End Times by Kenneth Smith   

12. Medieval Civilization VIII

H. The History of Spirit

In the early Twentieth Century theologians such as Bultmann began to "demythologize" Christian religion. They were of course a millennium and a half behind the religion, which from its origins had already determinedly sought to purge itself not just of myth but of magic as well. The Christian God was not one to share His wisdom so readily through myth, nor one to be manipulated through formulas and tricks like magic: He was above the webs of society, the education in wisdom that mythoi can provide, no less than above those of nature and its harmonics. One nonetheless commonly finds "Christians" who still have not gotten the news — who think magically and pray accordingly, in order to manipulate the almighty Commander of the universe into bending some eternal law for their benefit; and who take the narrative content of the Gospels or other, recently contrived fictions such as the Rapture and make myths of them all over again, highly compressed symbols or metaphors. In spite of the religion's contempt for myth, the literature enhaloing Christianity is of course replete with imagistic myths about the Grail, the Shroud, the Robe, Ahasuerus, etc.

All throughout the "Christianized" world, reports describe the tenacity of older ways, how beneath the whitewashed veneer of Church indoctrination peasants still cling to their traditional, nature-rooted myths: tossing coins into a river beforehand for safe passage, but now for the sake of the Virgin, not the river-god; making quid pro quo deals with saints; praying that Christ will rise once again, not in order to triumph over Death itself but in order that the village's spring crops may prevail. Christ may have walked upon the water but, as Leonard Cohen saw, "He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone." Human nature and cultural traditions are easy to divert but almost impossible to uproot: in many respects they have swallowed up Christian innovations whole. Every "new order of the ages" is bedeviled by the tatters — or the whole cloth — of some old order. The corruptions that make human order "worldly" have certainly taken the Christian revolution in hand and turned it everywhere to their purposes.

In spite of this the novel idea by which Christianity is defined, Spirit and its correlative act of creation, did in fact transvalue the world of nature and humanity in obscure ways. The sea-changes that Christianity worked on the soul and religion are indeed buried, eclipsed by its own formidably elaborate system of ideological theology. Just as Christianity was inherently or at its core hostile to myth and magic, so was it also antagonistic to soul, piety and mystery or faith. Its rhetoric so redefined the sense of all these as to obscure that antagonism, and those minds most successfully imprinted by Christian perspectives understand these issues therefore the least.

(1) Spirit is distinctively different from soul: soul is well understood by the Greeks as natural psyche, a "feminine" or passive principle (anima as distinguished from animus) in every human being. Psyche is our inward or subjective rootedness in the order of nature, our subliminal subjection to the matrix within which and by which we were begotten: we thrill to the music, beauty and dreams of nature, but we also suffer its anguish and conflict. Psyche is that point of electric contact between us and our actual, active matrix, the broth of life. Nature is one infinite, sympathetic order, a planetary superorganism so sensitive to all that is in it — sensitive part to whole, part to part, and whole to part — that the bond between twins, or parent and child, or pet and owner, has led some to suppose a kind of telepathy may be involved. Psyche in us is our attunement or soulish sympathy with that world. Through psyche we "know" what our poor active consciousness and reason (animus, intellect, will or mind) have no power to apprehend or comprehend; over history conscious intellect has evolved a culture all of its own which helps it coordinate itself with and master the finite world of things and of human beings considered as things. But this active principle in us — out of which spirit evolved as the most hybristic form of activity, a "pure" or absolute self-activity — indeed finitizes everything it touches or turns toward. Its primary chemical reaction is to reduce whatever it relates to, to make this matter something tractable to its specific organs and abilities.

In principle, because of its very mode of activity, ego or conscious intellect cannot comprehend what is infinite or whole or ultimate. All that it relates to it throws into sharp definition: for it always thinks merely in terms of definitions, of words defined utterly in terms of other words; thus it makes its object some kind of relative factor in a system of contrasts or distinctions. The difference between intuition (which sees things in their uniqueness or pre-articulated wondrousness) and intellect (which sees things always overcast by a system of interrelated and already-articulated terminology) was grasped intuitively by the Greeks as the difference between two forms of thinking, concretizing gnosis and formalizing noiesis; and this difference was grasped again theoretically by the late-medieval mystic Nicholas of Cusa, who termed these two functions in us the non aliud (seeing things intrinsically, as nothing other or none other than what they are) and the aliud (seeing them extrinsically, in an alienating or contextualizing way, in terms of their other). These two modes of activity correspond to our hemispheres' distinctive qualities of cognition and cogitation, that is, concretizing right-brained gnosis and abstractivist left-brained phasis.

