End Times by Kenneth Smith   

13. Medieval Civilization IX

I. The Christianization and Modernization of Religion

For most of its followers Christianity has foreclosed upon the conceivability of any other form of religion. They have been led to believe it the only valid or authentic form of religion, a definitive ideal of which other religions fall short. In actuality it is a highly peculiar, utterly unrepresentative species of religion: it has fallen prey to the darkest and most formidable vices of human nature and historical ideologies just because it believed it could dictate unilaterally how the world ought to be understood. Its processes of theologizing itself, of organizing itself into a systematic institution, and indeed of the millennially slow unfolding of its covert meaning or self-significance ⁠— its essential Logos ⁠— have obliged it to take on a distinctive shape and mode of authority. Christianity seems to many of its adherents "eternal" or "everliving" just because of its perennial proteanism, its ability to rejuvenate itself through reform. Is it truly a religion without a defining shape or fatal vices? Is its perdurance conceivably the survival of nothing more than a name, cloaking now this and now that partisan interest?

At the same time Christianity raised the hopes of the desolate and deprived losers of the ancient world ⁠— utter victims according to that world's sense of natural order and natural goods no less than its social, political and economic rules and privileges ⁠— the new religion also erected a stupendous idea, a God so absolute in power and vastness that that idea could not have its authority denied or its cogency outthought. Surely no other concept of God could be set beside this one, to compete with it in magnitude: the rich world of mythic imagination and intuitive insights into the many-dimensioned natural needs and potential of human beings ⁠— the way religion had once been digested into the cultural metabolism of human beings ⁠— had been checkmated by an apparently ultimate theology. From everything that men could comprehend as a worldly or humanly necessary form of law, this metaphysically exceptional Being was exempt. It is not true of course that the idea of an Absolute Being has to be therefore an absolute idea ⁠— anymore than the idea of something red has to be red itself ⁠— but this new God was fortressed by a presumed imperviousness to rational dispute and political or moral controversy.

Other people had their disputable opinions: Christians had ascertained by faith what the Truth was, and to make their faith into their whole being was entirely the dictate of this Truth. Other people had their many books; Christians had the one true Bible. Christian religion had put itself beyond the pale of human insights and judgments. It had made the culturing of critical intelligence superfluous, a pastime of worldly fools. To have borrowed so much from Plato's idealism, it is remarkable that Christianity managed to transmute his rationalist philosophy into fideism and dogmatism ⁠— into the very sort of rationally groundless doxa or slavish opinion that Plato so reviled. It is demonstrably a great difficulty to promulgate dogma in a systematic or theological way ⁠— amid pretensions of ultimate rigor and clarity ⁠— without revealing the ultimately irrational character of its content and method. Rhetoric, understood crudely as the disingenuous art of not calling things by their right names, is indispensable to this end.

As has been suggested, Christianity was taken by ancient thinkers to be an eruption of barbarian subculture full of dyslogic and myopic compulsion to believe. Its heterogeneous, multiple-ply theology confounded theism and deism, love and damnation, egocentrism and spirituality, and countless other chasms of polarity that its apologists blithely dismissed as the genius of its religious absurdism (Tertullian: "I believe because it is absurd," credo quia absurdum). The infinite powers of God, His omnipotence or omnipotentiality, meant that He held the reins of antagonistic laws and principles and could turn and twist them as He liked. The very comprehensibility of an infinite Creator to a finite creature had co involve paradox, schemes of transcendent unity that defied the limitations of a naturally or conventionally constituted mind; was homo spiritus indeed competent to understand even how he was limited, and by what sorts of factors? From a pious point of view all that a human intelligence could do was simply to capitalate, to believe however blindly might be required.

