the "black arts" of publicity and finance.

In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt remarks on a significant gulf between Aristotle and Aquinas, that the Greek understood politics — the exploration and mediation of conflicting perspectives and criteria, thus the human elicitation of naturally appropriate forms to enable democratic self-governance — to be incurably part of the human condition and the premier task of human intelligence, which is to form appropriate kinds of cosmoi out of preexisting chaos. But the medieval theologian understood man to be merely social, just another member of an order ordained hierarchically from above. In between the two thinkers' epochs, Christianity had normalized monarchy or autocracy, not democracy; it had repudiated as heretical the philosophical competence to think for oneself about ultimate or founding principles; and it had reduced philosophy, in a famous phrase, to a mere "handmaiden to theology."

The ultimate dilemmas that a fideist worldview entailed were well grasped by two philosophers who tried most profoundly to retain the essential intelligence of Christianity, Hegel and Kierkegaard. Hegel understood that faith was fundamentally immediacy, the condition of utmost inactivity or mere implicitness: subjective or spiritual life in its givenness, its least developed, most primitive form. Can faith truly fixate and immure itself, defend itself against subversive forces? Can faith even know and define itself, distinguish itself from what it essentially is not? Hegel sees both answers must be no. Precisely because faith is immediacy, it cannot grasp itself by means of the paucity of resources that immediacy possesses: the immediate cannot be immediately known or understood in its immediacy — it mutates itself just by the very processes of trying to determine what it is. In the domain of subjectivity too, there is a Heisenberg's principle that causes the very act of self-knowing to alter or affect what it is merely trying to "see." Not just in terms of the historical destiny of spirit but also in terms of the fated course of natural existence, a culture that seeks to retard itself in sheer fideism is doomed to fall into a corruptive sophistication, thus to decay away from what it most profoundly wants to be. A human being who wanted deliberately to remain nothing but an infant would, in spite of himself, bring far too mature — too subversively mature — tactics and strategies to that perverse task; and ultimately the higher cunning of those tactics and strategies would consume the naivete they had sought to defend.

Kierkegaard saw the logic of Hegel's argument and took to heart another component from it, the resurgent higher-order immediacy which is restored as the apparent ultimate or resting-place of every cycle in that argument: true faith to Kierkegaard is not the naivete which precedes all fundamental questioning but the resolution which is achieved after such doubt or reflection. Christianity in his hands becomes again a religion subtle enough for intelligent individuals, even for geniuses — but not any longer for sheep. Both philosophers understand the futility of trying to shield faith from all that is critical or negative in human subjectivity. The truth, as Hegel comprehended, is the whole — the entire system of what we are as subjective organisms, both our base of immediacy and our range of active mediations or processes. With respect to that whole and the infinite or encompassing Logos of things, all we can do is struggle and strive, stretching our insights to the utmost. Emerson saw the conflict quite starkly that spelled doom for the inertialist notion of faith: "God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. Take which you please; you can never have both." Spirit's ultimate character as the purest or most perfect form of activity — autonomous or self-activity — makes it profoundly incommensurable with the passivism of faith. All one has to do is grasp the very concept of spirit to see this. But to achieve conceptual insight, philosophy and not fideism is called for.

A culture that esteemed the aristocratic virtues of philosophical insight (and consequently despised the vices of majoritarian inertia and conformism) had modulated over centuries into one that regarded good human and civic virtues to consist in being gregarious, that is, ovine or sheeplike. Perhaps the visage of the Christian Devil did not draw features just from paganism's Dionysian god Pan and the stereotypical Jew but also from the archetypal philosophers of antiquity: men should know better than to hunger and thirst after wisdom — they should instead be ravenous for righteousness, being divinely endowed with correctness or orthodoxy. The Greeks were subtle enough to understand the follies and fallacies of claiming to be wise in an ultimate or accomplished degree; Christians however for centuries did not see the arrogance and indulgence that were implicit in theocratic authority as a political form. Many still today have not grasped what is so pernicious in the mentality of leaders who suppose themselves singled out by God to preach, ordain and dictate in an apodictic way. "By their fruits you shall know them" (Matthew 7:16). Wealth is not one of the fruits of spirit, as St. Paul had to explain to the materialist heretics in Ephesus — a lesson wasted still today on the preachers of the Gospel of Success. And on the hierarchies that esteem it even though they are careful not to preach it.