Conscious active spirit inherently tends to rise to dominance in the eventual triumph of an individualizing logos-culture over an earlier, communalizing mythos-culture; spirit deludes itself then into thinking it is the sole and ultimate principle of creativity. But the truth is that nature is that creative principle, and cultivated soulishness alone can see the world in its rich ambience of potential relatedness. Being inherently analytical and divisive, conscious intellect does no more than recombine and fashion permutations or controlled variations; it does nothing inductive, synthetic, or radically new because it cannot even grasp natural Gestalten, archai or the root-principles of how nature works, most of all in its own self. The modern world-order (as will be argued more thoroughly later) is the systematic elaboration of the worldview of conscious intellect, a domain of radical finitude and shallowness. This world has all of ego's modal flaws of control-fetishism writ large.

Religion for millennia had been rooted in psyche, anima or soulishness: it grew on the soil of natural humility, on the primal realization that one is necessarily a derived being. But the Christian regime of Spirit interrupted that tradition of piety; it distanced its believers and thinkers from the order of nature and all its formative and insidious or invasive powers in principle, repudiating all of this as a false Logos or specious way of accounting for our existence. The system of nature's logic extended of course into the history of peoples, the enduring life of families, the travails of character. Christian Spirit abstracted itself from all such bonds and lifelines; the apparently infinite world of nature it reduced to a mere artifact in the truly infinite Hands of a Creator. Not the wonders of nature and its subtle forms of order but contranatural miracle became the absorbing spectacle for Christianized mind. Because every individual is finite spirit and can by prayer tap into the wellspring of world-making infinite Spirit, humans suppose they then can potentially turn their naturally predestined characters around, erasing their complexities, necessities and biases by conversion or "rebirth." A higher, more spiritual personality can be grafted wholesale in place of what one had naturally grown to be.

The world and its natural goods and values thus no longer help humans to be religious but are seen overwhelmingly as temptations and natural-moral delusions, impediments to any truly clarified spirituality. Christianity thus had no use for soulishness which only deceived and distracted the good Christian soldier from his duty. To be sensitive to this world and its seductions was the weakness of a childish "pagan." (In the ancient world, this term originally denoted a peasant or one belonging to the land — paganus, pays, paysan, paisano — and therefore a self-indulgent "civilian," a term of contempt to the military. Julius Caesar once abruptly quelled a rebellion among his elite centurions by addressing them with a single shaming word: "Civilians.")

Christianity applied its genius to unraveling the weave of ancient culture and its naturalist order. As a new religion it wanted to spin its own system of rule or regime, but out of radically abstract elements — a new kind of God who could only be understood, not seen; and His prodigious powers that could be defined or felt but not experienced in worldly or natural terms. Just as modern science had to combat manifold natural illusions — that the earth feels stationary, an immobile fundament; that the sun seems so evidently to rise and set, to rotate around the axial earth; that life presupposes the constancy or eternality of self-replicating species; that we are psychologically just what we consciously know ourselves to be; etc. — so too Christianity had assumed long before science the daunting tasks of imposing a counterintuitive religion. By its faith in things not seen it labored to transfer to the realm of ideas the piety and primal love that it now denied to the insidious world of natural relations, desires and dependencies.

Of premier importance to Christianity was the extermination of soul, therefore, which is the intuitive tendency to see the glories and inspirations of the natural world from the same perspective of awe and wonder that the ancients had brought to it. Awe is a thing over which the Church seeks to exercise a monopoly. Wonder — concern about the origins and principles of things, about how things may be or be seen otherwise — is, as both Plato and Aristotle knew, the very seedling of philosophy, and must be particularly regarded by Christianity as explosive material. It is no simple or easy matter to take universalities and compress them into a proprietary form, so that only a few individuals in a self-appointed guild can comprehend them and have the right to profess what is true about them. To make of God a nostrum takes ingenuity indeed. This also requires relentless and ruthless shepherding, the constant pruning of the tree of culture and thinking so that too-fertile minds will not divert the Church's proprietary seed and work unprofitable or subversive changes on it.