No one familiar with the circuits of the history of Christianity and its mutations and corruptions can deny the utter one-sidedness of its ethos of fideism, its absolutization of faith. Faith gains a monopoly over the ultimate functions of judgment, conscience, will, and reason only at the cost of these abilities' integrity and healthiness. Faith induces utter passivity, gullibility or credulity. At its worst this peculiarly deformed or formless extremism suppresses utterly what the ancient world understood as the distinctively human powers in us, the kinds of active or organizing genius that raise us above being mere animals. Fideism fosters not spirituality but cunning authoritarianism, a self-righteous purge of conscientious and principled dissidents that somehow hardly touches the actual purveyors of sin and corruption. What we see so nakedly in the Inquisition and other periodic attempts of the Church to uproot contrarian views is not evidence of the spirituality that Christianity midwived into world history, but the rank infestation of organized religion by slavish and, increasingly, distinctively modern thoughtforms of ideology, quasi-rational and exclusivist perspectives whose "logic" forecloses on alternative forms of understanding. But organized religion has a patent character-flaw: a religion grown too Apollonian or theory-bound to command the respect of popular conscience finds it necessary to control the minds of the mass (and of competitive perspectives) by emotional coercion, by means of theatrics just as Dostoevsky described in "The Grand Inquisitor." (Other critics of the fatuities and corruptions of modern religion ⁠— Voltaire, Paine, Nietzsche, Bierce, etc. ⁠— are joined in this criticism by some of the most pious spiritual thinkers of the epoch: Blake, Hegel, Kierkegaard.)

Such an overintellectualized religion as medieval Christianity has lost its grip on its own putative intrinsic values and principles. All has become a matter of rule, control, and power in an entirely worldly or secular sense. It matters not what people think in the privacy of their consciences, or what forms of hypocrisy manage to accomodate themselves to such hierocratic rule ⁠— even bishops and popes have felt free to express their skepticism and cynicism within their private circle of friends: all that counts is that human beings know whom and what to fear, so they do not dare to speak what they think in a way that undermines authority. The ancient world knew "extrapolitical" or "antipolitical" phenomena ⁠— forms of rule contrary to the aristo-democratic order of the Greek polis ⁠— such as despotism (in Persia), which allowed private or economic freedom, or militarism and fascism (in Sparta), which did not; but that world knew nothing of the modern phenomenon of totalitarian order which would promise "the only person...who still leads a private life is the person who sleeps" (Robert Ley, National Socialism-Reichsorganisationleiter). Indeed it has been argued by Charlotte Beradt in The Third Reich of Dreams that totalitarianism did succeed in controlling its citizens even there, in the unspoken counter-compulsions of their subconscious life.

Totalitarianism is distinctively modern because of its determination to marshal the whole gamut of scientific means of social and psychological controls, and to put this apparatus of manipulation to the task of extinguishing the very autonomy of the private or inner dimension in human personality or subjectivity. Totalitarianism is a form of rule bent on exterminating the inwardness of human beings, the domain of privacy understood as resistance or contrarian resiliency against the forces of the outer world. Totalitarianism reveals nakedly the modern compulsion to uproot any strictly natural or independent aspects or strains in human nature. It aims to edit or censor the very metaphysical structure of human beings, to produce an artificially and maximally manipulable creature in their place, and ideally to make it truly inconceivable to them what has been done to them. Do forms of modern rule and its techniques of control ultimately create a dystopia in which most of the dimensions of human intelligence and conscience are suffocated? ⁠— no matter, human beings can be tailored to fit it, to be entirely incompetent to realize what is profoundly wrong or pathological about it. Commercial culture and uniformitarian education indeed met such totalitarianism halfway by distracting and impoverishing the resources of any form of inner life.

What privacy is ultimately for, what natural, rational, moral, and spiritual needs it exists to foster or cultivate, has almost utterly been lost upon the materialist and utilitarian denizens of modern order. They have been reduced to the stereotype of "psychological man" which the sciences have promulgated, and this type nests perfectly inside the stereotype "economic man." "Individuality" has become merely a compelling abstraction, of whose concrete teleology and nurturing they comprehend nothing whatsoever. That is effectively the extinguishing of privacy as a matrix for culture, conscience, intelligence, religion, philosophy, freedom not of appetites but of principles and values: a creative and insightful mind must have its own sense of philosophical syntax, of the way things belong together (Logos) and ought to be associated or contrasted. Not to have such an "ear" for the musical or subliminal coherence of ideas and language is to be pathetically reactive to the social and political "given." Prior to the scientized and climatic modern onslaught on thinking and conscience, only medieval theocracy had attempted to forge a regime of infinite subliminal control over human beings, and it did this transparently not in order to purge the evident reservoirs of "sinfulness" but in order to eradicate criticism and intransigence against its own rule. Late medieval Christianity, whose self-title as "Catholicism" or "universalism" looks properly sinister in this light, was a worldly empire devoted wholly to the propagation of its own power, for its own sake.

