End Times by Kenneth Smith   

11. Medieval Civilization VII

G. Miasma, the Sacred and the Profane

Christianity, as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche both saw, has had to wage war against demons that it itself invoked and empowered, in the sense of positing them as antiprinciples: not just Eros and original sin, but indeed even worse, the dread fate of a world populated with dead letter, that is, an amoralized and prosaic form of life. For Christianity's otherworldly perspective on life meant that life taken in itself had no substantial meaning, justification, purpose, or reason. Christianity inherited a morally burnt-out or weltmude population from antiquity, the human detritus of the exploitative Roman Empire and the ruined "sublunar" field of frustrations and conflicts: it fostered and fed this alienation and futility, and tried to medicate it with a grandiose promise of eternity, blessedness, and divine glories that indeed ultimately worsened its original afflictions. In medicine this ironic effect is called iatrogenic, an artificial disorder carefully cultivated by an unwitting doctor.

The hope of redemption was set out not just for individual souls but indeed for the whole morally blasted world. A spent civilization had bequeathed to the race of mortals a mundane epidemic of perfunctory and pointless lives, and within that crisis Christianity seized on just the most anciently unholy realization that was dawning in its age: namely, that the sacred stream of life itself was toxified, that men were rife with miasmal or blighted forms of despair that all-healing life could not cure. The root of all sanity, values, goodness, and health was polluted. Men had to be saved from the nest they themselves had fouled or cursed, saved with a radically new sense of purpose and reason for living. A regime of teleology, a whole system of purposes that assessed for every act and thing a transfiguring interpretation, a teleology beyond that of nature's, was called for. Christianity had to restore to human beings a reason to be grateful for being born, a reason to find ultimate values and sacraments in life.

The Greeks had known the phenomenon of miasma or soulish-natural pollution: it was just such a blight — ruined crops, sterile women, fouled morale, in sum, a natural order that no longer flowed and rejuvenated or refreshed itself as it naturally should — that alerted Thebes and its King Oedipus to the displeasure of the Gods with something unholy in its precincts. The very institution of tragedy was meant, like comedy, to provide catharsis or a hygienic way of purging the stultified functions of personalities and communities trapped in their own fixations and asphyxiations. Just as our bodies and their metabolisms eventually poison themselves with their own entropic by-products, so too psyche and conscious reason exude cloying and eventually toxic atmospheres for themselves: human beings cannot live by their own conscious and willful works alone. The cloistered world of artifices mirrors back to humans the same narrow and shallow aspects and perspectives over and over. Heraclitus wrote:

We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet, although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.

"It is in changing that things find repose," not in remaining constant or fixed. Healthy humans, aristic humans who care about cultivating excellence in themselves and others, know that they cannot stand apart from the conflicts that are the lifeblood of nature: "War is both father and king of all...." We live in our highest forms when we keep ourselves tensed and agitated: "Even the sacred beer separates when it is not stirred."

We must thus cleanse the palate of our minds, rid it of our old assumptions and certainties periodically, or else be infested with unthought-about prejudices we have caught from the Many: as with lice, so with biases — "What we have seen and grasped, these we leave behind; whereas what we have not seen and grasped, these we carry away." The Greeks took intuitively for granted what Blake saw: "The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, & breeds reptiles of the mind." All of the horrors of human history, of modern history most of all, have only been possible because closed-minded or claustral delusionism consolidated itself into an impenetrable organization in behalf of barbaric ventures: ultimately there grew to be far too few aristic minds to see those evils for what they were and challenge their noxious authority. The history of the great forces driving the West is indeed largely a history of such enormities, such mind-boggling inhumanities. Moderns are ahistorical not least because they can hardly stretch their minds to encompass such organized monstrosity; that is, moderns have little stomach for looking behind the mask of lies and illusions of some official order.

A steadfast orthodoxy such as Christianity esteems is not humanly healthy or sane. Because of its closed-mindedness and dogmatic rigors, Christianity not only does not serve as a cathartic religion to release humans from miasma — it is itself a miasma, a claustral and suffocating cell. It repudiates alien perspectives on itself, insists that it cannot be superseded, and will not let any other religion or philosophy correct its prodigious one-sidedness. It is truly a cure worse than the disease. By contrast Nietzsche's Zarathustra is of course rife with a Hellenic or an aristic ethic of self-metamorphosis, moral and intellectual rebirth through a healthy self-contempt (Part I, 3-5 of Zarathustra's Prologue):

What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue.

Unless they are wise enough to criticize themselves constantly and struggle against their tendencies toward passivity, human beings sink by nature from their own acts and life of activity into lethargy and stagnation, seduced by what Nietzsche calls the "spirit of gravity." Life, but most acutely of all the aristic life, demands of every intellect and conscience a perpetuum mobile, the utmost unrest and alertness. This concept is of course diametrically contrary to the inertialisms of faith and belief; and it is the very essence of culture and philosophy, the yeast that induces minds and understandings to grow and fertilize themselves.

In its primitive form Christianity raised a new sense of living among others as members of an extended family; it communalized property and extolled a higher kind of love, selfless Agape. But with the routinization of these values and their incorporation into the agenda of a hierarchic church, the "rationalization" of Christianity inevitably brought on the defeat of its primeval ethos: instead of imbuing all of life with a sense of the sacramental, a more organized religion set up a disastrous polarization between the sacred and the profane days of the week. Men were absolved of being worldly creatures for six days of the week, and were expected to be self-consciously religious only on the one day they were obligated to "keep holy." Rather than recalling Christians to a sense of sanctitude, Christianity made sacrality retreat to a reservation apart from everyday cares. Religion had to become a pathetic and irreal "consolation" for the world not being as men's Christianized consciences were trained to suppose that it should be. Religion became an affair of passive mass-consumership, of taking vicarious pride and wonder at the accomplishments of all those saints who had been holy for the Many or in their stead, saints who had sacrificially proven the obedience of spirituality in place of all those who merely hear or read about such things third-hand and are properly shamed thereby. Where ancient aristocratism knew the high culture and epic heroism of an exemplary few, who proved the extraordinary natural potential of human beings in spite of the Many who were only the exceptions that tested the rule, medieval Christianity knew the goodness and serene beatitude of the saints, whose cosmeticized lives served to demonstrate "empirically" that this idealizing and euphuistic religion was after all humanly practicable. All Christians felt suffused — inauthentically — with the spirituality that, strictly speaking, had been metabolized and lived only by an utter few.

For most of the week men and women were trained to accept a disenchanted world, a miasma of matter-of-factness; and for one day of high ritual drama, they were reminded of the long-ago ingrained psychology of awe and glory. Christianity reached a rapprochement with the prosaic world, to which it accustomed men virtually in preparation for the workaday-life of modern capitalism. The medieval calendar had of course been rife with church holidays, as many as 200 festival days that reanimated the sense of heroic martyrs and miracles. But that sense of sacrament has been eclipsed by the mechanized order of modern society and its wholly secular technological wonders. Salvation for moderns has become salvation merely from boredom and despair, from the troughs of our manic-depressive and our workday cycles — salvation by means of entertainment and distraction. Commercial escapism is the modern otherworldliness, a wholly innerworldly otherworldliness, in which awe and wonder devolve solely upon "special effects." It is of course an otherworldliness utterly in the control and service of this-worldly forces, an implement by which constellations of great wealth levy a tax on most human beings' incapacity to confront and deal with such a regime. The modern world however splintered and divisive indeed constitutes a system, a scheme in which one hand washes the other: and the consumer is the sap/soap, the client of a cultural conditioning whose lack of scruples about telling lies, the bigger the better, traces back centuries before Goebbels.