Soulishness — the natural theism of overflowing and thankful psyche, sensing itself pregnant with the riches of life — still crops up of course as a wholly natural aspect of human personality. But now, thanks not just to Christian deformations but modern scientizing ideologies as well, it is a seed virtually guaranteed to fall on stony ground. The distinctive condition of ancient culture was that it appealed everywhere, by myth, drama, literature, iconology, etc., to how human beings felt and what they could see; it took natural intuition as the central principle in human beings that must be cultured, complicated, rationalized and moralized. It fostered a connoisseurship in discriminatory intelligence, and a subtle mastery over the concrete forms that phenomena take. With the Christian and then the modern/scientific revolution, the very method of acculturation changed: indoctrination, intellectualization, education, spiritualization, all proceeded by grafting wholesale onto the young mind a distinctively abstracted or a priorist culture. As Jaeger has painstakingly described in the three volumes of Paideia, the Greeks educated only aristic or exceptional youth, and they taught by way of exemplary great writing, literature about paradigmatic heroes and geniuses who showed the exercise of arete in practice. The values of Greek culture are as firmly rooted in their concrete or natural context as Odysseus and Penelope's bed was fixed by its cornerpost-tree — as indeed Odysseus himself was in Ithaka, so rooted in his love of home and family that he had to refuse the offer of immortality itself. Even though it might take him decades to return home, Odysseus belonged nowhere else.

The dominant post-Hellenic civilizations however are abstractive, otherworldly, alienative, and they teach not how to think and see concretely but how to sever "absolute" truths from their context. Theses, premises, perspectives, ideas, philosophies, etc. are in Christendom and modernity not argued to inductively but rather imposed and employed deductively as dictates, indeed modern culture overwhelmingly distrusts inductive reasoning a priori, as an appeal to an intuitive function that, among us, receives no intelligent culturing. Yet it is only by induction that we learn how to derive the abstract forms from the concrete evidence, how to control those abstractions empirically or phenomenologically, how to master and govern our own ideogenesis. Among Christians and moderns, "thinking" and "understanding" tend to become "sciences," -ologies, or pseudo-scientific ideologies, and can no longer be true arts concretely penetrated by intuitive gnosis: even moderns themselves sense that they inhabit a Flatland or a linear track of too-logical thinking. Our abstractions run away with us, and do with us as they will. In the nineteenth century Emerson grasped a profound half-truth: "Things are in the saddle and are riding mankind." But it is not just realities but idealities too that ride artless and aphilosophical mankind. Christianity was the second wave, after the Socratic-Platonic rationalism, in the floodtide of abstractivism that redefined culture for the West.

Moderns take for granted a pandemic alienation — deeper by far than any merely psychological disaffection — which was by no means a development ex nihilo. Christianity itself inherited an apparently unprecedented world-alienation as the miasmal by-product of Imperial predation and corruption, but Christianity in its evolution and organization did not ultimately temper or overcome this total alienation, but rather exacerbated it. Christian theologism, its eternalism, its profoundest contempt for nature, history, culture, and human nature, meant that this religion would foster a unique form of irreconcilable alienation, an alienation in principle or a moral and conscientious alienation — not transient or fluctuating with variable cultures but structural and enduring. This dissociation from the human and natural world was rooted in an ethos of spirituality that defined what was ultimately right and necessary according to the very divinely determined essence of human nature. The Christian "mood" of abstractivism as an ethos of primal guilt, a trained but visceral revulsion against all that is worldly and natural, grew into the very ambient or background-tone of Western culture: it was not an intellectual or willful postulation that set "mind" and "body" in antagonistic disrelation in most modern philosophies. The externality of mind and body was of course decisive for the modern ethos of scientific and academic objectivity, the contempt that moderns "intuitively" feel for their subjective dimensions and functions that makes most moderns compulsive intellectualizers. Moderns were trained to feel aloof, cool, disconnected with their own emotions, not just by a scientistic culture but by all that rationalist Christian theology drew from Plato and Parmenides. Modern alienation is preeminently a millennial alienation.