Modern Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, is that same pernicious extrinsicalism or corruptivism but of course now serving an altogether different master: not the Church per se but the Church as digested into the modern system of megalopowers that organize and feed off of their human populace, a system which churches today subserve and help to stabilize. Religion exists in modernity not in order that humans should gain some transcendent perspective on how they live, but for the very contrary reason ⁠— in order that human beings should quell the impulse to question the artificial order of modern society. It is systematic and institutionalized apologism, the culturing of crops of useful idiots for the benefit of Behemoth. Religion is today a cultural sedative, a publicly sanctioned rest stop along the all-too busy highway of modern productivity and profit. Religion reassures an all-consuming way of life that everything about it is ultimately right and sane, is indeed God's very will; even as that way of life consumes religion itself and all of its preconditions. Modern religion is a fetishism of conciliatoriness in the midst of an unrecognized concentration-camp, it knows no prudence whatsoever save that of accomodation ⁠— of "rendering unto Caesar."

It is indispensable, even vital, that the denizens of modernity should not be able to see or think straight about issues of justice, rationality, values, responsibility, individuality, freedom, self-discipline and self-clarity. Do modern Christians, even Christian clergy who have repeatedly betrayed abysmal ignorance about their own scriptures and laws, demonstrably lack the interest and competence to read their own Bible for themselves? Is it child's play for a cultmonger to twist passages and beliefs to his own purposes, with little fear of intelligent resistance? This is not simply the epidemic of modern aliteracy at work; it is the stark but inadvertent acknowledgment that moderns' religion is driven not by spiritual but by ultimately worldly forces, which define for them just how far they need to take their religion seriously. Even "believers" manifest the grim truth of modern postcredal culture.

The irrationalism of most forms of organized religion is not a simple pathos ⁠— at least not for all of their hierarchy ⁠— but a way of gathering otherwise uncontrollable aspects of human subjectivity into a mass-form, like the channelization and damming of rivers to produce electricity. Massified, the spiritually starved and desperate forces of psyche become an asset, a virtually natural resource: human beings relax their critical intelligence, their rational suspicions ⁠— such at least as they have got ⁠— when an appeal is made to their altruism via the religious formulas that got installed in their prerational or childish personalities. Modern religion is thus a utilitarian extension of the system of scientized predation called the market, the world of exchange which knows nothing but extrinsic or instrumentalist value: the "theological" precept of this system is indeed that nothing is sacred but all things are to be used, including the souls and consciences of human beings. Religion anesthetizes self-interest and prudence in a culture that otherwise trains and hardens these forms of self-defense. The more relentless and militarized the modern cult of self-interest becomes, the more grateful its infantry is for the opportunity to lay down its ideological burden and to sacrifice what is most precious in contriteness for being so selfish. Our exploitative culture works the masses coming and going, fore and aft, day and night: it controls and profits off the very illusion that its system and its cloying ideology can be escaped somehow ⁠— that there is still such a thing as freedom or fresh air from outside its dystopian prison.

Who can look across centuries of Christian rule and culture and not be astounded at the incoherency of its accomplishments, the wars, the arts, the pogroms, the crusades, the frauds, personal vanity, and corrupt fortunes built up? But in a primary respect there is a unity, a logic to its character in toto. Ancient wisdom obliged its practitioners to look behind the obvious phenomena to the roots of things, to seek the tacit or hidden drives of natural interest and natural character beneath the rainbow of rhetoric and self-delusion humans are capable of spewing as camouflage: cui bono, "to whose good?" Never has this naturalist drive for critical or interpretive ad hominem explanations been more incisively championed than by Nietzsche, previously quoted in part:

If there is anything in which I am ahead of all psychologists, it is that my eye is sharper for that most difficult and captious kind of backward inference in which the most mistakes are made: the backward inference from the work to the maker, from the deed to the doer, from the ideal to him who needs it, from every way of thinking and valuing to the want that prompts it.

—(Nietzsche Contra Wagner)

Nothing is without its nature, its sufficient reason for being as it is: every being and every act serves some sort of purpose in the tides of natural teleology, and it is the task of intelligent humans not just to navigate those tides for themselves but also to learn to read them in other humans and in themselves. Even the most monumental and impassive structures of scientific "objectivity" are expressions of specific kinds of culture and character. Even the most daunting flights of religious ecstasy and theological grandeur are likewise a symptomatology of souls and minds that most profoundly needed to gratify or control or shape or reconceive something in themselves, by means of such Gods and forces. The Greeks had intuitively bent myth and religion to serve just such reflective purposes, to oblige humans to reveal to themselves and to come to understand something of their inner essences. But under the Christian un-reflectiveness, fideist man is not permitted to think why he has endowed just this sort of God with ultimate authority over him.