(2) The argument that spirit is inherently not piety is indeed nearly the same as that distinguishing it from soul. Piety expresses a sense of what Rudolf Otto called a res tremendum, a "thing full of dread" like an earthquake, very like "the sublime": a profound sense of being fearfully overmeasured, surpassed in scale and vastness by something incommensurable — the Alps, the Grand Canyon, the Atlantic. Piety adds to this experience of awe a sense of intimate indebtedness for one's very existence and even one's own defining powers that make one a self. Piety is the immediate or intuitive realization that ego normally and naturally deludes an individual, gulls him into supposing that he somehow accounts for and belongs ultimately to himself. Piety is the rupture of that illusory self-inflation; it reminds the individual not just of the fragility and pettiness of human powers but also of their very evanescence — there was a time, and there will be again a time, when those powers are reduced to nothingness. Our life and our very personality are leased to us for a limited term, the span of our conscious activity. We are creatures of an order in which and by whose tendencies we have become. In the script of our lives where consciousness selects this wording or that, consciousness knows little indeed of the motives and needs that prompt the whole course of actions and the weave of those actions into the tributaries of a life. Even the brightest and most acute find themselves bound like Gulliver with ten thousand threads of habits, verbalisms and prejudices they were unaware were entangling them — unaware they themselves were weaving and entangling themselves with.

Human consciousness is not just optimally and teleologically aimed at the finite world; it is itself always finite, incomplete, and exclusionary. To everything it thinks and says there is another, unillumined side, and beyond that still others; it is in its very character an aspectival creature. Lives and personalities that are bound to remain ego and nothing but ego so far as is humanly possible will know only its artificial, willful path and the aspects of things that appeal to these limitations of conscious intellect. Academics and intellectuals are not less subject to these limitations than laymen, but indeed more. It is the business of Christianized and modernized cultures to reduce their citizens to a hopefully perfect contentment with such a finite, finitizing order. To the majority of humans it is utterly incomprehensible that there might be principles active in them higher or more encompassing than consciousness and ego. That is the definitive modern delusion, but Christianity birthed it, not in its theory but by its practice.

The liabilities of Christian Spirit are well captured in its own literature, if little understood. Only Kierkegaard saw the irony, the circularity or mutual implication, in the Christian revolution. In a passage of supple paradoxicality he wrote in volume I of Either/Or.

To assert that Christianity has brought sensuousness into the world may seem boldly daring. But as we say that a bold venture is half the battle, so also here, and my proposition may be better understood if we consider that in positing one thing, we also indirectly posit the other which we exclude. Since the sensuous generally is that which should be negatived, it is dearly evident that it is posited first through the act which excludes it, in that it posits the opposite positive principle. As principle, as power, as a self-contained system, sensuousness is first posited in Christianity; and in that sense it is true that Christianity brought sensuousness into the world. Rightly to understand this proposition, that Christianity has brought sensuousness into the world, one must apprehend it as identical with the contrary proposition, that it is Christianity which has driven sensuousness out, has excluded it from the world. As principle, as power, as a self-contained system, sensuousness was first posited by Christianity; to add still another qualification, which will, perhaps, show more emphatically what I mean: as a determinant of spirit, sensuousness was first posited by Christianity. This is quite natural, for Christianity is spirit, and spirit is the positive principle which Christianity has brought into the world. But when sensuousness is understood in its relationship to spirit [i.e. as its contrary], it is clearly known as a thing that must be excluded; but precisely because it should be excluded, it is determined as a principle, as a power; for that which spirit — itself a principle — would exclude must be something which is also a principle, although it first reveals itself as a principle in the moment of its exclusion.

—"The Immediate Stages of the Erotic"

This ironic or dialectical relation — which makes the governing principles of a religion or culture intimately wedded to the very vices and counterprinciples which it professes to combat or even exterminate — means most minds of that religion or culture will be utterly trapped within the loops of its self-reference. Christianity as an imperium or civilizational universe reserves the right to define the significance of its other, its contrary. And within the universe of its culture all that is outside its realm or dominion is defined by it as its antagonist. Paganism or Hellenism — or Judaism, communism, materialism, or humanism — is not to be understood for its own sake or in its own right, but only as a counterforce against the doctrine of Spirit. This in simple form is the exclusionary mania or one-sidedness of all cultures, but most especially the more evolved and intellectualized ones.

It is no accident that Christianity vilified the Flesh, and just as little accidental that it evolved its own wholly significant Devil. "Flesh" for Christianity is uniquely permeated with guilt for its own natural needs, drives and hungers. Nothing about the Flesh is indeed innocent any longer; it has become the significance or meaning which Christianity stipulated for it, spun out of its own primary Logos of Spirit. Likewise the Devil is not just any sort of Antagonist or Evil One; he is distinctively the antagonist that Christian ethos begot, and he carries its family-scent. It is because Christianity defined spirit as the central or sovereign authoritative principle that it saw self-generating, creative Being as the ultimate or spiritual reality. God made human beings to be not just created or finite organisms but finite spirits, that is, marked by some degree of the same principle that prevails in its absolute form only in Him. On the logic of this principle Christian theology elaborated its own notion of "piety," but one in which God's bounty or beneficence overrode that of our natural parents, our city, our homeland and the earth. Christian piety does little to harmonize Christians with the whole of creation, in the conception of most of its theologians (St. Francis, St. Thomas, Chardin and some others excepted). For very strong reasons Christianity itself has tended to generate, over and over again, forms of world-alienation akin to ancient Gnosticism: it is indisputably an otherworldly religion.

Buried in this axiomatic logic of spirit is also an unruly implication that medieval theology did not know how to come to decisive terms with. That implication played itself out in the form of the Devil's spirit and was given voice for the first time by Nietzsche: "If there were Gods, how could I bear not to be one?" Spirit is the little lamp that enables us to recognize the order in God's cosmos and to be grateful for His marvelous handiwork in a way that animals cannot; but it is also an infectious and uncontainable lust to master things (thus, the self-discipline of asceticism no less than censorious puritanism) and to see them from the point of view of absolute or unconditional Spirit (mysticism). By its very concept — or in an extended sense, by its "nature" — spirit is rebellious and insubordinate. The account of man's disobedience and fall from Paradise in Genesis is indeed prescient, anticipating the dilemmas of Christian spirit (Nietzsche's incisive distinction in section 9 of The Birth of Tragedy between Judaic sin and Hellenic sacrilege — such as Prometheus' overt challenge to Zeus' authority — is culturally quite significant in differentiating the two traditions).

Spirit is precisely what makes us discontented with the finite forms of natural, social and historical existence; it is more ambitious and hungry than the whole temporal world can satisfy. The very idea of spirit demands immortality, eternality, all the privileges that the ancient world knew to be the prerogatives of the Gods, not of human soul: it evokes humanly and naturally unrealistic expectations of life by design and in principle, not by accident. For Christianity is burdened with a theological chemistry that the ancient world never had to deal with: both man and God are consubstantial or homologous in essence, made in different measure of the same fundamental actus purus. The Greeks presumed, by their concept of the correlativity of form and matter, that what the Gods are made of and what human beings are made of must be different — in place of blood, for instance, the Gods have ichor in their veins; the Gods eat and drink what is appropriate to Gods (ambrosia, for instance), not to men. There is a hierarchy of differential degree creating orders of rank among the kinds of beings that naturally exist, from divinities to humans to animals.

Under the Christian dispensation, even though human spirit was embroiled in nature, it was trained to despise nature as an inferior mode of being; but now, that spirit grew in principle discontented with nature as something loathsome and corrupt. And humans grew less and less content to be left in limbo between natural and spiritual existence; they demanded a promotion. The tactic by which primitive Christianity sought to oust ancient aristocratism now rebounded upon its own rule: by degrees Christians awoke to the inner reality that they identified far more with Satan than with God. Not just the flesh in them but indeed the spirit did not want to honor God but rather to be God. Spirit — that is, the inhabitants of that Christian culture which defined the inner essence of things as spirit — has paid out inch by inch the logic of having to be actus purus, a being that utterly cannot tolerate any residual passivity in itself. It had to awaken to the consequence that "finite spirit" was a contradiction in terms. Along with the domain of finitude and nature there expired also the grounds for any profound sense of piety or derivation and dependence. Christianity had potentiated or empowered sensuousness, had made it not just one of many potential manias against which the ancient myths had tried to provide object-lessons but instead a principle unto itself that was truly coterminous with the "world." It did the same with satanic pride, the worst of all vices to Christianity (as its cognate, autarkia or self-determination, had been the highest of all virtues to the Greeks; of such inversions of the scale of values are revolutions made, as Nietzsche saw). Just as the Greeks for centuries lacked any more discriminating nomenclature to differentiate "sophists" from "philosophers," so too late-medieval Christianity could not distinguish burgeoning modern Ego from traditional Spirit. Both Ego and Spirit were principles of activity that seemed to define what was essential to human personality, and both were presumptive metaphysical principles.