It is Nietzsche's prodigious accomplishment as a phenomenologist of religion and a philologist of its ideologies that he dared to ask an immense question: who ⁠— what kind of human being ⁠— most needed such an absolutist religion? Those who had the most vital interests in defeating the ancient scheme of things, that is, those who (already being naturally effete) had been further most radically deprived of morale and potency by the soulless Roman Realpolitik. It is the absolutely impotent who most desperately require an absolutely omnipotent Defender and Rectifier. Behind the ideology of absolutism in abstracto stands the need for specific advantages by specific personality-types; and behind the universalism stand the utterly particular interests and compulsions of that very class that ancient Christianity first galvanized ⁠— the class of slaves. Its character as a pathetic and inertial type of personality has not been refuted or transfigured ⁠— "reborn" or "converted" ⁠— by the rise of Christian culture; on the contrary, the triumph of this culture architected an epoch of "dark ages" during which political order fell into chaos and brutality, and political subtlety was refocused on ecclesiastically controlled issues. Never were aristocratic virtues more desperately needed, and more impossible to muster. Christianity's dark and dirty secret is that it has remained what it was in its origins, a religion of, for and by slaves, committed evangelically to reducing all others to that status ⁠— which is to say, eliminating all who by their counterexample challenge the inevitability of some collective dogmatism and who make the slavishness of slaves explicit or evident even to those slaves.

As a classical philologist and apostate Protestant, Nietzsche saw the signs plain throughout Christianity's long history. No Greek God ever gave a commandment to a Greek, or demanded a conversion from his natural character; the Greek Gods take a spectatorial or avuncular delight in the diversity in the psychological garden of human beings, but most of all in those who excel in being what they naturally are. The Greek Gods are merely jealous of their own prerogatives that raise them above the sorry human condition, and they want to curtail humans who try to encroach on these rights. Significantly no Greek ever prayed in a kneeling posture; they stand like free men; for all the ancient world knew that kneeling was the clear expression of slavishness or defeat. And no Greek ever supposed that the privileges and magnificence of the Olympians qualified any of them to be "Lord" or "master" over a race of humans whose pathos would then make them all no better than slaves. If there were a divinity before whom the Greeks regarded themselves as slaves, it would be of course the trinity of the Fates or Moirai ⁠— whose slaves would then include also all the other Gods.

In the process of attenuating the natural and traditional sources of religion, Christianity metamorphosed religion into a thing of idealities and transcendent duties. Ultimately it could not discriminate between the holiest of virtues and the most heinous of vices, and fell prey to forces that utterly unscrupulously took Christianity's forms in hand and wielded them as weapons in behalf of their thoroughly worldly interests. What moderns know as Christian religion is entirely an adulterated version, riddled by precisely the most prodigious vices. It is these vices that mutated into the modern drives of systematized ego. Like a body whose immune system has been fatally compromised, Christianity finds its internal processes have become the playthings of opportunistic viruses that surreptitiously redefine the concept of "health" and now demand the right to command in the name of all that is holy. All that religion once strove to exterminate is pleased to dress itself in high sanctimoniousness and parade before the world ⁠— as an utterly respectable "variant" of religious conscience of whom no one dares to speak ill.

So much of what seems to be the durability and authority of Christian faith is in truth the cultured obtuseness of its believers, who cannot bring themselves to comprehend the Logos of the new order of modernity or the insidious way in which it has deposed their ethos and deployed their institutions for its own purposes. It is not just sectarianly and politically that Christianity has become a house divided against itself, but also in its conscience and intelligence, in its lost sense of what is essential and central. It is never an obvious thing when incandescent Spirit has decayed into dumb and dull Letter: when forms of order and intelligence pass over from being inspiring solutions to be soporific problems, what has been compromised is just the very acuity of one's essential wits that would be able to detect this. Religion then has become no longer a Rock of Ages, no longer the "stone which the builders refused" but which became "the head stone of the corner," but just the greatest stumbling-block of all. Seminarians like to ponder whether God could make a stone so great even He cannot lift it; Christendom itself may be that stone.