By fostering such metaphysical discontent, Christianity itself had potentiated Ego into an unprecedented, world-dominating form, a radical self-centeredness and arrogance that would never again bend the knee to another Master. To call this Christianity-begotten egocentrism novel is to insist that its cultural constitution is profoundly different from ancient idiotism. The coca that is naturally extractable from its plant and the cocaine that is modernly and technologically purifiable and concentratable are not the same substance; as all forms of medicine have to recognize, dosage or degree is everything. Ancient idiotism was an ambient natural condition, a crude or unsophisticated mentality that certainly knew how to seek out a community of like-minded doxic fellows; it was, as Heraclitus saw, a kind of prolonged infantilism or extended dreamlife; but this natural mentality had, as yet, no organized culture designed to strengthen and streamline its traits. The ancient sophists first produced such a rich loam of rationalizations, rhetoric and ideologies that would make predatory self-interest perfectly honorable in its own eyes. But the egocentrism that Christianity now consolidated and provided an institutionalized theological rationale for was a kind of self-centeredness in which natural idiotism was merely the raw material. Human ego as a cultural-psychological force had outevolved the system of moral and religious controls with which primitive Christian ethos had tried to constrain it.

Throughout Christendom there is no scarcity of "Christians" blinded to their own delusions and vices by its permutated visions; in spite of their utter ignorance of the complexities of this evident world and of their own nature they have no qualms about professing to know God's own inevident mind. Individuals whose own self-mastery is dubious claim authority over other people's lives, minds and consciences. Christianity has devolved for the most part into a culture not of mens sana any longer: the cancers of vice-ridden ego have etched their way so far into its mentality that it cannot detect the difference between arrogance and holiness, self-indulgence and abstention, spirituality and selfishness, forgiveness and hypocrisy. Monstrous ego peers out of the eyes of televangelists and superpastors of the modern "superchurches," and blusters as well in their voices. The psychological maneuvers and Machiavellian rhetoric by which compulsory fads (foil cards, Beanie Babies, Pokemon) are cultivated as a controlled science have also made the formation and milking of mass-congregations no challenge whatsoever. Will our "respectable" churches rise to the difficulty of criticizing and unmasking transparently predatory freelance cultmongers? Not likely. These respectable churchmen also prosper and rule by just such exploitative measures.

The members of cults reveal something horrific when interviewed by the media: they are certainly not less sane generally than most religious congregants, and indeed are likely to be more than averagely articulate about what they believe. But a cult has seized on and magnified some childishly ingrained lunacy among their religious feelings, and it has caught them more and more tightly in the coils of its circular psychoses. Cultmongers as individuals or as small groups are merely more nakedly exposed to criticism from the public, their debaucheries more ruthlessly pursued by the media. They reveal what religions in general have devolved into under the pressures of modern culture, namely, the extreme in the impious manipulation of piety, the most intimate form of predation, a mode of exploitation with virtually no overhead or consumer-resistance. Just as universities and Congress have mutated into forms of business, so too churches and professions. A cult merely has a more narrowcast market, a more specific psychographic. Within the cult no one may dare say what those vicious dysvalues are that actually rule in the name of virtue.

(3) In antiquity mystery was monumentalized all over the landscape: not just the Sphinxes and Fates but the Athenians' statue "to the unknown God," as St. Paul reported (Acts 17:21-23). Nature was in essence a landscape of occult powers and principles, something whose own nature made it "love to hide" (Heraclitus). Mystery haunted humans intimately in the form of their very belief in amorphous fatalism, the certainty that every soul carries unrecognized the seeds of its own self-ruin, masked from conscious view precisely by the ironic ignorance and arrogance through which humans suppose they will protect themselves. Like an obscure story that suddenly illumines its own logic, man's life unfolds from some dark invaginated place: like a traveler on a stormy, treacherous plain the Greeks are grateful for any torch (to fire-bringing Prometheus) and for any revealing flash of lightning (to Apollo, the God of Revelation or Illumination). The Greeks well know that the Gods could have left them to asphyxiate in their own self-obscurity, for all too incisive are the examples of slaves, children, the actors/victims of tragic dramas, the pathetic subjects of despots, and others who languish in intellectual darkness.

Any man who thinks he can predesign his life like a highhanded architect is either a fool or a pathologically regular automaton. All lives like all thinking take for granted the collaboration of factors and forces beyond their strict control. What men call prosperity is merely a game of utmost artificiality, a little arena from which all that is unknown or uncontrollable has been, for the time being, excluded. Those few who escape this life before their houses of cards ⁠— their bubbles ⁠— collapse are not privileged but only more perfectly self-duped. The rule of human nature is still what the ancients observed in the tides of the Many, that men love their delusions more than life itself, certainly more than intelligence and clarity. Most human beings prefer the illusion of happiness to true happiness — there was thus a potential market for narcotics centuries before chemistry and economics colluded to produce high-potency psychotropics — and the whole matrix of society works to protect the Many conspiratorially from the risks of disillusionment. Mass or popular culture itself is a form of narcotic. Men curse the many circumstances that thwart them from getting what they desire, but the reality is, the vast majority should be grateful to be deterred from gratifying their fantasies: "It would not be better for men if they got what they want" (Heraclitus). With greater wealth and freedom come far more powerful intoxicants and narcotics, of which literal chemicals are only the most obvious form. Most human beings can barely handle the meager problems they already have, and yet are tantalized always by the prospect of More.

Human beings ⁠— especially those who fancy themselves predators ⁠— are themselves prey that have no idea what fatal force is hunting them throughout their lives. After five thousand millennia still we have no other way to grasp the logic and laws of a human life than retrospectively, after it has spent its ultimate energies and dreams in fact. From the terrors of life, and most of all from the horrors of what we are inwardly pregnant with, even Christians pray to be delivered ⁠— futilely. Life is saturated with mystery. For all his science and technology modern man is indeed even a greater mystery to himself than the ancients were, for he no longer has a religious or philosophical culture to caution him against all that he neglects to think about in himself. The repertory of modern concepts leaves all these issues virtually innominate and nebulous. Nearly every newspaper and newscast brandish our streaming irrationalities at us, remind us how utterly little our vaunted modern "rationality" counts for as a governing moral principle. This is of course not rationality in any substantive sense at all, but only the definitively modern idolatry of technique, the "rational fit" of means to ends about which we remain abysmally illiterate.

Christianity knew it was taking a decisive step in relieving the awful fatalism of antiquity when it conceived a religion of spirit, a theology of an ultimately moral and voluntary control over the natural world. By the same token that human spirit found itself less and less content to accept its bounds as finite spirit, so too it realized how profoundly oxymoronic it was for radically active spirit simply passively to accept the order of the world as something divinely dispensed. It was a contortionary theology that asked Christians merely to take the design and rationale of God’s system of purposes on blind faith: between such slavish ignorance or unquestioning servility and the fundamentally active powers of spirit there stood a naked contradiction. The more perfectly Christians conceived of themselves as a form of spirit – the more they digested the implications of this astounding logos – the more they expected their world to be morally and humanely well-designed. They could not comprehend catastrophes such as the Lisbon earthquake, in which the very most pious souls perished in their cathedrals on the holiest day of the Church calendar. And they began indeed to wonder about the consanguinity between human and divine spirit: how could it be that a world constructed to spiritual standards should not be fully comprehensible in its essential laws and order to all spiritual beings? The Renaissance and the Enlightenment were indeed thus inscribed in the very logic of spirit, but had been forestalled for centuries by awkward privileged orthodoxies with which Church authority had aligned itself.

If human essence is to be construed as self-active spirit, if we must take this principle radically seriously as the fountain of all our powers and rights, then a world produced by spirit should be in principle spiritually luminous down to its bowels. It should make moral sense and be profoundly knowable, and if factors have thus far stood in the way, those factors can only be accidental and not part of the essential structure of things. With this realization, Christianity was pivoting from an ancient into a modern way of understanding "mystery": there is for modernity no ultimate or fated mystery, only matters not yet mastered by the advance of scientific technology. Moderns disbelieve in principle in the infinity or insuperability of nature’s forces and order, just because as moderns they must believe in the infinity of their own arbitrary will instead. What drives modern science, like modern economics, is the primally irrational self-infatuation of man with his own will: man in modernity is an animal delighting in its own conditionability, and yet also an experimenter delighting in his ingenuity at retraining himself. But indeed such a game has no longer a goal or a value beyond the playing itself. Christianity‘s boost to human dignity, its belief that man was made in imago Dei, was now going to fuel his self-determination and self-confidence in liberating himself from that old order. Not just mystery but faith itself would prove inimical to the logic of the new self-conception of Ego being unleashed from out of the heart of the medieval Logos. By its uncanny, encrypted inner logic, spirit overgrew and then strangulated the intrinsic life of soul, piety, mystery, and faith; and then idly wondered why its God fell stone-silent for the next two thousand years. The regime of spiritual culture seduced Western man into an absolute certainty stronger by far than anything the subtleties and difficulties of natural existence had to offer: it made him advance morally and psychologically not from geocentrism into heliocentrism but more truly from theocentrism into egocentrism, into a remarkably delusional egologism that first made him suppose his own ego was somehow one of the foundational principles of metaphysics, and then overcast his shallow wits with incomprehension of any other metaphysics.

Nietzsche telescoped these developments into a single aphorism when he remarked that "Christian morality killed off Christian religion": in context he meant that the Christian virtue of honesty obliged the true believer to admit that he in fact had no reason to believe in God's existence. But this irony is true also in a larger sense: the peculiar sense of man as spiritus by degrees exterminated all of the preconditions that cultivated the ground to make religion possible in the first place ⁠— soul, piety, mystery, faith. We have in Christianity one of the most prodigiously self-documented histories of the vicious reaction of an intellectual-theological superstructure (an ideology) against its own soulish roots. Christianity continues today not as any sort of folk-religion but as a flotilla of derelict-institutions, drifting on because they are too well-organized and -financed and too hypersophisticated to permit themselves to sink. Their ideological ordering powers are too prodigious to permit any of their legions to glimpse acutely what has lapsed from their culture, and what now rules in its stead. In most congregations one cannot think of Jesus' invidious distinction between the Letter and the Spirit without realizing what awesome power the Letter has acquired under the methods and apparatus of modern publicity, psychological propaganda, strategizing economics, and especially the impoverishing modern education. Of course, not all churches exist solely and to the same degree for venal purposes: the exceptions are readily spotted. They are poor and tiny, and their ministers labor and die in obscurity. All the others have made a pact with the modern hybris.

The Greeks understood the inherent risks of an aristocratist culture that encouraged individuals to strive after excellence and extraordinariness: the same idiotia that they struggled to contain within the classes of douloi and banausoi might well resurge in far more efflorescent forms among the aristoi. Greek culture devised institutions such as tragic drama, philosophy, mythology, democratic politics, even history, as a way of deeply installing the dread of hybris or overweening idiotia. Excellence is for the sake of leavening the quality of culture and values of the whole society so far as is humanly possible: higher than the desire to excel must be sophrosyne, wisdom or moderation not in the sense of "mediocritizing" but rather as the sober sense of form, the awareness of how much is enough and what is just right ⁠— the teleological intelligence to comprehend what purposes activities must ultimately be serving. Excellence is for the sake of the whole quality of life among a people. One polis for this very reason ostracized an individual who was so far superior over his fellows that he won every competition he entered: where the gap is that great and certain, excellence is not inspiriting but demoralizing. But Christianity as a religion of subcultural and subphilosophical minds for the most part understood only the cruder forms of sin, not the manifold sophisticated forms into which pride or superbia could mutate. Pride, the rouged cancers of superbia, could wear the very masks of humility and holiness, could so envelop itself in the rhetoric of virtue and Scripture that few ecclesiastics would dare call its hand. Once woven into a culture, spirit did not extirpate sin and irreligion at all but, as it happened, fed them with a remarkable and unrecognized fuel, its own audacious supernaturalness.

Just as ancient sophism seemed to be carrying on the classical forms of a culture which in actuality it was perverting and betraying, so too Christian hypocrisy preserves the apparent forms and verbalisms of an ethos whose heart it is eating away. To those too decent ever to be deep and too gently mannered to be critical, a well-whitewashed but internally rotten sepulcher remains undoubtedly a thing of beauty forever. The advantages of stultifying the virtues of philosophical intelligence are at any rate patent to those most severely menaced by them. Jesus warned His followers, "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16). But Christendom so accomodated the vices of this world that its many sheep were rendered no wiser than doves, and so harmless they would not dare offend wolves by questioning their righteous sheepskins.